Dumpster Nutella and the Elvis potato...

Trying to tour a "circuit" is quite a logistical challenge. If you are broke and starving, like most independent musicians, it is also a financial tightrope. It requires careful planning, and sometimes, dumpster diving.

I say this because (surprise), I have a story.

I ended up in a dumpster behind a Safeway store in Santa Cruz, CA. Well, it wasn't just me. It was also my musical partner, and my girlfriend at the time. We were hungry. Very hungry. And Jessie (my musical partner) had this great idea. She knew that grocery stores often threw away produce and other items that were less than perfect. They were perfectly edible, but not up to the standards necessary to sell them in the grocery store.

Hoping to find a bruised apple,some stale bread, or perhaps a potato shaped like Elvis, we waited until the coast was clear-and we ventured to the dumpster. That's when we hit the Nutella motherload.

It became known as the "Nutella incident of 1995."

Nutella apparently comes to grocery stores shrink wrapped on a cardboard flats. It comes in cases of 24 jars. One of the cases delivered to the store must have been dropped, because just ONE of the jars had broken and gotten Nutella all over the other jars. Rather than removing the broken jar and cleaning up the rest, the store had opted to throw them all away. The shrink wrap hadn't even been opened.

I can certainly understand why the store might have done this. It was very labor intensive to clean all of the jars...and Nutella, in addition to being delicious and obviously manufactured directly in heaven...is quite sticky. I'm sure that the store also wouldn't want to risk contamination, illness, injury and liability from broken glass, yada, yada, yada.

We didn't care. We thought we had been blessed by the Nutella fairy.

Well, we did at first, anyway. Our tour lasted for 8 months. There were many times when we were hungry, but from that point forward, we ALWAYS had Nutella. I mean, it was everywhere. We were in a little motorhome. We would open our cabinets and find a brillo pad, a dented can of tomato soup, our Elvis potato, and a shit-ton of Nutella.

We dipped our bruised apples in it. We spread it on our stale bread. We ate it directly from the jar. We tried it with Top Ramen noodles (I really don't recommend this). We tried Nutella covered carrots (I REALLY don't recommend THIS)...we came up with many new recipes that wouldn't normally call for the use of Nutella. But, as I mentioned, we had a LOT of Nutella.

It's almost twenty years later, and I'm just finishing the last jar.

No, not really. I lost custody of most of it when the band broke up on a porch in Beverly Hills. But, that's for another post.

It's ok. Most of our fans were squirrels, anyway. Go figure...