Maybe I shouldn’t be allowed out on my own

October 5

Last night I had no press events to go to. I love nights like that, and decided to catch up on restaurants in my own neighborhood that I hadn’t been to yet. I picked Franny’s.
Franny’s opened on Flatbush in Brooklyn to much acclaim quite a while ago. I tend to be suspicious of wild acclaim over a pizza place, but I did, indeed, have a delicious meal of pizza with tomatoes, mozzarella, sausage and hot peppers, and a Six-Point ale.
I noticed that everyone working in the dining room — servers, bartender, floor management — all were women. Peering from my table into the open kitchen, all I could see were men.
I made this observation to the woman who took away my dessert menu as I asked for the check, and it annoyed her. (I later visited their web site — I think I was talking to Franny herself).
“Well, that happens to be the case tonight,” she half-snapped.
I shrugged and said I’d never seen that before.
“You’ve never seen that before?” she asked as though I’d said I’d never seen water poured into a glass.
I shrugged again and smiled sheepishly.
“Maybe I hadn’t noticed.”

It’s true that when I was waiting tables at Azar’s Big Boy in Denver — the one at the intersection of Colorado Blvd. and I-25 that later became a Perkins and I don’t know what it is now — one night the manager said “I have six girls on the floor,” and I realized that she had counted me among the girls, so accustomed was she to servers being women. And I’m sure on many nights there all the cooks were men, but of course since on any nights I was working, at least one man would have been on the floor, I never would have witnessed what I did last night.
Anyway, the title of this blog entry stands.