Friday night at the supermarket!
Still in my yoga pants and overdue for a shampoo, I was pretty unenthusiastic, but my mom was out of yogurt, and I know a grocery crisis when I see one. So I drove off to the local Vons, musing about my long ago stints doing factory work. After a week of doing mostly the same task over and over again, people got rowdy on Fridays. There was talk of getting paid, laid, and drunk. Nobody talked about how they just couldn't wait to shop for some groceries.
I would be chatty at the supermarket, I decided. Shopping, the Friday night social event. And I would buy whatever I wanted besides the yogurt and the other things on the list. But I lost my nerve and traded the idea of chatting someone up over the tomatoes for buying candy or getting a coffee from Starbucks. Whatever treat I wanted was mine.
Then I saw the butter. Not just any butter, but butter from France. On sale. And it was in a utilitarian container with a lid that would fit in the butter keeper on the door of my refrigerator, which would mean that it might stay soft enough for my mother to knife it out of there without the usual battle. (I've been searching for one of those Tupperware butter dishes for ages, to no avail.) So I put two containers of the stuff in the cart.
Turns out French butter is conversational dynamite. Two people asked me if it was good before I rolled to the checkout. The cashier could not stop talking about it. Then the guy bagging the groceries got interested. Suddenly that scene (you know the one) was running through my head. "The butter is for my mother,"I said.
When I came home I looked that scene up on YouTube. I'm not putting up the link. I found it just as weird and unsettling as I did when I saw it in 1970-something.
But I am going to go have some toast.
What are you doing with your Friday night?
1 comment:
Get the buttah. You don't know how often I think of that phrase and that scene. It's a little disconcerting.
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