IN THE BEGINNING THERE WAS TRATTORIA

One of the most pivotal friendships I made in Seattle after graduating from college in the late ‘70s was with an Italian American woman, Jackie Roberts, who had moved to Seattle from New York with her boyfriend and business partner. They had previously spent time in Italy and had fallen in love with the mom and pop bistros there and decided to open one in Seattle.

In the oldest part of Seattle, Pioneer Square, they discovered an abandoned diner from the 1930s and revamped it to resemble an authentic Italian-styled trattoria—and they called it Trattoria. Pioneer Square was experiencing a renaissance and was repopulating with serious artists and unique art galleries. There were jazz record shops, night clubs, and nice restaurants galore. There were bookstores and boutiques alongside the pawnshops, girly clubs, and the down-and-outers of skid row. Diversity at its finest.

    I met Jackie at a swinging party, hosted by one of the many new friends I made in Seattle after graduating college. He was also one of the first talented pianists I worked with, John Engerman. The party was an ongoing event at the Engerman residence, filled with actors and artists of all disciplines: performing, snorting coke and smoking weed, and bragging about their latest acting gigs while having romantic intrigues, sometimes falling in love and even getting married!

 I was often in attendance, as I considered them my new sophisticated friends who were in the arts, like I wanted to be.  This particular Sunday, I was in good form, very open to meeting new people who might help me get connected in theater or music. Jackie, new in town, fell in love with me since I reminded her of her!  Before the party was over, she offered me a job as a waitress at her new Trattoria if I needed a job. I was just out of college with a degree in theater and music, so it sounded perfectly logical to me!

At the Trattoria, I became the Pioneer Square lawyers’ favorite lunch counter experience—due to Jackie’s persuasive charm and her continuous prodding of me to sing.

But at the start, I didn’t sing. I was learning how to actually wait tables, something I had never done before. It was a relatively short work shift they offered me, from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. Monday through Friday: lunch rush. The Trattoria helped me to develop confidence dealing with “hungry” customers, which in a way, was similar to singing, only the audience is hungry for something else, and I had to deliver it.

First, I enjoyed the ease of cleaning off the tables. I had had plenty of experience doing that at home when I was a young girl with three brothers. Gee, I was getting the hang of being a waitress. I could do this!

 The table cloths were vintage patterns of red and green flower prints made of oilcloth. These table cloths were novel, having been utilized by postwar Americana truck-stop cafes: they never wore out. Other popular eateries soon started using them, but Jackie instigated that craze, along with many other trends in Seattle.

Jackie created the cozy, funky, family-like ambiance in that corner café, ensconced in large windows overlooking both Yesler Street and Post Alley. Yesler was named after one of the first pioneers who bought up and developed early Seattle. It was an active, long street, lined with funky as well as smart art galleries, jazz clubs, and beauty salons, and it went all the way east to Lake Washington. Rent was cheap, so artists’ studios and galleries straddled every block in the vicinity of Pioneer Square.

Every week Trattoria offered a new “lunch special.” Everything was popular, even a bizarre mélange of dandelions and wild greens on pasta. I loved the almond torte, ricotta cheese pie, and Carmela—all unusual for Seattle at that time, and tasty!

Since it was a compact restaurant, all tables and swivel seats at the counter/horseshoe bar were normally occupied during the lunch hour. There were hungry judges in white shirts, magistrates, and both novice and cut-throat lawyers. We fed various stragglers who worked for the City at the Public Safety Building and promising young artists who lived in warehouses and loft spaces in Pioneer Square’s old deserted buildings. This was during the grand resurgence of Art in the late ‘70s that totally revamped Seattle and added to its quirky personality.

Our customers would enter the ambience provided by Jackie’s LPs—a veritable smorgasbord of Mediterranean crooners, like Louis Prima, operatic favorites, and eclectic jazz I hadn’t heard before like Esther Saterfield, Chuck Mangione, and Dakota Staton. The records were stacked next to the record player, which Jackie took charge of.

Once customers were seated, diners scanned the menu, and I’d take their order. Then they’d chat or discuss their briefs (for a short ten minutes) until the food came. When everyone was seated and served, tables turned once during this two-hour lunch service. It was fun to watch serious faces digging into their steaming plates—perfectly cooked pasta or an overloaded meatball sandwich—with large paper napkins tucked into their shirts.

I usually wore tight, low-waisted bell-bottom blue jeans and a tie-dyed, shirt. The café provided a clean apron that I wrapped around my waist good and snug. I was currently taking the pill, so my boobs felt huge. I didn’t really like that look, but at the time it seemed I was stuck with it, and I noticed it worked for this clientele.

One day while I hurried in to work (a railroad crossing had forced me to be late), I tried to explain to Jackie that “I had to wait for the train.” She thought I was making a sexual innuendo and laughed at my feeble excuse. She had a more sexually explicit humor than I understood. Almost getting high that day from the intoxicating smell of garlic, I thought what a great marketing strategy it was to have the kitchen sautéing garlic in butter and letting that aroma waft onto the street! It was the perfect ruse to seductively bring in random customers who at first weren’t even sure they were hungry! But once they were seated and reading the short menu, then they were off to the races.

