Well, I had every intention of folding up this blog, but I keep coming back to it. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to write anymore, or if I’m any good at it (give me a break, I think I’m a FANTASTIC writer and I can’t figure out why I can’t get an agent or a publisher to option either of the novels that I’ve written), or even if the topic of this particular body of work is socially relevant. After all, this is just a blog about our family, who happens to have a special needs person in it that we all love and adore.
But we love other things, too. We love Mexican food, we love birthdays, and we love eating in restaurants. So when Mexican food,birthdays, and Alyne all collide in one place, preferably at a restaurant, we pretty much have a perfect time.
Now, in addition to being a freelance writer, displaced office worker, dog owner, and single mother, I am also a lifelong server/bartender on the restaurant circuit. I love restaurant work, the rhythm and flow of bringing hungry people food, and the inevitable closeness of the staff. I also love getting paid every day and getting a free meal nearly every shift (I’ll get back to Alyne in a second, I’m laying some background here so bear with me.)
As restaurant workers, we are a pretty salty bunch, because restaurant work definitely has its down side. We deal with picky bastards all day and grin through it, at least until we hit the kitchen door where our smiles fall off our faces and torrents of curse words pour forth from the very lips that were smiling mere nanoseconds ago. Our feet hurt and we have tendonitis in our wrists. Not to mention that we aren’t making the money that we did three years ago due to the new economy, but you can say that about pretty much any industry.
There is one thing that causes a universal shudder through the bodies of servers across the country though: customer birthdays. There’s nothing worse than having a customer call you over to discreetly tell you that there is a birthday at a table. That means that a) they expect a free dessert (depending on the restaurant, that may or may not happen); and b) they want servers to sing to them. We don’t begrudge your birthday celebration, not at all. It just presents logistical issues that we weren’t prepared to deal with.
As a birthday table’s server, you have to find at least two other servers that aren’t too busy to sing, which is difficult, because the instant you say “I have a birthday!” everyone suddenly becomes very, very busy. It also means that you have to fish around in assorted restaurant boxes to find a stray birthday candle, then light it on the bread warmer, only to have it blow itself out as you pass the kitchen fan. You repeat this until you are successful,or until someone finally passes you their lighter. Meanwhile, you’re ignoring your other tables and when you finally get back to them, the guy at table 52 is chewing the ice out of his empty water glass because he’s dying of thirst and table 33’s order has been sitting under the heat lamps in the kitchen for so long that the cook is threatening you with bodily harm if you don’t get it out of there.
It wasn’t always this way. My first serving job ever began 20 years ago, at a Chi-Chi’s Mexican Restaurant in Augusta, Georgia. Piñatas hung from the ceiling, the dining room was painted orange, and fake flowers hung over the walls. Alyne loved to eat there; actually, when she wants to eat Mexican food she still asks to go to Chi-Chi’s, even though the restaurant is long-closed and she lives in Kansas now. She still has one of my uniform shirts hanging in her closet. She also has one of my server aprons from there, which she uses when she eats spaghetti at home.
Anyway, Chi-Chi’s had a birthday song that was sung to the tune of “La Cucaracha,” and came with a free sombrero. If the party wanted, they could purchase extra sombreros, a piñata, and a small cake. We took a Polaroid of the birthday guest wearing their sombrero and gave it to them as a keepsake. It was absolutely impossible, as a server, to pull that celebration off with any sort of dignity whatsoever. So we went with it. We had a basket in the break room where we kept kazoos that we bought with our own money from the dollar store. Somebody brought in a plastic tambourine from a kid’s set. Whenever someone announced that they had a birthday, we raided that basket for our instruments. We turned the birthday song into our own special celebration. We would go into the dining room, hooting and shaking maracas, singing our ass off to the special birthday song. We had fun with it. We were so obnoxious. It is no wonder that restaurant shut down.
My mother came into Chi-Chi’s on her birthday one year with one of her friends, her friend’s sons, and all of my sisters (including Alyne, of course.) I don’t think Alyne even knew that it was anyone’s birthday, not even when my mother sat down in my section with strict instructions to “not sing that goddamn birthday song.”
So, of course we did. Loud and proud, with cake and sombrero and a donkey piñata and Polaroid camera and kazoos in hand, we crept up behind my mother’s table and burst into frenzied song. Alyne jumped about six feet out of her seat with elatedness. Her hands were going crazy with the Moses, and her feet were straight out in front of her at the table. That’s when you know you’ve done it right. Alyne is definitely in the Polaroid shot, with the happiest look ever plastered on her face. Tacos, the color orange, and cake. That’s what Alyne’s all about.
