Breakfast With Pizza.

[title type="h4"]Monday, January 13, 2014.[/title] Normand Pizza and I were in the same classroom during my three years at Jesuit High School. Then and now he was a mellow guy, friend of everybody. Now he's an attorney on the North Shore, father of eight, grandfather of seventeen, and one of the few classmates I see more often out and about than I do at reunions. A few weeks ago I was in his office to deliver a copy of my cookbook, and we thought it would be fun to have breakfast today. His Covington office isn't far from Mattina Bella. Even though I was there only two days ago, the menu has so much variety and quality that I looked forward to it. And it gave me a chance to show off the weight I swing by pointing out that Mattina Bella's poached eggs with crabmeat and mushrooms--the best dish in the house--was m idea. [caption id="attachment_36642" align="alignnone" width="400"] Poached eggs with crabmeat and mushrooms at Mattina Bella.[/caption] No matter what accomplishments we achieve, our high-school friends will always remember our peculiarities--the ones everybody has at that age. Normand was saddled with two inescapable labels. One came from the hit record by Sue Thompson that went, "Norman! Oooh-oooh-ooo-ooo-ooh-ooh." The song was current in our junior year 1967, and he still has to hear it when he encounters classmates. I remember he told me that he hated that song, so I didn't bring it up. The other was his last name, highly visible to everybody at Jesuit, because we wore name tags with only our last name in those days. Imagine walking around with the word "PIZZA" on your shirtfront. "I always heard that 'Pizza' isn't a real Italian name," he said. "But when we were on a trip to Naples a few years ago, I was talking with a man who said that if my name was Pizza, then I must be from a certain little town where everybody had that name. I asked him for directions, and we went there. It was a very small town, but everybody was a Pizza!" I wonder what the pizza shop there is called. And what the conversations were like if you called in for a takeout. "Pizza," the voice on the other end would say. "May I have your order?" "I want a pizza!" "Si, this is Pizza talking." "Is this Pizza Pizza?" "No, I think you're looking for Little Caesar's. This is just Pizza. Who are you? "Pizza." (Call in Lou Costello and work out the rest of this yourself.) I have more than my share of peccadillos, and Normand brought them up gingerly, lest I show sensitivity. But nothing embarrasses me anymore, so I demonstrated to him and the staff of his office (they had joined us for breakfast) the various sounds and motions made by Bus #208, about which I had a truly crazy obsession in my high school years. It remains not quite dormant in the front of my brain. I gave a demonstration of what 208 sounded like. The law office staff must have thought me insane. I could have done with that breakfast as my day's eating. But Mary Leigh said she was up for a wedge salad from the Acme, and The Boy is back across the lake at Loyola. We had a fun supper, starting with a half-dozen grilled oysters, then the salad and a plate of fried oysters with remoulade. I had red beans on my mind, but I wasn't hungry enough. One of the great things about red beans and its usual accompaniments is that it's great for cold days, keeps you nice and warm. In more ways than one.