Last Saturday night my husband, tween daughter and I found ourselves hungry in Paramus, NJ. We were driving back to Manhattan along Route 17, following a ghoulish shopping spree at a pop up Halloween megastore, and decided to stop at Hooters for a bite. Having both gotten into our 48th year having never been to a Hooters, my husband and I admitted we were curious to see just what these packaged, billboarded boobs were all about. Also, there wasn't much culinary competition -- between McDonalds, TGIF and Hooters, the latter won hands down.
"Can she come in?" we asked the greeters at the door, pointing to our awe-stricken daughter. "Of course! We're a family restaurant!" they exclaimed in near unison, hooters encased in skin tight tank tops emblazoned with the corporate logo. The burger and beer weren't bad and the people-watching was excellent. Other diners ranged from tables of gawking adolescent boys -- the suburban male answer to the night at the mall for their girl counterparts -- to an Asian family with a toddler in a pink bow and her infant brother asleep in a carrier. The girl was coloring and oblivious to the charms around her in the form of smiling women in orange hot pants, balancing trays of spicy wings.
The following Saturday night we went to Matthew Bourne's Swan Lake at City Center, this time with two daughters in tow. My husband and I had seen it a decade ago when it first came out and swept the Tonys in 1998. It was groundbreaking, creating a new paradigm of the classic fairytale of a prince who falls in love with a woman turned swan through an evil curse. In Bourne's modern dance inspired version, the swans are men and the prince longs not only for the love of the virile, lead swan, but also for the affection of his cold, unloving mother, the Queen.
At Hooters I didn't know what to expect. I went in willing to experience the new experience. But taking my seat at Swan Lake, I already appreciated Bourne's brilliance in having breathed new life into a classic ballet fairytale. I was simply looking to relive the magic I experienced the first time.
Perhaps the cast changes inspired a new emphasis on the emotional content or maybe I was just more prepared to take it in. The men were still exquisite, postured with their arms draped over their heads in stillness or lunging and leaping in wild fits as the Tchaikovsky score crescendoed. But what resonated more than the choreography was the profound loneliness the prince feels through the play, in contrast to the bliss he experiences while dancing with his swan lover. The ambiguity of what was reality and what was fiction also intrigued me. Was his love for the swan real? Or were the swans a fantasy of a mentally ill royal?
I might even want to see this production again in another ten years. Some things are just worth returning to -- but maybe once at Hooters was enough.
Photo credit: Photos by Bill Cooper