A Restaurant Review

“Give any dishwasher a camera, you give him a chance to succeed. But succeed after you do the damn dishes” Mae West should have said that…but she didn’t.

In high school, I learned that many of my teachers couldn’t hold a candle to the heroin spoon that many of my friends and I called life. We weren’t all heroin chic before Portland made it cool…but some of our teachers would buy us beer. So in turn, we tried to stay awake for the free lunch.

School being exactly all that we made of it, I found myself washing dishes at an iconic Vancouver, Washington restaurant, so that I might afford the Lucky Lager beer that I was purchasing…via the teacher who was supposed to be our drug councilor at school.

I hear that irony isn’t always so easily interpreted?

Fate be damned!, because eventually, we all find a way to learn things. The three years of nights I spent washing dishes at Paul’s, I too was ‘able to is are were learned some stuff also’.

I learned that the veal was breaded and frozen…as was the chicken fried steak
I just learned that I made more money washing dishes in 1983, than taking pictures in 2012
I learned about relationships from a few waitresses and barmaids that upon reflection
I should be more concerned about
But I’m not.

I learned that most of we low wage earners were just struggling to get by
I learned that a free meal should never be passed up
I learned that some people can be amazingly insane
While some people can be amazingly human.

I learned that no one ever notices the sameness between some identically breaded and frozen meat
I learned that people drank an incredible amount of milk
I learned that alcohol was a way of life
Yet some people–are capable of being amazingly human.

Some kids grow up and some adults grow stagnant
Irony has a way of catching up with some drug councilors
Learning nothing from everything is easy
Learning something from nothing
Is nothing to sneeze at.