by Erin Moore
Eminent actors, writers, and theaters jump at the chance to participate in this seasonal madness. The first Panto I ever saw was at the venerable Old Vic in London. It was a parody of Cinderella written by Stephen Fry. In the previous year’s production, Sir Ian McKellen had starred as the Pantomime Dame, the Widow Twankey. This allowed the Guardian’s reviewer, Michael Billington, to get in on the fun, proclaiming that “at least we can tell our grandchildren that we saw McKellen’s Twankey, and it was huge.” Pantomime’s commercial appeal is ironclad, as it pulls in all ages, both seasoned theatergoers and those who see one play a year. A good one can sell out six to eight weeks’ worth of performances in spite of competition from parties and other Christmas entertainments. If you’re going to your first Panto, be prepared to laugh yourself hoarse at half the jokes, and to need the other half explained to you.
Pantomime is practically unknown in America. This doesn’t mean that American stars can’t get in on the action—but it does mean that those who do are usually brought in mainly for their novelty value. In recent years, both David Hasselhoff and Vanilla Ice have played Captain Hook in regional English theaters (Bristol and Chatham, respectively). As I write this, Henry Winkler—the Fonz himself—is playing Hook in Liverpool. Emma Samms of Dynasty and Pamela Anderson have gamely played a Good Fairy and Aladdin’s Genie, though Anderson admitted that when she first agreed to appear in a Liverpool pantomime, she thought it was “miming in a box, which wasn’t the case but I already said I would do it.” On that note, it seems appropriate to leave Crimbo with the ominous words of Jacob Marley’s ghost, reminding us that “no space of regret can make amends for one life’s opportunity misused.”
Tip
In which a gracious art is defended from its detractors.
In English English, the word tip has several meanings. As in American English, it can be a gratuity given for service. But a tip can also be a garbage dump. This dual meaning is appropriate, and rather funny, since most English people regard American tipping habits as a load of old rubbish. One of the most common complaints the English make after visiting America is that everyone who serves them seems to have his hand out for a handout. The BBC’s Kevin Connolly captured the prevailing spirit nicely when he griped that “almost every transaction you undertake in America is booby-trapped with social awkwardness.” One of the more extremely worded complaints came from Max Wooldridge, travel writer for the Daily Mail:
I am constantly amazed that everyone in the US has blindly accepted tipping as a way of life. The transatlantic slave trade was tolerated for many years but that didn’t make it right. Different world religions are universally accepted but you are free not to subscribe to them . . . But when it comes to tipping, in the US at least, you are forced to participate whether you agree with it or not. And worse, if you moan about it for even a second you are immediately labeled a tight-wad or a pocket-patter.
One would think, given the invective directed toward American tipping by the English, that England and America had wildly divergent tipping practices. This is not the case. Americans are slightly more generous than the English when it comes to tipping. Americans tend to tip 20 percent, rather than the 10–15 percent that is standard in England. But it’s the culture around tipping—who and when and why we tip—that is the source of this seemingly disproportionate angst.
Travel websites and newspaper articles bristle with warnings about the “notoriously fearsome” (the Telegraph) tipping culture in America. Stories abound of vacationing Brits being chased out of restaurants by American servers, irate at having been tipped half what they expected. One Englishman told the BBC he had abandoned tipping altogether and was instead leaving his servers preprinted thank-you cards. (If he tried this in New York he would have to be carried out of the restaurant in a body bag.) His approach is not the norm—most vacationing Brits go ahead and follow American tipping protocol, even though many later go online and declare it mad (crazy).
