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Somewhere along the way, some enterprising restaurateur hit upon a solid plan to take the patrons' minds off their disappointment in the mediocre fare -- cutsey names for the restrooms. It started in some seafood shack in Atlantic City or Brighton Beach or Old Saybrook or some place like that. You know the kind of place I mean -- where everything is breaded and deep fried in oil - even the coffee. The owner must have reasoned that a nautical theme in the necessary room would excite the imaginations of the diners so that they could fancy themselves sailing the seven seas on the Jolly Roger, instead of merely pushing the over-battered shrimp around on the blue plate special. And that, children, is the story of how the men's room came to be called "Buoys" and the women's room became "Gulls."
It didn't take long for this ridiculous practice to spread like wildfire. Soon, there were water closets all over the land with names like "Captain," "Galley Wench," "Kings," "Queens," and so forth. This was bad enough, but the trend soon outgrew the pedestrian confines of the minds of its creators, and certain establishments with a decidedly bohemian stripe became bolder, experimenting with such designations as "Othello" and "Desdemona" or "Mars" and "Venus." Pretentious to be sure, but still capable of guiding all but the semi-literate.
After reports of an alarming number of faux pas, and in a nod to this last-mentioned demographic, some victuallers resorted to the tried and true pictogram. But never content to leave well enough alone, the avante garde hijacked the process and made the images ever more obscure and confounding: Is that a woman with a small purse or a man with a large wallet? Chaos reigned.
You would think this would have chastened the cabal responsible for comfort station signage. You would have thought wrong. Emboldened by their own peculiar interpretation of artistic license and public-be-damned attitude, the degenerates who make their living designing the outsides of bathroom doors in brasseries were off in ever more bizarre directions. In this brave new world, any efforts at the representational were cast off in favor of the abstract and metaphorical.
Needless to say, such a sad state of affairs transformed the average perplexing social situation into the outright awkward. Recently, in one such instance, clumps of teenage boys were spotted outside an eatery's refreshment center whose door was bedecked in kabuki masks -- the delineations of sexual features blurred beyond all recognition. To a man, the huddled adolescents sported a look of puzzlement and mild post traumatic shock. Meanwhile a young woman slouched in a corner opposite, sobbing quietly into a cocktail napkin.
How were they to know?
The prevailing order is a shanda, certainly, but there seems no chance of reversing it. For now, we have to endure the arrival on the scene of a motley crew who fancy themselves a new breed of surrealists or dadaists. In plain terms, things are out of control.
I mean, if the hostess directs you to a long, dark corridor where one door has a cigar box glued to the front of it, and the other is decorated with a tortoise shell, what the hell are you supposed to do with that? Life is hard enough as it is. It's gotten so it just isn't safe to go out, anymore. And people in war zones thought they had problems.
Somewhere along the way, some enterprising restaurateur hit upon a solid plan to take the patrons' minds off their disappointment in the mediocre fare -- cutsey names for the restrooms. It started in some seafood shack in Atlantic City or Brighton Beach or Old Saybrook or some place like that. You know the kind of place I mean -- where everything is breaded and deep fried in oil - even the coffee. The owner must have reasoned that a nautical theme in the necessary room would excite the imaginations of the diners so that they could fancy themselves sailing the seven seas on the Jolly Roger, instead of merely pushing the over-battered shrimp around on the blue plate special. And that, children, is the story of how the men's room came to be called "Buoys" and the women's room became "Gulls."
It didn't take long for this ridiculous practice to spread like wildfire. Soon, there were water closets all over the land with names like "Captain," "Galley Wench," "Kings," "Queens," and so forth. This was bad enough, but the trend soon outgrew the pedestrian confines of the minds of its creators, and certain establishments with a decidedly bohemian stripe became bolder, experimenting with such designations as "Othello" and "Desdemona" or "Mars" and "Venus." Pretentious to be sure, but still capable of guiding all but the semi-literate.
After reports of an alarming number of faux pas, and in a nod to this last-mentioned demographic, some victuallers resorted to the tried and true pictogram. But never content to leave well enough alone, the avante garde hijacked the process and made the images ever more obscure and confounding: Is that a woman with a small purse or a man with a large wallet? Chaos reigned.
You would think this would have chastened the cabal responsible for comfort station signage. You would have thought wrong. Emboldened by their own peculiar interpretation of artistic license and public-be-damned attitude, the degenerates who make their living designing the outsides of bathroom doors in brasseries were off in ever more bizarre directions. In this brave new world, any efforts at the representational were cast off in favor of the abstract and metaphorical.
Needless to say, such a sad state of affairs transformed the average perplexing social situation into the outright awkward. Recently, in one such instance, clumps of teenage boys were spotted outside an eatery's refreshment center whose door was bedecked in kabuki masks -- the delineations of sexual features blurred beyond all recognition. To a man, the huddled adolescents sported a look of puzzlement and mild post traumatic shock. Meanwhile a young woman slouched in a corner opposite, sobbing quietly into a cocktail napkin.
How were they to know?
The prevailing order is a shanda, certainly, but there seems no chance of reversing it. For now, we have to endure the arrival on the scene of a motley crew who fancy themselves a new breed of surrealists or dadaists. In plain terms, things are out of control.
I mean, if the hostess directs you to a long, dark corridor where one door has a cigar box glued to the front of it, and the other is decorated with a tortoise shell, what the hell are you supposed to do with that? Life is hard enough as it is. It's gotten so it just isn't safe to go out, anymore. And people in war zones thought they had problems.
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