Getting Jiggly With It
“Have fun in Salt Lake City!”
Close friends and family members actually used those words before the great send-off into the heart of dullness, into the land of buttoned-up Mormons, watered-down beer and carrot-topped lime green Jell-O.
They meant well enough, I suppose, although the words carried the same sort of smirking undertone you notice when someone advises, “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.”
That commandment, by the way, has been broken. I’ve already done something they wouldn’t do.
I am here. And they aren’t.
Have fun in Salt Lake City? Sure, it’s somewhat easier now, with the Olympics in town. That’s one way to improve the night life. You could drop the Olympics into a cow pasture and for three weeks, and that cow pasture would be rocking. (You should have seen Dave Matthews at the Medals Plaza the other night. Layered with sweaters and fingerless gloves, his breath forming massive clouds over his head, he looked fully prepared for the cow pasture--and probably thinking about using his guitar for kindling.)
That’s why Salt Lake City spent millions of dollars, many of them in the form of bribes, and risked international scandal and shame to bring the Winter Games here. It was to give the residents something to do.
But take away the five Olympic rings and Ross Powers reaching cruising altitude on the halfpipe and the Foo Fighters and what are you left with? “Denver, without the charm,” says one veteran Olympics writer.
A few years back, an independent film called “SLC Punk” did a good job of chronicling the condition. The story involves a young punk named Stevo who starts a (very small) punk-rock scene in Salt Lake City, banging his head against the boredom, the blandness and the bleakness.
“There’s nothing going on,” Stevo says in the movie. “That’s what I saw when I looked out over the city. Nothing. How the Mormon settlers looked upon this valley and felt it was the promised land is beyond me. I don’t know, maybe it looked different back then.”
I went down into the valley more than a week ago, arriving the Monday before the opening ceremony. Monday in Salt Lake City. Long Monday. Big Monday.
As in Wyoming at Utah, college basketball at the Huntsman Center. That sounded as if it might be fun. Tip-off was scheduled for 10:03 p.m. That would get me to midnight. One day down, 20 to go.
Huntsman Center was rocking with excitement at a quarter to 10. A couple of visitors joked about the crowd being up way past its bedtime, but that’s Myth No. 1 about Salt Lakers: They are not all early-to-bed homebodies. They will stay up for Rick Majerus and the Runnin’ Utes, who before this game held the nation’s longest winning streak at 13 and had won 48 consecutive conference games at home.
Especially when the opponent is Wyoming, second in the Mountain West Conference.
Especially when they are giving away plastic ice scrapers at the door.
The turnstile count pushed 13,000 for this one. It was a typical big-game college crowd, if a little more polite than most, at least until there was a break in the action.
During one timeout, the Utah mascot, a guy in a red-tail hawk outfit, readied himself for the standard off-the-trampoline-and-over-the-rim monster-dunk bit--except his takeoff was interrupted by another guy in a giant half-man, half-inflatable crash-test dummy costume, the mascot for nearby Rocky Mountain Raceway. The hawk crashed into crash-test dummy. The crash-test dummy was leveled. The crowd went wild.
During another timeout, the hawk pulled on a black vest, tied a black bandanna around his head and began break-dancing at midcourt. At Huntsman Center, this passes for cutting-edge hip-hop culture. The crowd went wild again.
At halftime, the public-address announcer informed the arena that “We have a special guest moseying out to center court.” It’s Utah football coach Ron McBride, brandishing the Las Vegas Bowl trophy, a memento of December’s 10-6 victory over USC.
The crowd greeted McBride with a rousing standing ovation as the announcer yells into his microphone:
“Thanks for bringing home the trophy to ... UTAH!”
The excitement, however, began to ebb in the second half as the Utes, undermanned on the front line and unable to withstand Wyoming’s inside pounding, fell behind and began casting away desperate jumpers. The Utes shot 11.5% from the field in the second half. The crowd went quiet.
To pass the time between Utah baskets, I began flipping through the game program and landed on the lyrics for the Utes’ somewhat gender-exclusive fight song, “Utah Man.”
“I am a Utah man, sir, and I live across the green.
Our gang, it is the jolliest that you have ever seen.
Our coeds are the fairest and each one’s a shining star.
Our yell, you hear it ringing through the mountains near and far.”
Utah lost, 54-46. Afterward, Majerus, a couple of reporters and a few friends gathered at Dee’s, a local hangout noted for its round-the-clock breakfast. Majerus’ gang, it was not the jolliest you have ever seen.
Breakfast with Majerus. On paper, it sounded like fun. But not this time, not when the paper is a depressing, distressing stat sheet that leaves Majerus in a state of near-catatonia, rubbing his right hand over the top of his head while muttering about defensive breakdowns.
*
Fun things to do while in Salt Lake City (or so we had heard):
1. Visit the Fun Dome. “Welcome to Utah’s premier entertainment facility,” says Mandy Hortin, the very cheerful employee at the big-promise Utah Fun Dome. “This is the funnest place ever!”
Fun in Utah is a relative term, of course. This dome offers a video-game arcade, bowling, laser tag, miniature golf and karaoke.
The Fun Dome, according to Hortin, “is awesome,” but it is open only two days a week, Friday and Saturday. The bowling alley has limited hours Monday through Thursday, but the rest of the place is shut down from Sunday through Thursday.
“It’s really not busy enough to be open more than that,” Hortin reports.
Fun in Salt Lake. Open two days a week.
2. Visit the Traveling Jell-O Museum. Did you know that Salt Lake City consumes more Jell-O than any other city in the United States? Did you know that a couple of years back, students at Brigham Young collected more than 14,000 signatures on a petition to name Jell-O the official state snack of Utah? Did you know that on Jan. 31, 2001, after being lobbied by Bill Cosby, the Utah State Legislature voted to approve the petition?
