« TT: Elsewhere | Main | OGIC: Two trains and a turn »
July 6, 2006
TT: Sunday dinner in Atlanta
The Georgia Shakespeare Festival is located in a dullish stretch of suburbia that is all but devoid of restaurants. I know this because I checked out of my hotel at noon on Sunday, went looking for brunch, and found nothing but a Piccadilly Cafeteria, three of the Waffle Houses that are ubiquitous as telephone poles in the Deep South, and a half-dozen fast-food joints. Opting for nostalgia over efficiency, I chose the cafeteria, though not without double-checking the time in order to make sure I got in ahead of the after-church crowd. Southern cafeterias start to fill up at a quarter past twelve on Sundays, and by 12:30 you can't count on getting a table.I don't know when I last ate at a southern-style cafeteria. When I was a boy in Smalltown, U.S.A., my family used to go straight from the Murray Lane Baptist Church to a restaurant called Two Tony's, but that was an all-you-can-eat buffet, the kind of place where you served yourself from endless steam tables, pausing only to tell the white-hatted man at the end of the line whether you wanted roast beef or baked ham. At a cafeteria the cheerful ladies behind the counter fill your plate for you, and the only thing on which you get seconds is your soft drink.
Time was when such establishments were nearly as easy to find below the Mason-Dixon Line as Waffle Houses. They're still far from uncommon, but you don't see so many of them nowadays. Baby boomers prefer to be served by a waitress, or to pick up their food at a drive-through window. I'd guess there were a hundred people seated in the dining room of the Piccadilly Cafeteria on Peachtree Road on Sunday at twelve-thirty, all but a dozen of whom were either gray-haired or bald. (I was about to say that I was the youngest person there, but alas, I wasn't. I find it hard to remember that I'm fifty years old.)
Times change and so do tastes, but the Piccadilly chain has yet to acknowledge the evolution of the American palate. I can't put it any better than does the company's Web site:
Walk into any Piccadilly and you'll swear it's your mother's kitchen. The first thing you'll notice are the friendly smiles, followed immediately by a huge selection of your favorite comfort foods. Delicious fried chicken, succulent roast beef, tasty fried shrimp, all ready to enjoy. Choose from our wide variety of garden fresh home-style vegetables like carrot soufflé, yams and green beans. And don't forget your favorite dessert just like mom used to make.
I'm usually pretty good about sticking to my diet, but I figured that as long as I was dining chez Piccadilly, I might as well go native, so I opted for the All-American Meal: fried chicken, mashed potatoes and gravy, deep-fried okra, cornbread, and Coca-Cola. The okra was mushy and tasteless, but the other dishes were pretty much as I remembered them. So, too, were the conversations on which I eavesdropped. Everyone was talking about the sermons they'd heard that morning, and except for the ripe Cajun patois of the very nice woman who collected my tray, all the accents were as thick and sweet as cold molasses. The only thing different was the color of the clientele. The table next to me, for instance, was occupied by a party of four women, two white and two black, who bowed their heads and said grace together before they dug in.
I'd brought a copy of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution with me, and I flipped through it as I ate my All-American Meal. The front-page feature in the Sunday Living section was all about fireflies, but the other stories were indistinguishable from those you'd find in any other big-city Sunday paper. I glanced at the "Literary Scene" column and saw that a fellow named Randall Balmer was speaking at the Jimmy Carter Library about his new book, Thy Kingdom Come: An Evangelical's Lament--How the Religious Right Distorts the Faith and Threatens America. (Here's a rule of thumb based on half a lifetime of book reviewing: any book with two subtitles is probably boring.) At that moment I overheard a man two tables away saying, "He's a nice guy, but you know what? He's living with a girl." I smiled, wondering what the author of Thy Kingdom Come would make of the table talk at the Piccadilly Cafeteria.
My eye then fell on the following item:
Laura Lippman. Talks about her new Tess Monaghan mystery, No Good Deeds. 7:15 p.m. July 12. Decatur Library, 215 Sycamore St. 404-370-3707.
Speak of the devil, I thought, having received an e-mail from Laura only that morning. The last time I saw her in person was a month before I fell ill, and if I'd come to Atlanta ten days later, I could have poked my head into the Decatur Library and said hello....
Like so many pleasant reveries, this one was cut short by the clock. It was time to go see Hamlet, so I finished off my Coca-Cola, paid the check, and headed back down Peachtree Lane to the Conant Performing Arts Center, reflecting as I drove on the smallness of the world. Today I'd eaten fried chicken in Atlanta, and tomorrow I'd be eating sushi in Manhattan. A week from now I'll be visiting the Idaho Shakespeare Festival, and two days after that I'll be at the Utah Shakespearean Festival.
As always, the Bard put it best:
Over hill, over dale,
Thorough bush, thorough brier,
Over park, over pale,
Thorough flood, thorough fire,
I do wander everywhere,
Swifter than the moonè's sphere;
And I serve the fairy queen,
To dew her orbs upon the green:
The cowslips tall her pensioners be;
In their gold coats spots you see;
Those be rubies, fairy favours,
In those freckles live their savours:
I must go seek some dew-drops here,
And hang a pearl in every cowslip's ear.
That's my life, more or less.
Posted July 6, 2006 12:00 PM
