Actually thinking about my time spent in purgatory, aka “the service industry”, I had some wild fucking events over the course of a decade.
There was the time a bride decided she didn’t want to go through with the wedding and tried to make her escape through the back kitchens of the venue and wound up sitting out back in the drizzling rain, bumming cigarettes from the delivery drivers, pristine white dress turning to mulch as she sat on an over turned catering crate. After a good half hour the groom came and found her and asked if she was okay. When she said she wasn’t sure if she wanted to go through with it he just nodded and said she should get out the rain because it was cold. The two of them ended up going back inside together, skipped the wedding part and basically had the most expensive party of their lives with all their friends and family.
There was another bride who could never decide on place settings, so in the end just turned to the coordinator and said “surprise me”. So we mismatched everything and called it “boho chic”. She loved it.
There was the groom who got caught in our supply closet during the late night reception…with the best man. And then there was also the father of the bride who absconded with the mother of the groom and had to be asked nicely to put their clothes back on and get out of the wine cellar.
At the same wedding.
There was the drunk best man who proposed to me using an umbrella cocktail and told me he was heartbroken when I told him I was flattered but married. He wore it behind his ear the rest of the night dancing like a mad man and telling anyone who would listen about “the one that got away”.
There was the Indian wedding with 800 guests. We rotated them in batches of 200 to fit them between spaces. All I can remember is never having enough drinks to hand out.
There was the arch bishop who only liked his coffee ground by hand because the effort of the worker “made it taste better”.
There was the time I took out the crystal drop of a chandelier with a champagne cork because the runners shook up the bottles for a joke.
There was the funeral party where the body couldn’t be delivered to the crematorium because the crematorium caught on fire.
There was the other funeral where a fist fight broke out over something our Jeanie said to our Mary 40 years ago, but then it turned out Mary was the one who said it.
There was the wedding where in a room of 200 people, the bride and groom only had eyes for each other.
There was the christening where the godmother kept crying to me over mocktails because she never thought she could love something as much as she loved “that bald little head”.
There was the old man at the wedding who came alone and smiled very kindly at everyone and always said please and thank you and who told myself and a coworker he’d been married to his wife for over 60 years and how she would have loved to see these two finally tie the not. She’d only passed the week before. He’d brought a picture of her so she could enjoy it in spirit.
There was the really tragic funeral where everyone kept hugging each other and saying “I love you” and us staff had to take frequent breaks to breathe because grief is tangible but so is love.
There were the times when nothing in particular happened at all, but they stand out so much because everyone there was happy.
Of course there was also the times when someone threw up on your shoes, or you got groped while serving the table, or someone was rude or snide because you were “the help”.
People are wild.
I don’t know why I’m seeing notes for this post in 2025. Did it get TikTok’d?
