Cowboys and westerns

Growing up we watched a lot of movies, they were mostly cowboys and westerns. The start of my dreams of becoming a cowgirl.

Cowboys were cool, riding horses into the desert, arriving at a dusty one horse town in the middle of nowhere. Sliding off their saddles, they'd tie up their horses and walk into a saloon bar with cowboy swagger. It was all about creating drama at the entrance, the saloon doors would swing open, they’d survey the room for a second, everyone in the room would grind their necks towards the solitary figure at the door, silence abound. All eyes on the cowboy. In he would saunter, slowly but measured, in direction of the bar, a split second away from a quick draw. As he reached the bar he would lean against the counter and take a good look around the room. Not a murmur. Then, as everyone waited with baited breath, he'd order a double shot whisky.

My cowboy dreams came early

Julia and I often reenacted these scenes in our kitchen when we arrived back from tennis lessons. Julia would open the fridge, get the milk out. My job was to line the glasses up as if I was behind the bar of a cowboy movie. I'd slide the glasses down the table saying doble whisky por favor and Julia would fill them up with milk then slide my glass back down to me. The challenge was to glug the milk in one full swoop and slam the glass down with a big ahhhh whilst wiping the back of my hand across my mouth.

Like a rhinestone cowboy.

Cowboys have always figured in my life over the years. Before air stewardessing, I applied to take part in the opening crew for Disneyland Paris. I landed up getting a job at Festival Disney, a row of restaurants and bars situated just outside the park. We were not given a choice on where we were placed so I like to think it was fate that I ended up working at Billy Bobs Western Saloon Bar.

Dressed up as cowboys, we served beer, cocktails and a selection of snacks to our customers. We’d take it in turns to do the kitchen shift, this involved sitting in a small room off the main bar, manning two hot plates of melted cheese and chilli con carne as we waited for an order to come through.

Next minute, the door would open and swing back, a cowboy coming to place his order.

1 nachos

The cowboy on kitchen duty would get out a tin plate, grab a handful of nachos and pour over a ladel of hot chilli con carne. The melted cheese came next, a generous dose to almost drown out the chilli and nachos underneath. To garnish, a couple of chopped spicy gerkins on top. This was plonked on a tray and out into the heaving saloon we would go.

Drink orders were at the bar, we would juggle the beers, plates of nachos and cocktails together on a tray. We had this off to a fine art, holding our order high up above our heads whilst we manoeuvered in and out of the crowds. I took my orders on memory only and weirdly, rarely got them wrong.

The Billy Bobs crew

It was a popular place to go. We had country tunes playing all night long, a couple of nights a week a live band played. As part of the saloon bar experience, we were expected to encourage the guests to come and line dance with us on stage.

In typical Disney fashion, we wore nametags. As time went by, our nametags often got lost, but mostly, we tired of customers calling out our names incessantly night after night. So we ended up switching our nametags around, or finding a random nametag and using that. I lost Sally early on and became Eleanor for the rest of my time working at Billy Bobs.

Work was physically tiring but we got used to it. The bar would close at 2am and by the time we had cleaned up it was 3am. If a group were up for it, we headed straight into Paris, finding somewhere open and ending up watching the sun rise, before we made our way home again.

We were a transient, multi national crowd, working a stint at the resort before we moved on to better things. I lost contact with many people I met, but there were a handful that I remember very well. One chap who was a bit older than me, an American guy, very understated with a dry sense of humour, worked for a short time at Billy Bobs. We got on well, I felt at the time he was watching all of us like a fly on the wall. He wasn’t working for long, one moment he was there, the next minute he was gone. He had mentioned to me he was going back to LA to become a writer.

It was only years later as the comedy, Friends became popular I was watching an episode and happened to notice his name come up as one of the main writers of the series.

A moment off duty, Maura, me, Phil and Joel