restaurant birthdays

[Martha]

>Joywitch M. Curmudgeon posted about restaurants and birthdays and 
things. Martha applauds enthusiastically (if the 
word "enthusiastically" is an acceptable adverb). ;-)

Joywitch, this is a truly wonderful rant, with which I agree 
wholeheartedly. Can't decide if my worst experience was the Italian 
restaurant where these three guys who were, essentially, different 
incarnations of Super Mario, serenaded me with a mandolin and a 
tambourine while the entire restaurant stared in horror, or the time 
that a Cliff Richard song was involved. 

My parents also have the particularly endearing habit of getting the 
staff at the restaurant to decorate the cake with some random and 
confusing in-joke which I then have to explain to everyone and which 
always leaves me paranoid that the waiting staff think I'm slightly, 
well, odd. This year it was "Happy birthday, love from Halibut 
Gibbous". The story behind this is long, involved and ultimately 
really quite dull, but everyone wanted to know what it was about, so 
I had to explain, and by the end, everyone's like, "Oh, right. OK."

Joywitch again:
> Happy Birthday to you!
> Happy Birthday to you!
> Happy Birthday dear customer!
> Happy Birthday to you!

This has got to be without a doubt one of the funniest things I have 
ever heard. It's the personal touch that really makes these things 
special, isn't it? :-D

At my primary school on a Friday morning in assembly everyone who had 
a birthday got to go and stand at the front, then we all sang "happy 
birthday dear children" and *one* of the kids got to *hold* a cake 
which was made of *plaster*. And my birthday always fell in half-
term, so I never got to go up. But I'm not bitter, no.

~ Martha, who smashed her first birthday cake with a fist, and it's 
been downhill ever since