“Wouldn’t it be nice if someone knew what they wanted when they came in?”

Well, let me you this, jackass, this horrible world is overflowing with filthy Burger Kings where I am certain you may find plenty of greasy mouthbreathers to stagger to your work station and demand a ‘#2′ or the ‘Valu-Kit’ or whatever they name the rubbish they box for sale in national chain restaurants. You could skate over to MLK Blvd and fill out an application immediately, forgoing the reading the remainder of this surly rant. As it happens, you choose to work behind the counter in a boutique coffee house where the menu is not reduced to efficient numerical packages, and the overwhelming majority of the populace does not have a comprehensive and intimate knowledge of every cake and tart in your case.

One wonders, as I do, what it was that you were doing that was so important that made my approach to the counter such a distraction. I would expect that you are in this cafe for the term of your shift, which is the same number of hours regardless of what any moment’s task entails, whether it is cutting eight dollar slices of peanut butter cake, hosing human fæces from the bathroom sink, or standing sedately at the register when a customer tries to order.

Given a choice, what else would you do with your time at the cafe? Were there many lives depending on you checking the messages your iPhone? Were you on the verge of breaking through a gene sequence that would prevent cancer or provide telepathy for future generations of humans? Was Obama texting you for advice on how to get 30,000 troops to haul ass to Afghanistan before accepting a Nobel Peace prize?

Not Gallery Espresso.

In the event, no one asked you to stop what you are doing and ‘wait for me’. I walked into the building and stopped five feet, minimum, from the counter to have a look. This tableauxist is the one least known for meticulous descriptions of a cafe’s physical complexion and superficies, but I do take notice. For these are those ‘things I can’t live without’ that are listed in my online profile, but they are not something I can sit down and catalog in any cohesive form. Why do you think I only write internally monologued biographies?

If my apparent dispassionate observations come across as confusion or befuddlement, maybe I am too easily distracted; perhaps if you tore down the display stands hocking earrings made from seashells and hot glue and demounted the matted laser prints of potted plants and shutters, and you instead put up a massive banner that states ‘No Vegan Items’, then I could rush the counter with out the need to spend a minute scanning every piece of text on site before my approach for a coffee.

What Ho! Can you imagine my surprise when upon my ordering ‘a coffee‘, you had to ask ‘what kind?‘?

“Wouldn’t it be nice if a barista could just take a simple order?”

There is only one thing ‘coffee’ can mean. I didn’t say I needed ‘coffee + soymilk’ or ‘coffee + sugar’ or ‘coffee + hazelnuts’. You don’t pour a sack of flour into a bowl and say ‘here’s your cake’; if you add anything to coffee then it is no longer ‘coffee’. If I say ‘coffee’, all I want in the cup is coffee. There is no ‘kind’, if I wanted a ‘kind of coffee’, I would have asked for coffee with a kind of something.

The only way your question would have been valid would be if you had a dozen varietals and/or roasts to choose from, which you did not, or if you offered a variety of brewing methods, such a vacuum pots, french press, the method method, or cowboy coffee. Even then, I would expect your question to be, ‘How would you like that coffee brewed, superuser?‘, since the ‘kind’ of coffee remains the same, but you only serve the standard auto drip.

This is cafe tableaux; when it comes to writing about about the nature of a cafe’s coffee, or the coffee + smilk, if you please, only I can decide what is apropos. To the reader who wonders, ‘hey brah, why don’t you devote more time to the coffee/baristas/lighting/whatever other hook I feel is so vital?‘, the answer is ‘because this is cafe tableaux‘.

However, in contradiction to my usual affected aloofness with regards to the rabble’s criticisms, to nip that shit, I’ll tell you now: I have found nothing remarkable about the coffee at Gallery Espresso, except that it was convenient and never hot enough. I’ve never touched the food there, but I once rendezvoused here with a couple of skinnies from pie v cake; they could not stop raving about the non-vegan pecan pie, and I recall they went back for second pieces. Also, you need a key to use the head. That should cover everything.

