A Room at the Inn

When I tended bar in a hotel, I always had to work on Christmas. Hotels, of course, do not close on the holidays. They become large boxes of lonely people with no place to go except the hotel bar, hotel restaurant, or their own room. Every place else is closed on Christmas; sooner or later, they usually all wind up in the bar.

There is something sadistic about filling a hotel bar with Christmas decorations - reminding the customers of their isolation - by fate or design - from their families. It's like showing pictures of food to hungry children. Then you add alcohol to their misery and everything gets so much better. I think the decorations are nice enough in the two or three weeks preceding, but they might just as well be toned down a little out of respect on the Big Day.

One hotel I worked at tried to make me wear an elf hat on Christmas. I said, "I did not spend this much time doing my hair just to have it flattened out with a children's costume. No thank-you."

Elves Have Feelings, Too

"Nobody's perfect. The only one that ever was was crucified."

- Loretta Lynn

I'm still here. I'm not dead. I'm just not here here.

My computer was dying, so I had to send it in to the manufacturer for repairs (it was under warranty) and in a stroke of genius I managed to lose all of the notes I made for my blog by either not copying them onto a disc, leaving the disc in the PC when I sent it in, or just losing the disc after I made it. Anyway, that leaves me wondering what stories I have left to tell, and which ones I've told already - knowing I'm gonna have to make notes from what I've already posted unless I wanna be like someone's granny, telling the same story over and over. Also, I just found the part of blogger that shows comments "waiting to be approved" so I was late getting a couple of them up. I was touched to hear from Fuck My Table - it's nice to be missed. There was a comment I didn't post, and it actually got me to go back and edit an entry so someone couldn't be identified. I don't want this blog to hurt anyone, so I'll work harder at disguising the guilty parties!

It's Christmas eve, and I just got back from candlelight service. I'm back to singing with the choir - hoping I'm not singing badly. Sometimes I do still miss waiting tables, but I know there were many years when I couldn't go to candlelight services because I was working, and I sure wouldn't have been able to commit to singing with any group regularly. One year, not only did I have to work parties on Christmas eve, but at the last moment - just when I thought I was going home - the hotel I worked for told me that one of the regulars from Saturday Night Live was in town for a show and NBC would like to throw a party for him and his guests in a suite upstairs, so I would need to stay. Midnight on Christmas eve, and about 3 hours' notice.

I stayed (it was either that or lose my job) and set up the hors-d'oeuvre and host bar, and the "star" showed up for less than a minute - treated me like a bad smell coming from the neighbor's house - and virtually ignored all of the people who had shown up to meet him. Good news is the party died early, but it sucked to be regarded as so inconsequential. Maybe NBC hadn't checked with their "star" and he was feeling just as manipulated as I was, but at least I stayed and did my job. I didn't need anyone to be nice to me; just don't be rude, waste my time, and dump your guests on me.

Most of my Christmas memories of waiting tables are from banquets when I worked 105-115 hour weeks with only snatches of time between shifts. There were always a lot of splits crammed into about eighteen days of pure bedlam. My legs would cramp, my knee would give out and I'd have to wrap it, and I'd eat the same holiday buffet food for several days running. I still gag just thinking of leftover well done prime rib. Once it has sat under the carving lamp for two hours and another two hours in the warmer, it's not so appealing, but it was better than the chopped weenies and hair in the employee cafeteria.

We had several groups that came back year after year for their Christmas parties. Some of those folks were as dear as family to me, and I miss them. I kept in touch for a while after I left Colorado and I have remembrances like a crocheted book mark, a coffee cup with my name on it, and a statue about 18 inches tall of a waiter with a tray that one of my groups carved the words, 'To Guy. Best Waiter in Denver" in the base of. They'd have extra cash for me for waiting on them all year and it was fun to see them having a meeting that was more of a party than business.

On the other side of it, there were some groups, both familiar and not, where the parties were sponsored by employers who intimidated their subordinates into attending. Nobody would drink until the boss drank, everybody drank exactly the same thing that the boss drank, and everyone was afraid to leave until the boss left. One older couple with several restaurants would "spontaneously" entertain their "guests" (prisoner employees) with a hokey song and comedy routine till after Midnight. Every year someone would be assigned to talk them into singing, and then they wouldn't stop. If they did stop, it was someone else's "job" to talk them into singing more. On and on it would go. It was painful. We'd see people arriving for the party with all the enthusiasm of children waiting to be inoculated for German measles.

Not that the hotel's own Holiday Party was much better, but at least there were always a few people in food and beverage who didn't care if they got fired for drinking too much and since the chef was making food for people he was gonna see every day - including his boss - it was pretty good. I still had to help set up the party, but usually they got management to wait on us. Sometimes, we'd work it and they paid us extra. One year we hired temps. We never did that again.

I always worked especially hard at Christmas, and under particularly trying circumstances. When I was a banquet captain, the sales staff would book more parties than we had silverware and china to accommodate, and when I was a bartender, there were a greater number of emotional basket cases dousing the flames of their own personal Hell with booze to keep watch over and know just when to help them to the broken crackers and sweating cheese on the buffet table. Among the staff, we didn't hold anything back and there were plenty of awful words exchanged under pressure, but out on the floor we made "Christmas" happen for the strangers paying for the experience. Those memories are bittersweet.

