Other Duties as Assigned

Or, how I spent Friday night washing glasses at a dueling piano bar.

I spent Friday night washing glasses at a dueling piano bar. This was not, strictly speaking, what I was hired to do.

I'm a marketing consultant. A fractional CMO. I've spent more than fifteen years building brands, developing strategies, managing campaigns, and convincing executives that no, they cannot put another seventeen bullet points on the homepage. These days, one of my projects involves booking private parties and corporate events at a dueling piano bar in downtown Denver.

It's a fun gig. Until Friday night, I might even have described it as relatively civilized.

We had a corporate party booked for somewhere between 75 and 100 people. The plan was straightforward: beautiful catered food, an open bar arrangement, two extraordinarily talented pianists, and a room full of people celebrating the end of a long week.

Approximately 150 people showed up.

Now, I have organized enough events in my life to know that the number on the guest list and the number of actual human beings who arrive are occasionally distant relatives. But fifty additional people is not a rounding error. That's another party.

Fortunately, the kitchen was in excellent hands. Coco, our chef, and Jenn, who had worked with him previously, were producing the sort of hors d'oeuvres that make you momentarily reconsider your relationship with dinner. Cucumber rounds topped with herb goat cheese, exquisite deviled eggs, and chocolate desserts decorated with tiny autumn leaves and piped flowers. Everything was beautiful, and the two of them worked together with the easy rhythm of people who already know what the other person is going to do next.

My contribution to this culinary triumph was walking around with trays and offering people things to eat.

I have to say, there's something oddly satisfying about passing hors d'oeuvres. You become a very popular person for approximately twelve seconds at a time. People smile. They thank you. They take a deviled egg. Occasionally, they ask where they can get a drink while holding a perfectly lovely glass of complimentary rosé.

Hospitality is a fascinating industry.

Somewhere in the middle of all this, the sound system decided not to cooperate. There had been some adventures with the building's internet service earlier in the week, and whatever had changed was apparently not getting along with the musicians' equipment. I had no idea how the system was configured, and I had even less time to investigate.

The pianists were understandably unhappy. They were also, as they always are, brilliant. Whatever technical frustrations existed behind the scenes, they got on with entertaining the room, which is what professionals do.

Meanwhile, the bar had become very, very busy.

Now, I should explain something about a party of 150 people. They don't simply order 150 drinks and politely wait for the next round. They move around. They dance. They put a glass down somewhere and forget about it. They find their friends. They order something different. They abandon perfectly good cocktails on tables, ledges, and any available horizontal surface.

Eventually, we ran out of clean glasses.

Not alcohol. Not customers. Glasses.

So I went behind the bar and started helping. Collecting, clearing, washing, doing whatever needed to be done so the bartenders could keep serving people. At some point, I caught myself contemplating the peculiar trajectory of my professional career.

I have sat in boardrooms discussing go-to-market strategy with people who earn astonishing salaries. I've managed product launches, coordinated international campaigns, and explained positioning to founders who were convinced their technology was going to change civilization.

On Friday night, I was a dishwasher.

And you know what? I was a damn good dishwasher.

The extraordinary thing was that the evening just kept getting bigger. The bartenders and servers were moving constantly. Coco and Jenn kept the food coming. The pianists had the room singing and dancing. Everyone was doing whatever needed to be done, occasionally stepping into jobs that had absolutely nothing to do with their actual titles.

Even the neighborhood got involved. People who weren't attending the private party wanted to come in, so Jami, the owner, started sending them to a little dive bar up the street with drink tickets. Apparently, they had a record night too.

By 11 p.m., when the private event was scheduled to finish, roughly eighty percent of the original crowd was still there. Another twenty-five people arrived hoping to join the fun, and the bar went on to do another couple thousand dollars in business.

Apparently, nobody had anywhere else they particularly wanted to be.

By the time the night was over, Fortissimo had done roughly $20,000 in revenue. The bar tab alone was around $10,000. The staff earned some spectacular tips, the musicians were well compensated, and the neighborhood dive bar had benefited from our inability to accommodate everyone who wanted to come through the door.

It was the kind of night every business owner hopes for and every hospitality worker needs a few days to recover from.

I think what I loved most, beyond the rather impressive numbers, was watching everyone pull together. Nobody stood around arguing about whose responsibility something was. There was a job to do, and people did it. We were tired, occasionally overwhelmed, and running on the peculiar adrenaline that comes from being in the middle of something much bigger than expected.

And the guests? They had a wonderful time. Which was rather the point of the whole exercise.

There's a particular kind of satisfaction in helping create an evening that people will remember, even if your own memories involve a sink full of glassware and wondering whether anyone had seen the last tray of deviled eggs.

For the record, Coco's deviled eggs are perfection. His chocolate cupcakes are even better. I conducted extensive quality-control testing, purely in the interests of maintaining standards.

I finally got home at approximately 2:30 in the morning, after more than twelve hours of work. I was exhausted, my feet hurt, and I had absolutely no interest in hearing another song played on a piano.

Waiting for me were two plants I'd ordered the week before.

Stevie Nicks and Debbie Harry.

One was a little variegated snake plant. The other was a gloriously speckled dracaena that arrived in a Día de los Muertos skull planter, because apparently my houseplants have developed their own sense of theatrical presentation.

After an evening of 150 people, two pianists, six extraordinarily hardworking staff members, a mountain of dirty glassware, and enough alcohol to make a liquor distributor weep with joy, I came home to two tiny rock stars who required absolutely nothing from me.

Well, except eventually some distilled water and better pots.

I stood there admiring them for a few minutes before finally going to bed.

It had been an absolutely insane night.

I'd do it again.

Although next time, I might bring my own dishwashing gloves.