The Soapbox Archives:

• August 6, 2023
  It's just my opinion, but when someone starts off a sentence with "I heard that...", that's the start of a conspiracy theory and possibly the start of "alternative facts".

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  Different venues (magazines, websites, etc.) have different criteria for rating restaurants. Of course, they would consider how good the food tasted, how it was presented/plated to the customer, how clean and updated the restaurant looked.

  I would like these raters an additional criteria to consider, to subtract a point or star or diamond off the rating. These reviewers should stick around during the last half-hour that the restaurant is open and watch what the staff does to prepare for the end of the night. Do they start sweeping the floors? Do they start cleaning and there are active ceiling fans? Imagine you're at the restaurant later in the evening, possibily close to closing and the staff starts sweeping the floors. Maybe they're smart enough to sweep away from you. Would you be concerned that whatever is on the floor is now airborne? What if there were ceiling moving air around. Perhaps any dirt and dust were moved a little off the floor; those ceiling fans would make sure that dirt and dust was now moving on the air currents created by the ceiling fans. Think that dirt and dust won't reach your food?

  Just my opinion, but I think restaurants should pay the workers to stick around after the last customer leaves so no one sees the obvious cleaning. There should be no plates, or cups, or silverware out on the tables until after the cleaning is done. no one should have to be concerned how clean the diningware on the tables are.

• August 13, 2023
  This is very late, mostly because the dance scene had been shut down for the last three or four years due to the pandemic, but we'd like to congratulate Mike & Jessica on their marriage. We hadn't seen them in at least three years so we didn't know. At the latest Swing City dance, Mike had announced that his wife Jessica had baked a cake for the event (not to mention the gluten-free cupcakes). As soon as he said "My wife...", one of my friends yelled out "Your WHAT?". :-)

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  7th Anniversary, 2022

  I was amused when we were watching Hallmark's "The Veil" (the first of three) and during a scene when the main female character was helping a friend shop for wedding dresses, the friend was trying on the same dress that my now-wife wore, a tea-length dress designed by Oleg Cassini, draper to the stars. When you buy one of his designs, you get a tabletop book with pictures of all the celebrities who wore his dresses (including Audrey Hepburn, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, and Grace Kelly, for example). It was a perfect dress for our wedding because we were going to be dancing. The thing that I remember about it is that some married-people gave us grief because we hadn't gotten the dress and it was two months before the wedding (August, 2015). They were giving us horror stories about the stress of finding a dress over the year before the wedding, not that they offered to help my then-fiancee go shopping for a dress. I felt vindicated when my wife found her dress within two weeks and it was a perfect dress; absolutely no drama and no stress, and no size alterations. I remember thinking, "Damn, she's pretty!", when she came down the aisle.

  And the practical side of me was thinking, it's a designer dress and the price was insanely inexpensive, especially when compared to a lot of other wedding dresses, and we get our money's worth out of it. My wife will be wearing it again next month when we go out to dinner for our anniversary (I think we're down to $100 per wearing). Some people spend thousands of dollars for a dress to wear one time in their life. Denyce wears a designer dress on that day every year.

• August 20, 2023
  

• August 27, 2023