Finishing School

Life Lessons at the Etiquette Dinner

BY SAM COCHRAN

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Illustration by Hilary Falb
Spoon and Fork

THERE WAS NO ONE IN SIGHT when I entered the Faculty Club at eight o'clock, sharp. It was the night of the annual etiquette dinner, hosted several weeks ago by Brown Career Services for graduating seniors as part of Career Week. Tickets to the event typically sell out, and driven by morbid curiosity, I had successfully secured a spot. With my meal paid for in advance-the vegetarian option, because it was cheaper-I expected to find someone at the door weeding out scavengers, or at least providing name tags. It was only when I entered the dining room to find everyone already seated that I sensed my intrusion. Servers in high-collared burgundy uniforms cleared soup bowls from the tables around which groups of my peers sat with straight backs and convivial smiles. The room breathed a collective sigh of digestive relief as everyone folded their napkins in their laps. Their eyes turned to me. I was two hours late.

The etiquette dinner is essentially a crash course in table manners, created in the hope of teaching students how to behave in the business dinners and interviews that will soon consume their professional lives. Upon entering corporate America, one faux pas-one spilled drink, one elbow on the table, one crumpled napkin-could cost you the deal, or worse, your career. It's true: studies indicate that humans communicate roughly 90 percent of all meaning non-verbally, through signals such as body language, dress and appearance. In today's increasingly tight job market, prospective employers want to see that an applicant can behave appropriately in both formal and casual settings. Proper table manners, Career Services contends, thus ensure a competitive edge.

Stick A Fork In Me, I'm Done

My neighbor quickly brought me up to speed on what I had missed in the first two hours. Using my untouched place setting as her demo, she identified the function and order of use of each piece of silverware. Forks and knives sat in crisp formation to the right and left of the plate. "Always move from the outside in," she explained in a polite yet eerily robotic voice reminiscent of a Stepford wife. From the left it went salad fork, fish fork, meat fork, and from the right likewise salad knife, fish knife, meat knife. The dessert spoon and fork sat parallel to each other above the plate, and the soup spoon beyond the knives to the right. It all seemed simple enough, and I was happy to receive the abridged version. If only I hadn't missed the soup.

Our fearless leader in the battle against bad habits was Agnes Doody, Professor Emeritus of Communication at the University of Rhode Island. Dr. Doody appeared to me the patron saint of once-upon-a-time. Her hair sat in a braided bun atop her head like that of a sikh. She wore a purple tweed pantsuit with matching purple jewelry-earrings that brushed her shoulders and a brooch that sealed a high-collared, silk blouse. Her body bore the dimensions of someone who had shrunk, with arms that hung from a collapsed spine to well past her knees. She looked alternately like a cane-wielding headmistress and a Christian missionary on safari.

I stared at my classmates as the main course arrived. Across the room one girl had assumed a smile so saccharine that no one dared talk to her. At a different table, a boy sat so stiffly he appeared to be dead. No one knew where to put their hands, which migrated from lap to tabletop, and back. Doody circled the room.

The scene was at once reassuring and depressing. I was relieved to find that many of my peers felt as uncertain and anxious as I did about life after college-anxious enough, that is, to spend an evening discussing cutlery. The fact remained, however, that we had reached a juncture in our lives: from this point forward things as meaningless as fish forks and meat forks could potentially dictate our professional success, arguably our entire adult happiness. Even now, I can think of few things less encouraging than to learn that all of a sudden forks matter-a lot.

Like most people, I felt troubled. While others labored over instructions, I dwelled on the night's greater message:this is your last chance to get it together. I know I am not alone when I say that I have spent the past four years developing and indulging in bad habits,be they dietary, hygienic, sexual or psychological. Just ask Charlotte Simmons. We, my sleep deprived, sexually depraved peers and I, have done so under the condition that college doesn't count, knowing very well that come graduation we will have to stop-no more days on end without showering, no more five day weekends, no more reckless abandon.We cannot possibly behave this way in the real world. As that day fast approaches, the time has come to take our first steps towards social propriety, so the etiquette dinner suggests.

What Would Doody Do?

How had Doody done it, I wondered. Fascinated by this veritable Muppet of a woman, I googled her as soon as I got home. I immediately unearthed bits and pieces of her past, not enough to form a coherent life story but enough nonetheless to satisfy my immediate curiosity. Dr. Doody, I learned, began teaching at URI in 1958. Originally the director of Forensics, what was then part of the Department of Speech and Theatre, Doody founded the Department of Communication Studies in 1967 and served as its chair until her retirement in 2003. During that time the department grew to be the largest undergraduate major, and Doody-Hurricane Agnes to her devoted students-garnered celebrity status across campus thanks to her braided bun and purple garb.

Hurricane indeed. Doody's past, I soon discovered, was littered with controversy. Born to a farmer in North Branford, Connecticut, she was the first girl to win the Connecticut State Animal Fair for her cows, and the first girl on her high school rifle team. During World War II, she lied about her age to join the civil air patrol. In college she was expelled for hitchhiking. Not simply the product of youth, Doody continued to create commotion well into her adult life. As a professor, Doody coached students to join the freedom riders, fought the URI President for merit raises for female faculty, and took out full-page newspaper ads attacking President Nixon. Complacent Dr. Doody was not.

This was hardly the sort of behavior I would have expected from the woman who, only hours earlier, had taught me how to properly butter my roll. I envisioned her instead as a classmate of my grandmother's at Miss Porter's School for Girls in Farmington, Connecticut where young ladies of their day learned to walk with books balanced on their heads, sit with legs gracefully crossed and sip with pinkies purposefully raised. She belonged among debutantes, not prize-winning cows; in a country club, not the passenger seat of a stranger's pickup truck. It was hard to believe that anyone who had not been force-fed curtsies and waltzes since a young age (and certainly not anyone that had been expelled from school) could remain so committed to traditions as antiquated as place settings. Somehow Doody, with no silver spoon to speak of, continued not only to practice but preach such customs while even my grandmother, a finishing school graduate, would now just as soon eat with her hands and Miss Porters itself has become a breeding ground for lesbians.

The discrepancies between Dr. Doody's decorous present and indecorous past only fueled further questions:When was it that the Hurricane reformed, that she pulled herself together? Did she at all? From what I could gather Doody had managed to reconcile her checkered past with her current status as etiquette queen. Propriety, her bio suggested, did not preclude controversy. Unfortunately, the internet is good for only so much. Ultimately, the truth did not matter-the uncertainty itself quelled my anxiety. There may well be a world where forks and spoons matter, but there is also a world where they don't; and so long as I live in the latter, I'll remain in no rush to enter the former. Even though they-Career Services, Morgan Stanley, the Man-will insist it's my last chance to get it together, I'll choose instead to just revel in the disgusting lifestyle I've created.

For the final course, Dr. Doody challenged us with inherently sloppy, difficult-to-eat dishes: fettucine with pesto for the vegetarians, chicken breast on the bone for everyone else. Both foods required such superhuman finesse to eat that even the most experienced diner would avoid them in a professional setting. People at my table struggled with their food. Whereas one guy poked so feebly at his chicken you would think it was still alive, another cut his with enough precision to intimidate even the most conservative employer. Meanwhile a girl stabbed her pasta with such force that she sent pesto deep into her cleavage. Doody advised us to steer clear of these items at all costs. "Stick with salmon," she said. "Salmon's safe."

Sam Cochran B'05 belongs among prize-winning cows, not debutantes

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