Dollar Slices

All men are hungry. They always have been. They must eat, and when they deny themselves the pleasures of carrying out that need, they are cutting off part of their possible fullness, their natural realization of life, whether they are poor or rich.
— M.F.K. Fisher, How to Cook a Wolf

I consider today the true start of my journey, my first chance to take a break from eight- and nine-hour days driving my diesel-powered Mercedes Sprinter van west on the never-ending I-80, and to slow down — the speed limits out here are typically as high as 75 mph — and observe what I’ve been passing by since starting out from Connecticut last week. 

And pizza is one of those delights I’ve passed by now since leaving Middletown. I’ve been surviving on the road on truck stop oatmeal, canned Starbucks energy drinks, and Subway sandwiches for dinner — certainly a diet lacking spark or depth.

“Since we must eat to live,” M.F.K. Fisher writes in The Art of Eating, “we might as well do it with both grace and gusto.”

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It’s 4 p.m. Mountain time on Tuesday and the kitchen is pumping out $1 slices for loyal fans assembled at Cosmo’s Pizzeria on Baseline Street in Boulder, Colorado.

“What can I get you,” asks a woman too busy to spend any time answering my curiosity. I order two slices — one pepperoni and one with diced tomatoes and basil, and a fountain drink. While I wait for my slices to be super-heated and wrapped in foil that burns my fingertips as I carry them back to my hotel room, I take stock of the crowd filling the restaurant.

That Boulder is truly a college town is obvious, based on all the students buying Cosmo’s slices and the fact that the town boasts the flagship university of the University of Colorado, with more than 30,000 undergraduates. As a college town, it has, perhaps predictably, been one of several cities to host a Halloween event called the Naked Pumpkin Run. 

Yes, people really have run on city streets wearing only shoes and hollowed-out and carved pumpkins — actual pumpkins — on their heads. They did so for about a dozen years beginning in 1998. Published reports and a video suggest that more people turned out in Boulder to watch the naked runners than to run naked, turning the event into a spectator magnet with all that skin on display. The nudity in the once-spontaneous event drew several minor arrests of runners in 2008 and 2009, and with threats of more serious charges in 2010, the run fizzled. Efforts to revive it have reportedly been half-hearted and unsuccessful.

Perhaps that’s not surprising. After all, it’s not pizza.