A Baby Waitress's Dream Table

e’re getting our kitchen remodeled and it’s a custom job because our house is weird and we’re hifalutin’ and things tend to go awry and we were stressed and George Foreman grill be damned, we’re eating out. So we loaded the kids, the niece, the aunt, and headed to Olive Garden.

Apparently, word got out since everyone in Chicago decided to go to the same Olive Garden. When we arrived it was bedlam. People were sharking with obvious malice in their hearts. Some contractor had parked his rusted hulk of a truck ON the sidewalk next to the restaurant, creating a bottleneck of America’s Funniest Videos proportions. There was menace in the air.

As we had to take two cars my aunt elected to meet us there and since she wasn’t stopping by Walgreen’s and didn’t have Queen-of-all-fourteen-year-old-pre-Goth-anime-superstars driving her crazy, she got there first by 32 minutes and was rewarded with the joy of standing in the middle of what amounts to Denny’s Italiana surrounded by people who treat parking spaces like big game kills.

Now usually, we are the difficult table. Older, more experienced, waiters can spot us at the door and will elect to faint onto the knife table and suffer internal injuries before of serving us. Most waiters start crying halfway through the initial drink order and My Attorney can turn the question of ‘soup or salad’ into a legal inquisition that would make for a good Boston Legal script.

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We started our abuse with the ritual changing of the tables: as soon as we’re seated and the drink order is in, we decide to switch tables because of a) draft, b) cigarette smoke (real or imagined), or c) republicans (real or imagined). Last night was no different except that for once we switched tables exclusively because they cleaned off a gorgeous round six-top in the corner behind us. So I informed the maitre de (some guy in a vest) and eloped.

Our waitress arrived with the drinks, managed to delicately lay them before their respected orderers, and smile. She looked like a Polish version of Kirsten Dunst and it was clearly her first night.

It had taken me twenty minutes and two fist fights to park after I dropped everyone off and I was ready for a total meltdown walking into the resturant—a table switching, drink-order-control-freakin what-are-you-getting-what-am-I-getting psycho screamfest. Instead, my wife greets me with a kiss and here we were ten minutes into sitting down and no one had complained yet. We hadn’t even sent anything back.

Things got weirder. After switching tables, we all ordered our food with zero hassle. We received our salad and it was replete with olives and onions, our bread sticks were hot—there were no problems. Our table neighbors didn’t pick their noses, didn’t curse wildly, didn’t smell. We all talked gently to each other and had a very pleasant time. I mean, seriously, it was pleasant.

Then Kirsten Dunstski blew it. She didn’t put our order in. We didn’t know this. We only knew that she came back to our table and rechecked our order then our order never came and we sat there and watched my son turn into raving, insane, drooling maniac. We watched the table next to us finish their meals. We had our drinks refilled twice.

I don’t know what it is about Roon, but he goes into self-inflicted laughing jags of titanic proportions. Last night, he morphed into some kind of Jack Nicholson/PacMan blend, laughing so hard it looked like his head was split in half. And once again he proved that he is boneless, provided, apparently, with a geleton instead of bones.

I was in the poker seat and could look out into the maelstrom of customers and waitstaff and saw Duntski walk into a small throng of unsympathetic waiters and put her head in her hands, nerved out of her mind, and I knew she’d messed up our order and didn’t know what to do. Worst, the waiters were schooling her on how she’d have to comp a six top. I could see her primed for a core dump.

But she lucked out. Normally, we’ll climb the management ladder until we’re on the phone with corporate setting up a lifetime free-meal plan replete with private jets and a celebrity masseuse. But some kind of weird grace descended on us last night. I think the stress of remodeling, the constant pounding, dust, arguments, strange architecture revealed by demolition, and constant pounding--along with the pounding--had tenderized us. We were stressed into some kind of gentle frisson, like a runner’s high. We’d worked through the pain. Everything was luminal and joyous. Waiting 45 minutes for crappy faux Italian? Blissful. Wondrous.

I think we somehow all realized that we didn’t really have anywhere to go any way and we never complained and we enjoyed our meal without incident (except for the Hyena). My Attorney did gently suggest they comp part of our bill and the waitress was quick to comply—then My Attorney tipped her 25% of the original bill.

T W E N T Y F I V E P E R C E N T.

I hope Kirsten Dunstki made it through that night and I hope that she makes it though the gauntlet of busboys and grabass soccer dads and the self righteous bill hagglers that can rape a tip jar with a single malicious word. I hope that when she’s knee deep in jackasses, when the management flips and the new guy is a hardass, when she’s too sick to work and there’s no one to cover so she has to work through a fog of Benedryl to placate a six-top of real estate management managers who want to impress each other by sending back a bottle of house Chianti and faking a birthday just for the stupid handclapping parade, I hope she remembers the table of smiling Irish who tipped big and believes that her next table might be half that easy.