Amish Key Lime Pie

My mom brought me home a key lime pie while she was out of town.

I took one bite and asked, “Did you try this?”

She said, “No, I got it for you.”

So she tried it, looked at me and asked, “Your thoughts?”

I said, “This tastes like someone read about key lime pie but has never actually tasted one. They found a recipe, understood the individual ingredients and followed every instruction but nobody involved knew what the finished product was supposed to taste like.”

Then I asked, “Where did you get this?”

She said, “An Amish stand.”

And I went, “Damn. That actually makes perfect sense. They made it entirely from the literature.”

And that immediately made me think of Back to School.

There’s a scene where Thornton Melon, Rodney Dangerfield’s character, a wildly successful businessman sits in a college business class listening to a professor explain how to build a factory. The professor calmly starts listing the costs, and Thornton keeps interrupting him with everything the textbook left out: greasing the unions, dealing with contractors, paying inspectors, handling waste disposal and surviving all the ugly little realities that exist between the business plan and the actual business.

The professor had studied how a factory gets built.

Thornton had built one.

That’s the difference between knowing the recipe and knowing what key lime pie is supposed to taste like. It’s also the difference between studying business and actually running one. Theory can tell you what the ingredients are. Experience tells you when the final product tastes like shit.

I don’t know why I’m posting this. Maybe there’s a lesson here about the distance between theory and experience. Maybe I’m just F'nAround.

But it’s a rainy Sunday in Chicago, Comcast has once again failed to comprehend its only purpose, and without reliable internet I can’t read federal case law. So now I’m sitting here with a pot of espresso, thinking about the difference between knowing a recipe and knowing what the pie is supposed to taste like.