Well dumplings I start taping new shows for the 2007 season of WOMR
first week in April
I thought you all might like a taste of the first show
so here goes
enjoy
manja!

and thanks to the great jill matrix
for being the best editrix always and ever

All you can eat

By rossi

There were a lot of things that could make my mom proud of my sister,brother and me: great report cards, a clean bedroom every once in a while, but the thing that really sent her into fits of joy was pushing us to further and further levels of just how far we could stretch our stomachs. And she had a "short list" of the best places to do it.

The Ground Round restaurant met all of my family's requirements for “our kinda restaurant.”

My sister, brother and I delighted in swishing our feet thru the
peanut shells that filled the floor and contributing to the ankle-deep mess by gorging from huge barrels of peel-your-own peanuts. We felt like real grown-ups chugging back root beer from frosty mugs, and the Ground Round even had live bands. Not just some 80-year-old guitarpicker wedged in the corner like a Xmas ornament but rock and country bands that made us feel as though we were having a real night on the town like city folks, even if we were in South Jersey.

The very fact that we could order our meals from the table and not
from the cashier put the Ground Round a steep step above the other
eatery my family frequented.

My parents didn’t give a hoot about the root beer and peanuts. They
had tunnel vision for one thing and one thing only; the Wednesday
night all-you-can-eat fish fry.

Mom would start starving us at 3 o'clock in preparation for getting
her money’s worth. We’d come home from school, famished as usual, and soon as we reached for the fridge, she’d shriek, “Save yourself for the flounder!”

By the time we hit the Ground Round at 6:30, we were so hungry, we
were biting air.

“Two adult all-you-can-eat fish fries and three kiddies!” Mom would scream at the waitress before she could even open her mouth.

The flounder would arrive heavily breaded, with a mess of fries. Mom frowned on wasting precious gastric real estate on fries, but to be able to devour more then one basket of fried fish, you needed the
fries, not to mention a whole lot of ketchup. My record was three
baskets, two filets per basket. I’m fairly sure my dad made it to
five, although he ran to the bathroom after, which in my mind is a disqualification. The rule was simple, you were not to stop eating until you were physically in excruciating pain. At that point, Mom would pull out a plastic baggy or two and quickly put the remaining filets in her purse.

Later in high school, I visited the Ground Round with pals. When I
asked if they still did the fish fry, the hostess responded, “No … we
had to stop that." Then she backed away from me as if remembering
something old and painful.

But the Ground Round wasn’t the crème de la crème of pig-a-thons for Mom. No, she much preferred the early bird special at the Blue Swan diner. Mom nearly caused a pileup the day she first drove past the Swan; she was mesmerized by the sidewalk blackboard advertising “ALL YOU CAN EAT.”

We weren’t thrilled about the Swan, it was a bright, 1960s-style
diner filled with old ladies, no peanut shells and no frosty mugs. The closest thing to live entertainment was the elderly cashier who kept humming to some song in the back of her head while she counted out change.

The all-you-can-eat part was their salad bar. The deal was you could order any entrée and get the all-you-can-eat salad bar for free, plus the early bird entrée specials were only $6.99 and included beverage and dessert.

Mom gave the salad bar high praise when she discovered that not only did it have lettuce, tomato, cucumber, peppers, onions, canned chick peas, green bean salad and croutons but it doled out the big money too; tuna fish salad.

Mom quickly devised a scheme where she would order a $6.99 broiled sole for herself, a $6.99 broiled salmon for me and then just ask for bread and make tuna fish sandwiches from the salad bar for my brother and sister. Dad missed out because the early bird only lasted until 6 o'clock and he was barely home from work by then.

It should be noted at this point that only four kinds of fish existed
in the world of mom…tuna, salmon, sole and flounder. Anything else was just gross or worse yet … Christian.

During the Blue Swan years, I ate so many canned chickpeas that it
took a decade before I could eat them again. Only hummus got me over my chickpea phobia … because I didn’t know what was in it until I'd enjoyed it several times. I still try to think of it as white bean puree.

It might not have been so bad if we’d been allowed to soak up the
extra salad dressing with rolls, but with the exception of the
tuna-wich, Mom didn’t want us to fill up on bread. She wanted her
purse to fill up on bread. Three refills of the breadbasket would all
find their way into her purse. After one season, Mom had so many
crumbs in that bag, she started to get ants.

But the gold medal of all-you-can-eat pigathons was reserved for the place far, far away and near to my parent’s wallet: the Thunderbird Inn. It was somewhere between the southern part of North Carolina and the northern part of South Carolina, I can’t recall, but it was the prime destination for our annual road trip from Jersey to Florida.

Mom would start starving us in Virginia, knowing the Thunderbird was coming up -- and for good reason. This place was the heavyweight of well … getting heavy. The Bird had a turnstile time system where you would pay your 6 bucks and could walk into this huge gymnasium place filled with Southern-style buffets and eat all you could stand until your time slot ended.

There was the 7-11am breakfast, the 11-3 lunch, two hours for the
joint to recoup and then the 5 till 9 dinner fest.The local old-timers had the system down. They’d arrive at 7, eat for
two hours, fall asleep under a table with their belts unbuckled and a
newspaper over their head and then wake up at 10:45, eat massively
again and be out the door, stuffed till the next day. While Mom
admired their ingenuity, even she had her limits. Sleeping under the
table was simply beneath Mom’s all-you-can-eat standards.

We’d gorge ourselves on fried fish, macaroni and cheese, black-eyed peas, corn-on-the-cob, cornbread and slabs and slabs of pecan pie. Mom sent us on repeat missions for cornbread and buttermilk biscuits.

After the incident referred to as “rice pudding wreck” Mom had wised up to what worked in her purse and what didn’t. The cornbread and biscuits were good hours later, if you didn’t mind the occasional ant.

Well I’m all grown up now, of course, and recently was feeling a bit
nostalgic, I was at a casino and decided to show a pal of mine what an all-you-can-eat buffet joint is like.

The food was less then mediocre of course, except for the steamship roast carvery, which was actually edible. Lots of old ladies filled the booths, and the familiar hint of blue in their wash and set brought back memories.

I didn’t want the cookies, never been a huge fan of cheap baked
Goods, except for Twinkies which are, as you know in a class by themselves and honestly were a huge step up from any of the baked goods in this buffet especially the nuclear lime jello casserole conconction, But I still went to the dessert table and piled as many cookies as would fit on my plate. Then I bundled them in paper napkins and put them in my bag.

I smiled, thinking of the little bundle as my tribute to Mom who went off to the great all-you-can-eat buffet in heaven some years back… but I made damn sure to get those suckers out of my bag before the ants arrived.