What’s the strangest conversation you’ve overheard in a restaurant?

Once upon a time, single diners used to take a book or a magazine into a dining room — God knows, I’ve done it myself — to pass the time while consuming a lonely meal. For some reason, having a “task” relieves the discomfort of dining alone. Now solo diners take cell phones into a dining room with them. And they talk.

I didn’t experience much of that when I was a server, back in the day. But once I was a patron in a restaurant in a Los Angeles restaurant, and the man sitting behind me was having a cell-phone conversation — a very theatrical conversation — with Barbra Streisand. Or that’s the impression he was trying to convey. I asked the waitress about the guy after he had paid and left, and she just rolled her eyes: “He sits there and pretends he talk to all kinds of people,” she said. “But you should come back on Sunday. That’s when he’s in here talking to God.”

As a waiter, I would frequently overhear tantalizing snippets of conversations as I checked on my tables. The problem was that a sentence or two, taken out of context, made it difficult to figure out what the conversation was really about. But not always.