Pizza

I usually like pizza, so long as it doesn’t have onions or tomato slices.  There used to be a pizza place around the corner from our house, but it closed during the covid lockdown and now there’s a felafel place there instead.  My three preferred toppings were pepperoni, pineapple and ground beef.  I’d always tear off the crust first and eat that while letting the rest of it cool, to avoid burning my mouth.

On the other hand, I can’t eat the stuff they sell at the Pizza Pizza chain—it literally makes me sick!  I wish I knew what they put in it that disagrees with me so badly…

I remember seeing an episode of The Brady Bunch involving competitive jumping frogs, with a moment when the frog got into the pizza! (I watched that show at the time, with no idea that it would become a camp classic…) The reason I remember it is that just as they were showing it, the broadcast got interrupted to report the death of Lyndon Johnson.

When I was young I read a thing about pizza in a Mad magazine paperback reprint. (This was from 1960 or so, when pizza was the new thing…) It had cartoon advice like “When you’re driving home with your pizza and get stuck in a traffic jam, you can always set the passenger seat on fire to keep the pizza warm,” and “If a policeman stops you, you can bribe him with a slice.” This included “How to eat a pizza pie,” which showed three methods, each of them ending with “…getting icky sticky gook all over your $49.50 charcoal-grey suit”! $49.50 would be a good price for a suit today.