Key Moment

I'm still in Big Bear Lake (as I understand the town to be called), and small matters just worthy of being written about continue to pop up. Yesterday we made a second visit to a brewpub. We drank and ate. The place was running some kind of a special, and so there were cheap drinks, hot dogs and fries. Naturally we partook of those things. Because a friend who ordered before me went with two chili dogs and a basket of fries, I of course had to get one chili dog and two baskets of fries.

I observed the first time we went there that the chief server bore a striking resemblance to Jennifer Lawrence. I didn't mention it then, but I did so to one of my friends, who mentioned it to the server in question. This sparked a brief conversation about her feelings on the matter, which were not especially favorable. She did say she liked the novels on which "The Hunger Games" and its soon-to-be-made sequels are based. Jennifer Lawrence is the star of those films, of course.

Trying to influence her more towards expressing a positive impression of the film and its handling of the source material, I brought up Woody Harrelson's performance, which I thought was good. The server left our table in what was an empty or nearly empty bar, and I was uniformly condemned for making such a false move. The thing to do, they chided me, was to keep the focus on how our comparison of her to the actress who plays the lead in the movie meant that she was very attractive

It is a sadly common occurrence, this bad move at a critical moment. A similar thing happened a good while back with a waitress at a sports bar. I overplayed her expressed interest in my fondness for University Of Florida football, and she very reasonably recoiled from that. I really must learn to get from the initial period of promise past the shaky interval that precedes commitment. Maybe it'll come next time.