[00:16] Meg and Jessica: Field trip. Field trip. Field trip. Field trip.

[00:23] Meg: Welcome to Desperately Seeking the 80s. I am Meg, and today I am in the basement of P.G. clark's near Lincoln center, if you can picture it. And I'm here with Donna Kaz and her friend Tara, who met in the 80s, kind of like Jessica and I did, except Jessica and I met in a cafeteria at Nightingale. And Donna and Tara met at the famed Saloon, which was a bistro, I believe, on the Upper west side. I've been doing a little bit of research on it, but I'm gonna let them, because they are experts, tell us the dirty details of what it was like at the Saloon.

[01:11] Donna: Hi.

[01:12] Meg: Welcome. Donna. Thank you so much.

[01:14] Donna: Thank you so much for having us. It's wonderful to be here.

[01:18] Tara: Hi.

[01:18] Meg: This is Tara.

[01:19] Tara: So the Saloon was a vast restaurant right across the street from Lincoln Center. And I think the kind of iconic thing about it, with reference to the 80s, is restaurants of that size really don't exist in New York anymore. And because of its location, it was always busy because people were coming and going from Lincoln center. And it was a well established bar. Bar scene on the Upper west side. And so there was like a battalion of waiters who worked three different shifts, four daytime.

[01:55] Meg: So when you say vast, can you give me sort of a sense of what vast means? How many floors?

[02:05] Donna: It was just one floor. It was. The bar was on one level and the bar was pretty big. But it had 10 stations, if you can imagine that. A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I and x. And so 10 waiters on the floor every night.

[02:20] Tara: At least two 70 tables, would you say? Maybe 70 tables right here.

[02:26] Donna: We can count them, but check the diagram. But it was huge. And it was. The floor was wooden. So in the 80s, the big thing was roller skating. So we had roller skating waiters.

[02:39] Meg: That's what I read about. That was that it was known for roller skating, which was a huge thing in the 80s. So were you roller skaters?

[02:51] Tara: I was not. I was encouraged not to skate.

[02:55] Donna: I did not skate either. But I do know that anyone who did skate made better tips.

[03:02] Meg: Well, I have to admit, I probably would give somebody more tips if they were roller skating. So you met at the saloon. First of all, are you from New York City? Where'd you grow up, Donna?

[03:12] Donna: I grew up in Glen Cove on Long island, and I went to college at SUNY Brockport and then came to New York right after that. So I came to the city in 1977.

[03:23] Tara: That's the same year I moved here. But I worked at The Saloon. I think from like 82 to 84, I was like that roach's son. Can I have my job back? You know, I kept like leaving and going back.

[03:38] Meg: Why is that, do you think?

[03:39] Tara: Well, I would get a job or I, you know, decide I wanted to do something else. And then I would need, desperately need money. So then I would go back.

[03:48] Meg: What did you come to New York to do? Where did you grow up, Tara?

[03:51] Tara: I'm from Illinois, originally from Southern Illinois. And my family moved around a lot when I was growing up. So we lived in various places in the Midwest. And then I went to high school in Baltimore and college in Boston. And I moved to New York directly after college.

[04:08] Meg: And for what purpose? What brought you to New York?

[04:11] Tara: Well, New York, I just wanted to live in New York. I knew I wanted to do something either in publishing or art theater. I had been in the acting program at my college for the first two years. And then I kind of had a little bit of a breakdown of confidence in terms of, like, could I ever really be an actor? So I took my degree in English literature. And so when I moved to New York, I worked at cbs. I worked in publishing. I worked for a News show called 30 Minutes for a while. Then I decided to really try to be an actress. And I got a job at the saloon.

[04:49] Meg: So you guys met on the floor of the saloon. Did you have the same shifts? What drew you to each other?

