But what I really wanted to be was a Rock Star.
Early jobs, lives forever entwined and making music.
My band Womyn of Destruction - 1991
I had always cooked to sustain my lifestyle of trying to be a working musician. Cooking jobs were everywhere, and I knew that if I was good at my job that the boss would let me leave to go on tour. All my musician friends, in the 90’s, either worked front of house or back of house at cafés and restaurants. But, how did I get into the loop of working in foodservice you might ask?
My first job, so to speak, was one I forced upon a small pizza parlor that had opened across the street from my house. I was 12 years old and loved hanging out there, pestering the men that owned the shop. I would go there almost daily after school to play my favorite song on their jukebox, Roxy Music’s “Love Is The Drug” because it sounded dangerous. I started helping the guys refill ketchup bottles and moved up to folding pizza boxes. They paid me in a weekly pizza or two that I would proudly take home to my family. But, my first paying job was at 15, getting paid under the table at another pizza place. I was hired as a prep person, but soon the owners decided to fire everyone except me. I guess I outworked the rest of the young staff, but with this came the additional responsibilities of waiting tables, prep work, running the grill, doing all the dishes, and finally making pizzas. When the owners, a couple from Italy and Mexico, needed to go home to “do work” after sending me to the liquor store to get them a six pack they would leave me on my own to run the shop. One day, they didn’t show up to open and ended up stiffing me my last paycheck. Needing a job I then was hired as a prep cook for the Huntingdon Valley Dinner Theater. There were two shows a day where we served 500 people a show. It was grueling work, peeling 500 hard boiled eggs, defrosting and traying up hundreds of near-frozen chicken thighs and peeling potatoes for hours every shift. I stayed there for nearly four years working part time throughout high school. I actually loved the people I worked with, the camaraderie we had in that kitchen, the secret make-out sessions in the dry goods room and how much I learned about cooking in quantity for large numbers of people. The head chef was a bristly, older Russian woman who took me under her whisk and brought me up the ranks from prep to pastry to sous chef. Again, this job had a big impact on me for what would become a career in my later life.
But, let’s back up a bit, I played piano since I was 5 years old, was self taught and played by ear, but wanted lessons. My Mom found an elderly woman, Eleanor Stoply, who offered her services. Twice a week I had to walked along the creek to her house for my lessons. Additionally, I had to help her with chores around her beautiful old Tudor style home that she shared with her chronic pipe smoking husband. She also would force me to eat cottage cheese for lunch. To say that I started to hate my lessons was an understatement. I was an impossible student. I could play exactly what the teacher played but I refused to read the music. After 3 years of Eleanor’s frustration with me, I quit.
Three years later, at the age of 12, I started an all girl band called Deep Spirits. This was after seeing Aerosmith in concert when I was 11, along with my friend Amy Berman and her Dad. That night I told Amy that I wanted to be a Rockstar. I even wrote a report in 7th grade about “How to become a Rockstar” for a class assignment on “what we wanted to be when we grew up”. I used the band KISS as an example.
Cooking for a living was not even on my radar at this point. What was on my radar at 13 was getting my first guitar, writing songs every day and recording them on my Panasonic cassette player. I learned Beatles songs, Neil Young songs and then went onto learning every Joni Mitchell song in all her open tunings. I was in choir from kindergarten through the 11th grade and played in every talent show from 7th grade onward. The only thing I saw in my future, in 1980, was leaving home after I graduated high school and starting a band in Center City, Philadelphia. That was, until I saw a boy named Ramon from Spain walking down the hall with beautiful long, brown hair and I fell completely in love. He and his family had been stationed in our town for a four year stint because his father was a diplomat for the Spanish Navy. Once their four year residency, in our town, came to an end I couldn’t bear to live without him. I followed him back to his country a week after I graduated high school in 1983, much to the dismay and frustration of both my parents as well as my bonus parents (whose story you will read more about below). Ramon and I lived in Madrid, Spain in a small, old apartment in the Costa del Sol area of town. Since I had no real reason to be there, other than being in love, I had also applied to the Conservatory of Music in Madrid, where I had been surprisingly accepted. I was going to study music in Spain! But, I never started because my parents didn’t have the money to send me to college and I wasn’t fluent enough in Spanish. With no real plans, Ramon and I traveled all around Spain and Morocco, following different Jazz festivals, for about ten months. I spent all the scholarship money I had received from high school in recognition of my art and music talents. He and I started fighting regularly, as the luster faded on our love, so I finally decided to come back to the States. I then applied to the Berklee College of Music in Boston, I was surprisingly accepted, in the Summer of 1984, but again, my parents didn’t have the money to send me. I couldn’t get any grant money or financial aid because the agencies said “my parents made enough money”, but they most certainly did not. Honestly, they would have had to sell off everything they owned to be able to afford Berklee. Just when I thought I would never be able to ever go to college or get out of my small town, my “bonus parents”, Marv and Sandy Savage, stepped in to help. They were the parents of my very first love, Joel Savage. Joel and I dated for nearly 3 years from the age of 12 to 15. He was 3 years older than me, loved fast cars, progressive rock bands like YES and PINK FLOYD, had a fire-cracker personality that I adored and was Marv and Sandy’s only child. On June 9th 1979, Joel, one of our good friends, Steve Koontz, and myself were on our way to a party that we had all been anticipating for weeks. But, for some reason, on the drive to the party I started to fall asleep on Joel’s lap while Steve was driving. Joel asked me if I was too tired to even go to the party and I decided I was, so they dropped me off at my parent’s house. Twenty minutes later, the lives of so many people would forever be changed. Both of them died in a horrible car accident on the way to that party. Marv and Sandy then became entwined in my life, as I was in theirs, having the love of Joel binding us together. They became very involved in my education, as well as my music and art activities. They would travel extensively around the world, bringing back souvenirs, photos and stories. Always encouraging me that I too could travel and get out of this town. When they found out that I had been accepted to one of the most renowned music colleges they were ecstatic. But, when I told them that my family couldn’t afford to send me, they immediately offered Joel’s college fund. They wanted me to have every opportunity that Joel would never have, and for this, I am eternally grateful beyond words.1 After my parents and The Savages hashed out how this amazing gift would work, I immediately moved to Boston, Massachusetts.
