March B-days and Fry Sauce

March is a great month for birthdays. Besides moi, there are several people I know who have birthdays this month (hi Nikki! Happy [late] birthday); then there are peeps I don't know - Dr Seuss, Chuck Norris (70 today? really??), Dee Snider (of Twisted Sister fame), to name a few. And then there's this - fry sauce. Fry sauce turns 60 today! I'm sure you all wanted to know that. It was a burning question you NEEDED the anwer to before you could rest easily, right? LOL It must've been a slow news day because I found the story on the local news channel 5 website this morning. Otherwise I'd have gone on about life without ever knowing the answer to when fry sauce was 'born'. Some of you may not know what fry sauce is; to you I give my condolences. Growing up in Idaho, fry sauce was a normal part of fry consuming life. Originally you could only find it at Artic Circle, which as it happens was the Utah-based burger joint who invented the stuff. If you wanted fry sauce at McD’s or BK, you had to make it yourself with ketchup and mayo (wasn’t the same though) in order to dip ‘n’ dunk those golden yummy fries in the pink stuff. It wasn’t until I was in Colorado on vacation in the early 80’s that I discovered that it was apparently a ‘local thing’. In a McDonalds in Fort Collins, I requested some fry sauce to go with my French fries; the teenager behind the register looked at me like I had lobsters climbing out of my ears and was sprouting wings! “Fry….sauce??? I don’t know what that is.” Huh?? I thought EVERYONE on the planet had fry sauce. It is still a relatively local phenom; you'd think that after 60 years it would be omnipresent in burger places near and far. Sadly no. I have a friend who sends her son in Colorado (maybe it's just Colorado who's not gotten the memo yet...) a gallon of it every other month. Yes, FedEx will deliver just about anything. But I digress. So Happy Birthday all you March babies! and here's to the wonderful guys at Artic Circle who 60 years ago made the world better for fry lovers everywhere. Well, at least in Utah and Idaho ;0)