I am the Burbank Booby Genius. Attend my genius, and learn.

I go to the Hooters of Burbank with my SAG card wielding Ombudsman every Friday. It is without a doubt that we have a scheme to pick up one of the waitresses — usually as a producer or actor of some invisible and unproven merit — but this time, this time I achieved something like anaphylactic shock to think of something so criminally fun and irresistible to these meat nymphs.

There, at the table, we sat sipping our drinks and making suggestive eye contact with the staff when I noticed my partner making clumsy conversation with a disinterested party. I don’t know where I get my ideas, but it was time to call in a surreal cerebral air strike and straighten this out. With booming, stentorian aplomb, I said, “I’ve been thinking a lot about you. I want to dress you up in a piranha outfit for a commercial I want to shoot at house in front of a green screen.”

She heard the word piranha and leaned in. I believe most piranhas have freckles on their bosoms, so I was almost there. Ah, the crew grimaced. I’m out on a limb. Will I jump? No. She’ll jump. She’ll jump into my arms. The word piranha made her molecules get all funny.

“You want to see me in a piranha outfit?”

Yes. Your face in piranha makeup, no clothes over the shoulders. We hear Hall and Oates’s “Man Eater”, whoa here she comes… tum tum tum, tum tum tadum… I want you to be swimming in front of the green screen, minding your own piranha business, when something dangles over the far left side of the hypothetical fish tank. You see it! It’s a man! A man made out of Slim Jims!”

Laughter. I said to my partner with my eyebrows raising and lowering in code, “Watch this. I’ll have them all over hear petitioning for our phone numbers.”

“Oh. My . Gawd! That’s so funny! Oh. My Gawd.”

The Oh My Gawd First Alert signal pulls all Hooters waitresses to our table to the scowls of local firemen. Player, play on!

“You become incensed with hunger! You perniciously bite and chomp your way over to him and start lashing out at it and biting at him — gnakk! gnakk! — until you have him like a pinch of Skoal’s Bandits between your lip and gum. Then tear him asunder. Cut to graphic. OUT. Thirty seconds. It can’t miss. What do you think. Wanna do it?”

Oh. My. Gawd. Where did you get this idea? Did you just think of it here? Are you serious? You want me to do this? Oh my Gawd. That’s so nuts! You’re serious? When did you want to do this?”

I think, perhaps, some of my claims resonate as fiction in the ears of my colleagues. This couldn’t be further from fact. I rarely, if ever, deviate one micrometer’s measurement from titful truthfuls of the Hooterotic. I don’t have to.

Reading Harold Bloom’s new book, “Where Can Wisdom Be Found?”, I decided to take James Gun, the newbie worker from Omnibus, and our twenty-something secretary to The Place for a quick lunch-hour wisdom hunt. My mind was filled with questions. Could wisdom be found in the inanity of struggled actress chatter? Could it be found in booby ogling? What is the direct comparison between Ecclesiastes and skin-tight orange biker shorts? And what can we learn, if anything, from the booby proletariat?

Shakespeare and Plato and Socrates — well, maybe not Plato and Socrates — liked to look at young nymphs in tight frocks for a myriad of reasons. Moreover, a damnable amount of the world’s most capable poetry was created to untangle bodice lacings in an atmosphere of shared passion and excitement. I concur with Bloom that such poetry serves a straight-forward, practical function, and like the Yahwist, the author of Ecclesiastes, and Cervantes, our very own Hooters of Burbank is a form of “poetry”, or “eye poetry”, that scrutinizes our racks in infinitely-recursive, self-referential celebration of the sexual identity.

It is true that Hooters, in stark contrast to Proust or Tolstoy, is a banal fish trap, an idiocy and mind-numbing conversational black-out that can barely be tolerated for one hour. And yet, when one pulls at the bra cups of this eternally unbound and unmasked meat blimp flotilla, delightfully tacky and yet unrefined Orange Pimpernels are these girls! masked by the non-threat of middle class ladder climbing and establishment through marriage to rich computer programmers. And wisdom can be found staring at their tits.

Wisdom also can be found not taking a girl with us when we go. As the Yahwist author of the Septuagint has put forth in omens and portents, girls are jealous creatures by design, and like Ogden Nash has mentioned, we crave the customary feminine attention but our food is late, we seek the close proximity of the D cups but our hostesses remain uninterested in us, we see our kitsch-choked atmosphere no longer mood-changing but imprisoning and unsatisfactory. Hell, indeed, hath no fury like a woman’s scorn.

Wisdom can further be found by not getting a grilled cheese sandwich to go for our prudish human resources officer in a box that says “Hooters” on it.

Now go back and read this article again.

Lookie here! A new kid wants in at our watering hole, so vilely despised by office fraus that we refer it exclusively as “the place” or risk sexual harassment.

We’re going to take this one scriptless. Let’s see how many of these waitresses remember us from last time.

