Author's Note

This is a work of nonfiction. Everything in it is true and nothing has been omitted. A few exceptions and clarifications are, however, necessary because I'm worried about what I mean by the words true and nothing.

It is true, for example, that I worked at McDonald's in 1977 after being fired as an Ice Angel on The Donny and Marie tv show. It was a nadir in my professional life as an entertainer, which I faithfully portrayed in the book, but the nadir was not without a few perqs such as the free quarter-pounder cheeseburgers. In fact, McDonald's is where I finally started to get in touch with the real me; that is to say, the real big me. In addition to my duties as the fry station operator during the lunch rush --a part I never leave out since people immediately understand the lunacy of the term fry station operator, as if managing hot fat and cardboard sleeves is somehow equivalent to flying a space shuttle --my duties also included local marketing, i.e., throwing the kiddie birthday parties. I suppose my employer thought that my background in the performing arts would be an asset for the S.T.A.R. position, an acronym for Store something something Representative. As the S.T.A.R. I discovered that I didn't have the stomach for watching children eat, and since parenthood clearly requires providing food regularly to offspring and seeing that it is consumed and cleaning up afterward, I was able to access and acknowledge the not-maternal-material me.

For artistic reasons I've also chosen to meld my experiences as a waitress at Dee's Restaurant into the McDonald's experience. The dramatic tension of the story was simply better if it seemed that I was plucked from a chilly ice rink to be an Ice Angel on a weekly variety show taped in Orem, Utah, when in fact I was holding down the six-to-midnight shift at Dee's after teaching ice skating during the day. The only thing this adjustment to reality caused me to sacrifice was a description of the apparatus I used every night before closing the restaurant to refill the ketchup bottles. Basically, you dump the contents of all the partially empty bottles into a vat and then extrude what's in the vat into the empty bottles and recap them so that it appears to the customers who arrive at six a.m. and want ketcup on their hash browns that new bottles have been supplied just for them. The bottles were never sanitized, I assure you, and I also assure you that I've never been able to use bottled ketchup in a restaurant ever since. At least McDonald's offered those hygenically sound individual-serving packets.

Because I didn't want to be sued for defamation, I've also eliminated certain details about Donny and about Marie and about their immediate family. What I did know, anyway, was minimal. I was part of the scenery, frankly; I and the other Ice Angels were like flats on a set. Only I was not exactly flat, being a little too fat even when hired, according to the standards set by the ABC network, which, through an intermediary informed me that the camera adds another ten pounds, like a tax or something for being famous or the backdrop for the truly famous--a so-called fact of entertainment life that about killed Marie, as far as I could tell, who looked great on camera and almost emaciated up close. And I remember feeling really sorry for her that one week when she was on The Master Cleanse, eating nothing but drinking from a plastic jug containing that concoction of lemon juice and molasses and paprika and some other stuff you can look up on Google if you're interested in convincing your body that the end of the world is upon it.

Here's what you can trust me on: the camera does add ten pounds; The Master Cleanse is devastating for your tooth enamel; quarter-pounders with cheese are the perfect antidote for an episode of depression, and unless you're eating at McDonald's bring your own ketchup.

Dawn Marano