Pete = Celebrity

I have to admit that my mother is one smart lady. As a kid I remember several occasions where she and my dad took all four of us rowdy hell-raisers and sat us down at the table for several hours and demonstrated proper table manners. We fought and argued. My brother would tip my chair over, and we threw table knives at each other. I used to deliberately test my mom to see how far she would go with her "ridiculous Mrs. Manners school" as one of my older sisters so eloquently described it. How my mom put resisted the urge to take us out back and bury us alive in a potato sack I'll never know. But over the years she and my dad drilled manners and some common sense into us and although I do still make my share of mistakes, I realize now that I have the background to recognize and learn from them.

 

These carefully cultivated (often with the help of a motherly backhand lol) manners have helped me immeasurably throughout my life. I once scored a bank loan that I needed but wasn't qualified for because I instinctively stood up from my chair when the bank manager (a lady) walked into the room. After some discussion, she remarked that she was impressed that I was such a polite young man and I replied that I couldn't take any credit for it but my mom could and I would pass along her compliment. It was a completely honest answer but BAM!

 

And now my manners have helped me to achieve mini-celebrity status among the hotel staff here. Having spent many an hour working as a waiter or bartender, I have a real soft spot for service folks and one of my major pet peeves is rude customers. I've made friends with most of the staff here including the manager of one of the restaurants. She brought a photographer over to my table one evening when I was having dinner with a girl and he asked to take a few pictures of us together. I didn't think much of it but then I started getting phone calls in my room from the girls, "Mr. Pete, did you see your pictures? Mr.Pete, Mr. Pete!"

 

It turns out he is a photographer for a famous magazine and our picture was in the happy couples section. So my polite manners and willingness to befriend strangers brought me, a pork-eating high school flunkee infidel, into a high-class Kuwaiti socialite magazine 4 pages away from the King himself. Now I've just got to wait until the magazine comes out in a couple of days so I can scan my 2 seconds of fame and put it out here. In the meantime, here's a picture of my newest culinary kryptonite: restaurant style nachos.