Well, here’s a slosh of petty bile, ’cause I’m just out of sorts today and the stupidest things are rubbing me the wrong direction.
I think gourmet pizza is the biggest ripoff and also a total misnomer. Especially the alleged pizza from a certain overweening, pretentious pizzaria which calls itself Pizza Bella. Just because your pizza oven runs on wood rather than gas doesn’t make it better, just more labor intensive. It’s been about two years since I ate at Pizza Bella and I’m still kind of pissed off. It was the stingiest pizza I ever paid actual money for. Only about a third of the pizza surface had any sauce on it and that was barely a smear at that. All it did was kind of moisten the inner circumference of the pie; it certainly didn’t add any particular flavor. It might have served to adhere the toppings, if there had been any to speak of. That was the shittiest, most expensive shitty pizza I’ve ever had the misfortune to encounter.
There’s an old saw that pizza is like sex, and that even when it’s bad it’s pretty good, but I am here to say that both bad pizza and bad sex are woefully disappointing.
For my pizza dollar, if I’m paying for somebody else to make it (and I make a pretty damn acceptable pie by my own plebeian standards) then I’ll pay either Minsky’s or D’Bronx for the pleasure. When I am going to eat pizza, I’m looking for a crust that isn’t mooshy, tough, or crumbly. There needs to be plenty of sauce, tomato, with plenty of oregano and garlic for preference. Also generous vegetables and a good sprinkling of cheese to glue it all together.
The other thing I’m irrationally irritated about today is the utterly cliched trend of doing photoshoots in the West Bottoms. I swear I can’t get home from work without dodging any quantity of shutterbugs, professional and amateur, who have decided to express their inner beauty amongst the outer decrepitude of one of Kansas City’s erstwhile districts.
I’m particularly enamored (and don’t think that I’m in any way sincere) of the fashion shoots that seem to take place pretty much continually throughout the back alleys of the Bottoms. I’ll be trolling the dumpsters, as is my wont, and have to dodge a photographer, her tripod, her assistant, his umbrella-thingys, and two or three crispily-tanned and expensivly coiffed JoCo schoolgirls in diaphanous dresses, who have set up a fetchingly juxtaposed scenario, enacting Paris Hiltonian moues on a crumbling loading dock.
I’m not sure where all of these fashion-shots get used, or if they ever do. But I constantly see photographers out there, putting their pricy gear to the test, while an apparently endless parade of well-groomed Midwestern pulchritude pouts, preens, and poses at the cameras.
I very strongly suspect that if you were to do a survey, you would find that agreement with that “old saw” was fairly neatly split, with the positives coming from the males in the group, and the negatives from the females.
Either that or people who haven’t had the experience of truly bad pizza!
Pizza, Pizza, Pizza . . . I had the same thoughts about Pizza Bella. Haven’t you heard, “Less is More”? It that gourmet thing you know. I have to agree I like Minskys, but Fun House Pizza is on top of my list.
Never tried Fun House. Where’s that at?