[04:57] Donna: Well, the saloon, it was a huge staff and I started there in 1982 and I think I left in 1984. So. So there were four shifts, AM, lunch, PM and swing. And there was a seniority. You had to have seniority to get the choice shifts, which were the PM shifts. But I think that Tara and I worked the swing shift mostly, which was a really cool shift because it started at 8:30, after the dinner rush of people going to 8 o' clock curtains at Lincoln center. The whole place emptied out. Some people came in and we worked. It was sort of busy until show break. Someone would call out show break. When the Met broke their show or. And in fact, the manager had the times of when the shows would end and would yell out show break. And everyone would be coming across the street into the saloon. And so we would have to really be on our toes then like 10 o', clock, 10:30. And the kitchen was open until 2 o' clock in the morning. I mean, this is when restaurants were open from 10am to 4am I can just imagine.

[06:03] Meg: I wish that people could see you, Donna, because you Basically did something with your arms that looked like a tidal wave of people coming towards a restaurant right when the show lets out. I mean, that's wild. You weren't a dinner place, you were an after show place and a before

[06:20] Donna: show, before show, after show. It was just such a huge restaurant. It had huge windows that looked right onto Lincoln Center. So the view was really good.

[06:30] Tara: Floor to ceiling windows. So it was. Yeah, it was very of the time in terms of its decor.

[06:36] Meg: I think now it's hard for me to imagine. Here we are sitting in a PJ Clark's. It's hard for me to imagine like people roller skating around.

[06:46] Tara: Roller skating with plates of soup. One guy can do that.

[06:49] Meg: Amazing.

[06:51] Donna: There was a. Well, there was one waiter who had actually played hockey throughout his out his childhood. And he was a fantastic waiter. I mean, they would. Yeah, plates of soup, doing twirls, running around, jumping down. There were steps from the kitchen. There were three or four steps down to the dining floor. Jumping down the steps. It was very exciting.

[07:12] Meg and Jessica: Field trip, field trip, field trip, field trip.

[07:19] Donna: I'm still in touch with at least 20 people that I worked with. Everyone was an artist of some kind. People were singers and dancers and actors wanting to break into the business. We were all that. But plus, so you have 10 waiters on the floor. You had busboys. There was a side duties person who was just refilling ketchups and stuff. There were bartenders, there was an expediter, there were runners. So you know, the staff during any one shift, it was 30, 40 people and you had to bond and get along.

[07:54] Tara: And I would say the other thing that bonded us was the way we were treated by the management. We were all kind of in that together. We didn't call it sexual harassment, but that's what we were experiencing every time you walked in the door. And so there was a bonding around that, like that someone would come up to you and say, you need to wear more makeup or make a really rude comment about your body. And if you asked a question, the question would be answered with like some vulgar comment that didn't have anything to do with the question that you asked. In that environment, you know, you hold each other's hand as you go through it.

[08:40] Donna: I think.

[08:41] Tara: Wouldn't you say, Donna?

[08:42] Donna: Yes. Yeah. I mean, it was a time, the 80s, when we had to suck it up and take this sexual harassment because we didn't really know how to deal with it and what we could do to combat it. We worked with some people, managers, who were particularly brutal in their treatment of the female staff, the gay staff, I would imagine. I don't think that the straight guys got anything, but we were constantly told we weren't pretty enough. Our tits. My favorite line was, your tits are shrinking. What? Yes.

[09:23] Tara: Many times if you ask the big boss a question, he would answer with suck my. You know what. And so that's what we began to call him.

[09:33] Meg: I have some follow up questions. I mean, I guess when you were first talking about sexual harassment, I imagined, you know, guys at the tables who had been drinking too much and were, you know, do that kind of thing. But you're talking about like the owner and the managers and do you think that it, you know, the apple doesn't fall far from the chair or the fish rots from the head or whatever. Was it because the owner was such a gross guy that all the managers were or it was like that everywhere. If you had some kind of power

[10:06] Donna: and authority, I think it was just acceptable in those days to say those kinds of things, to make those kinds of comments. It was ha, ha, ha. It's so funny. I'm just being like a guy, you know. You know what they say now, locker humor. It's just locker humor, you know, it means nothing. But of course, when we were there working, it really affected us because we are trying to be successful. We are young people, we're in our 20s, and we're beat down at our jobs, told we're not good enough, we don't look good enough, we're not pretty enough, we can't surf. Right. You know, it was internalized in a way that Tara and I never really realized until we started talking about it after the fact.

