I’ve got a side gig that I do for fun at Shoreline Amphitheater.  I’ve been doing it for about 15 years now because I love music, get to see free shows and ….  I do backstage catering and dressing rooms. (I think it would be cool in this part to talk about different riders for different bands. – ed 😉 ) I walk around like a supervisor, looking like a boss. I carry a clip board. I order special food from the kitchen and bring it to the dressing rooms in advance of the show. I sometimes help with the front line – which is a buffet style lunch for the stagehand crew that is working the show. The band, the crew, the executives at Shoreline, they all come back and enjoy this food at the shows. It is part of their experience. I like being a part of the crew to make that happen.

Kitchens can be stressful places to be. When cooking for 150 people and having a couple of different workstations with as many as 6 or 8 people in the kitchen at one time makes for the hollering of “Coming through with a HOT PAN” or “behind YOU” often. Getting lunch or dinner out on time is key when people only have a limited amount of time to eat! Keeping all the proper amounts of food on hand, running the crew in a way that everyone feels productive and like they are contributing. It takes a team. Teamwork makes the dream work, as Lia will say. She is the pseudo boss, in that she does what needs to get done and is Cindy’s #1. (Who is Cindy?)

Lia and Cindy were an odd couple to begin with – but I’ve been working with them for over 3 or 4 years now, seasonally. They’re having a hard time keeping a lead chef. Budgets. Timing. Control. Bottlenecks of information. It’s complicated by who is paying for the meal – depending on how the union deal is set up with the house and how the promoter fits in and what their relationship is with the house and the band. <—-(this is good shit, really spell it out for me and the reader, I don’t know those stories so they are interesting for me) Sometimes the kitchen won’t know until the very last minute how many they are cooking for, or that there are special requests/needs that must be met. There is way too much hurry and up and wait going on when it seems to be predictable in so many ways. But then again, I am NOT the leader in that situation. I act like a boss, and I make decisions when they need to be made, but mostly I defer to Lia or Cindy or someone else. I don’t like to be playing the game of telephone with what the tour manager said to someone else to pass the word to me that the tea for so and so has to be such and such a time. But it’s part of the game and we do it.

The hardest part is knowing how much to care. All of us want to do a good job, but really you can only care as much as your boss. The tour specifies what they want, and you’re supposed to source it, but often you don’t have money or resources, and you’re told to dig around in what we call “mike’s room” or the “drink closet” to scrounge up some beers, baskets to put utensils in – soy based compostable camping style utensils instead of the fine crystal china they’ve asked for , and to do what you can with the set-up on rental furniture, check all the tall floor lamps in their trailer of a dressing room. Work with What you’ve got.

I’ve accidentally dumped a box of cookies from Safeway onto the asphalt but – what you know – the 5 second rule, quickly regroup and replace without crumbling the cookies and reseal the plastic clamshell to-go container that was poorly sealed with today’s date and the price of the oatmeal cookies. They’re being loaded in boxes and into a van to take to another venue for another artist. I won’t be serving these, the person who serves them can’t tell they’ve fallen out of the package and who knows what happened to them before they ever got to me in the first place. It was an accident, and it was witnessed by Jeanette – of Mad Mamma and the bad boy crew or whatever her band name is – she also does the backstage stuff with me and she was the one who quickly called out the 5 second rule and we just carried on. No worse for the wear. She’d just shopped these and was not going back to the Safeway to get another box.

The next day the truck came back with those cookies untouched, so I felt better about that. Even a leader, the catering manager would have made the same call, I think. There are things that go on like this everyday, in every industry, and in every possible way. How much to care, how much to sweat it. Are you doing the right thing? Are you losing sleep over this? Are you being treating others the way you want to be treated?

Are there any rules or guidelines for this type of thing?  Are these things all decided on a case by case basis, or is there an industry standard that I don’t know about yet?  If there is, let me know, because if there isn’t I’m going to make one up.