my first pun

Driving through Watchung Plaza, a commercial area in my hometown where I spent countless hours working/buying dutches/consuming pizza, I was struck by the memory of what I believe to have been my first pun.

I was eating pizza at Mr. Dino's (the old Mr. Dino's, located in the space now occupied by Orbis Ambiguous Bistro) with a friend and her father. I'm going to place this memory in 1993: Video is king and Watchung Plaza boasts no fewer than three video stores. We ogle Mount Video, which I suspect sustained itself with an extensive back room selection. It's an unfounded theory but the place was seedy looking, the name was an afterthought, and I was always discouraged from entering.

--I further suspect that internet porn proved Mount Video's unmaking, It was the first of our local video stores to bite it, the trend finalized last year with the unceremonious closing of Towne Video, the store whose clerk Sam and I tortured so thoroughly he eventually slipped us (a couple of nine-year-old girls) Suspiria. Presumably in the hopes of scaring us so thoroughly we'd never return. In the parlance of our times: EPIC FAIL.--

Back to the pizza place: Fresh off a geography class, I remember positing that one could open a video store named Monte Video whose tagline would read, "Uruguay-ing to Love It."

I remember expecting laughter and receiving only puzzlement, even concern. The path of a punster is a lonely, lonely road.