Champagne and shame

Serve it chilled and don’t shake the bottle.

In my early twenties I played a lot of different roles and a lot of different games. Much of my time was pretending to be a waiter in a fine dining restaurant in Toronto. I was so good at it in fact that I ACTUALLY  did this in restaurants, with people, for money.

On this particular evening? I was playing the waiter for a corporate function game. This game had two objectives 1: Give everyone the best time ever and 2: make the number at the bottom of the check go up up up.

It was early February in 2000. Back then the apocalypse was going to come when the calendars on the computers couldn’t turn from 1999 to the date 2000. It was also the turn of the millennium. That new years eve was turned into a big deal. No parties like that one for a thousand years! 

The restaurant where I was playing make believe was also playing make believe. Aside from being a breeding pit for future directors and VP’s of marketing, it had pretences of being a ‘classy’ place. With that in mind, they stocked a lot o…