window on 3rd

One of those mystery shop window displays (that is - a mysterious display, not a shop dedicated to mystery and magic, like the one that existed for years opposite the British Museum in the 1960s, and whose esoteric window displays made me feel that I, too, could be a Magician, if only I could afford to buy anything more expensive than, say, a packet of Itching Powder) - one of those displays designed to catch the eye, and I couldn't tell you for a minute what kind of shop it actually is.  It's a couple of doors down from Joan's on Third, a cafe that Alice (reflected in the glass, looking as though she's holding an illuminated lemon) meets friends in very often.  This was my first time, and I'd much recommend it.  

But I realized - that my reluctance to patronize it before is due to some inexplicable British snobbery around the name "Joan."  I don't think this works in the US (Joan Didion, Joan Baez); it may not even work in the UK (Joan Armatrading).  But it was one of those names that my mother was, I think, inexplicably snobbish about.  Her cousin Jim married a Joan, whom I remember just dimly: not someone to create, I'd have thought, memorable feelings (they used to send me a book token at Christmas for five shillings, and I remember that).  I never knew any other Joans: it always seemed, to me, to be a very old fashioned name, and, of course, coupled with "Darby and Joan," an archetypal pair of fusty elderly people... All this is to say: it's weird (and ridiculous) how an an-thought-through prejudice against a name can, apparently and irrationally, put one off going to what was an excellent breakfast place.