DINNER THEATER

 

It began by accident.  In the early 70s, while I was away at school, my parental figures would eat at little neighborhood restaurant every Friday night.  And being something of creatures of habit, they always ordered the same thing.  My mother would have pork tenderloin and my father would have a steak.  Then they would call me on the phone and tell me how their week went.

 

Well, one Friday I picked up the phone and my mother was laughing so hard that she could barely talk.  It turned out they had gone out for supper and ordered their usual thing.  Only it was Good Friday, a day that meant absolutely nothing in our family and they sort of did not even realize that it was, but did mean something to the poor family sitting at a table next to them.  It seems that the family was in the grip of a depraved and vile superstition which forbade them from eating meat for supper.  This was causing their child some annoyance because he wanted a hamburger and his parents were having the devil’s own time try to explain to him that he could not have one.  And he kept saying, “They’re having meat!” 

 

By merely having supper, my parents had managed to annoy the hell out of some other people.  And they enjoyed it immensely, so much so that it became a Cosimano family tradition to repeat the performance on every Good Friday!

 

A few years later, I’m sitting in Baker’s Square in Wheaton, Illinois with my girlfriend.  It is fall of 1980 and the election is coming.  There is something going on at the local fundamentalist installation and there are lots of people dressed up including one family with lots of Reagan buttons.  It was too good to resist.  I turned to my girlfriend and praised Reagan to the heavens, saying the only problem that I had with him was that he never made any decisions without first consulting his astrologers!  (I had no idea I was being prophetic.)  The good folks at the next table nearly choked!

 

So let us fast forward.  My parents have gone to the great Race Track and Bar in the sky and I’m doing the Dr. Mirabilis project.  My damsel in distress and I have just nearly caused a 40-car pile-up on River Road near Chicago by the simple process of having her walk along the side of the road in some complicated rope work and she has her hands chained together in front of her as we pull into McDonalds as for some reason she has acquired a taste for chicken nuggets.  I offer to unlock her but she says, no, she’ll go in that way.  I shake my head and in we go.  The kids behind the counter nearly have heart failure but nothing is said as we get our food and sit down to the shock of some of the family types sitting in the place.

 

And then back to Wheaton.  Every Thursday night there would be a program at the Theosophical Society and after the program a few of us would go out for a bite at the Baker’s Square (which was right next to the Society property).  And for some perverse reason that place was frequented by young folks from Wheaton College, the aforementioned fundamentalist installation.  And they would do bible study!  Well, we decided to have some fun.

 

We had a Satanic Bible Study group.  We would bring our copies of The Satanic Bible and do a parody of xtian bible studies, reading a line from the SB and then asking, “Now, what is Satan telling us here?” as well as making pentagrams over our food and being very religious about the whole thing.  It shocked the shit out of them and was great fun.

 

Anyway, you see how this works.

 

When you go into a restaurant, you have something of a captive audience.  Unless the music is sufficiently intrusive, it is usually pretty easy to hear what people in the nearby tables and booths are saying and thus they can hear you as well. 

 

Find a topic of conversation that will shock them.  It is usually pretty easy, just talk about the latest sensational crime from the standpoint of a criminal critiquing how it was carried out and complaining that it was done clumsily and explain how it can be done right the next time.  This works particularly well with mass murders.

 

And if you have religious types at the next table, be religious yourself, but of a religion they may not like, like Satanism, which is always good for a laugh when you get back to your car.

 

And the fun part is they cannot complain without looking like complete nitwits!