My Friday delivery driver, Mr. Mossy Oak, stopped dead in his tracks this afternoon, stared at the tiny pair of speakers sitting on a shelf, and asked, “What’s that?!?” Once we sorted out that he was referring not to the jankety sound system but rather the music issuing forth, I told him that the current song was “Can You Feel Me” by Dru Down. “Drew who??” East Side Oakland rapper … concurrent with Digital Underground and MC Hammer, part of the Bay Area Mobb hip hop style. Yeah, anyway. The previous song had been “Shadows of the Night” by DJ Bobo with Sandra. Mr. Mossy Oak commented that each kitchen he delivers to has its own musical tastes (where music is allowed), but that mine was by far the weirdest and most eclectic. Yep – weird music taste – that’s my dictionary definition.
Mr. Mossy Oak is a man of many names around here. (Some day I’ll share the tale of how he came to be dubbed “Hickey Boy”). This particular nickname derives from his head-to-toe garb of Mossy Oak camouflage. Now, there is something very not right about a non-hunter, non-camo person being able to identify – by name, mind you – various patterns and designs of camouflage. Not uncommon is an exchange such as this:
“Hey, did I leave my jacket here last night?”
“What does it look like?”
“Men’s large, Mossy Oak ‘Obsession’.”
“Let me check. Nope, that’s a Mossy Oak ‘Tree Stand’, and this one is US Woodland.”
Not. Right. At. All.
Mr. Mossy Oak’s comment started me thinking about the musical idioms of the various professional kitchens in which I’ve worked.
The first professional kitchen in which I worked was an absolute boy’s club. There were a couple of women who worked there, but they always were assigned the least desirable and most tedious tasks. Guys who had less experience were given more responsibility, better jobs, etc. I was the token dyke, which was mostly okay, but not always an entirely comfortable role. This kitchen’s musical tastes ran high to Public Enemy, Beastie Boys, DJ Shadow, DJ Spooky, Princess Superstar, and Beck.
U2 occupied a unique love/hate space for these boys. On the one hand, there was the infamous “Lemon” incident in which, faced with two dozen bushels of fresh lemons in need to slicing, peeling, zesting, and otherwise mutilating before a looming deadline, the chef commandeered the cd player and set “Lemon” on an endless repeat at maximum volume until the task was complete. The kitchen was separated, geographically, from the front of the house by a long hallway featuring a right angle turn half-way along the path. Careful experimentation had allowed us to determine the maximum volume at which music could be played in the kitchen before it filtered out to the dining room. Given the unidirectional nature of sound wave travel, the “maximum” volume was only a step below the point at which sound degradation began through the speakers themselves. Turning the corner that morning, one was met with a wall of sound, a wall of Bono screeching “Lemon! Circle in the Sky. She wore Lemon!” Yeah … even the dishwasher was drafted into lemon duty that morning, but the process was still several hours of one song. I will say, however, that at least it is a song with a beat that lends itself to a nice, steady, and rapid knife beat. This, I am obligated as “journeyman of the obvious” to point out, was the genesis of the “hate” component of the kitchen’s relationship to U2.
On the “love” side of the equation was the ritual early Friday morning playing of
The Joshua Tree. Only, this was
The Joshua Tree unlike you have ever heard that album before. For some people, multiple repetitions of a song or album are necessary before they can even begin to learn the lyrics. For others, however, frequent repetition breeds a whole new relationship with the song lyrics – the ability to improvise, rewrite, and customize – on the fly. Few people were ever in the house for
Joshua Tree time, and the chef’s lyric improvisation ran wild. Some songs on that album are fairly well permanently ruined for me. Prior to that job, I loved the whole album, and had a particular fondness for “With or Without You.” Now I can’t hear that song without hearing the revised lyrics, featuring a chorus of “And you give yourself away/Cause you know your Dad is gay/And he’s fucking the neighbor.” Damn. This is a level of aural association on par with the Emily Dickinson/Gilligan’s Island pairing* that leaves you rather unable to ever hear the original version again without some sort of internal editing. Thus the love/hate relationship, though the lines of both categories were, and still are, irreparably blurred.
The next kitchen in which I worked was located in a fine arts college, so frequently our musical accompaniment involved student pieces or practice sessions right outside the door. Some of these individuals and groups were excellent; others not so much. When left to our own devices, our three person kitchen favoured Audioslave, Dru Down, Los Tigres del Norte, Alice in Chains, Boom Bap Project, and Blue Scholars. It was gangsta (the pantry cook was actually a former ESO gang member), it was male, it was aging punk, and it was all heavily tempered by the student population in which we found ourselves.
