Sometimes a girl needs a big cheeseburger the size of her head.

I like mine with lettuce and tomato, Heinz 57 and french fried potatoes....

Okay, actually it was with bacon and mushrooms and onion rings. There was a big kosher pickle* but it was an Oreo milkshake, not a cold draft beer.

The place to get a good cheeseburger in Boston is Mr, Bartley's in Harvard Square. They don't pay me to say that or anything. Not that they need to. Everyone knows this.

Mr. Bartley's is right next door to the Harvard Bookstore. We-- the collective unit known as Stewie-- passed the Harvard Bookstore as we escorted one of our number-- The Suz-- to the T, where she would ride over to see "Joe." E Money also needed to pick up his monthly selection of comic books-- but we don't talk about that.

The Harvard Bookstore has books like Deconstructing the Subversive Paradigm of Existential Thought and John Donne: A Life in the front windows. It's all trade paperbacks and hardcover editions of books about Big Ideas.

So of course I wanted nothing more than to walk right in there and ask them if they have the new John Grisham in stock.

Not that I want the new John Grisham, mind you. I was just wondering how that would go...

"HAH!"

"You can't be serious...."

"No, but can I interest you in this first edition of Roland Barthes's Mythologies?"

I didn't do it, of course. Partly because I don't have the stones. But mainly because I was afraid it would go like this:
"Why, yes, of course. Right this way? Will that be cash or credit card?"

And then I'd be stuck with the new John Grisham novel, and who wants that when all you ever wanted in life was to just eat a cheeseburger?

*Pickles, we have found, in Boston are not always pickles. Sometimes they are simply cucumbers that have been sitting in vinegar or brine trying to pretend they are pickles. In fact they are cucumbers with delusions of grandeur and we can't support that. Mr. Bartley's, I'm happy to announce, has real live honest to God pickles with their cheeseburgers. But you probably already knew that.