My husband has a special nickname for me.
I don’t mean honey…or sweetie…or my love.
Sure, he’s called me all of those. But he also calls me Sally.
Why Sally? It’s after Sally Albright, the character Meg Ryan plays in the romantic comedy When Harry Met Sally.
Again, why? Because I may have possibly been known, on occasion, to sometimes order something on the side.
Sometimes…
Okay, you got me. A lot.
I’ve ordered a grilled veggie sub. Sounds pretty simple, right?
Well, not for me. I always order it without hots or onions and on a different kind of bread instead of a sub roll.
And sometimes, I will pick off the tomatoes. Not all the time, but sometimes.
“I get why you don’t want onions or hots,” says my husband. “But why the different kind of bread?”
“Because I like it better than sub rolls. And they like me and will do it,” has been my response many times.
I can’t help it. Like Sally says in the movie, I want it the way I want it.
I like mashed potatoes, but not with gravy.
I like hot turkey sandwiches with gravy, but with beef gravy.
I put ketchup on my steak (oh shut up—like you are the first person to give me grief about this? Not. Even. Close.)
I like tomatoes if they’re cooked or in a sauce. The only way I like them raw is on a sandwich. But not every sandwich—just if it’s turkey or ham. If it’s tuna, I don’t want tomato slices on it.
Oh…my…God…I’M SALLY!
I don’t like tomatoes on my cheeseburger, but I like my cheeseburger with ketchup.
Don’t even say that ketchup is made from tomatoes because it’s not the same thing.
It is not! Stop it—I’m telling you.
If I order a salad while I’m out, I always get the dressing on the side. Why? Because if they put too much on, when I get to the bottom, it’s become a soup instead a salad.
And if I had wanted soup, I would have ordered it. Trust me on this.
I’ve eaten from our local Chinese food restaurant for more than a decade. I always order chicken with mixed vegetables. But I pick out the baby corn.
So now they’ve told me to order without baby corn, so I do.
But then, I also began ordering it with more vegetables and less chicken. Sometimes they do, and sometimes they don’t.
Why don’t I just order mixed vegetables? Because they make theirs in a cream sauce, and I prefer the brown sauce that comes with the chicken/mixed veggies.
It’s bad enough how I order it now. I don’t even want to try to ask for just mixed vegetables in brown sauce. They may never let me come back.
See, years ago, I ordered mixed veggies and chicken from a now-closed Chinese restaurant. And I would always ask if I could have the kind of chicken they used in the sweet-and-sour chicken, but with mixed veggies. They made the replacement, but they always knew us when we called.
A local sandwich shop added this sentence to their panini section: “Please don’t ask for any changes.”
My husband noticed and quipped, “Ha! Have you been ordering paninis from them?”
No, Mr. Smartypants I haven’t. And now, thanks to their stupid menu, I can’t.
There was a time, though, when I wasn’t Sally. A good friend was.
Instead of picking things off, she ordered her meal like a Queen: there were things taken away, things added, and even some stuff on the side.
It was impressive.
It was amazing.
And suddenly, it was exactly what I wanted to eat.
I turned to the server and said without a smile: “I’ll have what she’s having.”
Michele “Wojo” Wojciechowski, when she’s not asking for meals just the way she wants them, writes Wojo’s World®” from Baltimore. She’s also the author of the award-winning humor book Next Time I Move, They’ll Carry Me Out in a Box. You can connect with Wojo on Facebook or on Twitter.
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