Sharon Adl-Doost once hung up on John Travolta. She sang with Rosie O’Donnell. She has had Bruce Willis, Donna Karan, Diana Ross and Ralph Lauren call her number. Sharon Adl-Doost, curvaceous hillbilly from Georgia, is one of modern America’s biggest underground stars, and the most unlikely.
For 30 years, she spent her days flipping burgers at the US Geological Survey (USGS) cafeteria in Reston, Virginia. One day, someone gave her the job of recording the daily menu-line, a service for USGS employees, so they could decide whether to bother braving the cafeteria for lunch. In her cracked southern accent, Sharon would begin. “Good morning or good afternoon! Today we’re gonna feature the following. The soup of the day is gonna be Manhattan clam chowder. For the main event we are gonna have honey glazed pork chops. And for the vegetables mmm mmm mmm good ol’ mashed potatoes and gravy!” Simple food in a simple rendition, the same fodder that darkens cafeteria plates throughout the industrialised world.
In 1996, arch-conservative Newt Gingrich was ruling the House of Representatives, and federal employees were being laid off everywhere. Sharon decided people needed cheering up. After the food listing, she added a rendition of “Always and Forever,” sung off-key, but with feeling.
USGS employees seemed to like it, so she carried on singing, sometimes adding some homely wisdom, often signing off with “Love ya! You know I do!” When someone lost his dog, she sang “How much is that doggy in the window?”, badly. Someone mailed the menu-line number to a friend, who mailed it to another friend. Sharon became known as The Lunch Lady, and her fame spread like fire. Soon, much of Manhattan was calling an obscure government cafeteria every day, and then her notoriety went national. Within two months, she had her first fan letters, and within a year, she was on the front page of the Washington Post, on the Rosie O’Donnell show and hanging up on John Travolta (she didn’t believe it was him till he sent her a T-shirt from his latest film). “I knew I was cheering people in the building up,” says Sharon. “But, my goodness, I didn’t realise I was cheering the whole world!”.
Eventually, the USGS menu-line was receiving 50,000 calls a month. There were 6,000 phone lines in the building, but once, Lunch Lady calls blocked the entire system for three days.
The only people impervious to the Lunch Lady were her managers. “They treated her terribly,” says Boyd McDonald, who set up the Lunch Lady fan-club two years ago. “They’d call her stupid, and all sorts of things. Once, they made her stop singing!”. This, to a Lunch Lady fan, is like Ascot without horses. Ben without Jerry. A syringe without narcotics.
For the Lunch Lady, as a new documentary perfectly portrays, is an addiction. London-based director Leslie Mello, a long-term fan, fell for the call during dreary days working as a designer at Vanity Fair magazine. The documentary, a low-key low-budget affectionate portrait, was funded out of her own plastic - the $10,000 coming from paying off her MasterCard with her Visa, and vice-versa. More about her fans than Sharon - to perpetuate the mystery and magic of the menu-recording, the Lunch Lady’s face is never shown - Mello’s film swings between the art directors, ad company executives and office workers who would call every day for their daily fix.
“You know how people have a cigarette break?” says one worker in a video company. “I take a Lunch Lady break.” When the songs were banned, Sharon became the Amnesty cause for half of office America. The songs came back, but this was only the beginning of the battle between their grill chef and what she calls “the government people.” “She used to mention the fan club at the end of the recording,” says Boyd. “But they would yell at her about it. So she’d record the menu as normal, then halfway through the day, she’d sneak back and record it exactly the same again, only she’d mention the fan club on the end. It was a very underground thing.”
To those who haven’t heard her, it’s hard to explain the appeal of an off-key recital of vegetables. Most people, the documentary shows, called for the novelty value, laughing at the imperfect singing - Sharon cheerfully admits she couldn’t “sing her way out of a bucket” - and at the way she would forget the lyrics and stick in any old words. Some attribute it to cafeteria nostalgia, to the way school-dinners will always have a place in our palates, to the ol’fashioned simplicity of sliced carrots, or the Hot Dog Bar, or the Fresh Grill.
Some think it snobbery, because many of her initial fans were well-paid professionals. “Maybe creatives appreciate her zany humour more,” says Boyd McDonald, though he runs a convalescent home in California. “Blue-collar workers tended to laugh at her.” Boyd’s local radio station K-SAN used to play the Lunch Lady in their “White Trash Theater” slot, until he complained.
But the Lunch Lady appeal eventually conquered class divisions and prejudices. “I thought it was an entertaining little message that I would soon forget,” says Kathy Rubino in an email to the Lunch Lady website. “But it made me feel more human than the fluorescent lights and click-clacking of computer keyboards ever could.” The cracked tunes and “love ya’s!” of Sharon’s daily recording became telephonic therapy. A dose of enthusiastic human kindness - “y’all have a gorgeous day!” - down a phoneline into a cold-hearted office existence.
When Sharon decided to cheer up USGS employees, says the only current USGS employee interviewed, “she had the presence of mind, or just the interest, to think about people who basically said to her, ‘I’ll have fries with that.’ The spirit of mind behind that is incredible.” A bank worker from South Carolina agreed. “It’s so refreshing that someone’s goodness can spread like wildfire across our country, when there’s so much negativity surrounding us. I have seen Sharon’s menus make bankers smile.”
But the government people remained grim-faced. On June 4 this year, Sharon turned up to flip burgers as usual, to be told the menu was going online, and the Lunch Lady was derailed. She was devastated. “That was my five minutes of happiness!” She quit the next day. Her employers Eurest Dining Services (the biggest cafeteria company in the world) refused to comment on camera on their menu-line antipathy. But off the record, the Lunch Lady was too “countrified,” they said. The Lunch Lady had committed the biggest corporate crime - she didn’t fit the brand.
So for now, one of the more famous voices of America is adrift. “I’m feeling alright, I guess,” she says over the phone from Reston, with a glumness unrecognisable to anyone who ever dialled 1-703-648-7777. The same way she liked being on national TV only because her fans could see her, now she wants nothing more than a list of food and a record button, “so I can get the menu-line back for my fans.”
Leslie Mello, whose documentary screens this week at Edinburgh Film Festival, is working on getting her snapped up by a restaurant chain. “They’d be fools not to have her.” Hopefully, the brand-conscious and humourless managers at USGS will soon rue the day they stamped out a national obsession. “People call me to say they miss the line,” says Sharon. “They say they don’t even feel like going to the cafeteria any more.”
Published in the Independent