The Bunny Years Read Online Free PDF Page B

wearing. Just a white linen collar with a bow tie and cuffs with Bunny cuff links.
    â€œAnd remember, the Bunnies have to be kissing,” she warned. As I quickly learned, that meant that when you held your wrists together, the Bunny logos had to be facing each other—or you would be given demerits. There were also demerits for not keeping your Bunny tail white and fluffy. In fact, there were demerits for a wide variety of things. The Merit/Demerit System could have been a Parker Bros. board game. Demerits were what you got for absenteeism, tardiness, improper appearance, chewing gum or eating in front of customers. Accumulate 100 of those and you were out of a job. Merits canceled out demerits and could be earned by, among other things, working on your day off or doing unpaid promotional work for Playboy. At events where Bunnies were sent to promote Playboy, the girls wore remarkably chaste cheerleader-type outfits: black sweaters with a logo, white pleated skirts to the knee and black high-heeled shoes.
    Miss Burgess informed me of the rules—and the dire consequences should they be broken—in a solemn, matter-of-fact tone. Of course, the ridiculous marine drill instructor façade was funny, even funnier delivered deadpan. But I was too afraid at the moment to laugh. I made a mental note to make sure my Bunnies would always be kissing. Miss Burgess then gave me a brown folder with a thick Bunny Manual to take home and study. I wouldn’t take the Bunny training necessary to serve food and beverages for another week or more.
    And so began the daily race from the Academy at 52nd Street and Broadway to the Club at 59th Street and Fifth. I flew down the stairs after class, jumped into a taxi, wriggled into the black stockings, glued on eyelashes, leapt out of the cab, ran up the stairs to the Bunny dressing room, grabbed my costume, changed clothes, hurled myself down to the gift shop to get my cigarette tray and began my parade through the Club by 1:30 p.m. As far as I was concerned, the Cigarette Bunny had the best job in the Club. Each pack of cigars and cigarettes was sold with a black-enamel lighter for $1.50. The lighter with the white Bunny logo and the cigar or cigarettes cost me 55 cents. I was allowed to keep the difference. Almost everyone bought cigarettes to get the lighter as a souvenir, and I was invariably asked to “keep the change” from $2 and, very often, from $5, $10 and $20 bills.
    That first night after I returned home, my roommate, Sheila McGrath, sat with me at our kitchen table, smoothing out the crumpled dollar-billtips I’d stuffed into my costume. After one day on the job, I’d earned $45—more money than I made in two weeks of working at Bloomingdale’s. Sheila, who eventually abandoned her theatrical aspirations for a 25-year career as executive administrator at
The New Yorker
, was amazed. That night, I peeled off my new and expensive false eyelashes and left them perched on the bathroom sink. Sheila awoke bright and early the next morning. Entering the bathroom, she mistook the eyelashes for cockroaches and slapped them down the drain. Clearly, the fast lane was going to take a little time getting used to.
    I continued to write home several times a week, breezily informing my parents and two younger brothers of the worldly life I had been adopted into in New York. The letters must have struck them as news bulletins from Pluto.
    I will need my birth certificate immediately for the cabaret license—it seems strange that I have to have a “performing artist” license to wait tables! Because I’m 19, state law prohibits me from working past 10 p.m. and I’ll be off the floor before 7 p.m. Therefore, it will interfere less with school than Bloomingdale’s did.
    I won’t really be a short-order girl. We have busboys who do most of the lifting and carrying. We pay them out of our tips. The training is excel-lent—we really will