Serving h'orderves Among the Ruins

   Last night I had a one night temp job catering.  It was at The Cloisters which in itself was interesting (it is a branch of the Metropolitan Museum of Art housing architectural  and art pieces from Medieval Europe).  I have been trying to get into a catering company since September, but I have been stonewalled by my lack of New York City catering experience and head shots ( I don't even have one to present). Supposedly, Thursday, December 15th was the busiest catering night in the city, hence the need for temporary "butlers" as the NYC catering industry calls them.

  I observed a few things about the party, and I will not mention the specific name of the organization, but there were 300 curators of a particular museum there for the dinner. I was serving h'orderves and I was supposed to tell the guest what I was serving.  I think of the 6 of us serving I was the only person actually approaching the guest and urging them to sample the variety of delicious treats on the platter. Hmm.. may-be I was supposed to walk around silently and they would take from the tray at will opposed to at the urging of the wait staff, but whatever.  The guest were super friendly and they would ask me to come back to their tables/or corners of the dance floor with my next tray of food. In general I observed the "curators" to be lovely people who came hungry and like all of us needed a nibble or two or three or four to keep them going before the meal was served.

  And like any American woman I observe fashion and wonder what it would be like to have access to the most expensive salons and the highest end  boutiques.  Here was my opportunity to see it up close.  I was pleasantly surprised to see that all the woman seemed to wear what most reflected their personalities and were not driven by trends. There were the classic evening gowns with giant bows across their shoulders, sequined gowns that seemed heavier than the woman herself, short (I mean short) satin cocktail dresses, and the uninspired boxie holiday jacket with wide legged black pants.  Hair was long or bobbed, and smooth.  Make-up, being the northeast, was minimal, which is contrary to the rest of the country. Lots of smiles and holiday cheer.

  Another intesting thing was that several tables had much older patrons with them, may-be the grandfather or grandmother who were well into their 80 or 90's.  Their children or grandchildren made sure that they were partaking in all of the evenings events including being in the ballroom or enjoying the gourmet meal. Unlike nouveau riche who might want to give the impression of youth and opulance these old money families seemed to revere the matriarch and patriarchs of their families. WAIT - As I re-read that I guess the more skeptical might think that they are protecting their inheritance by catering to their elders.  Whatever, I 'm not that skeptical, and I like to think that it was respect and not greed that I was witnessing.

  At one point I walked through three intersecting giant imposing doors and I wondered if the The Cloisters were haunted.  I walked by the same place and thought the same thing again later.  And again I had the same thought as I was passing through that corridor. When the idea struck more for the fourth time in the same spot I stopped and laughed to myself.. I'm not sure if The Cloisters as a whole are haunted, but some energy was practically hitting me over the head to get me to notice that this intersection of ancient doors had something going on. The Christmas music streaming from the ballroom, the clinking of forks on plates, and the chattering of voices kept me from any further investigation.

  After the party we had to break down the catering event to leave no trace  and to restore the museum to its original somber existence. It wasn't until we had removed most of the set-up from the room that we were using as a kitchen that I noticed the glass case with a wooden statue of Mary and baby Jesus pushed in the corner, or the Last Supper tapestry hanging over the area we had used for dirty dishes. Looking at the museum in its original form it seemed like a strange place to set-up banquet tables among ancient pillar and to stage a band underneath a wooden figure of Jesus hanging from a cross. But on the other hand is there a better place to celebrate an ancient birth than among ancient ruins?

So I worked my one night of catering in New York City.  It had taken me four months to get inside of the Manhattan employment ring and for now just for the one gig. I was so tired as I walked with the crew of catering workers through the park from The Cloisters to the A train at 190th Street. Earlier in the day I had had the dreaded first sneeze of an oncoming cold, but even in my early stages of a cold and my fatigue from my long day working two jobs I tried to absorb the evening's events. I was grateful for the work, grateful for the window into a world of the privileged, grateful to be going home to a warm bed of my own, and grateful to be able to see the ebb and the flow of time and space.