A hair by any other name.

Hey D.

So, “The Great Fig Debacle” (stay with me, it is slightly complicated):

Megs and I had lunch at Pascal’s restaurant on Saturday afternoon. We each ordered salads and everything was fine and dandy till we spotted the longest, darkest, rattiest clump of dreaded, foul hair, drenched in a piece of lettuce in Meg’s salad. The waiter approached and noticed the ghastly sight and quickly apologized and removed the salad. We wanted to make sure he knew that we were not fussy girls and would never tell Pascal about the hair and gave him this sort of easy breezy wink. We were on his team.

Salad #2 was delivered to Megan. In it, we found a small piece of hair that was attached to a fig. Pascal joined us at this moment and noticed that we were examining the hair. He proclaimed that it was indeed the hair of a human and returned it to the waiter. Moments later, Pascal’s brother joined us and Pascal grumbled something to him about the hair in our Salad #2. His brother whispered in French under his breath, “well, it was a fig hair and the girls just don’t understand that.” P-skizz then totally threw us under the bus and agreed with his brother that it was clearly a fig hair and we just “don’t understand.” “Pascal, I can understand what you are saying in French and just because we don’t cook often does not mean I don’t know what a fig hair is,” I exclaimed bitterly.

We proceeded to explain that it was possible – even likely – that the hair in Salad #2 was a fig hair, but there was no conceivable way that the hair in S#1 was anything but the hair from a long and dark haired human being. Pascal and his brother repeated in a very condescending way, “you girls just don’t understand that figs have little pieces of hair and that was all you saw.” At this point, we became incensed and called the waiter over to back our story up. He arrived with three other waiters and the host who all explained to us that what we saw was nothing but a fig hair.

Now, not only were my annoying boyfriend and his brother speaking to us like stupid little girls who don’t know the diff between a fig hair and a nasty clump of human hair, but also, the waiters have completely turned against us and are pretending like Salad #1 (which only a select few people saw) never existed! By now, I was nearly shouting at Pascal and we had definitively and swiftly gone from being the non-fussy, cool as cucumber customers who don’t rat on the waiters, to two, wildly out of control and prissy girls who don’t even know what a fig hair is.

It ended with us storming out of the restaurant and Pascal coming home and apologizing to me that I was, “so very upset about a simple fig hair in your salad.” I had to walk around the block several times before returning and telling him that if we hoped to maintain a relationship, we would never again speak of the fig incident.

Eek,
Julia