Moojinorbit

The world looks very different from the other side of the bar.

Granted, my first night bartending a Magnolia Hotel event was largely a blur. Chris, the chief but disgruntled bartender, to whom I tried to endear myself in vain, walked off the job five minutes after I showed up. Ten minutes later the wedding guests were pouring in, mobbing the bar to take advantage of the hour that the bride’s family was buying drinks. Once my boss said the magic words, “Nancy, can you get behind the bar? That’s the father of the bride coming in and he wants to see three bartenders,” I was off and running, which meant learning everything I could by, well, just figuring it out. 

Doubtless I learned more in those 7 hours of bartending-out-my-butt than I would have in three times as much “shadowing” the real bartenders. Thank god for Shawna (also her first night at the Mag, but not at bartending) and Corey, who provided models for how to pour, what to do with the used glasses, how to run credit cards manually, and where the heck the bloody mary mix was. It was more stressful than fun at the time, but pretty cool in retrospect. Somehow the rhythm of it actually felt natural to me; watching my dad from upstairs in The Yodler all those years must have paid off. And, Lord, my legs haven’t hurt that much since I worked at the sporting goods store in high school. I’m kind of psyched to do it again.

But being on that side of the bar is a whole new perspective, and despite the madcap pace of the evening, I remember a few things. 

Everybody looks cheerful and sparkly at first, decked out in their wedding formal gear–summery floral low-cut dresses, pressed suits, hair in place. Then comes the flush of the first and second drink, before sitting down to dinner, when the guests are basking in the glow of affection for the night ahead, the newlyweds, the possibilities. People are brisk in their drink orders, but friendly, curious, making small talk. 

As they dine and begin the toasting, we work on popping three cases of champagne in the same room, quietly. Interesting challenge. We’re told that once the open bar reverts to cash after dinner, things will be mellower, and Corey will probably go over to Harry’s to work the club. Instead, dessert ends and we are instantly and consistently slammed. I have a vague memory of seeing the bride and groom dance (I remember only because it was Sade’s “By Your Side,” which I love), but other than that my horizon becomes a sea of urgent faces trolling for eye contact. I’ve been that person trying to get the bartender’s attention a million tmes, but it feels crazy when it’s ten pairs of eyes beaming for mine.

Apologies for this, but two words keep coming to mind that Natalie used to say: “Desperate Heterosexuals.” There may be no better magnet than a wedding to bring these folks to the bar, over and over, especially when the newlyweds are at most 27 years old. By the end of the night, I started to feel like I knew some of these people, and not in a good way. Talk about too much information.

There was the poor grouchy faced, hook-nosed, chubby girl in a painfully cleavage-revealing black and red dress, who ordered five Captain Morgan and cokes in the space of 90 minutes. And the willowy redhead (with the outgoing aereolae) who began her descent when she had a “misunderstanding” with the bubbly blonde bridesmaid who was grinding her hips against every man but her husband. I appreciated the aggressive Latina who managed to get three or four older men to buy her expensive cocktails while she made the most idiotic, cloying small talk. Of course, there were the half dozen increasingly drunken (and strangely tall) groomsmen throwing double Grey Goose’s and shots of Courvoisier on one another’s tabs. The twenty-three year-olds who figured out that the leftover Champagne was free were sweet, and, as you can imagine, increasingly red-lipped, sweaty, and wobbly as the night wore on.

I did not at any point have the desire to drink. It looks pretty nasty from the other side.

Definitely my favorite, though, was the frat-boy looking guy who gingerly shuffled up to me every twenty minutes and shakily asked for a tonic water with ice and lime. Then after I handed it to him, every single time, he’d say anxiously, “This is tonic water?” Poor guy, I think he was recently sober AND obsessive-compulsive. Never once tipped, but totally sweet (and dangling on the edge).

Sociologically, the wedding had some unusual aspects, like the fact that the white, Jennifer Garner-like bride was marrying a handsome African American groom–which meant the crowd was atypically mixed, but also that the dance floor was a bit of an embarrassment for the white folks. Mercy me; it was hard to watch those dripping WASP boys trying to be down when the Kanye West came on. I have to say, many white folks compensated for rhythm challenges with some serious drinking. Apparently the groom hailed from Southern California, which might explain why both the other bartenders and I were pretty sure that Erkel (the grown up one) was hanging at the bar most of the evening. Seriously, this guy was the spitting image if not the real thing.

Tipping patterns varied. It’s not true that black people tip less. It is sometimes true that drunk people tip less, but others tip excessively. Young women tipped generously. Very few older women came up to the bar, but the ones that did were obNOXious drunks, and I can’t remember if they tipped. I kind of enjoyed watching the guys who acted like they were going to tip but then pulled their dollar back when they thought I wasn’t looking. In the end, I walked home with $128 in my pocket–not bad for a wedding with three bartenders in which I was the lone fraud.

All in all, ’twas a nice wedding from what I could tell between ice plunges and soda guns and steaming glasses out of the washer. But by midnight when we stopped selling drinks I was deeply glad my hair was short enough to discourage any desperate drunk guy trying to catch a number. Shawna, the petite blonde 26 year-old (I’m guessing) was not so lucky. The girl was fending off three guys trying to get her to meet up with them–and it did not look fun. Desperate hetero boys whose buddy just dropped off the edge of the earth…not a pretty sight. Also not my problem.

I’m interested in what the next gig will bring.

By the way, for those of you familiar with my danger to any and all glassware, I only dropped one glass all night, and that was after closing when my hands were so tired they could barely grip. Suhweet.