Sometimes Pizza is the Better Choice

More often than not, I leave work on Improv Practice Day (more commonly known as “Wednesday”) and find myself faced with the daunting combination of nothing edible in my home and two measly hours before I have to leave for the theatre. Preferring to focus on the positive, I see this as “a perfect excuse to eat fast food for dinner” instead of “a sad commentary on a grown woman who can’t take care of herself properly”. But when it happened last week, I didn’t feel inclined to have pizza or Taco Hell or a mostly-cheese “vegetarian” sandwich. Instead, I had a brilliant idea. BRILLIANT, I tell you: frozen yogurt! It’s cheap, it’s low-fat but high-calcium, and apparently it contains “live and active cultures”, which are on the list of Trendy Things We’re All Supposed to Consume in Huge Quantities. So I stopped at Yogli Mogli (which, in case you were wondering, is exactly like Yoforia, Slimberry, Pinkberry, Menchie’s, Swirll, Cow Licks, Cloud 9, Yorika, Yogurtland, and The Yogurt Tap) (except Cloud 9 also has cupcakes), and as I drove home with the increasingly less-frozen yogurt in my cupholder, I thought, “I bet I could come up with at least…

10 Excellent Reasons Why I’m Never Allowed to Have Frozen Yogurt for Pre-Improv Practice Dinner Ever Again

1. No good comes of putting 7-year olds in charge. The 7-year old me, who makes most of my decisions, COULD NOT imagine a better dinner than this! But when you walk into a place called “Yogli Mogli” as an adult in business attire, you become acutely aware of just how not 7 you are. The only way you’re getting away with it is if you brought a 7-year old with you. And I’m pretty sure the daycare place doesn’t loan them out.

2. That 20 minute drive never takes 20 minutes. Sometimes I can get home from work in 20 minutes, but never on days when I need to. I should’ve known that putting anything frozen in the car would up the commute to at least 45 minutes. Lesson learned.

3. Panic attacks. 7-year old me may not care about the car upholstery, but 32-year old me cares very deeply about the car upholstery, so I spent most of the drive home glancing anxiously at the cupholder, waiting for it to spew forth melted yogurt at every stop, start, or turn. Of which there were plenty. I don’t need that kind of stress in my life.

4. It’s so, so sad. Sure, they have non-fat fruit-based options and sorbets and fresh fruit toppings, but I’m not in the target market for that. Chocolate yogurt + candy + more candy + hot fudge sauce = what I had. That is not dinner. It sounded like a good idea at first, but once you’re in line between two 12-year olds, spooning M&Ms onto your “dinner” in your work clothes, the word “sad” begins to suggest itself.

5. The Inevitable Sugar Crash. When you eat candy for dinner, you’re about 2 hours away from a nap. And if that’s right around the time you’re supposed to be rushing a stage every 5 minutes to vie for a spot in a scene…it doesn’t work.

6. The Internal Mom Voice. To whatever extent this could ever have been a fun experience, it was ruined by the responsible voice in my head that sounds suspiciously like my mother. An endless loop of “Young lady, you know very well that you are not allowed to have frozen yogurt for dinner!” will buzzkill the whole thing. Even 7-year old me was starting to feel guilty about it towards the end.

…but I was wrong; I could only come up with 6.