I'm reading a book right now called "The Managed Heart" that discusses the disconnect that happens/has to happen when people are paid to exhibit feelings they don't actually feel. Waiters have to look like they enjoy their jobs, are happy, eager, thankful, excited, concerned, remorseful .... anything but genuine in most cases. The customers sometimes even know that the face on the outside doesn't match the person inside, and may even challenge how well you've performed this ruse. They don't care that you are irritated with them, but they certainly care whether it shows. "Never let 'em see you sweat" is what is expected of you as a waiter, but it's probably the worst thing you can do in personal relationships. I don't miss being all the people I needed to be in order to be a waiter. I'm still working at discovering the person I really am underneath all those years of pretending.

I hope I start writing again, and that there's someone left reading. Thanks to all of you who have been so encouraging. Now that I've figured out where the comments are going, I'll be better about getting them posted. Merry Christmas!

Feeling needed

I used to work all of the holidays because I didn't have any family in town and I wanted to give the other waiters and waitresses a chance to spend as much time with theirs as they could on those days. One Thanksgiving, I had stayed all the way through the day shift and halfway into swing when I finally was cut, and I decided to take myself out to dinner at a buffet and have my own celebration. I arrived at the restaurant about a half hour before closing, but I didn't feel too guilty since it was a buffet and I wasn't gonna be camping. What I hadn't taken into account was that most of the food was gone! I would have been so much better off going home alone than trying to convince myself that I was actually celebrating anything. The meager scraps of pressed turkey and crusty bits of dressing made me lonelier than ever for my family.

After that experience, I had a new motive for working on the holidays. I was determined that each person I waited on on Christmas and Thanksgiving (not all the time ... I wasn't a fanatic!) felt valued and noticed. I still covered the shifts, but I wasn't just doing it for my co-workers anymore. I've always liked to feel necessary, and there were so many customers who were eating alone on those days. Now I knew what it felt like to be invisible in a crowd of people on Thanksgiving.

Eventually, there was a diner I worked at exclusively on Thanksgiving and Christmas, whether I pulled any other shifts for them or not. For about seven years, I committed to serving holiday meals there and got to know people over time and establish my regulars. It was almost like visiting family. I've got some great memories of those shifts. Heart-wrenching, in some ways. There were some customers who were so frail, I wondered if they would make it the next year and serving them what might be their last holiday dinner was a real honor. I think about some of them still .... an elderly woman who dressed to the Nines, so polite and soft-spoken, who loved the cherries in the Waldorf salad, so I always made sure she had extra .... a couple, one of whom had wasting syndrome and could barely swallow who held hands while they ate ... I'm glad I got to be the one to be certain that they got the best we had to give.

It made me feel good when people told me it was their "best ever" or how much my service meant to them, and I didn't feel the pressure on those days to work for tips. It's too bad I didn't have that attitude every day, and I don't really know why I didn't. So much of my feelings about waiting were affected by how I chose to look at the situation. I'm thankful I had at least two days out of the year when I chose to feel glad to be a waiter.

Goodbye, Friend

I read today that a favorite waitress friend of mine passed away. It happened quite some time ago, and I only found out because I saw an article about the place where we used to work. The restaurant had been operating for over 40 years by the time some land developers came in and decided to tear it down. Edith had worked there for over 20 years. I knew her best as one of her regular customers; I'd come in when I got off work at the bar where I cocktailed. I worked with her when the diner needed extra help, like on Thanksgiving and Christmas, for several years, and then eventually I worked there full time. The article said she died the day after the restaurant was razed.

Blue Ribbon Texas Nibblin' Double Dribblin' Oink Oink Plate

I never liked working on the 4th, but it wasn't because I had any particular burning desire to watch fireworks or barbecue or mark the holiday in any way. It's just the forced merriment of holidays in general, combined with the question that is always hovering in the air, "So, are you doing anything special for the 4th?" If they were asking me, the answer was, "Working." If I was foolish or insensitive enough to ask them, the answer was usually, "Just this." Oh, man. You really do have a crappy life if this is special.

Regarding "Specials: The 4th of July specials almost always had some "Blue Ribbon" or county fair kind of theme to them and it really sucked when they advertised the heck out of these specials all week and then ran out halfway through the shift. It's just mean to run out of anything "special" when your holiday crowd is made up of so many people who don't have families in town or didn't get invited to neighborhood barbecues. That's the one time you've gotta come through. It's especially mean when the restaurant has named the special (now 86'd) something rhyming or stupid that nobody wants to say in the first place. First you make a 40 year-old man say words that sound like they came out of a Dr. Seuss book and then you tell him he did it for nothing? They would be so much happier if you just said, "Same old shit today ... don't get your hopes up." Or even better, don't open the restaurant on the 4th of July. There are some of us who would rather go to a bar and drink about our independence than work on that day. We could take advantage of their 4th of July beer specials, 'cos Lord knows they never have to deal with depressed people on the holidays.