My date with a crunchy mister

Dear Readers,
If any of you are still subscribed to my blog after two years of silence, I am touched, and more than a little surprised. What better way to welcome you back than with an evocative tale of my date with a crunchy mister. Even better, there was a pre-date voyeuristic rendezvous involving a young vampire and a shirtless werewolf.

Now that I have your attention, I can spill the less exciting factual beans about my Saturday. I have seriously mixed feelings about the Twilight movies. I enjoy the books, though I find many faults in them. And, I adore the atmosphere of the films, which feel like home to me with their overcast skies, drippy drives to school, and overgrown greenery. I also find the song choices of the films to adequately push all of my teenage buttons which are creaky from neglect, but still wired properly. I could now list my objections with the films, but why dwell on such trivialities as awkward hairdos and horrid acting?

Mixed feelings aside, I found myself excited to see that Eclipse was playing at the dollar theater (whose name is now void as a movie there costs 2 dollars). After a brief, and admittedly incomplete, survey of local Twi-hards, I could find no one wiling and able to attend with me. So, I ventured off to "Captain Smelly's" which is what we called it before it became "the dollar theater" to see a movie by myself. To be fair, I wasn't really by myself. There was a pre-teen pair of siblings speaking Chinese, an old couple speaking Spanish, and a middle-aged woman, who seemed speechless at the end, enrapt and overcome by the multitude of long-forgotten secret desires that these films arouse within her. I nodded my head at her awkwardly as I passed her seat on my way out of the theater, feeling like we were acting out a scene of a man emerging from a dark viewing room at a sex shop who accidentally encounters the janitor in the hallway. For a second, I wasn't sure if I was the man or the janitor.

As I blinked away the painful rays of sunlight outside the theater, my mind swirled with musings about the types of people that adore the Twilight movies (i.e. mostly 13 and 49 year old females) and what that all really means, but that may be a blog for another day. I was headed back to the car when my stomach grumbled. I checked the clock on my phone; no wonder, it was after 1pm. A quick glance found a french-style bakery chain that I've never patronized because french food typically means cheese and cream, two of Steve's least favorite ingredients.

I wandered in and scanned the menu to find the very first item was non other than an old friend I met in France over 15 years ago (omg, has it been that long???), the Croque-Monsieur. This french fast food sandwich that is thought to have turned 100 this year is a little handful of melty, buttery goodness that was a great comfort food to ease the pain of culture shock in my travels. It is essentially a grilled ham and cheese sandwich topped with Béchamel sauce and another slice of cheese, then broiled to perfection. Its name means "Crunch-Mister"(...blink...blink...). Yeah. One bite sent me thousands of miles away and thousands of days back in time to my first crunchy mister in Paris when I was 15, almost 16. It is very stereotypically American for me to like this snack. It has the reputation in France of being street food, fattening and bourgeois. Probably similar to our whopper or big mac. But, nothing washes away the cares of seeming average like melted cheese on toasted bread.

One unfortunate difference that I noted was the size of the American version of the Croque-monsieur. It had three layers of cheese and ham inside instead of one. It was a sad reminder of a couple of patterns that are obvious in American restaurant cuisine: 1) Authenticity falls second to local marketability 2) Bigger is always better. So, I removed the excess layers, and enjoyed my mind's journey back to that street cafe on the cobblestone rue in Paris where I sat on the edge of a fountain and ate my first Croque-Monsieur. With the Eclipse soundtrack still echoing in my mind and a long forgotten, yet familiar, taste in my mouth, I may as well have been back in my torn-knee jeans, painted converse low-tops and a plaid flannel shirt. Just long enough to remember the good things about those days and brief enough to appreciate all the ways things are different now. It was wonderful.

(photo credit: Michael Brewer, taken from Wikimedia Commons)