Incidentally, my first day in this kitchen was almost my last. I had subbed for a week on the coffee bar in this restaurant, with no problems at all other than some vague amusement at the freshmen practice dance routines in the middle of the dining room. When I hired on full-time and moved into the kitchen, well, that was a bit rough. As we were about to begin lunch service, a group of haphazardly clothed students ran through the dining room yelling “Clowns!” Turns out it was “Clown Day” at the school, when the junior clown troops performed various routines during lunch. Stef doesn’t do clowns. Stef hasn’t done clowns since attending a Pride of the Piedmont Jubilee clown performance when I was a kid. Said clown used a miniature guillotine to apparently chop off the index finger of an audience member, complete with blood. I didn’t see how the trick was performed (that’s kind of the point, no?), but I’m definitely scarred by the imagery. Add into the mix more than my share of reading about associative disorders among clown performers, and a neighbor who would troop by our sliding glass door at sparrow fart o’clock in full clown gear off to a performance and I’m done for where clowns are concerned. Interestingly, though, I don’t have any particularly bad associations because of Stephen King’s
It, and count
Killer Klowns from Outer Space as among my favorites of 80s “B” cult films. A museum security guard did once offer to beat up the “creepy clown” performer at an event, but only if I went with him and watched his back. He didn’t do clowns either, and this clown was particularly far along on the sliding creep scale.
MoMo’s kitchen – the last professional kitchen in which I worked in Seattle – ran high to Lucinda Williams, Nina Hagen, Steve Earle, Jurassic Five, The Roots, and the Sunday morning KEXP reggae show (until about 11am, after which it was deemed to be crap). Occasionally bits of Mos Def would filter in from the baking area, as well. This is by far the most musically talented kitchen in which I’ve worked, and having people randomly break into bits of song was not uncommon. Oh, and I mustn’t forget the month long one line repeat of “Santa Baby”; almost enough to drive a crazy person sane, that was. There was so much music surrounding the whole company that to speak only of what existed in the kitchen is to offer quite a limited view. That’s what you’re getting, though. :)
If Mongo had his way, music around this place would be limited to Johnny Cash, Brooks and Dunn, Toby Keith, Alan Jackson, Elvis, and Elton John. In that order, always. Fortunately the speakers in the kitchen slaved to the house speakers were easily disconnected. Now the kitchen music is far more eclectic, faithless to genre, tempo, country of origin, or classic groupings or clashes. There is still a fair amount of Public Enemy, Beastie Boys, Dru Down, Blue Scholars, Jurassic Five, and Nina Hagen. Joining the party are many other artists, creating a lovely cacophony of unpredictable play lists. There are very few things that I flat-out won’t listen to (at least to give a fair try), and even those things that I absolutely abhor have gained that title through repeated listening attempts. Artists that once graced my “I’d rather poke my ears out” list have crawled onto the “Don’t like them as a general rule, but make exceptions for songs x, y, and z” list. Such a wide range of music can make for a wild ride for others.
So, as Mr. Mossy Oak, the Baroness, and I stood talking about music, Dru Down gave way to Coyote Grace (a segue that actually worked well, believe it or not), and all Mr. MO could do was shake his head, laugh, and take his leave of our insanity. He had barely made it down the ramp, not yet out the door, before the Baroness cried, “Play that ‘constipated and pale’** song! I like that one best of all.” Mr. MO missed a step and walked face first into the screen door, I kid you not. Poor guy. You think he’d have learned not to turn his back on the Baroness by now.
*(E.D./G.I. in brief – almost all of Dickinson’s poems can be sung to the Gilligan’s Island theme song. The one exception I can think of off the top of my head is “I Cannot Live with You”. It was high school, senior year, English class was boring, and anything went when it came to staying awake. This trick later insured that I got at least one answer on the GRE Literature Subject Test correct.)***She was referring to the Blue Scholars song “Fifty Thousand Deep,” a song about the 1999 WTO protests, in which they refer to Seattle Major Greg Nickels as looking “constipated and pale” in the press, trying to deal with an escalating situation. The Baroness doesn’t know artists or song titles; instead, she has a tendency to group songs into “danced (professionally) to that” or not. The primary exception to this rule is John Fogarty. She’ll never remember his name when she hears one of his songs, but once you tell her, she’ll be off and running, telling the tale of her night of wild passion with the man himself. I’ll spare you the sordid details until I can guarantee that you are seated, with an appropriate beverage available for the requisite spit-takes.**
No, really ... is it?
"backwoods-ness" of Trout Creek that was taking place between a youngish couple passing through on their way home to South Dakota. Not just South Dakota, but Gary, South Dakota (population 231). The couple in question? They were the real life models for Meg and Hamilton Swan - the obnoxious, awful preppy couple - in the film Best in Show. I was a very good girl, however, and held my retorts in check all morning long.
The Tao of Steve); I have freshly made Mango Chutney sitting in the walk-in, the product of an afternoon when Stef had too little with which to entertain herself. That would be a nice way to showcase the Mahi, and I have managed to pull the Mahi/Mango combo over once before without anyone getting terribly suspicious and falling back on the brown food menu.
from the freezer (why, yes, that is code for "leftovers"). Grouped as a "South of the Border Steak Platter", the special was: 
Cowboy: A man's attitude... a man's attitude goes some ways. The way his life will be. Is that somethin' you agree with? 
