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terrorist eye candy Friday, February 10 2006
This evening Gretchen and I went out with our friends P&D to our favorite El Salvadorian restaurant, El Pupuseria Mi Ranchito on Broadway in Kingston. Back in the day, two or three years ago, El Pupuseria Mi Ranchito was as authentic as it got, and when you went through that door you'd left the United States of America, passing through a warp in the fabric of the universe that placed you squarely somewhere well within the borders of El Salvador. Now, though, it seems our little unsullied bit of Central America has been discovered. Tonight a good half of the people eating there were gringos. The surest sign that times they are a'changin' is that when you sit down the waitress (who has by now completely mastered English) sets a basket of chips and a bowl of salsa in front of you. Don't get me wrong, both are delicious, but it's hardly authentic El Salvadorian. Suddenly the restaurant is trying to live up to the expectations of the gringos who go there expecting a generic south of the border experience.
I always get the same cinco pupusas, but the others who come with us often range widely over the menu. The D of our P&D contingent ordered up the pork and yucca dish, causing the collective mass of his Jewish ancestry to shift in a vaguely rotational manner within their graves (an action they execute regularly). I had a piece of each and found the yucca unexpectedly delicious, very french fryesque but with some unplaceable additional flavor that kept me from wanting to eat too many.
As always with P&D, conversation was an endless series of punchlines and amusing vignettes. The funniest moment came when P said that the constant parade of Arab terrorists on the television these days is, for her, welcomed eye candy. She finds them irresistibly sexy. "Are we in a movie?" Gretchen demanded amid laughter. This led D to mention something he'd read or written about the many women in New York who fantasize about Osama bin Laden, the ultimate inaccessible bad boy you can't bring home to mother. (I just did a search for this phenomenon in Google, and the result was a picture of the D in P&D. There you go. Love those internets.)
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