[10:50] Tara: I think it shows you just how normalized that kind of behavior was. When you walked in the door, looking back, I remember thinking, okay, here I go. And you accepted it. You knew it wasn't. I knew it wasn't right. It was humiliating to me. I think for some women, they could just laugh it off or they could just ignore it, but I don't know. I was always embarrassed every night by something that somebody said. And I think it was connected to also a sense of like, you're never going to make it as an actor. That was a big part of it, wouldn't you say?

[11:32] Donna: Yes, absolutely. And I was thinking about this because I wrote a whole play about this experience that. And maybe it's still like that now. When you go to a show and you go to the restaurant before, your experience of being entertained begins at dinner before the show. And so the staff expected us to be on and to sell a lot of product to push the appetizers, to push the specials. In fact, it's in the manual, if someone orders a glass of wine, ask if they want a bottle. And our seniority was partly based on our check average, how much we pushed, how much we entertained the guests and got that check up there. But we also, on the other hand, we were told to get people out of the restaurant as fast, to turn the tables as fast as possible so they could make as much money. Turn that table, turn that table, you know, go as fast as you can. Get those people out of that table. I've got another table of five coming in. So it was really this sort of irony of we had to really sell a lot. We had to be on, we had to entertain, but we had to also make lots of money and turn over the tables for the restaurant, all the while being told that our tits were shrinking.

[12:48] Meg and Jessica: Field trip, field trip, field trip, field trip.

[12:55] Meg: Thinking back to that time when people got away with it, because it wasn't obviously bad, but it still made you feel bad. So it was bad, but it hadn't been articulated yet. We didn't have the language to talk about how it made us feel to be dehumanized like that.

[13:13] Tara: There was no recourse to it. So there was no one to talk to. There was no one. And just like you didn't even. It's kind of hard to explain. It was. The only word I can think of is normalized. It was so normalized that you just kept going through it. And there was also a thing of, you will be fired, you'll be fired. Eat a piece of cake. Yeah. You'll fire yourself. Yes. Eat a piece of cake, you'll be fired. Do this, you'll be fired. Do that, you'll be fired. Donna can tell you about that.

[13:44] Donna: This is from the manual. If anyone eats desserts, they will. I'm sorry, I'm laughing because it's just, like, so ridiculous. If anyone eats desserts, they will pay full price and be fired. Treat the saloon as you would your own home when your favorite person is about to visit. Have pride in where you work. It's the hottest place on the Upper west side. Encourage new and higher priced drinks. I mean, this was all in the manual. And the thing about firing yourself was a was it was sort of like a mantra. If you do this, you. You know, anyone who drinks, like, if you want a glass of juice, you have to pay full price for it at the bar. If you don't. You will be fired or fire yourself. You'll fire yourself.

[14:29] Tara: So in any environment where. Where, you know, there's strict rules and everything, you can imagine what went on. You know, people drinking, doing drugs in the back. It was like a circus in the midst of it all.

[14:47] Meg: Okay, you've got dozens and dozens of people who are working here. Were there different factions within the groups of people who worked there?

[14:57] Tara: Don was in the in crowd, and I was not. I was uncool. But Donna was cool.

[15:02] Meg: So, wait, I have to know what the in crowd means?

[15:05] Donna: I was just, you know, it was now thinking about it. We had to do these subjects aversive acts to combat this. So, for example, we were never allowed to use napkins as rags. But I always, when no one was looking, would use a napkin for a rag. And I felt very happy when I did that. Like, screw you, I'm using this napkin for a rag. And then what we did was the swing shift ended at 2am Nobody was there. The managers weren't there anymore. We would just go to the bar and drink for free all night long. And that was also a way that we got over on the management.

[15:43] Meg: Were the bartenders kind of separate from the waiters? Separate from the busboys?

[15:47] Donna: No, the bartenders were all on our side. The bartenders were fantastic. And they, you know, they were famous. That bar was famous. There was actually. There was a. There was a bartender who shall not be named. But he was such a popular bartender, and there were so many people would come to the bar just for him. His girlfriend would come in with a huge bag and say, hey, can you just store this bag behind the bar? And in the bag were bottles of liquor that he would just serve and take all the money. So he was fired when they found out about that. But they suffered so much that they hired him back. Because even when he was stealing, they made more money.

