Honey Just Allow Me, To Give You One More Chance

This column originally appeared on Sunday, Sept. 21, 2008

I know what you're thinking. I know that you're thinking that this is the last Sunday of the summer, that autumn officially starts tomorrow, and that the calendar thus indicates that this must be the date of the ever popular-slash-dreaded West Chester Restaurant Festival.

And you are also thinking that I am going to lecture you about how much we "real" West Chester folks — as opposed to those pikers who walk around town wearing "Dub-C" T-shirts — really don't like the restaurant festival and consider it an event more endured than enjoyed. Sort of an open-air colonoscopy, with crab cakes and crowds.

You are thinking that I am going to tell you how I would rather sit and listen to state Sen. Andy Dinniman describe the machinations of the state budget process, without bathroom breaks, than try to walk down Gay Street today after noon, when the festival is in full swing. That you would no more find me at the festival than you would find a wild elk in Elk Township. That I'm going to hunker down someplace as far away from West Chester as possible without spending more than $50 on gas until the crowds of soon-to-be unemployed Lehman Brothers executives have gone back to MortgageForeclosureLand.

But dear readers, that was then and this is now.

It is the season for change. I know that this is the season for change because every time I turn on the television and listen to the radio, a junior U.S. senator from Illinois or a senior U.S. senator from Arizona is telling me that. Change is no longer something you dump in a bowl with your car keys, but something you have to embrace, something you have to hope for, something you have to accept like it was a birthday card from your Aunt Louise.

So change we must.

This year, I'm going to give the restaurant festival another chance, even though I'm not certain it really deserves it. I am going to open my heart and take the festival back in, like a ex-girlfriend who dumped me on my birthday and now finds that she needs a ride to the airport. I'm going to allow it to make up for past transgressions, and to look for the shining pearl in the center of the grimy oyster.

Who knows? Maybe I will find that the restaurant festival isn't really all that bad. Maybe it will be the same as when I got tired of eating Indian food and vowed that I would never eat it again, that Indian food was the worst food on the planet, that I would no more eat Indian food than I would ask a Lehman Brothers executive for a sub-prime mortgage -- only to find years later that I really like Indian food, and could you pass the chicken tikka, please?

I am, after all, capable of changing. I am not so stuck in my ways that I would avoid going to the restaurant festival just because I ridiculed it in the past. After all, if John McCain is capable of embracing tax cuts that he once denounced, and if Barack Obama is capable of backing off a pledge to take public financing, than I am certainly capable of standing in line for 35 minutes to order a crab cake the size of an iPod Mini and paying $7.50 for the privilege, and enjoying myself in the process.

No matter what you think.