LIDOS PIZZA

There it is...Lido Pizza, affectionately called "Lido's" by the customers. John K discovered this gem of a restaurant years ago, and it's since become an animation hangout. Half the animation people in The Valley get their pizza here. And no wonder...Lido's makes it stringy and gooey, just the way cartoonists like it.

Maybe the restaurant is so good because it's built near sacred ground. The Bedford Falls set from "It's a Wonderful Life" was built in nearby Balboa Park.

Maybe the restaurant is simply scared to lower its standards. Mickey Cohen the famous Los Angeles gangster had a house near Lido's. That's Cohen (above) on the right. The area is full of history.

But I digress....

Katie and Milt kindly invited my wife and I to Lido's this afternoon and we did some serious chowing down.

That's Milt showing his appreciation for the cartoony pizza strings. I wish I could show you the womenfolk, but they refused to be photographed.

  

While the wives talked Milt and I kicked around ideas for a Basil Wolverton-type pizza eating sketch. Boy, Milt sure likes Pizza. He even talks to it.  

While we were talking I glanced over Milt's shoulder and was amazed to find familiar faces there.

Good Lord! It was cartoonist Mike Kazallah and his wife Tracy!!!! Tracy wouldn't let me take her picture. None of the women present could be persuaded to act in this story.

Cartoonist Mark Schirmeister was there, too.

I went over to say hello and was dismayed to see that I was interrupting an intense literary discussion.

MIKE: "I'm familiar with that book: "Delicate Riders of the Storm." It has a frail, almost tentative structure. but the eyeless fish, the gods of the rain...they're pure cliches."

MARK: "But don't you agree that it marks an advance in relationship? One observes rather quickly that something is right with it, and one is thus able to get one's bearings."

MIKE: "Aaaaaaah, but are those bearings the result of fresh perception? I find them immersed in the mystical communion of the romantic, which leads too often to disintegration."

MARK: "Hmmmm.....okay, I see what you're getting at. You're forcing an altered perception of the detail. The old points would be regained after the breakdown, the quality of the perception being then affected by the past experience of the breakdown. That's very clever. "

Yikes! I could see I was getting in the way, so I said good bye and rejoined Milt.

I don't think Milt even realized that I'd gone. He was still talking to his pizza.

Well, a good time was had by all. Lidos never disappoints.

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Sorry for the rambling structure of this post. I'm just too full of this afternoon's pizza to think clearly.