Jeff Burkhart: Not everyone is charmed by fame
At tomorrow’s Academy Awards, the icons and ingenues will saunter down the red carpet, marching in lock step towards cinematic immortality. Some will make it and some will disappear as quickly as they appeared, because fame is a fleeting thing and so are award shows, at least to the bar business. It’s almost as if some people are more interested in others’ pretend lives rather than their own real ones.
Two different experiences at two different upscale restaurants exemplified that difference for me long ago.
Our sous chef was beside himself, going gaga over a woman from Spain.
It was odd for him to be out of the kitchen. When it came to food, he knew what he was doing, but when it came to people, he didn’t. So usually, he stayed away from them.
“She’s a legend,” he said about the silver-haired woman sitting at the bar.
She was an opera singer, or a jazz singer, something like that. Whatever it was, it wasn’t my milieu. But clearly it was his.
Refined, well-dressed and well-appointed, she didn’t really standout from half a dozen other women at that upscale restaurant. It was easy for me to interact with her. She was just another customer. So, we had the casual interaction that all servers have. It’s our job to interact. In fact, it is expected.
But the sous chef could barely look at her. Fame is weird that way, it turns grown men into little boys and confident woman into bashful, blushing teens. He did manage to send out appetizers, on the house, of course, and expensive Spanish wine, the only Spanish wine we carried.
“I don’t care for Spanish wine,” she said, leaning over and whispering.
Later when he did manage to go over to her table, he stood there shuffling his feet and looking down bashfully. She signed a menu for him, and I am sure he treasures it to this day.
At another upscale restaurant, our waiter walked up to the table, exactly the same way he approached every other table.
“How are we doing today?” he said.
“We don’t want to be bothered,” said the couple, a short slightly balding man with glasses, and a much taller, slightly younger woman.
“Who would bother you?” asked the perplexed waiter.
“We are kind of well known,” said the woman.
“You are?” asked the waiter.
“We are,” they answered in unison, nodding their heads affirmingly.
“For what? If you don’t mind me asking,” replied the waiter who still had a job to do.
“We’re on TV,” said the woman.
“Oh,” said the waiter unimpressed.
“Would you like something to drink?” he added.
The couple looked at each other and then back at the waiter.
“We are on one of the top shows on TV,” said the man.
“That’s great,” replied the waiter. “Some drinks?”
“We’ve won Emmys,” added the woman.
If you have to say, “Don’t you know who I am?” then you probably aren’t who you think you are, at least not in the eyes of the other person. And even though this couple never said those words, they practically hung in the air around that table.
Eventually, they mentioned the name of their show. The couple at the next table over looked up at that. But the waiter just shrugged.
“I am sorry, I don’t have a TV,” he said.
The couple looked at each other in disbelief.
“No TV?”
“No TV.”
Once that frame of reference had passed, the rest of the evening progressed. That waiter charmed them with his knowledge and wit. He did the job that he excelled at, and they seemed to enjoy it.
The next time they came in, they asked for him by name.
He, however, couldn’t remember theirs.
Leaving me with these thoughts:
• All the world’s a stage,” once wrote a man, who never won an Emmy or Oscar.
• The nice thing about being a celebrity is that if you bore people, they think it’s their fault,” once said Henry Kissinger.
• Context is crucial. Without it, we are all just people.
• Tomorrow, I will be pouring drinks for both the pretenders and the realists, just like any other night.
• Fame does weird things to people, both to the ordinary, and sometimes to the famous.
Jeff Burkhart is the author of “Twenty Years Behind Bars: The Spirited Adventures of a Real Bartender, Vol. I and II,” the host of the Barfly Podcast on iTunes (as seen in the NY Times) and an award-winning bartender at a local restaurant. Follow him at jeffburkhart.net and contact him at jeffbarflyIJ@outlook.com