Bostan korkuluğu.

Boh-STAHN KORK-ool-oo-oo : The scarecrow.

Last Friday night, Keith and I decided to eat out on the town of Green-frikkin'-wood for our sup. This came as no surprise to us considering that our refrigerator currently contains:

1) Six Guinness beers, each wearing either an attractive Coleman glo-in-the-dark "beer 'cuzzi" or an IU-print foamy basketball jersey.

2) Half a jar of coctail sauce.

3) 1/4 of a container of ketchup.

4) Three Pepsi One colas.

5) An embalmed head of fancy lettuce.

6) Half a loaf of bread, formed and baked before the birth of Mohammed.

7) Two packages of low-moisture shredded cheese, in the "parmesean" and "mozzarella" varieties

Hahahahaha, Mom! I'm kidding! (no I'm not! I am slowly starving to death! Help me help me help me! *tear*)

So anyway, we decide that we've tired of all of the places we usually patronize (tired of? or were we forbidden to return? you'll never know, bitches) and that we'd favor making a visit to a place we'd seen in passing, commented on frequently, and thought might be reasonably interesting. It's called

THE ACROPOLIS.

Having been to Greece and having suckled ravenously at Mother Hellas' nourishing teat for four days in 1997, I have to admit that I am suspect of most Greek cooking and Greek restaurants in the US. How could I eat moussaka when I can recall the sensation of eating it homemade in the Plaka district in Athens, my eyes unwaveringly trained to the massive crag of the Acropolis, the Parthenon itself aglow in the gentle caress of an early spring Attic night? Will a gyro filled with meat not broiled on an outdoor spit in a mountain town near Delphi taste OK? And don't even begin to talk about the honey - I'd sell my sister to the Romany for a decent jar of Hymettus bee-puke.

Nonetheless, we decided to give it a shot. I carefully concealed my tattoo under several layers of clothing and we made our way to the establishment. My fervent prayer was this: that this wouldn't be one of those weird Greek restaurants where you smash unfinished terracotta plates and then have to pay $12.95 for each of them, where you'd be forced to slap dollar bills on the sweaty foreheads of drunken Zorba-dancing Greek men with male pattern baldness, sweat donuts and body odor that could stun a bison or a place where you would have to listen to waiters shriek "OOOOOOOOOpaaaaa!" as they unecessarily set food alight with cheap Bic lighters.

Apparently, there is no God.

Our meal started innocuosly enough. A salad and soup and some bread - standard fare. I was pleased, incidentally, with the feta content of the salad - it was chockablock with it, thanks be -but I digress. Anyway, Keith ordered "oregano chicken" and I, being an insufferable Hellenephile, ordered my moussaka with the perfect Greek emphasis on the syllables.

Moose-AK-ah < - *Hissss!* No, not how you say it! Damn you!
Moo-sak-AH < - Yes. Oh yes, that's the way you make Daddy feel the burn. *delicious shiver*

We get our meal and I began to rue my decision - the eggplant was really effing mealy - when suddenly this very loud, very *gasp!* Turkish-sounding "music" began to pulse through the tiny restaurant. We'd noticed that, about five minutes before the "music" began, that two very shady men had sat down at an adjacent table. One was possessed of an earring upon which I could clearly see the paint left by the Titanic as it scraped past. The other stared vacantly ahead like he'd been stunned with a bolt-gun for slaughter. They both were clad in hella-baggy gym-pants, billowing sports jerseys and do-rags hidden underneath slanted, askew baseball caps. I decided, then and there, that I wanted to be them when I grew up.

Since they weren't ordering food or eating and since the waitress was ignoring them (the waitress who, at the time, was setting some sort of weird cheese dip on fire with a cheap Bic lighter whilst trying to muster a hearty "oooooOOO-pa!"), I figured that they were petty mafiosos despite the fact that, by mafia bylaws, neither one would have qualified as "Italian", if you get my drift. It would only, by my reckoning, be mere moments before a heavily armed gentleman with a unibrow burst down the door with size 12 jackboots and mowed the two down in a hail of white-hot lead. I began to hastily cram the grim moussaka down my cakehole; if I survived, I didn't want to have to pick the gore off it, and if I didn't, I wanted to die full.

