ANDERSONVILLE — Towering over a line of ice cream shop patrons, his 6’ 3” frame clad in a black t-shirt and diesel jeans, husband Steven Binkus, 34, is decidedly out of his element. Convinced to go out for a sweet treat with his wife Lisa and their two young children, Binkus struggled to acclimate to this unfamiliar environment. “I was asking him if he wanted to try any samples, and he just looked really confused, then whispered something to his wife,” said ice cream scooper Sammy Yell, 20. “His kids got into it, trying a couple things before ordering and having fun, but he seemed to struggle with the concept.”
Wobbling in front of the first freezer of ice cream like a newborn deer, Binkus stared at each flavor for a good thirty seconds before stepping in front of others in line to scope out the cone situation. “It was like he’d never seen ice cream before,” said fellow patron Brianna Halson, 15. “He looked pretty overwhelmed the whole time he was in line, and got really flustered every time the employee asked him if he wanted anything.” Halson, who ordered a small sugar cone of moose tracks, had to step around Binkus several times to navigate her way safely through the line. “He kept doubling back to look at the vanilla,” she recalled, effortlessly posting an Instagram story of her cone refracted artfully in the mirrored surface of the countertop while paying at the register. “I guess he was thinking pretty hard about it all.”
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Binkus, who ended up having two scoops of chocolate chip ordered for him by his wife Lisa, blundered through the line like a drunk bear, panicked and clumsy. “Steve can really shine in the right setting,” noted Lisa, spooning soft-serve into her toddler’s mouth at an outdoor table while her husband waited in line for the restroom. “But he’s not usually an ice cream kind of guy, so this was kind of a challenge for him.”
“Lisa’s the one who likes ice cream, you should ask her,” said Binkus when pressed about the reason for his visit to the store.“I’m usually at the gym or in our condo overlooking the gym, so this was definitely something I don’t usually mess with.”
After trying to pay for his family’s ice cream with an expired gift card from a hardware store in Wisconsin, Binkus gave the cashier a wrinkled twenty, tipping his leftover change into the small trash can next to the cash register.
