I recall sitting in a long, dull editorial meeting one Monday afternoon. It was around 4:30; a dozen writerly types, all disengaged. Our eyes were darting between our watches and the door. Then, the editor gave us the topic for our annual food issue: Best Pizza. Suddenly, everyone in the room perked up and had something to say.
What is it about pizza? Not only is it a strikingly perfect meal: if you assemble it correctly, all five food groups are represented in more or less the right ratio. But it seems to strike an emotional chord with just about everyone in the free world.
That it is the preferred late-night nosh of college students seems right to me, too. These are kids — really — away from home for the first time. There could be nothing more comforting than a warm slice, bubbling with cheese, to take the edge off worry about exams and dating and that touch of homesickness to which none of them want to admit.
I saw this demonstrated just last week, when I mentioned to my creative writing class at Macalester that Papa John’s has now made it possible to order a pizza by text message. Half the students in my class rose off their chairs, as if they couldn’t possibly make it through the next hour of lecture; they simply had to leave and code in an order for a large pepperoni with onion and green pepper.
Talk about your savvy marketing campaigns! Papa John’s not only has the most active Internet ordering system of any pizza purveyor (it’s advertised during Heroes — how much more exposure can you get — and statistics show one in five PJ pizzas is now ordered online), the company has hooked into the Millennium Generation‘s favorite method of communication.
There is nothing new about any of this. Pizza has long been unique among restaurant food offerings: it’s the only item available for delivery to your hotel room, dormitory, house or apartment door in nearly every city, township, and village in the United States. And certain beloved pizzamakers are willing to go to great lengths to ship their product directly to you.
How do I know this? Because I have a personal pizza story of my own:
Back in April, I was on a college fact-finding trip with my younger
son, who was then a junior in high school. It had been a tough year.
Max was a varsity football player who got laid up with a nearly fatal
staph infection, missed the final game of the season, and confessed to
us that he’d always hated football and he was just as glad. . . .This
explained a lot: the moodiness and testosterone bursts and mediocre
grades we’d been seeing out of this heretofore model kid.
Things
were still a little tense, even when we left for our trek through
Wisconsin, Michigan, and Illinois. This was supposed to be our chance
to bond — mother and son — getting back to where we were before the
fall from hell. We drove to Madison and had a fine time. Then we went
to Ann Arbor, and it was as if the heavens opened up and angel trumpets
began to blare. Max was entranced. He met with professors and took
every tour and dragged me to a falafel place on the far side of town.
"This is where I want to go," he told me that night over dinner. "There’s no need to visit Northwestern; let’s just go to
Gino’s instead."
He’d been talking about Gino’s since we planned
the trip. "It’s the best pizza in Chicago, probably in the country,
maybe in the world." But I — the responsible mother — was having none of this. "We came to visit colleges," I told him, "not eat pizza."
We
set off the next day for Northwestern. I’d programmed it into the GPS
and allotted just enough to get there for our scheduled tour at noon.
But as we drew closer to Chicago, something clearly went wrong. The GPS
kept directing me toward downtown, though I knew the university was in
a place called Evanston. Finally, around 11:30, I pulled over and asked
someone.
"You’re a good hour and a half from Northwestern," she told me. "There’s no way you’re getting there by noon."
I
was furious — at myself. I told Max I was going to find a coffeeshop
where I could call the admissions office to get good directions and see
if I could postpone our tour. I turned left, then right, then left
again, and then I heard Max shout, "There it is! I don’t believe it. .
. .you got us to Gino’s! See? It was meant to happen."
Well, there it was. Indeed. And I had to make a split-second decision. Should I stick to my guns and drag the kid to Northwestern, risking our fragile new relationship; or should I go with the flow and share in his sense of divine guidance?
Let’s just say: The pizza was really, really good. The lightest upside-down deep-dish I’ve ever eaten, it had a savory cornmeal crust and lots of tangy tomato sauce. And the best part is, you can have it shipped to you anywhere in the country.
My son wears his Michigan sweatshirt proudly, but his other memento from that trip is the black marker I bought him to sign Gino’s wall.
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