Gayle – "abcdefu" (2021)

A-B-C-D-E-F you

And your mom and your sister and your job

And your Craigslist couch

I don’t think of myself as rich, but I do think of myself as smarter than the average bear.

Nonetheless I pay $15.99 every four weeks – that’s $207.87 a year – to have the Washington Post delivered to my home every day.

Looks like I have more money than brains.

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Tom Sietsema, the Post’s restaurant critic, hosts weekly online discussions (which are summarized in Friday’s print edition) with Washington foodies.

Getting paid to eat your meals at white-tablecloth restaurants and then write about them sounds like a pretty soft gig, but don’t be fooled – our man Tom has a well-developed sense of responsibility to the planet and to his fellow man.

For example, earlier this year he wrote a long article about how thoughtful restauranteurs were packing carry-out orders in compostable clamshells and eschewing plastic cutlery in favor of biodegradable knives and forks fashioned from bamboo or wood.

Of course, such items usually end up being buried in landfills just like the styrofoam and plastic items they replace.  But offering faux-“environmentally friendly” products allows holier-than-thou millennials to avoid feeling guilty about stuffing themselves with overpriced takeout cuisine.

There is a much simpler cure for all the trash generated by carry-out food orders: GO TO THE GROCERY STORE AND BUY FOOD YOU CAN COOK FOR YOURSELF AT HOME!  Ride a bike to your local supermarket and carry the food home in a cloth bag and you’ve truly minimized any negative impact on dear old Mother Earth.

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Here’s an actual letter from Sietsema’s most recent WaPo column:

Our 5-year-old daughter has been eager to return to restaurant dining.  Now that she’s had both doses of the vaccine we feel that we can oblige, and we promised an in-person dining experience as a treat.  She has requested a “fancy pasta restaurant” . . . . With that in mind, do you have any recommendations for a fancy pasta lunch [in Washington, DC] where a kid would be welcome?

It’s funny, but my 5-year-old grandson recently told me how eager he is to return to strip joints.  He’s also been vaccinated, and I’ve promised him an in-person session of ogling naked dancers as a special treat.  (I didn’t write to some know-it-all newspaper critic and ask him to do the work of picking a suitable spot for me – I’ve been out doing the necessary research all on my own!) 

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But seriously, folks . . . I’m supposed to believe that the couple with the 5-year-old daughter is only going out to a fancy-schmancy downtown ristorante because their little darling “has been eager to return to restaurant dining”?

Presumably her parental units have not taken her out to dine since covid-19 reared its ugly head – meaning that she was only three when her nibs last plopped herself down in a faux-leather banquet, draped a starched cloth napkin over her dainty little lap, and listened attentively as the waiter recited the specials du jour.

Do you think there’s the tiniest possibility that it’s actually the parents who want to gorge on some braised-eggplant cavatelli, or the squid-ink linguine with octopus and calamari ragu, escarole, tomato, and peperoncino?  That the daughter is serving as a beard for her parents?

(By the way, the pasta dishes offered by the restaurant that the newspaper critic recommended will run you from $22 to $26 at lunch.  If you’d like to start with soup or a salad, that will be an additional $12 or $14, respectively.  On the other hand, you can get tiramisu or a lemon tart for dessert for only $8 – a relative bargain.)

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Gayle (who was born Taylor Gayle Rutherford) was barely 17 years old when today’s featured song –  her first major-label single – was released last summer:

I had never heard of “abcdefu” until a couple of weeks ago, when not was the subject of a trivia question.  (None of my team had ever heard the record, so we got zippy points on that one.)

Gayle’s song doesn’t measure up to Alanis Morrisette’s “You Oughta Know” when it comes to its scorn quotient – Alanis is definitely the leader in the clubhouse among contenders for the “Most Scornful Record” title – but that’s not for lack of effort by Gayle.

Click here to watch the official music video for “abcdefu.”

Click below to buy the song from Amazon: