One Big Pancake

I was a senior at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, PA in the fall of 1991. The campus is in west Philadelphia and quite urban. It was a Saturday night and seven of us wanted to go get dinner somewhere, but we needed to pick a place. Now 6 of us didn’t really care where we went, as long as we ate. Unfortunately, there was also Olga.
Olga was Jewish, but had not been religious until she got to university. Just a few months earlier, she grew even more religious, and had decided that she would keep kosher as well. Not, completely kosher, where you had different sets of plates and cutlery for meat and milk, or couldn’t even have meat and milk in the same kitchen, or where you could only eat specific Rabbi blessed meat, but kosher where she wouldn’t eat pork or shellfish, and wouldn’t eat meat and milk together.
Now, our friend, Melissa, had been Kosher all along, and she had always found something perfectly acceptable at the restaurants that we would go to without there being a problem. However, that didn’t seem to work for Olga. She would always have some issue with finding a place to eat, mostly just to get herself some attention.
So, here we were coming up with some places, and she kept vetoing each place. To keep the peace, and knowing no one else cared, we asked her where she wanted to go. She wanted a place that was cheap, close, had good food and would meet her kosher dietary requirements. We started suggesting places, that met these needs, but none of them were acceptable. She, then, decided that she wanted a place that served breakfast 24 hours a day.
We all thought hard, and we came up with a diner that was cheap, close, had good food, would be kosher, and served breakfast 24 hours a day. Then, she wanted to know if they made pancakes. Kim had eaten breakfast there before and she said that, yes, they did have pancakes. We were all getting excited, because we had been taking about going out for about an hour now, and now we were finally going to go get something to eat.
However, Olga had another question. She wanted to know if they served one big pancake or 6 little pancakes. We told her that they have 6 little pancakes. She, then, announced that this wouldn’t work for her. She wanted one big pancake, like her grandmother used to make.
Olga decided that she would just microwave a Hebrew National hotdog in her room instead of going out. The rest of us groaned in complaint and went out to eat. I don’t remember where we ended up going, but that’s not really important…. now is it?