Do you know what I mean, or the return of the gesticulation

 

I attended an art opening recently, meeting people I hadn’t seen in decades. The sponsor, who had been my high school drama teacher, greeted me with a warm smile. As we chatted, she asserted that I hadn’t changed at all. Not a bit. At all. At first I was dismayed, thinking that my tailored knit ensemble and understated jewelry had failed to redefine an awkward teenager as a sophisticated gallery-goer unlikely to topple the statuary. I mumbled something I couldn’t hear over an inner voice clamoring, “Oh my God, tell me you’re kidding!” and launched into an anecdote illustrated with a thorough and varied assortment of gestures, hoping that I was communicating just how much her tutelage had meant to me.  In the late hours back at home, I realized that my over-enthusiastic display had surely fueled her assertion that I remained as I had been decades before.

I have always relied more on gesture than on speaking, as if communicating a request for the salt across the table depended on the frantic illustration of a lunatic mime. Even as recently as last night, I dipped my hand in a bowl of red salsa as I was describing a poster I’d seen to my  dinner  companion. This habit of out-sized gesturing is of such long standing that a Humanities professor once clasped my hands between his, saying, “Now talk” and when I was struck dumb, laughed, released them and added, “Hmm. I  just wanted to see if you could. Guess not.”  I felt a certain vindication in later years when an emphasis on gesture was promoted as a key strategy for teaching English as a second language.  My gesticulations, bobbing and dancing around through years of teaching seemed to keep my elementary students’ attention, although they may have been placing bets on how soon and with which piece of classroom furniture I was most likely to collide.

One would think that such a dependence on kinesics would have made me a better student-actress in high school than I was. Our early training was in mime, and I began to shape objects in the air even in casual conversation. I prefer to characterize my over-the top moments onstage as a soul-deep desire to get my point across rather than a bone-deep klutziness. I was the Blue Fairy who leapt for the papier mache tree trunk near the footlights as part of a musical number in A Mid-Summer Night’s Dream and toppled it and myself into the front row of the audience. In another play I was a burglar hoping to avoid capture by jumping head-first into a large barrel that I did not see had been placed too far upstage. When I vaulted in it, the barrel tipped over and wedged itself between the back wall and the stage risers with me thrashing around inside it. A third time, I was prancing off stage as the Mother Bear of the Goldilocks trio and bounced off a pillar in the wings. Our teacher-director was impressed that I stayed in character as I plopped down on my backside to the cement floor, still Mama Bear wringing her hands under her chin.

A few years later my love of the communicative arts re-emerged in my teaching. Students love stories, and over the years I’ve taken a few workshops to refine my skills. One of these gave me just a taste of pure glory. It was held at a mid-town hotel. There, in a banquet room adjacent to the bustling dining area, a staff member from the Arizona Theatre Company was using Alvin Schwartz's  “Tales to Tell in the Dark” to play theatre games with the Tucson Tellers of Tales group. In one of the sessions, a small group was to mime the events of a story told by a single narrator. My character was the vengeful victim of a bully who’d died the week before. Not satisfied with just seeing him buried, I went to the graveyard on a pitch black night with the wind rising and the trees flailing (other gamers surrounding me, moaning and waving their arms about). I kneeled on his grave, working up the nerve to stab through the mounded dirt to ensure that my tormentor was truly dead and I was finally free. I looked up to see my fellow work-shoppers encircling me, drawing closer, moaning louder, reaching in and pulling away. I was so lost in the story that after plunging my butter knife deep into the pillow on the carpet (I was supposed to mime catching my coattail under the knife and so believe that the dead bully was pulling me down to join him), I dropped to the floor wailing in terror. The wailing tree spirits went silent. The lunch-time traffic in the restaurant across the hall stopped dead.  The restaurant manager came in to have a word with the director. The clatter and bustle next door slowly resumed, and the workshop participants drifted back to their seats.

I got up feeling sheepish and in a secret way, just a little satisfied. Ah, the power of the perfect marriage of motion and emotion. Surely you see what I mean.

Clueless in the kitchen, or adventures in food service

At home, a clean, well-lighted place

I have been maneuvering through daily life one-handed for the past three weeks after washing a wine glass in too big a hurry. This brings to mind similar accommodations after my mishaps long ago in restaurant kitchens. There were cuts and punctures (by which I discovered your living bones are actually pale green), burns or scalds (as on the eve of my wedding) and electrical fires (just two, but one was truly spectacular, with orange flames rising behind a chest-high bank of drawer-like ovens and bursts of sparks reflecting off steel-paneled walls).

