Buffet Tables

This week I have been working at a desk made of buffet tables. You know them as folding tables, used for multiple purposes, but I know them as feeding platforms during weddings, funerals, Christmas dinner and graduations. I was raised in a house full of them, always lining our walls like paintings during the mass-eating off seasons. And now that I am back to working in a career that is built for portable tables and limitless sugar and crispy salt chips of varying degree of spiciness, I have been hyper aware of my former life.

There was a time in a former life when I worked at a Buffet table as a TV producer, because on set they're the cheapest and most mobile way to set up a workstation...but in this case it really did hold a buffet. I'd get to the set of a show, Dog Eat Dog or Weakest Link or Meet My Folks, sit down and start making calls.

"Can she bring 13 stuffed penguin costumes," I'd ask in between bites of a rainbow-sprinkles glazed doughnut, "And can one of them be Salmon colored?"

An hour later, with a box of animal crackers next to me and my friend Erica, a chubby girl who wore tons of makeup, I'd promise myself only five more cookies, times five. That's twenty-five cookies over a conversation about petty cash. "Should we pay the Black Cheerleaders From Compton cash or have production cut them a check?"

"You can't call them that, it's racist." Erica said.

"No, we are using the Latino Cheerleaders From Compton in episode 104. I want that to be clear."

"Well, if you give them cash, they'll assume it's because you think they don't have checking accounts, so no."

"I don't care about that right now," I'd yell. "I have to make sure the script that we're making the Mom say during the elimination vote doesn't sound too hoity-toity." By then my Pizza had arrived. I liked Round Table Pizza's Meat Lovers Marvel. "There's too many 'However's' in this script. "

"You have Cheese in your hair, Sean."