Category: Humor

Seinfeld’s Unfrosted was … Not Bad

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Jerry Seinfeld’s Unfrosted was … not bad. Screech! Spit coffee! Swear word! Screams! Car Crash! It is shocking, I know, to hear that coming from a Jerry Seinfeld fanatic. If you’ve read any of the articles on this site, you know how often I source him as one of the greatest comedic minds alive today. I consider him one of the best standup comedians of his generation, and his observations on what makes us weird have had a huge influence on this site. The show Seinfeld was my favorite sitcom of all time, I loved Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee, and I even enjoyed his Bee Movie. I didn’t love it, but I really liked it for what it was. Oh, and I laughed so hard during one of his standup shows that Jerry Seinfeld looked over at me with a look that suggested he was comedically concerned about my health. If the difference between fanatic and fan is excessive and intense, uncritical devotion, I am a fanatic. I never wrote to him, collected dolls, scripts, or took tours, but if there’s a hip term I don’t know for a passive fanatic, that’s me. I’m probably his idea of the perfect fan, a guy who quietly buys and watches anything to which he attaches his name. Which is why it pains me to write these five words: “Unfrosted is not as funny as I thought it would be.”

Watching the movie reminded me how we all want more of everything we love. We want more from our favorite artists, athletes, politicians, and plumbers, until they give us so much that we realize it probably would’ve been better if they left us in a state of wanting more. That’s the advice seasoned entertainers often leave young upstarts, “Always leave them wanting more.”  

And Seinfeld warned us, numerous times, that more is not always better. He’s said it in relation to why he decided to prematurely end his show Seinfeld, but he’s applied that principle to his career too. He’s informed us on so many days, and in so many ways, in the numerous interviews he’s done throughout his career, that he’s learned that he’s best when he stays in his lane, his lane being standup. He’s learned what he’s good at, and what he’s not, and he has proven to be the opposite of what makes some comedians so great, in the sense that he’s not daring, risky, or experimental.

If I were to pitch him a project, I would say he and Larry David should develop a sketch comedy in the Mr. Show vein, but we can only guess that he’s had hundreds of similar pitches from friends, fellow writers, and corporate execs, and he’s turned them all down. Some of those projects may have proved embarrassing, some may have been so far out of his lane that he didn’t even consider them, but we have to guess that some projects that were so close that he had a tough time turning them down. He did it all, because he knows who he is, what he’s good at and what he’s not, and he’s learned how to stay in his own lane.   

On the greatest sitcom of all time, Jerry Seinfeld surprisingly (to me anyway) credited the three actors (Julia Louis-Dreyfuss, Michael Richards, and Jason Alexander) for making the show so brilliant. He does not shy away from the idea that the writing on the show, of which he played a huge role, was great, but he admits that the actors brought that writing to the next level.  

“I did get caught in a beautiful, cyclonic weather event,” he said in an interview. “The actors, Larry David, the thirteen phenomenal comedy writers, and everyone on both sides of the camera was a killer. You know when you’re a part of it, but you know it’s not you. You’re a part of it, but if you’re smart, you know it’s not you. It’s not all you.”   

On Seinfeld, Jerry played the Alex Rieger of Taxi, the Sam Malone of Cheers, the center of the storm. He’s always been great at adding that final comment, lifting that eyebrow to exaggerated levels, and saying, “ALL RIGHT!” at the end of another character’s hilarious rant. He knows how to put a cherry atop the pie in other words. As long as that pie, or the acting required to nuance it, was filled in by someone else. He can write funny, he can deliver a short, crisp line deliver as well as anyone, but the nuances in the acting craft required to build to Seinfeld’s punctuation were always best left to others. I heard him say this so many times that I saw it, until I accepted it, but I always thought there was a bit of humility attached to it. Some of us were so blinded by enthusiasm that we never learned how to curb it completely.

When he decided to end Seinfeld after the ninth season, it felt similar to an athlete retiring at the downside of their peak, not the prolonged, sad tail end, just the other side of the peak. There were hints in seasons eight and nine, after Larry David left, that the show was on the downside of its peak, but it was still the best show on TV. Why would an athlete, or a successful showrunner, quit prematurely? I understand not wanting to outstay your welcome, or allowing us to see glaring levels of diminishment and not wanting to go out like that, but if you’re lucky, you might still have forty years on this planet. What are you going to do in the rest of your life to top that? Some of them, I think, are too worried about what we think. They don’t want us to see their downside, or because they love the game so much that they can’t bear playing at anything less than their peak. They can’t bear someone saying, “If you just called it quits after season nine, it would’ve been a great show beginning to end. Season ten was probably one season too many.” They, some of them, don’t want us to remember them as someone who stayed around too long.

