44 - 3/19/11 - Marshside Storytime VIII

Initial Impressions

Christopher Setterlund

44 – 3/19/11

Marshside Storytime VIII – Cooks vs. Food

For tonight’s Marsh Storytime we go back to the most famous food fight in Marsh history.  We go all the way back to my first year there, 1993, for this one in a million story.  In my first season I was a young and naïve dishwasher, yes an American dishwasher, they went extinct sometime in the late 90’s.  Anyway, I was working the night shift with three other very famous Marsh Hall of Famers, Maui, Remi, and Craig. 

            The night was relatively slow and I was able to coast a bit with the dishes.  Being new I was pretty quiet and just did what I was told unlike today where I don’t shut up.  During the night I would get periodic requests to go across to the prep area/barn/warehouse and retrieve something needed by the kitchen.  It was slow enough that Craig had been sent across to do some night prep so I was able to ask him what exactly they needed back in the kitchen.

            At some point Maui and Remi thought it would be funny to start throwing cherry tomatoes at me as I headed across the parking lot.  Lucky for me they were pretty bad shots.  Tomatoes would skid across the rocky parking lot or splat against the barn.  The throwing of cherry tomatoes became a past-time and we even ended up having a few tomato plants growing by the prep room door after a while.

            With their first assault attempt a failure I figured they’d quit and leave me alone.  Wrong.  It seemed odd that they constantly needed stuff from next door but being new I did not question the frequency of the trips.  Each time the tiny tomatoes would come whizzing by, only one or two actually making contact with me.  The rest were a waste which would have been hell in today’s ‘food cost is all that matters’ Marsh.

            I ended up cluing Craig into what was up since he had heard a few of the tomatoes hit the wall and wondered what was happening.  Craig knew that Maui and Remi were waiting outside for me to come back and hooked me up with a large sheet pan which I held like a shield to protect myself.  From inside the prep room I could clearly see Maui standing in the kitchen doorway watching.  It was dusk but I always had good eyes.  Sadly I could not see Remi which worried me.

            The capper for me went this way.  I had the sheet pan in front of me and was preparing to head out the door into the war zone.  Craig came up behind me and told me to ‘take this to throw.’  I put my right hand back and he put something in it.  I thought that it was a tomato or maybe a dinner roll.  Wrong again.  I opened the door and stepped out. 

            Immediately Maui began firing, tomatoes splatted near me but I was untouched.  Then I saw Remi, he had been ducking down standing on the picnic table next to the dumpster.  Being concealed by the seven-foot fence he had a great surprise attack position.  He began firing and the cherry tomatoes struck the sheet pan, so having that paid off.  Then Remi made his mistake.

            He got down from the picnic table and started to run for the kitchen door.  From my angle there was less than three-feet of open space between the fences, not to mention the steps going up to the deck, and the fact that it was almost dark.  Baring that in mind I cocked my right hand back and fired what was in it.  Now, what I thought was a roll or tomato ended up being a raw red bliss potato a little bigger than a golf ball.

            With all of the things going against me it seemed like I would nail the fence.  Nope.  I nailed Remi as he ran up the stairs right in the side of the head.  The 6’3” 200+ lb. Remi collapsed in a heap on the deck.  Shocked that I actually hit him, and worried that the big man might kill me, I ran over to check on him.

            I apologized profusely as he still lay on the deck clutching the side of his head.  He was surprisingly conciliatory and admitted that he had started it by throwing the tomatoes.  So I was off the hook and we had a world famous story to tell for all eternity.  Food fights like that did not happen all that much after that, we all had learned our lesson, even though nothing happened to me so what the hell did I have to learn.  Maybe to check what’s in your hand before you throw it?  Oh well, that’s Craig’s fault not mine.  Cheers!

43 - 3/11/11 - Marshside Storytime VII

Initial Impressions

Christopher Setterlund

43 – 3/11/11

Marshside Storytime VII – You Say Potato

            For tonight’s storytime we discuss what is to be done with leftover food that is of no use anymore.  More specifically I want to talk about the left over baked potatoes from the previous night’s dinner.

            Now don’t get me wrong, when we had other uses for the leftover potatoes they were not wasted as you are about to read.  This is speaking more to the times where the potatoes were going to simply be thrown away.  How do you throw something away?  Easy, right, you just toss it in the trash?  Wrong.  There was a much more fun way to rid the restaurant of those pesky potatoes and that involved becoming an amateur football kicker.

            The participants were myself, Claudio, and Bento.  The idea was to dropkick the soft potatoes over the tree line at the edge of the marsh.  It was a great game and also a more fun way to throw stuff away.  If only we could have done it with everything.

