My Brief Bartending Career

In the early 1990s, I left a husband, a house, and a job because none of it was turning out as I had hoped. I could live off the proceeds from selling my house for one year, so I had one year to get on my feet. My plan was to work at night in the lucrative field of bartending while writing by day.

It seemed like a plan. I’d work at night in an atmosphere of noise, hubbub and congeniality, which would take the loneliness out of being single again and make me forget all my romantic and career failures while I lived in this netherworld. There would be the added bonus of big tips for mixing magical potions. I would be a wizard before Harry Potter was ever invented.

This was also pre-Internet and pre-blogging. If blogs had existed back then, and I had blogged my bartending adventures just as Diablo Cody would one day blog her adventures as a stripper, which got a book deal, then a movie, and an Oscar, where would I be now? Alas, I was ahead of the curve, and my bartending life didn’t last that long anyway.

I took a course at J. Sargeant Reynolds in bartending. There was such a thing then. We met once a week at Extra Billy’s for a couple of months, learning recipes, mixing tips, equipment, customer service, and listening to fascinating and hilarious bartending stories from our young, attractive male teacher. All my classmates were younger than me, but back then I could pass. I received my diploma, which no one ever asked to see, and a folder full of drink recipes, which I converted to index cards.

Getting a job as a bartender was just as impossible as getting a job as a journalist. There were seldom ads for the position. Cold-calling bars produced no results. No one wanted to let me start behind the bar. I would have to waitress first, with no promises of advancement. Even at the least trendy places, like Piggy's Attaché Lounge, I was told I had to waitress first. Men did not have to waitress first. They went straight behind the bar, either as a bar back (carrying ice and supplies from the back) or actual bartending. It was discrimination.

I don’t remember now why I didn’t agree to that. Maybe I thought it would be too degrading. With my shiny new diploma, I didn’t want to be out on the floor carrying a tray. I was ready to mix!

So I signed up with a temp agency that supplied bartending and catering services. I said I was a bartender, not a waitress. I didn’t want to do gigs where I carried food trays. I was very clear about that, so I worked less than girls willing to do it all. Still, I got a few jobs.

On the surface, it was glamorous. The uniform was a white tux shirt with a black bowtie, a black cummerbund, a black skirt, and black flats. I still had the legs for the skirt. I’d see older, exhausted women who had transitioned to black pants, but I wasn’t there yet. And my stomach was still flat enough then to rock a cummerbund. A bowtie and a tux shirt is a good look for anyone. I would see how the other half lived, and in Richmond there was definitely another half where life was sophisticated and elegant.

Under the surface, it was not so glamorous. It was a sticky job. You started the evening cutting up dozens of oranges and limes for your station, the juice splashing all over you. Since you had to report to work in your uniform, you were stuck wearing that sticky outfit for the rest of the night. During the course of an evening, you’d be making dozens of basic highballs with club soda, ginger ale, tonic water, orange, grapefruit or cranberry juice, mixed with vodka, gin, whiskey or rum, and garnished with fruit. You’d be rapidly cracking open the soda bottles and getting sprayed by them. By the end of the night, you were as sticky as a pest strip from head to toe, standing in a big wet spot -- and not the good kind either.

Four jobs stand out in my memory, and in the end, I didn’t work much more than those four because they sealed my fate as a bartender.

I’ve never been good at memorizing anything, a flaw that kept me from being an accountant (multiplication tables) and an actress (lines), both careers I wanted to do. So I was very nervous about a special afternoon event at the Lewis Ginter Botanical Gardens where we would do more than the basic highballs. We were equipped to make a few fancier drinks, like whiskey sours, Manhattans, martinis, and others. I had some of my index cards in my skirt pocket and would peek at them. One of my table customers thought this was charming and would cheerfully talk me through his drink orders.

But at the end of the evening, the temp agency booker, who had also worked the event, chewed me out for using cards. It was unprofessional, he said. I was never going to make it in the bartending biz at that rate. Shame on me.

