Print This Page
While in college I worked as a waitress at a private dining club for doctors and administrators at Rush Presbyterian-St.Luke’s Hospital.
I had just started this job and I was happy to meet another new waitress, Katie, who was about my age (20), had curly red hair and loved to laugh – a really fun person. We found we had a lot in common: our favorite movie was The Wizard of Oz, we both loved crazy tropical drinks — what more is there at the age of 20? — and so we became instant friends, working mainly the lunch shift but occasionally afternoon or evening parties.
There were so many new people to meet; I was really surprised that a private dining club in a hospital could be so huge: at least 6 main cooks, 5 other fulltime waitresses, 2 hosts, a few bartenders (yeah, customers — sometimes even doctors, but never heart surgeons thanks God –were drinking during the day!), dishwashers, cleaners, managers, dieticians — all working in this restaurant, keeping hundreds of doctors well fed quickly and efficiently.
Katie and I had only been working there for about 2 weeks when we were goofing around in the waitress’s locker room, changing into street clothes. Specifically, we had a talcum powder fight, which resulted in a large cloud of talcum powder on the floor. Inspired by our favorite movie, I wrote “Surrender Dorothy!” with my finger in the powder and we laughed at our cleverness and went out for drinks at the South Pacific Restaurant, a Chinese/Tiki bar in the Loop.
While we were blythely consuming drinks with names like “Washed Ashore” and “Consuming Desire” however, our new colleague Dorothy was reading our talcum powder message, “Surrender Dorothy!”. She thought it was for her, the real Dorothy. She was scared like hell and the next day she brought a gun to work, thinking she was being stalked.
Although I hardly knew her at the time and swear I did not even remember her name, Dorothy was not a person to keep her thoughts - any of her thoughts — to herself. I learned this quickly at least. When she told me she had brought a gun to work, I asked her why. When she told me about the threatening message in the locker room, I gasped.
Our eyes met — she had beautiful big dark brown honest (they seemed to be searching) eyes — and I quickly tried to figure out the best way to tell her not to worry, she wasn’t being stalked — without getting shot on my 12th day of work. Fortunately Dorothy had a great sense of humor, and the truth worked. And my profuse apologies. Many apologies. In retrospect, if she hadn’t seen the horrified look on my face, she might have been more pissed. She knew it was an honest - stupid yes, but honest — mistake. I had to explain the whole wicked witch in the clouds thing to her which she kind of remembered.
And word had gotten out — everyone was talking about this incident with one of the new waitresses. I apologized to our manager, Mr. Cunningham, who was forgiving of all of the commotion. (”I thought she was the quiet one” he remarked to the bartender. “Those are the ones you have to watch out for,” the bartender answered.)
The real Dorothy and I connected and she tolerated me after that - she was really a great person to work with and taught me a lot - not so much about cooking, but about working, life and fun.
Katie quit soon after but we continued to meet for Tiki drinks and laugh about the danger of talcum powder fights.
Subscribe to RSS feed