Anyway, this ‘tableau’ is obviously little more than a rambling diatribe. Gallery Espresso seems nice enough; it is just that one barista is a bit of a cunt. It strikes me that Gallery is a place is more suited for tourists to get sandwiches after visiting the Forrest Gump bench or the Girl Scouts house than it is a place for locals to meet for their Sunday morning Reading Circle (this week: The Red and The Black), so a barista could call you a ‘shit stain’ to your face for all the difference it would make, as you won’t be around town for a second visit anyway.

This could probably be taken up in klatch – and would have been if anyone used it – but I wonder if cafe tableaux might develop a classification system for the various but limited cafe typologies. It is not for a lack of cafes or trying that this superuser rarely posts new tableaux; you see, unlike JHT, I am unable to eat dung and shit silver — trust me, I have seen the man in person and it coats him like dew every morn. The truth is, believe it or not, I am debilitated by depression and loneliness 9 days out of 10, and the chances that anything noteworthy transpires at the moment I visit a cafe are slim to none; it is this fading of one cafe experience into the next as ‘my life drips like coffee down the drain‘ that unmans me as I stare at an empty jotter night after night.

Allow me to assure the reader, I have tried to enliven events, for your sakes — manipulating craigslist missed connections all week before going in to judge the employees’ and customers’ behaviour, or pouring coffee on a cute girl’s notebook whilst she is in the restroom then telling her that I saw the guy who did it running out the door. However, though we are not objective here, it seems like an impropriety to affect the story with such tactics; this is not ‘gonzo tableaux’.

So! All of these cafes look the same to me. After describing one of each type in the first round of tableaux, I have no zest for listing their details again and again. If this site were to take any lesson from Burger King, we could just stamp out ‘visited a #2′ and maybe keep the attention of the baristas at Gallery:

1. Strip Mall Cafe — Clad with cheap wood veneer, tile floor, and neon. Owned by a wife-husband team or a sole proprietor with another, reliable source of income; they have heard that this Starbucks thing has made billions of dollars, so they want the same from cafe. Bottles of syrup prominently displayed. Everything looks cheap and cash-and-carry, because they put bare minimum of profit back into store, for the rest goes to buy a new flat screen or smart-phone. Lasts 10-15 months.

2. Business Cafe – Run by someone who is not particularly into coffee or cafe ‘culture’, but knows how to run a service business. Usually savvy enough to leave coffee/cafe decisions to someone else. Likely have broader menu than just coffee drinks. On the ball about fixing things.

3. Passion Cafe – People love coffee and will do anything to keep store running, like it is their baby or puppy. Similar to the Strip Mall, but the owners are more earnest, and have quit their jobs and invested all savings into cafe. Trying too many things at once to make everyone happy, they burn out in 8-10 months, putting up a sign that says ‘coming back soon’. Probably would be the type of cafe run by most contributors to cafe tableaux.

4. BoHo – Mismatched chairs and cups. Lamps on tables. Menu is hand written in chalk cute names for ‘specialty’ drinks that every other cafe also has (ex, espresso shot in coffee: red eye, shot in the dark, dive bomber, brown star). Meets most people’s conception of a cafe, because it is what they would see on tv or movies, but it is not the actual ‘cafe’ they go to (see 5).

5. Corporate Lite – Not a chain, yet, so you don’t feel like a complete asshole for visiting, but you do feel like an asshole lite. Menu is a printed sign that matches the furnishings. They have store-bought prints framed on the wall. A logo is printed on cups and paper takeaway menus. They are most likely to open a drive-thru.

6. College Cash Barn – Near university or similar high traffic area. Owners don’t have to do anything special but keep the electricity on, and the money just pours in the doors. Could also fit into other types’ classifications, which is unfortunate in the case of Strip Mall or Corporate Lite, as they will last for years.

This is a work in progress; feel free to add your own.