Sandy and Marv Savage at my graduation at Berklee College of Music - 1988
While studying at Berklee, I worked part time jobs, again all in food service. My first job was at Steve’s Donuts slinging coffee and crullers behind the counter. My second and final job in Boston was working the deli counter at Store 24, which was directly across the street from Berklee. I would make sandwiches, grinders, bagels and chili four days a week for all the students and teachers. My co-workers were all musicians as well. After graduating, I moved with the band I sang for to Baltimore, Maryland in 1989. My first job there was at a place called Picadilly’s Deli. My previous sandwich skills at Store 24 enabled me to get this job as soon as I arrived in town. I worked there for about a year until they closed. I applied for a cashier position at Eddie’s grocery store, which was around the corner from my apartment in the Mount Vernon neighborhood. At 24 years old, with floor length cornrowed hair and a dream of being a rockstar, I seemed to be too freaky for that job and quit after a few months of harassment from the boss. Then I did a quick stint at a health food store called The Green Earth. By this time, I was getting burnt on the aspect of selling food. I saw an ad looking for an assistant manager at a bead store, called Beadazzled, that was going to be opening on Charles Street. I applied and got the job immediately. I had always loved making things and this job gave me all the creative freedom I desired. I could do the window displays, teach jewelry making classes, find my love of polymer clay and adorn myself in beautiful jewels. And they were ok with my outwardly weirdo sensibilities. I was also playing in a couple of bands at that time. Both were popular in town, the first called Womyn of Destruction, Baltimore’s first Riot Grrrl band, which was followed by my next band, Gerty, that I formed with my new boyfriend, David Koslowski. We would go on month long tours across the country. Beadazzled allowed me the luxury of being able to come back to my job after these tours. It was perfect. I was there for six and half years until David and I decided to move the band to Chapel Hill, North Carolina, in hopes of better musical opportunities, as well as a safer and easier life.
It was here that I started my Personal Chef Service in 2000. Mind you, I had already been devouring cookbooks, studying recipes of various world cuisines and throwing heavily catered parties for my friends and family since college. I was also the person who would be whipping up late-night egg and cheese sandwiches for touring bands that were crashing at our house. I had always loved exploring new spices, ingredients and cooking techniques. When we moved to North Carolina, in 1998, I immediately found work as a manager of an imports store called T’Boli Imports. It was similar to Beadazzled except without all the beads. My husband and I were playing shows with our band every weekend and the boss was always cool enough to let me to go out on the road and, again, be able to come back to my job.
While I was there, I struck up a friendship with a regular customer named Brad, a thirty-something, who frequented the shop. He had told me that he and his wife were about to have a baby. He complained that they didn’t know what to do about meals and that they were both completely stressed out.
At the same time, one of my good friends, Brian, had told me about his boss having a Personal Chef. I was like, “What’s a Personal Chef?”. He told me that this woman owned a business where she would go to his boss’s home and make a weeks worth of meals for him and his wife in their kitchen. I asked Brian to see if he could get me the chef’s number.
A week later he had her contact information for me. I emailed the woman the next day. She responded back telling me that her company was so busy that she had 4 other women chefs working under her at various client’s houses. I told her about my background in cooking and she set up an audition for me to cook for her and the chefs. The following week I went to her home at around 4pm. She and the other 4 chefs were all there. She had 3 large bags of groceries on the counter and told me, “You have 2 hours to make us an an appetizer, an entree and something for desert.”, and she left me alone in the kitchen. I pulled out all the ingredients onto the table, surveyed what she had bought, devised a menu in minutes and began creating. I served them each course and then was asked to leave. The next day I received an email from the chef. She said, “the dishes were sublime”. I’ll never forget that. ‘Sublime’. I had to look up that word. I had no idea what that meant. She asked me to join her team and gave me a contract to look over and sign. I had a lawyer friend check it out before I would sign it, to which he said, “DO NOT SIGN THIS!”. It was a non-compete contract stating that if I quit working for her that I could not start my own business for two years and could not cook within 50 mile radius of her current clients. And she had clients ALL OVER the Raleigh/Durham/Chapel Hill area, locally known as “The Triangle”. I would have had an impossible time finding clients outside of those parameters. Knowing that I was on the right path making what she considered “sublime” food, I had the confidence to begin cooking for friends, using them as guinea pigs to get my systems in place. I came up with a company name, had a graphic design friend make me a logo and marketing pamphlets in exchange for meals for her and her husband and created my own client interview sheets. This company of mine helped me to continue playing music, putting out tens of records and continue my dream of being a rockstar…but, it also gave me a definite career that took me to more places I couldn’t even imagine. Food styling for TV shows and movies … Which brings me back to that customer named Brad at T’boli Imports… and the first story.
Until next week, Thanks for reading.
-Shirlé
**All names, places and occupations have been changed to protect the identity of all clients.
The connection I have with Marv and Sandy Savage forever changed the trajectory of my life in ways that still continue to unfold to this day and will be the subject of the second book I am writing entitled “And You And I”.
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