In we go. It’s a little like a barnyard scene with the cocks crowing and the floppy uttered cows mooing and some of the pigs scurrying for the comfort of their filth. I enjoy it for what it is. I intend to have these girls service drinks on my yacht when I get around to buying one. Ah, the center table. Fabulous. The regular girl behind the bar has a nice smile. She blew us off but three months ago when we encountered her in the wild of the nearby parking garage. (Burbank is a compact little place.) But something is different. Yes, yes… she has reasoned it out. We’re those guys. Now bend over and let’s see ‘em. That’s right. We’re those guys.

But what is this! Not one more familiar face! Out of twenty-five, only three we know! (And we know they’re all taken.) My Sly SAGman (like an Ombudsman) mentions that they need to put up posters on the wall with all the relevant info: Actress, Dancer, Singer, Model, Available, Silicone or Saline, etc. The waitress is chipper with agreemency! She dazzles us with a new trick. She will memorize our order without writing it down. Okay. I’ll have the tube sock, er, steak, and lettuce and onions and… no, no I want a hot dog with chili and onions and muskrat juice and your phone number… wait… come back to me…

Two more check in. They bend low in obeisance and tell us about gigs fallen through at PAX and Disney. Hmmm. It’s tough. It’s a garsh-darn tough world out there. You need someone who’s been to the trenches on a horse with no name and a knowledge of the universe in which we reside. I am such a man. Your hand. Ah. Soft. You have a long love line. Yes, I excel at palmistry. What is this! Unexpected wealth at forty-eight! We must be married immediately!

No! To the mystery of this accused place! What happened? Is there another rival meat blimp emporium swaddling up the honeys for closed clientele? A tittie bar with a lunchtime buffet? Maybe we should go there.

Whelp.

We inquire of our Hooters mole when the rapture was. Most of these pinched little numbers are auditioning or attending university. I think she says one of our notables from last time is going for her Masters in Boob Administration (I have a minor in that discipline), but I have a hearing problem.

The others… well, screw ‘em. I like turnover. She brings us all our vittles and me, a glass of water with a nice slice of lemon. Thanks for playing. Good night, and in case I don’t see you, good afternoon, good morning, and good day.

They are making it even easier to pick up on the waitresses at the Burbank Hooters with a script and a DVD under my arm. I choose to be, in most instances, shielded from deadly kitsch by hiding my face from anyone who might see me cross the threshold in that tacky yet unrefined ovarian Bastille. But when the manager wants to shut down the hockey game to run the trailer for my movie — and he doesn’t even know who I am — well, who am I not to swing my script through the boob factory and see what impacts.

They come like hummingbirds to sign the napkin, as a kind of appetizer. If a Hooters girl does not sign the napkin to make you feel welcome, they are so terribly fired that it’s upsetting for me to type. But if they see us “reading lines” they all come at once. I’m chit-chatting loudly with the manager. I want to run the trailer but I can’t run the trailer because it’s a psycho thriller about a black security guard who kills white men to win the heart of the woman he loves. (The trailer sucks, but my bluff is so good that I won’t have to screen it. I have given the manager — and the birds in earshot — the idea that it could have been screened were it not for stuffy customers. For all they know, it’s a ripped copy of SHORT CIRCUIT II: BACK IN HOT WATER.) But…since it can’t be shown, a surrogate mixture of trivia and BS will stimulate the grapevine. Shot entirely on location in Kathy Ireland’s former office. A perfect B movie with a digital L+F with a distributor.

I got 90% of my talent off craigslist. This is easier.

They squeeze into the booth, two and three at a time, beside us and in front of us. Describe some of them? Okay. Thin and young with nice racks, big eyes, big dreams and single, a tumbleweed blowing across the cranial steppes. Now multiply this by twenty-five, allowing for genetic variance within the Burbank population pool. That is what they look like. We read the scene where our main character inappropriately gooses his love interest on the first date. I picked this scene personally just to see if we could get away with it. Normally, a six hundred pound gorilla makes quick work of this behavior, but my sly dog produces his SAG card, which, in this reality, is a periapt of proof against lawsuit. Forsooth, derrieres scrounge into our orange casting couch in the midst of grumpy men eating taco salad and wishing they were younger and/or us. And although these beauties stammer over the main points, I direct them to give the part more feeling and imagine they are really getting their ass pinched by a good-looking serial killer. Sometimes it’s the way you let yourself be pinched that makes a difference on film. And… scene. I take a one mega pixel image with my wafer-thin RAZR of the hot nineteen year old who runs her hand up my thigh when she drops off the onion rings. (Say what you will about Motorola, the phone is worth its weight in nookie.) Numbers come in many shapes, sizes, and varieties, but why bother with the napkin when I can program them next to their pictures. Look upon my works ye mighty and despair!

We stay an extra twenty minutes. And why not! I have kept my hands to myself, and my friend, who hasn’t, will be a fine acting coach to the ones still young in their parts. Because this is Hooters of Burbank! Where hotties remember our names, and follow us out of the restaurant and chase us to the car. This is the naked suburb of the big film town. This is how easy it is to get a Hooter’s girl when you are even 1% industry.

Now go back and read this article again.