[16:28] Meg: I love that. I can't believe you can't tell me his name. You know, he must be so proud of that now. I mean, come on.

[16:36] Tara: He probably works on Wall street or something. The best is the story of the man who put his checks in the ice cream. Yeah, let Donna tell that story.

[16:47] Donna: Yeah. So one night, at the height of the rush, this waiter was completely frustrated and fed up with the saloon. So he decided he left in the middle of the rush.

[17:02] Meg and Jessica: He.

[17:03] Donna: And no one could find. All of his orders were in, but no one could find his checks. So nobody knew who got what. We all had to scramble to cover for him, which had Like a trickle

[17:14] Tara: down effect on the whole restaurant because no one knew where anything went. And he walked out the back door. So he was sort of like a folk hero to everyone that he was the Joe Hill of the saloon.

[17:27] Donna: There was an 86 list in the kitchen and he wrote his name on the 86 list and walked out. And months later, when they were cleaning out the freezer for the ice cream, they found all the checks in the freezer.

[17:37] Meg: Honestly, again, this person sounds brilliant. That is the best way to leave a job I think I have ever heard of.

[17:45] Meg and Jessica: Field trip, field trip, field trip, field trip.

[17:53] Donna: It zapped you as a person because you were being harassed so much, but also zapped you artistically in that way, in that sense of you were expected to perform and be on. And that was also very draining.

[18:09] Meg: You were in the performing arts. Were you in the performing arts as well? And if you've got a. You've got a job that takes you from 6:30pm through to 4:00am that's like Prime performing time.

[18:28] Tara: Yes. I mean, I was not a big stay late at the saloon person, but that was mostly because I wasn't in the in crowd. I just went home. And I also lived in the East Village and I rode my bike to work most of the time. Excuse me. So if I left like at 1 in the morning or 2 in the morning, I could ride down 5th Avenue, like in the center of 5th Avenue on my bike. And that was like such a great experience. So I kind of opted for that. Some of the time you lived in

[18:59] Meg: the East Village, do you remember why you decided to work on the Upper west side?

[19:04] Tara: When I first started working there, I lived on 92nd street and then I moved to the East Village.

[19:10] Donna: Yeah, the saloon opened in late 1979 and I got the job because my friends from college worked there and they told me there were openings. And so I went there and I lived on 89th and West End, so I lived on the Upper west side. So it was very convenient to work there. But also when you got a job as a waiter, and that was pretty. It was a pretty good job, tip wise.

[19:36] Tara: I mean, we did make enough money to support ourselves.

[19:39] Donna: So if you got that job, you sort of didn't want to lose it. I mean, you could take time off to go to auditions, you could take time off to do a show. But then you came back and you sort of had this job, which is why some people sort of got. I mean, I felt stuck. By the time I left, I was like, I gotta get out of here, you know, you know, I'm really waiting on tables too much. But, you know, the whole seniority thing that they pulled on us, too. Seniority was based on higher date. Plus all of these weird. Not weird. I mean, they were cooperative spirit, kitchen etiquette, guest relations, appearance and check average. And so you would have a review, like every six months. They would review you, they would sit you down and they would go, okay, your Number is now 31. So you can, you know, get on the PM shifts. But then you would. The next day you would look at the new roster and you'd be still on the swing shifts. I mean, it was. It was. It was sort of a joke.

[20:35] Meg: And when you say they was there, I'm imagining, like, for some reason, three or four guys in suits or something. Like cheap suits, sorry is what I'm picturing.

[20:46] Tara: That's pretty accurate. The management staff that I remember most vividly were the big boss who was the most vulgar, and then two people who worked for him whose harassment was less sexual and more almost like psychological, you know, like, they were the ones who were sort of like, well, if you lose this job, I don't know what's going to happen to you because you're probably never going to be a successful actor. As I said before, there were women who it just kind of rolled off their back and people who became very successful. I remember right after I started, one of the waitresses was going to the Williamstown. She was leaving because she was going to the Williamstown Theater Festival. And that was like a source of inspiration for me for months. Like, someone got to Williamstown from here, you know. But yes, someone got out. And when thinking back, like, why didn't we put it all together? Because people got fired all the time and they didn't end up in the streets. They got other jobs, like, you know what I mean? It came sort of like a cult in a way, to work there and be a part of it.

