So a couple weekends ago, my friend and her husband came into town and wanted me to drive them around Hollywood doing the tourist thing, which I was happy to take a day off from work to do. Our wandering led us to Mann’s Chinese Theater where crews were setting up for the premiere of “Fred Claus.” Hoping we might get a glimpse of Vince Vaughn, we hung out for a while until we all decided we were pretty hungry and realized it would be best to find a restaurant close by because parking in Hollywood, especially on a premiere night, sucks.

The only restaurant on the block happened to be Hooters and my girlfriend, whose sister had worked at Hooters in Nebraska, got excited and said that the food was really good there, and so that’s where we went. It was my first time at a Hooters.

So we all sit down at the table and start perusing the menu. After a couple of minutes a short girl with a cute figure (although I wasn’t particularly impressed with the size of her tits and wasn’t sure they deserved the title of “Hooters” which implies better than average titties just by drawing attention to the idea of them) comes up to the table to take our drink order. She was wearing the typical orange dolphin shorts with tights on underneath and way, way, way too much makeup. I figured with all that makeup, she was either extremely attractive underneath, or excessively hideous, but since it would’ve taken an ice pick and a good ten minutes of manual labor to find out, I decided not to care.

She seemed normal at first… a typical waitress, perhaps a bit too bubbly as she took our drink order, writing it down on her little pad. I ordered my standard diet Coke, my friend’s husband ordered a Bud on tap, and my friend got a Corona Light.

“Would you like a glass?” the waitress asked. I always find it amusing when waitresses bring women glasses for their beers. We all know how unladylike it would be to drink beer directly from the bottle and how heavy a beer bottle can become on the third or fourth tip upward. So my friend says yes and the drinks are brought.

I, of course, still need another minute when she comes back to take the order.

“No problem,” the girl says to me and then turns to my friend and just stares down at the empty beer bottle on the table for a moment. Suddenly, she starts to giggle, prompting us to all look up from our menus.

“Oh… heheheheehhe….” she says tossing her long, brown hair behind her. “I just had a total blond moment.”

We all just look at her, not sure what to say. So she decides to explain…

“I looked at your empty beer bottle and was gonna ask you if you were ready for another one but then I realized I’d brought you a glass so you couldn’t have drank it that fast.”

The glass, by the way, full of beer, was sitting about three inches from the empty beer bottle on a table that’s about 2 feet by 3 feet total.

When none of us responded because we weren’t sure how… she repeated, “I’m such a blond.” Dismissive, and maybe even proud.

Because I’m making a concerted effort not to be such a bitch to stupid people anymore, I let out an obligatory little laugh which I hoped could be construed as polite or at least, an attempt at female bonding. I didn’t even roll my eyes when she walked off. God, I’m becoming a nice person, I was thinking until my self-adulation was interrupted by an ear-splitting “Hooters Girls!” and a metal clip holding an order slicing through the air above my head on its way from the waitress station to the line cooks.

WTF? I turn in time to see the line cook pull an order off the clip and hurl it back on the cable.

Can’t they just use a computer? I thought, but then remembered the “blond moment” we’d just witnessed and decided that even a computer system can’t make up for too many of those.

On the second go around, we ordered our food. My order went smoothly, so did my friend’s. And then it came time for her husband to order. He ordered the hot wings.

As soon as the order came out of his mouth, our waitress shot her tiny fake nailed French manicured hand into the air in front of her face fingers spread.

“We have five levels of hot sauce,” she said and with the index finger of her other hand, pointed at her thumb. “Mild.” Then she pointed at her index finger. “Medium” Then she pointed at the middle finger of the hand held staunchly in front of her face. “Hot…”

“I’ll take Hot,” he says, not realizing the autopilot had been turned on and she was required to finish listing them.

“3 Mile Island,” she said, her voice rising an octave, “and 9-11!”

“Hot,” he said again.

“Hot is the middle one, ” she said as if he might not have understood the lofty concept that she so clearly expressed a moment ago by pointing to her middle finger.

I wanted to ask her why she thought they call it “three mile island,” just because I was curious as to what her answer might be… but then I remembered that thing about me not being a bitch, so I didn’t. Although it may have given me even more fodder for this post.

Half way through our meal, she came back with her little calendar in her hands and flipped through each page, trying to get my friend’s husband to buy one. When he said he didn’t want one, she set it on the table and told him he could think about it. He was busy watching the football game, and I don’t think he spent a whole lot of time thinking about it. About ten minutes later, when she saw no one had touched it, she came back over and retrieved it before it could get splattered with the sauce represented so clearly by her middle finger.

So that was my first experience at Hooters. I was a little disappointed. The food wasn’t that good and the girls weren’t that pretty. Their uniforms weren’t very flattering either. In a town where hot midwestern girls migrate thinking they can be the next Cameron Diaz only to find that they’re destined to share an overpriced studio apartment with future prostitutes, hoping the homeless drug addict that sleeps on the corner will someday stop pissing on their front door, I thought the women would be much more attractive.

But you can’t have it all, right? Beauty and brains are a scarce combination.

So with that said, here is my advice to the Hooters waitresses:

1. Plastic surgery will probably serve you better, and be cheaper than, an entire bottle of eyeliner and foundation ever will.

2. I know manicures are expensive and don’t last long, but most of us can remember a list of five hot sauces (particularly when they’re listed in a logical, progressive order) without the two-hand demonstration.

3. If you have a blond moment and are lucky enough to have kept it inside so that no one realizes you just had a blond moment, go ahead and keep it inside forever.

That’s my advice. If I can help just one Hooters waitress, I’ve done my good deed for the day.