When we were kids, we ached for another Star Wars movie, then we got one later, much later, and it ruined the legacy of Star Wars. After the second trilogy was complete, the almost unanimous opinion among those I know is they probably should’ve left us wanting. As Led Zeppelin did. Zeppelin broke up after the untimely death of their drummer John Bonham, in 1980. We spent our teens and early twenties talking about the possibility of a reunion and another Zep album. I understand they said it wouldn’t feel the same without Bonham, but the remaining band members were still in their early-to-mid thirties when they broke up. How do you leave a juggernaut like Led Zeppelin in your early thirties? The Beatles were in their twenties when they broke up. As Theodore Roosevelt said of being president so young, “The worst thing about being president of the United States so young, is that there’s nothing you can do to top that for the rest of your life.” Led Zeppelin left us wanting, and it was probably for the best. What could they have done to top those first six albums? They most likely, and in all probability, would’ve only disappointed.

In a career studded with comedy gold, Gold Jerry! Gold! Unfrosted has the feel of a sequel. It’s not a sequel, but how many of us walked out of a killer comedy, talking about how that movie just screams out for a sequel. We didn’t talk about how great that comedy was, we instantly wanted more. Then, when the sequel came out, it was, “That wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t as good as the first one.” That was the impression Unfrosted left on me. It felt like all the players were trying to recapture something that used to be really funny, and we were all prepared with our preparatory smiles on our faces, until the smiles slowly faded away.  

The characters have this feel of trying to repeat something that worked before, but it just doesn’t for all the mysterious reasons that some movies work and some just don’t. The jokes have a feel about them that suggests to us that they’re brilliant, but they’ve been done so many times before that we no longer need to figure them out. As someone who doesn’t know one-one hundredths of the knowledge Jerry Seinfeld has about comedy, I think the figuring out part is the reward of comedy. 

Unfrosted seeks the opposite tact. It goes for familiarity, and we all love familiarity. Familiarity with actors, themes, concepts, and all that. Unfrosted displays this level of familiarity in the beginning, to establish a through line to the audience, but it never branches out into that unique spin that kind of shocks us into laughter. The setting of the movie is the 60s, and what a foolish time that was, and even though this has been a million times before, we still think it could be great in the minds of geniuses.

It’s a mystery to us why some movies don’t work, because we don’t make movies, but you’ll often hear moviemakers, actors, and all the other players say, in interviews, that they don’t know why either. “We thought it was funny, but we had no idea how huge it would get.” We don’t often hear the players involved say, “We thought it would be huge, but we had no idea people would consider it a little boring.” What works and what doesn’t is a mystery to us, and it’s a mystery to them. Generally speaking, dramas and action movies are probably a lot easier to predict for those involved, especially when the star actor signs on to the vehicle. Comedies and horror have a super secret formula that even those involved in the finer details of the production involved don’t know whether it will hit or not.  

Unfrosted gave us all a be-careful-what-you-wish-for feel, because you just might get it. As much as we cried out for a movie, or any project, from Jerry Seinfeld, we walked away from it thinking that Unfrosted, unfortunately, should never have been made. What could they have done to make you feel better about it? “I don’t know, I don’t make movies, but they probably should’ve left me wanting more instead of giving it to me.”

Watching Unfrosted, reminds us of that elite athlete who retired on the downside of a peak, not the bottom, just the downside, and we clamored for his return. How can he retire at 37? He still had what two-to-three years left? If he lives to eighty, he’ll spend the next 43 years reminiscing and thinking he should’ve played two-to-three more years at least. Then he comes back, and we see how much his skills have declined. He didn’t do it for the money, I can tell you that much. He did it, because he loves the game, and what’s wrong with that?

The point some people make on various websites is that athletes and entertainers run the risk of ruining their legacy by staying too long. This line right here makes me almost fighting mad. So, you’re telling me that the athlete who made so much money for the league, the city, and the franchise shouldn’t be able to sell his wares to anyone who will take them? He shouldn’t try to get another paycheck for the punishment he put his body through for your entertainment, because you want to remember him the way you want to remember him? Isn’t that a bit myopic, even selfish? He wanted to get paid for his efforts, of course, but he didn’t necessarily do it for the money? Seinfeld, and most modern athletes, have so much money that that’s not why they’re doing it. They’re doing it for the love the game so much that they want to play at least two more years? What’s wrong with that, and what’s wrong with you for wanting to deny him that?