[22:06] Meg: I mean, it seems like to me that there'd be plenty of people who would want to work there. So why did they have to entrap you by, like, messing with your mind? Unless it was kind of fun. I don't know.

[22:20] Donna: I think that they were also maybe frustrated people, too. I mean, why do people put people down instead of bringing them up? It was sort of like, oh, right, the person who went on to Williamstown, oh, she'll be back. That was sort of the attitude, oh, she'll be back, she'll be back, you know.

[22:35] Meg: Well, you know what that sounds like, to me, is that if there's something better than this, then why am I here?

[22:43] Tara: That's very good. Yes, I think that might be. Yeah. I don't think happy people behave the way these people behave now that, you know, in. In retrospect.

[22:52] Meg and Jessica: Field trip, field trip, field trip, field trip.

[22:59] Meg: And this number system I find fascinating. So these guys are rating you. I. I mean, it sounds somewhat arbitrary.

[23:10] Donna: I remember I was told I was gonna. Okay, you're. You know. Yes.

[23:14] Meg: You.

[23:14] Donna: You really. You've worked here for three years. We're gonna give you Thursday, Friday, Saturday, PM shift. And then I. Then the next day it came out, I was Monday, Tuesday, lunch, you know, Wednesday, swing. And it was totally. It was. It was a lie. So we actually all. The seniority thing, I think, is the thing that broke the camel's back, because it was bs, the seniority thing. And we. I think it was you and I,

[23:45] Tara: first attempt at trying to unionize. I did it again. I've never been successful.

[23:52] Donna: Right, exactly. But we found out that there was a restaurant workers union. So we called them up and they sent a representative to meet with us and told us. And, you know, we explained all of our problems. The security thing.

[24:06] Tara: We all signed the card.

[24:08] Donna: Yeah. And do you want to vote for the union? And we said, yes, we would like to have. We all signed cards that said, yes, we want to have a union vote. So then what happened is they shut the restaurant down and had a meeting. They have never shut the restaurant down. They shut it down and called us all in for a meeting, all the owners. And they stood in front of us and said, what's the problem here? We're gonna give you guys a huge Christmas party. Did you know that? And health insurance. How would you like health insurance, too?

[24:43] Meg: Well, yes, please. So is that what busted the union, Health insurance?

[24:50] Tara: Yes, yes, I think. I think that was it.

[24:54] Meg: I mean, I don't blame you. I mean, like, what are you supposed to do? That's actually, in fact, what you probably need most of anything.

[25:03] Donna: I think we could have gotten it through the union, too. I mean, they were very nervous. They did not want us to unionize, definitely. That would have been terrible for them, which is why they all showed up and shut down the restaurant, which had never been done. I mean, I was amazed. I said, oh, we really have power now. We shut down the restaurant. We're going to have a union vote. But it failed.

[25:25] Meg: So you have this moment that actually is pretty impressive. I mean, they could have just ignored you and would you have been Successful at walking off, who knows? But the point is that you scared them.

[25:37] Donna: And we did get insurance. Years later, I met someone who worked for this restaurant chain who said, oh, you're the one that tried to unionize. Thank you for the health insurance.

[25:46] Meg: So, like, TGA Fridays, like, owes PJ Clarks or whatever owes you for, like, health insurance?

[25:53] Tara: I never really thought about that.

[25:55] Meg: That there was an impact.

[25:56] Tara: There was an impact, yeah.

[25:59] Meg and Jessica: Field trip, Field trip, Field trip, field trip.

[26:06] Tara: I honestly, it's terrible to say, but I don't remember my final day there. I don't. I kind of faded out.

[26:14] Donna: Yeah. I think you ate a whole Mississippi mud cake.

[26:19] Tara: I hope I did. I hope I did. I don't think I did, but I hope I did. I hope I had, like, 16 drinks and 15 desserts.

[26:26] Meg: And how do we know if anything has even really changed?

