It was the summer of 1998, and I'd just finished my sophom*ore year of college. In order to put myself through an upcoming year abroad in England, I took a job performing in an off-off-off-Broadway revue of sorts in a resort in upstate Michigan. A Midwestern Dirty Dancing-esque summer, if you will. Six nights a week, my castmates and I would belt favorites from Cabaret to Rent, entertaining visiting families and hordes of golfers on "business" trips.
During the day — when I didn't have to stuff my bra to fill my French poodle costume or put 10 pounds of makeup on my face — there wasn't much to do, other than go to the nearby beach or practice choreography. Rather than use the resort as our personal playground, most of us took second jobs. Along with the other showgirls, I landed a coveted gig as a beverage cart girl for the resort's golf course.
I couldn't have been less qualified; I'd never worked as a bartender or a waitress, and I'd never manned a golf cart, let alone a beverage cart, which is much larger and much more unwieldy than your standard golf cart. But a simple driving lesson and an even more simple memorization of the Spartan menu — overpriced beer, overpriced premium beer, sandwiches, chips — led me to believe that a monkey could do this job. A monkey in shorty shorts, that is.
The beverage cart girl uniform of shorty shorts and a tight golf shirt was about as modest as the poodle costume, but in the blazing summer heat, I wasn't about to complain. And after I counted my tips from the first shift, I decided that stuffing my bra during the day might be a good business move, too. I have a European adventure to pay for, I convinced myself, temporarily extinguishing any embers of feminism smoldering in the dark corners of my mind.
One day I was driving the usual route, daydreaming and enjoying the breeze that served as the only respite from the oppressive heat. Perhaps I was going a bit fast — I don't really remember — but what I do remember is that as I took a sharp corner, only part of the cart came with me. The sound of crushing metal snapped me out of my reverie as the cart tipped, and I was thrown several feet away onto the neatly manicured grass.
I crawled back around the corner to discover that the entire bar portion of the cart was now somewhere between Hole 6 and Hole 7. I shakily grabbed the walkie-talkie from my waistband and radioed back to the main clubhouse.
"My cart broke," I pathetically whispered into the mouthpiece.
"Your what broke?" An angry voice bellowed back. I forget her name, but the clubhouse manager was a rather grumpy lady who seemed to hate all of the careless 19-year-olds she had to babysit on a daily basis (imagine that).
I crawled to a shady spot beneath a tree and tearfully tried to explain what had happened. Exasperated, she sent a cart to come help me. I doodled on my notepad while I waited. I drew pictures of England and Spain and all of the things I was going to see later that year. I tried to wipe the grass stains off my shorty shorts.
Hearing the sound of an approaching cart, I stood up and brushed the dirt off my legs, expecting to encounter a friendly maintenance man coming to my rescue.
Instead, it was a cart filled with bemused, slightly inebriated golfers. Thirsty golfers who wanted more beer.
So I did what any beverage cart girl would have done: my job. I crawled underneath that overturned heap of metal — dodging sharp, broken edges and wriggling over mounds of rapidly melting ice — and pulled out as many slightly dented beers as I could reach. And I charged full price, because I had a European adventure to pay for.
After the maintenance cart showed up, I was escorted back to the clubhouse, where the angry lady demoted me to poolside waitress for the rest of the summer. I may not have made as much money as the beverage cart girls, but I learned how to make all of the boozy frozen drinks, and I also learned that if you put a shot of vodka in a full beer, you can't taste it.
So who's dangerous now?
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