As I stood over the largest frying pan I’ve ever seen, about to
dump calamari into a mixture of olive oil and vermouth that was
inevitably going to spit a several foot plume of fire within inches
of my face, two questions ran through my head:
”
How did I get myself into this?
”
and
”
How flammable is my face?
”
Gilroy – As I stood over the largest frying pan I’ve ever seen, about to dump calamari into a mixture of olive oil and vermouth that was inevitably going to spit a several foot plume of fire within inches of my face, two questions ran through my head: “How did I get myself into this?” and “How flammable is my face?”
I knew the answer to the first. The Dispatch assigned me to be the “Super Volunteer” and try as many Garlic Festival volunteer duties as possible. On Saturday, the first leg of my volunteering marathon, performing a flare-up in Gourmet Alley and getting a taste of what local chefs do day in and day out at the Festival was one of those duties.
The answer to my second question? Well, I was about to find that one out.
With my patient instructor, Gourmet Alley assistant chair Ken Fry, standing over my shoulder feeding me directions, I pulled the pan back off the heat and yelled the customary warning call: “Fire in the hole!”
Then I dumped the seafood into the pan and said a little prayer.
Up came the flames, and as promised, they were searing. Sixteen to seventeen hundred degrees of heat right in front of me.
In the words of Paris Hilton, that’s hot.
When it was done, I picked up the large pan and dumped its contents into the container from which it would be served. Away from the heat pit, I felt my hot skin begin to cool off. I put both hands to my face.
I still had my eyebrows, but I felt like I’d just had an extreme facial. And I only did one flare-up. The real pros on Gourmet Alley stand over the fire doing this all day, every day of the festival.
Next, I was ushered over to help prepare some shrimp scampi with chef Dave Bozzo.
“Do I have to yell ‘Fire in the hole?'” I asked him as I got ready to put the shrimp in.
“You don’t have to, but you can if you want,” he said.
Joking, he shouted, “Shrimp in the hole!”
I dumped in the shrimp, which doesn’t flare up like the calamari. But for some reason, the heat was even worse. And there had to be onion in there or something because that, mixed with the heat, was burning my eyeballs and making me cry in front of dozens of festival-goers who were watching the chefs perform.
Earlier in Gourmet Alley, I helped stir a 20-gallon barrel of red calamari sauce with a large oar. The calamari sauce fills two of the four barrels – the other two are shrimp scampi and butter for garlic bread – manned by volunteers Dean Raymond and Dave Bruni.
My third Gourmet Alley task was helping assemble Combo Plate No. 2. While others filled the plate with garlic marinated mushrooms, garlic chicken stir fry, garlic sausage and shrimp scampi, I added the finishing touches: A piece of garlic bread and a fork. It took every inch of my will power to not stuff a piece of the bread in my mouth when no one was looking.
Come Sunday morning, it was time for me to leave the friendly confines of Gourmet Alley, where I was only heckled once for my Chicago Cubs shirt.
The first task was the one that from the beginning, I had looked forward to least: Trash duty. Or, as Festival President Jennifer Speno, called it, refuse, which sounds a lot nicer.
I joined the Gilroy Xtreme’s 13-and-under baseball team father-and-son crew of Mel Shields (the driver), his son Patrick, and Pat Chris and his son, Taylor. I jumped in the back of the trailer that held the collected trash – yes, riding right alongside the garbage is a job requirement – and we headed off.
“The food is where it gets messy,” Pat Chris said. Fortunately, I didn’t have to encounter much of that. I picked up mostly broken-down cardboard boxes as we circled the outer limits of the festival behind the food tents.
I was left with our load o’ rubbish at the compactor as I got ready to head over to the transportation area for my next task: Helping deliver lunches to the parking shuttle bus drivers.
I met up with transportation chair Garry Offenberg, smack-dab in the middle of the last day of his four-years with transportation, which is in charge of the parking lots and bus shuttles to the festival grounds.
We headed out to the parking lots – quite possibly the hottest location on earth – where members of the Sobrato High football team, the Odyssey Theater Company and the Gilroy Presbyterians directed people where to park and then ushered them on to shuttle buses.
As we continued on, Offenberg points out Dave’s Hill, an actual hill run by Dave Hill, a sergeant with the California Highway Patrol, who can see the 101 from his perch and informs everyone else about the local traffic.
“We call him God,” Offenberg said with a smile. “He runs our life, our destiny.”
When we get back to the main grounds, I tell Offenberg how I’ve been so impressed with all the volunteers I’ve met so far. Despite the long hours, heat and less-than-savory job duties, it seems like everyone takes great pride in being a Garlic Festival volunteer.
Offenberg believed that attitude comes from former executive director Dick Nicholls, who died after a three-month battle with cancer a month and a half before the start of the festival.
“He made you feel like you were the most important guy in the world,” Offenberg said.
I said goodbye to Offenberg, who also hails from the outskirts of Chicago. I was ready to tackle my final task: Information booth duty.
Information chair Mollie Botill happily greeted me outside the booth near the Gazebo Stage. She tells me the three tents were fighting over who would get me.
Why people would be fighting over someone so uninformed as me for their information tent, I have no idea. But it was nice to be wanted.
FYI to future Garlic Fest workers, the information booth has got to be volunteer heaven. There’s no physical labor, all the water you can drink and the most coveted festival resource of all: Shade.
But there is one downfall: Stupid questions. It was my first grade teacher who said, “There’s no such thing as a stupid question.”
Um, yes, there is. And information booth leader Lynnie Nojadera assures me she hears several of them a day.
I take my place at the front of the booth just in time to hear one.
“So I know I take the shuttle bus to the parking lot. Then what?” one woman asks volunteer Cecile Mantecon.
Mantecon states, “You go to your car.”
The woman was actually looking to get directions out of Gilroy, which Mantecon was able to provide. The woman should just be glad she didn’t come to me first. Something sarcastic and uncalled for would probably have slipped out of my mouth. I’m just an amateur next to these pro volunteers when it comes to customer service.
At my post, I sell a lot of water (the most popular item), some programs, one bottle of sunscreen and give a couple what I now believe were wrong directions to the Jelly Belly tent. It’s time for me to retire, I decide.
As I gather my things to leave my last and final volunteer post, I felt a twinge of sadness. I really enjoyed being a volunteer and being around all the wonderful people who donate their time to make the Garlic Festival one of the best food festivals in the country. It’s a mighty contingent and makes this Midwestern native a little bit prouder to be an adopted member of the Gilroy community.
If I’m lucky, maybe I’ll get to do this again next year.
