Fandom Island and Town

Yitzhak hadn't even made it home from his weekly drag show on the mainland until this morning, and he was so completely hungover and cranky that he didn't even notice the strange woman bossing his staff around, doing all the cleaning he wasn't bothering to do, and trying to put flower vases on the tables.

. . . okay, maybe he noticed a little, but hey, someone else doing his job? He wasn't going to complain. It meant he didn't have to care, and he could go sleep off the hangover in the storeroom.

The kitchen staff, for their part, couldn't be sure whether this was a turn for the better or the worse. It might be a tossup.



Luke's is open, and a liiiiiiiiiiiiiittle torn today.

Yitzhak was at the diner a good hour and a half before he usually showed up, mostly to escape the blinking message light on his phone at home. Phyllis Stein kept calling him, for reasons he didn't think he wanted to know, so he was being avoidy. Sure, he could have just grunted noncommittally at her, but he'd much rather not hear what she had to say at all right now.

Thus, work.

He still hadn't done much in the way of cleaning, although he did bestir himself long enough to pick up a particularly gross crumpled napkin in a corner.



Is Luke's open? You could probably consider it to be, in a very broad sense.

The kitchen staff was just a liiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiittle tiny bit cranky about the fact that they were down to about a gallon of milk in the fridge, and the hamburger bun supply was running dangerously low.

Yitzhak? Was sleeping off a hangover in the storeroom, and really didn't care about any of this.

You could probably tell by the fact that he'd locked the storeroom door behind him when he'd gone in there.

[OOC: *surfaces from beneath projects* Mod away, as I'm only at work for another hour and then I'm gonna be AFK the rest of the night. Gah. Sorry for the lateness here; got super busy and forgot.]

If Yitzhak paid any mind to the statues around town today, it was only to survey them with a slow, detached gaze and mentally critique their sculpted clothing. And then he went about his business again.

He could've sworn, as he unlocked the diner's front door and caught sight of the reflection in the glass, that one of the statues had been behind him to the left a second ago, not to the right . . . but he chalked that up to the extra couple of hits he'd taken off the -- *COUGH* -- in his apartment just before he'd left. He was wishing he'd taken a couple more, now, because one of the kitchen guys had apparently been afflicted by a case of The Dumb and kept asking him questions about how to use a toaster.

Luke's is open, and no, it's really not a little fragrant in here, it's just . . . lingering scent from Saturday's cleaning spree. That's it. Yep. Really.

Yitzhak was feeling a little . . . soulful today.

That might have had something to do with waking up this morning to find his boots and his stiletto heels in the middle of what could only be described as a gang brawl . . . with dancing. The boots had been trash-talking the heels, which couldn't talk back and settled for trying to impale the boots instead.

He'd ended up having to quarantine them to separate sections of the apartment, despite the boots' loud and really rather profane objections, and much to his chagrin was wearing a pair of battered old saddle shoes -- a fashion embarrassment to be sure, but they were shy and retiring and the best-behaved out of his collection.

Yitzhak was a little heartbroken that his beloved footwear collection had turned on itself and taking it out, as was his habit, on the kitchen staff. The stereo was cranked up today, playing a whole lot of Earth, Wind, and Fire, just to sort of cover it up. Not that it was particularly working.



Luke's is open. Bask in its proprietor's shame over his own feet today.

Yitzhak was hoping for a quiet week, what with Spring Break and all. Too bad one of the kitchen guys had set up a makeshift drumset using some of the more battered pots and pans from the storeroom, huh?

If anyone asked, he'd say it was what Yitzhak deserved for not paying him enough money to afford a game console and Rock Band. If you asked Yitzhak, he'd say (through a complicated tangle of eyebrow-twitches, grunts, and passive-aggressive postures) that if anyone was getting a game console and Rock Band first, it was going to be him.

And then he was going to set it up and make the kitchen staff watch him play. Isn't he the best boss ever?

Luke's, above the din, is open.

Yitzhak had a long, long, kind of crazy blonde wig and a tambourine today. Unfortunately the busboy was out sick and couldn't do the Lindsey Buckingham Looks of Scathing Doom (tm), so Yitzhak was doing a solo act. With occasional guest vocals from the rest of the kitchen staff.



He didn't need the busboy around to twirl fabulously with the tambourine. He did that just fine on his own. Dammit.

Luke's is open, and kind of twirly.

Yitzhak was reading Solzhenitsyn today . . . and smirking evilly, since he'd managed to coerce his cook into trying to whip up as many foods as possible in 20 minutes.

He was evil sometimes.



Seriously, order the specials at your own risk today, but Luke's is open.

Anyone looking for Yitzhak today might have to peer behind the counter -- where he was huddled, a towel over his head to cover the fact that the stray cat who lived in the alley behind the diner and usually was shamelessly affectionate as a way of getting food had jumped off the dumpster and clawed his face today.

There was no specials board today -- this kind of indignity completely precluded specials -- but the Help Wanted sign was still up in the window.