Often their annoyance is focused on the fact that most tipped workers—particularly restaurant servers—do not earn a living wage in America. In some states, their employers are legally allowed to pay them as little as $2.13 an hour, with the understanding that their tips make up the rest. Many English tourists argue that it is shameful for such a rich country to treat its workers so poorly and that they, the consumers, should not have to bear the burden of America’s low minimum wage. Not to mention that cash tipping enables tax evasion on the part of restaurants and workers alike. They do have a point. But most high-minded rants about labor laws eventually give way to more mundane concerns: The English find American-style tipping awkward, and they resent being considered cheap if they don’t pony up. This particularly rankles when it comes to bartenders. English bartenders don’t expect tips, and are happy to be bought the occasional drink by their regulars, who signal their intentions by saying “and one for yourself” when it’s time to pay. No wonder they marvel that bartenders in the United States expect one to two dollars per drink. Why should they pay extra to people fulfilling their basic job requirements?
In England all staff over twenty-one are paid a minimum wage of £6.31 per hour (about $9.50), tipped or not. Since the 1943 Catering Wages Act, service employees have been guaranteed a wage that significantly reduces their dependence on tips. In recent years, most restaurants have even embraced the Continental practice of adding a standard service charge that takes the place of a tip, and printing “service included” on their bills to let customers know. A couple of generations in England have grown up with this model, and that explains why the American system seems ridiculous to them. It’s not that they are cheap, it’s just that tipping is not as universal—or as important—in England as it is in America. The English aren’t used to it, and it makes them nervous. Some sources of information on tipping magnify this anxiety with a nannying tone. The TripAdvisor website shames would-be tippers with lines like “In the UK, the price you pay for a spa treatment is all-inclusive. You are not expected to secrete money somewhere about your person in order to tip your masseur!” In the United States, this is considered something of an art form, as is palming the cash for the coat-check person, such that it is never flashed but covertly passed at the same time your coat is returned. In England there is a little metal tray by the coat check and people who choose to tip ping pound coins into it as loudly as possible so their generosity will not be missed by anyone within five feet.
Americans are alternately proud and defensive of their tipping habits. They are not immune from anxiety about tipping, but they are forced to confront it early and often, and developing tipping skills (the math is just the beginning) is a crucial part of their education. A straightforward psychology underlies American-style tipping. Those who choose to tip generously do so because they know service people work hard for little money, they feel guilty about the unequal relationship of the server and the served (perhaps having worked in service jobs themselves), and they want to be seen as generous. Also, they respond to guilt trips. (A coffee shop where I was once a regular had a sign on its tip jar that read KARMA IS A BOOMERANG.) But above all, Americans like to think of their society as one in which hard work is rewarded, and they like these rewards to be at their discretion. Even if they consistently tip 20 percent regardless of service, as many do, they like the idea that they are choosing, case by case, what to give.
The very few American restaurants that have abolished tipping have made international news, even though some of them simply replaced it with a European-style service charge of around 18 percent. Restaurateurs who have done this report that Americans will often choose to tip anyway, or will argue that their tips would have been more generous than the service charge. They dislike the feeling that they have no influence—whether real or perceived—over the quality of service they get. According to a survey by Zagat, 80 percent of Americans prefer tipping to paying a service fee. One woman, commenting on the Daily Mail’s travel blog, summed it up:<
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I found it uncomfortable to be charged a set service fee in our very nice London hotel/restaurant. Some of the wait staff were superb and efficient, some asleep at the wheel, and I felt there should be a differential in compensation. Not a difference between zero and twenty percent, but perhaps a difference between ten to twelve percent and twenty to twenty five percent . . . When I discussed it with the manager, he said their wait staff pools all the tips—a much more socialist orientation than an American staff would prefer. Waiters in the U.S. have a more entrepreneurial spirit. Here it isn’t viewed as exploitation of low-income workers, but an opportunity for a worker to generate as much extra as he or she cares to.
Ah, capitalism: the entrepreneurial spirit that animates America! Interestingly, how much we tip has been proven not to have much impact on the quality of service we receive, but it is an article of faith in America that a good tip—and the potential to earn tips—makes for better service. Americans are so well known for this attitude that you may be shocked to hear that not only did they not originate the practice of tipping, they once fought to outlaw it.
