Entered on 2001-08-21 at 8:16 a.m..
Larry�s Ice Cream
Last night I got together with the three other Marshall Scholars who are in the DC area. This was our third such dinner and it was especially nice because Jason brought along his girlfriend, Jenny, and Dan brought along his good friend Sarah. So after having been away from Tech for three months I finally had a decent ratio in a dinner party. It was amazing how much the conversations changed with the addition of just two women. Last time we had dinner I had been completely shocked to hear how much the guys talked about different women, what would make themselves more/less attractive to women, and who among the Marshall females (judging purely on posted bios) they were looking forward to meeting. I used to think that this was an obsession that only affected the men of Tech simply because there were not a lot of women around. Nope, it is a universal guy thing, no matter how accomplished the male.
Dinner was crazy as usual. I have found that since we all like to talk, we tend to speak very loudly and very quickly, and never truly finish a conversation. I admit to beginning to feel a twinge of culture shock. I consider myself a pretty science/engineering-centric person. Therefore whenever Seth, Jason, Dan and I all get together I am completely out of my depth. This is not because I don�t enjoy discussing political issues, but more so that they don�t actually discuss political issues. Instead, they discuss who�s behind the political issues and their motivation. So they talk about people I don�t know and honestly don't care to know. So I sat there smiling at Jenny waiting to try to speak with her when a break occurred in the din (it was bound to happen everyone needs to breath)
Last night Seth and Dan�s two favorite topics were the inferiority they felt/feigned at being Marshall scholars versus Rhodes scholars, and Larry of Larry�s ice cream. The former topic is much less interesting than the later, and since I don�t think that Dan and Seth are going to let the inferiority issue drop, today I�ll only talk about Larry.
Larry is an Eastern European / Western Asian immigrant who runs an ice-cream shop on Dupont Circle. Larry�s claim to fame is his similarity to the soup nazi from Seinfeld. Larry takes great pride in abusing his customers. Well not abusing persay, just being gruff with them. For example when a woman asked for a taste of the Mango ice-cream, Larry�s response was, �what?! Its mango, what do you think it tastes like strawberry?� Or when Jason asked if there were eggs in the ice-cream, �what kind of shit ice-cream do you think we�re serving here?� For some strange reason, Dan took an instant liking to the man. Maybe no one is abusive in California. So Dan began to stalk him, he needed to know everything about this man, specifically where he was from. This was the topic of much conversation at dinner last night. Our only clue was his accent, and his revelation to Jason that he formerly drove camels. Everyone had thrown out suggestions, and we were all off to the shop to find out once and for all. We figured after all, there were 6 of us, we should be reasonably close.
Thank goodness there were newspaper articles about the shop and its owners hanging on the walls. It didn�t take me long to discover that Larry was from Turkey. I was pleased because this had been my guess. Somehow Dan repeated that information out loud, and Larry picked up on it. �How you know? You ever been to Turkey?� �no� �You got a Turkish family?� �no� �You got a Turkish boyfriend� �no� �You want a Turkish boyfriend� �no� �What! I�m not talking about me, I�m talking about him, girl� (points to son). Needless to say Larry (whose real name is Jerry) proceeded to try to set me up with his son, and to try to pick up Sarah for himself. We left the shop that night having satisfied Dan, and scheming to bring 36 others back for more abuse in September.