We had been married about a year and a half when my husband and I bought a small cafe inside a bowling alley. We worked many long, hard hours, often putting in eighteen to twenty hour days with just the two of us. I baked an array of "homemade" pies, a specialty pleasing to many of the men who bowled in the early evening and often missed their dessert to arrive on time. I also made a different "soup-of-the-day" every morning. Because it was a particular favorite among our regular lunch customers, I made extra-large pots of bean soup so that it was always available. We put it in the empty one-gallon plastic jars in which we purchased mayonnaise and stored it in the large cooler.
On one particular afternoon, with just one young high school girl and me working fast and furiously as cooks, waitresses, busboys, dishwashers, etc., one of our elderly customers ordered his regular bowl of bean soup. We were, at the time, preparing and serving various lunches to approximately 30 people in addition to the regular coffee, Pepsi and french-fry crowd just finishing league in the bowling alley. I hurried to the back, bent to grab the gallon of soup from the cooler and stood, holding the jar by the lid.
Apparently the lid had not been screwed on tightly by the last person who opened it. The jar made a heavy and hasty retreat, hitting the floor at my feet solidly. Upon impact, its contents were propelled upwards as if launched from a cannon: up my legs, up the front of my apron and uniform, up the inside of my uniform, up the front of my face, up my nostrils, up, in fact, to the heater-fan unit five feet above my head and right up to the fifteen foot ceiling.
With my ear-piercing scream, the room became silent and all eyes were riveted on me as (whatever goes up must come down, remember) the soup began dropping from the ceiling and the heater in great yucky globs like cow pies: plop . . . plop . . . plop! They fell on my head and ran down my nose, beans dripping off the tip. They oozed down my arms and splatted onto my shoes. Strangely, no one laughed but me - I was completely and instantly hysterical. I had beans stuck in my eyebrows and ears and dripping out of my dress, adding to the general insult on my shoes. Kathy, my part-time girl, stared at me, appalled. I'm not sure if the beans or the laughter dismayed her most. She wavered between a quavering quirk at the corner or her mouth and a look of real concern, thinking that perhaps I had lost my sanity and needed a good slap to bring me to my senses. Afraid to laugh and afraid to whack me, she resolutely grabbed a towel and, scrutinizing me closely again, attacked the mess on the floor. I did the best I could with me, all but climbing into one of the large utility sinks. I washed off my arms, legs and face, put on a fresh apron, brushed what I could out of my hair and put on a clean cap (we wore little "French-maid" caps). We talked the gentleman into clam chowder and somehow made it through lunch time.
As the restaurant cleared out about an hour later, Kathy really took a good look at me for the first time since the soup hit the fan. She collapsed into an empty chair gasping with laughter, unable to talk. I hurried to the mirror in the back room and stared in horror at my reflection. Do you know what starch looks like when it dries? My eyebrows were standing out stiff and white. I had splotches on my face and arms which looked for all the world like a Biblical example of leprosy. I was wearing navy blue stockings that were decorated with identical spots but made my legs look as if they were molding!
The strangest thing, of course, is that during the lunch time rush not one customer asked me about my appearance and they certainly had not all been there when I screamed. It was impossible to wash it all off, try as I would and that's how I worked 'till midnight. As new part-time girls arrived, they were each given a new task for that evening: when Margaret started drying out, just hit her with a glass or two of water. As long as the starch was kept moist, it didn't show up. The girls were such gracious and faithful employees that not one of them complained. For the most part, they kept me looking presentable the rest of the night and those unexpected glasses of cold water kept me both clear headed and laugh-free.
Years later, long after we had sold the restaurant, it was renovated to make it into a tavern. Workmen scratched their heads and pondered over the origin and nature of the cement-hard, small, rounded bumps on the ceiling that they were unable to scrape off without damaging the ceiling itself. Time had baked them into a part of the structure. Shrugging their shoulders, the workers removed the heater, installed a furnace vent from the bowling alley and put up a false-ceiling.