Did Seinfeld ruin his legacy by doing Unfrosted? No, first of all, it wasn’t that bad, but, then again, I never expected to say that a Seinfeld project “wasn’t that bad”. I don’t remember any of the elite athletes who “stayed one year too long” for those latter years, and I don’t begrudge them for taking as many paychecks as they could before they called it a career. I also don’t begrudge them the idea that they loved the game so much that they couldn’t walk away, until it was obvious to them that they truly couldn’t play the game anymore. I actually respect it, as I say it was for the love of the game. I respect the fact that Seinfeld’s friend pitched him on the idea of Unfrosted, and not only did he like the idea, but he didn’t think he was done yet. He thought he had one more big project in him, because he loves doing the things he does so much that he wanted to try it at least one more time. Good for you, Mr. Seinfeld, I say, and if he feels like doing another project, or projects, I’ll be there on the first day it’s released.  

Jerry Seinfeld has admitted that he doesn’t expect to be remembered after he’s gone, and he’s even gone so far as to say he doesn’t care, or that’s not his driving force. I’ll remember Jerry Seinfeld as a great, almost perfect standup comedian, the cocreator of one of the greatest sitcoms in TV history, and as a gifted natural when it comes to observational humor, but Unfrosted doesn’t do much to either lift or damage his legacy. It was just a marginally entertaining movie that they probably won’t list in his very lengthy resume when that final wave off arrives.

The Platypus Courtship Chronicle

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Due to its proximity to the brain, the sense of smell is the most powerful for recalling memories, but when was the last time you used your ampullary electroreceptors to locate crustaceans in deep, dark water? You probably didn’t even know you had ampullary electroreceptors, and I don’t write that to display some sort of superiority, because I don’t have any either. Knowing that, a platypus might pull a power play on us by talking about how he uses them as a sixth sense. Just dropping those two words, sixth sense, you know this platypus is going to get some attention at the pool party. When he starts in on the mechanics behind his super-sensory skin on his duck-bill and its three distinct receptor cells that help it detect electrical impulses caused by movements of objects in the water, and how he’s one of the few mammals that have this ability, you just know people are going to start gathering. He’s super-obnoxious about it too. He knows the best way to put exclamation point on all of his claims is a party trick.

He tells a short fella, wearing a yellow shirt, to throw a worm in the pool, then he instructs us to blindfold him, nose plug him, and add some noise-canceling earphones just to prove he isn’t using any of his “pedestrian senses.” And what do you know, he just happens to have all that on him. 

“What’s going on here?” a late-comer asked, and the other guy shushed him and pointed. Other than that whisperer, the rest of us were silently watching that short guy in the yellow shirt spin the platypus around three times to disorient him. Yellow shirt then led the platypus to the edge of the water and pushed him in. After about seven seconds, the platypus emerged with a worm in mouth. He allowed it to dangle at the end of his bill for a couple seconds, for effect, then he sucked it in.

“Ta-dah!” someone called out to ignite the hooting and hollering. Free-flow laughter followed, as we followed the platypus, all but yipping with excitement, to a dark corner of the grotto.

We would have even joined in on all the adulation, if we didn’t see that smile on Tiffany. Tiffany was such a friendly woman, with such a warm disposition, and we were really hitting it off, two minutes prior to the platypus putting on that show. She showed us a smile when we began talking to her, and we thought it was that smile, until we saw the smile she gave the platypus. Then, when we added what we considered a clever, little joke after the show was over, her smiled ticked over to us while we spoke, but it lessened a little when she answered us in a polite, slightly dismissive tone. When the platypus added his own stupid joke about how he was a member of the relatively exclusive species of egg-laying mammals, “Other than the echidna, otherwise known as the spiny anteater.” Tiffany laughed. She loved it. As she continued looking at the platypus, awaiting his next line, we saw that smile, the smile we wanted, return to her face. It strengthened to such a degree that we figured it wouldn’t be long before we saw our first, live platypus love donut.

Even after Tiffany touched the soft, suede-like bill that she said she found quite pliable and fleshy around the edges, we maintained Walter Payton’s never-say-die motto. We could feel petty boiling up in our insides, but we didn’t want to become petty. We tried to maintain our smile to get that smile from Tiffany on us, but the one thing we know about petty is that it’s difficult to control once it starts coursing through the veins. 

