TheBanyanTree: Life Stories 191

[Tobie Shapiro]

March 28, 20000000007


Dear Helpers,

	I got several e-mails about drinking the 
water in Tijuana.  The unanimous opinion was, 
"Don't do it."  I'm still trying to find some 
official source for that advice.  And another 
thing came up.  A couple people mentioned that 
Feyna will need a passport.  She hasn't got one. 
Anyone know about this?  What will happen to a 20 
year old woman without a U.S. Passport? She has 
student picture I.D. and a California Driver's 
License.  I can send her with a copy of her birth 
certificate.  But there's no time to get a 
passport.  Neither Alex nor Natalie has mentioned 
the need for one.  They will be flying down to 
San Diego, bussing to the border and walking 
across.  Someone tell me what to do.





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Franchise Dreams

	We were not very health conscious while I 
was growing up.  We concentrated on the care and 
feeding of brains.  Thank God there weren't a 
whole lot of fast food joints dotting the 
landscape, or I'm sure my parents would have 
frequented some of them, and I'd have had 
occluded arteries by the time I was fourteen.  At 
fourteen, the beauty of that situation would be 
that like most fourteen year old girls, I would 
have blamed the arteries on my mother.  There 
would have been a shouting match.

	Now, there are fast food joints in every 
block, gigantic chain restaurants that 
manufacture their food from a central kitchen and 
ship it out to their franchises.  There were 
chains back when I was young, but it wasn't an 
epidemic.  No one was counting carbs or figuring 
out the sodium content of the soup.  Pizza was 
healthy for you because cheese was protein.  Big 
slabs of meat were the regular fare.  A humble 
baked potato was filled with an ice cream scoop 
of whipped butter, three tablespoons of crumbled 
bacon, and a cup of sour cream.  Don't forget the 
salt.  Lard was the common grease, and creamed 
sauces with butter and flour in them were 
standard.  Still, obesity wasn't so pervasive and 
we weren't tracing cancer back to that can of 
soda with sucaryl in it, the half gram of animal 
fat we ate off the steak, or the environmental 
hazards of power lines, pollution and stray toxic 
waste.  The audience put their dark glasses on 
and sat in their chairs watching the atomic blast 
in the desert, their hair blowing back in the 
wind, their bodies being assaulted by the evil 
waves of radiation born of the explosion.  But no 
one knew.

	Now, on top of the dietary and 
environmental factors contributing to terminal 
illnesses, we also have the worry about all these 
factors which can break down your immune system 
faster than HIV.  That's another thing.  There 
was a time before AIDS.  The sexually transmitted 
diseases were gonorrhea and syphilis, and only 
bad, really loose people got them.  This was, of 
course, all myth.  We also were under the 
illusion that everybody, or rather, every woman, 
was a virgin when she got married.

	The chains were beginning to proliferate 
when I was in my twenties, and hooked up with 
Harry Lum.  He believed in experiencing America 
and American culture.  This is why he went by 
himself to see, "Night of the Living Dead," at a 
drive in, and why he studiously listened to 
rock'n'roll.  So when a new Sizzler restaurant 
opened up fairly near his house, we went there on 
opening night.

	The place was all balloons and banners. 
They were giving table service.  Waiters and 
waitresses in uniform with name tags were coming 
to tables and taking your orders.  We looked 
through the menu, which was fairly limited.  You 
had your steak, and then there was your steak and 
shrimp.  There was shrimp, and there was shrimp 
and steak.  There was a salad bar with a 
convenient and reassuring, "sneeze guard," which 
is a much more appealing name than a, "phlegm 
guard," or a, "vomit guard."  They had this down 
to a science.

	Harry and I both ordered steaks.

	"How would you like that done?"  (Oooooh!  A good sign!)

	"Very rare," I said.

	"Very rare," said Harry.

	"Fine.  Go help yourselves to the salad 
bar and I'll be back with your steaks."

	We took up positions on opposite sides of 
the salad bar, and worked our way around, 
skipping nothing but the marshmallow jello 
surprise, and the Ambrosia, a frothy icky sweet 
creamy mayonnaisy sauce in which maraschino 
cherries, grapes, pieces of apple and chopped 
walnuts were drowning.  We built fortifications 
of bean salads and solid substances around the 
bed of lettuce to make a solid wall that would 
contain all the mushrooms, beets, croutons, 
broccoli, cheese, peas, onions, bacon bits, cole 
slaw, fruit salad, cottage cheese salad, 
cucumbers, tomatoes, pickles, olives, wax peppers 
and gallons of mixed salad dressings.  There were 
also stiff little rolls and pats of butter.  When 
we got back to our table, the plates with the 
steaks had arrived.  Oooh, La La!  Slabs of meat 
with accompanying potato.  We cut into the 
steaks.  They were grey inside.  Well, that's not 
rare.

	We called the waiter over.

	"We asked for very rare.  These are well 
done.  See?  It's grey on the inside."

	The waiter apologized and removed the two 
well done steaks, promising to bring back very 
rare ones, just to our specifications.  We hurled 
ourselves into our salads.  They tasted chemical. 
The major ingredient in the dressings must have 
been, "additives, preservatives, and 
stabilizers".  We ate it anyway.

	Halfway through our mountains of salad, 
the waiter returned with two freshly very rare 
steaks.  He stood there waiting for our approval. 
We cut into them.  They were grey on the inside.

	"Look," Harry instructed the teenage 
waiter whose voice was still cracking and who 
probably didn't even have fully descended 
testicles, "The insides of these steaks are grey. 
That means it's well done.  A rare steak should 
be pink and red on the inside."

	"Yes, sir," said the waiter, removing our steaks for a second time.

	I was feeling slightly embarrassed.  Were 
we expecting too much of the Sizzler?  After all, 
it was only a lowest common denominator chain.

	"What do we do if the steaks come back 
grey inside again?" I asked Harry.

	"Then we send it back again.  We keep sending it back until it's rare."

	I squared my shoulders, sat up very 
straight for the upcoming assault.  The waiter 
brought back the steaks.

	"Here," he smiled broadly.  "I watched 
the chef.  He only flipped them after half a 
minute on either side.  These are rare."  He set 
them down.  We cut into them.

	They were grey.

	Harry and I looked at each other.  It was 
evident that very rare at Sizzler is grey, 
because the steak starts out grey on the inside. 
It's processed meat, riddled with preservatives. 
There is no such thing as pink at the Sizzler. 
We ate our treated salads, and left, shuddering 
whenever we thought of what could possibly make 
the inside of an uncooked steak grey.



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-- 




Tobie Helene Shapiro
Berkeley, California   USA

tobie at shpilchas.net