Number Twelue
29 late for work again this week. When does it all end?
serve decent food to make a buck. Now it's difficult to find a restaurant not animated by an entertainment concept. While it's true th at some of the high-end theme chains-Fashion Cafe and the Rainforest Cafe, for example-have hit a wall (mostly because they served lousy food), entertainment still has become a standard of the eatery industry in the post-Melman universe. When people step into a restaurant, they now expect to enter a different world. Sometimes, of course, that world is one better left in the dustbin of history, as in the case of the popular Chicago restaurant Le Colonial, which sumptuously evokes the languid, sensuous milieu of French Indochina in the Twenties, with bamboo fittings, lazy ceiling fans, and sepia-tinted photographs of peasants carrying water, harvesting rice, and hefting a sweating, porcine worthy in a sedan chair. The pictures, one gathers, are the next best thing to staffing the joint with real peons. The self-impressed patrons ofLe Colonial would hardly be likely to endorse the viciousness of the French regime in Indochina, and yet the nostalgia for an era of entitlement, deference, and abject servitude dovetails nicely with the leitmotifs of our own time: the polarization of rich and poor, the noexcess-is-too-absurd imperative to please that is imposed on service industry employees. At Fado, the staff plays along gamely in the bar's exaggerated effort to convince its cu stomers that they are experiencing something other than a denatured spectacle called into being by transnational investors. They proudly boast how the chairs you sit on, the bar you lean on, and the floors you tread upon all were made in Ireland. The patrons by and large appear to love the contrivance of the bar, and the air is abuzz with them excitedly telling the story of Fado to friends who are experiencing the craic for the first time. No one really seems to mind, or even acknowledge, the irony th at the quaint Irish pub they are drinking in is a very modern creation brought into being by the sort oflarge conglomerates th at are destroying loc al institutions ranging from the drug store to the butcher shop. Everyone's too enthralled with the "authenticity" of the Made in Ireland surroundings and the fun of playing at Irishness; on every visit to Fado I have either heard someone ape a brogue or seen someone break into a half-assed jig.
Weil, her husband gets ta work on time and kids
are all at school. Now it's time ror her ta get ta the diner because she has ta be able ta cover the check she just wrote tor the water bill. Needless ta say, there's no time for makeup, and she'll have ta wait until
she gets ta work ta take her cwlers out of her hair so a scarf will have ta do for now. As she gets into the car, she realizes that she's still wearing her housecoat.
There's na time to change now,
50
it's offto work,
curlers, housecoat and all. On her way to the diner, traRk is much worse than usual, and she ends up getting there a few minutes late. There's no time now to take those curlers out so she decides ta hit the Roor and start waitin' tables. When her day ends here, she'lI head on home and start cooking dinner for her husband and five kids. Our paar, tired housewife follows the same routine every day. Just imagine how she must feel. Despite her near exhaustion, she finds a smile for everyone and a pleasant "heilo." Our tired housewife goes by the name of ~unice, but other wamen on her bloek are named
f-1elen, Beatrice, t=anny, Aliee, and Norma.
The Beau~ SchoolDropout It's not hard to spot this beauty queen. She's the one who applies everything she ever learned at beauty school, ta herselF, every day (not to mention every cosmebc she ever bought). As far as the hair goes, the bigger the better. Just rat it and spray it. f-1er eyelashes are 10'19, thรก, blaek, and fake. The only boundaries her eye shadow knows are her eyebrows. Speaking or eye shadow, don't stop with one color, or matching calors ror that matter. Just mix and match. Despite her ridiculous appearance (never say that to her face) she cansiders herself the authority when it comes to cosmetic self-improvement. She has a hundred ideas for hairdos and just as many ror makeup and nails. She'll never hesitate to lay then on ya. But whatever you do, don't take her up on her beauty advice. Berore you can blink, she'll pull out the tools of the trade. They're never far away. She'll start clipping and curling, spraying and dying and when the hair spray settles, you'lIlook just like her. f-1ow fabulous! Thls girl is always ready to go to work. She wears her pants skin tight with a pink lab coat (who knows, one day it may be a science) and white socks with Keds. She usually accessoriles her lab coat with a firstname Initial pin, or her entire first name spel led out in rhinestones. Her makeup is thick. Our beauty school drop-out goes by the name af 8abs, but same of the girls in her caloring class are named Dolly, t=renchie, DeeDee, FIo, Pinky, and Maybelline.