Laundry and Living Tables

So, I took a day off work (the winter students are gone and the spring students haven't arrived yet) and took care of catching up on a bit of blogging as well as some more email. A far-too-large part of my day was dedicated to doing laundry, which was an unspeakable nightmare. I spent a large part of my day fighting with broken machines and dryer-stealing residents; I don't know how the designers of the building thought that 3 washers and dryers for 300 people would work. If I was wealthy, I would take my clothes to a cleaners rather than deal with this crap. On the other hand, if I was that wealthy, I wouldn't be living in this building. So touché.

Anyway, rather than go on about that, I want to show you this:

...and this...

...and also this.

So this is apparently a specialty food service, called "Living Tables", offered by Makeup by Julie. This is one of those things that I find both fantastically awesome and horrifying at the same time. The idea of turning furniture into humans or humans into furniture has all sorts of post-human implications, made even better by the fact that this is popping up in a themed-catering company rather than an avant-garde film. Do people want furniture that talks back? Do they want to use other humans as furniture? The main page advertises that these "living tables" will chat with guests "in character," which raises some questions about what some of these characters would say if people were eating hors d'oeuvres off their ass.

On the other hand, a lot of these "characters" are in fact generic stereotypes of particular ethnicities and classes. I'll give them credit for some consistency at least: they're happy to stereotype whites and white Europeans as well (French, Southern Belle, "Crazy Tourist, etc.). Also, they obviously put some thought into which stereotypes were safe to use and which ones weren't: there's a "spanish seniorita" but no "conchita, the paperless domestic"; there's an "african queen" but no "nightclub bouncer" or "DMV princess." There are no gay or aboriginal stereotypes (yet); the former one is sort of ironic, considering these two photos:

I'm just sayin'...