School Lunch ~ Then
and Now
Yorkville 1962: in 2nd grade the St. Stephen’s school lunch
program was like a daily visit with a raging toothache to the dentist without
anesthesia. The list of crimes is endless: brown meat, green meat, cheese with
teeth marks in it, soup so bad it made strong kids cry. Wax beans, Yellow
beans, rock hard beans and a room temperature boiled egg on every tray. There
must have been a sale on aging celery cause it showed up in most foods. In the
windowless lunchroom, a nun stood guard making sure you did not talk and ate
everything on your tray, or you devised food escape routes (some more clever
than Steve McQueen's).
Yorkville 2012: I’m sitting on an 82nd Street stoop a week
ago. A stylishly dressed girl about 8 years old strolls past me with a cell phone and
she’s frantically texting the Gettysburg address to a friend. Her mother in
four-inch heels engaged on an iPhone trapped to her ear while carrying packages and a knapp sack was
10 feet behind the daughter when she broke off her phone conversation and yelled
out to the princess, “Did you finish you sushi at lunch today?”
That’s when my 50-year-old nightmare came back to me. I’m still mad at my mother for two things: throwing my gorgeous Yankee Stadium model away (murdered while dusting) and
sentencing me to school lunch.
Our next "City Stories: Stoops to Nuts," storytelling show at Cornelia Street Cafe is Tuesday,
November 13th @ 6pm. Our artists: Michele Carlo, Julia Joseph, John Newell and
Tim O'Mara. Admission is $8 and that includes a free drink. Come down to the
Café, nuzzle in and let the telling take you away.
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