Legionnaire for an evening
Jul. 2nd, 2005 10:33 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jaunthieMy husband and I are spending the holiday weekend visiting my aunt and grandmother. Today was the monthly oyster feed and fish fry at the local post of the American Legion. For reasons I can’t quite explain (because I’m still not quite sure how it happened), I found myself volunteered to help bus tables from about 6 p.m. to closing. Having neither set foot in an American Legion hall before nor attended an oyster feed in my life, I wasn’t at all sure what to expect.
I did have a chance to eat with my family and observe before diving into the fray as a volunteer. In some ways, it was very much a slice of small-town, old-fashioned life in the stereotypical American vein of family-oriented food event in support of a good cause (in this case, the American Legion college scholarship fund). You buy your tickets at the door (the cheap, brightly-colored paper ones that come in long perforated rolls) and find a spot big enough for your group at one of the long lines of red-white-and-blue decorated folding tables amongst the other folks (mostly families, mostly white) already there. Eventually a volunteer server (almost certainly a Legionnaire Auxiliary, aka a female) comes by to take your ticket and offer you the choice between the fried oyster plate, the fried fish plate, or the half-and-half plate. The truly brave can order shrimp cocktail or raw oyster shooters for an extra fee. You socialize amongst the din generated by a hundred people sitting and talking in what is essentially a big concrete and wood rectangular box while the Legionnaires (aka the men, mostly older men) fry up the food in the industrial hall kitchen. You nosh on the freshly fried food of your choice when it arrives. Eventually your party finishes eating (or boxes up half of the plate to take home) and you go home, making way for the next group of hungry folks – or in my case, you stay and work off the effect of some of that fried food by spending the next several hours hustling around picking up plates and wiping down tables.
A few things surprised me. I wasn’t expecting the fully stocked bar at the other end of the Legionnaire Hall from the kitchen. In retrospect I suppose it shouldn’t have been too surprising, as I seem to remember that the Elks had a bar as part of their hall, but I don’t remember the Lions having one in theirs, and certainly the Masons didn’t. (If you’ve ever set foot inside an Eagles hall or Moose lodge, feel free to chime in on whether they have bars.) I wasn’t expecting the salad bar, either, although the contents of the salad bar were exactly what you would expect if you expected a salad bar at this kind of event: iceberg lettuce in a giant bowl, with items like pickled beets, green peas, slaw, and three or four dressings in smaller containers embedded in the shaved ice. And I certainly wasn’t expecting the cigarette smoke (not having anticipated the bar), although in retrospect I suppose I should have.
Other things did not surprise me at all. The friendliness of the volunteers, happy to meet you, sure they’ve heard all about you from your relatives, and sure that you’re going to have a fine time. The general gender-based division of labor (and the fact that the female members are auxiliaries, not just legionnaires), and the general age (older) and race (white) of the Legionnaires and the aforementioned Auxiliaries. The plastic bowls of tartar sauce and cocktail sauce, and the ceramic plates holding blocks of butter. The giant plastic jugs of tartar sauce and cocktail sauce and the challenge of neatly pouring from them to refill the plastic bowls. The bucket of cold bleach-and-water solution for sterilizing and rinsing out wipe-rags. The stainless-steel rimmed service pass-through openings between the kitchen and the hall, the dull metallic clatter as dishes are scraped and set down on the counters on their way to the Hobart. The industrial tile on most of the floor (the bar area was carpeted) and the patriotic, laminated, painted signs on the walls. The expectation that most folks already knew each other, and if they didn’t, well, then maybe they were from out of town, but isn’t it nice that they came. All of this was eerily familiar, either from long-forgotten memories of serving as volunteer help at other service-organization type dinners as a Jobie/Camp Fire Girl/etcetera, or from the mass cultural expectation of what these events are like. It had the curious effect of leaving me feeling countrified and citified at the same time, almost schizophrenic in my bemused comprehension of the mutual script we were all following. And it left me wondering how much of our American mythos is really more universal fact (and not just artifacts of the mythical small-town country life) than we popularly suppose.
