Pizza Time

Best served with pizza.

A few weeks back Evan got invited to a birthday party at a local pizza place. It was our small town version of a Chucky Cheese's. Half the games but just as many kids. We had been successfully dodging those places up to this point: What he didn't know couldn't hurt us, right?

So much for that. The other night we returned to the scene of the crime of our own volition. It's hard to say no to Ev. (We can do it. But it's hard.) We sat down and ordered a couple of pizzas while Ev took his seat at the controls of a speed boat video game, zip-lock bag of quarters in hand.  While we sat there I had to think back to our pizza retreat as kids. A slice of pizza in the Coop at the Student Union was standard fare out on a bike ride or on the way home from touch football. But didn't that was kid stuffing, not going out for pizza.

For a real family night out there was only one destination for our family: Pizza Palace. Pizza Palace in the village was born and died before the age of the video game. It existed in the era when college students-- even rowdy dissident college students of the late 60's-- could coexist with a milquetoast suburban family with two boys in t-shirts, Levis, white socks and Jack Purcell's. The pizza? Probably just okay. The real attraction for us, just like for Evan at our local Little Caesars the other night, was the entertainment. Movies.

There, at the corner of, what?, Weyburn and Gayley?, we got pizza dinner, a tossed salad served in little wooden bowls, and movies. W.C. Fields, Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Keystone Cops, Our Gang, and probably a few other classic comedy shorts form the teens, 20's and 30's. I like to think it was an education. Certainly my fondness for early comedy was birthed there at Pizza Palace.

So now I'm left to wonder: Will the day come when Ev will be writing about where he acquired his love for driving speedboats?