There's no shortage of movies about food and restaurant life. I've seen almost all of them, and I relished the chance for a glimpse into a world I longed to join. Being a seasoned woman, I thought I had a pretty good handle of what was real and what was fantasy.
Falling in love with your sous chef the way Katherine Zeta-Jones and Aaron Eckhard did in No Reservations? Fantasy.
Setting up a fellow chef up for failure the way Pascal did in Big Night? Possible.
Changing relationships as we age a la Diner? Reality.
I may be naïve. I've never worked in a restaurant - either front of back of the house -- so I filed the sexual antics and the gross vengeances against customers in Waiting as comedy - pure poetic license. But clearly everyone didn't feel the same way.
Last week, I got a text from one of my classmates. I opened the message to find another student flashing "The Goat." (For those of you who haven't seen the movie, it's the most extreme position in the penis-showing game the crew plays to entertain themselves at work.)
And thus the game began in real life. The next few days were filled with circulating photos of several of the other male students' "junk."
A new twist on of "sexting" I could do without.
I pride myself on being the cool mom - the one who lets my kids put florescent color in their hair and get belly-button piercings at 15. And I smile each time (and silently patted myself on the back) every time one of the younger students tells me they wish they had a mom like me. I never believed in Too Much Information. But it may be time for that to change.
