Levedy

Putting my foot down

We’re planning Chris’ baptism for Thanksgiving Saturday. The Greeks will descend on Vegas for Thanksgiving weekend. I will have cousins and aunts and friends-of cousins and cousins-of-friends sleeping on any available horizontal surface.

One invited guest, Pappadakis, wants to bring the souvla, and roast an entire lamb in my backyard.

Let me just allow the horror of that sink in to my non-hellenic readers. AN ENTIRE LAMB CARCASS. IN MY BACKYARD. AT MY HOUSE. WHERE I TRY TO SLEEP AT NIGHT.

I have been to backyard lamb roasts before, and part of the enjoyment factor is the realization that it’s NOT AT MY HOUSE, that I can leave at any time and go to a petting zoo and apologize to all of the little lambies for marrying into a culture that chases one other around with roasted lamb skulls and fights over the brains and the eyes. It’s much harder to roll my eyes and sigh from the sidelines when it’s on my property. I can’t pity the sad sack whose house it is, because it’s my house.

I have a nice catering company ready to cater the baptism reception. I have a sophisticated, yet crowd-friendly menu selected that will please all palates. People will be dressed nicely, since they will have just come from the church. It will be a lovely, sedate occasion. There will be no livestock turning over an open fire tended by a gigantically tall bald Greek man wearing a joke-barbeque apron that exposes a rubber dildo when he lifts it.

No. Not again.

Lay off, you tell me? The Greeks certainly won’t mind, and the non-Greeks will find it hysterically quaint, you say? Fine. But cleaning up after a lamb roast is like trying to turn a slaughterhouse into an operating room. Just can’t be done, people. I have a folding table that was only next to a lamb on a spit last Easter, and that puppy STILL smells like lamb fat. Lamb is eternal - You can kill it, cook it, eat it, and scrub up after it, but its oozey, noisome, oleaginous remains will be with you FOREVER.

And for all those people who would call something like this folksy and quaint, may I remind you:
Hacksaw (slightly gross)
I have eaten off this counter (really gross)
Not in my backyard (grosser than the first, not as gross as the second)
Pappadakis' Apron (NSFW)