I always shudder when I see a group of five or more women enter the restaurant together. These ladies (generally) fit the mold of one of the following:
1) A group of timid (ugly) girls who order in a whisper, pick at their food, drink Diet Cokes, calculate an exact 15% tip and take their sweet time ordering.
2) A group of overly friendly church ladies who share two salads, look through endless photo albums before ordering, request incessant iced tea refills and take their sweet time ordering.
3) A group of fake-boob-fake-tan early-40s sluts who feel classy eating in a low-end Mexican restaurant and who will accept a compliment from anyone (from the nasty Jewish businessmen to the homeless man outside) and take their sweet time ordering.
With a modicum of restraint, I can tolerate groups 1 or 2. Grating as they might be, at least they're usually polite.
The third group and I, however, are sworn enemies. Because unlike the other testosterone-filled servers who think that one of these Dina Lohan lookalikes will blow him in the back alley, I know the tactics of the cougars.
All talk, little action, no tip.
The other night I had a group of six cougars ready to drink, giggle, and pretend they were the girls of "Sex and the City" (All Samantha's, the whole badly Botoxed lot of them).
Every single time I approached the table, one of them had to crack some sort of sexual joke.
"May I bring you...ladies another around?"
"THAT'S NOT ALL YOU CAN BRING US!"
Then, as if taking their cue from an Olive Garden commercial, they all laughed in unison, each of them leaning forward in pretend convulsions while faking the motion of spitting out a drink.
(And's that not all they had to spit out! See, I can sink to that level, too).
One of the girls will inevitably assume the role of "Nice cougar" once she senses that her reptilian-skinned friends are behaving badly. In this case, the dumbest one of the group decided to play 20 questions with me.
"So where are you from?"
"Oklahoma."
"Oh! I know someone from there."
(weak grin) "Cool."
"Did you go to school there?"
"No, University of Missouri."
"Oh, yikes, were you affected by Katrina?"
(beat)
"Were you...ladies ready to order?"
You can imagine what ensued. A lengthy list of modified salads and tacos, all "enhanced" to be more diet friendly (when in reality the only thing that could save their stomachs would be a month in Somalia carrying around sacks of feed, living off 500 calories a day).
After dinner was served and orders were sent back, the ladies continued downing their white zinfandels and vodka & cokes. The drunker the cougar, the poorer the server.
Within 10 minutes, one of the cougars was trying to escape her cage and dance on the table. Our manager, slow to notice fights and fires, sprang into action and tried to cajole the untamed beast back into a safer habitat. He was not helped by the battle cry of the fellow cougars, each trying to paw her way to a similarly awkward display of drunkenness.
Me, well, I'd given up on ever escaping the cougar den. I'd dropped the bill a good 90 minutes before it was actually paid. After running six different credit cards, I was home free. My tip was a series of scribbles that I eventually deduced to be just above 10 percent.
Fortunately one of the cougars left behind a trail on her way out, a trail that led me to a an extra $25 that had been carelessly left under the table after the feast. The $25 that would have been callously used on designer knock-offs will now find a better purpose in my liquor fund, which frequently helps erase the memory of this and similar animal attacks at work.
The Somalia bit reminds me of my favorite writing on the wall in Paris (translated):
Betty found herself a bit too heavy
Betty had a small problem with weight... she loved hamburgers and the drink.
So, John, her husband promised to help her and for Christmas he offered her a 'fat cure' with a super vacation:
one week in Kosovo,
two weeks in Vietnam,
and then 2 weeks in Rwanda.
In her latest letter, all proud, she had already lost 110 pounds.
(along with her left hand,
her right arm,
1/4 of her butt...
but she was still holding up)
Since her visit in Africa, we are still without news....
Posted by: LJLundberg | February 11, 2010 at 10:49 PM
Hey Chase ... next time you have a Cougar Den remind them upon receiving your shitty tip to take their Boniva with their Activia when they get home. Put them right back in their places, the low rent resale shops! Hope all is well. Aly
Posted by: Al | September 19, 2008 at 08:32 AM
How you don't yet have a book deal is beyond me.
Posted by: Clare | September 17, 2008 at 10:42 AM