For the sake of disclosure, and to defuse a barrage of charges of elitism and class warfare, it shall be known that this tableauxist was himself a barista for six (6) years and in that time was only gruff with a single customer — in a case that was justified. All disgruntle and crabbiness was directed at the other baristas, until the day I had to quit, so as to avoid being ‘taken outside and taught how to shut [my] mouth‘, but that is a tableau for another day…

However, it was mildly soothing scene in one respect; I was liberated from a specific hunger: soymilk was cheap and tofu was local; I was finally freed from my steady diet of sour apples, budget digestive biscuits, and boxed multi-vitamin ‘dryck’. On the other, hand I was marooned on a barrier island with only sporadic communication with my outside world, narrow as it is, without a bicycle for the first time since 2003, and obliged to a task too grim to describe in the pages of cafe tableaux.

Days were wasted traversing the island on foot to the county library, where I could attach my portable computer to the internet and frantically click through dozens of websites dedicated to polling of detestable groups – NASCAR Dads and War Moms — and to deconstructions of Youtube videos for Senate campaigns in states I never cared to otherwise know about, save for in my dreams of an exhaustive study of highway rest areas about which I have mused to everyone I have ever met.

It’s difficult to imagine now the public mood of those yond days in the context of what has followed. Voting is for suckers; there is no doubt about that, but the manufactured drama of elections can suck almost any cynic into the charade. Now we all know that it does not matter one way or the other who is acting as president when he or she is not doing jack shit, but back then, we were on pins and needles, wondering about some Aryan Nation maniacs assassinating a candidate, dreading the day an air-headed empty suit would succeed to the office upon the death septuagenarian Vietcong Candidate, and tasting something hypocritical in our mouths as the ‘grass roots’ candidate spent more than million dollars on one night of 30 minute teevee commercials.

Despite my obsession with the ‘national conversation’, in moments amidst the hours spent at the public library refreshing sites like the hysterical dailykos, the more rational fivethirtyeight, and even the crude wonkette, I pushed the keyboard to the back of my cubicle and scrawled a few ‘notes’ in longhand in the margins of my viking novel-in-progress, which, by the way, was conceived twelve (12) years earlier in a shower across the hall from Peter Zellner’s dorm room near Boston — not in Sweden the previous month.

It was this penciling of gibberish that caught the attention of one of the library maidens, one responsible for re-shelving audio tapes of Carol Higgins Clark works and giving out 30 minute passes for the computer stations, most likely because I was the first person she had seen inside the building not using a cell phone or arguing over the right to play World of Warcraft without headphones. After thirty days of my warming the same seat in the rear corner of the biography stacks, she approached me and asked what it is that I was always scribbling on a ‘graph paper’ notepad.

“it’s this story about these three months i spent building a cabin in the Ardennes”
“wow, is it true?”
“i only write autobiographies”

She stooped over my shoulder and scanned my spiral bound Pocket Notebook; I fanned my hands to cover most of the thumbnail drawings of battle axes and ravens.

“you should come to our short story salon, ok? we meet every week and exchange stories”
“is that something i can do online?”
“no we meet at a coffee house and give each other feedback”

I am not really one for a salon, but I am one for a comely young dish with a bookish look and, on occasion, a slight aura of crunch.

I don’t know how to compose short stories, either, but I do know how to lie about my name and how to steal things off the web. Thus, I was introduced to the salon as ‘Jagger Herzt Trefry’ before presenting several of my ‘Decay’ pieces the next week, fragments of a narrative edited within the bounds of Creative Commons license to remove the more lurid sexual innuendo in the source material.

It was after the presentation of one of these pieces one night at Sentient Bean, a piece in which I neglected to discern, and therefore expunge, a metaphor for the vulva represented by Sepulveda Boulevard as it climbs away from Venice, that the fine lass from the library approached my easy chair.

“ok, it’s really cool that a guy writer can be so in touch with his feminine side”
“ok”
“no i mean your story you read tonight, ok?”
“yeah that was like really hard to do. i don’t think i’ll do that again”
“dude you totally should. it was so awesome…all these other guys just write about spies and hating their fathers and stuff, ok”
“uhhhhmm, i do have some more things like this one, but it is pretty hard to read them aloud in front of these guys –”
“fuck those guys”
“–especially the guy in the fucking ed hardy shirt and crocs”
“dude those guys are losers, ok? you need to write more like that shit tonight, ok”
“yeah…maybe i will send you something.”
“that would be rad ok?”

