parallelism on the fly

I know you can change the max degree parallelism server wide, but can you do it on the fly for one query? I know... trust the query processor but when I turn it off for this one sp, my query goes from 3 seconds to 0 and I got this ex-MS guy in here telling me there is a way, but he does not remember how.

I want him to simplify the sp or have his project's DBA do it, and I even offered to take a hack but... you know.It can be done at the query level. I think you add

select *
from pubs..authors
option (maxdop 1)

Standard qualifications apply of test with/without the query hint every once in a while to see if the data distribution now favors the parallel query.|||thank you.