I try to stay away from writing columns about food, mainly because it always makes me hungry and once I’ve gotten up to get a snack of any proportion, that column’s got about as much a chance of getting completed as Winona Ryder’s new blouse has of getting paid for. I should also note that as an aspiring humor columnist, I often find myself aspiring for other things as well, including both food and shelter, and not necessarily even in that order! There is a common myth floating around that artists such as myself, and yes – if you look really closely, it’s art of some sort or another, have been known to be able to sustain life on a healthy diet of macaroni and cheese, ramen noodles, and various other crap foods found in your grocer’s ten-cent bin, but I’m here to tell you today that there’s a new alternative, if you think you can handle it…

Remember back to those hot, sticky summer nights when Momma used to let you play outside until nine o’clock at night, before she would call you in for a bath and a quick bite to eat before bed? You’d frolick with the best of them, kicking the can and hide and seeking until you could hardly move, yet there was always one good reason to drag your dirt-encrusted carcass back to the house every evening, one sliver of purity to still look forward to before you had to turn in for the night, and that holy grail of your wonder years was:

THE GRILLED CHEESE SANDWICH

It was a simple manifestation, created in only a matter of minutes as you tried with little success to comb the rats out of your hair after your 45 second bath, but it gave you everything you needed to continue the fight another day. All of the major food groups were represented – the grains by two humble, yet mighty slices of bread; the vegetables by that silly pickle that somehow found its way onto your plate every night, even though it didn’t actually stand a chance of getting eaten; the dairy group even got two representatives, as both the very piece (or pieces if you were lucky!) of cheese which made up the heart and soul of the meal AND as the tall glass of milk which stood watch over the entire table, ready and waiting to spill itself onto any important documents which might fall in its path. I’m sure there were some more food groups around, too, but you can’t milk a dead cow, you know!

(…oh, there’s another one for dairy…)

So what I’m thinking is that if this almighty feast was enough to keep us strong and daring throughout our youth, what exactly happened as we got older to turn us off to the cheesy delight that is grilled cheese and bring us into the ramen-filled state which we live today? Sure, as we got older, the grilled cheese did begin to lose a bit of pizzazz and occasionally we needed to liven things up a bit…maybe with the addition of a slab of ham here or there, or in the poor, unfortunate man’s case, SPAM.

Hold on, I’m sorry – I didn’t mean to do that! Here I am, meeting some of you for the first time and I’m already insulting you by throwing the s-word around like that – how rude of me! Just calm the children down…I promise it won’t happen again…

So where was I? Oh yes – occasional the sandwich needed to be dressed up a bit by adding various condiments, and for a while there it almost got upgraded to a regular entrée for everyone, but then what happened? Just as the adults aren’t allowed to order the ham strips at Schelde’s, suddenly we’re excluded from enjoying a nice, warm grilled cheese sandwich, too! You won’t walk into any bar in these woods and find a group of merry old men shouting and having a gleeful old time, all the while clanging their beer steins together and wolfing down grilled cheese sandwiches as fast as ye old serving wench can cook them, now will you? No, instead they’re choking down porterhouse steaks and baby-back ribs, and believe me, they’re all miserable about it…

I don’t know where exactly we dropped the ball and I’m not one to focus on the past, anyways, so instead I say we look to the future. Any sane man knows that it can’t be done in one night, or one hundred nights, or even one million nights, but it needs to be done – for you and for me, for the good of mankind, and for America (especially Wisconsin – they’ve been kinda slipping a little lately…) – we need to get the grilled cheese sandwich off the endangered entrees list and back onto our menus! We need to stop instilling the idea into our people that grilled cheese is a child’s food because it’s not just for children anymore!

When I think about the future, I see a business man, a leather-clad biker and an eight-year-old child sitting at a bar together, eating the all-American meal of a grilled cheese sandwich and a nice, cold beer (or a tall glass of milk in the child’s case – he’s still underage…), and reminiscing about the good old days.I don’t know exactly what these good old days were, and frankly I don’t care because I’ve reached my word quota, but I’ve got a feeling that they were sweet.

Enough about the good old days, though – don’t you have a dinner you’ve been fixin’ to grill up for a long while now? Do it for me, do it for America, or at least do it for Wisconsin…at this point they can use all the help they can get…