Tipped Off and Other Server Stories
By CHARLES FERRUZZA
After the first couple of former servers got up to tell their tales at the Central Library’s “Tipped Off!” event on Monday night, what was billed as a “showcase of prepared spoken-word performances by local writers in the restaurant trade” started sounding more like a 12 Step Meeting.
Waiters Anonymous?
But most of the monologues – performed by yours truly, as well as my Pitch colleague Lorna Perry, actor-playwright David Wayne Reed, Present magazine’s Pete Dulin, Kansas City Public Library’s Kaite Stover and perpetual curmudgeon John Hastings -- were upbeat and funny.
The Library’s series Order Up! Tales From the Dining Room also includes movies (Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore screens Saturday at 1:30 p.m. in the film vault; Cocktail is scheduled for July 26) and lectures. At the Waldo Branch Library on July 29 at 6:30 p.m., local historian Tom Taylor remembers America’s first professional waitresses in a lecture titled “Hometown Hostesses: The Harvey Girls.”
My own story began with my ambitious climb up the ladder from naive teenaged busboy and dishwasher to professional waiter (my celebrity customer list includes Noel Harrison of The Girl From U.N.C.L.E, the late soap opera queen Ruth Warrick and Mickey Dolenz and Davey Jones of The Monkees. All totally D-List, but they tipped well.
I shared the “Four Rules of Life” I learned from a trio of chain-smoking, hard-bitten old waitresses who taught me the ropes. I won’t share all of the rules here (they require more of a performance setting), but I will tell you what a tough old bird, Phyllis, revealed to me way back in 1979 (the year that picture of me before the jump was taken). To get the full impact of this sage advice, you have to imagine Phyllis – now in Hash House Heaven, I’m sorry to say – smoking Marlboros, taking an occasional nip out of a small bottle in her purse (“It’s cough syrup!”), and always complaining about men, menopause and her bunions, not always in that order.
She was watching me cleaning coffee pots – filling them with ice, salt and lemon wedges and shaking carefully, rinsing well – and puffing on a cigarette when she shared these words of wisdom:
“Never, ever lay your meat where you make your bread. That means never sleep with your co-workers in the restaurant business. Especially cooks and managers, because they’re always married to hen-pecking hags who have driven them to drink and drugs. Those fuckers deserve to be miserable. And never sleep with the other waiters, because they all have big mouths and short attention spans. And for God’s sake, never have sex with a dishwasher – the dishes might be clean, but they never are.”
It was excellent advice. I wish I’d always followed it.
3 comment(s) / Post a Comment
