The Judge, The Boss, and Chihuahuas

This column originally appeared on Sunday, June 13, 2010

I'm at The Table last week for lunch and settling in to work on a late-week edition of The Times and its close-to-impossible crossword puzzles, staring vacantly at the clue for 9-Across — "Erased," five letters — when The Judge sits down.

The Judge tells me he's exhausted because he's been working so hard all week. I'm thinking to myself why he should be tired now, since The Judge pretty much works hard 24-7-365. I don't always stop by his courtroom a whole lot because he works so hard it makes ME tired. He comes in early and leaves late and when his schedule says he's going to be on the bench at 9 a.m. you can't just show up at 9:27 a.m. and figure you've got an extra minute or two to complete your paperwork, because he's been waiting for you since 9:01 a.m.

The Judge said he'd been so busy this week that he'd almost forgotten to tell me that he sentenced a fellow to a state prison term for shoplifting. Not that that in and of itself is necessarily newsworthy, since lots of people get sentenced to go upstate for shoplifting, I've learned. Collecting shoplifting convictions in Pennsylvania is sort of like collecting baseball cards — the more you have of them, the more you're gonna get at the back end. No, what he found interesting about this fellow's case was what he decided to steal. To wit, more than two dozen copies of the DVD presentation of "Beverly Hills Chihuahua," starring Jamie Lee Curtis, George Lopez, Piper Perabo, and Drew Barrymore as the voice of Chloe the Chihuahua.

I say I'm sorry I missed that because that's the sort of story that has legs, as we say in the ink-sloshing business. The Judge says he's sorry he missed it, too. The movie he means. He said he heard it was pretty funny. Seems there's a pampered Beverly Hills Chihuahua named Chloe who, while on vacation in Mexico with her owner's niece, Rachel (Perabo), gets lost and must rely on her new friends before she is caught by a dognapper who wants to ransom her. OK, fine. Whatever. Anyway, all the talk about Chihuahuas made The Judge hungry for some Latino food, he says. The Judge says he hasn't had a nice, inexpensive Mexican dinner in a while.

Over walks The Boss, who couldn't help overhearing what The Judge and I were talking about, primarily because she was eavesdropping anyway. The Boss doesn't actually own The Table, but when the nominal boss comes over and tells her that he thinks the special should be the cheeseburger hoagie on Wednesday, The Boss pretty much looks at him and says, "Let me get back to you on that." Anyway, The Boss says there is this place down at that new shopping center on Route 202 near where they used to have the drive-in movie theater that serves a mean Mexican meal. The Boss has The Judge's attention, because he'd forgotten that he once had a pretty good meal at that very same restaurant. The Boss says she feels comfortable at the restaurant since the owner used to be a pilot and she used to be a flight attendant for the same airline, except that when he was flying east to west she was flying west to east so they never actually met.

This is somewhat confusing to me since I'm not clear what air-piloting skills actually have to do with one's ability to set out a table of nice Mexican food, but The Judge is off and running. He and The Boss are comparing notes about the best types of burritos and enchiladas and whether refried beans are better than rice and how hot the hot sauce should be on a plate of quesadillas, when all of a sudden The Judge mentions that as a matter of fact the best taco he'd ever had was served to him at …

And at this point he says the name of a fast-food restaurant that I will not repeat but which occurs to me used to use a Chihuahua as its national spokes-animal and I wonder if The Judge has worked himself so hard that his taste buds have pretty much fallen off, and whether airline pilots who take second jobs wear their flight uniforms to work out of habit, and what Drew Barrymore thinks of the whole thing.

Oh, and the answer was "blank."