I hauled ass back ‘home’ and scoured my namesake’s partner site for more of the effeminate compositions. The best piece with a woman’s touch that I could find was an sketch for a work of awkward erotica about a father and son. I bent the genders a bit and removed the most alarming segment – describing an episode under a tree on Xmas eve – then sent an email to the young library trick from a spoofed account intimating that I would be more comfortable sharing this story in person, on a hard copy, not digitally and infinitely reproducible, suggesting that we meet somewhere peaceful where she could read it without distractions “like maybe your apartment or something.”

Whilst I waited at her kitchen table, staring at her knees and other select parts, she turned over the last of the loose leaf pages onto which I had transcribed the holiday tale.

“do all your guys shoot themselves at the end?”
“no! it’s rare. i actually prefer the notion of a hanging –”
“god that’s morbid”
“–preferably with like a belt or the cord from a motel room blinds”
“dude”
“what’s the difference? in the long run?”
“it’s not funny ok”
“shit, i’m not famous for writing fucking comedies”
“well i have a thing about it because my dad was a suicide victim, ok?”
“hmm” there goes that.
“he did it after my mom contracted breast cancer –”

Jesus Fucking Christ. I wondered if I could text someone to call me with an ‘emergency’.

“– he couldn’t bear to see her all sickly and weak from the chemo, ok?”
“uh ok”

She shielded her face with her hand, fingertips on her forehead, as her eyes began to water. No! No! No! No! No!

“you know when i was in Sweden we had these lamps we had to sit under for like two hours a day so we wouldn’t kill ourselves…because it is dark there perpetually”

Her shoulders trembled as she gasped a silent sob; I looked past her neck at the clock on the stove that indicated only 20 minutes had passed since I arrived…

And when I awoke, I was alone, this bird had flown
So I lit a fire, isn’t it good Norwegian wood.

Shortly after 6am, I scratched out a note about needing to be “on set” at 8am and stuck it to the refrigerator with some ‘Poetry’ magnets spelling out ‘Anticipation Settles Accounts”. I swallowed a few gulps of pulp-free orange juice from the carton, swiped an Odwalla Superfood bar from the pantry, and crept into the hall. I held my breath as I turned the deadbolt to open the door and climbed along the iron handrail down to the sidewalk to avoid stepping on the creaky wooden stairs. Upon reaching the landing, I sprinted down the remaining brick steps and jogged around the corner towards Broughton Street.

I headed towards my uncle’s sweet shop near Habersham, where I napped on the sidewalk in front of the entrance until he arrived to open for business.  I begged him to loan me his Prius so I could drive back ‘home’, but naturally he refused, suggesting instead that I use the Islands Shuttle that takes people out to the beach from Emmet Park. After using a trip to the bathroom as a pretext to steal two cans of cocoa from his storeroom, I thanked him for the advice and ran to catch the shuttle.

Knowing that no place serving coffee on Tybee would be open and feeling a little gypped by the promise of ‘Super’ in the Odwalla bar, I implored the driver to let me exit the shuttle at the traffic light in front of Davis Produce and Circle K, and I walked the half-mile to Johnny Mercer at low tide, the path reeking of sulfur and the flinty stench found in an old tackle box or the shitter at a Captain D’s.

By ten o’clock, I had reached the ‘Islands Center’ strip mall, figuring this would be the closest I ever found myself to the Savannah Bagel Cafe at ‘breakfast time’, so I crossed the street at the sight of their mildewed sign and anonymous box of shit and stucco, dripped sweat all over their floor and tables as I drank overcooked coffee from a foam cup and ate the best rosemary and garlic bagel outside of New York City and West Los Angeles. I never again saw the interior of the island’s library.

