Pizza from the Street = Streetza

Ricky, Kandis and I headed down to the Ivy Room in Albany to see our buddy George Chen do a short set of standup comedy, giving us a chance to see him stretch his creative muscles outside of the musical realm. On the way there, we decided to take advantage of the take-out Lanesplitter's Pizza on San Pablo, just down the street from the club. This must be the easiest job in the world. There is barely any foot traffic by the shop as Albany is really only two square miles surrounding San Pablo Avenue between Berkeley and El Cerrito. These dudes just hang out all day on the internet, watching movies & listening to recordings of big bands playing those romantic slow dance songs that appear in the scene of, for example, The Shadow, when Alec Baldwin's brusk confident charm overcomes Penelope Ann Miller's skepticism, disrust AND better judgement, and they fall in love over the lilting strains of croony trombones. Plus they get all the pizza they want! We ordered a 19 inch pizza for the low low price of $10.98 American on the drive north, only to discover a near whole pizza squirreled away in a cozy box, lounging in the dumpster outside. As to not put a damper on my fellow proletarians, we followed through on our implicit agreement and paid for our hot fresh pizza, but there is nothing like strolling down the lane and finding a friendly cheese pizza waiting to be caressed by chilly hands and churned by our hydrochloric acids.

Later on at the Ivy Room, George Chen, even withhis Baldwin-esque charm, was met with a fair amount of heckling, but shone through the fog of mediocrity, like a small Asian beacon of scathing sarcasm-as-hope. Among the many victims were white folks in Oakland who love Bakesale Betty's dry-ass chicken sandwiches, white folks who use iPhone applications to locate muggings and Chen's own strict Chinese upbringing (Three rules: 1) Don't go into the sun, 2) Don't get wet and 3) No food after midnight).