I Baked a Birthday Cake for Stevie Nicks
In the spring of 1978 I got to touch the little finger of Fame. My new job was in a cool place called Longhi’s on Front Street, down from the Blue Maxx and I, at a very uncool and (still) awkward seventeen, had so much cool around me, I felt almost cool.
Fleetwood Mac’s Rumors had been out about a year but it was new to us on Maui, since most things back then arrived by boat. All the members of Fleetwood Mac were hanging out in Lahaina that year and their place of frequency was Longhis Restaurant! They regularly sat at a corner booth, known as the Fleetwood Mac booth, and soon we all stopped gawking, they were there so often.
One day when I came to work, the prep list left for me by Jan said to bake a carrot sheet cake, to be sold whole to the Fleetwood Mac table for Stevie Nicks’ birthday. Her note said “make it good” or something to that effect. “Wow,” I remember thinking, “that’s cool.” So I baked the carrot cake, topped it with our luscious cream cheese frosting and lovingly grated little flecks of orange peel over it.
Dinner rush came, the cake went out and all was well. I was scrubbing down the maple table when it happened. Led Zeppelin blasting from the big black speakers crashed into silence. I turned toward the main prep kitchen behind me and there she was, a blurry apparition of skirts and shawls, floating through our food-world . . . towards me! I turned away from her, afraid to look (I know, still awkward) and resumed scrubbing my table. Then I heard the bathroom door close behind me.
Was it clean in there? Why was she in our bathroom? Were the other ones broken? WERE there other bathrooms? (I don’t remember). Was the apple pipe stocked with hash? Did she like the cake? All I could do was ponder these important questions as she peed behind that door then left. I turned back toward the kitchen only in time to see the beautiful edge of her skirt disappear like a butterfly wing around the corner of the kitchen into the dining room. If she remembers that birthday of hers at Longhis on Maui, she’ll probably recall that snotty baker who ignored her. No, not snotty, just shy as hell.
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