It would be foolish to take space in this forum to decry the homogenizing effect on world culture that corporate retailers have. In fact, this entire project is in a sense a repository of the twists, discrepancies, extremes, both positive and negative, that independently owned coffeeshops provide us with. This repository exists to preserve their memory when they are gone. It is also not really the goal of this project to bitch about the people who prefer to go to these corporate establishments, who like to joke about it being ‘their thing,’ while they boast about their inability to survive several hours without a latte from CBTL. It is however our purview, in the intersection of these worlds, to lambast the fool who marches into Savannah Coffee Roasters Cafe to ask them where the Starbucks is located.

It is entertaining for querulous people to mask their critiques or complaints within their declarations that they are not going to complain or criticize. For instance, in response to this gentlemen, the tableautaur might say, “I am going to refrain from making some obvious statement like, ‘You are looking for a starbucks? Close your eyes and walk 30 meters.’” Such statements like these are easy ways to pretend that you are bigger than the culprit and too disinterested to descend into a debate about the merits of such a booji boy. So I will refrain from making such statements as well!

The look on the Starbucks-bound pedestrian’s face characterized the whole larger exchange. It was one of guilty self-satisfaction.

Like a bloated red-faced bank manager, freshly shorn face dappled with sweat from strolling in the sultry spring morning without his parasol, he loses his way, this portion of town is unfamiliar to him, it brings fear to his giant heart, weakened and fat as it shuffles watery blood past his sock-garters into his oedemic ankles, he ducks his head into the cleanest hovel he can find, even then having to push aside mangy curs and urchins with blistered mud-caked hands aside while his eyes adjust to the darkness, he yells out into the dim space, after tucking a finger beneath his starched collar to let his sweaty bosom cool and clearing his throat, “I say, is there anyone down there? I seem to have lost my way… could anyone tell me on which square the Havelocks, Buzzy and Veronica, are having their garden party? I am already frightfully late!”

So it was that the humble folk would offer to help, to no benefit of theirs. The gentleman of course is satisfied that people are generally decent, and that he can continue to enjoy his high standing. But beyond that, in his sheltered and linear existence, he feels proud in his pity for these people who have chosen the low road, but only because he knows that he has made all the right decisions in his life and there have never been moments to look back or cast a stray glance.

But sir, you missed that the people in the den, whose faces were obscured in shade and in the sweat running down your eyebrowless forehead, were smiling, were talking about ghosts and aviation, were smelling the freshly roasted beans and attempting to guess how many were filling the bin, were ruminating on the pleasure of the trek to the bathroom which took them through the lobby of the adjacent building, down a service hallway, and into the lightless bowels of some nowhere building on a corner of some sundrenched square down the road from Starbucks.

Sometimes in this line of work you drink a cup of blackjo “just because.” It is not the lure of the steamy low lit den with pressed tin ceilings, or the wide open transparency of a corner shop with white walls and stripe-shirted baristi, or even the desperation of the pedestrian in the strange city looking for somewhere to take a beastly dump spawned by their morning cup at one of the aformentioned types. Sometimes you just want to go in for the sole reason of getting to make some notes about the place, to get it, as an oddity, under the belt of the project.

The cobblestone promenade along the river in Savannah is at once a rich stretch of dank and dark alleys with ridiculously steep and narrow stairs cascading down from Bay Street, with storefronts and establishments in low hovels like something out of a Dickens novel, or at least the one that I have read. It is a place that doesn’t like pirates for the same reason that hipsters like pirates. I don’t know why hipsters like pirates. But this street looks like a pirate maybe once strode it, or at least a longshoreman, his boots covered in algae and his teeth like barnacles thirsty for mead. There is swill running through the deep joints in the cobblestones. When you stand in a shadow the air is cold and wet. Though on land, you are surrounded by water, condensing on walls, pooled on the ground, siphoning into your lungs. It is a waterfront. Barely.

At some point, if you can look down at the ground long enough without bumping into someone’s enormous belly or tripping over a kid geeked up on saltwater taffy, you notice that the liquid running through the cobbles is not some kind of archaic dew, but the combination of outboard motor gas, spilled beer, and fraternity urine; this is the cocktail of the post-mardi-gras sewer, the post-coital sweat of a city overrun by bros and fatties.

