My love affair with The Art Institute of Chicago has been going on since I was about 10 years old. My 5^th grade class went on a field trip and my Aunt Maryellen was a museum docent. I had a brief moment of fame because my aunt was our guide. It was wonderful to feel so special as my aunt greeted my classmates. I would visit again many times as a teen and finally I decided that this is where I needed to work.

 

The feeling of the polished parquet floors was enticing, the large quiet galleries, the art work from around the world, the enormous El Greco at the top of the grand staircase, Paris on a Rainy Day and of course Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte. These paintings became the touchstones of my visits to the museum, and also my friends, as I passed by pushing the cart of clean silverware from the museum dining room to the Garden Café. My dream had come true and I was working in the museum.   The summer after my sophomore year in college I was a waitress in the Garden Restaurant. I was given a harvest gold waitress uniform, a little black apron and I needed a hairnet. None of these things looked good on me, but all of us looked equally unflattered.

 

An amazing waitress named Katie W trained me. She had waited tables in the stately museum dining room for many years ,and the shoulder on which she deftly hoisted her tray was forever lower than her other shoulder. Katie W. knew her customers and they knew and loved her. She remembered a birthday, who would want cream in their coffee, and she was never flustered. She was an excellent teacher.

 

All the Garden Café staff were college students, we had our schools and our names on our tables. It was a great way to begin a conversation with museum patrons. I had many “regulars” that summer: a handsome man who brought a different lovely woman each day and always gave me a wink, a little woman with a hat and pocket book who always wanted the purple cabbage removed from her salad, and my one famous person, Angela Lansbury. I ran around the patio for 3 solid hours serving beautiful salads, gazpacho and Antoinette’s frozen pies, lemon, chocolate or mocha.

 

The centerpiece of the garden is the Triton Fountain designed by Carl Milles. These bronze Greek gods provided the perfect sound effect for a summer day on the patio. But that summer the water that each merman radiated had begun to look like a weak drizzle and so a repair was made to the water pressure and the Tritons were once again creating a lovely spray. We seated our first customers near the fountain and began to serve lunch, but a sudden change in water pressure and those messengers of the sea were suddenly spraying all our fountain-side diners. There were people dashing by with salads, iced tea and sandwiches. We were all laughing until we realized we should help our customers relocate and continue with lunch. Triton’s attribute of the conch shell is meant to either calm or raise the waves, how apropos.

I think of this event each time I visit the museum and I always find something new to look at, or I visit my old friends.