Project 3867: Eat at Joe's - Home of the BIG Napkin!

Iconic

Every eatery has to have a specialty and a hook. Vitale's across the street has spicy meat pizza, Mad Dogz has the Chilimacaloco, and Mill Creek has those dammmnn good nachos. 

Every cartoon I grew up on featured a greasy spoon diner called Joe's.

What's a joe in the food world? Sloppy Joes! There apparently is already a sloppy joe restaurant, sloppyjoes.com but it doesn't go all in on this concept. 

The menu will feature nothing but a variation of a sloppy joe sandwich. Serve up some classics: 

• Manwich
• Barbeque
• Iowa loose meat

Add some protein variety, such as pot roast, pulled pork, and something a local called sloppy chicken, which may be similar to Russ' creamed turkey sandwich (shredded chicken plus gravy).

For juxtaposition, offer a rotating "neat meat" sandwich of the day, like fried spam or a plain burger.

Bun variety: regular, poppyseed, pretzel, onion, everything, Hawaiian. 

Ordering made easy: "Pick your bread, pick your meat, then by God, pick your seat." 

A dress-up station, where people can add condiments like pickles, jalapenos, onions, au jus, mustard, ketchup, and BBQ sauce. 

Go local and serve fountain Faygo - OMG, fresh red pop! - and Better Made chips in classic but also quirky flavors. 

Yeah, a NAPKIN

The signature look: blue and white checks, with oversized blue-checked paper napkins with tabs so you can also tie it as a bib. Be known as the Home of the BIG Napkin. 

The Cereal Project Sidebar: Cameron Frye's Day Off Movie Synopsis

Frye Reprise: Cameron as a wise, chill dad in his office. 

To create the cereal prizes to tie-in to the movie promotion, we need a brief synopsis of what Cameron Frye's Day Off is about. Can't just make a Detroit Red Wings sweater eraser and call it good. 

What's fun is Alan Ruck has already reprised Cameron in a commercial for home security, where the scene is set that he has a family and a nice corporate job downtown. In those 30 seconds, he has established he's a much more mellow character than he was as a teen - we can thank Ferris' influence for that. And he is wise to his son and his friend's shenanigans. 

And rich. He owns the killer house and the roadster. 

So WHY would Cameron Frye have the day off? 

    A - He's been downsized;

    B - Ferris has roped him into a caper; or 

    C - His family needs him for something, and it's dad to the rescue.

I don't want this to become a downer, as this will be an escapist, nostalgia trip that exists purely for fun, so A is out. As a tie back to the first movie, where he hated his dad for working and ignoring his family, Cameron seems like the kind of dad who would be there for his kids. 

And Ferris is an icon.

Let's combine B and C! 

But what would his kid or kids need him for? The commercial has established he has a Ferris-like son. But what about a fun exploration of the father-daughter dynamic? 

I picture a daughter who is a little too much like the Cameron of old, and her dad wants her to live a little. What if she's showing signs of busting out of her shell and needs dad and Uncle Ferris to help her? 

Antagonists would be the older brother from the commercial as a reprise of Ferris and Jeanie's sibling rivalry; mom, who doesn't want her to become a screwup like her brother (a cautionary tale); and life itself, with college, and perhaps untapped talent on the line.

Ferris is on board, a professional cybersecurity expert putting those early computer skills to good use. 

Hilarity ensues. 

The original Ferris Bueller's Day Off was a love letter to Chicago between the Cubs game, the parade, the Sears Tower, and, of course, "The Sausage King of Chicago." Cam's love for cars and the Detroit Red Wings sees him relocating to the Detroit area, so we can bring our affection to the Motor City and have him working for Ford, capitalizing on the Motor City Renaissance.

Musical montage at Hitsville USA. 

A stop at Comerica, where a day game is happening. Cam and Ferris lament missing the game and still manage to catch a ball, perhaps a home run out by GVSU's Detroit offices. 

To make the breakfast food connection, daughter Gord (naturally) has to be a cereal freak. 

Before readers complain (crickets), this isn't the Great American Novel; this is an escapist-nostalgia comedy created to fictitiously sell cereal. 

And a fun fantasy start. 

Lipstick on the Mic: Bananarama

They were really saying something with that wardrobe

Sara, Siobhan, and Keren have always had a special place in my heart from those early 80s MTV days - the quirky videos, catchy lyrics, and the street punk fashion easy to pull off in Soho, not so much middle America while hanging out in the Westwood Mall. 

History: the three were friends at fashion college, in need of a place to live and some way to earn money. A friend offered them an apartment that happened to be above the Sex Pistols rehearsal room. They acted as backup singers for performers such as The Jam and Iggy Pop and recorded their first demo Aie a Mwana in Swahili. It became a club hit which led to a record deal. 

They traded guest vocals with Fun Boy Three and did It Ain’t What You Do for them and FB3 returned the favor with Really Saying Something. (I was cleaning carpets of cat barf and hairballs when the music video came on and damned if I didn’t do the choreography nearly 40 years after the fact.)

Their star continued to rise with Cruel Summer and Robert DeNiro’s Waiting and a guest spot on the charity single Do They Know It’s Christmas? 

The ultimate in hot coolness came in ‘86 with their remake of Venus, going number one everywhere. 

Know what they say about reaching the top? There’s only one way to go, and that’s down. They had a couple more mid-level hits like I Heard a Rumor and Love in the First Degree, then Siobhan left to create Shakespear’s Sister and the creepy song Stay with Me. They recruited another girl to the trio but the magic wasn't there and Bananarama quietly left the limelight.  

But like any good 80s band, the reunion tour siren called, and Siobhan rejoined Sara and Keren in the teens to tour Europe to relive the good times. 

The Fifth Monkee, Frank Zappa

Banal and insipid?

How appropriate on April Fools Day...

Not all the kids watching were ready for Zappa, but I'm sure there were a few who were. 

Zappa earns his entry as the fifth Monkee for appearing in the series and the movie Head. Both appearances were batshit crazy in the best way. 

His first appearance was as Mike Nesmith - and Mike as Frank - in an interview to open the episode Monkees Lose Their Minds. Frank, a fan of Dadaism and an expert on sound experimentation, got to rip into popular music while playing a car. This was Frank's performance art, finding music on anything - he had demonstrated this trick on the Steve Allen Show years before, when he played a bicycle. If that's odd to you, remember putting baseball cards in the spokes of your bike just to hear the rhythmic "th-th-th-th" that became a whirr the faster you went. That's what he was doing. 

He showed up as The Critic, walking a cow in the movie Head, calling Davy Jones "pretty white" in response to his Daddy's Song routine, and encouraging the band to work on their music because "the youth of America depends on you to show them the way." 

Even I had to say WTF to that. 

I could go on about the bizarre but admittedly uneven brilliance of the man. He found melody in discordance. His performance art extended to movies and television. He celebrated things while mocking them like the 80s hit Valley Girl, a collaboration with daughter Moon Unit. We knew we were being mocked, and we enjoyed it anyway. Besides, you can't claim to be a true Val when you're repping the Mitten State in discounted jam shorts from Jean Nicole. 

And my kid loves St. Alphonse Pancake Breakfast. I expect no less from the kid whose favorite Beatles song is Revolution #9.