When you’re young you tend to laugh at anything that paints any kind of clown face on normality or the status quo. I was thinking this morning about how I couldn’t stop laughing when I was 18 or thereabouts when I drove by Art’s Hot Dogs, a little stand on Route 7 in Norwalk about a mile south of the Wilton town line, and noticed that some kid had hand-painted the sign so it read “FArt’s Roessler Hot Dogs.” For some reason this made my day. I was giggling about it for hours. Now if I happen to see a commercial sign that’s been defaced I feel badly for the owner — another thing to fix and make right. Then again if I was Art (or whomever owned the stand) I would have accepted from the get-go that every so often some high-schooler would paint the extra “f.” Only natural. In a way Art was asking for it. If I’d been Art I would have always kept paint on hand with one or two brushes, always ready to go.
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