Free Pancakes!

You know the saying, "You Get What You Pay For?"

Me too.

And yet, tonight, Gael and I braved the mad rush that was the iHop (I love spelling things with a little i capital next letter. Like iMportant or iBerryBlackPhone. Shut up? Okay.)

Anyway.

We went to the iHop on Collins and 69th for our FREE THREE BUTTERMILK PANCAKES! to celebrate not only Mardi Gras but NATIONAL PANCAKE DAY! N'Awlins ain' got nothin' on the iHop!

When first we got there, and the colorful bounty spilled off the pages of the sticky menu, I wondered aloud, why I didn't go there more often for their Crispy Chicken Salads! or their Danish Fruit Crepes! or their International Crepe Passport! (Ooh! How continental!) I would NOT, however, go there for their Rooty Tooty Fresh n' Frooty. I hate that name. A lot. I don't know why.

Anyway, I wanted to go back... until I soaked it in a little more.

It struck me as I sat in that sticky, dusty, crayon-scribbled heck-hole, that iHop is the place where dreams go to die. I realized this while I watched the DVD playing on repeat on a sticky 13" television, featuring images of crippled children limping through the hallways of Miami Children's Hospital. And child-surgery. Liposuction, I think.

It made me want chocolate chips in my pancakes. Kids love chocolate chips! Also, it's funny to joke that the strawberry syrup you're pouring on your pancakes is the blood of children. Maybe you had to be there.

Gael and I were all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed when we got there (wearing freshly laundered clothing!), but our waitress, poor sad, harried, washed-out Patricia with the Rhode Island accent, for some unexplainable reason, made me want to slit my wrists with dull iHop cutlery - actually, there was a reason - my epiphany that she was pushing 44 years old and working the night shift at the iHop on Free Pancake Day.

Poor Patricia.

The other clientele, were equally as suicide-inducing - the bumbling idiots, stoners, recien-emigre, and permanently single of Miami Beach.

The experience further eroded when I had to search every table for an "Original Syrup," and don't even get me started on trying to find the Blueberry syrup, fer' cryin' out loud.

But Butter Pecan Syrup, they had in spades. Three sticky jugs on every table. It tasted like "Original Syrup," iMho.

::sigh::

But the Pancakes were good. They even came with a little dick-hair sprinkled into 'em. "HAPPY NATIONAL PANCAKE DAY! Eat my pubes," I could almost hear the surly line cooks muttering to the griddle of golden, free flapjacks.