stick it to the man

I love the Cheesecake Factory. I love, LOVE, LOOOOVE it.

I pretty much want to marry it.

At some point, on any trip to Las Vegas in the past, you would be sure to find me sprawled in the licked-free-of-debris Chicken Madeira plate while doing the Homer Simpson gargle to the last swallow of mango marguerita and berating my server loudly to make my cheese-cake-to-go reeeeal snappy.

I was thrilled when I found out that we, in Utah, were finally deemed worthy to have our very own Cheesecake factory. Sometime back one of our local news stations had ran a report that they were looking for new areas to expand and had several states that they were looking into. Unfortunately they said that the owners of the Cheesecake Factory, in their infinite wisdom, only built their restaurants where the college education rate was above a certain percentage and Utah fell below that rate. Now I never finished college and I don't know how right I may be, but I came up with a few hypothesis as to why maybe they use that percentage as a location factor:

1. College educated people go to school a lot. That makes them hungry.

2. Smart people are fat. Fat people eat more.

3. College educated people generally make more and thus eat out more often.

I'm not sure if any of them are close to their reasoning but I am glad they rethought their decision cause I felt it was pretty weak. Its not that Utah is the Land of the Stupids or anything like that or we just quit going to the school house when Pa needed us back on the farm. Actually the rate of students continuing on to college is pretty high around these parts. The problem actually comes from the fact that many students, once wisened up, leave in a mass exodus like flocks of ducks seeking warmer climes. Our biggest export is good college educated people. They act like Utah is a big family. All the good smart kids go to school move out and get jobs and all the stupid kids stay home and live with Ma and Pa.

Maybe that's why although we finally got our own place its scandalously fun-sized. You can fit three of our Cheesecake Factories into the one in Vegas and probably still have room for Celine's farewell party for her dancers.

Every time I drive by around dinner dining hours there is a crowd spilling out onto the sidewalk with over an hour wait. I went at a quarter to ten recently and was told it would still be 45 minutes. I guess they underestimated us. Do they not know that we all dream of having a family with eight kids and we can only leave one at home locked in the closet before the neighbors become suspicious? That we might not buy the alcohol but we make up for that in sheer numbers? So the next time you stop by (I highly recommend you do if you haven't yet) and you're waiting outside huddled against a no parking sign for warmth for an hour and a half in order to give them money for their delicious moderately priced fare, and then hurried out again like cattle in a shute while still trying vainly to scrape the last crumb off the plate, just feel happy that you're showing those high paid exec types up. Guess we're not as dumb as they thought we were.