I felt humiliated. Here I was with a college degree, and yet I’m being made to feel like dirt because I peeked at the instructions for a whiskey sour. I would have cried all the way home -- and I did shed a few tears -- except for the fact I had a $20 tip in my pocket from my most helpful customer. There was a certain advantage to being a damsel in bartending distress that my boss did not fully appreciate as far as making money. As long as you looked like you were trying, there was always a mercy tip. But that turned out to be the exception, not the rule.

I didn’t think I’d be called again, but two big events were coming up and they needed everyone they could get. So I got a station at the Bal du Bois ball at the Country Club of Virginia, the only time I’ll ever see the inside of that temple of privilege. Here were Richmond’s most elegant young people and their very rich parents, dancing, eating and drinking in their very fine clothes. But despite all the good breeding, drunk guys are still drunk guys and there’s nothing elegant about being a sloppy drunk.

At the end of the night, as I was closing my station, one of those drunk boys came up to me and blubbered, “I jus wanda you to know you made me feel baaaad all night. Ever’ time I came to you for a drink, you looked at me that way.”

I knew what "way" had cut him to the quick -- a look of disapproval that despite his fine tuxedo and jazzy, multi-colored cummerbund, and his Porsche parked outside, and his future career as a corporate lawyer, he was still one sorry, sloppy drunk tonight and I felt for at least that moment that I was better than him.

I was going to have a serious problem as a bartender if I made my clients feel like crap every time they ordered a drink.

The downward spiral continued at New Year’s Eve at the Tredegar Ironworks, another expensive ticket for the rich kids. It was a BYOB affair. The catering service supplied the mixers and fruit. The guests brought their own liquor, which was name tagged and kept at the multi-staffed stations and poured on demand by We the Bartenders. The evening went okay until the end of the night when a very drunk young man came to retrieve what was left of his bottle from my station and I couldn’t find it. He accused me of stealing it, but his party convinced him to forget about it and leave.

Shaken, I ran to the ladies’ room, which was a disaster area. Every toilet was full and overflowing, a couple of inches of water on the floor. Sanitary napkins, tampons and wads of toilet tissue were floating in the bowls and puddling on the floor in white and pink heaps. Faucets were left running. Every sink was full of plates of leftover Swedish meatballs and chicken wing bones. Lipstick smeared the mirrors. Garbage was everywhere. There’d be no peeing here tonight. Girls who came from well-to-do families had trashed this bathroom. Had no one ever told them not to flush tampons and sanitary napkins in all their private school years? Had no one ever told them to put their leftovers in the trashcan, not the sink?

Out in the parking lot, my drunken nemesis spotted me heading to my car and tried to attack me again for supposedly stealing his liquor bottle. His friends had to tackle him as I ran for my car just as the police pulled up. There was yelling, accusations, and a disgusted police officer who clearly saw a very drunk boy and a pathetic older woman in her sticky tux shirt and bowtie with no liquor bottle concealed on her body. I'm just glad I wasn't strip searched.

You would think that would finish bartending for me, but I took one more job at a reception at VCU President Trani’s home in Windsor Farms. His house is like the White House, with a series of reception rooms for entertaining on the spacious ground floor. The kitchen was huge and impersonal, built for caterers as a staging area. The actual private quarters were upstairs and unseen by the public.

I dutifully cut up oranges and limes, only to learn I would not have a bartending station at this gig. Despite my request to only be booked as a bartender, I was assigned to pick up glasses. Only guys could bartend. The girls walked through the grounds and the reception rooms, picking up abandoned glasses and returning them to the kitchen. I remember being disgusted by a big fish with its face still on being used as a serving plate. It had been split open and its insides were filled with some mushy stuff people were scooping up with crackers. I feel your pain, fish. This is a humiliating way to end up.

