Vegetarian Chicks

My former college flame M (see my May 30 post Are Men Naturally Snoopy) will be in town this weekend for work and I'm looking forward to seeing her again. It will probably be a group dinner type situation.

After getting kicked out of college, I bummed around in a series of low-status, low-pay McJob-type jobs while M went to law school. I ran into her on the street in '98 (Chicago really is a small town sometimes) and my then-wife and I ended up living three buildings down from her in Lakeview. We went out for drinks a couple times.

She moved to New York to become a legal recruiter and a few years back contracted non-hodgkins lymphoma which eventuallly spread to her brain. She's off chemotherapy now and hopefully has the cancer beaten for good.

Two things that caught my attention in the email heralding her imminent arrival in Chicago were the announcements that she's become a vegatarian (although of the fish eating variety) and that she no longer drinks alcohol.

So, I see a possible Sunday brunch at a yuppie-trendy vegetarian spot in a heavily gentrified neighborhood serving soy bacon and NO bloody marys....OK, OK, she's right to be concerned about her health after what she's been through and I'm in no position to judge someone else's culinary peculiarities, me of the Chicago-style hot dog...

Still...

I'm a live-and-let-live kinda guy, but a major major turnoff for me in a girl is vegetarianism. I believe in a healthy lifestyle---I make my own (very sensible, I might add) lunches, generally avoid fast-food chains and get plenty of fruits and vegetables in my diet but I also looooove a good steak and have been known to get into heated arguments with my co-workers about the location of the restaurant selling Chicago's best burgers.

When a girl becomes a vegetarian, it's like she's joined a cult. Joie de vivre is replaced by a sort of Calvinist stoicism. If she's motivated by health concerns, you get "...how can you eat that shit, do you know what that does to your stomach/arteries/heart?" If she's motivated by one-world spiritual karmic animal welfare, it's worse. Far worse. You're reminded that you're contributing to the destruction of the rain forests, the slaughter of the innocents, third world poverty, global warming, the oppression of the working class and the perpetuation of the phallocracy.

All by eating a hamburger.

Dating becomes a real pain-in-the-ass as all restaurants are screened for suitability, and suitability does not mean a couple of meat-free offerings. It means adherence to a code, it means a stable of choices, vegetarian friendly, or, if you will, carnivore hostile.

I have a weakness for old-style art-deco diners, the kind run by middle-aged Greeks that serve hot roast beef sandwiches topped by mashed potatoes with the whole thing smothered in gravy. Those kinds of restaurants are out.

So are Chicago's wonderful hot dog stands. The ones with the Vienna Beef sign in the window or over the door. Every neighborhood worth living in has at least one.

Barbecues are always problematic. Portobello mushrooms demand their own separate grill. It's not enough to clean a grill that previously held a steak. The vegetables must be completely uncontaminated by the meat.

No, when I date a vegetarian those pleasant establishments become memories of a distant past. Instead, I find myself sitting across from an anemic (produce all the statistics you can that show a vegetarian diet is healthy, my eyes tell me otherwise) waif in a crowded upscale bobo restaurant surrounded by the upper-middle class faces of privilege and political correctness, listening to WORLD MUSIC in the background, giving my order for a Save The World Tofu Omelette to a white guy wearing a sari.

I'll take a healthy looking girl with an order of bacon and eggs, sunny side up, in a relaxed setting with a waitress who knows how to make a perfect bloody mary. Any day.