Bigger social issues, not eatery's name, should trigger anger

Apr. 26, 2006 12:00 AM

I suppose I should be offended. I suppose I should be hoisting the flag of feminism and marching on fashionable Scottsdale. I suppose I should feel assailed, aggrieved, affronted even.

It turns out what happens in Vegas apparently doesn't stay in Vegas because one of its eateries is coming here. Specifically . . . the Pink Taco.

There, I said it.

Quick, someone check and see if Scottsdale is still standing.

I know its mayor is listing slightly. In fact, Mayor Mary Manross asked the restaurant owner to change the name of his soon-to-open place at the posh Scottsdale Waterfront. There is even speculation that the city might try to block the place from getting a liquor license. It seems the mayor doesn't relish the idea of lunching in an establishment named for a female body part.

"I don't appreciate anything that offends more than half the population," she told The Republic's Megan Finnerty, in a story in Saturday's Business section. "I really didn't want to see a business with that name opening anywhere here."

Like I said, I suppose I should be aggravated, exasperated, irritated even.

But then maybe I should have been horrified long ago, when my dad used to haul the family up to Cave Creek every Mother's Day for lunch at the Horny Toad.

Ed Chilleen opened the place in 1974. His wife, who worked at the Arizona Heart Institute, got the idea for the name from a doctor. It caused a brief stir and went on to become an institution in Cave Creek.

Chilleen sold the restaurant after a few years but eventually bought another one just down the road. One of his employees, a cowboy entertainer named Buffalo Rick, came up with its name. "Well, if there's going to be a Horny Toad," he told his boss, "we can be the Satisfied Frog."

And so it is. Quite satisfied, I would imagine, given the crowds it attracts.

Still, I suppose I should have been irritated, insulted even, that my dad would have considered such a place suitable for a family gathering. Just as I suppose I should stand with the mayor and be outraged that such vulgarity would come to Scottsdale. To Scottsdale, where nothing vulgar, nothing over the top ever happens.

Well, here's where I confess.

I can't work up much outrage over the prospect of a restaurant named for a slang word meaning "vagina."

I'm far more angered by the bars in downtown Scottsdale that nightly spew drunks onto the streets.

I'm far more shocked by the fact that the biggest private employer in America offers wages so low that nearly 2,800 Wal-Mart employees in Arizona look to taxpayers to provide their health insurance.

I'm far more offended by the fact that women earn 77 cents for every $1 their male counterparts earn, according to the Census Bureau. This, in the 21st century.

Yet the Pink Taco controversy will be all the rage for the next few weeks. We are, after all, so easily offended.

I think Chilleen, he of Crazy Ed's Satisfied Frog, said it best. "When does this offense, when does it all stop? You can't keep being politically correct, and we never have been," he told me. "When we stop laughing at ourselves, this country has really gone to hell in a handbasket."

So if Mayor Mary will excuse me, I'll decline to fret about what some restaurant decides to call itself. Besides, if she doesn't like the name, there's an easy way to make a loud statement using another body part.

They're called "feet." Use them to go eat some place else.

Reach Roberts at laurie.roberts@arizonarepublic.com or (602) 444-8635. Read her blog at robertsblog.azcentral.com.