beautifully weird.

Nostalgic kleptomania. That is the new phrase, the new buzz word, the name for the condition I am about to describe. Nostalgic kleptomania will furthermore be used to describe the need that some feel and subsequently act upon to have a souvenir that is not for sale. I'm sure you know the type. They take broken-off pieces of stone when they visit ruins, they take ashtrays from restaurants, and they are the reason that pens in banks are tied to large pieces of furniture that are difficult to steal. I've known some nostalgic kleptos. I had dinner with one who took the little plastic frame that described the dessert menu from the restaurant because there was no ashtray; we had requested non-smoking. And I've been in the restaurant business long enough to see things disappear. Not frequently, not even enough to warrant the theft as a major nuisance. Call it a minor annoyance. Sometimes it's even a little amusing, just thinking about the bizarre things that people will steal.

But bizarre isn't even the word for what I witnessed last week. Kirstin was emptying the trash in the men's room to close down for the night when she happened to notice the empty picture frame hanging next to the mirror. Now we do exhibit some things that might be considered modern art, but nothing so modern as an empty frame. It took Kirstin a minute to realize that the frame hadn't always been empty, that it used to contain the standard sign issued by the State of North Carolina, stating that all food service employees must wash their hands after each and every trip to the bathroom. But now the sign was gone.

The job was thorough. The thief had taken the trouble to first take the sign out of the frame. Then the culprit very carefully replaced the cardboard backing into the frame, making sure to bend all the little metal tabs back so the backing would stay. Finally, our clever criminal hung the frame on the wall, knowing that as long as the frame was in place, the crime could go unnoticed for days.

We all marveled at our thief's brazen cunning, his deft ability, and also at his outright weirdness. I speculated that it might be an inside job and looked at all the males in the room with narrowed eyes. Harry, our head chef, jokingly admitted that he did it because he was tired of washing his hands. By pretending to confess, he smoothy shifted the suspicions away from himself. Tricky, that.

But then we decided that it was probably just someone who suffered from nostalgic kleptomania. A particularly odd form of nostalgic kleptomania. And the whole thing was so deliciously weird that I wanted to start doing it. I wanted to begin a collection of the hand washing signs. Maybe I'd even branch out to taking the "Stealing is a crime!" signs found in Wal-Mart bathroom stalls if I was feeling particularly ironic.

And I could showcase my collection in a 3-ring binder full of sheet protectors holding the souvenirs of all the bathrooms I'd been to, each one neatly described and dated, organized by location and time of theft. And it would all be so dazzingly, fascinatingly, beautifully weird.