This review of
a.k.a. Friscos dredges up some of my most positive memories. This was the cool place to get lunch when I was in
high school here in DC (longer ago than I can really believe). These days, now that sandwich shops are the next big thing, a place like a.k.a. Frisco’s doesn’t stand out that much, but back then my other lunch options were the school cafeteria (like, omg, tater tots
again????), Popeye’s, and McDonalds. There was the bagel shop, too, but that was really more of a place to smoke cigarettes while skipping study hall.
It felt like being an adult, leaving campus, strolling right past the kids waiting for their super value meals, and sauntering into a real lunch place, frequented by grown-ups. They had fancy sodas, like IBC root beer and Orangina, and baked potatoes and side salads. They had tables in the back where people on lunch breaks from the Fannie Mae Foundation (pre-scandal) would sit, talking about more important things than how hard the next day’s bio test would be.
I remember being astounded by the exotic sandwich names, taken from San Francisco landmarks and neighborhoods: the Alcatraz, the Nob Hill, and my personal favorite, the Presidio. California was far away, and as mysterious as Oz--I knew it existed, and had my own ideas about the specifics, but when it came down to it I saw it as a land of free spirits and counterculture. Those place names were just empty signifiers to me, like “Arabia,” or “solipsism,” and I gave the allure of their geographic and cultural distance free rein. I imagined wandering around Haight-Ashbury, tie-dyed, pot-addled hippies holding hands and singing songs of freedom and love. Curvy hills stretching up and up, obscuring the horizon with townhouses and a neverending stream of streetcars. Professors in Berkeley and flaming homosexuals, corduroy-coats with elbow patches coexisting peacefully with leather chaps and G.I. Joe moustaches.
Of course, a lot has changed for me since then. I’ve been to California, even lived there for a while, and saw my (in retrospect) ridiculous expectations fall to the wayside, only to be replaced by more subtle and far more fascinating realities. I’ve taken up and given up bad habits, I’ve flown across an ocean to walk on ancient ground, I’ve read books written centuries before I was born. I’ve made great friends and lost them. At some point I became an adult, I suppose, for lack of a more meaningful term. I’m pretty sure there aren’t any adults who really feel like they’re all grown up, though, and probably that realization is the best indication that I’m not a kid anymore.
I miss the days when I could walk down the block to a sandwich shop and enter another world, and the days when this kind of crap sounded like real profundity.
contemplative