La Casa Sanchez y la Betty Boop

Alright, you've all been very patient with a slow week. Thanks. I hope you all had great weekends, because I did.

On Friday night I took Steph out to dinner at Casa Sanchez. I'm not a huge fan of Mexican food, but Steph likes it, so I took her there. I had been curious about the place since I had moved to this part of town. It is a house, I'm sure someone used to live there, maybe they still do. I had always thought it must be a fairly tight fit for everyone inside and my suspicions were confirmed when we entered. Steph and I were seated at the smalled dinner table I had ever eaten at. It almost had less room than my lap.

Most tables for two we've been seated at in restaurants are arranged so that the people are seated opposite each other, with ample space behind each person. Some times we get seated at a table for 4 and instead of sitting opposite of each other we sit kitty-corner (or catty-corner) from each other, on the two sides of one corner. Well, merge those ideas and imagine a little less room and you've got it.

The room itself was very cramped. There were three tables for four in three of the room's corners. In the final corner, right next to the entry to the room was our table. It was a very small two person table, maybe a one-and-a-half person table. It was pushed into the corner so that the only two sides to sit at were adjacent. Steph's chair almost couldn't be pulled out since the guy sitting behind her was basically right up against her chair--luckily she's really small and fit in fine while seated, she just couldn't get up very well. My chair pulled straight out with no obstructions, though I was seated pretty much in the entry to the room.

The salsa and basket of chips nearly filled the table, which didn't bode well for dinner. The chips were excellent, lightly salted and just the right amount of density and crispiness. I did feel obligated to try the salsa once, but as you can imagine (look at the title of this website) I enjoyed nearly all of my chips sans decoration, and I loved it.

With some help from the server we figured out what we wanted and ordered. I ordered pork fajitas and Steph had an enchilada and a chili relleno. Everyone knows what enchiladas are, but a chili relleno is something I haven't seen anywhere else. It is a green chili (pepper) stuffed with monterey jack cheese, lightly battered and pan fried.

Our food came and it was an excersize in quantum spacial mechanics (a new field I just made up) to figure out how to fit all of the plates on our table. With everything in place we comenced the dining. Unfortunately I can only say that the food was okay. Definitely not the best Mexican in Bozeman. Steph and I both agreed on this point, but you should take her opinion more seriously, since she actually really likes Mexican food. But hey, we would have never known that had we not gone, and you wouldn't have known it either.

So we headed home and popped in a DVD to watch. A while ago Steph and I were in Walmart and I happened to see a huge display of DVDs with large signs proclaiming DVDs for $1. Things of this nature tend to catch my eye so it wasn't surprise that I noticed it. The DVDs in question were collections of old cartoons. There were old Superman, Spiderman, and many other characters I don't know well enough to remember. The one that was most interesting for the purposes of our story was the one Steph ended up buying, which was a Betty Boop.

Steph loves Betty Boop. She has a thermometer, a clock, a framed picture thing, a little figurine that hangs on her cell phone, and numerous other paraphenilia of her favorite cartoon character. So, even though she doesn't have a DVD player it didn't take much for Steph to shell out the one dollar for the item. We knew we could watch it at my house or she could watch it at her parent's house some time.

So we finally sat down to watch it on Friday. I can't say for certain, but I don't think I had ever seen a full Betty Boop cartoon before. They certainly had some risque parts, considering they were made in the 30s. Especially the one where Betty was wearing nothing but a grass skirt and a lei and doing a Hawaiian dance on the beach. The flower in the ground next to her was so embarrassed he replanted himself roots up. They were all pretty funny.

I am a big fan of the cartoons of my youth and Japanese animation and it is interesting to see what kind of stuff was made in the infancy of the art form. For one thing, there aren't too many tunes in todays cartoons. Every episode of Betty Boop had her or someone else singing a song.

So that was Friday, we had a good time. I'll get to the rest later.