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gay pizza parlour
Friday, November 6 1998
Eight of us co-workers went up to a Serra Mesa Japanese place for lunch. The conversation, as usual, was amusing and reasonably intelligent. I haven't hung out with all-male groups in a rather long time and it's kind of refreshing. By the way, I've found that it's best to do lunch with a mix of people who do a variety of jobs. Whenever I hang out exclusively with programmers, we tend to dork out excessively and it's embarrassing to think people might overhear us discussing such things as database table structures.
In the evening Kim and I smoked a lot of pot and drank some red wine and then headed out on the town. My mind was so addled at the time I don't really remember how this came about or what we were really trying to do. I remember Kim pointing out Suzette the Schnauzer's little black puppy. He's five weeks old and no larger than a rat, but he moves and sniffs and romps around just like a scaled-down version of a Great Bernard. It's really very strange to see an animal so small being a dog.
We ended up somewhere on the downtown side of Hillcrest, in a neighborhood less populated with rainbow flags and classy restaurants. There are restaurants, though, and we went into one of them. It was a humble Italian place, complete with checkered table cloths and refreshingly homely waitresses. We didn't really know where we were so Kim asked if we were in Little Italy. No, according to our very talkative waitress, we were still up on the above Little Italy on the fringe of Hillcrest. She went on to give us detailed instructions on how to get to another, classier Italian restaurant with which this one is often mistaken (because of a similar name). But we were delighted with the humble, unspoiled atmosphere and the decidedly blue-collar nature of the clientele. And when the food came out, it was absolutely delicious. We'd stumbled onto a real find!
During dinner, Kim talked about lots of stuff but I was so messed up that I had no comprehension at all. My mind was spinning with delightful graphical representations of the behaviour of Active Server Pages as they exchange form data.
While we were ate our dinner and sipped our cheap table wine, the customer demographics changed dramatically. What had been tables of families and heterosexual couples gradually changed to fairly large groups of obviously gay Hillcrest Men. "Mama Mia!" Kim laughingly pointed out that the Pope would never approve.
In Hillcrest proper, Kim and I wandered into a sushi restaurant just to split a saki. When we told the bartender we'd just had Italian, he was puzzled. "Italian, then saki?" Tonight was, I suppose, a cross-cultural evening focused on the Axis cultures.
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