One option to follow up a good Irish pub crawl

"...All my hopes were on this midnight Mass, even though it was being held at nine o'clock, which was not promising. In Enniscorthy the Holy Saturday Mass had been changed from twelve o'clock to nine as well, because, it was said, there were always drunks at the back shouting up slogans and causing havoc when the Mass was at midnight. There was an old story, in fact, about a midnight Mass in Enniscorthy years ago when a man got very enthusiastic as the priest was inviting people to renew their baptismal vows. 'Do you renounce Satan and all his works and pomps?' the priest asked the congregation. 'I do, the fucker,' the man shouted."

Anecdote courtesy of Colm Toibin, author, The Sign of the Cross: Travels in Catholic Europe. Story gets better (at least for me) when words "Enniscorthy" are subtly replaced by "Valparaiso University", and "the priest" replaced by "Pastor Cunningham", but of course that's all wishful thinking. (Is it too much to ask, though, to insert "all his works and pomps" into our Lutheran baptismal liturgy?)

over the counter advice at a Best Buy

I was there for a CD, which had $14.99 on the sticker and ran $16.04 at the counter. I paid with a five, a nickel, and eleven ones.

"That's a lot of ones," announced the boy at the register.

"I do a lot of bartending," I rejoined, without a lot of interest. Eleven ones don't seem like very many when you regularly finish a shift with thirty or so of them. Once, serving, I had a table pay me with thirty-five one dollar bills; I came back and asked if they'd knocked over a vending machine on their way over. "Actually, we do own a chain of vending machines in the area." "Oh," I noted. "So, in other words, you did."

"How did you get into that?" asked the boy bagging my CD.

I didn't really have an answer for him. I shrugged and said, "I wanted it."

No, check it out: I stuck up for you

One thing that's true of both bars where I work: when the bartender has time, the bartender garnishes the drink (puts a lime on the vodka-cranberry, etc.). When the bartender does not have time (e.g., has eight more drinks waiting to be made), the bartender leaves the drink for the server to garnish.

In general, I like working with Shaun. His laugh is exactly that of Cody from Step by Step, and he's even spacy in an adorably similar way. The other night he was selling round after round of dirty vodka martinis to a table on the boat: by the time we docked, I'd emptied a bottle of Ketel One (the call brand of choice for two of the drinkers; another wanted Stolichnaya). They ordered their first round during a stretch when I wasn't particularly busy, so I had time to skewer two olives on a sword pick and balance them on the edge of each martini glass. But I can barely remember the second round they ordered; it must have fallen into a "rush" period.

As a result, I heard about it the third time they ordered a round: Shaun leaned over the bar and confided to me that, "They're like, 'Don't let that lady give us just one olive this time.'"

I was still trying to react to having been called (apparently) 'that lady,' when of course I realized Shaun was the one-olive bandit, a fact of which he was fully cognizant as well.

"Shaun--"

"But no, check it out: I stuck up for you. I was like, 'She's a real nice lady, I won't let her do it again.'"

"Shaun, get off of my bar."

He obliged. "I got your back!" was his parting shot, and I dumped more olive juice into a mixing tin trying not to smile.

My first day behind the bar at the Green Iguana

went fine. At the end of the shift, I scrawled in permanent marker on a dollar bill and staple-gunned it to the wall, which is something hundreds of other folks at the restaurant have done before me. Usually to mark an incredible night out. In addition to dollar bills, we have a quote attributed to Ernest Hemingway painted over one section of the wall: "Always do sober what you said you'd do drunk. It'll teach you to keep your mouth shut." I put my dollar next to Hemingway's name, that being the only part of the wall that held any interest for me.

So naturally I got made fun of for holding my first tip in such esteem, but other than that the shift went smoothly. My months at a service bar were ample preparation for getting the servers the drinks they rang in, usually before they were ready for them. The exception to that statement would be Chris, who had to ring in a pair of rum runners...

The delay wasn't due to my not knowing how to make a rum runner. Rather, it's that there's a lot of random stuff in a rum runner (two kinds of rum, blackberry brandy, banana liqueur...). And rum runners just aren't as popular as, say, a margarita, on whose account we keep triple sec and lime juice and tequila all grouped together in the speed well. So I had to go wandering.

And wandering I went, making both rum runners, a splash of each ingredient as I located it. By the time I got to the grenadine, Chris was at the bar, and said, LOUDLY, "Geez, Katie, you work slower than my grandmother fucks!"

I thought an assertion like that would throw me off for the rest of the day, but eight or ten minutes later Chris had to appear at the bar again, slightly abashed. "I need another one of those world famous Katie Benjamin rum runners."

"Too right, you do."

things I'm tired of hearing myself say, part 2

(1) "Ohhh, you guys are sooo picky!" (My only recourse for dealing with our persistent and inexplicable silverware shortage at the Green Iguana, and tables catching on and asking me if they can have some, so that I have to go foraging in the dishroom.)