One step inside the Trattoria, you’d meet the consoling smell of chicken soup bubbling away, along with the aroma of tomatoey Marinera sauce—very appetite enhancing! Working there, it was easy to put on the pounds because I got to eat whatever I wanted at the end of my shift—except the deserts, thank God.

I couldn’t remember anyone ever mentioning that pasta could make you fat. I didn’t especially care for it as a kid. As I grew up, we’d never eaten pasta with just garlic and butter. We were Sicilian; we didn’t mess around with that kind of sissy Italian fare! My family sautéed garlic in olive oil and anchovies. Then we added parsley or flavor-laden sugo made of ox tails and pork bones. (No wonder I avoided it as a kid. I would become a vegetarian within the next decade and never look back.)

But pasta with garlic and butter was an entirely different thing! Now as a blossoming young woman of marriageable age, I was bringing on the baby fat again. I felt a little “chubby,” but Jackie assured me that I was simply voluptuous. Which I appreciated, but didn’t particularly like. The owners, Jackie and her boyfriend, were equal-opportunity employers. They often generously hired street drunks to be the dishwashers when the sober ones didn’t show up.

After work hours, sometimes Jackie and I would hang out together, chatting about our as-of-yet untold futures. One day Jackie confronted me directly—something I normally discouraged people from doing.

“Julie, what do you really want to do with your life?” (I wondered if she was thinking of letting me go?)

I felt uncomfortable, but couldn’t dodge it. “I’ve been considering getting a job as a Metro bus driver.”

Jackie reacted with total revulsion. “Julie, if you do something like that, it’s going to ruin your whole life!”

So, I blurted out, “I wanna sing!”

“You say you wanna sing? So, then SING!” She made it sound like, “Just do it, for God’s sake! It’s not that hard, if it’s your passion.” I needed someone to say things like that to me.

Soon the day came when Jackie and I agreed that I would sing! Every seat at the horseshoe counter had been served—spaghetti and meat balls, or linguini and clam sauce, or Cascioppo’s Italian sausage sandwich—and everyone was happily inhaling their juicy dish of pasta. With all that eating and very little talking, there was a slight lull.

I took a moment to catch my breath. Jackie looked at me, eyebrows raised in a question. I nodded, secretly wishing I didn’t look like some overworked, overweight, voluptuous waitress. Suddenly, very abruptly, Jackie lifted the needle off the current record, and she yelled, “Okay, Julie!” (Like I needed her to tell me!)

A dramatic Mario Lanza tune seemed to fly out of my mouth totally acapella! With my whole self, I sang “Be My Love, and with your kisses set me yearning!”

Except for my singing, the room went eerily silent. At first their jaws dropped! But when they realized that they knew me (oh yeah, she’s the one who took our order), then they relaxed and resumed eating. Occasionally, as they chomped away, they’d stop and listen as I cautiously meandered around the horseshoe, smiling coquettishly at anyone whose eye I could catch, wanting to make everyone feel included.

After I sang the last note, the applause was shockingly boisterous!

From then on, I was more than a waitress.  Every weekday at noon, the lunch counter was taken over by a variety of lawyers, clerks, and judges, parading in to eat a succulent, inexpensive Italian lunch. And almost every day I broke into one of Mario Lanza’s semi-operatic, full-voiced songs: “You Are My Love” or a rousing “Come Prima, Come Prima, I'm In Love!” or an anthem “You Light Up My 'Lunch',” (Cindy Boon’s big hit). It was at that time that I started to take liberties with lyrics and make them more pertinent to the situation. I mainly sang just one song each day. It wasn’t something I particularly wanted to overdo. (Keep ‘em wanting more, ya know?)

I transported these guys in three-piece suits back to a Felliniesque village in Sicily. At first they were alarmed, then slowly but surely, charmed. This was exciting—a sort of daily marathon! And I helped make it happen. Soon popular word-of-mouth made the Trattoria super lively with business. I hoped someone handsome and successful might discover me, fall in love with me, and take me away from this job (which eventually seemed to happen, but nothing serious.) Whatever opportunities came my way, I tried to make them work for me like stepping stones.

I’d proven myself as a spontaneous, instantaneous singing waitress who could think on her feet. And the tips they left informed me that they liked it!

This eventually paid off when I was issued parking tickets. I’d be summoned to assert my “innocence” for getting parking violations. (Seattle use to be a gentle town to drive and park in.) I always chose to show up at the courthouse to contest the ticket, as I had more time than money! Explaining the circumstances to one of those kindly middle-aged judges often got the infraction dismissed. Through working the lunch counter, I got to know many affiliates in the judicial system. And my traffic tickets became insignificant, unnecessary demands placed upon me—the charming, singing Italian waitress to the judges (who might say, “Looks like the meter maid overestimated the time you spent in the ‘loading zone,’ I dismiss this case.”).

 Together, both Jackie and me and the cafe added perfectly to the old-world charm of Pioneer Square, transforming the once-strategic corner of Post Alley and Yesler into almost the “Little Italy” of Pioneer Square. Plus, Trattoria featured my family’s Italian Sausage! Which wasn’t quite as famous as it is today.

It was novel, being a singing waitress. And Jackie was a good friend. I did it to please her, and in exchange, my tips increased, and it somehow guided me to pick up where I had left off singing with Bill in cocktail lounges in California. It inspired me to go on a diet and start building a real career, this time on my own terms.