When the platypus started flapping his flat pads of hardened gum tissue about being three different animals in one, he had the room. There were people I didn’t even know who were captivated by his, “We mimic the traits of the bird here, a reptile there, and a mammal like you everywhere else.” When he said you, he was talking directly to Tiffany. He proceeded to reveal his intentions by directing the rest of his stories, clever anecdotes, and descriptions of his prowess at Tiffany, and we felt that deep in our throat.  

Tiffany was all about short-term fascination in the moment, but I started thinking about how long-term calculations influence even the shortest short-term thinking. When Tiffany began gently stroking the platypus’s fur, while the platypus talked about how “science has found his fur displays bioflourescent properties under an ultra-violet lamp, and how that reveals that his fur can absorb short UV wavelengths and then emit visible light, fluorescing green or cyan,” and how “We camouflage ourselves from other UV-sensitive nocturnal predators or prey by absorbing UV light instead of reflecting it.”

“And then what?” was the question spinning around in our head. We were then going to further that question with a “What good does that do us, how can we use that piece of information?” to play to Tiffany’s long-term calculations. We didn’t ask it, because we knew how petty it sounded. If the platypus answered, it wouldn’t be a good one. If the platypus didn’t answer, we thought we might have had him, but silence can be a tricky thing. If the platypus was crafty, he would allow that silence to play out, until it came back on us and we were drowning in it.  

By the time he got around to talking about his tail, and how it isn’t just a rudder for swimming, we were no longer even smiling at the platypus. Our competitive juices were consuming us to the point that we didn’t like him when he said, “It’s like a fat storage depot, much like a camel’s. It’s almost like a secret snack drawer.” We were not immune to his charisma, and if it wasn’t for Tiffany falling under his spell, we might’ve marveled at how a platypus can captivate a room of humans so adeptly.

Even a man named Tom Fielder fell under the platypus’s spell, and Tom was one of those narcissistic types who doesn’t pay attention to anyone who cannot do anything for Tom Fielder, and yes, he spoke of himself in the third person. Even Tom “the caustic, cynic” Fielder couldn’t conceal his compliments, “You’re a delightful blend of quirkiness and evolutionary marvels—a true testament to nature’s creativity!”   

We’re not fools, we could see that we were nearing a point of no-return with Tiffany. She was about two flapping eyelashes away from enamored by this duck-billed beaver who European naturalists thought was a hoax when they first encountered one of his ancestors. The painful memories of losing out to the males of our species struck us in the moment, as we thought about how much more painful, bordering on humiliating, it would be to lose out to a male of another species. This humiliation led to the desperation of us saying whatever we could think up, at that point, to try to convince the contingent surrounding the platypus in the grotto to move into the light, so Tiffany could see that the product of her adoration didn’t have teeth. We knew that she was thinking short-term, as the platypus went on about how multifunctional his bill and fur were, but we all know that nestled within even the shortest, short time thoughts are long-term considerations. Women might be able to overcome the superficial qualities of the toothless, for example, but they have to factor in how embarrassing it might be to go out on a date at a restaurant and have the other patrons notice that her date has to use gravel as makeshift teeth to munch on his food. That just has to be consideration for her, we thought, as we continued to hint around that our conversation would be so much better in another, better lit location in the pool area.

My competitive juices were getting the best of me, but I didn’t say anything about his teeth, or lack thereof, because a friend and former co-worker of mine placed a warning sticker in my mind about letting my competitive juices getting ahead of me when it came to fighting for a woman that I’ve always tried to apply.

“Be careful when you’re competing,” he said when I was competing with another fella, and I was about to let that woman know everything she didn’t know about that man. “Be careful that it don’t get the best of you, and you say the wrong thing. You gotta be discreet, strategic, and methodical, or it’s gonna come back on you, like the boomerang. You gotta lay your scoop out organic, or as organic as you can make it, so she thinks she’s discovered it all on her own. You pointing out his vulnerabilities, blatantly, will boomerang back on you, and you’ll be the bad guy in her eyes.”  

It was great advice from a dishwasher, and we’re not cracking on him either, because he said it himself. He said, “How do I have all these women, and I’m a dishwasher? I must know what I’m talking about.” I kept his advice in throughout this disastrous evening, until Tiffany started fingering the horny stinger on the heel of his back feet. That pounded home the point that her interest was so far beyond superficial and zoological that it was almost game over.

