Friday, April 27, 2007

Restaurants That Remove The Jukebox and the Customers Who Come Back Anyway But Kind Of Hate Them For It

Be sure you click over to The Education Wonks and check out the latest Carnival of Education. Remember, those who don't keep up, have no call to whine about anything.

The actual "teaching" part of the semester is over, and next week I will be giving finals. When Hub gets home from school today, we're going up to the main campus wherein reside many and diverse high-tech Xerox machines that duplicate and sort and staple all by themselves. The squirrels that run those machines and the little elves who sit inside and staple packets are run pretty ragged this time of year. That's my explanation for it, anyway. It's all magic to me.

And then we're going to have dinner at the Cafe Pizzeria, on Kirkwood. It's Bloomington's oldest pizza parlor. Nothing inside has changed (except for the removal of their gigantic glowing jukebox, for which I will never forgive the management) (and the prices) since at least the seventies and probably, well, EVER, and when we sit inside and look at the pictures and the murals, it's easy to feel like an undergrad again. Until we pass a mirror or window, that is. Sigh.

Or when we bring the kids and realize that they are now older than we were when we first sat in the Pizzeria watching the world go by on Kirkwood and feeling that the world was our oyster and all we had to do was dig a little for the pearl.

So, yeah, next week is finals week, and then I will have a few days off, and then I'm flying west to visit my brother and his family, (thank you, Mom) and then summer school will start.

In other words, I will be far too busy to do much housework or cleaning.

Speaking of jukeboxes, why are almost all of the restaurants removing theirs? That dreadful piped-in music from those canned radio stations drives me nuts; I hate that stuff! I suppose it's cheaper for the restaurant, and without the jukebox they've got room for another table, but the tradeoff isn't worth it for me.

Besides, the canned radio music is almost always Oldies. I get enough of that just by looking in the mirror. I want something different, for a change. Besides, with a jukebox, you can almost always tell what kind of crowd you've got by the music they choose.

But oh well. Remove those huge neon music machines and stick another table in there. Buy a subscription to a radio station's canned music; heck, they don't even have live dj's most of the time, just a guy answering the phone, pretending to take requests, and hitting the 'commercial' button on cue. One more impersonal thing in our lives.

The Pizzeria's jukebox was an awesome one, too.

We'll be there around five thirty, Pizzeria.

With a little luck, their canned radio station will have begun playing some music from at least the eighties by the time we get there. I'm not holding my breath, though; most of the time, when we hit any restaurant, we get there just in time for the Obscure Sixties Motown and/or "Leader of the Pack" Hour. I'm always up for some good "Big Chill" Motown and a lot of those sixties "I'm in love with a bad boy/girl and my parents hate him but then he got killed" songs, but holy canoli, some of those songs the canned stations put out are so obscure and so terrible that it's easy to realize just why they're obscure! We are both pretty knowledgeable about music, but much of the time, in a restaurant, we will just look at each other and say, "Have you EVER heard that song in your life?" and the answer is almost always, "No."

Does anybody else out there consider a restaurant's choice of background music to be important? By piping in the canned music, a restaurant tells me that it really doesn't care what I have to listen to as long as it's easy and cheap for them.

Other than that, though, the Cafe Pizzeria is great. It's Hub's favorite pizza in all the world.

Grecco's is mine, but Pizzeria is next.