            There was one problem, making certain that the potatoes had been cooked the night before.  I mean you could really whale on the cook potatoes and bust the meat out of them.  However, one time in my excitement I grabbed one that was raw.  Don’t know what the hell it was doing in with the cooked ones unless they were trying to tell me to stop doing the kicking game.  Anyway I grabbed the raw potato and kicked it with all I had.  The result was a loud slap as the broadside of the potato hit my foot.  I went down in a heap in pain, luckily it was before we were open and there were no customers to hear my cries.

            Another problem was making certain that the deck was dry, or at least that your plant foot was on a dry spot.  There is nothing worse than rearing back and throwing all you have into a kick only to have your plant foot slide and you end up flat on your back.  Trust me, I had that happen.  Claudio was concerned at first but when he knew I was not dead he and Bento laughed their asses off.

            Finally, if you’re going to play the potato kicking game make sure that your shoes are tied tightly.  This falls at the feet of Bento.  A short time after he started there Claudio and I were playing the kicking game and he wanted to try.  Bento grabbed a potato and kicked it.  Well, his shoe flew off and went further than the potato out into the marsh.

            I have never laughed so hard in my life, tears were pouring out as Bento yelled about losing his shoe.  Lucky for him it was low tide.  I graciously volunteered to walk out onto the marsh to retrieve his rogue shoe.  We must have laughed nonstop for a half hour and it became one of the funniest moments I ever remember at the Marsh.  Bento did not play the kicking game again until he got new shoes that he actually tied tightly.

            Sadly the kicking game has been retired, much like a lot of the old school fun, once the new building opened up but we still have tons of memories.  Hopefully all of the old Marsh peeps read these and it brings back great memories, and all of the recent Marsh peeps can get a better understanding as to why us long timers are so tight like family.  Cheers!

42 - 3/10/11 - Marshside Storytime VI

Initial Impressions

Christopher Setterlund

42 – 3/10/11

Marshside Storytime VI – Not Without My Glasses

This edition of Marshside Storytime at Initial Impressions is a classic tale of love and loss, not knowing what you have until it’s gone.  Nobody likes to feel like they are getting older, the signs start to come with occasional wrinkles or gray hairs.  Getting glasses is one of those things as well.  For some people it is just another stage of life, for others the glasses become like an arch enemy.  For Maui they became an arch enemy.

            He would talk non-stop about how much he hated his glasses from the moment he got them even though they did help him to see better.  It was what the represented that made him hate them.  In time he began to wear them less and less, leaving them in his truck, or at home conveniently.  I was set up as the middle man, to read the orders to him so that he would not have to use his glasses.

            His worked well when I was there but on days off he was forced to swallow his pride and wear the glasses.  One day he had them on while he was doing some prep for lunch and dinner; this was back when we did breakfast as well.  He had been working for a few hours when he realized that he was not wearing his glasses anymore.

            First off, I don’t know how you can be wearing your glasses on your face and then not be but not noticed it for hours.  That’s another story though.  So Maui took to looking all over the prep room, in the walk-in fridge, in the freezer, there was no sign of his glasses.  He went out to his truck, nothing, he checked in the bathrooms and out by the coffee makers just in the off chance he had dropped them there.  The glasses were gone.

            He checked the little nook where the phone and our time cards were, nothing.  He looked underneath all of the counters, tables, over the river and through the woods but there was no sign.  His frantic search surprised me since he always said how much he hated his glasses, but he said it was more of the fact that they were prescription and expensive not because he liked them.  Finally he decided that if he stopped looking for them they would suddenly appear.

            The timer went off and Maui realized that the chickens he had put in the huge pizza oven were done so he opened the middle door and slid the sheet pan of steaming chicken out.  It was then that I heard a groan of shock and disbelief.  There on the sheet pan among the chicken sat Maui’s glasses!  They were almost totally melted to the metal and covered in chicken juice.

            He had taken them off and put them in the front pocket of his chef’s coat and while he was working on it they had slipped out and landed silently on the sheet pan among the raw chicken.  Maui had cooked his own glasses.  Sadly they had to be tossed and he had to rummage through a few pairs in the lost and found to find something suitable until he was able to go and get a new pair from the eye doctor.  I think he had worn a pair with tiger stripes on them for a moment before we all suggested they looked really stupid.

            So there you have it another classic story of love and loss.  You don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone and Maui didn’t appreciate his glasses until he cooked them and had to wear terrible tiger striped ones afterward.  That was several years ago and to this day he still hates his glasses, but anytime I bring up laser eye surgery he gets angrier.  I said it is safe but he will not hear of it; maybe he secretly loves his glasses and doesn’t want to get rid of them?  Who knows?  Cheers!

