I told my mother, on the phone, that the Pizza Hut near our house wasn’t a really good place to have dinner.

While the food is usually fine, I’ve had poor service there, and worse! it seems every time I go that there are always tons of noisy kids there. So, it wasn’t really the best choice for my mom and my grandma and I to have a meal where we could talk.

But, she didn’t want to drive into town to the other Pizza Hut (the one where the food is better, and the amount of well behaved kids tends to outweigh the brats).

Also, she really didn’t understand how bad it could get.

It started innocently enough, we got to the place, and I requested a table that wasn’t directly under the loud speaker playing hits from the eighties. We circled the salad bar, and talked a bit about the fact that it doesn’t seem to matter what night I go there, it always ends up quite crazy. But, she said, at least it wasn’t family night. I think that’s Wednesdays, I said. She says, well, at least the boy scouts aren’t here. Not more than a minute later, while I’m trying to decide if I do want green peppers and cucumbers on my salad, do we hear a waiter talk to a man about the basketball team that would be coming in about twenty minutes.

She looked at me and laughed.

We sit down and begin to chat and eat, and a set of about eight 4th or 5th grade girls are seated off to our right. They appear to be in some sort of club, having similar t-shirts, but don’t seem to me to be a basketball team. They are very loud, loud and rambunctious, bouncing around, screaming and screeching at each other, yelling across the two feet of table.

My mom looks at me, and laughs, starting to understand what I meant earlier.

In the course of the next ten minutes, practically every table in the place, is quickly filled with wiggly, ill mannered children. And then the basketball team appears and takes the whole area to the front of the restaurant. (right behind me)

During this whole time, while I am munching on my cheese pizza, the noise level in the whole place is going up up UP!
It quite literally sounded like we were eating inside the monkey cage at the zoo.
(I hate to be one of those women, but the sound of children being ill-mannered and crazy screeching drives me up the wall. Who knows if this will change when I have children of my own, but ack!) I was really trying to put on a good face though, because it was quite obvious my mother now fully understood what I meant, and had shared my warning with her mother earlier when I had got up for salad.

Trying to have an adult conversation in that climate was quite difficult, and every once in a while my mom would grimace and joke, ‘If they would just quiet down’. But honestly, it was really hard to hear her, and she was a foot and a half away from me. And then a surge of noise as the team behind us applauds and cheers someone, and we can hardly take it.

We’re sitting there, chuckling over how absurd the whole place was, and suddenly, my grandmother yells into the din
“Help me! I’m drowning!”

This, of course, made all three of us crack up. And the really horrible thing was… no one even noticed, the monkey noises and the little girl songs and the wrestling behind us continued unabated.

She did it once more before we left, and I told her she’ll still be yelling that in ten years, but won’t remember why.