A friend of mine called me a “singing waiter.” This was new slang to me, and I didn’t want to throw a good glass of pinot noir at him until I knew the deal.
“Your career is bifurcated between making art and making media,” he explained.
I blinked until he explained what “bifurcated” meant too.
I replied that I was making a living.
After he stopped laughing, he said that’s why I’m a singing waiter—I’m sublimating my art into the day job.
I made a case for being a practitioner of the “fine art of media,” which convinced neither of us.
A fancy business newsletter I read encourages brands to identify tensions in our culture and market their resolution. The go-to example is usually some do-gooder company that helps high-end consumers assuage their guilty participation in an inherently exploitative capitalist system by leveraging part of their purchase into the service of a cause. These companies proliferated in the aughts and teens.
Now, a tension I perceive amongst my cohort is this singing waiter issue my pal sees in me: Creative people have arts-adjacent careers but aren’t necessarily working artists. We live in Wine Country, but few can afford the Wine Country lifestyle sold to tourists. It proliferates from here—into housing, into time, into the quiet erosion of the hours one might otherwise spend making something strange and possibly great.
Sure, there has never been a true meritocracy in the arts, but there also has never been an algorithm that can make some gibberish on TikTok the font of a sustainable career as a “creator.” Yay, more tension to resolve. I don’t have the word count for that here, but suffice it to say: Live your legend now. Flip the script on arts-adjacency. Be like the raver in the ’90s who asked me what I do “on the side”—as if a career was merely a means of supporting a primary occupation as a raver. There’s wisdom in that inversion.
If you’re a singing waiter, like me, sing louder—sing weird, profane ballads about the life you’re actually living. Let them curl out into the room, into the margins, into the in-between spaces where your aesthetic DNA has already taken root like tendrils in the imaginations of others. That’s the work. Not someday—now, between shifts.
Who knows who will hear it? One of the earliest known singing waiters was Izzy Baline at a hotel bar in 1905. He later changed his name to Irving Berlin and wrote “Puttin’ on the Ritz.”
Super-duper.
Daedalus Howell is editor of this paper, host of ‘The Drive’ on 95.5 FM, and sings loud as the director of ‘Werewolf Serenade’ and a newsletterist at dhowell.com.
