Wait Station or Backstage?

Every restaurant has areas where the servers work from. Sometimes they’re just a small area where the server can get coffee and soft drinks, at our restaurant we have rooms, or areas in between rooms. Downstairs where the large banquet rooms are we have a lot of space, and they’re behind doors. Since this is an old rambling building, one of the wait stations has four other rooms feeding off of the main wait station. There’s a furnace room, a linen room, and two storage rooms.

On show night, one of the storage rooms becomes the dressing room. It looks like something out of an old movie. There are two metal shelving units that house the chafing dishes and stands, some miscellaneous stuff (some that will be used occasionally, other stuff that will sit there forever.) There are two round tables, minus the legs stuffed into a corner, and yet another small, rickety shelving unit stuffed in another corner. But on show night, the room takes on a whole new persona.

We drag in a six foot table and fill it with make up, jewelry and other accessories. The rickety shelves hold Styrofoam heads with wigs on them. Dresses and costumes hang from the tall shelves. We bring in long mirrors and prop them up on chairs. And, in the colder months, we have a small space heater. We even have an old rug on the cold cement floor, that I found in yet another storage room…..I put it in there nine months ago, no one has bothered to move it since then. I think it falls into the “stuff that will sit there forever” category.

So for one night a month, the wait station becomes “backstage.” The poor little storage room looks so forlorn when we remove all the glitz and glamour and it once again is just a storage.

Not to say there isn’t any drama on nights when there is no show….these wait stations could still be considered “backstage,” they’re where we go to vent about customers who are pissing us off. Then we put on our game face and go tackle the crowd again. So I guess there is never any lack of drama, just glitz and glamour.