The Theatre that I work at sometimes gets me to play hostess for the night, so the others can have a chance at making tips (just kidding!) Don' get me wrong, I like the job, I getty to wear high heels and dress up in my fancy pants, boss everyone around a little bit, (a tiny little bit), and so on and so on. But there's one thing that's always kinda bugged me. A thought that's just been burrowing away in the base of my spine, the very fringe of my grey matter. Lemme explain.
We have a coat check room beside the hostess station where the busser, (and sometimes a hostess or two) get to hang up all the coats/mitts/boots/hats/dead ferrets/etc/you get my point. And on the desk of the hostess station there's a little wicker basket that people throw their change into to tip/pay coat check. Now when it's very cold outside, which it's been for a week or two now, both hostesses help out with coat check, as customers tend to appear all at once, totally ruining our calm and collected appeal, and practically turning the front door area into a war zone. okay, that may be a bit of an overstatement, but it gets pretty hectic in there. Anyways, that little wicker basket comes into play at the end of the night, as, hopefully, many people have thrown many bits of change into it, and then it gets split up between the hostess and the busser.
This is where my quandries and thoughts start a-naggling at me. When I was in grade three, we had a school dance. I really don't remember anything about it other than I wore a black 3-tiered mini skirt with neon trim in pink green and orange, and that I won a dance contest with another boy in my class. The prize was a box of icy squares. I remember going to the stage to pick up the icy squares, going over to the bench with the boy, and divvying up the squares equally, because, gosh darn it, we had both worked very hard to win that competition.
How different is a couple of people dancing around a coat check room, working very hard for the prize, then going to the back room(it's where the paying public are prohibited. most of the time,) and sorting through the change til it's in two piles, and having that slightly proud feeling of accomplishment when you get a big tip out? So this is my problem. Every time I hostess, I get swept back into grade three.