shame

Back when our college food court still had a Burger King (and a Chick Fil'A, and a really shady stir-fry station and sushi on demand), we regularly partook of Burger King deserts. Two in particular were especially deadly: the first, a gooey chocolate, Oreo and whipped cream concoction my friend Grant referred to as "Shame Pie:"




I know, right? It's like an orgasm in a cookie crust.








My favorites, though, were the perfectly gooey Tollhouse chocolate chip cookies in the plastic bin by the cash register. They had the ideal balance of crispy edges and slightly undercooked middles, chips a-melting and greasy crumbs making the little red and yellow cellophane wrapper nearly transluscent. Students ate so many of these things that Burger King was forever pulling new batches fresh from the oven, so you could always get a warm pair. I have spent the last twenty-three years on an Arthurian quest for the ideal chocolate-chip cookie, and the Shame Cookie is closest I've come yet.

Before heading to our deadly boring prosem junior year, Becks and I would trade off who bought the Starbucks and who bought the Shame Cookies. You didn't want to go too many days in a row, because Burger King was right off the sushi/salad bar and while you handed over your ID card to purchase 17,000 calories worth of deserts you'd be forced to look at the size 0 freshmen buy their cucumber rolls while loudly complaining how fat they felt and was there such a thing as nonfat soy sauce?

Why all the food porn today, you ask? BECAUSE I'M FUCKING STARVING.

Since getting cast in this show, I've been watching my diet, working out four times a week and trying to switch from beer to wine and/or vodka. Despite all the carrot sticks and elliptical sessions and cookies politely ignored, I've only lost six pounds in two months. Not one of those pounds, I might add, was from remotely useful place. I think my elbows might be skinner, but that's the only difference I could see and then only in really excellent lighting.

There will not be really excellent lighting in the show. Oh, it will be of good quality, but it will be in the form of a spotlight on me in various states of deshabillé. Mostly, though, I'm just really ticked off. All that time and effort for basically no payoff. I could have spent the last two months with an IV dripping brownie batter into my veins and be basically the same weight.

And if I'd done that, I wouldn't now have a craving for Shame Cookies so fierce that in about five minutes I will be joining the crack whores north of the convention center, ready to blow the next visiting businessman who will drive me to a Burger King.