employablog

A number of strange things have happened.  Most recently, today I yelled at the actor who played Van Wilder not to lock Jesus in the cellar.  Really.

Here is how this happened, I’m going to fast forward today before I rewind to some of the random steps I took falling into this job.

With my journalism degree, prehealth studies, and research and minor in Jewish Studies and Civilization, I am a restaurant manger (amongst other thing *cough* teacher, public health researcher).

But a restaurant manager, it’s unique in two aspects, one that it is my main income, and two, that I am in no way qualified to manage a restaurant.  I am not qualified to wait, or even bus.  But during lunch shifts, I am the busser, waiter, host, manager, and so far — so good.  A friend recommened me to this job, and I got it.  Bussing.  Two, three days later, I was serving, and now I have the keys to the safe, blah blah, etc, and all that would be exciting were it not for the fact that something just really doesn’t make sense.

And, that this job, aside from the fact that I get free food, and am good at flirting and placating *cough* getting tips, is entirely irrelevant to, well, anything I plan to do with my life.  So today, things got a little intense, and forced me to evaluate all that has happened in the brief and insane period since I returned to New York City.
Back to today, I yelled at Van Wilder not to lock Jesus in the cellar.  All day, a huge production crew was filming Definitely, Maybe (due out: 2008) on the block, in front of the restaurant and next door.  And it was crazy.  Rich people, actors, directors, all that stuff and they all came to eat.  One actress really liked me, tipped me for ‘to go,’ explaining,

“I’m in service too, you’re an actor too huh?”

I told her, this may sound crazy, but I’m actually going to be a doctor.  Huh.

But back to Jesus, and Ryan Reynolds (the actor who played Van Wilder, and that guy in a fat suit in that stupid movie).  They wanted to close our basement door, those metal doors that open out of the sidewalk for a shoot.  I said, “No, Jesus is downstairs, I’ll go check on him.”

Van Wilder was wearing a hoodie, and looking sheepish for some reason.  Maybe because I dropped the ‘J’ bomb.  A production monkey asked if they could shut the door once I was down, I said “No.  Then we’ll have two people trapped in the cellar, me and Jesus.”

So I went downstairs to talk to Jesus (pronounced, “Hey-Soos”), “Van a cerrar la puerta para uno o dos minutos para la pelicula.”

Jesus said that’d be cool (”Está bien”).  I went back up, and told it how it was.  But after the scene, I had to remind them to let Jesus out, which they did.  Anyways, the day was ridiculous.  I spent the entire day translating from the film crew to my workers (English to Spanish) so that everyone knew what was going on, and making adjustments, writing checks, taking orders, signing things and managing people, answering phones, taking orders, blah blah.  Irrelevant or not, I am learning something, and even if it is limited to sore feet and English-Spanish translation, and well, shmoozing, those are all very, very relevant.  And certainly, how to flirt with old euortrash women and gay people to make money.  Give free bread, smirk.  It works — table eight said that I was adorable.
To close, Van Wilder nearly trapped Jesus in a cellar in the West Village, oh, and now I am officially an MCAT teacher, and I got a phat tip for helping a stumbling tutor to teach a physics lesson at my restaurant.

Yeah, New York, NY, it’s a hell of a town.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 17th, 2006 at 10:26 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.