Thursday, I ate a lot of pizza; Or College Park is awful

On Thursday, I ate a lot of pizza. 4 slices--2 for lunch, 2 for dinner--to be precise.

I forgot my lunch and had to run out at noon for something to eat. I weighed my options...chipotle? Jimmy Johns? Taco Bell? I was pretty burned out on the College Park options...but then I remembered that there was Vito's Pizza at the end of the "revolving door" strip mall (I call it this because nothing in that strip lasts more than a few months...). A few months before, it had been Tony's pizza. Before that...something, I can't remember. The location has housed at least 4 different places since I moved to the area. Anyhow, I'd not tried Vito's pizza, and I figured I should. It's one of the few pizza (or pizzaesque) joints I'd not yet tried in College Park.

Their student special was 2 slices of plain cheese and a can of pop for 5 dollars. I suppose that's decent.

The pizza wasn't though. I was pretty hungry, but couldn't finish both slices. Not because they were too generous--they were average sized slices, and quite thin--but because they had just an overwhelming amount of crappy cheese on them.

I know, I know, I tend to say that the cheese is the least important part, because how can cheese be bad? But...I guess Vito wanted to prove me wrong. It was just a really cheap white cheese blend, and laid on really thick, and not fully melted, and gummy and gross.

The sauce was fine--a bright sauce, which is nice (and needed to combat that cheese), and the crust was thin and floppy. It was, overall, very greasy and heavy and I needed large amounts of red pepper to choke down a slice and a half. I'm pretty sure by the end I was wishing I'd just spent my 5 bucks at Jimmy John's again.

Later that evening I went to the Barrelhouse present's Big Lucks reading at Wonderland, and because I'd been running around all day, I didn't get a chance to eat dinner beforehand. This seems to happen to me every time I go to Wonderland for a reading, and I'm really sick of their menu, to be honest. It's fine every now and again, but you don't want to go there when you're actually hungry. So...I decided to forgo eating, while hoping that my tummy wouldn't growl too loudly during the reading.

The one thing I didn't take into account though when making this decision was that they had Two Hearted on tap, and it was happy hour. Uh...so I drank 2 of those, and was drunk (I'm pathetic.) And so...a bit later, once the reading was done, I needed food for real if I was going to make it home. I went to Pete's and managed to get 2 far superior slices of pizza for the same price I'd paid at lunch. Ugh. Go Pete's, and fuck College Park.

Back to the reading real quick--you know, Wonderland host's the Mock Turtle, and I always figured that the reason Wonderland was so crappy during our readings is because it was a Friday night and they really didn't want us there/felt like they were doing us some huge favor. But what's typical of Mock Turtle's? Oh, the bar isn't ready. Oh, the sound system isn't working. Oh, the chair's aren't set up. Oh, our bartender called in. They're just never prepared or happy to have us there.

I thought it was just us. But clearly, it's not. Barrelhouse was doing a Thursday reading (and I would imagine they'd be more hospitable to a Thursday event than a Friday one...) and they were told, upon arrival, that they had the date wrong, that the bar wouldn't be open for the event (seems like a great way to lose money, Wonderland...) , there was no sound system at all (cos everyone loves listening poetry and fiction when it's shouted from a stage), and no AC.

They pulled off a decent reading in spite of this. Good job guys.