I won’t use any names…

A few months back, my dad, my brother, my sister, and I decided to go to Oak Hill Cash Market to share a pizza for lunch. Little did we know this would begin a long-running inside joke in our family, that I have chosen to share today.

We arrived and ordered our food “One large pepperoni pizza EXTRA cheese please.” My father said, trying to put extra emphasis on the EXTRA, in hopes that the employee would understand that we wanted far more cheese than the average cheese enjoyer. My family loves their cheese, we even named our order from little ceasars (A Detroit-style deep dish variant) the “cheese brick”. Moving on from that we purchased our strawberry milks, and sat down, awaiting our delicious meal.

Twenty minutes later we were really feeling the hunger, my brother had already drunk his strawberry milk and was now slurping down a Gatorade. Around the corner comes the employee, holding a pizza and some napkins. He handed the napkins to one of the three groups within the store and began to speak “I got a large pepperoni with EXTRA cheese.” He put the same emphasis on the extra. My dad spoke up “That’s us.” The employee didn’t seem to understand him “What that?” He said, my dad, responding “That’s us.” The employee looked at him confused, apparently misinterpreting what my father had said, unbeknownst to either of them. “Yeah?…” My dad said, also a bit confused. “Umm okay, 1 minute.” The employee said, walking off with a confused look on his face, matching my father’s.

We sit there and look at each other for a minute before my dad says “Did he just say red sauce?” We pondered this together. We decide our best course of action is to just gracefully accept what red sauce he may bring, and thank him. We weren’t sure what red sauce he was going to bring. Marinara? Ketchup? There seemed to be more than one red sauce commonly used for pizza. The tension built and built until the employee came back around the corner. We desperately tried to hold back the laughter as he gave us a bottle of ketchup, finally breaking once he left, we must have laughed about it as silently as possible for 20 minutes. By the end, we left with sore throats and tears in our eyes. It’s tough to explain why this strange occurrence was so funny to us, it just struck us in a way, we hadn’t laughed like that in a long time. Now we are physically incapable of calling ketchup what it is anymore, it will forever be… red sauce.

Featured image citation- “Ketchup face” by Trinity is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.