When it was over, we were supposed to hang around to load up the caterer’s truck, but the truck was late coming back and when it did, it was parked at the end of the long, curving, downhill driveway. Let the guys carry the trays and stuff down to the truck. They hadn't been walking all night, picking up glasses. I physically could not carry trays of plates down a cobblestone driveway. I had not signed on for that duty anyway, so I left. I left without asking permission if I could leave. I left before the gig was officially declared over. I left confused about my career as a bartender, reduced to picking up glasses from the lawn of the president of the college where I had attended and graduated with hope and promise.

I never got paid for that job and I never called the agency to report that I did not get paid because I figured they’d just yell at me for leaving before the truck was loaded. I never got a call to work again either. And thus ended my brief career as a bartender.

Virtual College

When my son was in college a few years ago, it was like I was back in college, and it was just as dumb as it was the first time. Once he called for help with his English class. They had watched "Dr. Strangelove or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb," and he was supposed to write two paragraphs on how satire was used in the movie.

To submit his paper, he had to post his thoughts on an electronic discussion board, which was a lot different from when I was in college and we actually wrote on paper and handed it in. At the time, he didn't own a computer or know how to type, so he would call me on his cell phone from the computer lab, I would log into the same discussion board from home and I'd type in what he dictated.

On this particular evening, before he could think of something profound to say about the use of satire in "Dr. Strangelove," a campus policeman flashed a card in front of his face which said the use of cell phones in the computer lab was forbidden. So he logged out and walked home, dictating his two paragraphs to me as he walked. I typed it into the discussion board.

This may not be the college I remember, but thinking about "Dr. Strangelove" is. College is a lot of information you will never use again. Dr. Strangelove had nothing to do with his major either, a technical trade that requires no philosophical thought. There were 200 people in his class in an auditorium setting. At the first session, the professor taught relaxation and meditation technique to prepare for the semester. In preschool, this was called nap time.

Before I logged out of the discussion board, I read what the other students were writing and was appalled to find even in an English class, they were submitting their "papers" in email style writing -- all caps or no caps at all, minimal punctuation if any, and no paragraph breaks. They were not learning to write, spell, or punctuate in this class, although there was an advisory to utilize the spellcheck.

The next week my son called again because he needed to analyze three poems and didn't know how to think about poetry. The poems were vaguely related to "Dr. Strangelove," being anti-war and satirical. For each, the professor's online instructions were to "tell how the poem deepens your contact with its content." And, the instructions prodded, "don't forget to say why this poem is good, and what you wonder about."

What if I wonder why the professor presupposes I think the poem is good? What if my contact doesn't deepen? What if the poem is stupid? What if I think most poetry is a fraud, especially the stuff that doesn't rhyme or have any iambic in its pentameters?

My son got angry with me. "We have to take this seriously. It's a grade."

Well, okay, but it's difficult to discuss poetry and what it means and how our contact is deepening when one of us is making an illegal cell phone call with a dying battery from the computer lab and the other is reading the poem for the first time. I read the poem that begins with the line "McNamara Rusk Bundy." Then it vaguely talks about children in a school yard. Do college sophomores today know what McNamara Rusk Bundy means? That's from the '60s.

"They were poets in the '60s?" my son asks. No. They were government guys involved in the Vietnam War. How old is your teacher that he's going back to the '60s for war protest poems? My son points out that "Dr. Strangelove" is pre-Vietnam War. He has a point. Our contact with the content is actually deepening after all.

My own English professor many years ago was a young man who was teaching to avoid the draft and ending up in Vietnam himself. He wore sandals and sat on top of his desk, cross-legged. His favorite book, from which he obtained his philosophy of life, and from which he taught, was "The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis."

To put this in historical context, before there was "Gilligan's Island," there was a show called "The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis" based on this book about a frustrated college boy. Bob Denver, who would go on to play Gilligan, played Dobie's beatnick friend, Maynard G. Krebbs. His catch phrase was "You rang?" To put beatnicks into historical context, before stoners, there were surfer dudes, and before surfer dudes, there were hippies, and before hippies, there were beatniks. Hey, I should be teaching college.

