The above is an IHOP “happy face.” In my lifetime, I have served 345 of these. Give or take a few.
As a teenager I worked at IHOP. On Thursdays. If I worked there now, in a society sensitive to the needs of those in the customer-service industry, they’d call me a “pancake artist,” but alas this was 1998 and such new-age thinking had not yet been successfully implemented. Unless you lived on the West Coast. Where they also regularly ate hummus.
Thursday night was “balloonimal” night. A clown named Fred would come in and make the kiddies balloons in the shape of various animals. By various I mean three. He had talent enough to create exactly three animals: giraffe, dog, bird.
If you were a small child and didn’t like one of those, you were SOL. I suspect Fred didn’t lack ability, just ambition. I never really saw him practice his craft in his downtime.
In fact, mostly, I saw Fred smoking weed with the cooks.
But maybe that was just artistic exploration.
1 Comment
February 15, 2008 at 2:59 pm
Balloonimal is such a great word.
It seems to me it could also be a kind of mystery meat.
“Yeah, I’ll have balloonimal on rye with lettuce and mustard, hold the mayo!”