Shaggy-dog story

 Shaggy-dog story 

My brother-in-law, Ike, declares there is no such thing as bad pizza. There is great pizza, very good pizza, good pizza; there can be mediocre pizza. But there is no bad pizza. My sister, Hannah, adheres to a similar stance with regard to costume melodramas: the worst are not bad at all if they have the primary ingredients, their crust and toppings: that is, a plot of some sort though it may meander (crust), and costumes and sizzle; villains, rogues, and heroines that overcome, cinderellas, or at least younger sisters, that emerge from the ashes, or the embers, to wear the best dresses of all the dresses and off camera, and sometimes even on, will pee in the pure-goldest of golden pots (toppings). In her most recent, set in 18th-century Spain, the King is going mad and the Queen is going mad and everyone is sleeping with everyone else except for the chaste wife of Don Diego. In bedrooms the size of the Great Salt Lake in castles the size of Utah with grounds swallowing up Nevada, Idaho, Colorado, Wyoming, and New Mexico, everyone, everyone is sleeping with and blackmailing everyone else, upstairs and downstairs, male and female, the birds of the air and the fish of the sea, and the beasts of the field and the forest. This is the way she talks about her shows, like an Evangelical priest on color TV; it always amazes me. But ...

Melodrama Pizza, delivery

Since they live in a small town on the Upper Peninsula, where the truly poor get enough casino money to live in houses with modern appliances, maybe even pizza ovens, with security cameras, and with flat-screens the size of one wall — at least so Ike and Hannah see it — they think, “Such is life.” It can be anywhere from grand to mediocre, but if you don’t eff up, it will never be bad. Even if you do eff up, county and/or tribal mental health will catch you, and the one or the other will wrap you in a blanket until you are ready to come home again.
     It may not be a sophisticated social philosophy, but it arises the way social philosophies arise even for the “more sophisticated,” out of observation and temperament. It doesn’t matter how widely you read, Uncle Albert says, it doesn’t whether you graduated from Harvard or Muskrat High, you end up thinking what you think based on what you think you see and what you think you are feeling. And you are also likely to think that whoever disagrees with you is either an uninformed cretin or an ivory-tower snob.
     “Who said this,” Uncle Albert says, “because I don’t remember: ‘Everyone has his prejudices, but thanks be to God, mine are the right ones’?”
     “Or hers,” Roz adds, “her prejudices.”
     “I don’t know,” I say.
     Roz: “You don’t know what?”
     “Who said it,” I say.
                                                                           10.14.23