In 1992, a girlfriend at work wanted to set up Patricia Bonanza on a blind date. “She said, ‘I know somebody else that is going through a divorce, but I don’t know if you’d like what Phil does,’” she recalled. “I said, ‘Well, what does he do? Is it legal?’” He sold hot dogs for a living. “I said, ‘Is he happy selling hot dogs?’ She said yeah. I said, ‘That’s all I need to know.’”
A world where happiness is all that matters and a man can make a living selling hot dogs. Meeting the Bonanzas can leave one awe-struck and slack-jawed, like a paleontologist stumbling upon a woolly mammoth tusk on the Siberian tundra. The couple are perfectly preserved specimens from an era long-gone, their lives and world encased in a permafrost of Italian ice.