Commercial kitchens are all straight-lined, right-angled steel and tile and the managers of those in schools and hospitals take the health inspections seriously. Early in my days as a part time galley slave I discovered that some retail restaurants can be vastly more casual about them. The two cafeterias I worked at while still in school were hygienic opposites. My mother was the kitchen manager of the one, and held herself, me and the entire staff to an “eat off the floor” standard of cleanliness. I doubt that eating from any surface at the other location was a truly prudent choice.

I was unsettled by the state of that kitchen from the moment I walked through it to reach the closet-like office in the back. There was standing water in the pock-marked concrete floor. Water bugs scurried ahead of me to dark corners where, I found out later, they hung out with the rats--all of whom had been given names. Every counter I saw was sticky, every cook’s apron was stained and smeared. The interview with the heavy-set, balding manager was brief (“You’re tuberculosis tested? You’ve had a tetanus booster recently?”) and paperwork for a transfer completed.  Whatever misgivings I had, economic expediency meant that come August when my sophomore semester at the U of A began and we were newly installed in married student housing, I needed to transfer to this more conveniently located branch. Doing so meant I could maintain my latest promotion (from line-server to 3rd cook!) together with its nickel raise past minimum wage, I could get there on a Suntran bus, and perhaps I would not be the only new employee. From the look of the place, no doubt a whole new crew was being hired.

Although I’d taken the bus home from the dorm every Friday afternoon during my freshman year, I was anxious about riding the bus four miles one way after a one mile walk from married student housing to the bus stop three nights a week. As it happened, the commutes to what I later named the E. Coli Kitchen were uneventful. The adventures were all onsite.

Patrons were fewer, generally older, and obviously poorer than the clientele I’d known. The older staff greeted their regulars with a fierce, defensive recognition of their common struggle to make do and get by. In a mix of compassion and carelessness, they combined questionable leftovers into menu items unsanctioned by the out-of-state corporate officials and offered these at lower prices. I could not reconcile this rough friendliness in the front of the house with their unconcern for anyone’s immune system in the back. I hoped that no one lingered over their meals. The safest course was to eat while the food was still well above the 140 degrees that inhibits pathogens.

The cooks’ intent was patently kind and I cannot say these plats du jour were inherently unwholesome, but their preparation was alarming. The cooks stopped short of actually smoking while handling the food, but any soup seasoned with fire-purified ash would have been safer than the one made with vegetables taken from the tub stored in the walk-in refrigerator under seeping boxes of raw chicken. As third cook it was my duty to keep that cold box clean, and that first night I wondered how long just ago my predecessor had been fired—or had quit.

My matter-of-fact re-organizing and scrubbing of the walk-in seemed to please the head cook. Trouble was, I was only there from Friday to Sunday. When I walked in for my second weekend shift, she jerked her chin over her shoulder toward the walk-in from where she sat on a milk crate in the back doorway, saying, “Hey, Miss College, grab a rag and get to. It’s been waiting for you all week.” Now I wondered how and with what the health inspector was being paid off. It couldn’t have been free meals.

Every Friday night for six weeks, I closed my eyes to the pervasive dirt, grease, and  spills in the kitchen. The soured, always matted floor drains were harder to ignore. The walk-in, as foul as it was, became both my duty and refuge. Hiding out in there meant I could avoid inadvertent comparisons to my mother’s kitchen that might land me in even more unpleasant cleanup. It helped, too, that the particular dank odors of the cold box were subdued in the still, cold air, that 40 degrees is not all that cold, and that the freakish metabolism of a nineteen-year-old allowed me to stay there for a long time.

On my last night, I spent most of my shift in the walk-in as usual. I threw out the latest round of unidentifiable fermenting objects. I sorted the remaining pans and used a big black Sharpie to label them with their contents and the date after first sealing them in fresh, tight plastic wrap. I wiped down each rack after first peeling away the thin but perversely elastic layers of congealed sauce that stretched from rod to rod of the open shelving. I scrubbed the crusted floor so that it could actually be seen to be tiled, although the grout remained black. At length, I scooted the scrub-bucket of bleach and detergent through the doorway toward the pot station and pushed my hip against the heavy door to close it. The door latched to with a satisfying click as I leaned back on it. While resting there I saw a giggling, shrieking line-girl run past me, followed three steps behind by a maniacal pot-boy swinging a drowned rat (Fred?) by the tail.

I walked slowly to the office, where I set down my apron on the manager’s desk. He raised an eyebrow, saying, “Couldn’t take it anymore, hunh?” I mumbled something pleasantly innocuous, but I recognized a strange new emotion as I made my way through the parking lot to the bus stop. I could not remember feeling contempt for another living person before.