Bandanas and Bartending

So this Sunday I took a bartending job at one of those upscale Dallas Plantation Homes just outside Highland Park. Bartending jobs are usually excellent because A) they pay really well, B) if they're hiring from a temp agency they usually don't need to you to make anything more complicated than a glass of wine or maybe to run a margarita machine, C) tips of the rich are uniformly awesome, and D) serving alcohol to rich people is a source of unending hilarity. You have no idea.

Weirdly, this party was scheduled for mid-afternoon on a Sunday, outdoors. First off, no one in Dallas ever schedules events at the same time as a home Cowboys game unless said event is a Cowboys watching party. I mean it's just not done. Who do these people think they are? Secondly, why on earth would you hold an event at the peak heat time of the day,, at the end of summer? It was wicked hot, with absolutely no wind or clouds. This ended up making the event much more awesome for me, as you will soon see, but still mucho weird-o.

Since I am the low man on the bartending totem pole at this event, I get stuck on outside bartending detail. Which means that instead of being at the front entrance hooking people up with margaritas as they come in, or over at the patio rocking the mimosas, I'm out at the far end of the lawn in the middle of the blazing sun, next to the croquet field, handing out soft drinks and beer to the genteel masses.

(A side note: Rich people are insanely attractive. Maybe it was just that this event screened out all the ugly rich people, but damn, yo.)

So this is not my beautiful bartending gig, seeing as it is ridiculously hot and all I get to do is hand people ice cold beers, which they proceed to drain in front of me in a not-taunting-but-might-as-well-been display of thirst quenching. But at the same time, I've done much worse while temping, for way less money, in much hotter temperatures. This is pretty much par for the course, except as a bonus all these catty old women keep coming up to me and making incredibly bitchy comments about everyone else at the party, which tends to keep everything nice and lively. ("She's had so much work done in the past 3 months I'm surprised her lips still move when she talks.")

I guess, though, that rich people must not spend a lot of time in the heat, because they seemed absolutely sure that I was going to whither and die standing out there in the sun. Every two minutes someone would come up to me "Oh you must be dying!" "Do you need some water?" "Are you sure you're okay?" I think I must have had some big time frail-waif-boy vibes going on, 'cause it was kind of embarrassing. Especially since the rich people usually don't care about the help, so long as the drinks are flowing in the proper direction.

It could have had something to do with the fact that it was something of a charity dinner; it's chic to help the poor, especially when they're serving you stuff.

At first they insisted that I take a very pink cloth napkin, fill it with ice, and drape it around my neck like some sort of bandana gone horribly wrong. It gave me the appearance of an incredibly gay old-time bank robber, who suddenly decided to go straight and start serving alcohol.

Wonderful.

I tried to circumvent the whole hideousness by tucking it into my shirt collar (because these people were damned if they let me take it off, God knows why) but that just made things even worse. 'Cause now it looked like I had no neck, something of a hunchback, and you could still see the pink through the fabric of my shirt. From gay-bank-robber to gay-hunchback. You've come a long way, baby.

The other bartenders ribbed me about it to no end, but I was a strong, proud, independent, obviously-gay-failed-bankrobber/hunchback, dammit.

In the end though, the catty old women decided as a group that it would not do for me to stand out in the sun all day and insisted that I move my bar under the shade of a tree at the far side of the lawn. Which was great since no one wanted to walk that far to get a drink, so I was just me and my pretty, pretty pink bandana, alone together for the rest of the party.

All that, and I got paid too. Jealous, much?