The Importance of Being Brandied

When your day starts off with your waking well before the snooze alarm, warm and comfortable beneath two comforters with a snoring dog beside you and seven pillows surrounding you, it’s a good thing. Looking at the gray/gold tint to the early morning sky, you know it’s snowed overnight and even better, you’re awake in plenty of time to manage a commute that’s guaranteed to be made longer by those other drivers on the road who completely forget the basic rudiments of driving a vehicle simply because there is residual white stuff on the road that recently fell from the sky. It’s a great frame of mind to wake up in and it’s exactly where I was this morning well before six a.m.

Until, that is, the phone rang. “You have got,” I actually said out loud, waking the snoring Basil beside me, “to be kidding.”

The caller was not. It was my current meeting planner client, calling me frantically from one of our ballrooms, absolutely beside herself because my set-up manager was nowhere to be found and the meeting tables were not yet fully set. There were maybe a half dozen unskirted and this, I knew, would take the set up crew roughly ten minutes to accomplish. Her general session began in roughly two hours.

“Can you light a fire under someone?” she asked, “because I’m really, really not feeling comfortable here.”

I assured her our set up manager would ‘be right on it’, as I’d call him right away. Maybe, I thought, the six-thirty a.m. meeting I’d arranged between them before leaving work the night before had been rescheduled – for more than an hour earlier. The peaceful glow of the morning rapidly fading, I reached him on his cell phone and alerted him to the situation. “I know,” he said. “I’m two minutes away. Don’t worry about anything. We’ll take care of it.”

I knew he would. He always did. I thanked him, and called her back to assure her the situation was under control. Which it was because at that time, he was in the ballroom with her and already at work with his team. I pulled the comforter over both myself and Basil and tried to return to early morning peacefulness, but it was not to be found. So I got up, got dressed, and took Basil out for her morning jaunt, accomplishing it in half the usual time because as I’ve mentioned before, she doesn’t do cold, and she doesn’t do snow, and basically she took care of business faster than I’d ever experienced because all she really wanted to do was return to the warmth of my apartment and get started with her usual morning routine of watching the daily news and then the Today Show.

I wish I could say the rest of my day went well, and in some respects, it did. I had a great meeting with a group of clients doing a program with us next summer, and if you minus out an extended lunch in our restaurant (during which you never really do anything with the food on your plate except push it around with one of your forks because to actually take a bite of something would mean you wouldn’t be able to rapidly answer one of their inquiries about space, rate, mushroom bisque vs. butternut risotto, or audio visual until you’d finished chewing), a two hour walking tour I had absolutely the wrong shoes for, and no less than seven phone calls from my in-house planner before I’d even reached my office, it wasn’t bad. Actually, the phone calls were probably the worst of it, coming as they did when I was driving to work – or attempting to drive to work – at exactly 5mph because the road was completely covered with snow and every time I moved forward more than two feet the car in front of me hit their brakes.

Still, not a bad day, and as it drew to a close I reminded myself, as I often do when I have a higher maintenance program in house, that we were past the midway point, and I had exactly one more dinner event to get through that night, one more day of meetings the next day, and then I could actually not log 7 – 10 walking miles from the time I got to my desk in the morning until the time I returned to the parking garage at night. Better still, there’d be no phone calls after hours as I received last night when I finally got home, a semi-frantic request for additional sliced fruit on the dessert station. Which, ridiculous as it seems, was actually something to get concerned about and cause me to call my banquet captain not once but eight times consecutively on his cell phone until he picked up.

Having checked the dinner room and the reception set up, I assured my planner I would be happy to stay throughout the dinner service (yes, sometimes and often we lie in the hospitality world) but if she felt comfortable with her banquet captain (she did) I would simply watch the plate-up in the banquet kitchen and go home for the night. Sounded simple enough. The entrees were beautifully done, and absolutely matched the event order prepared. Feeling entirely confident of the evening’s success (note: this should always be your first clue to be wary of having overlooked a detail), I detoured through the pastry kitchen and asked to see the trifles being served for dessert. The chef happily removed one from the freezer and presented it for my approval.

It was, I have to say, absolutely perfect and beautiful in it’s chilled flute, except for one small detail I knew with absolute certainty would send my planner over the edge and guarantee another after hours call.

“That won’t work,” I said.

He hooked at me blankly and all I could do was gesture at the glass again. “That,” I said, pointing to the top of the trifle, “is a maraschino cherry. The event order calls for brandied cherries.”

“You want me to soak them in brandy?” he asked, and I then explained that they had to go completely. There couldn’t be a maraschino cherry within six feet of that dinner and certainly not my planner because while it had been the first choice arrived at, she’d later decided the dessert absolutely needed brandied cherries.

“That one thing,” I said, “will be the one thing that gets her upset, and complaining.”

The assistant pastry chef quickly produced a bucket of dark cherries, which were perfect, and doused them in a soaking solution, following that with a half bottle of brandy. Now we were in full resolution mode, and I felt somewhat relieved, especially when he left the pastry shop in search of another bottle of brandy, to really give the dessert the ‘punch’ the planner had requested. I offered to stay and pluck marashinos from the glasses, knowing there were only two of them in the shop and roughly 160 desserts to re-garnish, but they assured me they were on top of it, and not to worry. As by this time the entire shop was starting to smell like brandy, the assistant having returned with another bottle and duly soaked the cherries once more, I took their word for it.

With all resolved, I decided not to worry, that everything would go well, and I could go home and relax, even be so bold as to leave the Blackberry in another room while I watched TV, sure it wouldn’t ring. As it often does, it crossed my mind that somewhere in the world surgeons were performing medical miracles, scientists were evolving life-changing cures, and novelists were producing tremendous works of literature, while I was considering the day well spent because I’d averted a near-disaster with a cherry. That seemed ridiculous but in the often unusual world I live in for a living, it’s important to appreciate the importance of being brandied.

I’ll leave the life-changing cures and the medical miracles to those much better suited.