Despite callous feline lack of regard for human standards of appearance, Luke's is open.

Yitzhak had gotten the perfect dress for a drag show he'd be doing in Alexandria on Sunday -- well, perfect except for one small and very important detail. It wasn't nearly sparkly enough.

And so, slouched oh so elegantly on a stool by the counter sat one scrawny, scruffy, scowly drag queen with a sewing kit and a huge pile of sequins that were getting sewn meticulously onto the dress. The sewing kit seemed to be blessed with an overabundance of needles, all of which were glinting in their very shiny and pointy way, bristling flamboyantly from a pincushion that, if it hadn't been stuck full of needles, would have been -- let's face it -- pretty risqué for public consumption.

The kitchen staff were, maybe unsurprisingly, pretty nervous about the needles; their boss really, really, really didn't need that many sharp pointy things within reach. The busboy kept insisting that he'd heard of tragic accidents involving needles going into people's fingers and then on up to their brains. (Whether or not he and the rest of the staff were hoping for such a thing to happen to Yitzhak remains a mystery.) Fortunately, he was prepared for just such an occasion and proceeded to pull out a bag of thimbles, adamant that he, the dishwasher, and the cook should all wear one thimble on each finger. And thumb, of course.

This made cooking, dishwashing, and bussing tables a little difficult, but at least they kept themselves entertained in the back, using the thimbles to do impressions of horses.

Yitzhak? Just kept on sewing. Occasionally he got up and sewed a couple of sequins to the Help Wanted sign, just for a change of pace.

Luke's isn't actually a miniature racetrack, no matter what it sounds like, but it is open.

[OOC: This is what happens when my MP3 player comes up with clips of Eddie Izzard routines while I'm trying to write up this post. I'm so sorry.]

It was snowing. Snowing. Yitzhak? Totally dressed for it.

Diner? Totally open. And warm.

Glittery Help Wanted sign? Totally still in the front window.



Yeah, so he was stretching on that last one, but he always wanted to name a menu item the Randy Newman.

Luke's is open, and no, the light's not sparkling off the snow in here; it's sparkling off Yitzhak's incredibly rhinestone-studded belt. Sheesh. Some people.

The problem with going to a drag queens' party on the mainland for New Year's Eve? Discovering addictive new video games.

Not that Yitzhak particularly had the money to go and buy himself a gaming console, which of course meant that he was now hooked on Guitar Hero III and unable to play it. That would be why he was cranky today. (Like he was ever not cranky?)

It would also account for the very bizarre air guitar technique he kept employing as he wandered around the diner singing Pat Benatar songs . . . not so much under his breath.

Which would account for the kitchen staff's crankiness.

Luke's is open, and PS3-free. And PS2-free. And XBox 360, and Wii, and . . . yeah. Woe.

Anyone who walked into the diner today and, for whatever reason, decided to peer behind the counter would find Yitzhak curled up in a small ball, hands over his ears, rocking back and forth.

Anyone foolhardy brave crazy enough to want to find out the cause of this, who then ventured into the kitchen, would discover that the cook and the dishwasher had set up a karaoke system and were crooning the best of Barry Manilow.

Look, you'd be rocking back and forth in a ball too, if you were Yitzhak.

[OOC: Quite possibly subject to even slower SP than usual during the workday per my earlier post. This post brought to you by the fact that my MP3 player, 22GB of songs on it and all, decided to go on a five-song Barry Manilow streak. I have no excuse for this.]

Yitzhak was browsing the web again today, but staying well away from the bulletin board he'd been playing on yesterday because it just wasn't good for his emotional state. (Any more "proof" that humanity could be descended from the survivors of the last remaining Strifenova and he'd laugh, and laughing . . . just no.)

Instead, he was amusing himself with a web forum for Confessions of Closeted Cosmopolitan Readers . . . and started beating his head into the counter when that same guy from Dog River, Saskatchewan showed up in the comments.

Was there not a lot going on in that town or something?

Did it smell like chicken noodle soup in here?

Well, yes.

Did it look a little . . . steamy in here?

Well, yes, that too.

Did Yitzhak appear to be irritated by these circumstances?

Well, duh.

But come on. Wouldn't you be irritated too if the kitchen staff decided it would be fun to make the storeroom into a chicken noodle sauna?

Luke's is open. And soupy.

Yitzhak had been cleaning out the stockroom and found an ungodly number of incomplete turkey basting kits and no, he really didn't want to know what had happened to all the basters, and he certainly wasn't going to admit to knowing anything about where the flavor injectors had gone.

But that was a lot of poultry twine. He stowed it behind the counter inside the ceramic pot from a broken slow-cooker, along with a string of dried peppers, out of some half-formed curious notion that the artist kid might do something amusing with them.

The theme of the day? Heart.



Luke's is open, and not so tinselly today.

[OOC: . . . OMG, I gratefully blame stupid_toasters for the theme.]

