Lunch convos, Part 1

I really need someone to follow me around with a video camera. Some of the situationsand conversations I find myself in are definitely reality-show-able or sitcom-able. I am positive that a day’s worth of video of just ordinary life would produce more than enough footage for about 22 minutes of hit comedy.

Take asingle lunch conversation this week, for example. I went to Gucci El Rods for lunch with some friends on staff which included: Alex, our youth minister; Aaron, our swiss army knife minister (because his title has a lot of slashes in it), and Jess, a former intern who was back in town for a wedding.

[Just FYI] For those of you who live in Blacksburg, you need to know we were at the Gucci El Rods, not the Ghetto El Rods. For those of you outside of Blacksburg, there are only two establishments that earn this title. One is El Rods – a great Mexican restaurant. It has two locations – one on north Main Street, closer to Virginia Tech. It’s the older one, and even though it’s nice, it has earned the rep of being the ghetto El Rods. The newer one is in an attractive outdoor shopping mall area. The other establishment is Kroger. There’s a Ghetto Kroger on one side of town – so named because it’s smaller, older and I guess because it doesn’t have a full deli there. The Gucci Kroger is on south Main Street (close to the Gucci El Rods), and is like a food Kohl’s. It’s nice. (The Black Sheep newspaper even did an article on the Gucci Kroger.)

[Now back to theconversation] I actually wrote down five different things that are “blog worthy,” but we’ll just focus on this one comment:

At my private school we were not allowed to wear a HarryPotter or Pokemonoutfits. (Alex)

He made the comment in reply to something I had said about the Pokemon craze. Alex threw his response out there. The entire table was incredulous. It revealed to us so much about his upbringing, and it allowed us to do quite a bit of psychoanalyzing.

The bigger question is why a person would want to go to school dressed up as a character from Harry Potter or Pokemon to begin with. We bantered around with this random fact about Alex for quite a while when suddenly Aaron declared (in a voice exactly like Hagrid’s) “You’re a wizard, ‘arry.” Aaron does impersonations, and he has impeccable timing. While we laughed with Aaron, we forgot to follow up with Alex on just how his inability to dress up like Ron Weasley or a Weedle may have adversely affected his social life.

For his healing (and your enjoyment), I offer you Alex… as a Harry Potter character. Let’s hope his old principal doesn’t see this.

Stay tuned for more lunch conversations. And feel free to grab a video camera or an iPhone and follow me around. If we get approached by a network, I’ll let you name the show.