The New York Times - Serving Canapes, Then Recalling the 107th Floor
The New York Times > Washington > Campaign 2004 > kind of moving article in the times about how this convention has people in our town from out of town, talking about things they weren't here for, and the people whose job it is to stand there and keep quiet. i'm not sure i'd have been able to.
By DAN BARRY, NYT
To be a banquet worker is to be invisible. Do not engage customers in chitchat. Just collect the discarded shrimp tails, keep the cheese platters fresh and know how to pose simple questions - "Hors d'oeuvre?" - so unobtrusively that you might as well be a phantom.
These rules hold true no matter how often out-of-town customers turn a certain jagged phrase into a political rally cry, and no matter how often their bar-banter invocation of that phrase, September 11th, sends you back. You ask if they'd like another mojito, and you say nothing more.
Monzur Ahmed, who has been managing a buffet table this week for several Republican National Convention parties at the Noche restaurant in Times Square, says nothing as speakers use September 11th to justify four more years for their candidate. He tells no one about his life at Windows on the World, the glittery restaurant on the 107th floor of the World Trade Center's north tower, or about the 79 friends and colleagues who died, including a beloved uncle.
....
A few minutes before Rudolph W. Giuliani began talking of September 11th at a political event down at Madison Square Garden, they decided to go home, to places that most delegates would not be visiting: Harlem, and Woodside, and Elmhurst.
By DAN BARRY, NYT
To be a banquet worker is to be invisible. Do not engage customers in chitchat. Just collect the discarded shrimp tails, keep the cheese platters fresh and know how to pose simple questions - "Hors d'oeuvre?" - so unobtrusively that you might as well be a phantom.
These rules hold true no matter how often out-of-town customers turn a certain jagged phrase into a political rally cry, and no matter how often their bar-banter invocation of that phrase, September 11th, sends you back. You ask if they'd like another mojito, and you say nothing more.
Monzur Ahmed, who has been managing a buffet table this week for several Republican National Convention parties at the Noche restaurant in Times Square, says nothing as speakers use September 11th to justify four more years for their candidate. He tells no one about his life at Windows on the World, the glittery restaurant on the 107th floor of the World Trade Center's north tower, or about the 79 friends and colleagues who died, including a beloved uncle.
....
A few minutes before Rudolph W. Giuliani began talking of September 11th at a political event down at Madison Square Garden, they decided to go home, to places that most delegates would not be visiting: Harlem, and Woodside, and Elmhurst.
posted by quickstuff at 1.9.04
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