yes please(41)
?Everything in moderation.
don’t forget to tip your waitresses
THE TOWN WHERE I GREW UP WAS DECIDEDLY BLUE-COLLAR, FILLED WITH TEACHERS AND NURSES AND THE OCCASIONAL SALES MANAGER. My friends and I fell asleep to the sound of our parents arguing about car payments and tuition. It was our soundtrack, this din of worry. If you were old enough, you were expected to have a part-time job.
When I was sixteen, I got one. I was a junior secretary in a podiatrist’s office near my house in Burlington. I had to wear a short white skirt, a tight blouse, and high-heeled shoes. This outfit made me look like a teenage nurse, which sounds hot but I promise you was not. I was a teenager during a period of truly awful style. It made sense that my friends and I all had part-time jobs, because we dressed like Melanie Griffith in Working Girl during a long subway commute. Hair spray was king, and the eighties silhouette in Burlington was big hair, giant shoulder pads, chunky earrings, thick belts, and form-fitting stretch pants. My silhouette was an upside-down triangle. Add in my round potato face and hearty eyebrows and you’ve got yourself a grade-A boner killer, so remember that before you try to jerk it to my teenage-nurse story.
Anyway, this other nurse and I used to jump around in our underwear and kiss each other for fun.
Oh wait, what I meant to say was that I answered phones and filed things. The best part of my job was leaning into the waiting room and whispering, “The doctor will see you now.” It always felt like such a WASPy phrase. Right up there with “It truly is my pleasure” and “We just got back from the country.” Every once in a while we would get an exciting sprained ankle or a flat-feet emergency, but usually the patients were just old people who couldn’t cut their own toenails anymore.
I was a really good waitress. Waitressing takes a certain gusto. You need a good memory and an ability to connect with people fast. You have to learn how to treat the kitchen as well as you treat the customers. You have to figure out which crazy people to listen to and which crazy people to ignore. I loved waiting tables because when you cashed out at the end of the night your job was truly over. You wiped down your section and paid out your busboy and you knew your work was done. I didn’t take my job home with me, except for the occasional nightmare where I would wake up in a cold sweat and remember I never brought table 14 their Diet Coke.
My first waitressing job was in the summer of 1989, a few months before I left for college. I was seventeen and sticky. I earned the extra money I needed for textbooks scooping ice cream at Chadwick’s, a local parlor that specialized in sundaes and giant steak fries. Chadwick’s was in Lexington, Massachusetts, the rich town next door (the Eagleton to our Pawnee). Lexington was the famous home of the “Shot Heard ’Round the World.” Burlington was the home of the mall. Lexington, as it turns out, is also Rachel Dratch’s hometown, and much later I would learn that she also worked at the same sticky emporium a few years before I did. Imagine if our paths had crossed! Imagine how hilarious we would have been while we shoved toothpicks in the club sandwiches! Think of all the jokes about “marrying the ketchups.” Such a waste. Lexington High still plays Burlington High on Thanksgiving Day, and Dratch and I trash-text each other. She calls me Burlington garbage and I tell her to go drive her Mercedes into a lake. In my town, the best way to insult someone was to call them rich and smart, which, looking back, was maybe a little shortsighted of us.
You know what? Who cares. Burlington rules! GO RED DEVILS!!
Summer jobs are often romantic; the time frame creates a perfect parentheses. Chadwick’s was not. Hard and physical, the job consisted of stacking and wiping and scooping and lifting. At the end of my shift, every removable piece of the restaurant would be carted off and washed. Vinyl booths were searched and scrubbed. This routine seemed Sisyphean at first, but I soon learned the satisfaction of working at a place that truly closed. I took great joy in watching people stroll in after hours, thinking they could grab a late-night sundae. I would point to the dimmed lights and stacked chairs as proof that we were shut. It was deliciously obvious and final.
Chadwick’s was one of those fake old-timey restaurants. The menus were written in swoopy cursive. The staff wore Styrofoam boaters and ruffled white shirts with bow ties. Jangly music blared from a player piano as children climbed on counters. If the style of the restaurant was old-fashioned, the parenting that went on there was distinctly modern. Moms and dads would patiently recite every item on the menu to their squirming five-year-olds, as if the many flavors of ice cream represented all the unique ways they were loved.
There was a performance element to the job that I found appealing. Every time a customer was celebrating a birthday, an employee had to bang a drum that hung from the ceiling, and play the kazoo, and encourage the entire restaurant to join him or her in a sing-along. Other employees would ring cowbells and blow noisemakers. I would stand on a chair and loudly announce, “Ladies and gentlemen, we are so happy to have you at Chadwick’s today, but we are especially happy to have Kevin! Because it’s Kevin’s birthday today! So, at the sound of the drum, please join me in singing Kevin a very happy birthday!”
The appeal didn’t last long. I’m not sure when the worm turned. Maybe it was during one of the many times we announced the BellyBuster. The BellyBuster consisted of mounds of ice cream in a giant silver bowl carried in on a stretcher. The busboys would have to pretend to struggle under the weight of this giant sundae as they lifted it onto the table and handed a giant spoon to the maniac who had ordered it. I would ease my pain by exchanging looks with one busboy who was always slightly drunk and the ex-junkie cook, who was always slightly grouchy. The cook spoke in bumper stickers when describing his disposition: “Of course I’m mean. It’s hard to be happy when you are standing this close to the fire.”