my television debut

I've become very forgetful in the past six months or so. It's strange, and very unlike me.

I'm a Virgo, okay? We're anal. And I'm a publicist, a writer, and a waitress. Each of these roles requires -- no, demands -- sharp faculties of memory. If you can't recall basic details, how can you make sure your clients have everything they need for their upcoming interviews? If you can't describe detail, you probably can't master that basic "show don't tell" part of good writing. And if you can't remember what dishes/drinks your table ordered, in addition to remembering to bring the items to the table, check on their enjoyability, refill them when they are empty, etc, etc, you are probably a miserable excuse for a waitress. So yeah, having a good memory has always been on my shortlist of strong skills.

You could even say I take this memory for granted. Forgetful people, the type who are forever losing their keys, leaving their wallet at home, forgetting their purse in a taxi, or have to use a passport to get into bars since they haven't seen their driver's license since 2002 elude me. Don't get me wrong, some of my best friends are forgetful people: they forget appointments, run late, forget to call, don't do their homework, get locked out of the house, time and again. And I bail them out, patiently. But I have never understood how these loved ones get by in the world in spite of this basic impediment to their functionality. "How did you throw your keys in the trash can AGAIN???" I'd think, totally perturbed, while rummaging up to my elbows in garbage helping Camilla look for her car keys. "How is this possible? How have you done this three times since January???" No one needs to be shamed when they're down, so I always kept these thoughts to myself. But still...I mean, really? You threw your keys in the trash?

Then, suddenly, starting sometime this March, I became very spacey. It happened suddenly, without warning. I have taken to leaving my ATM card behind me every which way I go, like a little Hansel & Gretel trail of breadcrumbs: at the Franklin, at Pho Pasteur, in various ATM machines -- a nice security guard chased me down the street and gave it back to me last time i did that. I thanked him profusely, as I had only just gotten the new card in the mail the day before. You could blame the booze for the night at the Franklin, but every other time I've made this error, I've been sober.

Like today. When I left the house to go to work and completely forgot to put on make-up. I managed to get tinted moisturizer on my face, and to get out the door sporting my laptop, my work uniform, my purse, and two pieces of organic fruit to snack on later -- but that's where my preparedness for the day ended. There was no eyeliner, no eye shadow, and no mascara. When I was a dark brunette I needed lots of make-up to make myself look presentable -- eyeliner on top & bottom lids, lots of shadow, lip gloss or lip stick every day -- because the color made my skin look so washed out. As a blonde it doesn't take much for me to look like a normal human being, but still -- I never leave the house without at least putting mascara, unless I'm going to yoga or across the street to Francesca's for coffee. Without it on I feel totally naked, like I just left the house and realized, "Ooops, I forgot to put on my shirt!"

For a hot minute I thought this would be fine: "Who cares? It's just Toro, right? It's dark in there all the time anyway."

wWrong. When I got to Toro today, I was promptly informed that my naked face in all it's exposed glory was going to be on TV. "A show called Local Flavor hosted by Master Sommelier Andrea Immer, is be coming in to tape a segment," my manager said. "They're going in your section, you're their waitress."

Fortunately I'd had time to duck into the ghetto Walgreen's on Washington and buy some Maybelline Great Lash on the way from PR job to waitressing job. Still, I'm quite confident that in the harsh glow of the TV lights my eyes looked beady and small, my skin looked flush and blotchy from nerves, and all the rest of me looked fat, what with the camera adding ten pounds and my PMS adding five of its own to the cause.

So much for my "big break." One can only hope that my natural charm shined through as I smiled like Miss America and spoke emotively about each of the dishes I served to hosts Andrea and John: "These are the gaaaa-mbas al ajiiii-llo" [nodding knowingly, reassuringly]; "This is the mai-iiiz, the corn, the specialty of the house -- be sure to squeeze the lime over the dish before you dig in" [like their personal corn cheerleader]

You can look for the segment on Delta flights nationwide, and I'll be sure to let you know once it's up on the web.

This may be the only fifteen minutes I get, after all blotchy skin & beady eyes notwithstanding.

things to love about working in restaurants

I was reading over my post of New Year's Eve and feeling as though it gave restaurant work a bad name.

The fact is, I love working in restaurants and I always have. On a good night a busy, smoothly run restaurant is an amazingly fun, energizing, lucrative place to work. And in their best incarnations, restaurants lend themselves to a community-oriented working environment that is unparalleled in the world of cubicles, flourescent lighting, and desks, more akin to hanging out in a fun club-house with your weird friends than working your blue-collar job.

