Resolved: S.Lo to Dress the Role to Attain Favored Seating Status

Yes, as a matter of fact. I have made a resolution.

I plan to go out to eat every night in 2002, because there’s no better way to study L.A. society than by making the restaurant scene.

Recently my wife and I had a special occasion to celebrate. It called for something other than the No. 2 combination at Los Tacos on Santa Monica Boulevard in West Hollywood. So we got into the station wagon and went to a very nice eatery on the Westside, named for an olive. We were seated so close to the bathroom they could have hung the towel dispenser from our table.

It might have been the Subaru. If you pull up to a Westside restaurant in a Subaru station wagon, there’s just no way to look like you’ve got anything in syndication or post-production. The valets radio in to the host that a couple of rubes are headed for the door, and the fix is in.

So there we were at our sad little table on our very special night and now the waiters were flipping coins to see who got stuck with us. Who would want these stiffs who were such nobodies they got parked next to the commode?

After the appetizers, roughly six months went by before there was another sighting of our waiter. I thought maybe he went home sick or had changed into all black and disappeared into the crowd. But suddenly he appeared out of nowhere, fussing like a hen over a young couple who were being seated next to us.

They might have been somebody, the way their glasses were refilled every time they took a sip of wine, but I don’t think so. The thing was, the woman was dressed like Britney Spears and the guy had a skull cap pulled down over his ears and to a point just above his eyes, like either he had just come in off a ski slope or had just knocked over a convenience store.

This is the look, I gather. I’m sure we’ll see it in one of the next televised car chases. And I happen to think it’s the look for me in 2002, as I complete my image make-over and become S.Lo, man about town.

My question to you is this:

If I had made a reservation at that same restaurant under the name S.Lo, then showed up wearing a cap pulled down to my sinuses, would they have stuck me next to the john?

Of course not. I don’t think you have to actually be somebody. You simply have to look like you might be somebody.

The worst that can happen is that the guy in the skull cap sees me wearing one, and asks himself if he looks like as big a dope as I do. This used to work with my sons when they started wearing their pants around their knees. When we went out in public, I threatened that if they didn’t hitch up their trousers, I’d hang mine even lower than theirs, a visual that I believe haunts them to this day.

As the new year dawns, I just have to embrace the S.Lo persona, and L.A. will be mine. That’s the plan, anyway.

Kelsey Grammer, who recently bought a $6.9-million beach house in Malibu because the $4.5-million spread in the nearby hills was too far from the water, once walked into a Venice restaurant with a young blonde and an older woman I took to be either his mother or mother-in-law. With God and Allah as my witnesses, the older woman was wearing a “Frasier” jacket. I don’t recall, but it’s entirely possible the younger woman, who might have been his wife, was wearing a “Cheers” jacket.

Either way, the Grammer party sauntered in after us and got seated before us, which would have happened even if I’d won a Nobel Prize for curing cancer. But would it have happened if my wife was wearing an S.Lo jacket?

Speaking of sitcom royalty, once, on another very special and elegant occasion with a former boss, I dined at the Hotel Bel-Air. For all I know, this might be the only jacket-required restaurant in a 600-mile radius, but on the one and only night I was there, a true rebel decided to challenge the house rules.

Jerry Seinfeld.

Imagine the tragic moral dilemma for the Bel-Air.

Should they honor their own standard, or keep a big sitcom star happy?

They seated Jerry at a very lovely booth. I think if he had been wearing a skull cap, they would have comped the meal.

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Steve Lopez writes Monday, Wednesday and Friday. He can be reached at steve.lopez@latimes.com.