All this I remember, yet I can't think of much I actually learned in college that was useful when I went to work. I learned all the work stuff on the job, or by teaching myself things I needed to know to get a certain job.

Still, everyone will tell you that you need a college degree in life. All a college degree means, though, is you went through a lot of crazy hoops and ordeals over a period of time. Maybe that in itself is some kind of preparation for life -- except now we don't get graded.

Elegy for a Printer

I just returned from Colonial Heights where I donated my HP Laserjet 2100M to the Swift Creek Mill Playhouse office. A young man carried it out of my car, up the stairs and left it on a table in the hallway. I said a few final words to it, hoping it would have a nice life and stay busy in the theater world.

Yes, I felt bad about leaving my printer. We had been through a lot together.

I think I bought it in 1997 for $800 from CompUSA. It was a huge purchase for me because I didn't have a job at the time. My hobby, a monthly newspaper I pasted up in my dining room, was almost as time-consuming as a real job and had expenses that were barely covered by the advertising money I raised. Everyone running a website as a job these days knows what that's like.

I originally created the newspaper on a Apple Classic II and a Stylewriter II printer, printing out columns of justified type, headlines and cutlines, cutting them out with a razor blade and a ruler, coating the backs with a glue stick and pasting them onto blue-lined sheets of card stock in a newspaper page design. This was the same way the daily newspaper was created between the eras of hot type and computers. I had been a paste-up girl for about a decade at the daily, assembling pages like a puzzle while old, cranky newspapermen acted inappropriately. When a story was too long to fit its diagrammed space and needed a part cut out, you had to call out, "I need a bite!" to get an editor's attention to come tell you which part you could cut out.

Papers took preplanning back then. You had to diagram them out as precisely as you could because once you had your photos screened, you were stuck. I had to have all my art and photography together in advance, crops marked with a grease pencil, and take them downtown to a very small business that did photo screens. I had to know what size I wanted the photo to be in advance. The screen guy would rephotograph the cropped part of my photos and blow them up or shrink them to the requested size, and give the screened photos back to me in big sheets called veloxes. If you looked at the velox with a magnifying glass, you could see each photo was actually a series of dots. Those dots were your resolution and what made your black and white photos have all the necessary shades of gray; otherwise, without a screen all dark areas of a photo reproduced as black.

Doing color photos was even more complicated, involving color separations, and was something I never learned and couldn't afford to do anyway.

I was paying the screen guy anywhere from $75 to $200 a month, depending on how many photos I had to use, so between the screen guy and the print shop that actually printed the whole newspaper, my profit margin was very small.

Enter the HP Laserjet 2100M. This printer not only produced sharper text than the Stylewriter, it could do 1200 resolution. If I printed out a grayscale photo on it, it would have enough dots in it to look like the photo. All I had to do was cut it out and paste it down, just like I was doing with the text. I could pay for it in four to six months if I stopped using the screen guy downtown. It was my first big business decision, after the decision to start the paper itself.

I still feel bad about the screen guy because I think the Free Press and I were his last regular clients and he was on the brink of being an unnecessary business and had not planned for anything else.

So for the next couple of years, I continued to roll along with the cut and paste, and then doing the paper on QuarkXPress and printing it out in two big chunks, the top of the page and the bottom. But by 2002 or so, my printer in Ashland was telling me, after I did the whole paper in QuarkXPress, to just convert the whole thing to a .pdf and bring it to him on a disc. No more glue sticks or razor blades, and no more need for the printer. It wasn't long after that when I didn't even have to bring the disc anymore. I just uploaded the file. And it wasn't long after that before I decided why bother to pay the printer all the money anyway, just upload the file to a website and let people look at it that way. And it wasn't long after that before the website itself became the paper.