In light of this, I thought I'd list some of the reasons that I love working in restaurants, and will be loathe to give my notice when my big break comes, no matter how rich and fabulous I have become:

1. Interesting people work in restaurants. It is difficult for ex-convicts and illegal immigrants to get jobs in offices, but usually not much trouble at all for them to find work as bussers, line cooks, chefs, and waiters. Some of these people live shrouded in mystery on the margins of society, sure; but they often have the best stories to tell.
2. You get to be around food ALL THE TIME. As a former fat kid, food and I have had a tumultuous love affair. As a restaurant worker, I have been able to cultivate this relationship a positive friendship.

3. Waitressing is an instant, free education in food and wine. Good waitstaff must familiarize themselves daily with the stuff that self-proclaimed "foodies" dream about. Plus, if you start in the business at the tender age of 16, like I did, it is high probable that some of the talented young cooks you used to work with, or maybe even your former roommate, will have marched up the culinary ladder to the very prestigious position of Chef de Cuisine or Executive Chef, by the time you are 28. Then you can tell all your office-worker-bee friends as Will Farrell did in Elf: "I KNOW HIM!!!"

4. Waitressing is the ultimate PR education. In both professions, you must learn to spin or die trying. It is also great for building up a thick skin, and learning to know in your heart when you've done your job well, no matter how ornery, cranky, or crazy your nightmare table is, and to pat yourself on the back for your work, regardless of the size of your tip.

5. Restaurants are deliciously unprofessional. I am an ultra-liberal lady who strives to be as politically correct as possible in real life. It is nice to have an alternate work environment where I can tell an obnoxious co-worker to go f*** themselves every once in a while. As necessary, of course.

The fact is, I live precariously balanced between the world of restaurants and offices. Like an immigrant who has lived for twenty years on new soil but pines for her home country every night as she falls asleep, I feel completely at home in neither. I'm not really sure how this blonde is going to handle it once every night of the week is mine again, and all of that free time stretches out in front of me like a string of dark, blank pearls.

Oh wait a minute, yes I do. I will spend that time writing posts for Blog 365.

"Blondes Make Men Act Dumb"

A recent study suggests that blondes have the power to actually make men act dumber.

Conducted by French scientists at Paris Nanterre University, the study asked male participants to view pictures of women with various hair colors, then complete general knowledge tests. According to The Daily Mail, "Those who had been shown pictures of blonde women scored lower marks than those who had been shown pictures of brunettes and redheads."

What can we conclude from such a study?

Professor Theirry Meyer, a joint author of the paper, concludes that, "people confronted with stereotypes generally behave in line with them," and that "Blondes have the potential to make people act in a dumber way, because they mimic the unconscious stereotype of the dumb blonde."

Is this true in my experience as an Undercover Blonde? Well, unfortunately boys, I have to say it is. As a brunette, I was taken much more seriously by complete and total strangers, as evidenced by the research I shamelessly conducted at my waitressing job. I am condescended to and patronized with much greater frequency as a blonde.

Sometimes guys dumb it down with me to be assholes, or because they're trying to flirt, or have had too much to drink while waiting for a table and no longer know how to act like civilized diners. And sometimes good, intelligent, well meaning people assume I'm an idiot, without even realizing it. Just the other day at Toro, for example, a regular assumed I wouldn't be able to help him out a bottle of wine to go with his dinner. This was a special customer, a VIP guest, an important regular whom I've waited on before. I know all about this guest: I could rattle off his usual order to you in a heartbeat, and more importantly, I know exactly what kind of wine he likes to drink. I knew in advance that he'd be coming, that he'd be sitting in my second, and I had a perfect bottle of wine picked out for him in my mind ahead of time. So when he said, "Can you send the Wine Director over to help us pick out a bottle of wine?" my eager little waitress heart sank.

This regular must have read the disappointment in my face, because he quickly offered, "Unless you know the wine list and can help...?" His voice was tentative, the sentence limp.

"Actually, I do have a wine in mind for you," I smiled, "I think it's perfect for your tastes. It has that kiss of oak that you like so much about French Chardonnay while still retaining the integrity of the Albarino, very unusual..." and so on. I offered to bring him something else if the wine didn't suit his tastes.

And he loved it.

Was he surprised? I'll never know. But I'm glad he decided to take a chance on this blonde.

Trepidation

So, I haven't posted anything in months. There's good reason for that.

You see, my last post about the Italian in the wine store wasn't very good, and caused me far more trouble than it was worth. I tried to make it cinematic & interesting, but I rushed though it, and it shows. I can accept that it's not my best writing. Really, I was plowing through the piece for the wrong reasons. I was trying desperately to get something posted on this site, to actually get some traction with this project, to be a little less self-critical and self-censoring for once. The result? A post that is undeniably sub-par.