41 - 3/9/11

Initial Impressions

Christopher Setterlund

41 – 3/9/11 – In My Footsteps Trip

Made a trip today up to Georgetown, Mass., and back to Ipswich to shoot it right.  270 total miles, $30 in gas thanks to the Middle East again.  Why only 2 towns?  That will become clearer as you read.

            I was cruising along Rt. 3 making great time until WHAM!  Traffic.  No, not at the Braintree Split where it usually happens, but around Exit 12 for those who know the area.  Ended up spending 45 minutes there crawling along and learning as many license plates of those around me.

            As we sat in traffic I decided to make the best of it and blasted Billy Ocean’s ‘Suddenly’ and sang it for all of those around me.  There was also some old man smoking in his car which was not a big thing except for the fact that he had all of his windows rolled up.  Slowly but surely there was more smoke in his car.  I guess just driving old was not challenging enough.

            I arrived in Georgetown an hour later than I wanted to.  I had never even heard of this town until a few months ago.  The first place I stopped at was the site of the Goodrich Massacre.  It is where a family was killed by angry Native Americans in 1692.  The problem I had with this was that it said that the site was ‘Ten rods east’ of the sign.  Rods?  What the hell are rods?  Who uses that unit of measurement?  So I snapped photos in that general direction but rods, really?

            I parked at an abandoned antiques shop so that I could cross the street to shoot the Samuel Brocklebank House, the town’s historical society.  Once I stepped out I heard what sounded like someone banging on the windows inside the antique shop.  I looked and saw nobody which creeped me out.  After shooting I came back to my car and waited and then heard the banging again.  Have to check and see if that building is haunted because there was nobody else there but me.  Nice.

            The Georgetown Town Hall is the first one I have seen that used to be something else.  It was originally a school a hundred years ago.

            I need to get a bumper sticker that warns people behind me that I make frequent stops like a mail truck.  That would have come into major use when I hit Ipswich.

            I stopped at Pentucket Pond, there was a woman and her daughter there as well, she gave me some really dirty stares.  Do I really look like one of those guys like you see in the horror movies?   Wait, don’t answer that.  It also snowed a little there too which helped me forget that lady who hated me.

            My GPS decided it would be funny to send me up a steep barely paved hill and down a similarly awful section of road in the Great Neck village of Ipswich.  Sure, it was technically the quickest route but one slip would have sent me off a cliff to my grave with the GPS’s British voice laughing.

            Ipswich has the most historic homes of any town I have ever seen thus far.  There was no way to photograph all, or even most of them, so I decided to focus on the 17^th century ones.  I counted eight of them in my travels, pretty impressive.  This is where I could have used the ‘frequent stops’ bumper sticker again.

            Went back and reshot the Whipple House c.1677, this time I actually spent the extra time to walk down to the really old Choate Bridge from 1764, there were so many cool spots.  I loved the Riverwalk which crossed over the Ipswich River.  The falls were great but not as great as the history of Ipswich and America mural painted on the side of the EBSCO Publishing building.  Amazing.

            Was psyched to stop at Dunkin’ D’s for a quick lunch until the lady alerted me that they had no hash browns, the essential part of any meal there.  What a rip off, although the lady asked me not to tell anyone that the boss there was so stupid that they didn’t order hash browns.  I agree.

            Castle Hill was the crown jewel of my trip.  Almost didn’t get in since they needed cash which I didn’t have, the guard didn't accept cards, yay.  I had to drive all the way back into town to find cash, no ATMs so I had to go into Shaw’s, bought me a 5-Hour Energy so it wasn't all bad.  Oh yeah and I didn’t eat my Dunkin’ D’s food for like an hour thanks to that craziness.

            The mansion at Castle Hill was featured in The Witches of Eastwick, the lady there last summer said The Next Karate Kid, I had to look it up to be sure but yes it was filmed there too.  Never saw either movie and seeing the grounds is as close as I will get.

            It ended up being so cold on top of Castle Hill that my hands were too numb to shoot any more photos.  In the end my battery was almost dead from Ipswich alone.  I figured that with it being late I should quit while ahead and save my last stop for another time.  See, the stupid traffic cost me an hour so it’s the traffic’s fault I stopped early.  Also, it was so obvious that nothing was going to top Castle Hill so why even bother.

            Still managed to get stuck in more traffic, this time going through Boston, and the damn GPS tried to make me drive in the Carpool Lane again, idiot.  You’ll see by the photos below that it was all worth it.  Ipswich was even better this time despite it being freaking cold.  Cheers!

The possibly haunted antiques shop.

Spotted this on my drive through Georgetown.

Part of the amazing mural along the Ipswich Riverwalk.

The incredible mansion atop Castle Hill.