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| I want pizza |
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| Lane and I like pizza |
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| Coponata |
12noon Sat....PART 1---Tonight we go in search of that elusive pie of my childhood. My brother says it may be just a function of a child memory enhancement (he used other words). The recollection: we'd call
from our rotary phone in the linoleum store on Wilson Ave(formerly Hamburg, before WW1) ...Glenmore 5-4512.
Mom would the send me with the $5?? I would walk to Central or Evergreen and Bleeker or Greene???
I am sure it was a bar. I am sure the was a side entrance and that Rheingold, the one beer to have when you are having more than one, or Schaefer or Schlitz was on the floor and in the air. "Wait here ,Kid, on the wood chair with the round seat in this small space next to the curtain ." He had come from behind the bar to toss the dough which i could see him do through the heavy curtain made of the kind of material that draped the screens at the Rivoli on Myrtle or the Madison or the Parthenon or even the Chinese restaurant upstairs with the female impersonators to which my parents took out of towners if they didn't go to Ben Massicks? Country something and something Club or THE ELEGANTE. He dropped basil and oregano on the cheese and sauce. He left to pour a draft and returned to check the coal...we had coal too in our store basement and a coal stove and on Harmon the super fed coal into the furnace and at school we saw a film about back faced miners with head lamps. The pie was boxed... returned to the store and there Mom and Bro and I ate. We ate the char and the luscious cheese and the tomato ambrosia.
And now with a big birthday pending ..."and imminent even," as Snaglepus would say,,,I am headed blocks from that bar...to Irving because someone found an old coal pizza oven and built a restaurant around it based on a grandfather clause that allows such unhealthy environmental activity to continue. The hunt is on. Tune in later.
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| Like a madelaine the foyer tile of my apartment building |
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My apartment birth to 16 same but we had no air
conditioner |
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| roasted potatoes and cheese and rosemary |
Part 2 1215am We saw the tile foyer ..mosaic of my childhood home and walked to Verde....Soon i realized this was Webers bakery where my Dad got his crumb buns, and soon we were listening in as customers described Connie Francis' roots in this hood and Jackie Gleason's home on Chauncey street. We ate amazing roasted potatoes with primo de sale cheese and rosemary and had coponeta on toast and an artichoke pizza and a margarita. All good though the pizza was different than the kind I knew. And then we visited the oven...and met the team and received an out of the oven bread...warm like those from La rosas for 14cents in 1954 (scaletta?).
I saw Rella's place,the coal and ice and later fuel oil friend of my dad's . I found a place where my childhood is remembered. But I won't stop eating pizza at totonos or franny or la villa or petes or lombardis or peppinos or grimaldi..but I will go back to Verde .
