Doug's Donuts, Cresta

Friday, September 13, 2002

Service: *
Food: * * *
Ambience: *
Babe Count: * * *1/2

Cresta is humming. It's Friday night, and those who survived Friday the thirteenth are out and about in force.

Lots and lots of Randburg-style babes.

Which means realllllllly tight jeans, the type where cracks and bumps and mounds are accentuated. White shoes. Mandatory attendance at hair salons whose stylists are members of the Misogynist Hairdressers' Guild of South Africa. That pink-sweet perfume, ladled over the body. And dolloped on the erogenous zones.

With countless male slugs attached to their hips. What's with the women in this town? They all seem to have grotesque parodies of masculinity tethered to them. Don't they know I'm in town?

Anyway. I'm at Doug's Donuts cos I've just come out of Cresta Virgin Active gym, where I spent a sweaty and pounding forty-five minutes chatting with Saranne. My routine is this: 10 minutes on the stepping machine. 15 minutes rowing. 20 minutes on the bicycle. And I try not to get caught sniffing the seats after. Yeah yeah. Sick joke. But given half the chance, and in my present state of abject girlfriendlessness, I'll resort to anything.

So I've only got ten minutes before my movie starts, and I'm really hungry, and Doug's Donuts is the only place that seems to openly have pies. I order a Cornish Pasty from the supremely surly counter attendant, and sit down at the Anat Falafel table next door. The serving guys look at me as though I've just stolen their livelihoods. One of them calls me a skelem, a crook.

The pie's okay. Tastes fine. But then the wonders of modern culinary art take over, and the pie changes from okay to good. See, I can feel it taking hold of my heartburn manufacturing plant, and I know I'm in good hands.

Thirty minutes into the movie, the heartburn kicks in. The pie's now upped it's rating from a mere good. It's perfect. It's behaving the way pies are supposed to behave. Acid-grip! Fledgling ulcers! I'll eat a Doug's pie again.

The movie I'm watching is completely packed out. It's ABOUT A BOY with Hugh Grant. Written and directed by the Weitz brothers. I chuckle all the way through it. Belly laugh in places. The movie is a wonderful piece of work. I give it an unflinching 9 out of 10. It's about as good as they get.

And it only takes two trips outside to get the screening right. The first trip I ask them to focus the picture, which they do quickly and correctly. The next trip, ten minutes later, is to ask them to fix the lip synch. It's about four frames out, which means when Hugh Grant slaps his remote control down on his glass table, the whack happens a moment after you see him do it. A bit like lightning and thunder when they're far away.