I wrote that piece around 8/9, hence the date, and posted it about a month later. Two days later, the boy I am seeing--to whom I shall heretofore refer as "the Mathematician"--confronted me about it. All of a sudden we were having an issue and, all of a sudden, a talk. Since then, I've been blog-paralyzed.

At the time of our conversation, the Mathematician and I were a little less serious. More specifically, we were both feeling kinda serious about each other, but weren't using certain types of verbiage, such as "boyfriend" or "girlfriend" to refer to each other and our feelings. I have good reason for this. I just broke up with my fiance of 3 1/2 years. It was recent and colossal, and I need to just take my time right now.

None of this changes the fact that I care about the Mathematician quite a lot. I have since started using the b-word, and am quite psyched about it. And I was upset to learn that he was not psyched to read my post about the Italian in the wine shop.

To understand this, I try to imagine how I'd feel to read a similar story about the Mathematician. Maybe he'd be at a rock show, for some indie band I've never heard of. A cute little thing wearing a tee-shirt for Pinback or the Futureheads or yet another band I've never heard of and cat eye glasses would start talking to him about music. Maybe she's in a band herself, maybe she's even a bassist. She'd be just his type, and they'd have a fantastic, intelligent, and infuriatingly flirtatious conversation. So yes, I can understand where he's coming from. Just imagining him flirting with this indie rock bitch has me hot under the collar. And she's a figment of my imagination--not an Italian who can be found at the wine shop on Tuesdays and Thursday.

So what's a girl to do? What does a writer do when her pet project threatens her love life?

I have this curiosity, this minor obsession even, with the exchanges that occur between men and women, where sexuality is at play and it messes everything up. I have this fantastic title, UNDERCOVER BLONDE. But, more importantly, I have a deeply vested personal objective for this project. It's my attempt to understand how the body betrays us, how external factors, like the way we walk, talk, move, and act can at times speak more loudly about us than our voices do.

Here's an example. When I first started working as a waitress at Tremont 647, someone made up the ridiculous story that before working at the restaurant, I worked as a stripper. "Kitty? Yeah, she totally used to strip. I mean, just look at the way she walks! It's like she's dancing around a stripper pole. Duh!" Maybe it started out as a joke, but it certainly spread as a rumor, and shortly became accepted as fact, all unbeknownst to me (news-flash: people rarely spread lies about you to your face.) Months later a friend mentioned my "previous job" to me casually--to my horror. I turned bright red and almost dropped the plate I was clearing right in a regular's lap. It was humiliating.

Sure, Tremont is your typical cliquey little South End restaurant, and of course they have their own special and especially bitchy ways of teasing the new girls. But, like so many myths, at the core of this one there is some fact. Something about my body, something about the way I move, speak, and act screamed "stripper" to these people. In reality, nothing could be further from the truth. I am incredibly self conscious, brutally self critical, and struggle every day with the deeply ingrained mental image of myself as a fat, unloveable little girl.

So, where is that disconnect? How can I be communicating something so far from my true feelings, without even realizing it? It's something that's troubled me since that dirty old bastard ogled me for the very first time at my very first restaurant job when I was just fourteen years old. This blog, this social experiment, the book & personal research I intend to do to support it is all part of my quest to resolve two grossly conflicted parts of myself that somehow share a mind and body. I would like to find a way for these parts to coexist in peace.

My last posting is entirely unsatisfying to me, because all it shows me doing is flirting shamelessly with a stranger for a couple of free glasses of wine, then wondering lamely if he'd have given me freebies if I was fat. That's not what happened. What happened was this:

I had PMS and was feeling exceptionally bloated and ugly that day. I went out to meet my adorable, petite, brunette friend, who has great clothes and was dressed way better than I was. The Italian was friendly and accommodating to me, sure, but I assumed he was just being professional, and hoping for a decent tip. I didn't think for a second that he thought I was pretty--how could he, when I was looking so totally fat & bloated and under-dressed next to my adorable, petite, brunette friend? We got drunk, stayed until close, and as we stumbled out the door, my girlfriend intimated that she thought the Italian liked me. We tabulated the amount of free wine he'd poured for us and decided that, yes, this may in fact be true. Of course, we were drunk, so who knew, and who the fuck cared?

That said, I understand exactly where the Mathematician is coming from. And going forward I will approach this project and all that it entails, starting with this very post, with no small degree of trepidation.