Have You Heard About The Shamokin Dunkin’ Donuts?
It's a cheap, classy place to meet up with your friends.
My Grandmother’s house burned down recently. She didn’t live there anymore. She doesn’t live anywhere anymore. It was the house my mother grew up in. It was the house where my family had lunch every Sunday after church. It was the house where I spent the summer after my parents got divorced, and my mom had to go back to work. My sisters and I would watch gameshows in the morning with my Gram and her sister (who always lived with her, even when my Gram was married) and when it came time for them to watch Soap Operas, I’d sneak upstairs to watch reruns of Saturday Night Live and Kids in the Hall on a tiny old black-and-white TV in my Gram’s bedroom. That house was my home, even if its address and mine were never the same.
In many ways, the house was already gone. Nobody in my family lived there, or owned it, and the people who were living there didn’t take very good care of it. Apparently, that’s part of the reason why it had to be destroyed; firefighters couldn’t get into the building “due to the extreme hoarding conditions.” I wouldn’t have ever wanted to set foot inside and see what became of that place. But I’d drive by whenever I was back in my hometown. I’d point it out, and tell stories, and show whoever I was with how we’d walk from there to town to run errands, or have lunch, or go to the library. But now, it’s gone gone. I won’t be able to ever show my daughter where her Great Grandmother lived and where her Grandmother grew up.
My Gram’s house was on South Market Street in Shamokin, PA, about three-quarters of a mile from “downtown” Shamokin and the stores and restaurants that (once? maybe still?) lined Independence St. When driving to her house, we’d often make a quick stop on the way at Dunkin’ Donuts.
Yes. That Dunkin’ Donuts. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, take a moment to watch this.
This video blew up on the internet. It has over two million views. Daniel Tosh used the clip in his segment on “the biggest shitholes in the world.” Famous Dunkin’ lover Ben Affleck has seen it (because he was forced to watch it by Theo Von – the fact that Ben Affleck has to go on Theo Von’s podcast for any reason is something I’ll need to save my energy to talk about another day.)
I’ve done a podcast episode about the Shamokin Dunkin’ Donuts with my friend Ryan Conner. I had no idea he was obsessed with the video until, after sending him a clip of my father being interviewed by Nikki Krize, he became starstruck by the reporter and revealed his love for the viral clip (you can listen to the podcast if you become a premium subscriber to my Substack or Patreon.)
I have mixed feelings about the popularity of this video. Of course, it’s funny to watch a guy call Dunkin’ Donuts a “classy place” to do his legal business. We’ve all been to a Dunkin’ Donuts before, and “classy” is one of the last words we’d ever use to describe the place. The last thing I want to be is a guy who can’t laugh at something only when it hits too close to home…but this doesn’t “hit close to home,” it hits home. “People acting a fool on the local news” is well-worn territory for viral internet clips. Watching local folks wild out with a camera in their face is something we can all collectively laugh about and send to each other with an “aren’t we glad we aren’t these people,” that’s never said, but always implied.
But I am these people. I understand their pain.
It’s easy to laugh at people being upset when a Dunkin’ Donuts closes when you live comfortably in a place that has things. Shamokin is not a place with things. Not today. Not in 2016 when this event actually happened. Not for a while before that. I live in Los Angeles now and try to explain it like this: imagine if you woke up tomorrow and all of the coffee and donut places in the entire city closed…also, 40% of the jobs in the city disappeared. Now, are you upset?
Maybe now you’d be on the news so flustered that you’d forget what a latte is actually called. Maybe that would be you mourning your friends no longer having a place to get their “frothy milk drink with pictures on it,” or the fact that you have no places to have a classy meet-up with a studio exec who doesn’t really care what you have going on, they just have to fill their day with meetings in order to look busy in their fake job – they’re just going to greenlight a project by one of their friends who has a coke hookup anyways.
Look, I’m not even FROM Shamokin, okay. I’m from Mount Carmel. We hate Shamokin. Shamokin sucks. I’ve called Shamokin “the biggest shithole in the world” plenty of times. But only because I also kinda love Shamokin (don’t tell anyone from Mount Carmel I said this – I already almost got the shit kicked out of me for accidentally wearing purple shorts to school on the day of the Coal Bucket game in 7th grade, I don’t need to get beat up as a full-grown man.) Only because I’ve seen a big rock of coal drop from a pole on New Year’s Eve in the shadow of a “mountain” that’s actually just a pile of coal refuse that stretches to the sky and goes on for miles. Only because I watched Jurassic Park, and Batman (1989), and Home Alone, and plenty of other movies in the Victoria Theater before it got torn down and replaced by a Rite Aid (that is now also closed.) Only because I spent summers in the library and winters in the basketball gym above the library that you had to walk up a thousand steps to get to and the roof was so low you couldn’t really shoot from far away or your arc of your shot would hit the ceiling.
I felt this way about the reaction to this video for a while – I’ve talked about it in my stand-up. I’m writing about it now because of the flood of memories I’ve been experiencing in the wake of my grandmother’s house no longer existing—two fires, on opposite ends of Market Street, making people appreciate what they had after it’s been taken away.
It’s still funny that the cop’s name is Psycho, though.
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