Ever since a Little Nero’s delivery boy dropped off $122.50 worth of pizzas to the McAllister family in mid-late December of 1990, the intrinsic relationship between food and the small and silver screen representations of Chicago has captivated me.
Unbeknownst to me at the time of my first viewing of Home Alone, but a year earlier, just over four miles down the road from the Wet Bandits’ silver tuna in Winnetka, Buck Russell had been struggling in the kitchen of his brother’s colonial detached in Evanston to get the toast through the door for his nephew Miles’ birthday breakfast.
And of course, before Uncle Buck came the misadventures of Neal Page and Del Griffith. An odd couple haplessly thrust together in a desperate dash from New York to the Windy City via a series of planes, trains and automobiles in time for Thanksgiving dinner.
As much as the food in these films alerted my imagination to what it could possibly be like to experience not only these meals, but these meals in their celluloid settings, it was the all-encompassing clatter and chatter of the atmospheres surrounding them that really enraptured me. There was a wholesomeness to the Chicagoan suburbs; The diners, the bowling alleys, the convenience stores, the frenzied family gatherings.
With every viewing I manifested an alternate reality where I was plonked, like mad little Mike TV from Charlie and The Chocolate Factory, onto the other side of the screen. I wanted to be dropped slap bang into the middle of the McAllister’s kitchen so I could nab Fuller’s Pepsi away from him and lambast Uncle Frank for being a tight old bastard and not going halves on the pizzas. The miserably old snide.
Then there came another festive family gathering in Chicago. Christmas Eve, 2018. ‘All Alone on Christmas’ by Darlene Love cascades from the living room around the downstairs. There are lights upon lights upon lights. It feels like there are three houses worth of decorations surrounding the dining room alone. Anxiety ridden siblings smoke out front, figuring out tactical manoeuvres and sharing emotional support, while inside their uncle Jimmy breaks balls and their mum heaves tidal waves of red wine down her throat amid a chaotic cacophony of boiling and bubbling pans and marinara splatters.
If that doesn’t feel like the quintessential Christmas experience then, quite frankly, I don’t know what else does.
Only, SLIGHT spoiler alert, this being the Berzatto household, tensions within a confined space can only simmer for so long before boiling over into a scalding stove fire where everyone gets burned.
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