The owner of Joie de Vivre is a WASP. Not a particularly faithful one, but ingrained habits make it impossible for her to countenance the use of certain words at Joie de Vivre. Unlike Harold Ross, who famously described his new new magazine, The New Yorker, as "not for the little old lady from Dubuque" Joie is designed not to make anyone uncomfortable, from children to - well, little old ladies and gentlemen from wherever. And this has sometimes meant we've passed up things we thought were pretty funny and not offensive, just to avoid "certain words." Bitch, if not matter of factly used to describe a female dog, would be one of the milder examples of a word we don't want on our products. Anyway, we recently ordered 12 copies of a new book called "The Chef Says: Quotes, Quips and Words of Wisdom." Reading through it we found two pages of rather profane wisdom. What to do? It's a great book and we really wanted to sell it, but didn't want someone picking it up and turning right to the offending page. (which of course would inevitably happen!) Anyway, we came up with a solution. In store censoring! We sacrificed one copy of the book, taped over the page, and wrote our own copy. People of course buy the uncensored version - but, they will have been warned ! Problem solved !
