Three Slices

"My advice is stand firm for what you believe in, until and unless logic and experience prove you wrong... and there's no aspect, no facet, no moment in life that can't be improved with pizza. Thank you." -- Daria Morgendorffer

I spent my morning in SoHo with Rutila, and by accident, our shopping trip was perfectly timed from beginning to end. She caught her bus, I caught my train, we arrived at 10 AM when the stores were opening and the streets were blissfully empty, we arrived at Lombardi's Pizzeria when the place had just opened, and we finished for the day just when Broadway started to get crowded. In commemoration of the three delicious slices of calamata olive and spinach pizza each of us consumed, I'm writing about three slices of our day.

1. Because I'm a crazy woman when it comes to makeup, skincare, and hair products, I had enough Sephora Beauty Insider points saved up to earn a 500 Point Perk today. (You get one "point" in your bank for every dollar you spend. Yep, I have a problem.) Anyway, my perk was a little shopping bag full of Benefit Cosmetics goodies, including a sample size of BADGal Plum mascara. It's a warm purple color designed to enhance one's eye color, but since I live and die by black mascara and black liquid liner, I was naturally skeptical. Miraculously, it works -- my normally nondescript brown eyes looked wider and more striking than usual today.

2. I purchased two cotton tanks -- one black and one slate blue -- at Uniqlo. The cut and quality felt identical to the J. Crew tank I was wearing... and they cost $4.90 apiece. I'm not sure if this is an indication of Uniqlo's general amazingness or J. Crew's slipping standards.

3. As always, Rutila and I lunched at Lombardi's, the oldest pizzeria in America and purveyor of the best coal-oven pie you'll ever devour. We arrived when the shop opened and shared a dining room with a crowd of about twenty visor-wearing, fanny pack-toting tourists. This normally isn't a problem, but we soon discovered that these tourists were on a pizza tour. Meaning they were accompanied by an overeager tour guide who spent half of our meal loudly delivering a lecture on all the crap you never wanted to learn about pizza. We heard about the pizza of New York City, the history of pizza, the composition of pizza, and the importance of staying hydrated while consuming pizza. The tourists were given pizza journals to record their undoubtedly profound observations about pizza, took turns visiting the kitchen to see the coal oven where the pizzas are made, and were instructed to look at the bottom crusts of their pizzas to observe the charring patterns.

Naturally, Rutila and I guffawed into our Italian sodas the entire time. We then began to chuckle audibly when the tour guide demonstrated "the semi-fold method" of eating a triangle slice -- which, allegedly, is the only way to eat pizza like a true New Yorker.

Note that Rutila and I were using knives and forks to eat our slices... and you can't get more Noo Yawk than the pair of us.

The tour guide then confided that the semi-fold method works on a scientific level "because it changes the moment of inertia of the slice." Yep. Cue the huge, ridiculous belly-laughs which earned us at least one withering glare from the tour guide.

And in an example of why the universe sucks, the pizzeria's top review on Yelp is written by some out-of-towner who calls herself a NY pizza expert after taking the same tour we overheard today! Hence the reason why Lombardi's mediocre website, not Yelp, is linked in this post. Too much asshattery for my taste.