We were losing so bad that our desperation eventually reached a point where we cast our dishwasher’s advice aside and shouted out, “But aren’t you a monotreme?” That silenced the contingent, and we temporarily buckled under the weight of the lifted eyebrows around us, but we maintained our stance, because we had a point that we needed to drive home. When he proudly said yes, because he was proud his species, we pounced before he could use our classification to pivot a conversation about how proud he was of his heritage. We added, “Monotreme is Greek for one hole, so that means you only have one hole for waste removal?”

Was it a party foul? Yes, and we knew it was on so many levels that we knew it wouldn’t be met with approval by those who cultivate group thought on conversation topics and social decorum, but we also knew it could prove a depth charge that once detonated could affect Tiffany’s short-term thinking.  

The problem with this is that individual methods of waste removal are not in a woman’s, but more particularly a young woman’s, top 100 list of considerations for a potential mate. The party foul also illustrated the dishwasher’s boomerang effect in that if we made a dent in the platypuses’ chances at Tiffany it did not have a corresponding effect on our own. We could even say, judging by the raised eyebrows arcing even higher, that they viewed the comment as mean-spirited.  

When the platypus answered that with an all too thorough and descriptive answer, that effectively neutered our attempt, he concluded it with a clever redirect about how “Some stupid humans try to cutesify, as oppose to classify, the baby platypus as a puggle.” Tiffany laughed hard at that again, too hard. It was an all-in and it’s-all-over-for-you laugh that those of us who’ve lost out on so many potential dates know well.

In a last-dying gasp, we asked the platypus to do his blind-folded, worm trick again. We didn’t do this, “Because, I found that first one so inexplicable that I need to see if you can do it again.” We did it, because we wanted him to remove his swim shirt again, and when he did, we were all ready for it. We clicked the flashlight on our cell phone on for the supposed purpose of shining some light on him so he could see, but we accidentally exposed the fact that he didn’t have nipples in the process.

We considered this our strategic and methodical way of allowing Tiffany to discover this information on her own. Were our motives pure, of course not. We were ticked off, and we thought if we could help her discover the platypuses’s incongruities, it could lead her to question his commonality. While I suspect that very few people would avoid dating someone with a subtle incongruity, such as a strange set or nipples, or no nipples, I hoped all these depth charges might lead her to add them all up to a discovery that the platypus might be incongruent.  

If you’re competing with a platypus for a human female, and you’re losing, you might have other issues, but we were willing to bet that a toothless, nipple-less competitor who poops and pees out of the same hole might cause a woman to second guess who they should consider the ideal mate with whom they might eventually plan to marry and procreate. We also thought those long-term considerations would have a powerful influence on her short-term thinking. You can call us mean-spirited, or whatever you want, but we were trying to help Tiffany see beyond her short-term fascination with the platypus to weighing the long-term consideration of the traits their shared children might inherit from their father.  

You Don’t Critique Another Man’s Meat

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“I love grilling,” Leonard said. “Absolutely love it. Some people do it, and some just do it, but for some of us, it’s a passion.” 

If someone said this from behind one of those sleek, compact, Three-Burner, Liquid Propane grills that feature porcelain-enameled, cast-iron cooking grates, you’d scream, I’d scream, we’d all scream for red meat. Check that, I probably wouldn’t scream, not anymore. I’ve been beat down, brothers and sisters, by all them grill-at-the-parkers hollering about how salvation is near. I’m here to testify that those Willie “the wunderkind” types who man the grill, and who, by all appearances should be the chef du jour, are false prophets.

You’ll be disappointed too, but you, the patron of the park, the family and/or friend of the chef, keep in mind that you ain’t paid a dime for that meat, the seat, or anything in between. You are to be grateful, always grateful, when someone hands you a plate, telling you to “Dig in!” on what you’ve been smelling and salivating over for the past ten minutes. You go grateful and stay grateful, because they paid for that meat, and they’ve been slaving over the fire, and you ain’t paid a dime. 

It’s that smelling that gets us, and it leads us astray, my friends. I’ve been there, you’ve been there. We believed in that smell, and our expectations went sky high. We tried to listen to Niece Maggie talking about her volleyball matches, but we don’t hear her, because of the symphony of sizzles going on behind our back.

