Bruni Interview and The NY City Food & Wine Fesitival.

October 8th, 2008 by Waiter

Frank Bruni, the food critic for the NY Times, interviewed me for an article in his Critic’s Notebook titled Old Gender Roles with Your Dinner? Basically the article is about how male and female diners are treated differently in restaurants. I am quoted as saying, “Men eat and leave. Women eat and stick around” and “Waiters are guilty of treating female diners as second-class citizens.” A sommelier countered my claim saying “top-notch servers consider it a challenge to do the best for — and thus coax the most from — any table they’re given, and don’t see any advantage in showering less enthusiasm on a group of women.” I think that server spent too much time drinking the hospitality Kool-Aid. Hasn’t she ever heard about the not getting blood from a stone thing? There’s only so much you can “coax” out of a table of chicken caesar salads with water and lemon! Oh well, maybe I’m just a bitter ex server!” In any case, don’t everyone start accusing me of misogyny. Hey! Some of my best tips have been from female customers. I just wish they take less than four hours to eat sometimes! Many thanks to Mr. Bruni for including me in the discussion!

I’d also like to point out that on I’ll be doing a book reading and discussion at the New York City Wine & Food Festival on October 11^th. Tickets are still available. The entire festival runs from the October 9^th to the 12^th.  Check it out!

P.S.  Here’s a postscript from Bruni on his Diner’s Journal blog.

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Eagle Eye

October 7th, 2008 by Waiter

(Possible Spoiler Alert!)

It’s ten o’clock at night and I’m leaving the movie theater with my friend Mike. It’s Mike’s 37th birthday so I liberated him from his wife and infant son and took him out for beers and a movie. After consuming greasy man food and a pitcher of Bass Ale, we went to see Eagle Eye – a movie about an all seeing, super secret government computer system run amok. While the movie was visually stunning, I found it a tad predictable. It was like HAL from 2001 and the WOPR from WarGames made a baby and we got to watch their love child wreak its inevitable silicon sociopathy upon humankind. Michelle Monaghan was the only reason I could keep my eyes open during the movie.

“What’d ya think?” I ask Mike as we walk towards my car.

“Great movie,” Mike replies. “Awesome.”

“Are you kidding me?’ I say. “I knew a computer was controlling everything five minutes into the movie.”

“Are you stupid?” Mike snaps. “It was a great movie. Great production values.”

I bite my tongue. Mike suffers from a psychiatric malady called Cinematic Reaction Formation Disorder – CRFD for short.  People afflicted with CRFD will watch a horrible movie but, because admitting negative emotions about a movie they’ve been hyped into looking forward to and shelling out $11.00 to see might initiate a complete personality meltdown, the subject unconsciously converts their negative feelings about the film into positive ones.  Anyone over thirty who says they loved The Phantom Menace or Indiana Jones and The Kingdom of The Crystal Skull suffers from this disorder. The most common treatment for CRFD is flooding the brain with old movies from the American Movie Classics channel. I recommend dosages of The French Connection, Lawrence of Arabia, Dr. Strangelove, and any film with Bogart in it. The prognosis for remission is Mike’s case, however, is poor.

“Let’s not argue about it,” I say, opening my car door. “You can never admit when a film’s bad.”

“Gimme a break,’ Mike says. “If the new James Bond film sucks you’ll be crying like a little bitch about how great it was.”

“It won’t suck,” I reply. “Daniel Craig will surpass Sean Connery as 007.”

“That’s fucking sacrilege,” Mike says, slamming the passenger door shut.

“Well I said it. So there!”

“You’re an asshole.”

Suddenly my cell phone rings. I answer it. It’s Mike’s wife. Mike “unconsciously” left his cell phone at home. Now she’s calling me.

“Tell Mike we need light bulbs,” Mike’s wife says.

“Now?”  I reply. “Can’t it wait?”

“I have no light in the bathroom!” Mike’s wife shrieks. “How can I give the baby a friggin bath in the dark?”

“Okay,” I say, soothingly. “We’ll get some on the way home.”

“You guys aren’t drunk are you?”

“No ma’am.”

‘Get here soon.”

“Okay.” I shut off my phone.

“Who was that?” Mike asks.

“Your wife, you deadbeat motherfucker!” I shout. “She needs light bulbs.”

“Jesus.”

‘What kind of father are you?” I chide. “Letting your kid bathe in the dark?”

“Okay, okay,” Mike says anxiously. “There’s a store near my house. Let’s go.”

Don’t get me wrong. Mike and his wife take great care of their baby. But early parenthood is stressful. Sometimes I just enjoy busting Mike’s fertile balls.

Mike and I pull into the parking lot of a 24 hour supermarket and walk inside. The garish florescent lighting accentuates the colors of the product packaging but makes the human beings shuffling along the aisles look pockmarked and old. We look at the plastic green signs hanging above the aisles noting the locations of bread, dairy, meat products – but no light bulbs.

“Where are the fucking light bulbs in this place?” Mike asks.

“Beats me,” I say. “Ask someone who works here.”

“Excuse me,” Mike asks a surly looking teenager unloading cans of no frills peas. “Where are the light bulbs?”

“I think they’re on aisle sixteen,” the kid says. “Maybe aisle seventeen.”

We find the light bulbs on aisle twenty.  Good help is hard to find. As we walk to the self checkout counter Mike points to a round black video dome in the ceiling recording our every move.

“It’s the Eagle Eye,” he says.

“Oh boy,” I reply. “Scary.”

“Do you honestly think the government is watching everything we say or do?”  Mike asks.

“I can see my car parked in front of my house using Google Earth,” I reply. “I’m sure the government has something better.”

