I became aware of Fiddler's Green Amphitheatre the day I arrived in the Denver area. It was an 18,000-seat music venue. 1988 was the its premiere season and it had stirred up a lot of controversy in the first few weeks that I was in town. There were complaints about noise all the time. City officials were threatening to shut it down. The unions objected because the employees of Canteen Services, which provided concessions, weren't in a union. There were also complaints about traffic on event days.
The day after I got fired from The Doctors Group, I was going through the classifieds. Fiddler's Green had an ad looking for concession employees. Since it was only about three miles away from my Uncle Ord's house, I thought it would be a good place to work. When I arrived, there were a lot of people filling out applications. (One of the things I knew I was NOT going to do was put The Doctors Group down as a previous employer. I figured they wouldn't notice I hadn't been employed in three weeks.) We were told that when we finished, we were to stand in line and wait to be interviewed.
There were different people who would come up and get the next person in line to interview. When I got close to the front, there was some confusion and the manager wound up interivewing two of us at the same time. He took us into the general seating area. He told us about what the job entailed and asked us about what we had done before. We both gave generic answers, but neither one of us had done food service. He just went ahead and hired us both on the spot. He told us to show up the next day and they would tell us where to go. He gave us these green visors. He said those would get us into the employee entrance. We were also told to wear black slacks, NO JEANS. I guess they hired just about everyone who showed up that day.
The next day, I parked my car on the outside of the horseshoe-shaped street that surrounded the amphitheatre. I started walking toward the entrance. On my way there, I noticed another person who was also carrying a visor. I asked if he also worked at Fiddler's Green. He said he did and that he had been there since the season opened. On our way, we ran into someone from the union handing out flyers and trying to get people to boycott the place. The guy I met said he didn't care about a union, he was just happy to have a job.
Concessions had numerous kiosks set up around the perimeter of the amphitheatre. There were two main concession stands on each side of the venue. When I showed up, I was assigned to the back kitchen of one of those main concession stands. It was rather chaotic. It was me and whole bunch of other new hires who had absolutely no idea what to do. There was someone running around barking orders. I suddenly realized what it must be like to work in a fast-food restaurant. After the opening act started, things calmed down. We were able to collect ourselves and prepare for the rush at intermission.
After the intermission rush, they started sending people on breaks. During our breaks, we were given these tickets so that we could collect our free hot dog and soda during the shift. We were also permitted to go out and watch part of the concert during our break. We were allowed to go onto the grassy part of the amphitheatre to watch. I enjoyed taking a break like this, but it was very easy to lose track of time and forget that you were supposed to be back in 15 minutes.
(Before I was hired, they had apparently had a big problem with lots of people quitting in the middle of their shift so they could go see one of the biggest tours of the year without having to buy a ticket. One of the things they had given me when I was hired was a list of rules. One of them stated that if you quit in the middle of your shift, you would be escorted off the premises and not allowed back in.)
As I mentioned earlier, there were a lot of complaints from nearby residents about the noise coming out of the venue. It got so bad that it was featured regularly on the local TV news. There were all kinds of threats to shut it down. I had to watch the news on event days to figure out whether or not I was going to be able to go to work. Somehow, compromises got worked out and we were able to stay open for the rest of the season.
One of those compromises was earlier start times. The bad thing about this was that if you bought a ticket before the compromise, it had the original start time. That meant many people showed up an hour late and missed the opening act. People were coming up to the concession stands to complain. What made them think we were in charge?
One issue with working shifts was that many of the kiosk managers in the beginning of the season really didn't know how to manage. Some of the other co-workers and I had determined that they got their positions because their parents knew people in charge and were able to secure positions that were higher up the chain, even though they had no previous work experience. By the end of the season, most of these managers had left. This meant that people like me, who were hired in the middle of the season got promoted to assistant kiosk manager and up to the position of kiosk manager. This is what happened to me. I was a kiosk manager for the final three shows of the season. But I still really didn't know what I was doing. There was no training for being a manager. They just threw me into it.
I came back the next season in 1989. The one big change was that they put up these walls on the north and south sides of the amphitheatre. I really didn't like it because I had enjoyed being able to see the Rocky Mountains in the early part of the evening. I guess they did that to cut down on the noise.
Canteen Services also did things very differently that year. Instead of having countless employees at the kiosks, they allowed local organiztions, like the Jaycees, come in and work the kiosks to earn funding for their causes. There would only be one Canteen employee at each kiosk to help things go smoothly. I was put in charge of the back kitchen at first, but when the first show turned out to be a disaster in the back, that position was taken from me and given to someone else.
In the end, it didn't matter because I found a different job in the middle of the season that had me working nights. I had to quit.
But this job had a deep impact on my life in Denver. That was where I met the person who would become my best friend and the person who would become my next girlfriend. I'll be writing about them in later posts.
I'll also be writing more about my experiences at Fiddler's Green. There was so much that happened there, I couldn't put it all in this one post. I'll also be getting to those soon.
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