A Tamale Pilgrimage

If you need to get from Point A to Point B in Stiletto City, and you have to use your car, it can be a trial. Last night, driving back to Mummy Plotnik's house from Baby Isabella's house, The Great Plotnik and The Great Ducknik had to use the Hollywood Freeway. There is a point where the highway bends around to the right and your eyes collide with eight lanes of traffic flowing in each direction, and off to the right there are four more lanes, off the freeway, with cars also moving in each direction, and at night this means being surrounded by red tail lights and white headlights, thousands and thousands of them, all moving at the speed of a head-on collision, and yet smoothly, if that makes any sense, until one car thirty miles down the road has a flat tire, at which point the entire 24 lanes of traffic yawn to a halt, horns honking. Everyone says at the exact same time into their cellphones: "Dunno. Something must have happened up ahead. I'm not moving. I'll call you when I get a little closer."

On the other hand, when the plane touches down at LAX, you can walk over to the Flyaway Stop, and a big tour bus comes along, picks you up, and for $3 takes you all the way downtown to Union Station. It's so convenient and well thought-out the Great Plotnik wonders why Saint Plotniko couldn't come up with something so obvious, in a city 1/1000th the size of Stiletto City?



And then, there are the tamales. The Great 5Head and The Great Angel picked up Plot and Duck at the Flyaway Terminal and drove straight to Mama's for tamales and horchata. All the time he was eating (the first good food he'd gotten next to in two weeks) he was thinking how nice it would be if all Plotnikkies could make a pilgramage to Mama's Tamales down by MacArthur Park. It could be a yearly thing, like the hajj. We could call it the Tamalajj.

But that could be seen as insensitive, so Plotnik would never suggest it; still, how about April?

P.S. Is she cute? Ohmigod. Wait 'til you see.