AN AMERICAN IN DENNY'S
On the other hand, screw Denny's!
This is, above all, an homage to the age of Interstate travel. It was originally going to be another poem about the attempted impeachment of Bill Clinton(See"Psychotic Break on I-77" for the first one). After I had jotted down the first dozen lines or so the waitress showed up with our food, so I had to lay the work aside. Later that day I got on the PC and started tapping it out. About the time I got around to accusing the entire US Congress of rank hypocrisy (J'accuse!), I started running out of ideas. And then I thought, well, hell, has anyone ever written about eating at Denny's? No! I could be the first! I could start a trend!
The first dozen lines of this poem, with the exception of the first line, are nearly exactly what I wrote on the back of an envelope at the Denny's off Sunset Road in north Charlotte on a cold day near the end of November, 1998. I changed the first line a bit after my wife remarked that the poem was "too negative." Well, we can't have that, can we?
I suppose I should have started out by saying: this is in no way intended as a tribute to Denny's. It could as well have been written in or about a McDonalds, for that matter. It's partly about the ability, not to say tendency, of people to rise above the whole corporatization thing. I guess I'm a humanist above all else. Denny's itself I honor not. As a co-worker of mine observed last year: eight bucks is too much to pay for an omlette.