Sometimes The Best Thing You Can Say About The Day Is “Hey, At Least I Didn’t Have To Wear The Pizza Suit.”
When Ben was a couple of months old, I went back to work as a waitress. I’d waited tables for years before, so I was eagerly hired at the new pizza place that opened up in town. In a sea of newbies, I was a Master of my Trade. Queen of the Kingdom.
The general manager of the restaurant was a guy I’ll call Phil (although, I am stating for the record, this was not his name) and he was a decent guy. For an over-worked underpaid restaurant GM, that’s a huge thing.
He’d show up on the weekends and despite occasionally trying to get us to unsuccessfully have team building meetings at 5PM when the dinner rush was beginning to discuss things like “selling more pizza,” and often telling a server who was so slammed that she was eyeball deep in the weeds to “smile more,” I always liked him. Probably because he called me “efficient” which is a label–unlike ‘stupid bitch’ which I am called quite often–that I had never before heard.
Hokey and corny, yes, but Phil was a good guy. Which meant we’d often mock him behind his back–although, I must add, not unkindly–and try to do our best Phil impression. This often involved frowning a lot and bursting out conspiratorially with the often-heard “I think someone is stealing cheese,” and by far and away the best impersonator was one of the managers, a mexican dude named Cesar.
One Saturday night after close, Cesar, who was the night manager, pulled from the manager’s office this large cloth contraption. Mystified, we all grabbed our smokes and gathered ’round, our piles of tips left on the tables near the halfway rolled up basket of silverware. Cesar was laughing so hard that he was crying. Although this wasn’t uncommon as he was known for his excellent sense of humor, we all clamored to know what the hell was so fucking funny.
Once he’d caught his breath and wiped the tears, he turned around the cloth contraption he was holding. On the back it had been brown but on the front, it was red. With large circles of purple and dots of grey felt and slices of green felt. It took us a moment to realize what we were looking at, but we all saw it at the same time.
“Holy SHIT,” Amy–another server–yelled. “That’s a gigantic fucking pizza suit.”
And it was.
Phil had bought us, for no reason we could ascertain, a gigantic triangle-shaped pizza suit. I can swear to you, The Internet as my witness, that I have never, ever laughed so hard in my entire life. It was a typical Phil thing (it is killing me, I should add, to not tell you his real name not because it’s an exciting name, but because I can’t think outside the effing box) to do: pointless yet hilarious, hokey yet comedic, and one of those things that no one else would think was a good idea.
I mean, sure, I do sometimes see those poor fuckers, dressed up as a taco or a sandwich on the side of the road. We live far enough from stuff that driving from place to place is a necessity, so these people merely stand listlessly on the side of the road, wilting in the heat and freezing in the cold and choking on the exhaust of Escalades and Bentley’s. And I will tell you that I have never, ever, EVER stopped to eat somewhere because they had a person dressed as a chicken sadly standing at the side of the road.
If anything, I keep driving and pretend for both of our sakes that it never happened. I had not seen an actual humiliated person standing there, dressed as a large Chicago hot dog or a milk shake. Seemed healthier that way for all parties.
Anyway, there we were, a cluster of servers, bartenders and delivery drivers, staring slack jaw awash in awe of the possibilities that only a gigantic felt pizza suit would provide.
Which.were.endless.
Part Number B will air on Monday.
I feel your pain. I feel the pain of the restaurant mascot. I once had to dress in a giant popcorn suit for the movie theater I worked at.
[…] More: Sometimes The Best Thing You Can Say About The Day Is “Hey, At Least I Didn’t Have To Wear The P… […]
I wave at them. We have tax service places that put people out in Lady Liberty costumes in the spring.
Part Number B? 😉
my 1st job involved an octopus dressed as a sailor suit. Thankfully I was massively allergic too it and would start sneezing and wheezing if it came near me. I was the only person in the whole damn place to avoid octopus duty
Oh, I can tell this is gonna be good. Can’t wait for part number B.
I once dressed up as a peanut for a Thanksgiving play. Seriously, who has peanuts at Thanksgiving? I had one line, “And nuts.”
I remember as a child seeing Mr. Peanut walking back and forth in front of the Planter’s Peanut place in downtown Chattanooga. It was thrilling, I tell you! Thrilling! Ah. Sweet memories of youth.