When you'd spent most of your working life with no health insurance and dodgy (at best) immigration status, you tended to try and avoid getting sick as much as possible, which was why Yitzhak had spent the better part of the week holed up in his apartment after he'd heard the first reports of people falling ill. When yesterday's attempt to get the hell off the island had completely failed, he'd gotten back home just in time to catch Zoe's announcement on the radio.

Yitzhak had gotten the hell out of Croatia when it had become evident that a war was going to break out, but there was no escaping Fandom now. Besides, this island had become home to him in a way no other place ever really had. He'd been free to be himself and do as he pleased for the first time in as long as he could remember, and yes, he was actually happy here.

It had been almost a charmed existence, somehow -- trolls and dinosaurs aside, nothing truly tragic had touched his life here since he'd arrived, and things had always worked out all right for everyone on the island in the end. But this news -- learning that a student had died of the epidemic -- jarred him out of his usual comfortable complacency.

Even Yitzhak was capable of sympathy, much as he'd learned to hide his more vulnerable emotions over the years. So he ventured out of his apartment and down to the diner, set out the old brunch buffet bar, and got out a wheeled cart that also got loaded down with food and coffee. The doctors and volunteers would be needing their strength, and after countless disappointing gigs and the night-long road trips that followed Yitzhak knew how much good a few bites of food could do when you were exhausted and emotionally beaten down.

Leaving the diner in the care of the kitchen staff, he changed into a sexy nurse outfit and set out for town hall, wheeling his cart of food and coffee in front of him.

Yes, he was going to go help. But damned if he wasn't going to look fabulous while he was at it.



[OOC: No OCD today, and mod all the food you want; Yitzhak's off to town hall.]

There was no specials board today.

There were, however, what appeared to be splintered bits of the old one, and splatters of ketchup around the conspicuously wig-free Help Wanted sign in the front window.

The new specials board was on its way through mail order.

The busboy was just feeling lucky that Yitzhak hadn't tried to make him go pick the thing up and carry it all the way back to Fandom on his shoulders. He had no idea how close a call it actually was, though.

As for Yitzhak, if you followed the traumatized noises, you might find him behind the counter, working over the ketchup-splattered wig with a histrionic fervor worthy of the operating room team on Hearts 'n' Scalpels.

Luke's is open. It's okay, that's not really blood.

Yitzhak's hair was very impressive today -- considering he had a Dolly Parton wig on (with the, ahem, requisite matching pair of other accessories) he was taking up a lot of space in the diner. Maybe twice as much as usual, considering how scrawny he was.

The kitchen staff were taking bets on how soon before he got too topheavy and fell over in those four-inch heels . . . you'd think they'd know their boss better than that by now.



. . . yes, the Help Wanted sign had matching -- ahem -- accessories and a Dolly Parton wig, too.

Luke's is open, and no, that's not silicone, but don't ask what it is.

There was an extremely surly-looking, oatmeal-covered figure behind the diner counter today.

This was the absolute last time that the busboy was allowed to try and cover breakfast when the morning cook called in sick.

The busboy had tried to point out that at least Yitzhak's skin wouldn't be itchy, but since it hadn't been itchy in the first place (obsessive, if clandestine, moisturizing rituals would take care of that) it was a moot point.

Best not to ask what happened to the busboy -- cinnamon and maple sugar was so not Yitzhak's ideal perfume.

On the tiny sliver of bright side, at least the bewigged Help Wanted sign in the window was un-cerealed, and as fabulous as ever.

Luke's is open, and full of your recommended daily allowance of fiber and iron.

Was Yitzhak smirking today? Maaaaaaaaaaaaaybe. If you squinted and used your imagination. Or if you knew that he'd made a killing doing drag strip-o-grams on the mainland yesterday.

Best if you didn't know that though, wasn't it? The kitchen staff sure wished they didn't.

Luke's is open, with the HELP WANTED sign back in the window, covered with glitter, and crowned with a remarkably ornate pompadour wig.

Why, no, Yitzhak hadn't been spending far too much time mulling over his Luke's Diner's Top Minion Employee concept last night, not at all.

This had absolutely nothing to do with the gauntlet of sharp kitchen implements the staff would find arranged all over the back room of the diner when they came in to work this morning . . . or the ancient, beat-up hand-cranked film camera Yitzhak had trained on them when their backs were turned.

Really.

[OOC: As per usual, slow pingage from work, although I should be home before an obscenely late hour tonight. Also, poke me on AIM if you need to; my notifications are flaking out.]

The diner was open, the kitchen staff was properly terrorized, and the giant brick of a pseudolaptop was out on the counter.

Yitzhak had discovered ohnotheydidnt, and was highly unlikely to be torn away from it for the rest of the day.

Schadenfreude got to be such an addiction.

[OOC: As the office has now moved and I have a commute that's an hour and a half instead of 25 minutes now, as well as a lot of catchup/organization work to do today at the office, please to be modding your server as I won't be able to play during the day. Thanks.]