St Luke of the Blizzard?
Only in Cleveland, kids, only in Cleveland.
After the radical ice storm that threatened the Ohio Presidential Primary on Tuesday, a wild snowstorm created chaos along the North Coast on this Friday of Lent. But hey, what's a foot of snow when there are yet-untried Fish Frys to be explored?
By about 4:30pm, I think Sarah and I had each called St Luke's about 10 times to inquire as to whether or not their fish fry was still "on" for the evening (since everything ELSE on earth had been called off in honor of Mother Nature.) We believe we are thus personally responsible for their deciding to move ahead with the Fish Fry--after all of those calls, they probably thought they had a huge throng of people just YEARNING to come there and decided not to let us down, right?
Thankfully, we were not the only ones there! The parking lot was surprisingly full even in the crazy weather.
This was the fabulous week for Tom K to experience a church lenten fish fry for the FIRST TIME EVER! (Brigid, I can't remember if this was your first one too?)
We did have to observe, just for the record, that if those darned kids on That Seventies Show had been churchgoers, THIS would have been the basement where they had their youth group. (What IS it with churches still looking like it is 1970-something?)
Fab features of this particular fry included
*Live music by a guy on a guitar with a really rather extensive playlist. We had to wonder: when he was a teenager with a guitar, jamming and learning all of these songs, did he secretly dream of growing up to be Fish Fry Guitar Guy?
*Cheese pizza for $2.50--and it turned out to be an actual Domino's Personal Cheese pizza, box and all. For some reason we found this to be sorta hilarious.
*Extraordinarily on-task table bussers!
*Beer and wine available for a "free will offering". (I opted out 'cause i was gonna be driving people I love in a blizzard, for pete's sake, and had some wine when we got back home for late nite gaming....)
*A secret, hidden dessert table where you EARN that dessert by going on a treacherous, nearly impossible journey to find the hidden delicacies. Okay, that might be an exaggeration. Here's the thing: we saw CHILDREN with dessert (one of these kids was actually seriously too young even to WALK yet), but we didn't see the dessert table or anywhere that people were GETTING cookies. So we pretended that there was an insurmountable task of some sort that kept us from the dessert, and instead gloried in the dessert that Eric made and brought to my house afterward. It's just a better story to say that there was some epic journey involved that to admit that none of us could figure out where the cookies were. The fact is this: none of us could figure out where the cookies were. And we were too embarrassed to ask the little children.
One more week.....but that's getting ahead of ourselves, isn't it?
Sunday, March 9, 2008
Week 4: Dr. Martin Luther Evangelical Lutheran
Okay, I've been a little distracted and haven't kept up with the Fish Fry blog.....sorry!
So February 29 found us at Dr Martin Luther Evangelical Lutheran Church on Ridge Road in Brooklyn.
The atmosphere TOTALLY reminded me of the dinners at the protestant churches of my childhood in Ashtabula county, where the same spaces are used for all sorts of different gatherings. The room where we had dinner is clearly usually divided (by those collapsible walls I somehow associate with 1974) into little Sunday School classrooms, with blackboards hanging lower on the walls than I've ever seen anywhere else and little-kid-Sunday-School crafts hanging on the walls and even from the light fixtures!
On this day, though, the walls were pushed back as far as they could go to allow for the tables to be set up; the hallway was full of bake sales/chocolate candy sales/etc; and a wonderfully friendly and helpful woman welcomed us, explaining the many options on the plentiful menu.
All told, the food was TERRIFIC. I somehow ended up with the double-slaw Matt created when he emptied one container into another because he wanted the paper cup to carry tartar sauce back to the table (?!?)....ridiculous on both of our parts, probably, huh? :)
We loved the homemade kolache so much that it didn't really matter all that much what the purple stuff OR the yellow stuff was (blueberry and pineapple, it turns out. Some darling woman kept running back to the kitchen to get answers to our ludicrous queries.)
Bonus fun of the Fry: t-shirt reading. We took in quite a lot of t-shirt "literature" this time around (have I already mentioned the 70s?)
So at one point Matt, who btw was raised as a Lutheran, reads the word YMBALI emblazoned on the t-shirt of a person walking toward him and wonders what African language the word is from, and what it might mean. Not wanting to stare, I don't turn around to see this person, as I'm facing the other way and it's a small space.
Moments later, I turn and we both read the back of a t-shirt of someone sitting with their back to us; this t-shirt hybridizes Letterman's Top Ten List with Foxworthy's pre-5th grade antic, listing top ten ways to complete the sentence "You might be a Lutheran if..."
Neither of us can read the top ten list without getting uncomfortably close to the wearer, of course.
What I learned, however, is that YMBALI is not African for anything. It is Lutheran for "You might be a Lutheran if...."
These little cultural tidbits are a really important part of the Fish Fry Foray experience. We learn a lot of weird, random, cool stuff by going on this annual pilgrimage. Aren't you glad you're along for the ride?
:)
So February 29 found us at Dr Martin Luther Evangelical Lutheran Church on Ridge Road in Brooklyn.
The atmosphere TOTALLY reminded me of the dinners at the protestant churches of my childhood in Ashtabula county, where the same spaces are used for all sorts of different gatherings. The room where we had dinner is clearly usually divided (by those collapsible walls I somehow associate with 1974) into little Sunday School classrooms, with blackboards hanging lower on the walls than I've ever seen anywhere else and little-kid-Sunday-School crafts hanging on the walls and even from the light fixtures!
On this day, though, the walls were pushed back as far as they could go to allow for the tables to be set up; the hallway was full of bake sales/chocolate candy sales/etc; and a wonderfully friendly and helpful woman welcomed us, explaining the many options on the plentiful menu.
All told, the food was TERRIFIC. I somehow ended up with the double-slaw Matt created when he emptied one container into another because he wanted the paper cup to carry tartar sauce back to the table (?!?)....ridiculous on both of our parts, probably, huh? :)
We loved the homemade kolache so much that it didn't really matter all that much what the purple stuff OR the yellow stuff was (blueberry and pineapple, it turns out. Some darling woman kept running back to the kitchen to get answers to our ludicrous queries.)
Bonus fun of the Fry: t-shirt reading. We took in quite a lot of t-shirt "literature" this time around (have I already mentioned the 70s?)
So at one point Matt, who btw was raised as a Lutheran, reads the word YMBALI emblazoned on the t-shirt of a person walking toward him and wonders what African language the word is from, and what it might mean. Not wanting to stare, I don't turn around to see this person, as I'm facing the other way and it's a small space.
Moments later, I turn and we both read the back of a t-shirt of someone sitting with their back to us; this t-shirt hybridizes Letterman's Top Ten List with Foxworthy's pre-5th grade antic, listing top ten ways to complete the sentence "You might be a Lutheran if..."
Neither of us can read the top ten list without getting uncomfortably close to the wearer, of course.
What I learned, however, is that YMBALI is not African for anything. It is Lutheran for "You might be a Lutheran if...."
These little cultural tidbits are a really important part of the Fish Fry Foray experience. We learn a lot of weird, random, cool stuff by going on this annual pilgrimage. Aren't you glad you're along for the ride?
:)
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