The Great and Magical Barbara Beck
The Great and Magical BB
I met B at a bar mitzvah I was catering in an airplane hangar. Yup, an airplane hangar. They had the kid ushered in, in a World War II fighter plane. A former Playboy centerfold held his hand and escorted him off the plane. She was a super-sexy, curvy lady more than 6 feet tall. He was a 12-year-old boy who looked 10. He was thrilled, of course. But every adult in the hanger had the same look on their face. Something between horror and revulsion. I started calling it the pedophile mitzvah, “Pitzvah” for short, but I digress.
My chef at the time, Miha, had talked me into hiring additional people to handle the volume and the difficult stations-style menu.
“Sweetie,” he said in his heavy Slovenian accent,” You cannot keep running like chicken head. You need help.”
“That’s chicken with its head cut off, not chicken head!” Miha had learned English, but idioms still mystified him.
When B entered the kitchen, she seemed shockingly tall. She was taller than average for sure, maybe 5 foot 8, but nothing extreme. Later on, I realized that it was because her posture was just so perfect. No one in a catering kitchen has good posture. We were all hunched over like camels, chopping herbs, slicing bread. B strode in like gazelle with these impossibly long legs. Her hair was white as snow. Graceful as she was, she was also three decades older than me. I figured I’d go soft on her.
I tried to give her easy jobs. “Can you slice the baguettes?”
“Sure,” she said snidely. She opened up her bag and pulled out a serrated knife perfect for the job, or for, perhaps, sawing down a small tree. After she quickly sliced the bread, she asked, “How about I set up the cheese table?”
“Set up the cheese table?” I was astounded. No one set up my cheese tables. I was famous for my cheese tables! When I first started my catering business, I felt so cocky about my cheese tables, I called my business Have Cheese Table, Will Travel. I kid you not. Hey this was the ’80s, an era of stupid business names.
“No, no that’s okay,” I said trying to hide how offended I felt.
Very quickly I got pulled in a thousand directions. The maître d’ needed to talk to me about the flow. The band had just arrived and wanted to know when they would be fed, even though dinner wasn’t for two hours. (I offered them two choices; raw meat or wait.) When I came back into the kitchen, B had taken over. She’d organized the hors d’oeuvres for the cocktail hour in one section, the food for the stations in another, the desserts in another. The kitchen suddenly made complete sense and no longer felt chaotic. It was a huge improvement, and everyone felt it, but I couldn’t get past her taking over without asking me.
“What do you think?” she asked proudly.
‘It’s okay,” I said bitterly.
We continued on all night, she vastly improving things, me refusing to compliment her because my ego was bruised. We were like two roosters in a hen house. At the end of the party, I was exhausted from running around decorating all the stations. B was in the kitchen in a lovely, chirpy mood. She’d asked a waiter to bring some celebratory wine and was enjoying a glass.
“No glass in the kitchen!” I barked. My cardinal rule. Always. One broken glass and you have to throw out all the food in its path.
“Pish posh,” she said, and poured her wine into a plastic cup.
At the end of the party, I felt ready to collapse. Miha saw me and smiled. “Sweetie. You have Bar ba raaaaa. She make stations beautiful! Let her do dessert table.”
“Okay,” I said begrudgingly, too tired to fathom making anything else look pretty.
I still don’t understand what B did to this dessert table. We had two or three flowers left to garnish with and a few extra tablecloths. But somehow B built this giant three-dimensional sculpture by stacking boxes, covering them with swirls of tablecloths. She had the cookies and mini pies and berries and chocolates cascading in what felt like waterfalls of sweets. She opened her bag, pulled out a pair of clippers and ran around trimming off greens from every flower arrangement in the hanger. The dessert table looked like a scene from Willy Wonka. Utterly beautiful.
“How on earth did you do that?” I asked astonished.
“Oh that. It’s just about making a silk purse out of a sow’s ear.”
“A what?”
“Maybe next time you can get me something to garnish with.”
“You got it.”
The next time I saw B was at a wedding I was catering in Long Island City. We were under the gun, and I still hadn’t started setting up the large cheese table for the cocktail hour.
“Shit, shit, shit,” I kept mumbling.
“Sweetie, let Bar ba raaaaa do it. She make table beautifullll,” Miha opined.
“Fine!” I said, feeling angry. I was overwhelmed. I had to put my pride away.
“B! You want to make the cheese table?”
“But of course!” she said giddily. “Is it the sow’s ear, silk purse again? Or do I have any garnish?”
“The florist left three roses and one branch, but we’ve got a lot of bread.”
“Okay then.”
It’s hard to describe what B did after that. At one point I saw her attaching a giant focaccia to the wall behind the cheese table.