[26:31] Donna: I don't know. I became an activist after that, and I worked in la. I was working with the LA Commission on Assault Against Women. And I really got involved in sort of this kind of work. And I think that a lot of progress has been made and a lot of awareness has been made, but I also think that it's still a problem. And so how do you gauge how much we have advanced? I have no idea. It sometimes it seems like, you know, two steps forward and one step back or one step whatever, especially in this administration. So it's, It's. It's very circular in a way. And I think that, yes, things have changed and there is a lot more awareness. There are lawsuits. People now sue people for doing things like this, and some of them are successful and some of them are not. So we can celebrate the wins and still know that we still have a lot to. To do in this area.

[27:34] Meg: And there might be a bit of a backlash too involved in all of this, that once we do start getting the language to talk about it and we speak up and say, like, actually, no, you're not allowed to talk to me like that. Some people get really grumpy and then they do it even more because they want to do what they want to do.

[27:53] Tara: I don't think a manager of a restaurant today would speak to an employee the way we were spoken to. I do think that that has been pushed over to the other side, don't you? What else needs to be done? And I do think younger women, I think the generation that came after us had a, thank goodness, a better sense of their own power, and they understood, understood that they could speak up against those things because a mechanism was in Place in law to support them. And in industry, there were. There were human resources departments and places where things like that could be reported. And I honestly, it's possible that men only started to comply because there were the. Those mechanisms in place and they knew that they could be traced and tracked. I do think there's been progress, and I think young women, younger women, millennial

[28:58] Meg and Jessica: women,

[29:01] Tara: have a stronger and a more exciting, empowered sense of themselves than we might have had.

[29:11] Meg: My daughter just graduated from college. She's moved back home. She's doing great. She's juggling a few jobs. She has entered the workforce. One of her jobs is as a bartender. And so she's Gen Z. And I'm very interested to hear. I am so glad that she is living at home and that I can hear her stories when she comes back. And she certainly heard my stories. She heard my mother's stories. But yeah, I mean, we all have to sort of stay vigilant, I think.

[29:48] Tara: Absolutely.

[29:49] Donna: And I also think there is in some places, there is a slightly different attitude towards service servers and people in that industry and more, I would hope, more respect. I always. We always, Tara and I, whenever we go out to. To dinner, we are always aware of who is serving us and how we can sort of support them. And because we know how hard that job is.

[30:16] Tara: It's a good job. It can be a good job. Like, it's a respectable job and a

[30:22] Meg: hard job, and you meet so many strangers every single day and lots of people are crazy, and you just have to deal with it somehow, and you hope that at least your work environment is supporting you in that.

[30:38] Donna: So a bunch of people who worked at the saloon decided to get together because one of our waiters actually owns a restaurant in Times Square. And he said, let's have a reunion of people in the saloon. When was this? Like five years ago, Two or three years ago. And I joke, jokingly suggested that who should be invited but this asshole manager who was so horrible to us. And it was a complete joke. Well, someone didn't think it was a joke. And he was invited.

[31:13] Meg: Oh, no. That's why you didn't go?

[31:15] Donna: Yes, he didn't. He was invited and he was going to show up and I just said, no way. But, Tara, you went, right?

[31:23] Tara: I said hello to him.

[31:25] Meg: Yeah. How is he doing?

[31:28] Tara: I think he's doing fine. But I. Maybe I'm projecting, but I really did have a sense that there was an awareness of what he had done. I don't know. I felt like there was possibly an embarrassment he had no interest in speaking with me. He said hello. We looked at each other. We said hello. Because most of the people who were at that reunion had worked at the saloon after us and the men, the

[31:58] Donna: men had better experiences. And then you had the conversation with one of the guys who had no idea that this was happening to us.

[32:05] Meg: Ooh, I want to hear that.

[32:07] Tara: Well, I talked to him a little bit that night about what it was like to work there and, you know, what it was like to walk in the door every day. And he had a kind of very sympathetic response to it and said, I had no idea that that was happening to you all. And I think of it as one of the most fun jobs I ever had. And I can see how you would. Because there was. There was. Because of the chaos, because of the activity and the size and the scope of it all. There was always a sense of, like, keeping balloons in the air and. And famous people were coming in and you were going to put a plate of soup in front of Baryshnikov. And it was exciting, you know, but he had an emotional fullness about what. When he understood what it was like for us, as opposed to him.