When the moment of truth arrives, and I mean that in the most literal sense, we don’t even notice the au gratin potatoes when our plate hits that table. All we see is meat, all we hear is sizzling, and if the Promised Land smells anything like this, we might not mind going there a little sooner than expected. Then we get a taste, our first taste, finally, after all that waiting, and our sky-high expectations hit a gut-destroying, roller coaster dip.

“Is it just me or is this … bad?” we ask ourselves, and we’re all asking ourselves that question. You can see it at the table, especially on Cousin Teddy’s face. Do you have a Cousin Teddy? He can’t hide it? He has an eyebrow raised, but-I-ain’t-saying-a-word look on his face, but that face is just saying what we’re all thinking. Is the meat that bad, or are we all just that picky, and do we have a right to be picky, seeing as how this was all free? “But I had such sky high expectations. Doesn’t that warrant disappointment?”

“No, here’s what you do,” a friend of the family once informed me. “You shut your trap, and you keep it shut. That’s what you do. You open it long enough to put the food in it, then you close it to chew, and you keep closing it, until you’re headed home, whispering it to your wife on the drive home. You wanna be starting something? No, there’s nothing to be gained, at a family picnic, by critiquing another man’s meat.”

And when we talk about meat, we’re not talking about pork, brothers and sisters, because pork is tough to screw up. You know it, we know it, because we all done it, and we know it takes a whole bunch of stupidity to mess pork up. Brats, and all of the other meats that fall under the wiener umbrella, rarely knock our socks off or sadly disappoint, and we’ve had an absolutely horrible piece of chicken, what once? Twice, maybe twice. Red meat is the all-knowing meat. Red meat exposes a man’s under belly. It tells us who we are, who we really are. It tells us something about our attention to detail, the vulnerabilities of our spatula, and the frailties of our fork. Red meat does not forgive and forget, and it’s all about red meat.

Red meat is the reason we just drove thirty minutes to this park. We love our get-togethers, spending time with friends and family, and all that, but red meat is special. Can I get an amen, brothers and sisters? A soft, juicy hamburger is sublime, but a properly prepared steak is divine. I don’t care where they cut it, steak is the meat.  

I don’t keep a ledger on my disappointments in life, but when it comes to steak, I’ll throw out a whopping 95%. The fellas with the finest forks have disappointed me 95% of the time. The gas-grilled steak is edible, most of the time anyway, but it’s not Oh!-I-gotta-have-it scrumptious. It’s usually about two notches above edible.

I’ve seen them roll the most beautiful, top-of-the-line, stainless steel, propane gas machines into the park, and I’ve seen who’s ready and who ain’t. I’ve heard the grillers-in-the-park talk about those machines and how their top-of-the-lines can distribute heat so evenly across the grate, and how their four stainless steel burners can produce incredible amounts of BTUs that enhance heat retention so all that cooking “is not only more efficient, it’s convenient and quick.” And I know nothing about their world. I know nothing about all the knowledge they’ve attained from their research. But I’ve done my own research. I’ve researched what they generously produced for me with all their time and effort, between my teeth and gums, and I can’t remember eating a gas-grilled piece of red meat that’s earned those blue-ribbons. It’s quick, your propane grills with all their fixings are quick, but blue-ribbon? What are you smoking son?

So, we all giggle when Terrance rolls in with his $89.00 charcoal grill that he says he bought on sale at Walmart. We join in the giggles with the fellas-in-the-park, with a beer in our hands, because we know that they know, because they’ve been grilling for thirty-some-odd-years, so we trust they know their ins and outs. When the unassuming Terrance reveals his charcoal chimney starter, his flipper, his forker, and some tongs, the very, very basic three-tool set, that he purchased with the grill “all for a little over a hundy,” we join their public chiding, their gentle public shining, and we even join in on their private, and less gentle, scorn.

Terrance doesn’t talk the talk or walk the walk, because he don’t know it. He lived in an apartment and worked in an office for most of his life. Terrance is the type who prefers to eat out. He prefers restaurant food, and we all whisper that while he’s cooking, and we do it in the most condescending manner you can imagine. Terrance is the “doesn’t get it, and he probably never will” type of chef, because he started grilling late in life. If we talk about grilling with him, we started the conversation, not him, and we find he’s pretty insecure about his ability to cook a meal for the entire family.

“I let you guys do it for so long, because you love it. You all love doing this far more than I do,” Terrance whispers to me. “But I got a wife, and I got a life, so I decided to what-the-hell it.” So, it was the wife who talked him into grilling for the whole family. She also told him he was pretty good at it.

