bound to reach my timeless end

As I contemplate a potential move to New York this fall, I try to think of all the things that will change dramatically for me. It doesn't seem hard to think of differences between a sleepy Southern town and the harshest, biggest city in the country, but since my primary reason for moving would be proximity to my friends, I tend to think of the softer side of things. Still, I know I'm in for a rude awakening.

Take tonight, for example. My mother is performing in a play as a fundraiser for an ostensibly charitable organization, whose purpose no one knows for sure. It's dinner theater, which is sure to make my theater hound friends bleed from the eyes, and beacuse it's for "charity" they've roped friends and family who don't want to pay the $65 admission fee to be waiter. Including me, whose last waitstaff experience was bussing tables in a restaurant patronized largely by people who had known me my entire life.

I'm supposed to show up for duty at 6:15 tonight, with only the instruction to "wear all black." I have received no training-- I don't even know what the menu will be--but in a few hours I'll be serving moderately-fancy food to people who paid exorbitantly for the honor of eating while watching my mother recite Shakespeare in a bad British accent.

Here's the kicker-- these people will not care. No matter how many orders I screw up, no matter how many glasses of water spilled, no matter how cold the rolls are, they will not bitch and moan or blame me. And even though I know I could supplement my guaranteed-pathetic New York City writing job with a waitressing gig, my fear of rich, or even middle class, New Yorkers in restaurants will keep me out of the kitchen for life.

I'm not really sure which of these groups are right, either. Even though Xanax prescriptions and other self-medicating techniques have made their way down here, the easygoing attitude of Southerners is pretty much inborn around here. I'm one of them, too; I feel guilty when requesting salad dressing on the side. As much as I hate listening to people bitch and moan, I wonder if they don't have the right idea, refusing to treat everything in life with the same standards of a fourth-grade Christmas pageant: as long as you tried.

Still, when I'm finally serving dessert (whatever it turns out to be) and my mom is taking her well-received curtain call, it will probably feel nice. And it feels even nicer to know that, wherever I may roam, I can always come back somewhere that a mixed-up order is just a little mistake, and where literally anyone can be a star.