redondo beach

Life Lessons on the Pinkberry Road

I fully expect Pinkberry to find this blog posting and offer me a job (or at least a free frozen yogurt).

ML and I were down in southern California over the weekend for a friend's baby shower. We had no choice but to attend this event as the expecting mother told us that a no-show would result in life banishment (from all of southern California). Under no circumstances would I be ok with any sort of life banishment, except possibly to maybe, I don't know, a baby shower.

The Pinkberry Road - Redondo Beach (Day 1). ML's terrific memory guided us towards a Pinkberry she had been to in Manhattan Beach. We drove there immediately after we picked up our rental car (sweet Chevy Cobalt!) but did not make it before close. We thought that my first Pinkberry experience would have to wait another day until we spotted another one just a couple of miles down the road. 

I should preface by saying that I have only recently become a fan of the current frozen yogurt craze. When I first put the tart desert in my mouth, I wanted to throw it against a wall to make sure no one would continue to eat it and get sick. "It's gone bad. Don't eat it!" I exclaimed. And then, I slowly started enjoying the sour taste. Those crazy Koreans, my people are so smart.

I expected the Pinkberry experience to be exactly the same as the ones that the Bay Area offers (which would mean that it's in fact worse because of all the hoopla that surrounds it). I couldn't imagine that its imitators hadn't been able to mimick Pinkberry's gold standard. I was very wrong. The yogurt is vastly superior to the ones I have previously tasted. It really is. When John Lennon hauntingly sings "I'd love to tu-rn...you...on" on Sgt. Pepper, I think he was talking about Pinkberry. I felt enlightened. The world can be healed through the simple flavors of these frozen delights.

The Pinkberry Road - Manhattan Beach (Day 2). I am wondering how many more co-ed baby showers are in my future. I just don't see how adding men into the mix makes for a better event. Wouldn't the ladies rather have one afternoon in which they don't have to think about how disappointing their lesser halves are? At the last co-ed shower we attended, the guys played poker while the mother-to-be opened her gifts. This time around, the men protested the gift-opening ceremony by organizing a sit-in in front of the TV that happened to be playing the Titans-Ravens playoff game. From what I could remember, the parents-to-be received a beautiful  7-7 halftime tie for their baby.

The shower wasn't as bad as I'm making it out to be. In fact, it was more a party than anything else. The hosts catered a solid spread of Korean food and brought in some hired guns to prepare made-to-order tacos. They also provided a bounce house that ML took advantage of.

We both felt a bit heavy after all of the food at the shower and needed to cleanse our palates with our second Pinkberry run, this time in Manhattan Beach. I opted to go with the green tea varietal with no fruit toppings. This was ok, but I don't believe that I will abandon the original anytime soon. I felt immediately rejuvenated, cleansed.

We had dinner with two of ML's college buddies at Japonica, a Japanese restaurant about a mile south of our hotel. The food was solid, nothing spectacular or creative, but generally good. The dining area is comprised of intimate booths that allowed for some serious catch-up among the ladies while I pondered whether our waitress would be willing to fetch a Pinkberry for me. 

I left the gab fest to catch up with a high school buddy of mine, Seancy, at a local dive bar. Seancy is an established writer with stints on NBC's The Office and ABC's Miss Guided (cancelled). His talent for the written word can be traced back to our teenage years when we used to tear it up at our high school newspaper, The Charger Account (and by 'tear it up', I mean the usual: meeting print deadlines, posing for year book photos, and generally dominating cover to cover).

I learned that our newspaper advisor, Mrs. O, finally lost a lengthy battle to MS. She was a wonderfully snarky lady that pretended to be disapproving of our frequent shenanigans. My thoughts immediately shuffled through visuals of her and her walking cane. She didn't openly discuss her illness but never hid from it either. Still, the news jarred me. I am wondering now how many people I have known in my life that have already passed as well, and how many I will simply never see again. A sobering thought. 

Celebrating new life, mourning death, it's just a different stage of life. This was turning out to be a valuable trip.

The Pinkberry Road - K-Town (Day 3). 

During dinner the previous night, one of the girls recommended Park's BBQ for some K-grubbing. This was an excellent recommendation as we feasted on unmarinated kal-bi and dol-sot bi bim bap. Both of these offerings might just be the best I've ever had. 

We felt that the only appropriate way to conclude our short trip was to hit up another Pinkberry, something our taste buds could cherish until Pinkberry erects a franchise in the Bay Area. By the glory of God, we found one just a few blocks away (God's glory = over 60 Pinkberrys in southern California). 

One bone I need to pick, however: 

• A small cup costs $2.95 + $0.95 for each topping
  
• A medium cup costs $4.95 and includes three toppings

Thus, a small costs nearly $1 more when you fill your cup with three toppings. This does not make sense to me. This is like paying less for a three topping medium pizza than the smaller size. Shouldn't the small and three toppings add up to like $4.75, thus keeping it lower than its larger counterpart but more expensive by the ounce? Have they done enough primary market research to determine that those that opt for the smallest size very rarely choose all three toppings? Or did that same research prove that the perfect size is the small but consumers perceive the medium to be a "deal" and select the medium without being able to finish it (ML did not finish 2 of 3 servings). I am not sure why I am so concerned about this. My head will explode if I think about this any further. 

(I am sure to think about this some more once the frozen delights make their way up the coast.)

So there it is, some life lessons on the Pinkberry Road. At work, I eyed my boss' yogurt and toyed with the idea of pilferring it and freezing for a couple of hours. Would that work? After dinner tonight, I broke out into a cold sweat, crumbling to the floor in the fetal position needing some of that creamy frozen yogurt.

We watched ML's bag being boarded on the plane.

That's never happened to you.

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