“But, for the whole family?” he complained.

“You’ll be fine,” she said.

We don’t think he’ll be fine. We wonder what she was smoking. I mean, Terrance doesn’t even own an apron that says something funny about the chef on it. He’s so insecure about his abilities that he doesn’t even join the joke Aunt Pat is telling about the time “Terrance couldn’t find the anus on a trout for cleaning.” He doesn’t know what he’s doing behind a grill, so he ain’t got time for her playtime. He needs to concentrate on trying to cook a fairly decent meal for the whole family. He also doesn’t want to make anyone sick, so he keeps plugging his “Walmart temperature gauge thinger-diller” (a term he uses because he can’t remember the word thermometer!) in the meat, and upon grilling, the verbal kind, we find he isn’t “totally sure what’s the difference between a sirloin and a ribeye”.

The “Oh, boy” we give is not kind. “Oh boy, we might need to get someone else to man the grill Helen,” our brother Jerry says about halfway through. “I’m not sure if Terrance is da man,” he adds, and oh boy do we laugh.

That “Oh, boy” consensus quietly turns kind, about twenty seconds after we sink our teeth and gums into Terrance’s finished product. “Oh, boy!” we want to say, but when no one else says a word, we quietly devour this tender and soft piece of meat that quietly changes everything we thought we knew about grilling-red-meat-in-the-park.

A hint of crisp on the outside is expected, but nothing can prepare us for the soft and chewy 145 degrees of medium-cooked insides that informs us how much dopamine the brain can reward a human being for the sense of taste. Everyone has Aunt Phyllis’s green bean casserole on their plate and Aunt Donna’s au gratin potatoes, but no one has touched any of that yet. There is no talk of trout anuses, fishing trips with our recently-deceased Uncle George, or any of the other great times we’ve had at this park over the years. There’s also no talk about how Terrance and his “under a hundy” arsenal just upended thirty years of grilling research the fellas attained with their top-of-the-line materials. We just quietly devour what Terrance made on his “one healthy sneeze and that thing’s going down” piece of junk, Charcoal grill that he purchased, on sale, from Walmart ten years ago.

Now that our course has been corrected on grilling at the park, we love hearing Leonard go on about how he knows his way around a grill, and how it’s all about love and passion for him. He has all of the latest and greatest cooking utensils, coupled with his ‘Kiss the Chef!’ apron. His stainless steel, propane gas grill has a brand name with numbers behind it that Leonard spouts as if it’s a limited model Lamborghini, and the aesthetic design of it is an absolute feast for the eyes. His wife further amplifies whatever Leonard says about himself and his new grill, and you watch him to see if there’s anything you can learn from a bona fide master. Leonard has a wide variety of wood chips, and he “ain’t afraid to use them”, and he “ain’t afraid to season neither.”

“Delicate and measured,” he says. “I know it’s verboten among the smoke whisperers, but if you keep it delicate and measured, seasoning enhances as opposed to overwhelming.”

When we finally sink our teeth and gums into the finished product of Leonard’s decades of fine-tuning, through trial and error and research, we find a truth about his marvel of science and engineering. We didn’t want to find it. That’s the most important note I want to leave you with today. When Leonard started going on about his passion for grilling, we thought we were going to be rolling around in it minutes later. Our only concern was that we would love it so much that we might make noises when we eat, and some of them might not be human noises. 

We didn’t want him to be wrong. We didn’t want him revealed. We wanted a savory slab of steak between our teeth and gums. When Leonard graciously gave us one of his steaks, we were grateful, but we couldn’t help but notice that it produced a flavor so close to steak that it was edible, but compared to Terrance’s amateur production, Leonard’s steak was anything but we we call a tour-de-force.

“It was actually pretty bland,” we whisper to our wives on the ride home. We don’t say this to Leonard, however. We lie to him, as any respectful guest who just ate the product of another’s effort and generosity will. We whisper that Terrance, and his piece of crap $89.00 cooker, “Actually grilled up a better steak.” We whisper that because we don’t want anyone to know what we don’t. 

“I know,” she whispers back, “But shhh!” We’re in the privacy of our own car, and we’re whispering, and she’s shushing me to try to prevent me from carrying on to the point that someone might hear us and know that we don’t know what we’re saying. We don’t know anything. We know so little that we don’t even know what we don’t know, but we know what we know, and we know you don’t critique another man’s meat.