Why I'm Not a Waitress

I recently went to a new restaurant owned by Rich Melman, the dining mogul and proprietor of the Lettuce Entertain You restaurant group in Chicago. The new place is named L. Woods Tap. It has kind of a hunting/fishing club motif. Sitting at the fashionably curved bar, I noticed Mr. Melman himself slip into the room. It wasn't surprising to see him, since his success is often attributed to his hands on approach.

I looked straight into his eyes but received no return glint of recognition. I don't know why I thought there should have been. Our last encounter was twenty five years ago . . . when he fired me. The restaurant was called The Great Gritzbe's Flying Food Show. It was his second restaurant after the hugely successful R.J.Grunts. It was one of his few failures.

I was an aspiring actress, just out of college and living at home. I wanted to be a waitress because the flexible hours would leave me time for auditions. Also . . . I thought it was a very cool thing to be. The waitresses at R.J. Grunts had created a new kind of waitress . . . a trendy, attractive seventy's girl, slurping up the last juices of the hippie era. Landing a job at this successor to R.J.Grunts was tantamount to instant "in crowd" admission. Everyone congratulated me except my mother, who was appalled. As the daughter of Russian Jewish immigrants, my mother had worked hard to rise above her West Side tenement roots. She viewed a waitress job as sliding backwards down the ladder.

My mother watched with disdain as I tied my black half apron over my tight jeans and T-shirt for work. "For this, I sent you to college? Who are gonna meet there? Goyem men lookin' to fool around on their wives?" Gritzbe's was located near Chicago's Rush Street, an area crawling with conventioneers and travelling salesmen.

"Mom," I whined, "why does everything I do have to involve finding a husband? What about my career?"

"What about my grandchildren?" she countered.

This is where being an only child put me in a tight spot.

I tucked this guilt trip away somehow . . . and trotted off to Gritzbes, eager to be a waitress. How hard could it be, I asked myself. If I could sing and dance onstage and remember my lines, this should be a snap.

On my first trainee night, I followed a waitress around and saw the new wave cash register - the first of its kind. Instead of numbers on the buttons, there were pictures of the menu items: a hamburger, a chicken salad, fried onion rings. What a no-brainer, I thought. I also learned the protocol when someone in your station has a birthday. The waitress was supposed to hot foot it over to the "dessert bar" (a gooey tribute to heart failure) fill a bowl with ice cream, nuts, fudge and top it off with oodles of maraschino cherries.

Next, with plate in hand, she ran around the restaurant, shouting to the other waitresses "I've got a birthday, I've got a birthday!" All the waitresses would surround the birthday celebrant and sing a mostly off-key "Happy Birthday to you" at the top of their lungs. I struggled valiantly, in my pitch perfect alto, to slice through all the errant notes and find the melody.

This was my favorite part of the job. In these modest ceremonies, I felt a bond with the other waitresses, as though together we were a team doing our best to feed the hungry and thirsty, with such pre- heart healthy, inventions as the "Monty Gritzbe," a Ruben sandwich on French toast.)

The truth is, the sisterhood I yearned for never really materialized. These waitresses, princesses of cool, were not feminist, post hippie women like the R.J. Grunts girls. What they were, in fact, were tough broads . . . lifers, if you know what I mean. They weren't working here so they could finance an outside business in say . . . herbal tea. This job was the pinnacle for them, a place where they could meet conventioneers with money (and wives), who would take them out and lavish them with little gifts . . . such as paying their rent. The kind who call you babe and hon.

It wasn't long before my name was mud. I was clumsy, perpetuating daily spills and collisions. I didn't pick up my orders promptly, causing the other girls to bring my table's food out for me. But the worst thing of all was, I couldn't make change.

This was the reason I was late picking up orders. Checks were paid to the waitress at the table. Each waitress kept her own bank, in a hip bus changer slung around her hips. Each day I arrived for work with a bank of fifty dollars (this was 1975) from which to make change. The payment was turned in at the end of the shift. Anything left over my original bank was profit. After a week or so I began to notice I wasn't making any money. In fact, I was losing money. Too often I would have nothing left over. Clearly, the only thing I was good at was Happy Birthday.

The final blow came two weeks into the job. Eighty year old Louis Goldblum had a birthday. I ran around publicizing it to my fellow servers. But they ignored me, whizzing by, their arms piled high with steaming, fried onion cakes and half-pound burgers. Then, running over to the dessert bar, I piled on mushy cheesecake and un-defrosted strawberries. I crowned it all with drippy peaks of whipped cream. Holding my trophy, I skipped to the birthday boy's table, ready to take my place beside my brethren for a heartfelt tribute.

But the others never joined me. All alone, I began singing in a small voice, thinking someone would join in. "Happy Birthday to you, Happy Birthday to you, Happy Birthday Mr. Goldblum." They heard me belting it out for all it was worth, but not one of them stopped. They blurred right by me, arms a cornucopia of the good life. I sang on bravely and clapped as loud as I could when Mr. Goldblum wheezed at the candles.

Closing time on a Friday night was my swan song. As I was counting up the night's losses, Rich Melman approached me.

"I'm sorry Gail, but you're just not cut out for this work" he said.

"I know," I sniffled, my eyes filled with tears.

"But, Gail?"

"Yes Mr. Melman?."

"You sure can sing happy birthday."

As my husband and I were leaving L. Woods Tap the other night, Rich Melman was positioned near the door. I approached and told him I had worked at The Great Gritzbe's Flying Food Show. He didn't remember me.

"That was twenty five years ago," he said. Feels like a hundred."

"You fired me." I said.

"Looks like you got over it," he observed.

"Yeah, I got over it."

"Looks like you did okay for yourself," he added, eyeing my handsome husband.

"Yeah," I said, "but after three careers and two husbands, I still can't make change."