(2) "Weapons!" (One way of announcing at a table's elbows that I've successfully produced silverware, which tends to help said table not hate me.)

(3) "I -- yeah. No. You can have a Mudslide. But I'm revoking your man-card." (Then spin on my heel, saunter away, and order the guy's Mudslide, or Pina Colada, or Mango-Banana-Strawberry Daiquiri, and let his friends make fun of him for me. Once I had such a guy-friend holler after me, "Hey! Make sure it comes with a cherry on it!")

(4) "If you don't know how to tip, don't go out to eat." (If you hear me hiss that, cashing out a tab, just stay out of my way. Half the time it's due to a table that actually liked me.)

Warning

In one of my favorite scenes from the tremendous movie Fallen, John Goodman's "Jonesy" spends a two o'clock hour explaining across his desk in a deserted police headquarters to Denzel Washington that his wife Delores thinks we're all here to do one thing. They wonder whether, when your time comes to do that one thing, you know. And they wonder whether your whole life is judged on the basis of what you do when confronted with that one thing.

But all of those questions are in the context of Hobbes' (Denzel Washington's) morally and theologically complicated situation. Concerning Delores, from whom the one-thing principle is drawn in the first place, Jonesy simply says, "Her one thing is lasagna."

My Delores is called Bonnie. She works in the office making cruise reservations for the ship where I bartend -- where, recently, I've completed training as a server so the cruise director can be more flexible in her schedule-making. Where, recently, I got thrown off the bar and onto the floor when another server didn't show up and we found a back-up bartender before we found a back-up server. Where, recently, I had to deal with a handicapped lady so mean that she made me cry, and after we docked and I was stripping table cloths, the captain ventured down from the wheelhouse and asked if she was gone.

When I'd finished my side work, I shuffled meekly off the vessel and into the office to see Bonnie, who always, always, has cookies made and living in a tupperware box on her desk. Over the course of my visit, I took two brownies, hugged my Bonnie and reminded her she was "a great, great lady," and decided (here is your warning) that when I am an old woman, I may not wear purple, or a red hat, but I will always be armed wherever I am (doing whatever one-thing I find I am to do) with freshly baked cookies -- for the waiters and bartenders who so uniquely and unluckily find themselves dealing, as not many of the rest of us do, with people.

the night-ghasts are back

Out from the swirling vortex of a dozen conversations, of dishes being rushed in every direction and dumped unceremoniously behind swinging kitchen doors, of the food runner's signal-bell, of crushing streams from soda fountains: one thought asserts itself abruptly, and it's that table 63 doesn't have their vodka-cranberry -- and you jerk yourself awake so hard you fall out of bed.

I'm not the only server who's spent their first few months of serving having nightmares about being "in the weeds" -- so far behind that you don't know what's going on anymore, or how to fix it. In the waking world it's a truly awful feeling, one that motivates you to blame everyone but yourself for forcing you into this position -- even though the truth is, you already know if you had done just one thing differently, you could have held it together and kept everything coming in orderly fashion. And that's what the night-ghasts are for: your mind hasn't yet tired of trying to find what that one thing was it could have done differently. It's still trying to work it out, while the rest of you is sleeping.

Moreover, you spend all your time serving, so it's not like you have any sort of "life" to be the substance of normal dreams.

My nightmares stopped several weeks ago. I returned to dreams of shorelines and long hallways and unlikely conversations. But in the past few days, they returned; and I know exactly the reason why.

The Green Iguana has decided to throw me behind the bar for two shifts a week. I'm excited; I'm also terrified. I know exactly where everything is in my bar on the boat, and I know exactly where it's back-stocked in the hold if I run out. But if there's an organizing principle to the speed wells at the Green Iguana, I haven't caught on yet. Further, it's entirely unfair that I'm used to whipping a beer bottle opener out of my uniform dress slacks and stuffing it away without a moment's thought when the pockets on my jeans are cut entirely differently and moreover I have sudden recourse to back pockets.

The short version is, I need to teach myself to move all over again, and I need to figure out where everything is, and fast.

It's not that I'm worried about what the other bartenders will think of me. For example, when one of them, Scott, asked about my training day and I told him I couldn't find anything and I was slow and I felt bad, he assured me I would get better and that it didn't matter: Jamie had been there for years, and he was still slow and didn't have any excuse at all. Jamie promptly came around the corner and told him to shut the f*** up, of course.

No, I'm worried about the other servers, and somehow I'm worried about people I haven't even met yet. I'm worried about all the folks who wanted to be in line for the bar jobs, or who wanted to walk in and apply for them, that management could have put on as bartenders and didn't, who are going to watch me drop a gin bottle here and tear a cork in half there and wander around in frantic search of blue curacao and get behind in my drink tickets and just in general make a big, wasteful mess of things. Of course it's enough to give me nightmares.

late-night domesticities

I started a load of laundry last night around two o'clock with the understanding I could roll out of bed and throw it in the dryer this morning before having to report for my shift. All of this went fine; I was just amused to discover that in addition to clothing, I'd run through the washer no fewer than four pens and a wine key.

