The best dorkiest thing of the week: visiting Organ Stop Pizza in Mesa, AZ. When I heard about this place, a pizza parlor with an organ, I imagined some little joint with a church organ set up in one corner and an oversized Brandy snifter on top for tips. Oh no! It’s so much more than that. First of all the place is huge. It’s as big as a suburban supermarket cleared of all it’s shelving units and in their place is an enormous “Mighty Wurlitzer” pipe organ. There are big plate glass windows all along the back wall showcasing the hundreds of pipes and bellows contraptions moving the air through this beast of an instrument. On the sidewalls are clusters of cymbals and drums. Another wall has a bunch of horns. There’re glockenspiels, a train whistle — In a word, it’s awesome. The sound completely fills the cavernous space.

The pizza is only so-so, but who cares. The organist sits at a four keyboard stacked console with thousands of keys and buttons and the circular stage rises up from below the floor at the beginning of each set and can also rotate left and right in semi-circles. There are cheesy lights and some marionette style cat puppets that come out that look like they were made by someone’s grandmother in the 1970s.

These Wurlitzer theater organs were made from 1914 to around 1940 to accompany silent films. The one at Organ Stop is from 1927.

The happiness I experience here catches me by surprise. With my daughter dancing in the aisle with total abandon and my dad nursing a beer and my brother and his wife, both music nerds extraordinaire, giggling in glee. [Sorry Jules, I love you, but you are a Ph.D. candidate in music composition dude] On this night we are all enjoying the scene together. And a weird phenomena – when we first arrive I announce to the table that I hope to hear the Indiana Jones theme, my dad hopes to hear “Somewhere Over the Rainbow”, and my brother says he hopes to hear “Baby Elephant Walk”, by Henri Mancini. And guess what? By the time we rolled out of there two sets later, the organist had played all three!! Isn’t that crazy? And we didn’t even fill out a request slip and drop it in the bowl next to him. The Mighty Wurlitzer overheard our wishes and made them so.