Burn It All Down

My Film Catering Swan Song

This holiday weekend, I’ve found myself scanning memories for July Fourths past, but the last several years are a blur of generic 4th fare. The most noteworthy memory rises straight to the top, though not without a fair amount of triggers, as my mind jumps to July 4, 2019 like it was yesterday.

It’s been exactly five years since I catered my last film. I fed a crew of 50 for a solid month in rural Alabama. The hardest shoots I’ve ever worked on have been in the rural South in June/July. I think we can safely assume that the producers behind those shoots were not Southerners and had yet to experience the peak heat of a Southern summer, replete with mosquitoes and humidity, a season that hilarious memes of late refer to as The Devil’s Front Porch.

Film catering words to live by.

Initially, I wanted to share an anecdotal account of all the things that went haywire on that shoot because the conditions were nothing short of unbelievable. I thought I’d focus on how the producers threw us a July 4th pre-wrap party, which on paper seemed fun but was a terrible idea as it sent most of us into a zone of fatigue mixed with hangover for the final days of filming from which no one was able to fully recover.

In hindsight, we were all so ready to get the hell out and get back to our regular lives by that point that a wrap party before we actually wrapped did inherently yield a better turnout; we were all still stuck on the proverbial island. We would finally wrap in the wee hours of the morning at sunrise on July 7th, the month-long shoot culminating with a single-wide trailer being burned to the ground, the ultimate effigy for that entire experience.

In no particular order, here are some of the realities that contributed to the sheer chaos of that shoot:

Swampy summer heat. Living in a Comfort Inn (that hosted swingers parties on the weekends). Live rattlesnakes and a rattlesnake wrangler. Night shoots. Day shoots. Grocery store trips. Farm stand trips. Hot dog trips. Hog slop trips. The rancid smell of the slop bucket seared into every inch of my catering vehicle. Hot tub drinking. Hot wings. Pontoon boats. Flesh-eating bacteria (whether real or the stuff of legends). Self-care Sundays. Jumpsuits. Jumping off a rickety platform into a swimming hole and wondering, mid-air, if this is how I die. Singing in harmony with Talitha while we cooked. Delivering of sausage balls (and vegan balls!) for midnight breakfast. Phoning it in by the end. Outsourcing myself by hiring one of my prep cooks to make 300 hot dogs that I watched him grill with a lit cig hanging out of his mouth the entire time.

Redmond, owner/operator Downtown Dogs, Stevenson, AL.

Look, all film work is complicated, but I swear film catering is one of the gnarliest jobs. Please don’t take for granted who’s feeding you; they’re working the longest hours behind the scenes and receiving the least gratification. There’s a sense of entitlement and othering that can easily happen between the rest of the crew and catering, and it ain’t cool. Why be rude to the caterer? We could very well poison you if we were more vindictive or less professional.

While I don’t regret taking that job, it is the one that did me in, apparently for good. By the end, we were all in survival mode. Nothing made sense anymore; we’d reached the point at which mundane, nonsensical things become hilarious. Laugh-crying on the off-days, real-crying from exhaustion, missing my kid, my partner, my house, my bed, my calm. Missing my sanity.

Day-off shenanigans. Laughing so we didn’t cry (but also sometimes crying).

July 4th 2019 was spent mainly lying down on an itchy motel comforter drinking mini-Coors Lights, shootin’ the shit with two of my best crew friends, and doing face masks from Wal-Mart. Later that night, the whole crew would carpool to the pre-wrap party and rage karaoke fueled by enough alcohol for a small army.

But what lingers the most, and this is probably why I’ve struggled for four days to write this, is a whisper of residual mom guilt and PTSD that I’m still attempting to reconcile from missing a month of my young child’s life.

Of course, I signed up for that job. I wanted to do it. It was great pay, I was excited about it, and it was an experience I truly will remember forever. But I assumed my partner and child would visit at some point. Fly down from NC for some days off. I didn’t learn about the night shoot schedule until filming began, and it suddenly became clear that my catering schedule wouldn’t allow me any quality time (at least not waking hours) with my family. Once I realized this, I called the visit off and told my partner to stay put back home. We had all the grandparents in the mix as support, so I didn’t feel too stressed about my kiddo being cared for or missing me. What I didn’t anticipate was how much of a mental toll it would take on me being apart from him for so long.

By the end of the shoot, everyone was in survival mode. We were completely burnt out. After we wrapped, I took a very sad bath where I cried, drowning in anxiety, processing the entire last month. I wondered how I would ever physically get out of there. I was finally able to let myself feel after barreling through the month on adrenaline and fumes. I am stubborn and have a hard time quitting, though I am learning more and more how healthy it can be to quit certain things.

The producers graciously arranged to get me on a flight out of Chattanooga as soon as possible, which I almost missed due to forgetting the time zone change. When my partner picked me up from the airport, our son was asleep in the backseat. We drove to a fancy hotel, as is my tradition upon completing a big catering job, where we did nothing but lounge and order room service for the next 24 hours. You would too if you’d just prepared almost 100 meals in a row for a lot of cranky adults.

When I woke my son up to get him out of his carseat, he was cranky, too. Cranky from being awakened, likely disoriented seeing me for the first time in a month. It wasn’t the happy welcome home I was hoping for, but then again, he was two.

The silver lining of that job was meeting a handful of unlikely Earth angels on set, new friends who felt like old familiars and who lifted me up in our darkest film shoot hours. For that, I will remain forever grateful; had it not been for them, I would have gone completely off the deep end. (Alabama Earth Angels, you know who you are!)

That fall, I would enter pre-production for a TV pilot that fell apart when the lead actress pulled the plug at the eleventh hour. February 29th 2020, I would break my ankle at a friend’s wedding and need surgery. Two weeks later, the pandemic hit. I can understand why these last five years have been a blur, albeit a life-changing blur. The lessons I’ve learned, some the hard way, will certainly endure.

I still find much joy in cooking; I always have. There’s such a sense of satisfaction in creating and executing a recipe, a meal to feed my family. I don’t, however, have any desire left to cater for another film. I’m retiring from the on-set kitchen and reserving my culinary skills for my nearest and dearest. It is, after all, one of my gifts, and I have learned over the last five years to be more careful with whom I share them.

Last July 4th, I made an obligatory American flag sheet pan pound cake and decorated it with my son using homemade whipped cream and berries. It was ok but not great. This year, I made it again; it turned out much better, but I couldn’t shake the pang of hypocrisy, like I’m sure so many Americans are feeling, celebrating our country in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision to grant immunity, celebrating when there are wars and genocides still raging across the globe, celebrating while simultaneously bracing ourselves for the second half of this election year. How can we celebrate freedom when all are not free?

I still have many stories to tell and recipes to share, so thank you for being here if you’ve made it this far! Should I continue sharing tales from the film catering crypt or is it time to pivot? Tell me in the comments. There’s been something in the collective ether lately that keeps screaming to BURN IT ALL DOWN!

Note: I am absolutely not a right-wing propagandist. Please interpret this upside-down American flag cake as the symbol was originally intended.