Get a plate and pull up a chair. It’s time for spaghetti!

The Kindness of Cooks | Sonnet Schulz


Get a plate and pull up a chair. It’s time for spaghetti!



Sonnet Schulz knows she will have company for dinner the second Thursday of every month, she’s just not sure who’s coming to dinner.

One recent Thursday was no exception. A total of 39 people showed up for the monthly Spaghetti Dinner Open House at the home of Sonnet and Rich Schulz and their children in Illinois.

“The dinner is super simple, just spaghetti and meatballs and salad and bread,” says Sonnet. “It’s usually a mad rush to finish everything the day before and the day of. Once people start coming through the door—bringing French bread, desserts, hugs and smiles, and begin filling their plates—it’s all worth it.

“We’ve been doing this for three years now,” she says. “The fewest we ever had come was five people—oh, the leftovers!—and our highest number was 66 in November.”

Most dinner guests are friends or friends of friends. The six Schulz children, now 12 to 18, know that they can invite friends, too. Sonnet also invites previously-unseen online friends and sometimes people met in passing in the community.

“I don’t want anyone to feel obligated if they can’t make it or if they want to invite friends,” Sonnet says. “I have a little business card with the information written up. I’ll give it to people I don’t know well.

“I always make 10 to 14 pounds of meatballs ahead of time and freeze them,” she says. “Depending on how much chatter I hear that month, I thaw more or less.”

Sonnet’s spaghetti sauces bubble in slow cookers, including a big batch made with her meatballs. Another is made with extra veggies and Italian sausage bites. There’s also an all-veggie no-salt sauce made with her father, Les Horne, in mind.

“This is my backup batch,” she says, plugging in another slow cooker with meatballs to simmer in a dining room corner. “I think we’re going to need it.”

The first guests arrive. The first spaghetti pot is drained. Rich offers a prayer of thanks for the food and those who come to share it.

“OK,” declares Sonnet. “Dig in!” Sonnet admits this is fearless entertaining, especially for someone who used to worry too much.

“My husband and I are both introverts and I would feel anxious at the idea of having friends over for dinner,” she explains. “What to serve? How to impress? Is my house ‘put together’ or clean enough?

“At the same time, we felt like we were missing a lot of opportunities for friendships and connections,” Sonnet says.

Sonnet wanted all that to change. Then a friend, Julie, brought her daughter on a couple consecutive Thursdays.

“Oh, I should come every Thursday,” her friend quipped.

“So that was where I got the inspiration—why not have everyone else come?” Sonnet says.

She decided to keep the menu to spaghetti basics. And then she decided to do the same thing again the next month.

“I always know what I’m serving,” says Sonnet, laughter in her voice. “One girl says, ‘I dream of your meatballs all month.’

“I tell people to come any time after 5. And I say, if you’re still hanging around by 8 o’clock, you’re going to help me clean up.”

Spaghetti dinner friends include Kathy Hau.

“You don’t have to have a big fancy meal,” Kathy says. “Just get together and everything tastes better with friends and family.”

“That’s how society should function,” says Rich. “Eat something together and talk together.”

When a flock of kids fly through the dining room, adults pay attention.

“Don’t run, guys, just walk!” someone says.

“Run slower!” calls out another parent.

One little boy gives a younger boy a tour of the dessert area.

“Take one and let’s go back to the table,” he advises.

Grown-ups like dessert, too. “I just want a little piece,” one woman says.

“You’ll want the rest of it,” a friend predicts.

Sometimes the best laid plans go awry. That happened as Sonnet planned the family’s second great spaghetti dinner.

“I had asked off, but I hadn’t thought to check the schedule,” says Sonnet, explaining that she ended up on-call for her work as a part-time nuclear medicine technologist.

Sure enough, the phone rang.

“I think we had maybe 50 people and I had to leave,” she says. “I had to walk out on my company. I was just devastated. But when I came home, everything was packed up. A family stayed and did all the dishes. I thought if this can run without me, everything is fine.

“It’s not really about me,” Sonnet says. “I love to see people eating and laughing. The people I especially want to enfold are maybe a little in the margins or a little shy. If they can come and connect with someone, that’s what is important.

“I used to dream of going to Africa or elsewhere for people who are really at a disadvantage,” Sonnet says. “My world is smaller at this point. This is what I can do at this point, right now.

“This is my place. I’m not supposed to be anywhere else right now. I’m here with my family and I’m in my community. Feeding people is really what I love to do. What a way to receive, just to give people what they need at that moment.

“My passion is that more people will try to do something like this,” she says. “It’s broadened my world in ways I can’t even explain. I think it made me get over myself. I just don’t get that anxiety anymore.”

–Amy Silvers