Tuesday, September 2, 2008

Recap of Ethnic Festival

The Ethnic Festival was last weekend! Lots of salsa music, belly-dancing, Indian food, Greek, German, Italian, etc. Lots of fun. And St. Anthony's has three booths, every year, one with gyros, spanakopita, saganaki and such, one with something special like freshly-made loukoumades (like doughnuts, sort of) or baklava sundaes, and one with pastries. I do the pastry booth, every year. It's a woman thing, sort of. :) There are women in the gyros booth, but no men in the pastry tent. Who knows why.
Anyhow, my first shift was Saturday morning. I got there shortly after 10, thinking 10-ish is when we were supposed to set up. Panic moment - everything in packages and boxes, all pastries boxed in the freezer truck, signs not even up, and ME THE ONLY CHICK. In setting up, my job is to fetch, carry, find, arrange, all of it taking orders from one of the women who's done it forever. I've done it enough years I know what's IN everything, I look at the names of the pastries and go, "Oh yeah, that's the one", but I don't do the setting up! And it was just me until about 10:30, dashing about trying to decide what to do first. Then women start showing up - fellow white-bread Americans less experienced than ME, who have never even been at the festival before, and were less familiar than I was with what the pastries were. So guess who ended up giving the orders!!! I pulled in someone from the gyros tent to match up pastries and labels, and we got signs up, labels out, and found at least one tray of everything to have out in case worst-case scenario happened and we were all who'd signed up for the morning. I figured we were going to have to wing our first transactions with the change and singles from our purses, because we didn't know where to look for the cash box. But hey, IF we were it, we at least had stuff out, covered, and bare-bones ready to go.
Then the cavalry swooped in! Annette, wonderful woman, kept apologizing for changing what I'd set up - like I wasn't ready to fall down and kiss her feet for saving me!! Which I totally was!! She's one of the ones I usually take orders from! I'm taking notes this year, to save somewhere for next year, in case I'm on my own again. And then the day actually wasn't that busy - just LONG.

1 comment:

D. Lollard said...

And make yourself a note as to where you store your notes for next year, so you know where to look.