Reflections on Being a Bartender, Part I

There are three ways to get a job in this town.

(1) Lie.
Just lie. You won't get hired without experience; but unfortunately, you won't get experience without getting hired. So, lie. "Yeah, I learned to tend bar out where I lived before. Three years." Then hope they trust you on that and don't think to pay attention to you till long after you've got your feet back under you.

(2) Know somebody.
Have a friend who can get you the job, and (more importantly) loves you enough to show you the ropes. This is usually but not always combined with the first rule for getting a job; i.e., know somebody -- who's willing to lie for you.

(3) Go entry level, and go climbing.
Host, bus, serve, prove yourself a quick learn all along the way, and, finally, belatedly, bartend.

Or there's the way I got to be a bartender at the Green Iguana, which of course wouldn't fit any of the above-defined categories. No, my life (or, at least, my career trajectory) is more like a subplot to The Devil Wears Prada.

My time at the Green Iguana started off looking remarkably like Rule #3: I had been a host, I had been a server for months, but I was hitting the glass ceiling when it came to getting on the bar schedule. Now the woman keeping watch over our bar by night, Jenna, knew of my interest and was getting me on that bar schedule right about as quickly as the Missouri Synod has been hopping to ordain me, and for precisely the same reason. Men were the only hires she made, and for her own, privately arrived at reasons, which were open to discussion but not revision. Similarly maddening, but not quite the same level.

Then came the week I cut my hair entirely too short. (It was an accident, and made me miss roommates from college years who would cut my hair for free whenever I asked and not mess it up.) To combat the mess, I bought a hat -- to be sure, one properly called a cap, according to its class and European-fishing-village-flavor -- and liked it so much I bought a second in a different color. I wore (and still wear) these with such frequency that regulars at the restaurant have time and again known me long before I got around to waiting on them.

Which I do still wait tables -- but, ever since the week or two following that one, I've been on the bar schedule, too. And that's not an accident. Jenna, enjoy her company as I do, never had the time of day for me prior to the Cap Era.

And I'm not going to lie, it makes me wonder what goofy screw-up on whose part will shatter that other aforementioned glass ceiling.