WASHINGTON -- Call it the Washington pizza index: The bigger the crisis and the more time that government staffers hole up in their offices, the more pizza they eat.
This week -- with the confluence of impeachment hearings in Congress and war management over at the Pentagon -- the index is shattering records."It's going haywire," said Frank Meeks, owner of 59 Domino's franchises in the Washington area and the capital's unofficial pizza historian.
The index's rise this week is propelled by large numbers of White House and Capitol Hill types, Pentagon staffers and media folks all working into the wee hours and ordering pizza to sustain them. The White House and Congress broke their previous three-day record for pizza deliveries, according to Meeks, though at the Pentagon, the record set during the Persian Gulf War still stands.
Experts like Meeks like to remind people that much of the present turmoil in Washington can be traced to pizza. He recalls that Nov. 17, 1995, during the government shutdown, was "pizza night" for Monica Lewinsky and President Clinton, according to Lewinsky's day book. Lewinsky, an unpaid intern, was working at the White House because other employees had been furloughed. Had they not shared that pizza, history may well have turned out very differently.
Lewinsky also figured in another pizza-delivery frenzy: the previous three-day record for White House orders to Domino's was set after the Lewinsky story broke in mid-January.