No longer a virgin

I’ve lived in Chicago five years (tomorrow!), and until today I’ve never even walked by the everyone’s-been-there-but-Jake Billy Goat Tavern.


But that just changed. I was all set to head out the door for my noon workout when a guy I work with convinced me that a belly full of grease and more grease offered FAR greater health benefits than a set of pumped-up pipes. (I do arms on Fridays because when I first set up my workout schedule many years ago I figured the pythons would help me meet guys on my weekend jaunts to the bars and I wanted them to look plump and juicy and inviting. But admitting that in my blog would just make me seem superficial and slutty, so I’ll just keep that bit of information to myself. Now I do arms on Fridays because I’m too lazy to come up with a different workout schedule.)

Anyway, we grabbed our trim-ish tummies and well-fitting pants and headed off to the land of cheezborgers and no Pepsi around noon. And it was just as fun as I'd expected. The guy behind the counter yells “cheezborger!” at you the moment you butt in (GET IT? BUTT IN!), and he upgrades you from a double to a triple if you look like a double won’t adequately smother your abs in a thick shroud of goo. And the cheezborgers are pretty good—especially because they’re served on lightly toasted, perfectly textured Kaiser rolls. HOW GAY!

The best part of the lunch happened as soon as we’d gotten our orders and sat down: A busload of tourists from Stripmall, Nebraska, descended on the place with their pleated shorts and their oversized polo shirts from Kohl’s and their fanny packs and their almost-mullets and their self-conscious little smiles because they had seen the Billy Goat Tavern on SNL way back when pleated shorts were actually fashionable and now they were actually IN the Billy Goat Tavern which meant that THEY WERE A PART OF TELEVISION HISTORY.

But we didn’t make fun of them or anything. Not too loudly, at least.

And once we’d popped my greasy little Billy Goat cherry finished our cheezborgers and Cokes (I actually had a root beer, because I’m edgy and I don’t let no stupid TV show tell me what to drink), we waddled back to the office so I could blog about it all. And soon I’m running across the street to Nordstrom to check out their big-ass anniversary sale. Because that’s what the glamorous world of advertising is all about. Especially on a sunny Friday afternoon when a bunch of your meetings have been canceled. And you suddenly need to buy bigger pants.