My wife is from the Quad Cities. If you don’t know what that is, don’t worry. Neither did I for the first several years of our relationship. It’s Davenport, Bettendorf, Rock Island, and Moline, all jammed together on the Illinois-Iowa border like a group project nobody agreed on.
For 25 years, I have heard about the Quad Cities. The river. The people. The pizza. Especially the pizza. My wife talks about Happy Joe’s the way some people talk about their first car. With reverence. With longing. With a level of emotional attachment that I, a Texan, reserve exclusively for brisket.
So when I got a shoot in the area (filming a wonderful woman in her nineties, more on that in a second), I finally had my excuse. I was going to the Quad Cities. I was going to Happy Joe’s. I was going to eat the taco pizza.
The shoot itself was something special. The client’s mother was 90-something years old and she reminded me so much of my wife’s grandmother that it was almost eerie. Same warmth. Same sharpness. Same Midwest charming indifference. Same way of looking at you like she already knew what you were going to say before you said it. I sat with her for hours, and every minute felt like a gift. There’s a particular kind of magic when someone that age trusts you enough to just talk. To really talk. Not performing, not posing. Just being themselves on camera.
I called my wife from the parking lot of Happy Joe’s. I was giddy. I felt like a kid calling home from summer camp. “I’m here. I’m at the place. I’m about to eat the pizza.”
She lost her mind. She started listing things I needed to order. She had opinions about toppings. She had opinions about the crust. She had opinions about the specific location I was at versus the one she grew up going to. It was a whole thing.
So I ordered the taco pizza. The legendary taco pizza. The pizza that has been talked about in my house like it was carved by angels.
It was fine.
I’m not saying it was bad. It was fine. It was pizza with taco stuff on it. The lettuce was cold and the meat was warm and the cheese was doing its best. But “fine” is not the word my wife has been using for two and a half decades. She’s been using words like “life-changing” and “transcendent” and “you just don’t understand.”
She’s right. I don’t understand.
But I do understand this: nostalgia is the best seasoning on earth. That pizza isn’t about the pizza. It’s about being twelve years old in the Quad Cities with your whole life ahead of you and a slice of something ridiculous in your hand. I get it. I just can’t taste it.
The shoot was beautiful. The pizza was fine. And my wife still hasn’t forgiven me for saying so.