[33:03] Meg and Jessica: Field trip, field trip, field trip, field trip.

[33:10] Donna: I want to just describe the menu. The menu was a trifold piece of paper that was at least a foot long. It was huge. The menu had so many items on it that people could not decide what to have. You would go over, have you? Oh, the menu is so big, I don't know what to have was always what people were saying. Plus, there was a specials menu inside that menu. It must have had a hundred items on it. I mean, it was very hard to choose. So we're working with this huge menu. We are under the gun to get the order in and get the table turned around. Often I just would go up to a table. If they couldn't decide, I would start suggesting, you're having this and why don't you have this? So I could get the order in. And there was always a lit candle on the table. And these menus are made of paper. At least four or five times a night, the menu, someone's menu would catch fire and we would have to call the busboy over. Fire, fire on C3. And then we'd go running over and stamp out the fire. This was the time when we were American chefs were responding to French nouvelle cuisine. So we had to have shiitake mushrooms and fiddlehead ferns and a melange of whatever and a brace of soft shell crab. And people were Always going, I'll have the shit takes. What are the shit takes? We never got to taste any of it because we were on the swing shift. Only the PM waiters tasted the food, so we had no idea what it tasted like. So we would really be. We were really good improvisers. We would say, oh, yeah, that really. That's excellent. Excellent choice. Let's talk about the wine. Because we had glasses of wine that were $1.75, a half carafe was $4, and a full carafe was $7.75. And we served white and red wine. And Tara's going to tell the story of our new wine that we.

[35:06] Tara: Well, there was this lovely young woman from the south who came to work there, and one day I saw her with a tray and a single glass of it, and I said, oh, are we serving by the glass now? And she said, no, I make it myself. She was blending white and red wine and selling it. And she was also a person who. There was a man who was, like, today, we would describe him as being, you know, on the spectrum or something, but somehow he was connected to people at the restaurant. And he was allowed to sit at this one table and he wrote, and he was, like, kind of an interesting fellow. And one day she said to him, you smell. And he, like, kind of started freaking out. And he did smell, but none of us ever called it to his attention. And he started freaking out, and she said, nice. You smell nice.

[36:13] Donna: We really did have fun. We tried to have fun. There were many, many things that, you know, they were constantly telling to circulate, circulate, don't stand around. And so there was this one waiter who would just, you know, there was butcher block on the tables. He would just take a huge piece of butcher block and just walk around in circles, holding it above his head, like he was going to put it down on some table. So he looked like he was doing something. I mean, there was something called the Way Back. It was like a garage in the back. There was big boxes back there, and a waiter would go back and get in the box, and one by one, we would send people back there so we could jump out of the box and scare them. I mean, there were. And look, it was right across from Lincoln center. So people from the Philharmonic, opera singers, dancers, they all came there. A lot of famous people came there that we waited on. And I think Tara had. There was like a nightly Baryshnikov sighting.

[37:06] Meg and Jessica: Field trip, field trip, field trip, field trip.

[37:13] Donna: We worked at the saloon in 1980 81, 82, 83, 84 and 1981 was the announcement in the New York Times of a weird gay cancer happening and AIDS definitely affected. At the saloon we had a very dear bartender, Paul o', Hara, who didn't show up for work one day and we found out that he had passed away from aids. Yeah, that quickly. Maybe he was gone for a week. It just seemed like he was gone overnight and that that disease was taking people so quickly that it was shocking. And it just really affected all of us who worked with him because he was such a doll. We loved him.

[37:58] Tara: He was the first person I know who died of aids and I think the first person who. Which was something that we experienced afterwards, a kind of disappearance because the disease could take someone so quickly.

[38:15] Donna: I just also have to say that the reaction from Mr. Horrible towards AIDS was absolutely insulting. It was not only the women who got this sort of treatment, it was the gay waiters as well. And especially when that came up, there were really inappropriate jokes and comments made. Yeah, we had many gay waiters there at the saloon. We had a faux wedding ceremony between two of them in section I one night. And sometimes some of those waiters left and we never knew what happened to them. And we were sad if, you know, because this was a really trying time with that because of the misinformation and all of that stigma about it. It was terrible. But I still remember Paul o'.

