We're not yet in the plan-plan stage on this. We don't know where. We don't know when. And I haven't decided what flavor I'll order.
This will, of course, depend on where we go, but I usually lean coffee Oreo with jimmies, maple walnut, or - if it's really summery - strawberry or peach. But there are very few ice cream flavors that I don't like.
It's not that I've been deprived of ice cream - or at least frozen yogurt - during the shutdown. I usually have a quart or two of Giffords of Maine raspberry chocolate chip in the freezer. Maybe a pint of Ben & Jerry's Cherry Garcia fro-yo. If I decided to go all out, there might be a pint of Talenti pistachio. Gelato!
I've always been an ice cream fan, and when I was growing up there was almost always a gallon of something or other in the freezer. When my father took the family out for a spin, as we often did in the summer, we always stopped at the Cherry Bowl or Verna's for ice cream, or the Dairy Delight for soft serve (which was only worth having if you got the chocolate coating).
In my book, a day without ice cream is like a day without sunshine. (I was going to say 'like a day without being able to get out of the house and mingle", but we're having too many of those days. So we'll leave it at "without sunshine.")
I'm not the only one around here hankering for ice cream.
Folks down in Mashpee, on Cape Cod, went all out swamping Polar Cave Ice Cream when they opened last week.
But with testy customers who just did not want to wait for their cones f-bombing the shop’s teenage staff and a flood of orders overwhelming the small team Friday, owner Mark Lawrence posted “STOP ORDERING” on Facebook and unplugged the phone.
The shop opened at 2 p.m. and “by 4:30 on it was just insane,” Lawrence, 60, said on Sunday.
When he finally turned the lock to the Polar Cave that night at 9:30, more than an hour after the planned closing time, Lawrence said on Facebook it was “the lowest feeling I have ever felt.” (Source: Boston Globe)As his team adjusted to the new reality of social distancing, Lawrence asked folks to order ahead. He had one scooper working the online orders, three in the parking lot, and three doing the scooping.
One employee, an 18-year-old who was running orders to cars, was trembling by the end of the night, he said. After hours of f-bombs and slurs, Lawrence said, the woman didn’t even want her pay or her tips; she just wanted to quit.I know, I know. Nerves are frayed. Ice cream help soothe frayed nerves. Maybe cut those suffering from cabin fever a little slack. But as Lawrence pointed out, in the high season, folks stand in line for one hour to get into his shop. What's the big deal if you have to sit in your car for that length of time?
Meanwhile, Lawrence is figuring out how to reopen his business so that they don't have a repeat of the rager.
As for the f-bombed ice cream scooper:
“Right now she’s very fragile. It devastates me," he said.One of the many jobs I had over the years was working in an MIT snack bar when I was in college. (I didn't go to MIT for undergrad. I just worked there one school year.) Sometimes I worked the grill. (One of the big specialties was the Caliburger, which came topped with avocado - at the time, this seemed amazingly exotic.) Sometimes I worked the sodas (which included making frappes). And sometimes I scooped ice cream and made sundaes.
We only had 4 flavors - pretty much the basics of chocolate, vanilla, and strawberry, and a floater that varied - and they came in 5 gallon drums. Well, when one of those drums had just arrived from the deep freezer, you needed a jackhammer to get at the ice cream before it had a chance to soften up a bit. Seriously, some nights you would have to use a spatula from the grill as the chisel and a scoop as a hammer to free up enough ice cream to complete a serving. MIT being MIT, which was mostly male at the time, it was considered great sport to figure out which ice cream was the most frozen and order that one. Then stand there and watch while the (generally female) scooper struggled with things. Ho, ho!
Mostly this was all in good fun. (Ho, ho!) But there were inevitably a couple of guys who were true aholes. Tired of waiting in line, they would snipe away while watching the performance, getting testy with the scooper rather than with the jerk who'd ordered the concrete ice cream.
But you know what? No one ever screamed and no one ever hurled an f-bomb. (Admittedly, they didn't fly so freely back in the day.) Not even on the night of December 1, 1969, when the Vietnam draft lottery was held and a couple of guys came in whose birthday was drawn #1. (We also had a #366 or two.)
Anyway, I feel bad for the scooper who had to put up with all these out of control adult a-holes.
But things may not turn out all that badly for her. Her boss, Mark Lawrence, set up a GoFundMe , hoping to raise $15K to give to her towards her college fund. When I threw in my $25, it was up to $13,900. Yesterday afternoon, the fund was approaching $40K.
Seriously, folks, if people are going this crazy over ice cream, how are the going to behave when the COVID-19 vaccine becomes available?
I shudder at the thought of what that scene might look like.
I can still feel the ache in my wrist from trying to scoop rock solid ice cream when I was in summer school in ‘69 and worked in the dorm cafeteria. I don’t think anyone can blame tourists for the Mashpee incident, as I doubt there are very many visitors to the Cape these days. So locals picking on a local kid...nice.
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