Today at the Editor’s glance: Happy New Year everyone. Well, nearly everyone. Some of you crabby little buggers might as well stay in 2021, though no one doubts you’ll make like hell for us in 2022. This is Be Kind to Food Servers Month, so whether you’re getting served at McDonald’s, at your neighborhood restaurant or at some pretentious dive uptown, be sure to be grateful in more than words: tip 20 percent or better. I looked around for the origin of this recognition (after coming across false information that it had been started by the Labor Department: nothing verified it) and found an article in the Memphis Commercial Appeal on Jan. 7, 2009, which attributes it to Sybil Presley. She had started waiting on customers at a lunch counter in Mobile, Ala., in 1963. In 2009 she was working at Onix restaurant, which has since closed. She inaugurated Be Kind to Food Servers Month in December 2008. “Presley’s goal was to establish a positive relationship between diners and servers, generating better service for the former and more tips for the latter who, in Memphis, make an average salary of $2.13 an hour and generally receive a 15- to 20-percent tip,” the Commercial Appeal reported. (According to the Department of Labor, and this is verified, the wage is still $2.13 in Tennessee. It is, surprisingly for this state still hung up on sharecropper habits, $6.98 in Florida.) The Commercial Appeal reporter in that article spoke with Steve Dublanica, 40 at the time. He’d “spent nine years waiting tables at a series of high-end bistros in the New York metropolitan area after losing his job in the health care industry…. What Dublanica couldn’t swallow was the fact that while the majority of his customers were decent, at least 20 percent were psychopaths who live to make your life miserable. ‘They treat you like dirt, snap their fingers, ask for a million substitutions,’ he says. ‘Some of my customers were barely keeping it together they were using all their psychic energy not to flip out at work, and then they would come into restaurant and say, You’re only a waiter. I can say anything I want to you, and the consequences are going to be minimal.” Presley’s LinedIn profile now lists her as a Sales Representative at Discount Travel Club, and as president of her own Presley Promotions consultancy. I was able to contact her by email. She wrote back this morning. Now 75, she says she performs as a waitress comedienne. “I refer to my fictitious restaurant as The Soap Opera Grill,” she wrote. “I won third place in a national tv talent competition performing as a waitress in standup comedy.” She noted getting roclamation from the State of Tennessee by Congressman Steve Cohen, honoring her Be Kind To Food Servers month. She includes this image of her:
Now this:
The Live Calendar is a compendium of local and regional political, civic and cultural events. You can input your own calendar events directly onto the site as you wish them to appear (pending approval of course). To include your event in the Live Calendar, please fill out this form.
June 2025
Flagler Beach Farmers Market
Coffee With Flagler Beach Commission Chair Scott Spradley
Grace Community Food Pantry on Education Way
Pride Month Dance Party Rally on I-95 Overpass
Peps Art Walk Near Beachfront Grille
ESL Bible Studies for Intermediate and Advanced Students
Pride Month Finale Freedom Walk
Grace Community Food Pantry on Education Way
Palm Coast Farmers’ Market at European Village
Al-Anon Family Groups
Nar-Anon Family Group
For the full calendar, go here.
“It has been my experience that impatient reformers are as surprised or incredulous as foot-dragging conservatives when confronted by some of the little-known history of Jim Crow. The fact seems to be that people of all shades of opinion—radical, liberal, conservative, and reactionary—as well as people of both the Negro and white races have often based their opinions on shaky historical foundations or downright misinformation. Some of the most direful predictions of disaster as well as some of the most hopeful forecasts of interracial felicity have been so founded. And so also have some recent programs of reform as well as stratagems of resistance to reform. The twilight zone that lies between living memory and written history is one of the favorite breeding places of mythology. This particular twilight zone has been especially prolific in the breeding of legend. The process has been aided by the old prejudices, the deeply stirred emotions, and the sectional animosities that always distort history in any zone, however well illuminated by memory or research.”
–C. Vann Woodward, from “The Strange Career of Jim Crow” (1955).
Ray W. says
Thank you, Mr. Tristam, for your Bullock vignette about the stresses about waiting tables filled with rude customers.
One of my many humorous restaurant memories, some dating from my summer job at age 14, involves a now-deceased old friend, Shelley, who served at a beachside restaurant in the Shores for many years. She announced as she approached every customer that it was her first day, believing that boosted her tips. Over and over again, customers who had been vacationing at the same motel in the Shores for years would reply that she had said that to them last year and the year before and the year before. Shelley possessed the type of personality that fostered laughter in everyone. Many of her long-time vacationers would ask for her every time they came in, yet she still announced to them, too, that it was her first day.
One night just before the 500 in the late -70’s, Vicki, a long-time Minnesota-born server at that restaurant, complete with a pronounced accent, kept updating the kitchen crew about a large table of good-old boys who had asked for an extra glass, which they put in the center of the table. Each time she brought another round of drinks, one or another would put a $20 bill into the glass and announce that that was her tip. The amount rose to well over $200 and Vicki was quite excited about the unexpected good night. Then, quite upset, she came back to tell us all that they had emptied the glass as they were leaving and left her a much smaller but normal tip.
And, of course, you just haven’t lived until, during a long and very busy rush (sometimes during summer holidays the line formed long before opening time at 4:00 pm and didn’t end until after midnight) you see a server burst through the kitchen doors from the front and run out the back door, at which point she throws change at a car leaving the parking lot, yelling at the top of her voice: Keep your f—–g change.
I, like Sandra Bullock, recommend that everyone work in a busy restaurant, if only for a season. When I was a misdemeanor prosecutor in DeLand in 1987, my judge asked me why I never got upset when he ruled against me, adding that all I ever said was to ask him to call the next case. I replied that I had worked for years as a short-order cook in a busy restaurant that had as many as 25 waitresses on the floor during the busiest nights. I told my judge that if I didn’t get their food out to them quickly enough, they wouldn’t make enough money in tips to be able to go out for drinks after work and pay their rent the next morning. I told him that, compared to them, there was nothing he could do that would ever make me mad.