The Sunday gentleman

Daniel Dafoe, the author of Robinson Crusoe, was known as the ‘Sunday gentleman’ because after having failed one of his businesses and not being able to satisfy his creditors, he only could appear in public on Sunday, when no debts could be collected.

Last Saturday, I went to an exhibition in a abandoned house in Zurich that will be demolished, together with the installations, in October. The happening or whatever you might call it was labeled DOOM. I liked it. They had taken the glass out of the windows. One artist had grown mould on a Corbusier sofa. They served champagne and oysters (not for free). The people looked very neat. Very Züri. But everything was outclassed by a guy who was, evidently for the first time in his life, working behind a bar (I assume he was a lawyer friend of the lawyer host). He labeled, with his formidable handwriting, every single bottle with the correct price (even ice tea). He read the printed out email with the manual ‘what to do behind a bar’ again and again, nervously. He just had one problem, people were waiting and he was on the wrong side of the bar. And it was still Saturday, not Sunday.