Pygmalion The head waiter scrutinised him from top to toe. Thirty years in the job had given him a bit of a nose for trouble and this man stank from a long way off. Not that all trouble was bad. A good scandal from time to time was, in fact, what customers at the Viennese Theatre Café had come to expect. It had to be the right kind of trouble, though, such as when young, aspiring artists sang from the gallery in the Theatre Café that they were the next big thing or when a drunken ex-romantic lead from the National Theatre loudly proclaimed that the only positive remark he could make about the famous financier on the neighbouring table was that he was a homosexual, and therefore unlikely to reproduce himself. The person standing in front of the head waiter, however, did not seem as if he had anything witty or original to say; his appearance suggested more the tedious kind of trouble: unpaid bill, pissed and a scuffle. The external indications – black jeans, red nose and skinhead – had made him think he was one of the drunken stage hands who belonged in the cellar at Burns.
