The New York Times has a very New Yorker piece today titled “The Waffle House Brawl Belongs in a Museum.” I point it out to you because the premise is ridiculous — we should place a video of a chair-turned-aluminum-boomerang being deflected by a waitress next to the creations of Robert Pummill? Erm . . . maybe. The Guggenheim isn’t worthy, that’s for sure.
The piece is too funny not to share:
It starts in medias res: There are only a few seconds of shouting before we see a customer standing on the counter. Judging by the sky beyond the restaurant’s customary wall of windows, it’s either very late or very early. A different woman is already in the workers’ area, where the clip’s star, a Waffle House employee, threatens to throw an empty coffee carafe, then hurls a sugar dispenser. Other diners cross into the kitchen area, pummeling the worker and yanking her hair. Other workers join the fracas. Bystanders gawk and record from outside the enormous window. Even after the customers are pushed back to their side of the counter, they won’t give up. They start throwing things: dishware, an aluminum chair.
Then it happens. A second chair is thrown. It floats over to the worker, the one who has had her hair pulled and her body beaten. She moves her left arm to block it, and seems to freeze the chair in place for one time-stopping second before slamming it down to the side.
It is a miracle how she dispenses with the chair. “Dispenses” is not even the right word: She repels it. She parries the chair like an anime character deflecting a beam of supernatural power, like Neo dodging bullets in “The Matrix,” like King Kong swatting away a helicopter.
There are precious few things better than a stack of waffles at 11 p.m. in a Waffle House. It is a huge point in the South’s favor that there aren’t more locations of the venerable diner with its yellow ransom-note sign around in the North. It deserves our gratitude and respect for the service it provides to the masses looking for hot brown caffeine and some carbs and its employment of those looking to elevate themselves.
The only museum worthy of the place resides in Decatur, Ga.