The streetscape of River Street, if you can look up long enough not to trip over someone’s dog, is equally deceptive. The substreet hovels with solid doors and no awnings give way to the backs of classy looking antique stores above, accessed on metal bridges that span the alley below Bay street, and an enormous hotel spans River Street itself, touching down in between the promenade and the water with a depressing and vapid glass meeting room, the kind that isnt supposed to have windows, yet because it does, probably has to draw its curtains to keep revellers from Molly O’Mulligan’s from pressing their ass cheeks against the glass during a social for Korean War vets.

So you dive into Vic’s, what the hell? and leave the fiasco behind. The only occupant of a table downstairs is a filthy white microwave. You step down into the aura of a different kind of waterfront. The expectancy and tiredness of the interior transport you to an offseason European seaside town, perhaps by the beach in Marseilles, in January. The beachlets are fenced off and closed and the hunks from London and Basel are in the Dolomites warming their heels with a snifter of cognac in front of a fire, a flannel riding blanket covering their slippered feet, propped on a chest filled with more blankets. Only the locals and the cheap tourists sat, in silence, collecting dust and looking abstractly as the sun hit the sidewalk coolly.

I personally revel in this sort of ennui of place. I grew up by the ocean and it summons in me the afternoons in the houses of friends with divorced parents where the terrazzo floors were blue and shimmering with the late afternoon skies, or it makes me want to take a nap, no matter how wide awake I am, or gives me the feeling that I could nap on my feet, while climbing a seaside cliff to get a better view of where the sun is disappearing to, but still with the disinteredness I possessed walking down into Vic’s to get some autodrip in a styrofoam cup that I force myself to drink on a bench outside the candy store before going in to watch the taffy slide down the little system of catwalks into a large rotary system of buckets out of which stores typically sell nails in bulk.

All small town memories and practices, even the landlocked post industrial wastelands of east Kansas, even the moments of the isolated individual encased in the largest of cities, can be captured in the smell of churning bodies of water and the brief glimmer of the falling but still lofty sun on a wavelet, even if you cannot see it from the basement through whose dusty transom the light communicates, stirred either by a single breeze or by a wading seabird, left alone by his peers to break off some peace and space in the offseason.

the ‘great’ film paura nella città dei morti viventi was filmed in savannah. the film is often ‘lauded’ for its atmospheric quality and of course the tight soundtrack by fabio frizzi. it is a touchstone of fine fin de la d?cennie (the 70s that is) italian incoherence with a preference for evocative imagery and non-sequitur setpieces over continuity and plot. wandering through savannah, from river street south, through forsyth park, with the iconic presence of spanish moss, the painted ladies, and the looming presence of parks, dark in the night, and lightless shaded in day, leaves you with the notion that mr. fulci need not have made any great attempts to infuse his film with ominous atmosphere or absent causality, but merely turned his camera on the city and environs.

nay, the sentient bean isn’t overrun with zombii, or haunted with lugubrious, pale isolation in the light cast through the moss over park avenue, or run through as if it were a pavilion with the black ground and white skies blocked off into a grid. but perhaps this is its saving grace. the shop does what those fine italian splatter films and the finest coffeeshops do best, make little to no sense in a context of continuity. the sentient bean upsets your expectations, it steps out from the repetition of heavy atmosphere and serves as a counterpoint to what, after walking for hours through a city that grows homogenous in its allegiance to a particular breath of historic air, not breathed in 300 years, begins to feel like tedium. at the end of the stroll that takes you up the long axis of forsyth park, you meet a dead end. this block, unlike the rest aligned with this path, is unbroken, and you are startled that you are now facing a building, rather than the continuation of your stroll. here is the end of the historic district, a clear border to the cultivated gloom, and a shop straddling worlds like so many do.