Margot the maître d’, a no-nonsense woman from Long Island came over, “What’s she got in that red bag of hers, a stapler?”
An hour later, I was busy garnishing the hors d’oeuvre trays when Margot came in. “Girl. You need to see this.”
There standing before me was a giant cheese table that looked like it was exploding in color. The entire back wall was now made of focaccia, with mountains of red grapes, cut cheese and sausages cascading down swirls of tablecloths.
“No! Not yet! Oh, pish posh. I didn’t want you to see it yet. I’m not done!”
“What on earth could you do more than this?” I asked.
B arranged an explosion of baguettes from a milk crate she’d covered entirely in a red silk tablecloth. I tried to be polite about what it looked like but couldn’t help myself.
“It’s a giant orgasm!”
From that point on, I nicknamed B The Fluffer. She became part of our regular team. Within weeks, I couldn’t imagine catering an event without her.
There were days in the kitchen when our entire team of cooks, all of whom were 30 or 40 years younger than B, were simply spent by the end of the cooking day, but B would stride in with her 10-foot-long legs announcing, “Oh darling, I just had the most fabulous Pilates class!” Or “I just had a wonderful doubles tennis match.”
I found out she’d been dancer on Broadway. That didn’t surprise me one little bit.
She must have been one hell of a dancer. Miha was watching “Will and Grace” one night when he heard Jack announce, “You ain’t no Barbara Beck!” to a character who had attempted a high kick.
Understandably, it took B awhile to warm up to me. You know, the two-rooster, one-hen house thing. But once she did, she simply refused to have anyone else ride in the van next to her. She drove her minivan. I sat in the front seat next to her. That was the rule. The rest of the staff went in the other van.
The first few years, our small talk was about the party we were about to cater and any details worth going over. One day, she started chatting about her pre-catering life. She told me that after she’d been aged out of dancing, she switched to making costumes, doing all the sewing herself. Was there anything this woman couldn’t do? She then found her way into catering, as a bartender first. Pretty much the way I found my way into catering. Our conversations were pleasant and funny, but they never went deep. We respected each other, and that was good enough.
Our friendship crossed another threshold during the trip to Arizona in 2021, when Barbara made sure that our loving friends Celeste and Charmaine made it to Sedona to see the play adapted from my book. The highlight was the Vortex mountain tour. Lordy, that was a glorious trip. I have thanked god for it many times since then. Especially after we lost B.
The first van ride to a party after Sedona, BB spilled her guts. No not literally. She began to tell me deep, personal things about her life and her losses and her regrets. I tried to stay quiet and supportive. I didn’t want to do anything to change the subject. I knew what a huge compliment this was.
When Barbara got ill and it became clear how terribly ill, she was, I sent her gifts. Celeste offered suggestions. “She loves horses!”
I sent her movies about horses, healthy snack food, documentaries, anything I could think of.
She called me just thrilled with her gifts.
“Ohhh. … They are lovely!”
But when I continued to send gifts, she called to reprimand me.
“I sense some remorse from you,” She said.
“Is it not okay to be sad?”
“Ohhh. There’s plenty of time for that later. I have no complaints! 84 years! I’ve had a wonderful life! I have no complaints at all!”
I was able to see BB one last time before she left us. I braced myself for what she might look like. When I walked downstairs to her suite in friends Harry and Dotty’s house, I found her reclining. She looked elegant and beautiful, like the queen of England.
“You could at least have the decency to look like crap!” I said laughing.
Upstairs in the sunny greeting room. She sat in a comfy chair, and we chatted.
I felt helpless to fix her situation, so tried to cheer her up. I recounted stories of the glorious tables she’d built for me over the years.
Once again, BB reprimanded me. “Oh, pish posh! Enough about me! What else is going on!”
We chatted about lots of things that afternoon; how happy she was that her ex-, Joy, had come to see her, the Patterson Falls, catering, what one must do to retire.
“Don’t waste another minute!” was her advice.
It didn’t seem like it mattered much that I’d come to see her, but when I stood up to leave, she seemed suddenly filled with loss.
“Ohhhhh. You’re leaving?!”
I bent down and hugged her. Trying not to cry. I knew that would not be to her liking.
“I’m sure I’ll see you again before I die,” she said softly and out of character.
I see Barbara all the time. Every time I or Celeste builds a buffet or a cheese table. I see her in the mornings when I start my day by bending down to touch my toes, then slowly rise, vertebrae by vertebrae, the stretch she taught me when I complained my back hurt.
When I complete the stretch, I often whisper, “Thank you Barbara.”
More than anyone I have ever met in my life, Barbara Beck lived.
Some days, when I prefer to stay home and watch television rather than going out to a play, or to hear music or for a long walk on the water, I hear her voice.
“Don’t waste another minute!”
