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You may have noticed that things of late have not been
going too well. American body bags are coming home from Iraq on a daily
basis. The U.N. headquarters in Baghdad has been blown to smithereens by
crazed terrorists. The Episcopalians are on the verge of launching themselves
into schizoid territory as a result of one gay bishop. And Californians may
well toss duly elected Gov. Gray Davis into the Pacific and replace him with
a muscle-bound Viennese bodybuilder whose father was a Nazi. Bad as all these things are, none of them rivals the
pornographic pickle in which Williamsburg area residents find themselves as a
result of the most shocking news to reach their ears in years: Hooters Girls
may be coming to town. Not unexpectedly, the tut-tutters and anal retentive, anti-anatomy moralists are
either taking to what they consider the ethical high ground or plummeting to
earth with a severe case of the vapors at the thought of buxom young women
serving hot wings to lascivious young men.
And once again they’re all piling on the Yorkies for
making ugly with the revered and refined entrances to the Holy of Holies,
otherwise known as Colonial Williamsburg. In fact, Jeanne Zeidler, the Mayor
of Williamsburg and apparent leader of the NIMBY crew, insisted in an
interview with the Gazette that “Williamsburg is a brand that means quality
to people, that means taste, that means education. I don’t think [Hooters]
belongs on one of our main tourist entrance corridors.” Taste? Quality? Has the good mayor driven down Richmond
Road lately? Has she any idea what architectural monstrosities and tacky
businesses both the city and counties have allowed to surface like gigantic
warts along that tourist entrance corridor? Can Hooters be any worse than
those roadside fungal excrescences that have mushroomed up to blast the eyes
of residents and tourists as they enter Williamsburg from James City? I don’t think so. No, what really bugs the Bible-belted nay-sayers is
their belief that the success of Hooters is based on one thing: sex appeal.
And sex appeal is just not a family value. In fact, anything that has to do
with reproductive or nutritive human body parts is not a family value, though
these, ironically, are the very parts from which families derive.
Furthermore, anything that is not a family value is not a Colonial
Williamsburg value. Hence, it is totally inappropriate, reason the sex
sermonizers, to plop a Hooters in the midst of a bunch of family restaurants.
You just never know when the Hooters Girls might flutter out en masse from
their iniquitous den, invade adjacent family restaurants and start flopping
body parts all over in front of impressionable children and their pietistic
parents. My response to all this is that these puritanical
purveyors of negativity simply haven’t done their homework when it comes to
Hooters and the Hooters Girls. To begin with, and quite contrary to public opinion, the
Hooters logo is not ballooning bosoms. It is, in fact, the owl, or the
hooter, that is emblazoned on every Hooters Girls T-shirt. As we all know from our Greek history, the owl was the
symbol of wisdom and intelligence. Hence, it was also the logo of the goddess
Athena, who, in one of her capacities, was associated with wisdom, and
especially wisdom in warfare. Born from the head of Zeus after he swallowed
her mother, Athena counseled the Greeks in the Trojan War and eventually led
them to victory. In other words, she was a goddess born from a male who led
other males to a life of honor and virtue.
And so it is with Hooters, which claims not to be a
family restaurant, but rather a “neighborhood place” whose clientele is, for
the most part, men between the ages of 25 and 54. It is a place where young
men gather and, like their Greek counterparts, imbibe spirits and enjoy good
food under the tutelage of the owl-endowed Hooters Girls. Dinner at Hooters
is not at all unlike those ancient symposiums at which men met to discuss
matters of major import, such as the nature of love and the latest football
scores. Thus, Hooters and the Hooters Girls would waft perfectly
through those Williamsburg educational breezes so highly touted by mayor
Zeidler. Indeed, as suggested by one of the more lucid items in
the Last Word, Colonial Williamsburg itself might well profit from turning
one of its strait-laced restaurants into a Hooters. Or imagine the boom in
business that would result from replacing those stolid, trussed-up CW
interpreters with short-shorted Hooters Girls. Finally, if CW would loosen the reins of historicity a
bit, it might even consider turning the Governor’s Palace into a Playboy
mansion to be used as a training facility not only for bunnies, but for
Hooters Girls as well. In the final analysis, there’s really no reason to be
sucking up Valium or Prozac because of the arrival of Hooters. Like the
earlier Harvey Girls, Hooters Girls
are quite harmless. So, lighten up, and let our young men discover the wisdom
and happiness of the good life amidst the joy and succulence of the spicy
treats served up by these latter-day Athenas. |
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lewleadbeater.com Copyright 2002 All Rights Reserved
email: LWL@lewleadbeater.com |
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