A couple of years ago, while browsing the internet, I found out that Mother's Pizza (formally Mother's Pizza Parlour & Spaghetti House) was being revived. This is after having gone out of business in the early '90's. At its peak, the popular restaurant chain had approximately 120 locations across Canada, the U.S. and the U.K. I was excited by this news because as a young boy, my parents took me and my brothers and sisters to Mother's several times. We'd always order a large pizza but their
menu had a lot more to offer. For a beverage, I would always have a large root beer in a giant mug. Sometimes I would have a root beer float. The waitresses were dressed in red and white checked aprons which matched the tablecloths. They also wore bonnets. The throwback uniforms were in keeping with the old-fashioned decor of the restaurant. Everywhere you would look, there were reminders of days gone by. The walls were filled with vintage black and white photographs. The restaurant also had swinging parlour-style doors, antique-style chairs and
Tiffany lamps. The whole atmosphere was warm and cozy. Mother's went to great lengths to make you feel at home. They even had their own
pie wagon!
What does all this have to do with movies, you ask? As it turns out, quite a bit. As a matter of fact, Mother's Pizza is partly responsible for my love of silent movies. Although I didn't know it at the time, it was the start of my film fanaticism. Let me elaborate.
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| The famous Mother's waitress uniform and pizza pedestal |
In addition to the great food it would serve, Mother's showed black & white, silent movies for the patrons to watch. Dinner and a movie! Most of these were short films, many of them from the great comic actors of the silent film era. As a young kid, I got to see Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd and the Keystone Cops all perform their brand of slapstick humour. I would always laugh as they would do pratfalls and be amazed when they were running on top of rail cars or hanging out of windows of high-rise buildings. There might have been some early
Our Gang and Laurel and Hardy shorts shown also. The average film would probably run fifteen to twenty minutes in length so there was always time to watch at least a couple of them during each visit. I can't quite remember if full length features were ever shown. In any case, once the meal was finished and the bill was paid, every kid was allowed to pick out a free sucker out of a basket next to the cash register, if I recall correctly. It didn't get any better than that!
A few years later, one by one, Mother's restaurants began to close and the memories began to fade away with them.
Fast forward to the present and you'll find that Mother's Pizza is
back in business.
Before any of you skeptics out there zero in on the suspicious date of that tweet, let me assure you it's not an April Fool joke. The first restaurant did indeed open on April 1st in Hamilton, Ontario, where it all began.
