What makes me, me.

There are things I am learning or maybe recognizing about myself that I realize make who I am. Sometimes, these are things that I like, I have muscled my way thorough an extremely difficult several months (no worse for the wear) by simply enduring what I think are very onerous burdens with great patience. Sometimes, they are things I don't like, I am capable of getting very angry and barking orders at people, something I find almost too ugly to admit I've done. And there are things like my drive to be perfect, that while it annoys me (and others, I imagine) is what helps make the restaurant what it is.

Yesterday, we had a wedding reception in the place in the afternoon. It was very informal but the bride and groom who are actors didn't have a lot of money wanted something nice. They were African American and live in Chicago. In lieu of a cake, they brought in boxes of cupcakes along with 3 towers on which to arrange them. There were also 2 boxes of cupcakes for the kids to be put in front on the table and another small box marked for the bride and groom. 

Nearing the point when the reception was to start I realized that they weren't going to put the cupcakes on the towers, I had to. These were no ordinary cupcakes, they were from some famous place in Chicago. I opened the first box of about 40 or 50 cupcakes and saw that the blue frosting was whipped up and piled high on each one with additional decorative blobs of another color and little seed-like dots and almost petal-like decorations making them nearly impossible to even touch without getting finger marks on them. Then there was the question of getting them under each platform level with getting the frosting all over the tower. I started by filling in the backs of the 3 towers, emptied the first box, opened the second and saw the second box was an entirely different kind of cup cake decorated with tan frosting. I realized there were 3 towers and each should hold a different kind of cupcake. Touching these was not something that was intended to happen frequently. The frosting, utterly delicate, easily dented and messed, was already not looking as fresh as it had in the box and now I had to move all the blue ones all to one tower. Fine. Got that done, did the next and then opened the 3rd, I can't even recall what color that was. Then I went and got the kids cupcake boxes, I opened the first and saw that though the cupcakes were smaller, the frosting was piled even higher. It was almost impossible to put my hand over the frosting and grab the small cupcake at the paper holder line. 

I have to say that although I'm not much of a sweets eater these chocolate cupcakes for the kids smelled really, really delicious. I arrange the first box in a nice pattern in front of the 3 towers and then opened the second and almost fainted when I saw that these were vanilla. It would have been completely awful to just put the chocolate and vanilla separately on the table. By this time, the guest are coming in and I began to sweat. I had to remove every other chocolate cupcake and put in a vanilla one. Then a blue cupcake fell of the tower and landed on the pink table cloth upside down.

This is not how I imagined having a restaurant would be.

When I opened the bride and groom's special small box of cupcakes , it was obvious that the box had been turned upside down and almost violently shaken. There is no possible way to describe the horror I felt.

As it turned out, the groom had dropped the box.

I wish the bride and groom well, they were beautiful, gracious and reception was a joy.