So for the past decade, the big old printer has just been grinding out copies of emails and manuals. It became more and more difficult to connect it to newer computers. I had to buy a converter box to run an ethernet cable through it when USB became all the style. With the latest Apple operating system, Snow Leopard, there was no longer any support for printers requiring AppleTalk, and I had to network it to an older Mac to use it.

I'm not sure if Swift Creek will be able to figure out how to get it to work with PCs, but I wish them well. That printer was a partner and a companion as I taught myself everything I know today about publishing and print production. I'm sorry to see it go, but there's seven other printers in the house right now and it's just crazy to have so many.

That printer is also the star of my second most popular video on YouTube with almost 17,000 views. Good bye printer. I loved you. I'll miss you. I think I finally paid for you, although I'm not sure. Have a nice life at the historic theater and I hope you don't end up in a recycling drive anytime soon.



This Old T-Shirt

My husband has never worn a suit to work. He has never had to interpret "office casual." His entire working life has been spent in uniforms, sometimes with his name embroidered in italics on a breast pocket patch.

Not that there's anything wrong with that. Jobs requiring uniforms are just as honorable as suiting up. Toilets gotta flush; cars gotta run; product gotta ship. My husband has never spent money putting together a work wardrobe.

He has a funeral/wedding suit and a button-down collar shirt to go with it. He has a pair of dress shoes, and up until recently when I converted him to Skechers, he always had three pairs of Reboks: lawn-mowing Reboks, work Reboks (when he wasn't required to wear steel toe boots), and dress Reboks. They were all the same shoe, just in different states of wear.

Instead of office casual, his non-work wardrobe is life casual. He has a week's worth of jeans in two sizes, fat jeans and thin jeans. He used to have several pairs of Dockers, but after 10 years with the tags still on them, I gave them to charity.

He has never bought a T-shirt, and yet the last time I counted, he had 75. T-shirts are accumulated free so often, it'd be foolish to buy one. His T-shirts are a lifelong habit. His siblings are dressed up in their school photos. He's in sci-fi movie T-shirts. For a pricey Olan Mills studio portrait, he shows up in a Close Encounters T-shirt.

When I first met him, he wore shirts that advertised his state of mind. He often showed up for our dates in a shirt that said, "Ask Me If I Care." It was more nihilistic than romantic. Another favorite shirt presented a quandary: what do you call a bear with deer antlers?

A beer.

Another was philosophical, outlining the "four stages of tequila: I'm rich. I'm good looking. I'm bullet-proof. I'm invisible."

After we married, the shirts disappeared. Must have been some kind of laundry accident, I would say. But I can't make his entire wardrobe disappear. He wears shirts that advertise music festivals and events long past. Twenty-two, in fact. Whenever someone in his family goes on vacation, they bring him back a souvenir T-shirt, so there's all these shirts from places we've never been. Some of them have disappeared, like the one from the Outer Banks that says, "Got crabs?" I just don't want to go out to dinner with someone wearing that shirt. Some advertise colleges he's never attended. Several are tie-dyed. A couple of dozen advertise products he has sold, shipped, or purchased at one time or another.

Four are Redskins shirts that are only worn on game days because it helps the team. That's what I hear.

Sixteen shirts promote bands he's played with or roadied for and some of his favorites in that category are so thin, you can see your hand through them, but they can't be thrown out because of the "memories." They can't be worn anymore either to protect the fabric that's left. I can't think of any clothes I have that gets the museum artifact treatment. Okay, maybe my wedding dress. I still have that. But he still has his Stiff Richard band t-shirt from 1992 with a cartoon of a bare-assed boy holding his penis. Somehow it's not the same.

He spends his life as a walking billboard for bands, products, businesses, schools, and resorts, and for no more compensation than the shirt on his back, literally. Like the side of a bus, he travels around town emblazoned with a message.