Ways to Enjoy the Present: Crab Feeds

I think the glare of the cell-phone camera adds a nice sheen to the deli meats, don't you? If you are at all enticed by the "antipasto platter" to your left then you should consider dropping $30 dollars at your local neighborhood crab feed, where all this and more (and more, and more...) can be yours. Crab feeds are lucrative fundraisers for churches and social clubs and seem to be very popular around here, especially to Italian Americans and the 50 and up crowd. I sometimes like to go to them with my family, who have been hitting the crab feed circuits since the early part of the 1980s. The first rule of crab feeds, it seems, is to never diverge from this order:

1. Amble into gym, locate picnic table at which your family is seated, and sit there. Tie on provided plastic bib with crab illustration. Make smalltalk with people who aren't your immediate family but are at your table by some grave mistake. Try to identify "problem" diners by asking leading questions like "You big into crab?"
2. The antipasto platter and several carafes of red table wine arrive (see photo, above). The problem diners make hideous displays of greed and all the mortadella goes missing before the antipasto platter even brushes the table. Plan strategies against them for later.
3. Iceburg lettuce salad with a cherry tomato. Pass.
4. Soup. Minestrone or Clam Chowder. Right around this time the true crab feed hobbyists will procure their supplies from some carefully concealed kit-- individual butter melters, personalized crab crackers, and other things you didn't realize were so essential until you saw them and felt envious.
5. Rigatoni
6. After the rigatoni, a sort of Christmas Eve anticipation can be felt throughout the gym as diners notice the crab feed volunteers suddenly pick up the pace. The crab is HERE in the building!
7. Bucket after bucket of crab arrives like you've just won the lottery in a dream. Wrestle away legs and claws from the problem diners and eat until you no longer like the taste of crab (usually about 3 buckets in). Here is another glamourous cell phone photo of the carnage. What you're seeing is the small plate left behind after a volunteer had cleared my big plate. Greedier denizens will now start putting uneaten crab into baggies that are hidden in their purses for some fake homebound relative.
8. Mutter "why did I do that?" under your labored breath as an eternal raffle announces its gift baskets and spa days into infinity.
9. Chocolate icecream with wooden spoons like you'd get at the ballpark, tastes like wood and a faint childhood memory of chocolate.
10. Without much warning a dj appears and a disco ball is lowered. Hits from my grandparents' youth are on. Elderly couples emerge from the labyrinthine tables with smiling faces, no doubt thinking "it's great to be active still!" looking every bit like actors in a commercial for bone loss drugs.
11. Disco and r&b hits, alternately drunken dancing or leaving.
12. terrible terrible gas