[39:06] Meg and Jessica: Hara.

[39:07] Donna: He was such a great bartender, really fun, laughed a lot, was very sweet.

[39:13] Meg and Jessica: Field trip, field trip, field trip, field trip.

[39:20] Meg: So you formed this friendship in 1981 and how did you. When you were no longer working together, when you were no longer seeing each other on a daily basis, how did your friendship sort of progress after that?

[39:37] Donna: Well, I. You got married in 85, and then I moved to LA in 86. But you had lots of work in LA, so every time Tara would come to LA, we would see each other. I would come back a lot and then I moved back in 94.

[39:55] Tara: Well, there were two things. When I would go to LA on business, I would have a hotel room, but I would stay at Donna's. We would go out to dinner or something and I would say, like, don't make me go back to the hotel, let me just stay at your apartment. So I would always stay with her. And then when you back here in 1994, I think that was, that was when things. We were part of each other's day to day lives. And it was so fun to be Donna's friend because she had this amazing duality about her, where she was sort of an Upper east side matron, lived on East 79th street with this, like, cool British husband, and gave dinner parties and wore smart clothes, but she was at the same time, a gorilla girl.

[40:49] Donna: What? You're a gorilla girl? Yes, I am. Afra Ben. Afra Ben the gorilla girl.

[40:56] Meg: You didn't think to open with that?

[41:00] Donna: Well, you know, the. That's another episode, and that's another real 80s story, actually, because the Gorilla Girls were founded in 1985.

[41:09] Tara: I know. Oh, my God.

[41:11] Meg: I am. You have truly blown me away right now, Tara.

[41:14] Donna: And I. I mean, I. At that point, I was really into writing and writing plays and doing theater. Tara was in the theater doing casting. And we. Not only did. We did our friendship deepen, but we would also see a lot of plays together and talk about them to all hours of the evening. And Tara helped. Helped me many times with casting, some of my readings. And, you know, we just had. We. We had a really deep friendship that was really New York because we were working here, and we were living here, and your kids grew up here, and I brought Richard back here, and it was really fun to live on the. It was sort of west side, east side friendship.

[42:00] Tara: There's a Le Panquetidienne in Central park, and we would meet there on Sunday mornings, pretty much every Sunday morning that we could manage. And we called it the Office because it was kind of halfway for both of us. And we'd go there and have a coffee and a croissant and talk for, like, an hour and a half, and then both go our separate ways. And I. I have to say, when the pandemic hit started and then Donna moved out, that was. I had to kind of adjust myself when I wasn't seeing you on Sunday mornings every.

[42:36] Meg: Every.

[42:36] Tara: Every week. But I think also we were at a part in our lives, a point in our lives where we were going through big human stuff. Losing our parents when my daughter was a teen, and. And I wasn't sure about how to be a good mom to her. Donna was the person. Donna didn't have a daughter, but she was the person who helped me and gave me the best guidance that I got from anyone else, and that was based on her knowing me and knowing how beautiful and blessed and fabulous my daughter was and being able to. To help me with that. So I think it was the point of our lives as people that. That kind of sealed things in a certain way. And, of course, then losing her husband.

[43:34] Donna: Yeah, I mean, you know, Tara's been with me through a lot of loss, and my husband passed four years ago. But I also want to talk about Charles Harper, who was a mentor to me and a member of Circle Repertory Company and a fabulous actor and sort of encouraged me to go into writing. And he died of AIDS in 1989. But before he died, he met all of my friends, Tara especially. I remember him turning to me and saying, wow, you have a treasure in that, Tara. And it's true. You know, I'm sure you relate to this, Meg and Jessica, of, you know, having this strong friendship that lasts because endurance is all about living and endurance and having enduring friends is really what it's all about.

[44:26] Meg: That is a beautiful way to conclude this truly, truly lovely, lovely talk. I am so grateful to both of you, and I cannot wait for Jessica to hear this. And I. And I promised that I would share that you are going from here to the Cafe Luxembourg, because that's just too New York to leave out of this story. Cheers.