The Floor Factor

I’m an Italian Jew. We are a rare breed, vowel at the end of the name, yarmulke on the head. The two cultures are very similar in that they both revolve around food.

When I was growing up, it didn’t matter the occasion: my parents invited 75 people to the house and served food for 150. At the end of the day, we would send everyone home with leftovers and we still had enough for 30 to feed our family of five. Half the people would come back the next day and my mother would cook more so that there would be enough. And there always was. I know that this isn’t normal, but it seemed normal when I was a kid and honestly it still seems normal to me now.

Today, every time we are having company over, my wife and I have the same argument. I want there to be trays of food out when guests arrive, she wants the kitchen floor clean.

My way says, “Hello guests, you are welcome, you are family, let’s break bread.”
Her way says, “Hello guests, you are welcome, you are family, we are not slobs.”

Trust me, you can not prepare food and have a clean floor, simultaneously.

And this leads to a confession.

I know I’m in the minority but I hated the musical Les Mis.My wife hated it and our unborn child tried to claw her way out of my wife’s belly in an attempt to escape. I hated this show with such a passion that at intermission I left my extremely pregnant wife in the theater and ran across the street to steal a loaf of bread. My hope was to be arrested so I would not have to sit through the second act.
Anyway, the night we were prisoners at the Broadway Theater, the largest applause from the audience was for a scene change. A fabulous moment, the vertical slums of Paris spin in the air and become the horizontal barracks of the uprising. The audience went wild, including us. Note that I have a BFA in theater, and this is what I was taught (and I might be paraphrasing here): "If during a show the audience is paying attention to the scenery…YOU ARE SCREWED!"

Why tell you this? Because if you come to my house to eat, this is the conversation I hope you're having as you drive away.

“My God, have you ever had a better meal? Really restaurant quality. I couldn’t stop eating…They made enough for thirty.”

The conversation I pray is not happening

"My God, have you every seen such clean floors? Where should we go to eat?”

My wife’s family is British. They don’t know about food. The very reason the British built the greatest navy on earth was so they could go out and eat, because there is never anything to eat in England. But if they had food, you could eat it off their floors. Spotless!