falling at the edge of a fine district, the coffeeshop is never quite at home with the bistros, the boutiques, or the boulangeries. the coffeeshop, like the chameleon, eyes the world in two distinct directions, yet always connects them with its presence, its surety. it is always conscious of its base functions as a low lit drug den, where we converge, whether it be from a day of shopping for small female figurines with arms outstretched and antique porcelain platters or from sleeping long in a rubbish apartment to take a finely prepared espresso hit. it is so cognizant of this duality that it has bifurcated itself (since the last time we were here, when it was a single space), claiming an extra room next door, the border of the spaces rotated from the border that separates the districts, as if to add a distinct physical dimension to the cross section of customers. the middle aged jewish couple, the woman in athletic tights, the man with a cropped beard and a bomber jacket, on a morning stroll, the exceedingly tall college student, probably reading dfwallace or wgibson, with slender goatee, wire spectacles, and jeans tucked into loose boots talking about his need for a fifth cup of coffee, the family, about to leave town, with grandma and in-laws in tow, the asian male and female, talking about a break-up and about jungle music, the elderly black man, in a plaid shirt with a blank baseball cap drinking coffee next to the door, the flustered white woman who has come in and out three times carrying some sort of artwork packed in bubblewrap, the homeless men, on the sidewalk patio, talking about how they have convinced a local convenience store to carry their favourite cheap beer. just like all these people coming together in a space, the space of the coffeeshop, sentient bean does this same thing for itself in savannah, by being something different, somewhere different, and nodding good-day to the park and the bed and breakfasts every morning with the pleasure of a welcome reject.

cast of characters:

pop: seasoned world traveler, coffee aesthete, perfectionist
son: uptight prosewriting provocateur
wanda: mountain woman
soulpatch: failed SCAD hack, opportunist, venice beach reject
cashier: current SCAD student
ms. soulpatch (offstage): condescending masculine female

saturday, midmorning, the front doors of a cafe are open, cool air drifts in across the tile floors drawing blue savannah fog to meet the fluorescent pastry coolers.

ms soulpatch: wanda!
pop: rising ill get that.
wanda: this aint what ah ord’r'd.
pop: rising let me see what i can do. to ms soulpatch hi, this isnt the right thing, could you get us a coffee?
ms soulpatch: this is for wanda.
pop: yes but it isnt right, maybe this is for someone else in our party.
ms soulpatch: no, this is for imitating a hearing impaired speaker wha-n-duh. she ordered this.
pop: no, she ordered a coffee.
ms soulpatch: this is for wanda though.
pop: i realize that! i am with wanda!
soulpatch: appearing behind passthrough in kitchen look at all this whole milk i am carrying, and i am wearing a brown leather jacket!
ms soulpatch: it says she ordered a mocha.
pop: well she ordered a coffee.
ms soulpatch: it says mocha here… for wanda.

later, all are served, except son, who is waiting on his uncomplicated order, sensing in advance that it will be eff’d up, gets up to stand by the counter.

soulpatch: to ms soulpatch this is for someone in that really big party (of 6 -playwright).
ms soulpatch: son!
son: this isnt what i ordered, i ordered a latte with soymilk sits down to wait before he is defied.
wanda: why didnt you just drink it?
son: it is the principle! i hope this place burns to cinders.
ms soulpatch: son!
son: is this a soy latte?
ms soulpatch: no, it is just a latte.
son: ok, can i just get my money back?
cashier: soulpatch? how do i give him a refund, he says he ordered a soy latte and we messed it up repeatedly.
soulpatch: from behind the counter what?! wait a bit.
son: can you just give me cash? i dont need it back on the card.
cashier: no, no, ill figure it out, once soulpatch gets out here.
son: returning to his party im about to flip the table over.
wanda: you shouldve just drank it.
son: it is the principle, i dont want this place to have my money at this point, they cant get anyones orders right and they seemed exasperated that we were giving them our business from the second we came in.
cashier: coming up to table here is the cash, soulpatch couldnt be bothered to come out and show me how to do a proper refund, or apologize to you for his self-important attitude.
soulpatch: aside i wish i hadnt sucked at painting, maybe people will think this botched cafe is conceptual art!
son: eff this, im going to sentient bean.