Pizza Friday

I get it. It’s Thursday night. But Pizza Friday is a tradition around this house. Lately, given the change in our schedules, it’s become Pizza Thursday. Candidly, it hasn’t lost a step in the change of day. But its moniker hasn’t changed: it will always be Pizza Friday to me.

The origin of Pizza Friday is part of our love story and, a little bit, a part of our transition story as well. When we both had crazy busy lives and not enough time for each other, Pizza Friday became a tradition. My husband didn’t teach on Friday and was therefore working from home that day and I was where I always was – at the office. To make life a little more simple for me, he would volunteer to make dinner on Fridays. At first, the dinners varied. At some point, we settled on Pizza Friday.

The cool thing about Pizza Friday was that even though he did the heavy lifting on making a crust from scratch and making sure we had all of the fixings, the actual assembly we did together. I’d shred the mozzarella and always shred a little extra because I knew he’d eat some right off the tray. Same with the pepperoni – although he wouldn’t actually put any pepperoni on his half, he always had a few slices as I was cutting. He’d pick, wash and cut the basil, roast the sweet peppers, dice the hot peppers, etc. Whatever that other topping was, he’d take care of it.

So, when the time came to assemble the pizza, we’d be in the kitchen together, both likely enjoying a drink and with the music on. Sometimes, we would dance in the kitchen while we did our tasks. Other times, “our song” would come on the Pandora station and we’d slow dance while the pizza baked in the oven. (Our song is actually one of three: Simple Man by Lynyrd Skynyrd; I Can’t Help Falling In Love by Elvis Presley or Here Comes the Sun by the Beetles. Those that attended our wedding will get the significance.) Regardless, we enjoyed Pizza Friday. It was a signal of the start of the weekend and our time to get away from our stressful jobs and just be this not-so-young newly married couple.

Over the past few years, Pizza Friday has waned a bit. First, having pizza every Friday night does get a little bit old. Secondly, its origins likely started when we had fresh basil in the whiskey barrels by our back door. So, when that died off, so did a popular fixing. Finally, my husband began cutting out carbs as he was more seriously training for Ironman races. Bread, potatoes, pizza dough and pasta got a little scarce around here.

But gradually, Pizza Friday has made a comeback. Only this time, our weekend starts a day earlier and Pizza Friday now arrives on Thursday. Yet, the hallmarks are the same: it still signals the start of the weekend and we still end up making it together in the kitchen with an adult beverage and the music coming from the Bose speaker on the peninsula.

Tonight is a Pizza Friday night. Our pizza will feature Darryl’s special whole wheat/white flour crust and the pizza sauce I sourced from the Amish last fall. Our fixings? Tonight’s special is chopped banana peppers from the garden, pepperoni (on my half), basil (on Darryl’s half) and extra cheese. I’m likely pairing my slices with one of my “diet beers” – a low-carb IPA from Dogfish Head which just makes me happy. Darryl will, I suspect, make himself that New Orleans’ special, a Sazerac.

And I just have the feeling that it’s time to once again dance in my kitchen. Shoes off, hair down and pizza in the oven.

Its funny, because as I think back over our relatively short married life of six years, Pizza Friday and dancing in the kitchen are some of my favorite memories. Mostly, they’re just simple, unfettered memories. They celebrated the few short hours in all of our lives when our professional obligations have floated away – at least temporarily – and we can just be. It’s that release – when you feel your shoulders drop, your mouth turn up into a half smile and your feet just feel like doing that little happy dance – that make the memories. I’m not sure that there’s anything else we do that is actually quite as special in my world as Pizza Friday. It’s like we shut out the world, shrink our lives to just us and our fat little kitty and turn up the radio.

What’s your Pizza Friday? When was the last time you celebrated it? And if your Pizza Friday really occurs on a Friday, well then, don’t you still have time to make it happen this Friday?

Celebrate your Pizza Friday. Dance with your spouse in your socks in your kitchen. Open up a new cookbook and take a chance on a recipe that could go wrong. Pop that movie into the DVD and add extra butter on the popcorn. Take those few hours of release and enjoy them. Life is hard enough. It’s time to dance.