Tuesday, June 7, 2011

time to start keeping a dish towel over my shoulder

this past saturday, josie, eskay, dave, katie and i, volunteered at the american visionary art museum gala. this made for a nice night in a number of ways. it was something completely different from my normal weekend evening. it was free for us. we got to enjoy the awesome parade that included people dancing on stilts, a roller derby team, various dancers, a marching band, other weird stuff, and lewis black riding by on an elephant float. there was a fun live band that did party covers and also were dressed up as if they were amish. there were lots of crazy costumes including a life size sock monkey that josie loved. we got to drink for free. finally, and this is what i mainly want to discuss, our volunteer jobs at this event were as bartenders.
if you look closely you can see him on the elephant. he was smoking a cigarette and giving the finger to people while he was waiting to enter

various parts of all of my jobs involved some aspect of service, though never outright as a "server" and never involving food/drink. while many people who do this for a living probably don't enjoy it too much, this was an opportunity for me to give it a try. it really was an ideal situation as i was not an employee and the actual drinks we served were super easy to serve. also we got to keep any tips we made.

when we first arrived, michele had josie and i work at the wine bar. this was pretty easy as all we were doing was asking if people wanted red or white and pouring it in cups for them. easy money and it never got very crowded on our side. dave and katie on the other hand were working the first shift at the kettle one bar that involved pouring premade vodka drinks down a cpiral tube encased in an ice sculpture. that are was a lot more crowded and the act of pouring the drinks down this tube made it slow goings. they looked stressed. michele later asked us to relieve them and we did. i was excited knowing this was my real chance to play bartender.
it sounds silly and maybe privileged of me, but i really had fun being a "bartender". i enjoyed the action of running around making drinks, keeping everyone happy. i noticed how all of a sudden lots of people were striking up conversations with me and i found that fun. i learned that my go-to move is the thumbs up. i am easily swayed to dole out shots or add extra vodka to the premade drinks by having the drinker follow my eyes to the tip jar. josie was told she was beautiful a number of times and while nobody was as forthright with their admiration of my looks (though one girl told me she loved my pirate costume and brought me a cupcake...i'll count that as a win), i did see how it would be easy for a single guy bartender to keep conversations going and get to know the ladies. oh yeah...did i mention eskay and i dressed up as pirates? well we did and it was pretty silly. our shirts kept getting more and more unbuttoned as the night progressed.
at the end of it, we all had a fun night where we made a little money, though dave may have been ripped off by the kettle one rep. i offered to give him about half of the money i earned, but his scorn and anger towards the kettle one guy burns too brightly to accept. for now, that money sits on our dining room table, surely to be used to buy something ill-advised in the near future. even with that, josie and i were able to enjoy a great sage lunch and buy an amazing book from her store about inter-species friendships. a dog and a koi are bff's??? that's ridiculous! obviously it was a lot of fun and i hope to do it again next year.