43 - 3/11/11 - Marshside Storytime VII

Initial Impressions

Christopher Setterlund

43 – 3/11/11

Marshside Storytime VII – You Say Potato

            For tonight’s storytime we discuss what is to be done with leftover food that is of no use anymore.  More specifically I want to talk about the left over baked potatoes from the previous night’s dinner.

            Now don’t get me wrong, when we had other uses for the leftover potatoes they were not wasted as you are about to read.  This is speaking more to the times where the potatoes were going to simply be thrown away.  How do you throw something away?  Easy, right, you just toss it in the trash?  Wrong.  There was a much more fun way to rid the restaurant of those pesky potatoes and that involved becoming an amateur football kicker.

            The participants were myself, Claudio, and Bento.  The idea was to dropkick the soft potatoes over the tree line at the edge of the marsh.  It was a great game and also a more fun way to throw stuff away.  If only we could have done it with everything.

            There was one problem, making certain that the potatoes had been cooked the night before.  I mean you could really whale on the cook potatoes and bust the meat out of them.  However, one time in my excitement I grabbed one that was raw.  Don’t know what the hell it was doing in with the cooked ones unless they were trying to tell me to stop doing the kicking game.  Anyway I grabbed the raw potato and kicked it with all I had.  The result was a loud slap as the broadside of the potato hit my foot.  I went down in a heap in pain, luckily it was before we were open and there were no customers to hear my cries.

            Another problem was making certain that the deck was dry, or at least that your plant foot was on a dry spot.  There is nothing worse than rearing back and throwing all you have into a kick only to have your plant foot slide and you end up flat on your back.  Trust me, I had that happen.  Claudio was concerned at first but when he knew I was not dead he and Bento laughed their asses off.

            Finally, if you’re going to play the potato kicking game make sure that your shoes are tied tightly.  This falls at the feet of Bento.  A short time after he started there Claudio and I were playing the kicking game and he wanted to try.  Bento grabbed a potato and kicked it.  Well, his shoe flew off and went further than the potato out into the marsh.

            I have never laughed so hard in my life, tears were pouring out as Bento yelled about losing his shoe.  Lucky for him it was low tide.  I graciously volunteered to walk out onto the marsh to retrieve his rogue shoe.  We must have laughed nonstop for a half hour and it became one of the funniest moments I ever remember at the Marsh.  Bento did not play the kicking game again until he got new shoes that he actually tied tightly.

            Sadly the kicking game has been retired, much like a lot of the old school fun, once the new building opened up but we still have tons of memories.  Hopefully all of the old Marsh peeps read these and it brings back great memories, and all of the recent Marsh peeps can get a better understanding as to why us long timers are so tight like family.  Cheers!