She's So the One

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I did say I'd let all the Anonymouses speak for themselves, so here is Anonymous #1 weighing in on an early jobs before she went pro:

When I turned 16, I had my first summer job, doing credit checks for the father of a classmate who owned a small loan agency (Both the agency and the loans were small.) It was a window into the lives of people struggling to make ends meet and an industry preyed on their poverty. 
     The next summer, I worked for a print shop that put out a magazine for the construction industry, and counted the days till I could leave for college. There I snared whatever odd job was posted on the bulletin board. Once, I read The New York Times to a blind woman, and another time I modeled, but only once, when a sweater manufacturer decided to use real college girls in a fashion show. I stuck out my meager chest and strutted up and down the aisle, imagining a new and lucrative sideline for myself, but I lacked the poise that somehow came naturally to my colleagues. That was the end of that.
     My first college summer, I enlisted in the legions of students working as waiters and waitresses at summer resorts. I was hired by one of those grand old lakeside places in the Adirondacks where families once came for weeks at a time, but now hosted conventions where drunk insurance agents thought it was hilarious to run their fingers over the rims of wine glasses, marveling at the squeaky sounds they created.
     To learn to balance on one upraised arm a large, oval, metal try filled with plates topped with metal covers, stacked atop one another, and other waitressing skills such as flashing big smiles at those insurance agents in hopes of big tips. For three days, I trailed a veteran of two previous summers. And movie buffs might be interested to know that the waitress I trailed was a young Floridian named Faye Dunaway. Of course, she wasn't THE Faye Dunaway at that point, merely a theater arts student. But several years later, she was on Broadway. When I knew her, she was a broad-shouldered brunette, and I have always marveled at how she morphed into the slim, fragile blonde of "Bonnie and Clyde" fame.
    My roommate that year in the Adirondacks was petite and cute, and for those reasons, and also because she could never have managed those heavy trays, she was appointed "jelly girl," a cushy post because all she had to do was serve jellies and relish. She had a summer romance with a counselor she met at a nearby boys camp named John Lahr. That would be THE John Lahr, drama critic for The New Yorker, and the son of the famous Cowardly Lion. One morning he sent a canoe for us and his kids cooked us breakfast.
     I see I have gone on too long here. I didn't even get to my two summers working at Howard Johnsons on Long Island, living in sin with my husband-to-be in a moist garage apartment where a mushroom grew up through the bathroom floor. Every evening I would come home with the pockets of my grungy green and white uniform weighed down with quarters, and we would count my tips. I looked forward to each day at work to my free scoop of ice cream. My favorite was Swiss Chocolate Almond.