1/30/2024 0 Comments Tennessee whiskey cake tgi fridaysI didn’t tell them about my fears and my problems and my strange moods because I knew they wouldn’t have understood, and I suspected they wouldn’t have cared.Īmong this crowd there was a lot of bitchery and cunning and (for me, at least) a lot of trying so, so desperately hard to fit in. Sure, there was some underage beer-drinking and sex and once in awhile somebody cut school altogether to get to a Dave Matthews Band concert early, but that was about it. My popular friends and their popular boyfriends were squeaky clean, on their way to college degrees and solid corporate careers and 4-bedroom, 3-car-garage houses with nice long driveways and in-ground pools. But though I was attracted to more artsy types, I fantasized about dating the kinds of guys my friends dated: football heroes and lacrosse champions and future heads of sales and marketing for pharmaceutical and/or tech companies. I even managed to have a brief fling with one of the anointed, a good-looking school athlete, which momentarily encouraged in my parents the notion that I might turn to dating "normal" types instead of musicians. Crew and American Eagle and we did not smoke cigarettes, make our own tattoos, do drugs, create art, or engage in the suspect practice of "acting." I had acquired these friends in ninth grade, to my enormous delight after four years spent as a total dork in middle school. These were the popular friends with whom I could cut out of school for a TGI Fridays lunch, only to return to a wink and a smile from the school secretary. My other friends – pretty, well-spoken, good at field hockey and lacrosse and Student Council and socializing with adults. I wouldn’t be properly medicated until I was 21, in the wake of a suicidal nervous breakdown that sent me home from Emerson College in Boston and landed me right back at home in Flemington, New Jersey. These were my real friends, the ones with whom I went thrift-store shopping and to whom I cried on the phone when I was depressed. It had a lot of plants to shield the smoking section from the non-smoking section, and I can’t for the life of me remember if they were real or fake.įlem Fam was where I went with my weird friends, the artists and theatre fags and pierced freaks, the queer kids with homemade tattoos and drug problems. Flem Fam was worn and homey and half-choked with cigarette smoke in an era when teenagers could comfortably smoke in a suburban Jersey diner without worry of harassment from well-meaning adults. Surely the Flemington Family Diner, or "Flem Fam," didn’t count Gus, the old Greek owner, did not see fit to include any whiskey-flavored dessert items on his menu, although he did serve a great Belgian waffle. In a town packed with mall outlets and fast food franchises, fine dining options were few and far between. Somebody got a phone call that we’d won, and my table of popular friends celebrated with some kind of giant dessert soaked in Jack Daniel’s. I was at TGI Fridays (it had lost the punctuation, by then), though I can’t remember if I was at the slightly older one at the Somerville Circle or if I was at the brand-spanking-new one back home in Flemington, just a mile from the high school. But I did care about TGI Fridays.īut I was around in 1999 when the Hunterdon Central Regional High School football team won the championships in the biggest division in the state of New Jersey, at a game played at Giants Stadium in the Meadowlands. I wasn’t around when it became known as one of the first singles bars, fueled in part by its pioneering use of ladies’ night promotions (something unheard of at bars in that day). Friday’s at the corner of East 63rd Street and First Avenue in Manhattan. I wasn’t around in 1965, when Alan Stillman spent $10,000 to open a place called T.G.I. (It does, however, offer a Cup of Dirt dessert, a beloved suburban PTA mom treat featuring "chocolate pudding, crumbled Oreo® cookies and gummy worms.") I am relieved, and slightly disappointed, to note that the kids menu is Jack Daniel’s-free. There is a Jack Daniel’s handheld chicken sandwich, and there is a Jack Daniel’s dessert. TGI Fridays has a menu that answers the question, "Exactly how many items can we soak in Jack Daniel’s Tennessee Whiskey?" (That answer: thirteen.)Ī vast swath of TGI Fridays menu real estate is occupied by Jack Daniel’s Tennessee Whiskey. I’ve been thinking a lot about death, and thus TGI Fridays, and thus Jack Daniel’s, a whiskey of which I am inordinately fond despite my ability to access any number of higher-class, higher-value liquors. ’ve been thinking a lot about TGI Fridays because I’ve been thinking a lot about death.
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