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The Boston Market Story

Avalanche buries headline writer trying to avalunch

This story is embargoed until Hackensack Mayor Charles "Ken" Zisa removes the "Go ahead sniper, make my day" banner from in front of the Municipal Building.

    HACKENSACK, N.J. (The New York Thymes) -- As snow began piling up Sunday night, award winning headline writer Edwin P. Reiter put on his coat and gloves, pulled out his Boston Market menu, and began taking orders from his fellow hungry copy editors. Despite a forecast of several inches of snow, winds up to 80 miles an hour and a tsunami from the nearby Hackensack River, it was a balmy and springlike afternoon outside the offices of the Northern Record of Bergen County New Jersey, where the entire reporting and assignment and copy editing staffs had been holed up for several days for fear of not being able to make it to work when it started to snow, and thus messing up their perfect attendance record.

    Unbeknownst to the newspaper staff and unnoticed by hundreds of weather forecasters, including noted North Jersey Weather Observer Robert Zipf, the nor'easter became a sou'wester at the intersection of River Street and Temple Avenue, picked up some moisture over the Passaic River, picked up some chicken at the KFC in the ShopRite plaza, and then dumped 14 feet of snow and several chicken bones in the Boston Market parking lot.

    Although it had been several days since he disappeared with their food orders, no alarm was raised at the newspaper -- although a number of copy editors had to be taken to Hackensack University Medical Center after their noses became stuck to the frosted windows when they tried to peer into the parking lot to see if Ed had returned -- until the pile of snow in the Boston Market parking lot was melted by the heat from several antiaircraft missiles launched by the Bergen County Board of Frozen Freeholders who ordered the destruction of a 200-foot statue of the Veterans Memorial Bridge troll following a 3-2 vote along party lines that the centuries-old practice of troll worship was no longer kosher, if it had ever been.

    When a few melted New York State quarters with prodigious thumbprints on them were discovered amid the rubble of the obliterated icon, Ed's colleagues considered taking up a collection to bribe the guard at the newspaper's front desk to lower the flag to half-mast. But instead of the collection, his colleagues were able to heave a collective sigh of relief when Paul Lapidus, removing the large pile of Sunday  coupon booklets from Ed's desk since he would no longer be needing them, made a startling discovery: There, at the bottom of the pile of coupons, was the stub from a gainsharing check accompanied by a receipt for two Greyhound Bus tickets to Brazil, along with a picture of can can costume clad counterperson Renata offering coupons good for two rotisserie churrascaria dinners for the price of one at the Rio de Janeiro Boston Market.

 AP-ES-Q5-27- 99 2lQ7EDT

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