rustypants speaks

…but it was nice to have the government direct-deposit our economic “stimulus” check this past weekend.

now, who’s going to save the government?

as a boy, i was not an adventurous soul when it came to food. i knew what i liked and the menu was short. as i grew older, i got a bit more open-minded to culinary things that i’d not have even looked at in the past.

when we moved to washington d.c. 16 years ago, i quickly found that the huge array of cultures & nations represented in that area meant that you could literally eat any different type of ethic food you wanted – sometimes you just had to go looking for it.

my friend kevin helped open things up for me. he and i met at gallaudet, and he took me for my first indian food at taste of india – i’ve never stopped thanking him for that. we hit lebanese, chinese, japanese, african, italian, and too many others to remember or name. we shared a fondness for unique foods and had a unique friendship to boot.

i was introduced to soul food in d.c. as well and holy cow, do i miss it. cincinnati had one really good spot called millie’s in madisonville, but since millie had a stroke, are they even open any more?

lise and i have scoped out a lot of different ethnic foods over the years. we know all the best indian places in cincy. for greek, there’s only sebastian’s on glenway. mexican goes to el rio grande in n. ky. millie’s for soul food.

but there was one type of food we’d not tried yet. several weeks ago we went to tu-do, a vietnamese restaurant here in pensacola. it’s somewhat like chinese or japanese, but not really.

much lighter. more dependence on light sauces rather than thick syrupy ones. strange but tasty combinations of vegetables, meats, and noodles. they have some wonderful shrimp / vermicelli spring rolls that are wrapped in a semi-transparent rice paper and served with a peanut sauce that is just out of this world. when i eat chinese, i usually feel too full afterwards. after a visit to tu-do, i feel just right.

the meat is present but it’s not the bulk of the meal – more of those veggies and vermicelli / rice than anything. their sauces are also light and on the sweet side. each dish is described in detail (and there are 100+ dishes to choose from) and has its traditional vietnamese name (thankfully for us, they include numbers, so we don’t have to make fools of ourselves).

put away whatever stereotypical complaint you may have heard about vietnamese food and find somewhere near you serving it – you’ll thank me later.

“i overheard two ladies in my congregation talking about courtesy drops one day.”

thus began an interesting conversation with my pastor several years ago.

“courtesy drops?” i asked.

“yeah. you know how in some churches there’s all that faintin’ going on up at the altar during service?”

well, of course i had. i was the youth pastor at an inner-city african-american church. it didn’t happen there much, but it did when other churches would come and visit ours. we had seen it at other churches more frequently. all those fine-looking ladies in their sunday best, large ornate hats on their heads and handkerchiefs in hand, walking up to the altar for prayer. and then it would begin.

sometimes it was subtle. a little moaning, a little movement, then the drop.

other times it was an all-out production. crying. yelling. waving the hanky. hopping up and down. then the big drop.

and there are folks whose job at church is to act as a “catcher” to the droppers. they stand behind the congregant waiting for the moment, then, arms extended, they catch the person who has been “slain in the Spirit” and gently lay them down on the floor until they come around. sometimes a cloth is placed over them, other times they’re left alone completely.

“so, what’s a courtesy drop?”

“well, apparently these two had visited a sister church somewhere in town and the pastor, he called people up for prayer, right? so folk are going up and getting prayed over, but there was no fainting going on. well, the one woman says to the other, ‘well, i felt bad for him [the pastor] that no one was receiving the Spirit, so i went up, done got prayed over, then did a courtesy drop so he felt like God was moving even if no one else was dropping. i didn’t want him to feel bad about hisself.’”

i stared at chris, waiting to hear him laugh and tell me i was gullible and easy.

“dude…,” i said.

“straight up!” he replied.

it was a funny story that we talked about many times afterwards, but i came to only one real conclusion: like we need to give people another reason to not believe or not trust, we have folks who fake things like this just to pump up the minister’s ego on a “slow night” at church?

wonder what the percentage of courtesy drops to real drops is?