Tipping is thought to have begun in seventeenth-century England, where the word tip referred to cash given to tavern staff. Some sources claim that the letters T.I.P. originally stood for “to insure promptitude,” but an explanation so tidy has to be apocryphal. Tipping was an established practice among European aristocrats, and the OED definition of tip captures the attitude in which tips were given: “A small present of money given to an inferior, esp. to a servant or employee of another for a service rendered or expected.” Well-heeled and well-traveled Americans encountered this custom and eagerly imported it to America just after the Civil War. It went over like a lead balloon in a society that had been founded on notions of equality. Soon an antitipping lobby formed. Its central document, William Rufus Scott’s The Itching Palm, denounced tipping succinctly: “Tipping, and the aristocratic idea it exemplifies, is what we left Europe to escape.” Tipping was the “mortal foe” of democracy because “unless a waiter can be a gentleman, democracy is a failure. If any form of service is menial, democracy is a failure.” Some states attempted to ban tipping altogether, but these bans proved unenforceable and all were repealed by 1926 as tipping gained a foothold. There were still hopes in some quarters that the controversial custom would not last. Scott went so far as to say that “If tipping is un-American, some day, some how, it will be uprooted like African slavery.”
That sounds extreme, but it’s interesting to note that in Europe, where higher minimum wages and standardized service charges are the norm, waiting tables is seen as a profession, while Americans still regard it as more of a transitional job. There is ample evidence that servers can increase their take by doing things like writing thank-yous and smiley faces on checks, kneeling next to tables while taking orders, and touching patrons gently on the shoulder—all of which emphasize their lower status and the extent to which their livelihoods depend on pleasing others. As Chelsea Welch, a former Applebee’s waitress, wrote in The Guardian, “I’ve been waiting tables to save up some money so I could finally go to college, so I could get an education that would qualify me for a job that doesn’t force me to sell my personality for pocket change.” Not all tipped employees take such a dim view of the system. For Americans, the individualism tipping affords for server and served alike—the ability to distinguish oneself through superior service or generosity—has triumphed over any fear that it undermines democracy. In fact, over the past one hundred years, Americans seem to have decided that tipping is democratic after all. Whether they will still think so a hundred years from now, who can say? But in the meantime, the English should stop worrying and learn to love tipping—at least when they are visiting America. After all, they started it.
Tea
In which the drink—and the rituals surrounding it—are shown to be considerably stronger than they appear.
The British Pavilion did not win the 2013 Venice Biennale, but for sheer crowd-pleasing it was hard to beat. With his exhibition English Magic, the artist Jeremy Deller struck a balance between exuberance and provocation. There was a mural of a harrier hawk clasping a Range Rover in his talons, payback for the threat to these endangered birds by toffs on the hunt. There were gut-wrenching drawings by jailed ex-soldiers. There was a film of hundreds of people bouncing on a giant inflatable Stonehenge to the tune of David Bowie’s “The Man Who Sold the World,” played by the Melodians, a steel drum orchestra. But what really got the polyglot crowds going was the tearoom at the back of the pavilion. Everyone formed an orderly queue, acting positively English as they waited patiently for their turn to tell the “tea lady” strong or weak, with milk or without, sugar or no sugar. It brought to mind the World War II–era slogan “Tea Revives the World.” On this occasion it was true, and as I took my steaming cup from the tea lady, I suddenly felt really at home.
The tea that brought the international art crowds together that day—and every day of the Biennale—was the near-caustic-strength blended brew known in England as “builder’s tea” because a strong, inexpensive, often sugary drink is what a builder on a break might have (though in a recent survey within the construction industry, 44 percent of builders said they preferred coffee). Typical brands you’d find in any home are PG Tips, Typhoo, and Tetley. (Twinings is also popular, but considered a bit posh.) People who haven’t spent much time with the English might think that tea-drinking culture is more refined than it is, possibly marked by persnicketiness about blends, china, and the cult of milk-in-first or milk-in-last. George Orwell played into this stereotype with an article he wrote for the Evening Standard in January 1946, “A Nice Cup of Tea,” in which he claimed that “the best manner of making it is the subject of violent disputes. When I look through my own recipe for the perfect cup of tea, I find no fewer than eleven outstanding points.” I’m sure there are more like him out there, but most people from all walks of life seem happy with the basics. An ad for the tea company Make Mine a Builders declares: “This country wasn’t built on camomile.”