So, the "music" starts and a young, very scantily clad woman leaps forth from the kitchen, adorned with hundreds of bangly-type objects and jinglers. The two hoods hooted appreciatively and the waif winked at them naughtily as she began to twitch like an electrocuted trout to the pulsing, vaguely Middle Eastern percussion. Slowly, painfully, she skulked throughout the restaurant and I, embarassed despite myself, couldn't take my eyes off her horrid little routine. It was likewhen you are driving down the highway and you see a fawn scampering in the median strip - you know in that nasty, black part of your soul that it's not going to end well. The worst part was that the patrons of the restaurant began cramming dollar bills into her hoochie-skirt - including a five year old boy, who clearly derived some infantile pleasure from touching the nearly naked woman. The partially digested moussaka rose in gorge to the rim of my esophagus. Then, as she gyrated her teenage hips in front of the two hoods, she deftly plucked the cash from her booty and flung it at Mr. Iceberg Ear-bling. I realized then and there her relationship to him: he was her effing pimp. Oh yes.

Three times Miss Thang circumambulated the room and thrice she was rewarded for her efforts with money hastily crammed into her nether regions to just get her the eff out of our way and our dinners, which the patrons suitably disguised as naked admiration for her "mad skillz."
When she was done, the freakish 1970s rembektiki music resumed at a low decibel level and, horrified, we tried to resume our dinner without the image of a barely pubescent teenager shaking her junk near our food. She was gathered by her pimp in a coat and taken outside, no doubt to be choked for trying to hide some of the money so she could afford to get her "teef cleaned."

We left bewildered and with the full knowledge that we'd be spending most of the night hunched, ashen, over the porcelain throne. Mostly, though, I was filled with vague yet persistent nostalgia for the seventeen-year-old me who sat entranced under the facade of the Parthenon, moved to silence by the weight of centuries and the grandeur of a building considered to be one of the most perfect creations of mankind. Plus, that seventeen-year-old me could have drunken a raw sewage martini and would have not even cramped. Damn you, Seventeen-Year-Old Me.

***

Saturday night found me standing very still at the edge of an orchard in jeans, a flannel shirt, a smock, burlap rags and a straw hat waiting for tractor-drawn hayrides to pass me, whereupon I leapt forth and went apeshit on hundreds of children's asses. When the man with the tranquilizer gun took me down, he had to shoot three darts into my abdomen to get me to buckle and lay still.

No, actually I'd been asked by Keith to volunteer with him for Headless Horseman, a Halloweeny event put on by his employer, Conner Prairie. Since many of you wonder who the hell would allow me to volunteer to frighten children, Conner Prairie is a living history museum in Fishers, Indiana. To give you a better idea about what Keith does there, he, and I quote him, "dresses up like he lives in 1836 and lies to little children for a living." This, in stark opposition to my job, wherein I dress like it's 1990 and tell the awful, stark naked truth to the bewildered and international who often weep in despair.

So anyway, there we were, waiting to leap forth and shriek at children - one of whom I FERVENTLY hope soiled him/herself - when we began listening more closely to the bizarre sound effects they'd rigged in the trees across the way in 1886 Liberty Corner. Every twenty seconds or so there was a random shriek - a shriek which sounded astoundingly similar to the cry of a peacock. I had to stifle myself every time I heard it, thinking of course of the Eerie Undead Peacock of Doom and what said fowl would look like.

*Gather 'round, children, an' let me tell y'all about the most cursed bird ever to walk this earth. It all began at on a dark, stormy night at a badly-run petting zoo...*

On the Divine Effing Retribution end of things, I managed to get a nifty earache out of the deal. As my jaw lay, partially paralyzed, I knew I shouldn't have enjoyed myself so much on that divine Headless Horseman hayride evening.

Or, at least not videotaped the damn thing for later improvement techniques.

Until Friday, I remain,

Domonic