Other Things
Addie Edition
Welcome to Other Things, an interview series where I talk to restaurant workers about the other things they spend their time doing. So many people I know lead double lives, waiting tables to fund their creative pursuits, often unbeknownst to coworkers and patrons. Working in hospitality often demands a sort of flattening of the self—we exist in service of the customer, as a gesture in a landscape, a momentary presence. (Kate Zambreno: “The beauty so often of being not a portrait, but a landscape.”) In this environment, it can be difficult to feel connected to one’s creative practice and the version of the self who participates in it—the other things seem less real than the work that actually pays the bills. I wanted to give my friends and fellow servers, bartenders, etc. an opportunity to reveal themselves as real people with thoughts and interests and ambitions—to talk about the work that hospitality serves. Mostly I wanted to figure out how everyone else is doing this and when they find time to eat breakfast.
I met up with my coworker, Addie, an actor and writer, for a brief happy hour chat on a shared day off. I was particularly struck by Addie’s characterization of restaurant work as being “outside” the traditional hierarchies of capital, a status that she finds necessary to her own sense of morality. Obviously restaurants remain well-entrenched in capitalist exploits, but I’ve often experienced this work as transgressive, or nearly so, in a similar way as Addie describes here (certainly this is in part a result of the particular restaurants at which I have worked, which have almost exclusively been small, locally-owned, casual diners or bars run by stressed out GMs and a small crew of straight-A students with liberal arts degrees); we are the arbiters of leisure, and as such our jobs, by definition, contradict the traditional workplace.
Of course, this line of thought has produced abysmal labor conditions for hospitality workers—if it’s not a “real” job, no one needs to be treated as a “real” worker with those ever-elusive “real” rights. Still, I think what Addie speaks to is that there is some personal significance to one’s labor being oriented toward life and leisure, rather than the dizzying mechanisms of capital. It all goes toward the latter eventually, but hospitality muddles the distinction between, “life-making” work and “thing-making” work, as defined by Tithi Bhattacharya. As Alicia Kennedy writes, “a restaurant or bar is both life-making and profit-making. Life and things are being made and exchanged. We are not good at understanding this mix…”
I struggle to parse out these ideas, and I hesitate to glorify restaurant work too much, when it’s actually just exhausting and repetitive and demoralizing most of the time, and I’ve only gotten worse, over the years, at providing genuine care and service to guests. Sometimes I think that’s fine and people should know when they’re being difficult; other times I think: wow, I’m pretty bad at my job! But ultimately hospitality work does seem less the “bullshit job” David Graeber wrote about, those middle management positions which inflict “moral or spiritual damage” by their overwhelming pointlessness; it’s care work.
It’s also work that allows and encourages a certain amount of fuckery: taking shots on the clock, gossiping with my friends and ignoring my tables, enacting my revenge on an obnoxious man by pouring him a very bad pint of Guinness. I often say I like working in restaurants because it forces me to socialize and pays me for it. I think that this all contributes to a sense of being off to the side in ways that are both rewarding and limiting but feel, for me, and I think Addie too, in alignment—with myself as an artist and a citizen of this hulking, horrid world—by remaining fundamentally, albeit variously, misaligned with that world.
Do you want to start by telling me about your creative pursuits—how you define yourself and your work outside of your job as a host?
Yeah—I’m an actor and a writer, sometimes. I feel more like an actor than a writer because writing has been something that I either do for fun or, more recently, to feel some sense of control over my acting career.
Is writing a newer medium?
I’ve always written poetry, as a teenager and then on through college. My university program was multi-disciplinary; I got a BFA, so I was studying dramatic art, but we had to also study playwriting and directing and creative technologies. So I started playwriting through that.
We did a lot of devised theater, which means basically that everyone is kind of expected to do everything and people don’t have specific jobs. So you’re just in a room, as a creative person, trying to make a piece of theater that has not been written, and you’re creating it collaboratively. And that can have a bunch of different structures, and it can be very weird and really taxing—you don’t have a position, you’re kind of just fully having to contend with everybody.
