Microkhan by Brendan I. Koerner

We’re in the process of trying to find an insightful passage to read at a pal’s forthcoming wedding. (Suggestions welcome, by the way.) It’s taking us much longer than anticipated, in large part because we keep getting sidetracked by old favorites we’ve discovered while ransacking our overstuffed bookshelves. Case in point: Lawrence Wright’s Saints and Sinners, a collection of profiles of larger-than-life religious figures. Upon finding the book, we immediately flipped to the passage that is etched into our memory, from the beginning of the chapter on Satanist/showman/charlatan Anton LaVey. Wright describes a dinner with LaVey and Blanche Barton, which he quickly mars with a hilarious faux pas:

“What dressing would you like on your salad?” the waiter inquired.

“Bleu cheese,” I said.

LaVey and Barton exchanged a look, then returned to their menus. Unknowingly, I had just failed the LaVey Salad Dressing Test. According to The Satanic Witch, his guide for lovelorn sorceresses, “dominant masculine archetypes [like LaVey] prefer sweet dressings, such as French, Russian, Thousand Island,” because the smell resembles the odor of a woman’s sexual organs. Bleu cheese, on the other hand, is “reminiscent of a locker full of well-worn jock straps.” It is suitable, really, only for wimps, homophiles, and submissive females. LaVey ordered the twenty-two-ounce porterhouse steak, rare.

We reckon that it’s for the best that LaVey was cremated after his death in 1997. Otherwise, he would be constantly spinning in his grave due to the soaring popularity of Buffalo Wild Wings.