Accidental Dinner Theater

After church Sunday my wife, son and I went to one of those cool pizza cafes where all the employees are young, hairy, and slovenly dressed and were treated to a comical drama about a poorly run restaurant. Thankfully, all of us had that wonderful patience working that comes from having no particular place to go or thing to do, so we sat patiently in our booth watching the dinner theater of an obviously shorthanded staff crippled by quiet but persistent incompetence.  

The show started downstage left with the table of older ladies next to us who apparently had all their checks mixed up with some other table’s checks. As the ladies chirped and quibbled over their bills, my wife noticed at center stage right the only two waitresses in the rapidly filling restaurant rifling through a stack of previously impaled checks, quietly but desperately trying to sort the mess out. And, up stage the hairy male minions unhurriedly went about their business of pizza making.

Shortly the waitress returned to the pleasant old ladies with many an “I’m sorry” falling from her lips. A quiet frustration rested on her dewy brow and her dewy upper lip and her dewy makeup coated cheeks as she took our drink order. Already alerted by our general observations that the service might be impaired, we ordered our meal with the drinks. Our drinks arrived promptly, and we sat back to watch the show.

Several minor players paraded past our booth, plates and platters in hand, presumably to deliver meals, but stopping at table after table unable to pawn off the proffered dishes to anyone. For all the world, they looked like they were offering hors d' oeuvres at a party with no takers.

One of these players, a male I think, could have passed for a hipster version of Gollum although his carriage was erect and his gait had a light spring on the upswing. His newsboy cap settled at his eyebrows and though he carried his hors d' oeuvres for multiple laps would hardly make eye contact to confirm the correct destination.

Another of the hors d' oeuvre toters, rocked the unwashed hippie with an Aunt Jemima do-rag look. He had a gauge in his ear big enough for a circus poodle to jump through. His anemic blue cords dragged the ground behind his dirty hemp shoes as he shuffled about delivering the wrong dish to yet another table.  

One of the players cast in the role of waitress, the one waiting on us, appeared from the rear to be too much flat bottomed waitress poured into too little denim, giving the impression of a woman wedged in a funnel. Everything about her seemed slightly distressed and in a mild disarray, her hair, her sweaty makeup, her fist full of meal checks. And there were the glances over her shoulder and away from those she waited on, as if some emergency compelled her attention elsewhere.

Her counterpart, dressed in a sheer blouse that seemed meant to suggest the airiness of a fairy, floated through the air from the waist up, but the skinny little legs protruding from the itty bitty pink shorts worked like pistons when the gaps in tables exposed their mechanics. Her hair too, looked disheveled along with the rest of the company, but that seemed to be in dress code. 

We ate our food (when it finally arrived… in stages), watched the growing number of diners slowly swamp the unkempt pizza drones, and vowed never to return to the accidental dinner theater.