when catering leads to football

On saturday a few weeks past, I was 1 in a crew of 4 catering a wedding in Estacada on a commune. The bride was a hippie, the groom Indian. While we were there to do dinner service on the first day, they planned to parlay that into a three day hippie psycho-trance fest (the groom is apparently the ‘it’ DJ in the Portland house party scene). So imagine, if you will, the extended family of two very hip people trying to keep up with their very hip friends. Extended family is never hip; in this case we had some good ol boys drinking coors out of plastic bottles vs. Sari-laden extended family from the groom’s ancestral home.

Anywhoo, the worst part of the job was that the kitchen and the serving area were about 200 meters apart. lots of running. in clogs. with hotel pans full of food. On one of these jaunts, with a platter full of vegan-carrot-wedding-cake, one of the hip ‘friends,’ who was obviously about 25-40 minutes into her roll, attempted to take me down. I wasn’t having any of that, no sirree, i wasn’t going down. It was a scene out of a bad sports commercial–i stiff armed her and spun deftly to my left and just barely avoided a crippling bear hug (with a 24″ silver platter on my palm, mind you).

“You are SO amazing!!! your food is SO amazing!!!! I love you!!!!”

My apron flaired out and added dramatic effect, as did the glow sticks that had been attached to me by a very adorable 6 y.o. pair of fraternal twins while I explained to their mother that all the food was vegan, then listened to her rave about how much good Karma we were bestowing upon the young couple. all very weird. this was 3 hours into service, which was…13 hours into my day. (i ended up on my feet for about 20 hours.)