'Who's your daddy?" he said as he patted her on her rear end. It was meant to be a private comment, but in public places things are rarely private.

She leaned in and kissed him quickly before squeezing in between the wall and his outstretched arm. The space left between them was so small that if he were her employer the behavior might have fallen under the "impeding movement" clause of employee sexual harassment. That pat, however, would most likely fall under an entirely different heading.

As it just so happens, he was her employer, and now he was her lover - sort of.

I had watched the whole scenario unfold over the previous six months or so.

She had been a server at a restaurant loosely affiliated with the one at which I was working. Affiliated mainly by virtue of the many romantic entanglements that are so prevalent in the industry. This cook is dating that waitress who dated that manager who is now managing another restaurant where he is dating a cocktail waitress that used to work at É on and on it goes. So much of the restaurant industry is much less than six degrees of separation - more like two degrees. At any rate, what happened at one restaurant was common knowledge at the other, sometimes witnessed, sometimes told.

It had started with him coming in for lunch occasionally with either his business partners or his employees. Even more occasionally he would come in for dinner with his wife and two daughters. Over the six-month period his dinner outings

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with the family slowly abated while his visits for lunch came more often. A lot more often.

She always seemed to know when he was coming in for her lunch shift because on those days she was a little more gussied up than usual. She had stopped dating the assistant manager some time back - a supposed big secret - and as a result she no longer seemed to work the best shifts. Just another day in the restaurant business.

That is until a job opportunity for an unskilled receptionist at his place of employment presented itself. Miracle of miracles, she landed the job. Soon enough she was coming in to lunch with him. Things progressed, and he began to dress more stylishly. Their lunches became dinners as he began wearing thumb rings and sported an earring. Occasionally, he would don a Kevin Federline-style hat to go with his paisley shirt - an unusual look for a man in his mid-50s.

As the six months wore on the dinners with the wife and daughters stopped completely, as did the pretense of these "job meetings." It was now back-corner make-out sessions and steamed up windows in the parking lot.

All of which brought us up to the rear-end patting moment.

As soon as they walked in, two construction worker types who had been nursing bottled Coors at the bar ambled up to them. One of the men, a grizzled giant of a man with gnarled hands that were probably as adept at sawing a board as they were at pouring concrete, extended one of those 50-something hands to the man about his own age.

"You must be Jack," said the giant.

It was awkward from the get-go. Meeting your daughter's new boyfriend is always a little unusual. But when he is a married man about your own age and who makes twice as much money as you do, awkward doesn't begin to approach it.

The giant of a dad eventually got tired of putting on airs and more importantly, tired of dancing around the fact that his daughter was dating a married man. Dad wasn't going to buy any of his excuses or stories, and he certainly wasn't going to be influenced by his income or flattered by his attention.

His 20-something daughter, however, was.

The two middle-aged men played nice for a while. Until dad mentioned the wife. Then the cocktail waitress/receptionist/mistress/daughter lost her composure.

What followed was a little screaming, some finger-pointing, a whole lot of tears, some knocked over chardonnay and the early departure of a clearly distraught father (and his buddy), followed by the comforting of a middle-aged man.

All of which has left me with a few thoughts.

- Whenever I've heard "Who's your daddy," I have become strangely troubled.

- What impresses a 20-something does not necessarily impress her 50-something parent.

- Nothing you want kept private should ever be done in public.

- If there is such a thing as karma, in about 10 years or so, our 50-something Federline wannabe will be meeting his own daughter's 50-something married boyfriend. For that encounter he might want to remember the phrase, "Who's your daddy now?"

Jeff Burkhart is an award-winning bartender at a Marin bar/restaurant and an author. His columns appear weekly in Here. Add your comments to the end of this story. Contact him at jeffb@thebarflyonline.com.