The first thing an English person does on waking, on returning home, on being greeted with good or bad news, or on receiving a guest, is to turn on the kettle. Every English home and office has an electric kettle capable of boiling water quickly, usually in under a minute. This allows tea-making to be a seamless part of everyday life. According to the United Kingdom Tea Council, 96 percent of tea is consumed in the form of tea bags (an American invention), 98 percent of people take milk, and 45 percent take sugar. Residents of the United Kingdom each consume 2.3 kilos of tea per year to Americans’ 0.2 kilos. That adds up to 165 million cups per day and 62 billion cups per year. Most tea is drunk at home, but the consistent quality of what’s available, in even the humblest places, points to how important this ritual is. It is ironclad and comforting and near universal in England, but it isn’t at all sophisticated unless you count the kettle technology.
Most English people, day in and day out, are drinking tea of a strength that Americans would find a little overwhelming. (Not to mention murder on those expensively whitened teeth.) This explains why 25 percent of all milk consumed in the UK is taken with tea. The English claim that this tea has a negligible amount of caffeine. Don’t you believe it. A couple of months after moving to London, convinced I was having panic attacks, I realized it was simply overcaffeination at the hands of generous friends and colleagues. Every cup of tea I was offered, I took—it seemed rude not to—to the tune of five or seven per day. The cumulative effects were heart-pounding, hand-sweating jitters that abated as soon as I learned my limits.
Not that I didn’t drink tea in America. Lots of Americans do, and from relatively young ages. But according to the Tea Association of the USA, 85 percent of the tea Americans drink is iced. This chimes with my own experience. I grew up in the southeast drinking only iced tea. (Hot tea was considered strictly medicinal, though in colder states it is more popular.) Here’s my f
amily recipe:
Boil a pot of water on the stove. Tie five bags of Lipton’s tea together and drop them into the pot. Leave to steep until the water turns dark brown, about five minutes. Take the tea bags out. Upend the five-pound bag of Dixie Crystals (granulated sugar), and pour directly from the bag into the pot, stirring, until no more sugar will dissolve in the warm tea. When the saturation point is reached, sugar crystals no longer melt but sink to the bottom in a white layer. Pour the tea, which should now have the consistency of syrup, over ice.
If you order iced tea in a restaurant south of the Mason-Dixon Line (which I like to call the Dixie Crystals line), you will be asked, “Sweet or unsweet?” and to answer the latter marks you immediately as an auslander, possibly a Yankee. In the northern and western states, all tea is unsweetened unless otherwise specified (and unless bought in ready-to-drink bottles and cans, which account for 25 percent of the market, worth $4.8 billion and growing, as of 2012). So a Southerner will find, to her horror, that Dixie Crystals do not melt in tea that is already cold, but sink forlornly to the bottom of the glass. For some Southerners, this is the extent of our science education.
The English don’t really drink iced tea because it requires a large quantity of that foreign substance, ice. Americans like to complain about the lack of ice in drinks throughout the United Kingdom, and this is largely warranted. I was once served a gin and tonic in a fancy Pall Mall club with only two cubes in it. And even the coldness of the renowned martini at Dukes Bar in Mayfair is achieved by freezing the gin and not adulterating it. On arrival in America at age two and a half, my daughter was given a cup of water that contained about one-third liquid and two-thirds ice. She stuck her hand in the cup, pulled out a piece, and said, “What’s this?” I am raising a stranger.