“Yeah,” Mike says, “But there’s way too much information out there for the computers to process. They can’t keep up with everything.”

‘So you don’t think the government can monitor all out phone conversations?”

“Dude,” Mike says, “These assholes can’t even monitor Wall Street. What makes you think they can monitor all of us?”

“I don’t know.”

“Don’t tell me you believe in all that Echelon shit.”

“It could happen.”

“You read too many spy novels,” Mike says. “It took those bozos five days to get water to the Superdome. Don’t forget it.”

“You have a point there.”

Mike and I get into the self checkout lane. Mike the runs the light bulbs under the laser price scanner and pulls out an Amex card to pay for it.

“You need to use an American Express card to pay for light bulbs?” I exclaim. “You are one broke ass mofo.”

“Just wait until you have kids, asshole,” Mike retorts. “Now watch this. I’ll show you all this computer monitoring stuff is bullshit.”

“How?”

“Just watch.”

Mike slides his credit card through the reader. When the computer screen asks him to sign his name, Mike writes “FUCK YOU ASSHOLE” in the signature box with the electric pen.

“I can’t believe you just did that.” I say.

“Watch,” Mike says.  “It’ll clear.

”Sure enough, the computer accepts Mike’s credit card and we’re on our way.

“Eagle Eye my ass,” Mike says.

I drop Mike off at his house and drive home. The autumn night is cool and the stars are shining brightly in the cold sky. As I stand looking up looking at the heavens, I notice one of the stars moving rapidly across the horizon. It’s probably a meteor, a communications satellite, or a Soviet rocket booster left over from the 1970’s. Or maybe, just maybe, it’s the Eagle Eye looking at me. Shrugging, I toss my paranoid notions aside, walk up to my apartment, drink two more beers, and fall asleep - dreaming I’m being chased by Michelle Monaghan. That’s a nice dream.

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Wondrous & Strange

October 5th, 2008 by Waiter

I often buy things for myself out of shame. I bought a new couch only when it became obvious that my musty, sagging, slip covered old one was about to achieve sentience. When I realized that I’d be in public promoting my book I finally decided to replace the worn, ill fitting “funeral and wedding” suit hanging in my closet with new blazers and slacks. And, when I realized that I was forty years old and had never bought myself a television set, I replaced the dusty 27 inch cathode ray tube box my parents gave me in my twenties with a sparkling 50 inch plasma. I have shoes in my closet older than some of the people reading this sentence. So you can imagine how far I let my mattress go.

My mattress is thirteen years old. I know its thirteen years old because the delivery men who hauled it up to my apartment in 1995 asked if they could watch the O.J. Simpson verdict being announced on my television. After O.J. got acquitted the men thanked me, left, and the dust mites and I got on with our lives.

That mattress saw me though four apartments, two presidential administrations, several women, Wall Street booms and busts, a dog, more than a few jobs, and writing one book. It cradled me when I recovered from double pneumonia, spun like an LP when I had too much to drink, and held me when I cried on 9/11. I read hundreds of books on that mattress; napped, daydreamed, listened to music, had sex, not had sex, woke up in pain, tossed and turned with anxiety, suffered nightmares, had flashes of inspiration, made life changing decisions, felt love and hate, hope and despair, talked to God and sometimes to the other fellow. I had a lot of fun in that bed - but I also spent many nights wondering if I’d die alone in it. If I had conceived a child on that mattress the day I bought it, it’d be a bratty teenager by now.

Sleeping in hotel beds over the past two months made me realize how much my old mattress had deteriorated. It’s sagging in spots, creaks, and I’ve been waking up sore for almost a year.  On Wednesday, motivated by the desire not to be a forty year old guy with shitty bedding, I bit the bullet and went mattress shopping. Let me tell you, shopping for a new mattress is more complicated than buying a new car. After visiting several stores, testing two dozen models, and listening to salesmen bullshit me out the wazoo, I settled on a new queen size model with some bells and whistles. Of course the money hemorrhage is just starting. My old mattress was a full, so now I have to replace all my sheets, comforters, and buy a new headboard. Then again some people are sleeping on dirt floors, I should consider myself lucky. At least I’ll be comfortable sleeping into my fifties.

Then on Friday one of those little coincidences that make life interesting happened. Orenthal James Simpson was convicted of kidnapping and burglary thirteen years to the day he was acquitted of criminal charges in the murders of Ron Goldman and Nicole Simpson. Exactly thirteen years after my old mattress was delivered. Some of the reporters covering the trial in Vegas were in grade school when O,J. walked in ’95.  During my old mattress’s lifespan O.J. was a free man and I stumbled though a bunch of jobs, became a waiter, and  ended up becoming a writer. My old mattress is going to the dump and The Juice is going to jail. As I lie in my new bed, I gaze up at the ceiling and wonder what life has in store for me. Who knows?

The world is wondrous and strange.

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Interviews!

October 2nd, 2008 by Waiter

Here are two fun interviews I did for The Street.com and WNBC. Many thanks to Gregg Greenberg and Jillian Kreitzman for making it look easy!

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TV Land

September 29th, 2008 by Waiter

I’m very happy to announce that the good people at BermanBraun, an independent production company, have optioned Waiter Rant for development as a television series. My deep thanks to Gail Berman and Lloyd Braun for their faith in the material I’ve created and their willingness to develop it in a new and exciting way. Thanks are also due to Nick Harris, my agent at Rabineau, Wachter and Sanford for bringing us together.This is going to be fun!

So here’s the big question. Who is going to play me? Hmmm…..the comments should be interesting for this one.

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