Sometimes You Want To Go...

Will return to the topic of on-line "community" a little later. Today, a little levity.

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I was ordering a pizza the other day and, as usual, the guy on the phone where we order our pizza from knew what I wanted before I finished. We order from the same place about once a week and we always get the same thing, large pie with fresh basil on the whole thing and black olives on half. The guy who runs the place always finishes my sentence for me after I say "Large pie with fresh basil..."

He'll say "Basil whole thing and black olives on half. Hey how ya doin' buddy," in classic New York pizza guy accent. We have a little bit of banter and he wishes me good weekend, having called me "buddy" several times. And I love it. The guy is so nice to me and it is such a difference from Boston. And in Boston the blue collar folk would call you "pal" or "guy," which both just come across as more terse than friendly.

So the other day when I got off from ordering and kind of said out loud how much I liked that, my wife said, "Of course you do. You like being recognized at places. You've liked that since you were a teenager hanging out at Denny's."

She really nailed it on the head. I really do. I love being a regular. I always have, just like she said. And she was right, it did start back at Denny's in Chicago's northwest suburbs, on the corner of Rand and Dundee Roads.

Now of course Denny's is not the hippest place in the world to hang out. But as a teen in white, middle-class suburbia there were not a lot of options. The redneck jocks with pick-up trucks already had the Burger King parking lot. Us New Wave kids had the local teen dance club (called Photon) and Denny's.

Pretty much every Waver kid from the general Arlington Heights, Palatine, Barrington, Rolling Meadows area hung out there on weekends, and every night during the summer. I hung out there so much that the hostess and most of the waitresses knew my name. It also helped that my friends and I actually tipped pretty well for teenagers. They pretty much let us hang out there as long as we wanted. We could spend hours at the back corner table drinking coffee and they were OK with it. I think the people who worked the night shift there liked the social outcasts like us. I never saw them be that friendly to a preppy or jock type that walked in. I was such a regular there that one night I pulled up as another group of people were walking in and it looked especially crowded. I thought we would have to wait for our table, but when we walked in the hostess (Gloria if I remember her name correctly) said, "Denny (as I spelled my name then) your table is all set for you," and we went back and sat down. She made the people who walked in first wait, because she had seen us pull up in the parking lot.

So of course I love it there. The Waver hangout Denny's was a little teenage oasis in the arid desert of white suburbia. But I had to leave that all behind when college started.

But I have had a regular place to hang out where people knew me just about every place I've lived since then. Of course, after the Denny's the rest of the places are bars.

Once at college I didn't really hang out at the college bars. I was one of those guys that hung out at the townie bars. They had much more character than the college bars. Not that I was the only student at them, but there were a lot less of us that liked the low-key bars over the meat-market frat bars. So much nicer to be able to have some food and beer in actual pint glasses instead of plastic cups at the Jackson Street Pub rather than listen to annoying Bon Jovi Music and giggling sorority bimbos ordering "sex on the beach" at the Gin Mill.

After I moved to Seattle I started hanging out at a jazz bar downstairs from the theatre I was working at where a lot of us from upstairs had ongoing tabs. That was the greatest thing ever. No matter how broke I was I could get a beer and a burger. The phrase "put it on my tab" is one of the coolest things to be able to say.

I think I still owe them money.

I had other place in town where I hung out and bartenders knew my name, and would give me lots of free beers.

After I moved back to Chicago I found another place because of working at a theatre. A bar across the street from the Steppenwolf and next door to the place I was working, The Royal George, was brand new while I was working there. So a bunch of us from my show were the very first regular customers they had. Sometimes the only customers they had. I had my very last cigarette in that bar, sitting there alone with the manager working the bar and nobody else in the place. It was the kind of place that knew me so well that I would have my beer sitting in front of me by the time my butt hit the bar stool.

Of course I didn't really get this in Boston, because people there just suck so much, including, and maybe especially bartenders. Except for a short time that I was eating lunch during a temp job at the bar at South Station, and the woman behind the bar there got to know me. And I haven't found my place in New York yet because we don't get to eat out all that much, and when we do it is always someplace different, and I don't get the chance to hang out in bars like I used to.

I guess that's why I like it so much that the pizza guy knows my order.

I don't know, does this make me needy? An attention whore?

Anybody else just love being a regular? What's your favorite place?

I know at least one of my readers (initials TBO) is as big a fan of the concept of being a regular as much as me.

What about the rest of you?

Oh, and I know the title of this post is pretty lame, but I couldn't think of another pop culture reference that related to this topic.