The Tie That Binds

One of the waitresses at work approached me with a smile on Friday, saying she had something for me. She has expressed a fondness for shopping at thrift stores in the past.

"It's an ugly boy's tie," she told me. (Ugly, of course, meaning the tie and not the boy, just to be clear.) It was adorned with black & white soccer balls and a gray background. At the bottom of the tie, one ball seems to be tearing through the netting of a goal, but it appears as though the ball has been shot through an electrical fence. I said my thank yous and promised to wear it the sometime soon.

Sure enough, on Saturday I decided to sport the tie since my own selection has been severely limited by timeliness (bats would be appropriate if this were still, say, October) or simply being lost (blue-checkered design that was a gift from an ex-girlfriend is mysteriously absent).

My boss' mother—as she typically does—comes up to me to review my uniform. Seeing as my apron is clean and my shirt is pressed, she has little to complain about. "I like your tie," she says. Ordinarily, this is the equivalent of a bad review.

Later in the day, a couple at a booth with another friend asks me "what I do." Not quite certain how to answer that question, I respond with something to the effect of "you're looking at it." For one reason or another, they state that I come across as somebody who works in banking, or "executive"-type work. Why they've drawn this conclusion is lost to me, but I catch a glimpse of my tie just above the top of my apron as I accept a business card they've handed me. No customer at the waffle house has ever given me a business card.

After running into another server from a different restaurant at the bar later, we're discussing the differences and similarities between our two establishments when he suddenly starts urging me to come in and apply where he works. I could do well there, he says. "I can see you come off very professionally," he tells me.

Again, I look down at my tie. I'm no longer wearing an apron, but usually I'd have lost the tie by that point too.

Fast-forward to Sunday when I opt for my sentimental favorite, a tie entitled "Busy, Busy Cars" that was drawn by a nine-year-old girl (I'm guessing on the age, but you get the idea ...). It's my Sunday tie, I suppose, and the day goes on with no comment about my wardrobe—except from the same waitress who'd supplied me with the soccer ball art adorned around my neck. She sarcastically gives me some shit about not wearing her tie again, and I promise I'll wear it in the hear future.

I'm in a hurry on Monday when I exit the shower, run downstairs, grab the neatest-looking shirt from the rack and the only tie I can find: soccer balls. We are exceptionally slow—so much so that the waitress in question and I have time to begin, but not finish successfully, two crossword puzzles. Later that evening, I trek downtown to meet with a former editor still working at the paper when he points out that I'm looking "sharp." Again, I can only assume it's because I haven't removed the tie. Sure enough, a barback standing near us tells me, "Nice tie."

And so while I'm mulling over searching out thrift stores for more conversation-starting neckwear, today I followed up on that fellow server's advice and applied at his restaurant. Because, hey, if you can't find one real job, you might as well take on two decent ones to compensate.

The application was about as basic and vague as they come, and the interview might as well have been:

1) "What's your name?"

and

2) "When can you start?"

The answer to that second question is tomorrow evening. And with the annual Christmas Walk coming through town this weekend, I'm guessing I just booked myself a rather hectic little week. Or couple of weeks. Or couple of months. But let's stop there.

"And what should I wear?" I asked the front-of-the-house manager interviewing me.

As is common among fine dining, it's a long-sleeve white dress shirt and black dress pants.

"No tie?" I asked.

Nope; open collar. Perhaps now I can test to see if my naked Adam's Apple reaps the same attention one shortly-debuted tie earned within a single weekend, but I've got my doubts.

Emphasis On The "P" In The Acronym "R.I.P."

There's nothing quite like Thanksgiving to end a pretty ugly week of racial tensions in the media. Besides the post below regarding numbskull Mark Fuhrman's comments adding to the latest sad attempt by "The Juice" to profit off his ex-wife's death, we also got treated to Kramer going slightly postal at a comedy club and then making us further uncomfortable by trying to explain how he's somehow not a racist on Letterman. Oh, and in a slower media week, maybe somebody might have been a little more upset about what the typically asinine Michael Irvin had to say about the ancestry of a certain white athlete in Dallas.

I was thinking how we might need Rodney King to come out and ask for us to all get along again, the way a motion picture director would when dealing with a cast of out-of-line celebrities.

And that's when I woke up this morning, picked up the paper, and saw that the man who built a reputation getting the best of his large ensemble casts had died.

Anybody who watched this past year's Academy Awards telecast would likely remember that one of the night's bigger surprises (besides the show being trumped up as a celebration of how "courageous" Hollywood is every year right before naming a faux controversial piece of cinematic swill like "Crash" Best Picture) was Robert Altman accepting an honorary award and revealing that he had undergone a heart transplant years earlier.

It was sometime around the mid-90s (1996, I believe) when I discovered that video cassettes of older pictures were available for free rental at the public library. And I went through most of the classics quite quickly before becoming so consumed with taking in all of the older fare I'd heard so often but had never actually viewed. On one occasion, I watched all three of the "Godfather" films in a single day.

I don't really tend to lean toward any particular director as a "favorite," partly because there's too many good ones to choose from and partly because nobody can have that kind of remarkable consistency—the greatest directors can let us down on occasion, not with a particularly bad film, just a disappointment.

But going over the obits for Mr. Altman today, I was struck by just how many very enjoyable films he had made. Ask me my list of favorite directors yesterday, and I might've likely forgotten to include him. But from "M.A.S.H." to "Nashville" to "Short Cuts," his work always stood out in the singular way that you imagine any great artist's would: Only he could have pulled that off.

Of course, 1992's "The Player" remains my favorite of his. But just to make sure I've seen the entire scope of his beautiful career, I did the only thing I could think to do today and went out to rent his final film, "A Prairie Home Companion." I'm not especially fond of Garrison Kiellor, but with Altman at the helm, I'll trust that perhaps one last movie of his might make me believe that we can all still get along.

UPDATE: Okay, career gone for Michael Richards.

Mark Fuhrman: "These people will kill someone and go have chicken at KFC"

I can still recall the day of the infamous O.J. Simpson Ford Bronco chase during the Knicks-Rockets game of the NBA Finals. We all assumed that he had done it at that point. It was just a matter of catching him.

And as his trial dragged on for month after month after relentless month, I remember slowly listening to his defense and realizing how they weren't so much proving his innocence as they were creating a reasonable doubt. An episode of "Seinfeld" spoofed the decision to have the defendant try on the glove, but many would admit that perhaps one of the most explosive bits of testimony to come out of that trial was that of Mr. Mark Fuhrman.

I'm not terribly proud to admit that when we were ushered into the high school library to witness the verdict being read that day at the conclusion of the trial, I was one of those people who cheered when O.J. was found innocent. I could make excuses for it now if I sincerely felt O.J. was actually innocent, but instead, I'll just refer to this recent clip from FOX News' "Hannity & Colmes":



There's a number of discouraging things to be found in this video clip:
1) Alan Colmes shows unprecedented backbone.
2) Mark Fuhrman continues to treat his racist views as though they are beyond question.
3) Sean Hannity—as he always has—supports his good friend Fuhrman through and through.

The judicial branch of America ain't perfect; but watching ass-hats like Hannity and Fuhrman continue to try and deny how much of a role Fuhrman ultimately played in O.J.'s subsequent acquittal makes me appreciate a fair, but flawed justice system even when the jury's decision is not indicative of the conclusions the rest of us in the public had drawn.