And then since graduating, I wrote a short film and I’ve been working on a full-length play. So in the past year and a half, two years I’ve been trying to write plays in a more intentional way.
What was the impetus for starting to write more?
I think a lot of times it can be very disheartening to just be auditioning and to not have any control over whether or not you get to do the thing that you want to do. Acting is such a dependent field—you’re dependent on other people deciding that they want to work with you, and them having a project for you to work on, and a character that fits you.
I spent a lot of time after college auditioning for everything—and a lot of times the writing for these roles is really bad. And that wore on me. It was pretty taxing—like, I’m trying to convince some 20-year-old man who wrote a pretty terrible script that I should be, I don’t know, the quirky girl in the woods looking for Bigfoot. You know what I mean? It’s really demoralizing. Now when I feel that way about a script, I just won’t do it.
Yeah, I cannot imagine having to rely on people like that to give you a job, or even just to do your work.
Yeah. And even if they do give you the job, the work that you can do as an actor is only within the container of what they’ve written. And sometimes that can be really unmeaningful or even opposed to what I, as an individual, believe or want or think. So I’ve been feeling like I want to be able to contribute something to the world beyond just being, like, a puppet for other people’s thoughts and ideas.
What drew you to acting in the first place? I mean, A) what drew you to it? and B) do you feel like your opinion on it has changed?
I was always interested in theater, but I didn’t want to be an actor until high school. My sophomore year of high school, I did my first play that wasn’t a musical—it was “Our Town” by Thornton Wilder—and it was really meaningful and it changed the way that I thought about what theater could be.
And also I was 15, and I had people telling me that they wanted me to do this big thing, and that I was really good at it, which was this earth-shattering thing. Like, oh, I’m good at this.
And then I continued doing plays throughout high school, and pretty much exclusively applied to BFA programs. And I don’t think that my thoughts about acting have changed—it’s still very much how I identify, what I want for my future, what I want to be doing. I just think that I want... I want to feel like an artist.
And it’s still really fun to get up on stage and perform no matter what I’m doing. Like a dumb Shakespeare farcical thing is still really fun. But I think I’ve gotten to the point where I really would like for what I’m doing to feel meaningful.
Can you tell me a little bit about what your days look like? Starting with what you eat for breakfast?
Oh. Well, I usually wake up—I’m a pretty ritualistic person, so I kind of do the exact same thing every day—I wake up, I put away all the dishes, and I make coffee. I drink my coffee on the couch, and then I probably have, like, a yogurt. I’m not a big breakfast person. But I’ve been eating yogurt recently. Before that, it was, like, oatmeal with chocolate chips in it…
So, I’m in the actor’s union called Equity. I joined a little under a year ago. They have these things called EPAs—Equity Principle Auditions—and any project that works under the union, which would be pretty much any professional theater project, they’re required to post these open calls where any Equity member has the chance to be seen by the casting director for the project. And you don’t necessarily know—because they have to do this—you don’t necessarily know whether or not they’re actually casting from these things, or if it’s just a formality. But sometimes they are! So I usually go to those probably once or twice a week, depending on whether or not it’s the busy season. So right now it’s audition season, so they happen a lot more frequently. I really try to audition for anything that has a part for me.
So on my days off, if I’m not going to one of those, I’m usually home trying to work on the play that I’ve been writing, or learning material for auditions, like learning new monologues, finding new material, reading new plays.
I try to cram all my life tasks into the days where I’m also working. That way my days off are actually free. So I usually do my laundry on Saturday morning before I go to work or I go to therapy in the morning on Wednesday before my shift. And then my boyfriend also works in the service industry, and until just a couple weeks ago, he was working a morning job, so it was hard to figure out moments in which we could spend time together because we were on completely opposite schedules. So orchestrating that is also a part of my life.
