Hollywood Casino, Grantville. February 2022 (not my photo... seriously not)
[from FB post: June 24, 2010]
I went to Hollywood Casino for lunch with my parents. I guess it's the first casino in PA? First of all...there is this DRONE of noise, I can't even describe it. It sounds like the "in dolby stereo" trailer in a movie theatre, but it never ends! It's really oddly annoying. We ate there with a lot of seniors -- you would think it was the last day of food on this green earth. Such pushing and shoving!
When Mom and Dad still lived in Hershey the Hollywood Casino opened next to the Penn National Horse Racing Track. In their twilight years, as with many seniors, eating out became larger than life. My parents would latch onto a place, patronize it to death, get bored, and move on. They practiced that "scorched earth" approach with any new favorite dining place - love it, patronize it aggressively, and move on. I saw them burn through countless places in the Hershey area with that pattern. They ate both lunch and dinner extremely early as most seniors do in order to get a discount. Their stomachs were in a totally different time zone, even for me who tends to eat quite early.
On one of my visits to Hershey we just "had to try the new restaurant up at the casino".
As I said in the post, upon entering the place there was this indescribable drone of all the slot machines, their noise melding into one ongoing "moan". I remember Adrian FVdR telling me about growing up in Margate, Kent, England and its amusement pier with a sickening drone. He worked on that pier as a kid and said to this day he can't stand any similar noise. Once on a trip to Brighton with him he refused to enter one place with the same sound. It literally made him feel ill. I thought he was exaggerating until I went to Hollywood Casino. The dining room somewhat muffled the drone, but it was still there, omnipresent and endless. I was sure if I worked there I would have ended up like Adrian, becoming literally sick from the noise.
I don't even remember what food was served, but I do remember the aggressive queueing and jockeying for position at the buffet by the senior crowd. It should have been funny, but along with the drone, it was just annoying. My parents could never really escape the need to "eat as much as possible". I think the privations of the Great Depression had so imprinted on their neural pathways that if a buffet were an option, then it was necessary to indulge in it with gusto. I grew up with that mentality and, only over time, realized that food was more about enjoying and its flavor, not shoving copious amounts of calories in ones mouth in one sitting. I was disgusted with the whole experience - the drone, the pushing and shoving, the general air of "desperation" - as if we were in the last moments before some apocalypse. It is funny now to remember Hollywood Casino as the nadir of "buffets that I hated".
That is not to say I hated all buffets. The Sunday Brunch at the Ritz Carlton in Singapore (where I took my mother and aunt years before) was the same thing, just with more decorum, better quality food, a higher price tag, and no horrendous drone. I wonder if my Mom and auntie really appreciated the food or if for them it was just another "eat all-you-can-eat-in-desperation" kind of meal? I honestly liked the Ritz Carlton buffet. I also liked "churrascaria rodizio" restaurants from Brazil with their never-ending skewers of freshly barbequed meat. What was it that got me so wound up about buffets sometimes, but not all the time? I fear I am being "munafik" [see: munafik], just a big hypocrite.
Now I reflect on my time in Bangladesh working at a place where I have students who grew up in calorie-poor households. They get free, decent lunches as part of their scholarship. For food being prepared for hundreds of people, our canteen really isn't all that bad. I eat lunch there every working day. Some of the students are just as aggressive in queueing as the seniors at Hollywood Casino. There are signs all over reminding them "take only what you can eat", yet these little mites of women pile the food high and throw half of it away. It is like having some "survival switch" permanently turned on - food!!! get as much as possible. Is this the hunter-gatherer gene dormant inside all of us? Once in food-panic mode, do we have no choice but to act like people who grew up in the Great Depression or like young people who were raised in households where they felt hunger every day? I wonder.
How I manage to stay overweight after constantly being faced with people who overindulge with food and act as if each meal may be their last seems ironic, too. I don't see myself overindulging, yet I don't see myself shedding extra weight either. I guess I am as munafik as everyone else.