(It also served to remind me why I really don’t want to think too much about what I’m eating at those dinners or how the food is handled, but that’s another post.)
I did have a chance to eat with my family and observe before diving into the fray as a volunteer. In some ways, it was very much a slice of small-town, old-fashioned life in the stereotypical American vein of family-oriented food event in support of a good cause (in this case, the American Legion college scholarship fund). You buy your tickets at the door (the cheap, brightly-colored paper ones that come in long perforated rolls) and find a spot big enough for your group at one of the long lines of red-white-and-blue decorated folding tables amongst the other folks (mostly families, mostly white) already there. Eventually a volunteer server (almost certainly a Legionnaire Auxiliary, aka a female) comes by to take your ticket and offer you the choice between the fried oyster plate, the fried fish plate, or the half-and-half plate. The truly brave can order shrimp cocktail or raw oyster shooters for an extra fee. You socialize amongst the din generated by a hundred people sitting and talking in what is essentially a big concrete and wood rectangular box while the Legionnaires (aka the men, mostly older men) fry up the food in the industrial hall kitchen. You nosh on the freshly fried food of your choice when it arrives. Eventually your party finishes eating (or boxes up half of the plate to take home) and you go home, making way for the next group of hungry folks – or in my case, you stay and work off the effect of some of that fried food by spending the next several hours hustling around picking up plates and wiping down tables.
A few things surprised me. I wasn’t expecting the fully stocked bar at the other end of the Legionnaire Hall from the kitchen. In retrospect I suppose it shouldn’t have been too surprising, as I seem to remember that the Elks had a bar as part of their hall, but I don’t remember the Lions having one in theirs, and certainly the Masons didn’t. (If you’ve ever set foot inside an Eagles hall or Moose lodge, feel free to chime in on whether they have bars.) I wasn’t expecting the salad bar, either, although the contents of the salad bar were exactly what you would expect if you expected a salad bar at this kind of event: iceberg lettuce in a giant bowl, with items like pickled beets, green peas, slaw, and three or four dressings in smaller containers embedded in the shaved ice. And I certainly wasn’t expecting the cigarette smoke (not having anticipated the bar), although in retrospect I suppose I should have.
Other things did not surprise me at all. The friendliness of the volunteers, happy to meet you, sure they’ve heard all about you from your relatives, and sure that you’re going to have a fine time. The general gender-based division of labor (and the fact that the female members are auxiliaries, not just legionnaires), and the general age (older) and race (white) of the Legionnaires and the aforementioned Auxiliaries. The plastic bowls of tartar sauce and cocktail sauce, and the ceramic plates holding blocks of butter. The giant plastic jugs of tartar sauce and cocktail sauce and the challenge of neatly pouring from them to refill the plastic bowls. The bucket of cold bleach-and-water solution for sterilizing and rinsing out wipe-rags. The stainless-steel rimmed service pass-through openings between the kitchen and the hall, the dull metallic clatter as dishes are scraped and set down on the counters on their way to the Hobart. The industrial tile on most of the floor (the bar area was carpeted) and the patriotic, laminated, painted signs on the walls. The expectation that most folks already knew each other, and if they didn’t, well, then maybe they were from out of town, but isn’t it nice that they came. All of this was eerily familiar, either from long-forgotten memories of serving as volunteer help at other service-organization type dinners as a Jobie/Camp Fire Girl/etcetera, or from the mass cultural expectation of what these events are like. It had the curious effect of leaving me feeling countrified and citified at the same time, almost schizophrenic in my bemused comprehension of the mutual script we were all following. And it left me wondering how much of our American mythos is really more universal fact (and not just artifacts of the mythical small-town country life) than we popularly suppose.
(It also served to remind me why I really don’t want to think too much about what I’m eating at those dinners or how the food is handled, but that’s another post.)
