Pigs Is Pigs (part two)

After church, I took my wife and granddaughter to eat at Red Lobster. I remember the first time I went to Red Lobster, I took my ex-wife. They kicked her out for bringing her own crabs.

Anyway, my father didn't want to go, so we took him home.

"Bring me back something," he told us.

Now that he's older, he's become like Bigfoot and prefers to stay away from people.

You're going to think I'm crazy, especially since I've told you how cheap-I mean, frugal-I am, but my granddaughter, who's 10-years-old, likes to order The Ultimate Feast. It's about forty dollars. If you include my tip, that makes it forty dollars and twenty cents. Fortunately for the server my wife does the tipping. I don't want to say she's too generous, but people have been known to retire after she tips them.

"Tipping is the price I'll happily pay not to cook or do dishes," she tells me.

Normally, if anybody else wanted to order a forty dollar meal on my dime, I'd tell them to take another look at the menu and order something, well, less extravagant, but love is a curse, a force even stronger than frugalness, so I let my granddaughter order what she wants-two lobster tails and two orders of shrimp scampi-and then watch her savor every morsel, which she devours enthusiastically. By the end of the meal I'm poorer in dollars but richer in delight, and sometimes even splattered with butter sauce.

At Red Lobster, they were playing modern music. Not popular music, because I didn't recognize any of the songs, but modern. It had electric guitars and stuff. If the music they played was food, it would be burnt toast.

Trying not to listen to it, I wondered why they weren't playing seafaring songs, like "Brandy" by Looking Glass or "Ride Captain Ride" by Blues Image. "Closer To Home" by Grand Funk Railroad would fit in nicely. As would "Barnacle Bill the Sailor". "Popeye the Sailor Man"? Why not? I can't think of any other sea ditties, but I'm sure there must be more.

By the end of the meal, the server asked if we wanted dessert, but we were too full.

The great comedian Jim Gaffigan has a funny bit about explaining American eating habits to someone from a starving nation.

"Appetizers?" he says, and I'm paraphrasing here. "That's the food we eat before we eat the food we eat. Soup and salad? That's also the food we eat before we eat the food we eat. Dessert? That's the food we eat after we eat the food we eat."

And then, on the way out of the restaurant, we'll grab a fistful of after-dinner mints because we're such pigs.

"Yeah," he says, "we eat a lot of food."

So much that at the end of our meal we even ask for doggy bags to take what's left over home to feed our fat, little pets.

https://youtu.be/wZFRtRgCnyY 

Pigs Is Pigs 

Merrie Melodies cartoon (1937) 

directed by Friz Freleng 

  

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