8. Scoop Ice Cream

A friend of mine, Chad Drazin, owns a kitschy little ice cream business called Fifty Licks out here in Portland.  I say kitschy because it's based on creating "Portlandy" ice cream flavors like "Maple with Bacon," "Stumptown Coffee," "Pineapple Jalapeno," and (vegan) "Coconut Lemon Saffron" sorbet.  Anyway, the annual Mississippi Street Fair was on Saturday and Chad needed some extra hands around to scoop perfectly spherical balls of ice cream for a needing crowd.  I'm a sucker for things like this, especially since beginning Project 100.  I'm so desperate for ideas of new things to do that I can't really say no anymore.  And that's the fun of the whole project, really: saying yes to things I've never said yes to.

So I drove up to north portland on this eighty degree Saturday, and entered the fair (wouldn't you know it was packed to the gills with people and the absolute first person I saw was my ex-boyfriend.  Errrr, good sign!).  When I got to the ice cream stand, there was a line ten-deep of sunburnt-nosed folks pointing and rubbing their greasy fingers on the glass shield of the freezer case.  This, my readers, was human enthuisam in its most unadulterated form.  Read my next sentence out loud while sighing and groaning and you'll get the picture. "Goddamn bacon-flavored ice cream on a hot Portland day"  I realized I was actually scared when Chad handed me the "Zeroll," an expensive high-tech professional grade ice cream scoop engineered specifically for rolling the frozen cream into perfect balls with a penny-saving hollow center. 

Rolling ice cream is tougher than it seems!  It took me a good three hours of scooping to get it down.  It was a joyous three hours of practice, though.  By the end of the night my sticky wrists hurt, but my face hurt more from smiling so hard.  People are happy when they get ice cream.  Seeing this pure enthusiasm was a dose of good medicine.  Shiny.  Happy.  Fat.  Lactose tolerant. Joy.

I will only say one thing negative about the experience: I didn't hear nearly enough magic words.  I gave free samples all day to folks demanding, "Let me try the Carmelized Apple," or "give me a sample of the Tahitian Vanilla."  In case you haven't been told, the proper way to ask is, "May I please try the Pineapple ice cream?"  It's not simply a question of manners, but something more troubling.  To me it speaks to bigger issues of entitlement and pretension.  It makes me feel a little yucky.