Church Nerd's To-Do List

Opening this weekend in downtown St. Petersburg's Florida International Museum: "Vatican Splendors," so called for boasting the largest display of Catholic Christian art and artifacts outside the Vatican itself. We're the show's first stop on a lengthy tour of North America, where rumored exhibits include a partial recreation of the Sistine Chapel's interior, and a heavily guarded Mandylion of Edessa (perhaps the oldest visual representation of Christ left to us). Whee!

http://www.floridamuseum.org/current_ex.html

Ash Wednesday Irreverence

It seems I'm quite lost this liturgical year without a church to consider myself in charge of.

No matter.

One more thing to love about these months I'm spending at home in St. Petersburg, Florida: the proximity of St. Jude's Cathedral, an enormous and ornate locus of Catholicism, whence originate the daily Masses that are broadcast on local radio. The place reminds me of VU's Chapel of the Resurrection for two reasons -- similarities both architectural and liturgical, each of them quaint, neither of them prepared to lend themselves to quick summary.

I attended Mass at St. Jude's today to get smudged, just like I would have done if I were back in Valparaiso, except that I rode my bike around midday through balmy weather to get there, as opposed to trudging across campus, icy wind under the collar, just after sunrise. The readings, though, were just as I would have heard them in Valpo -- complete with a portion of Joel that inspired a truly delightful Chapel drama last year about a Dangerous Dan, Adventure Man action figure and just what we give up for Lent and why.

Maybe it was because I started thinking of Valpo that I queued for communion without even thinking. Other times I've worshipped at St. Jude's I've hung back, uncertain. But it's not like they card there, as it turns out. I approached the woman with paten and wafers, and crossed myself as she ministered to the person in front of me -- ending with simultaneously stepping forward and cupping hands together to receive the host. All was going well, but she didn't catch the expertly executed subtlety, and went to feed me directly. I bit her (by accident, not retaliation), and she apologized.

It all reminded me of a passage early in Colm Toibin's memoir The Sign of the Cross: Travels in Catholic Europe, where he describes the cathedral in his own home town:

"I was an altar boy there and I accompanied the priest with a patten as he gave out communion to the faithful. And thus I got to see everyone's tongue at close range. Some stuck it out with great force as though it was a leather strap; others were timid about sticking it out as though it was an intimate part of their body which they preferred to keep hidden... Some people had trouble keeping their tongue stuck out, despite their best intentions, and would draw it back in, as though someone was going to commit some offence against it, and the priest would stand and wait until it ventured out again. And I would stand there too, watching."

proposed new feature for improvement of cars

I have a lot of time to think when I'm on my bike. Usually I think at the intersections, where I have to stop and wait for the left turn signal to run its course before I can safely dodge across the street. I thought the other day what a difference it would make to install U-turn signals on cars. Just think: I wouldn't have to sit at the intersection waiting for the left turn signal to run its course while three SUV's in a row popped U-turns and the crosswalk in front of me stayed tantalizingly empty only for the next guy to actually turn across it, motivating me to wait even longer.

Then I thought, No -- we've had regular blinkers for long enough without people learning to use them properly, and there's no sense giving anyone a false sense of certainty about what any given car is about to do (or not do) next.

So instead of suggesting the installation of U-turn signals, I'm contemplating a little computer that can sense when you've pulled your vehicle over a sidewalk in preparation to leave a parking lot, or over a crosswalk in preparation to turn, and automatically berates you with something along the lines of, "Did you check for bikers and pedestrians before you did that, you cretinous oaf?"

Maybe it can come with adjustable profanity settings.

things I'm tired of hearing myself say

1. The twelve beers we have on tap at the Green Iguana, in alphabetical order. (Bass, Blue Moon, Budweiser, Bud Lite, Coors Lite, Guinness, Killians, Miller Lite, New Castle, Sam Adams, Stella and Yuengling. Now you know. Don't friggin' ask me again.)

2. "If I bring you a Pepsi, can we still be friends?" (My forced response to anyone asking for a Coke.)

3. "It's a good thing she's here; you didn't know what you want!" (To be uttered brightly after some poor guy's wife bullies him into getting the fries so she can share, even though she got the side salad he had his eye on -- dispels the tension like no other.)

crossing guards

A few days ago, one of the crossing guards on my route leaned backward as I approached and took an animated glance over his shoulder at the electronic timer counting down the seconds pedestrians (or bikers) had to dodge across the intersection before the traffic signals changed. He then straightened, turned to me, and as I shot by on the crosswalk did a strikingly good impression of The Waterboy's Rob Schneider: "YOU CAN DO IT!!!!"

The same crossing guard as frequently hollers a good morning my way, or sticks out his foot as though to trip me.

We're friends.

And he's a wonderful change from most other crossing guards, who stare grumpily straight ahead for more school children to assert their authority over in response to my perceived wanton disregard for their help.