You will find the information, along with plastic Jell-O spoons with pictures of Wayne Gretzky and Patrick Roy on the handles, at the Traveling Jell-O Museum, now doing time at the ZCMI Center Mall in downtown Salt Lake.
Or you can attend a book signing for “Jell-O: A Biography” at the Borders across the street and ask the author herself: What’s the deal with Salt Lake City and lime-green gelatin?
“You start with the fact that there are a lot of large families here,” Carolyn Wyman says, “and Jell-O is cheap, so you can feed a lot of kids. Also, there’s a high percentage of teetotalers in Salt Lake City. If you don’t drink, you have to have a vice. Here, it’s sugar.”
Amy Motta, a local resident, stops by Wyman’s table. Motta is a self-described “Jell-O collector,” searching out old boxes of the stuff, old cookbooks, molds, advertising. She proudly shows off her green Jell-O Olympic pin.
Motta begins reminiscing about 1999, a tough year for Salt Lake and its favorite dessert. That was the year Des Moines passed Salt Lake in the Jell-O consumption standings, sending a shockwave through the marshmallow and carrot shavings community.
“We’re not embarrassed [to be No. 1], we’re proud,” Motta says. “When we lost the title, it was, ‘My gosh!’ It was like it had been stolen from us. ‘It’s rightfully ours! Let’s get it back!’”
It took a year, but Salt Lake rallied to reclaim the top spot. Currently, the Utah Jazz is holding a “Jazz Up Your Jell-O” contest, asking fans to “show us your most spirited picture of you dressed up in Jazz gear, enjoying your favorite Jell-O product, for a chance at a Grand Prize Suite for you and 23 of your closest friends.”
(Cinematic footnote: As the final credits to “SLC Punk” roll, the soundtrack shifts to a song by the old Bay Area band the Dead Kennedys. Lead singer’s name: Jello Biafra. Nice touch.)
3. Grunts And Posture. It has been billed as the funkiest, most off-beat store in the city, a vintage clothing shop with a musty smell of incense, adorned on its exterior by dozens of Jell-O molds--of course--nailed around the doorway.
Grunts And Postures is the place to go if you’re looking for an Austin Power chest-hair wig ($6), or a 1968-69 Women’s International Bowling Congress rulebook (bowling is big in Salt Lake), or vampire red hair dye.
Or a Jesus Action Figure, selling for $9.95. “We sell a ton,” says Alex Berry, a clerk at Grunts And Postures. “Around Christmas, they flew out of here.”
4. Eat. “Green Jell-O and Red Punch: The Heinous Truth! About Utah!” is a book title sold at Grunts And Postures--and two of the city’s culinary staples, along with ice cream and fry sauce.
Fry sauce is a dipping sauce for French fries, developed in the 1950s by the local Arctic Circle hamburger chain. Now, most of the local burger joints have their own version--a little ketchup mixed with a little mayonnaise and a “secret” assortment of spices. Hires Big H here calls it “Super Fry Sauce.” In L.A., you’d call it “Thousand Island Dressing.”
A colleague mentions a place he’s heard about, supposedly Salt Lake’s answer to the “Soup Nazi” restaurant of “Seinfeld.” We’ve been gone awhile and starting to miss the verbal abuse of the greater Los Angeles service industry, so we decide to stop by Big City Soup.
Inside, there is soup and bread--no sandwiches--just like the television show. But there are six brands of soup and two helpful clerks behind the counter who offer free samples and smile as they ring up your order and hand you a pre-wrapped slab of cheddar cheese to go with your bread.
“Seinfeld” has its Soup Nazi. Salt Lake has Soup Mormons.
And Snelgrove Ice Cream Parlor, touted on CitySearch.com as one of the city’s best “Mormon Meet Markets,” has 45 flavors, including English Butter Toffee, German Chocolate, French Silk, Macadamia Nut and Canadian Vanilla.
Multiculturalism, Salt Lake style.
5. Hoop. Basketball is an obsession across Utah, and Salt Lake City, from the venerated Jazz to the 6 a.m. pickup games held at the Mormon church houses. Spend some time here and it’s easy to understand why.
“It’s a team sport--Mormons tend to be very team-oriented,” says Mike Gorrell, Olympic reporter for the Salt Lake Tribune. “And it’s indoors. Every ward [Mormon church] has its own gym.”
On the college level, loyalties are fiercely divided between Utah and BYU. “No self-respecting non-Mormon ever cheers for BYU,” Gorrell says. But the Jazz “is the one unifying force in Utah,” he says. “Everything else is broken down along religious lines.... The Jazz transcend all the divisions. The two years they made it to the finals, it was a wonderful time here.
“Until the end.”
6. Have a beer at the movies. When it comes to dinner and a movie, Salt Lake has one keg up on L.A., or just about anywhere else. Believe it or not, Salt Lake has a place where you can order a microbrew and a pizza or burger, sit on sofas or in theater seats with eating trays and enjoy a meal while watching “Ali” or “Vanilla Sky” or “Spike & Mike’s Sick And Twisted Animation Festival.”
Brewvies bills itself as a “cinema pub” that features all the usual accoutrements--three pool tables, pub grub, rock videos--along with two big screen theaters. It also sells T-shirts. “We Support 3.2% Tithing And 10% Beer” reads one. “I Went To Utah ... And All I Got Were These Dumb Seven Wives,” reads another.
Across town, a microbrew that calls itself “Polygamy Porter” plays off the same theme. Slogans: “Why Have Just One?” And, “Bring Some Home To The Wives.”
You have to like a place that knows its place, and knows how to have some fun with it.