Friday, December 31, 2004

South Bend Report, Part 3

No Studebaker pilgrimage to South Bend, Indiana, would be complete without dinner at Tippecanoe Place, a steak house that now occupies Tippecanoe, aka chez Studebaker, a 4-story, 40-room mansion built for Clement Studebaker, who later slipped on the grand staircase and died. Any of the 20 fireplaces in the mansion is impressive, but the one in the foyer is surpassed only by the one in Citizen Kane that you could parallel park a Studebaker in. We dined in the library and managed, unlike Clem, to go down the staircase and live.

Nowadays, you can get credit cards with pretty much anything on them. One of ours is the Star Wars Galactic Rewards card (spend $5000 and we can get a pez dispenser), and that happened to be the one we used for dinner. Throughout the whole meal, our waitress gave the distinct impression of being on a triple-dose of Prozac. This woman was mellow in the extreme, right up until she took our bill. When she opened the folder with the card and bill, we heard our overly-mellow waitress shout, "Darth Vader! Cool!" all the way from the hallway. You can also get the card with Yoda.

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