'Eat it, Daddy! Eat it! Take a bite of the enchanted burger!"
Through the side of my curly wig and Zorro mask, I could see my kids and their little pals from the block cheering me on. I had been holding a Rouge burger out in front of my face for several minutes like a tempting storybook treasure - the amazingly thick patty dripping with juice and Gruyere cheese that glistened in the midday sun. Eating it sounded like a good idea. It had become an enchanted burger, indeed.
I brought the burger to my lips . . .
"Don't take a bite!" barked the director, Chris Jolissaint, from behind. "I just want you to cup it in your jaws."
So there I was, my mandibles frozen in mid-chomp around a gargantuan sandwich with a panoramic view of the Center City skyline in the background. Jolissaint's camera captured the moment from every angle. And as my jaws began to cramp, the thought occurred to me that maybe this music-video stuff was more than I had bargained for.
I had no one to blame but myself.
A food roundup story is already grueling enough without the distractions of recording studios, TV cameras and a wardrobe of disguises. Over the last six months, my best-burger quest had brought me to devour more than 50 burgers around the region - the results of which were published in Thursday's Food section (see http://go.philly.com/cheeseburger). Some of them, I really liked.
But something else wonderfully unexpected also happened along the way. I had rediscovered a long-dormant hunger for making music.
It began, naturally, with the bite of a burger. But it wasn't just any burger, it turns out. This one, at a Center City bar called the Good Dog, triumphed where so many others had failed, sucessfully stuffing the center with bleu cheese. Inside the Good Dog's signature sandwich was a spring of molten bleu, and it caught me by surprise. It bubbled up from the patty's heart like a Roquefort river of tangy goodness. It seemed like an offering. I was moved.
So in the course of the Good Dog's review last December, I produced my first-ever hamburger haiku: "Cheeseburger, I Hold."
But the little poem just wouldn't leave my head. Suddenly, it latched onto a bouncy tune, and before long it became a chorus. I dusted off the old guitar, and a real song began to take shape, paying homage not simply to the Good Dog, but to all the beautiful burgers of my life (as well as the bitter disappointments). Call me the Julio Iglesias of cheeseburger passion, if you will. I had a lot of material.
