Practicalmadness

While walking home down Chicago's Magnificent Mile, I ran into a film teacher from last Spring, Tom Comerford (aka Commie). That I call him Commie should tell you something about how it looked to see him on the Mile, walking past Crate & Barrel and Cartier. He was probably on his way to the film lab, but only because Tom (a notorious do-it-yourselfer) hasn't yet figured out how to MacGyver color chemistry using vinegar, developing powder and Starbucks Tazoberry.

Let's play a little game and see how many major brand names you can spot in the following paragraphs: Today's solution to the ongoing problem* of coming to work at Chicago's most visible (and most Corporate-ridden) Starbucks Coffee shop wearing days-old, smelly clothes: buy more clothes. I walked into the Gap half an hour before my shift and bought a complete change of clothes (except for pants, only because the Dockers Recodes I had on were perfectly acceptable, thankyouverymuch).

The shirt, socks and, yes, even underwear I walked into work wearing were removed, Febrezed and wrapped in three layers of plastic garbage bag. As a result, we had 20% fewer customer complaints about "that guy -- who's doing a great job, don't get me wrong...it's just that, well, he smells like a gorilla." (We did, however, have 21% more complaints about "that guy...he just fell asleep into his steaming pitchers...")

Tonight's IFC Fridays on Bravo feature is The Crying Game, which I have never seen. It looks appropriately quirky and filmic, although I don't know how much I might get out of it, as I already know Dil (Jaye Davidson) is a man. Watching it, and having seen Davidson as a man (who still, nonetheless, looked like a woman) in Stargate, I see little visual cues that tell me something ain't quite usual with that broad.

One more observation: those customers who even deign to acknowledge that our cup sizes are not called 'small, medium and large', or are not named after composers (e.g., 'Verdi'), sometimes feel compelled to apply French pronunciation where it is not appropriate. A couple of obviously quasi-affluent and only slightly bourgeois girls came in, tastefully dressed in leather-jacket urban casual. Then one of them said "Von-tee". As with nearly everybody these days, I sharply but politely repeated her order using the correct pronunciation ("Venn-tee", anglicized from "Veyn-tee") and got the requisite nasty look. At least she didn't say "Caramel Makita"; I would have been forced to ask her to leave the establishment immediately.