Do you find that it’s difficult to balance that part of your life with your creative work and your work work? Like, is it hard to figure out how to schedule your boyfriend in?
I mean, I think we definitely handle it by just doing a lot of our work together. He’s an actor, so we’ll wake up and go to these auditions together or we’ll film self-tapes together or go to a coffee shop and work together during our time off. I also have been working on this project with him and a couple of our friends where we’re filming Shakespeare scenes and monologues in places in New York. So we do that together as well.
Do you feel like it’s motivating to you that your boyfriend is also an actor?
Yeah, I mean, I think I’m a pretty competitive person, so on that level, it’s like I don’t want to be left behind. And we can bounce off each other’s ideas. It makes me feel less alone, too; it can be pretty isolating to just be working as an individual without getting any feedback from the outside world.
Do you have a sense of your long-term career goals? And how do you see working as a host in a bar aligned with those goals?
I mean, I think I feel pretty far away from where I would like to be. I would like to have an agent, I would like to be doing professional theater, I would like to be working on plays, especially new plays, which are generally produced off Broadway. But more than anything, I would like to be making work that I think is meaningful, and so whether that comes from reaching that level of professional success, or whether it comes from figuring out how to produce things on my own, which is something that I want to do, the main goal is to feel like I’m making things that I think actually matter.
I think working at the bar has really opened up my ability to do that—previously I worked at a bakery where I had to work a lot more hours in a week in order to pay my rent. I think generally my calculus is, like, trying to spend as few hours at work as possible to maximize my time outside, so just making enough to pay my bills and be okay and live. And working at the bar has been huge for that—I used to work in a bakery where I had to wake up really early in the morning and it was really physically taxing and I made a lot less money and spent a lot more time there. And so being able to work 20 hours a week and pay all my bills is huge. And having my mornings free—I feel like my brain is operating at a much higher level than it was for that period of time when I worked at the bakery because I was just kind of exhausted and sleep deprived all the time.
Yeah, it often feels like such a huge privilege to have a job that allows you to have a whole life outside of it.
Yeah, I mean, usually I work between 18 and 23 hours a week. Which is not a lot of hours.
Do you feel like you make up for those hours with your other work?
I mean, I would like to make up for them more. There is something about having this much extra unstructured time that is really difficult for my brain.
How do you deal with that?
Ummm, I go to therapy? I don’t know. I’ve been thinking a lot about getting back into taking classes—which is hard because they’re obviously all so expensive. I’ve been really afraid of it because my experience in college was kind of negative, so I’m afraid being in a class will be like that, though I don’t think it necessarily will.
But also just joining the union has helped. I do other auditions outside of these open calls, but a lot of them are filmed, so you just feel like you send it in and then disappear into the void—you have no contact with other people. And they never respond to you if they don’t cast you, you get no feedback. It’s kind of crazy-making. So actually getting to be in the room with people, sometimes getting some form of response from them, has actually been really nice, regardless of whether or not it comes to anything—it’s just less insane than being alone in a room filming yourself.
Yeah, then you just feel like you’re doing so much work, but when no one is seeing it or validating it, it starts to feel kind of useless, or even not totally real.
And it’s easy to get to a point where you’re like, why bother?
Yeah, and then you go to your job at the bar and people don’t think that you’re a person. And it’s just like... I guess this is where I belong, I guess this is who I am. Which of course isn’t a bad thing, but it’s not what I want for myself or how I define my work or my identity.
I’ve been thinking about how working at the bar sticks with me when I’m not there, like even in the time where I’m supposed to be trying to work on my stuff, I’ll find myself, on my days off, going to the Grand Army Google thing and looking at the reviews of the bar. And I don’t know what it is, but I think it’s maybe, like, having done all that work, trying to deal with all these people, I just want to know what they’re saying.
And also sometimes after I work a really crazy shift, I’ll go home and sleep and I’ll dream in Resy. And I will be literally seating people on a seating chart. It can be hard to let go of—this feeling of being at odds with other people or the world—feeling like you hate them.
