You can call me "Betty"

So one of the more interesting observations during our post-reading criticism session yesterday (at least from a linguistic point of view) had to do with forms of address. Mazeppa made a serious effort to avoid anachronism, but something which struck one of the older women in the audience rather forcefully was that he had a child address an adult by her given name. I never watched much Bewitched, but according to those who had, even the child's mother and this woman (the show's Wacky Neighbour) never addressed each other by given names in its entire run. It was a deliberate choice on Mazeppa's part to show that the two characters were relating to each other as adults, but it was so jarring to those of a certain generation that they felt it needed to be addressed somehow in the script.

It gave me a bit of insight into just how radically bourgeois social codes have changed in a mere half a century. Back then, it was possible to be on quite cordial terms with someone without knowing their given name. Even spouses would refer to each other as "Mr" or "Mrs So-and-so" while addressing each other with terms of endearment. I wasn't alive while Dick York was still in the cast of Bewitched and I can't recall the given names of any of the adults at my first grade school, for instance (with the exception of the nuns, who we addressed by their names in religion); most likely, I never knew them. It was notable that my mother's friend Trish insisted we call her by her given name; at the time she was the only adult not related to me I can remember doing this with.

Today the situation is almost entirely reversed. There are dozens of guys in this city I know on sight and chat with in social situations. But I could only supply surnames for perhaps a third of them (generally the ones I know best, but not necessarily)--and that's only due to the constant reinforcement of Facebook. To disambiguate we end up having to resort to workarounds "You mean Big Tim or Longhaired Tim?" Because if you gave surnames, I'd simply shrug.

"You can't ever know a person"

I can't remember if I ever mentioned it, but a reason for me to keep frequenting the Greek Fire Grill which was at least as compelling as their tasty food cooked to order was an incredibly hot counterman. Middle-aged, bearded, brick shithouse, and quite honestly the best cook they had. (More than once I considered asking him to teach the other grillman his technique for rolling up the chicken wrap on the griddle to make it all nice and gooey inside.) I eventually worked up the courage to chat him up a bit, but I never got as far as asking any personal details, not even his name.

Both his shifts and my visits varied, so it took me a while to determine that not running into him this past month was more than a fluke. I thought about asking the manager, who likes to chat with me about FRPGs, but I held back in case there had been some unpleasantness. And then the week before last, I ran into him quite unexpectedly at the Loyola stop. He was about to board a bus with a small child (presumably his son), so I barely had any time to chat. "Are you still working up in Evanston?" "No, I'm working downtown now."

But today I was back at GFG and I saw the other veteran cook, one who's always been more friendly to me than I to him. (Why oh why is it so hard to get personality and physique to match up?) While waiting on my souvlaki, I asked him, "Whatever happened to the older guy who used to work here?" I was expecting a number of possible responses--he moved on, he got fired, etc. I was not expecting, "The cops came for him and he went running out the back."

"But he was a good worker, wasn't he?" "He was one of the best." What sense does it make to work your ass off and steal? If you've got the chops to make an honest living, why risk it? And if thievery is your game, why put that much effort into your cover? He had been caught stealing from the store a couple times, the cook told me, but he passed the incidents off as "mistakes" and was forgiven on account of his diligence. "Apparently his wife is a thief too, she stole something from Target."

Oddest of all, he came back four days ago and asked for his old job back. "I guess things had cooled off enough," my informant told me. It's all making me wish even more that I'd made the effort to chat with him. Someone with that level of contradictions is bound to have some interesting things to reveal, but not without building a lot of trust first.