The Pun Also Rises(as seen in the North Adams Transcript)
"Slice of Life"Life is like a pizza. A pizza is something that almost everyone likes. Some prefer thin-crust, some prefer thick-crust, some like pepperoni and sausage on their pizza, some are purists who prefer only cheese and tomato sauce, but we are all united by the fact that we like pizza. Except for people on a diet, or people who are lactose-intolerant, or Italian-intolerant (food racists), or people who just don't like pizza. Actually, I guess there are a lot of people who would rather not have any kind of pizza at all, which isn't really the case with life, as even people who don't like their own life tend to want a different kind of life, rather than no life at all. And very few people are life-intolerant. But presuming you do like pizza, if you're anything like me, then you like it piping hot. In fact, you will gladly eat pizza that is so hot, it will burn your face right off of your skull, like that guy in Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark. Why this is the case, I don't know. But it definitely is. In fact, if I am given a piece of pizza so hot that I cannot pick it up because it burns my hands, I will immediately search for another way to convey it into my mouth. "Maybe if I fold my napkin over double and then use it as a pot-holder to grip the crust... Ah, still too hot. Perhaps if I just tilt the plate and hold it so the tip of the pizza is peeking out over the edge of the plate, I can bite it off without touching it... Aha! Ow! AAAAAHHHHH!!! Hothothothot! AAAAAHHHHH!" Naturally, by this time I have burnt my tongue and severely burnt the roof of my mouth. Which is just what you'd expect when you take something too hot to touch and insist on finding another way to get it into your mouth at that temperature. But I cannot help myself, and I know I'm not the only one. Sure, everyone laughs at me when it happens, but I think they're laughing partialy in empathy because we've all put food that's too hot in our mouth. Last week I was in the kitchen with two friends of mine, and the first one took a bit of food that was too hot, so we got to laugh at her as she made the surprised face and the sounds that one makes when delicious food is burning the inside of your face. Then the other fellow took a bite of his food, which was also too hot, and we got to laugh at his faces and noises. This isn't the laughter of spite, but the laughter of shared human experience. But neither of those foods were pizza, so it doesn't really help my case. Especially because when life is too hot ("Help, I'm in a desert and it's 120 degrees!"), we rarely try to eat it ("Maybe if I lick up all this sand...AAAAHHHH!!"). Pizza, however, is good cold. If you have leftover pizza, you don't even need to heat it up to enjoy it. Life, as anyone who has been in the Berkshires for the last two months can tell you, is not so good cold. And in fact, if you don't have heat, it's downright unpleasant. Which is why in life, people always want more oil when it's cold. But when it comes to pizza, people often want less oil. There is definitely a lot of pizza in North Adams, as you might guess from the town motto ("North Adams: Land of Pizza, Banking, and Haircuts"). And there is a lot of life in North Adams. And some of the tastiest pizza places are open late, like Village Pizza (who judging from the number of people behind the counter, may well have the motto "It takes a village, to make a pizza."). But while there is good late-night pizza in town, there's really not much good late-night life. So why is life like a pizza? Well, okay, maybe it's not like a pizza.
All work on this page is copyright Seth Brown. If you are sharing it, please give attribution. If you want to reprint it, please contact me first. |