I think I have had sufficient time to recover from the trauma.

I think.

It’s not easy to write about this but sometimes, the truth must be dealt with in an open manner. 

My daughter and I attended a writer’s conference last spring.  This was our second one of these and we thoroughly enjoyed ourselves.  The speakers are always entertaining and inspirational, we learn so much in the classes and the other attendees are a delight to be around.

The only problem was the food.

Actually, the food was fine.  It was, in fact, gourmet and exquisite at times.  However, my daughter and I only eat plain food.

I am such a picky eater, I don’t even like to cook for myself.  I’ll plop my plate down and look at it and say, “Ew.  What’s in it?”  I argue with myself.  “It’s good for you.  Eat it.”  “No, I don’t wanna.”  “Just try a bite.”  “It looks gooshy.”  And so on.  It’s embarrassing.

By far, the majority of people at this conference loved the food.  They ate every bite and when they thought no one was looking, they licked their plates and took their neighbor’s food when they went to the restroom.

But not us.  For three days, we basically had only cold bread that we vainly tried to spread with cold butter and salad.  By the end of the weekend, my daughter, who loves salad no end said, “I do not want to see another salad for at least a month.” 

We survived by the grace of God and dessert.  Every lunch and dinner was followed by a wonderfully sweet concoction that we devoured with relish.  It got to be that our routine for every meal was to move our food around our plates while anxiously casting glances towards the doors the servers would use to see what would be brought out to sustain us until the next meal.

So, by the final night we were starving.  It was hard to hear the speaker over our growling stomachs and we sat in distinctly un-ladylike positions because of the bloating.  We were served salad, of course, cold bread and stiff butter and a plate of something that we both poked at and shifted while smiling politely. 

Our table was cleared and we locked our eyes on the targeted door to see our salvation.  What would it be?  When would they serve it?  What’s taking so long? 

The servers came bustling out with large platters the size of small hockey rinks and whisked off the covers to reveal…cheesecake.

Cheesecake!  Yay!  We were saved!  We started up a chant:

What is it?  What is it?  What did they make?

Praise the Lord; it’s blessed cheesecake!

Oh, wow it really looks too great!

Hurry, hurry, give me a plate!

Or I’ll be forced to gnaw on my elbows.

The waiters hurriedly scurried about with their plates o’ bliss and we knew, deep down inside, if they did not get to our table soon, someone was going to die.

Finally, the tasty pastry was placed in front of our drooling mouths.  We daintily grabbed our dessert forks like shovels and dug in…only the have the forks bounce off and poke our neighbors in the arm.

The cheesecake was frozen stiff.

I nearly wept.  “Why?” we sobbed to the servers.  “Why did you serve us bricks that looked like cheesecake?  Why?”

Our waiter explained that “someone,” who is now marked for death, mistakenly put the cheesecake in the freezer instead of the cooler.  When they cleared our table, they had taken all of our silverware, no doubt, because they knew if would have had access to deadly weapons, such as butter knives, blood would have been shed.  We were faced with cheesecake rocks and were only armed with dessert forks.

What happened next was not pretty.  Remember, we were ravenous and judging by the looks of gloom on the faces of the other diners; we were not alone in this feeling. 

An explosion of dietary violence ensued that shall go down in the annals as “The Night of the Cheesecake Massacre,” soon to be a television reality show on Fox.

We hacked, we sliced, we put our faces down on the plates so that we could gnaw with our back molars.  Nothing, not the forces of nature, not the rules of etiquette, certainly not personal pride, was going to stand in the way of our getting some cheesecake into our gaping mouths.  This was war and to the victor went something that was supposed to be yummy.

As we stumbled out of the dining room, faint from hunger, we looked at the other dining tables and saw the unbelievable carnage.  Mangled, mauled and battered remains of what was once perfect triangles of cheesecake were scattered on, under and besides the tables.  Dessert forks were twisted into unimaginable deformed and grotesque shapes giving evidence of the violence inflicted upon them.  Wild-eyed would-be diners stared emptily into the void with cheesecake bits smeared on their cheeks, chins and foreheads and the servers were trembling in fear as they hid behind the dais. 

As we passed them, one of them hopefully whispered, “If you want, there’s more salad.”

Thank God my daughter didn’t hear it.