Totally, it’s crazy. I feel like as I get older and continue to work in this industry, it only gets worse. I thought that I would care a bit less as I got older, but instead I care a lot more. And now it deeply hurts me to have to deal with these people who act like I don’t exist.
I do think it’s been helpful to me in that I am a very conflict-averse person, and, as you may have noticed, my job is incredibly full of conflict. I’m just telling people “no” over and over and over again, all night long. So, I do think there’s been something good in having to do that, and getting to see that it’s ultimately okay, even if they get mad or they’re shitty or they say something mean. Like, I’m not dead. The world hasn’t ended. The bar is okay. It has been a little bit of exposure therapy.
Do you feel like working in a bar influences your creative life at all? Or vice versa, like how do you see these two things that you do being in conversation with one another?
I mean, I definitely think that there is something politically enlightening about feeling like you are on the outside of society in this way, outside of the hierarchy. And maybe this is a product of my upbringing, but, you know, most of the people that I grew up with work corporate jobs, they have high-paying careers. And I think it’s important to me, as an artist, to not be part of that. There’s something about existing in the world in that way that makes you more likely to feel that there’s nothing wrong with it.
With “it” as in those jobs and the corporate world itself?
I mean, like… with capitalism.
Yeah.
For me personally, I think it’s important to not be able to feel like I’m being a part of it.
Yeah, like you can remain on the outside of that world. And you feel like working in a bar in this way allows you to do that?
Yeah, and I think that seeing the way these people we deal with—who are often incredibly wealthy people—interact with other people and the world and the way that they talk about their jobs, their lives, can be particularly infuriating, but also sometimes it’s enlightening. It’s like, oh, this is what it would be like to not think anything is wrong or to not care or to just be very content with what is being presented to you as normal.
Yeah, it’s wild. I mean, I’m sure that you would get this more at a nice restaurant in Manhattan or something. But at Grand Army, we get people who just seem so oblivious to not only what is going on in the world but also, like, the people standing right in front of them. And that is such a strange, alienating experience.
I feel it the most when we do private events.
Yes, the events are crazy.
Especially because the events are usually celebrating some really big emotional milestone in a person’s life—their engagement or a 30th birthday or a marriage even, and like, feeling so dehumanized by a person or even just by the chaos of the circumstances which are maybe not their fault or intention, but to feel so beaten down by that, and then someone gets up and starts giving a speech about how this person is the kindest, most loving person they’ve ever met, the most important person in their life. They’re celebrating this really emotional, really human thing, and you feel dehumanized while it’s happening. There have been moments where that shit is happening and I just want to cry, like it really sticks with me, you know, because people do come to restaurants to celebrate big moments in their lives, and they are kind of in their own world—there is something really human or really important happening, for them. And it just feels like, how could you be having this moment at my expense? Even if that’s not their intention or they’re not necessarily doing something wrong.
Yeah, but it’s like your explicit job in that situation is to be a part of the background. Like, we’re not supposed to really exist—we’re just a disembodied void delivering drinks. It’s this totally strange experience, and I think early in my restaurant career, I found it sort of beautiful to be able to be a part of these people’s experiences, these big moments. But now I just feel completely jaded about it, and I’m just like, I don’t give a shit.
Yeah, because they feel like they bought the space so they can do whatever they want in it. And also, I think that they get really drunk. And they lose all concept of what they’re consuming because they’re not thinking about paying for each individual drink. They’re like, “I put down $10,000 and now we get to go hog wild and nothing matters.”
It’s crazy, but it makes me sad that I feel so cynical about it. Because I do think it is such a human thing to want to celebrate an event like that, to have an experience that’s catered to you. But then people just take advantage of that to an extent that is so crazy and it makes me not give a shit about it.
Congrats on turning 30 and spending thousands of dollars to rent out a restaurant and feel very important. The entitlement at these things is so absurd.
Fuck your love!
