Pizza Marathon: Day 1, Pizza 2 – Billy Bicket

Billy's approaching the pizza like he does everything else

Marathon of Pizza, Day 1, Pizza #2: Billy Bicket joined me for a pizza last night.  He’s one of the folks who facilitated my social media experimentation back in early 2005 when his org (Tech Soup, or more specifically, NetSquared) helped turn me into a minor internet celebrity in the nonprofit technology world for my work establishing and promoting Interplast’s blog, which was the first blog established by an international NGO.

He moved to Austin a while ago and has been everything from an idea sounding board to a racquetball partner to a pizza date for me.  Even though he spends months on end gallivanting in San Francisco or Eastern Europe for work, it’s nice to have him in town when he’s here.  We keep each other grounded in an otherwise ridiculous the tech scene.

He asked me about my training program and how I’ve been preparing for the upcoming HOES contest, so I told him.  Every couple of minutes he’d split up in laughter.  He thought it was hilarious that I could talk about such a ridiculous event and set of circumstances with a straight face.  It made me think, my life and pizza deal is pretty ridiculous.  I mean, I stood with my hand on an eggplant sub for hours and hours and won free pizza for a year from Austin’s best pizza place.  Not that I take it for granted (see Exhibit A), but the story has lost some of its absurdity to me.

Billy closes on a house today, so he was pretty excited.  We talked about a housewarming party, pizza marketing, the recent Crunchpad debacle, and HOES training techniques.

Jodi Bart of Tasty Touring came in with some friends and said hi.  She went back to her table of eight or so, and about 30 seconds later, I felt seven heads turn my way, including one guy in the corner who non-nonchalantly (is chalantly a word?) stood up on his seat and poked his head over the booth to catch a glimpse of me.

Then, as we were leaving, Austin’s undisputed eating champ Chris Floyd came by.  We discussed our respective preparations for the contest, recent experiences with the media and impressions of each other’s competition.  Chris is weighing entering the Elevation Burger eating contest (first to finish a ten patty burger and basket of fries wins a year of free burgers), but as it’s on Thursday, it might be a little too close to the pizza eating competition, which is the crown jewel of all Austin eating contests.  I didn’t want to rush the conversation, but we’d been done with the pizza for a while and I didn’t want to selfishly hold onto a table.  I hated those folks when I was a waiter back in the day.

And lest I forget, the pizza was bomb.  Green olives, fresh tomatoes, garlic, fresh basil, fried eggplant, fresh mozzarella, sausage on his half, anchovies on mine.  Billy is from NYC and used to date the daughter of a big shot pizza immortal.  He says Homeslice is right up there, if not better.  He even said that Homeslice just gets it: pizza is love.  When the bill came and he saw the “Pizza Is Love” at the bottom of the ticket, he nearly lost it.