Hey- my first GM WAS really named Phil. He was a complete jerk. We called him Fat Phil for obvious reasons and the weirdest thing was that he was MARRIED and his wife would park her car across the street from the restaurant and spy on him because she thought he was fooling around on her, which was the most bizarre thing in the world because how he ever managed to get a girl to even date him in the first place and then to MARRY him was beyond anyone’s ability to figure out. And we knew for a fact that he had used up every bit of his love-luck with that one crazy woman who married him.
Bless their hearts.
Hahahaha. You have the best stories.
your memory!
I would kill to remember what I vaguely did yesterday.
All your stories have so much detail.
Well done to your brain.
x
Hilarious.
I once saw a guy dancing in a pizza suit outside of Papa Johns. I nearly had to pull over from laughing so hard.
People dressed as a hot-dog always scare the crap out of me. I don’t know why, they just do.
I dressed up as a wall for a middle-school play of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. I had to hold my fingers up in a hole where the two main characters kissed through…
I love your stories!
You could “bring it on down to pizza-ville…”
omg , i had to dress as a horse once to do mascotting but work let me bail last minute because i was short , thank the gods i am short.
those things stink worse then a den of skunks.
I just feel so sorry for those guys – particularly when it feels like 102 degrees out there and they’re dressed in something like, um, I dunno, a mattress or something…
aunt becky… did you really have auggie stuffed? and as for airport security.. .even if you hide something you REALLY. really. *really* want to keep inside a backpack of your husbands dirty socks and boxers and your beloved pregnancy gooed underwear… those bastards will still find it. apparently my HUGE pregnant belly had your airport luck last time I flew… All i wanted to keep was this 3.5oz bottle of lotion that was half full… apparently the rule is not only fucking retarded but 3oz. they pulled every single peice of stinky underwear out of the backpack for all to see and still took my lotion. my plan turned evil and became embarrassing very fast.
as for the bulk of randomness.. I just had to catch up on like a whole weeks worth of posts…
I realized that when we pass someone working in a costume, I sort of hiss at my kids, “don’t stare, keep going” as though we were passing a heroin addict getting a fix or something.
Clearly this says more about me than about anyone else. Which is why I mention it.
Honestly I have only ever seen clowns up here. Makes me think they make it too darn cold in Canada to have people dress up in costumes and make ’em stand on the road like nerds to sell food…or else I’m too absent to notice when I drive past…..I’ll check next time I drive around town and get back to you. Maybe we do have them and I have been rude not to honk or wave. Poor people frying on the roads, I’m horrid!!
I live in a town of 800 people so finding anything dressed up is rare. Although I did see a farmer dressed up for a wedding once.
Like Meg said, we don’t make our citizens dress up in wacky costumes to sell things here in the Great White North. Maybe it is too cold. It’s hard to get into a pizza costume wearing a snowsuit.
When I see someone dressed up as an animal or piece of food, I get on my hands and knees and thank the heavens I have the job I do!!!
Thank god I’ve never had to dress in a food suit voluntarily. One year fo Halloween, though, my boyfriend’s mother hand sewed him a penis costume. Complete with shaving cream on top.
I do hope that Part B concludes with something spectacular like you meeting Steven Segal while wearing the Pizza suit.
I’d rather be the employee caught ‘stealing’ the cheese rather than cutting it.
I can only guess where this story is headed…
please tell me there is a photo of you in the suit?!
I would DIE if I had to do that, just DIE! Pizza is for eating dang it not wearing 😉
xxx
I’ve had a couple of jobs that had someone dressed in a stupid costume. Fortunately it was never me. Either the suit didn’t fit or I was urgently needed to something very complicated that only I could do – like fold boxes.
Awesome!
Oh My Gawd….that is flippin HILARIOUS!!!!
Next time hubby complains about his job, I will tell him that it could be worse – he could be in that pizza suit. Yikes!!
[…] first, go read this, o! yee who don’t sit at their computer all weekend waiting patiently, crying, and prostrate […]
When I was in high school, I once voluntarily dressed up like Frosty the Snowman at the grocery store. It wasn’t that embarrassing, plus I was being paid for it, but it was the hottest few hours of my life.
I never had a costume as a “surprise” additional job duty. That might be it for me at that job!
You know, I can *almost* see pizza at a pizza place, taco at a taco place, and so on. *Almost.* However, we have a great little Greek place here. Owned by Greek people. Do they have a gyro suit? No. Baklava? Nope. They have a Dora costume. DORA. I haven’t been back since.
“I think someone is stealing cheese” is totally going to be my new blog tagline.