Friendly's sold

Of all the things in the news today, the one which immediately drew my eye was the headline "Friendly Ice Cream Corp. Sold". It's a local story. Along with the story is a link for readers to share their "Friendly's memories". Personally, I find it hard to wax nostalgic about Friendly's. This is not to say I haven't got any Friendly's memories, just not any of the sort which I think I'd want to share in a pleasant trip down memory lane context. More evidence of my jaundiced views I guess.

I should back up. Friendly's is an ice cream/family restaurant chain. Of all the local chains of my childhood, Friendly's has never stood out as anything special. Compared to the occasional local dairy farm run ice cream stand/shop (of which there are usually a couple in any New England region), Friendly's is downright nasty.

It's not so much the ice cream which makes Friendly's nasty, and possibly in a town where there are many more choices for restaurant than Friendly's, Friendly's wouldn't seem so, well, wretched. But living in Buttfucknowhere CT for 9 years now has made me sort of loath Friendly's.

The only chain which outnumbers Friendly's are Dunkin Donuts. I do not feel a similar loathing for Dunkies because they are not a "restaurant". They don't try to be, even with all the silly shit they keep adding to the menu. You can still treat them like a coffee shop. Friendly's, on the other hand, is a restaurant. Because it is a restaurant, it occupies a dining niche which, were it not for Friendly's taking up that space, might be filled by something (or some several things) else. Something better.

In one of the three strip malls which border my university campus and which count as the commercial district of the "college town", there is a Friendly's. There used to be a nice little coffee and donut shop in this strip mall. According to the campus police (the ones I liked, yes, I'm the kind of tool who talks to police officers - the decent ones at least), this coffee shop had the best coffee. I used to go there. They had chess board table tops and games you could check out. It wasn't great, it wasn't bohemian. It was a regular working class local privately owned coffee shop and it went out of business a few years ago.

The space stood empty for some time. Two women I knew who ran the coffee truck on campus considered moving into the space the nice locally owned coffee shop used to lease, but they dropped their plans when they were told by the owner of the strip mall that they would have to limit their menu due to a deal with Friendly's. That is, Friendly's wouldn't allow any shop to move into their strip mall if that shop planned to offer menu items which might compete with the items Friendly's offered.

Talk about fucking collusion.

Needless to say, the space is still empty. It was occupied for a short while by a nice enough coffee shop - although the atmosphere left something to be desired ("ugh, who ever heard of painting a dining room BLUE?!" my brother yelled when we ate there once). But they went out of business about a year ago, leaving the empty space and yellowing "for rent" signs up in the windows.

Friendly's, however, remains - offering such delightful menu items as the "fishamajig".

I recall going to Friendly's with some school mates when I was in my former graduate department. It was me, another American (Kelly), and a young woman from Spain (Emma). Emma had only been in the country a few months. We looked over the menu and Emma asked "what is 'fish-a-ma-jig'?"

Kelly and I laughed and advised her NOT to order it. "See, it's like fish and whatever. Or whatever kind of fish," Kelly said.
Emma was confused.
"The suffix "ma-jig", in English, is added onto words to denote a sense of non-specificity," I explained.
"It's like 'fish or something, but we might not know what'," Kelly added.
"Oh," Emma said, staringt at the menu.
"So you probably shouldn't eat anything that has the morpheme 'ma-jig' or 'ma-bob', that's another one that means sort of the same thing."
"And don't eat something that has a 'whatsit' in it either. That would be ill advised also."

I wonder if Friendly's will change their menu now that they have been sold. I wonder especially if they will change their atmosphere. The one across from my campus has a chronically grease-slippery floor, an ordor of bleached french fries, and acid-like pictures of giant ice creams photoshopped into photographs of New England landmarks. The ice creams seem to be lurking, waiting for an unsuspecting tourist. Also, the local Friendly's plays just truly wretched music from the late 60s/early 70s. I mean BAD music. Muskrat Love, Neil Diamond, John Denver, all the worst of course, bad bad music.