Klonie

JORDAN

There’s a whole boatload of etiquette books on the market that cover everything ranging from which eating utensils to use to how to greet foreign dignitaries.

And I’ve not read a whole lot of etiquette books so I’m not really well-versed on the finer points of how ladies and gentlemen should behave in your more high-brow social settings.

I was reading an article the other day that offered some dining tips and they kept referring to something called a “formal cuisine environment,” which for me is any meal I don’t eat bare-footed.

And while I might not be an expert on “formal cuisine environments,” I know some of the basics, like it’s OK to lick the steak sauce off your fork and use it to eat your dessert, and you don’t eat chili with your fingers.

What I’d like to see is something that covers not only rules for eating, but also the more complicated and puzzling scenarios that sometimes present themselves.

Like, say, what is the accepted practice for getting from Point A to Point B while wearing one of those hospital gowns? Y’all know that if you go to the hospital to have an X-ray taken, they’re going to make you put on one of those gowns, then walk across the hall in it.

And y’all also know those things don’t always cover up the, uh, back bumper.

Now it’s not a problem if there aren’t a lot of people waiting in the lab hallway of the lab. You can sort of stick your head out of the dressing booth and look both ways to make sure the coast is clear, then skedaddle on across the hall kinda quick-like.

But sometimes there are folks sitting out there.

Then what?

Do you:

A.) Try to hold the back of that thing together with your hands while carrying your wallet, keys and checkbook in your teeth? (One shouldn’t leave one’s valuables in the dressing booth.)

B.) Kinda dipsy-doodle your way across the hall like a ballet dancer, trying to keep your backside pointed away from would-be onlookers? This is sort of tricky but it can be done, although if you leave your socks on, you are subject to slip and/or slide uncontrollably on the slick tile floor, especially if one of your maneuvers is too intricate. Listen, the last thing you want while trying to conceal the back porch is to lose your balance and fall into the lap of the elderly lady sitting there minding her own business quietly sipping her caffe latte. I know a guy who tried the ballet maneuver, slipped and fell backward and wound up butt-wedged in a mop bucket.

By the way, getting back to the socks, nothing says CLASS ACT more than a guy dressed only in a paper-thin hospital gown and a pair of argyles.

C.) Just make a run for it and take your chances? It’s a hospital, right? They would respect your dignity under such vulnerable circumstances, wouldn’t they? Sure they would. Well, you would hope so anyway. But I did see some nurses one day passing money back and forth and I’m pretty sure they were betting on who would make it and who wouldn’t.

I’m guessing hospital gown protocol isn’t the kind of thing covered in your multi-volume Emily Post collection.

And we haven’t even addressed the many questions regarding what to do when they start flopping you around on that X-ray table like a carp out of water.

You’d think with all the marvelous medical breakthroughs we’ve made over the past few years that somebody would have figured out by now to put the gown-changing booths in the same room as the X-ray machine.

But they haven’t. So until that time comes, the best we can do is make sure we wear our best socks on X-ray day.

(Klonie Jordan is executive editor of The Gaffney Ledger. You can contact him via e-mail at Klonie@gaffneyledger.com)