5/9/2008

My first trip to the circus was to attend the Ringling Brothers/Barnum & Bailey extravaganza, at the Glens Falls Civic Center. I don’t recall much from the show, except the smelly animals and an electric gun that you had to rev up with a trigger to make sparks appear at the end. What I do remember is dinner after the show. We stopped at a restaurant that had tiny jukeboxes at every booth. I don’t know if it was my parents or my brother and I who selected ‘Disco Duck’, but that’s what we played at our table. Quack, quack, waddle, waddle…

The waitress told us to feel free to help ourselves to the salad bar whenever we were ready. We scooted out of the booth, my brother and I, and hurried off to the salad bar… wait, that can’t be right… we wouldn’t have been tall enough to get the salad ourselves. So one of my parents must have gone up to get our plates.

At that time, my favorite food in the world was the marinated garbanzo bean concoction at Pepe’s Restaurant. They were drenched in a homemade salad dressing, tangy and spiced with onions and black olives, and no other restaurant ever quite got it right. Still, any garbanzos were better than no garbanzos, and I asked for my parents to get some for me.

The waitress stopped when she heard me talking. “I’ve never heard someone so young call them by their real name,” she told my parents with an incredulous open-mouthed smile. She was impressed.
I didn’t know what else I was supposed to call them. Chick peas? How common.








