Story by Katie Packer, December 2008
Photos by Charlie Doerner
As Dane Brevoort raises his sharpened knife and hacks it down from tip to heel in one continuous motion, a few tears fall from his eyes. It’s 10:40 a.m.
He blinks rapidly in an attempt to shake them, but he can’t. Once the first one’s out, there’s no stopping the rest.
He knows his pointed knife will make a clean cut, and he wouldn’t have it any other way. It makes his job easier since the tears tend to blur his vision.
“Not cool,” he says while deepening his voice. “It’s just so not cool.”
He has given up on blinking and now looks up toward the ceiling, as if begging the tears to flow in reverse.
The onions get him every time.
The hasty chopping of fresh vegetables for one of the largest salad bars on Sorority Row, just east of the University of Florida campus, is bound to cause a few nicks, especially when about 100 diet-crazed women are waiting for sustenance.
Now that fall recruitment is over, Brevoort, the 23-year-old sous-chef at Delta Phi Epsilon, and the other sorority house staff members are back in full swing, preparing 10 meals a week for hundreds of college-age women and making sure the house is in tip-top shape. Though the workers are adamant that working for the women is both fun and challenging, they divulge the sticky situations they sometimes find themselves in, and the bonuses that can be found working at a sorority house.
Enough Food to Feed an Army – of Sorority Girls
Next to where Brevoort is working in the stainless steel, impeccably clean kitchen, one of the two Sub-Zero refrigerators grumbles as if it has an upset stomach. Dane Yesconis, the 25-year-old UF graduate who has been DPhiE’s head chef for three years, has just filled it with its week’s shipment of food - 110 pounds of chicken, 100 pounds of tomatoes, 80 pounds of lettuce and 40 pounds of tofu.
Yesconis and Brevoort are both thin, almost as if they don’t consume the food they prepare. Yesconis is the paler, cleaner-looking one of the two, as Brevoort’s dark, brown-haired stubble and pierced left eyebrow make him seem like he should be performing the rock music blaring from the radio instead of chopping to it.
While Brevoort cuts, Yesconis is worried about making his chicken fingers crispy and light, golden brown. He notices it’s already 10:43 a.m. as he hovers over the fryer, not 5 feet from Brevoort. He is also worried about the debut of his sweet potato fries.
“Everyone’s been asking about these for awhile,” he says as he removes the burnt-orange-colored fries from the bubbling oil.
He aims to please. Nobody ever claimed it was easy to work at the DPhiE mansion, one of UF’s 16 Panhellenic sororities. The house serves as home to 39 women in 20 bedrooms and more than 100 others who come on a daily basis.
Yesconis is so busy, in fact, that he continues to chop, fry, sauté, season and defrost throughout the entire interview, pausing only to pepper his responses with interjections directed at Brevoort, who is now working diligently on homemade spring rolls – “No, no. That just won’t work,” or “Too much egg,” – because Yesconis believes that presentation is just as important as taste.
The best chefs and housekeepers know just how arduous it is to cook and clean for hundreds of people, at a hotel per se. But it’s an entirely different dynamic to work for young women between the ages of 18 and 22, Yesconis explains. The two chefs and the housekeeper at Delta Phi Epsilon resemble worker bees trying to please their queen. Only, their queen is about 150 strong.
Although lunch is served from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. Monday through Friday, at least 10 young women crowd the dining room tables at 10:45 a.m. daily, ogling the buffet where the food will be served. While Dane One and Dane Two, as the sorority women have dubbed them, keep chatting with me, they are right on time with the food, setting the steamy fries and chicken fingers on the lunch buffet table at 10:58 a.m. precisely.
The Danes don’t even have time to back away from the food they just set down as the women burst out of the dining room seats and set piles upon piles of crisp fried chicken on their dishes. Yesconis and Brevoort are caught in the animalistic free-for-all. It’s 11:01 a.m., and the first batch of food has already disappeared.
As for the notion that all sorority girls starve themselves? Yesconis wishes. If they did, his job would be much easier.
“That’s certainly a myth,” he blurts with a slight laugh as he dunks another batch of chicken fingers into the fryer. “Chocolate always seems to go over well here.”
DPhiE is one of the only houses to serve dessert every night of the week. Some nights there’s a make-your-own sundae bar, others there’s rich fudge brownies and gooey oatmeal-chocolate-chip cookies, and yet others there’s red velvet cake with creamy, whipped frosting. Yesconis estimates that anywhere from 65 to 80 percent of the young women eat the dessert.
The food and dessert that isn’t eaten during mealtime is put in fridge in the dining room, so the women can access it at a later point when the kitchen is locked for the night.
“You can be sure that the rest of it will be gone by the morning,” Brevoort said.
Food Fight
Though the Danes spend hours preparing the food and packaging the leftovers, not all of it is eaten because sometimes, Brevoort complains, it ends up on the floor.
“Oh that marinara mess,” he sighs while slicing cucumber.
Brevoort has vivid memories of the morning he arrived at work to find the 3-gallon tub of marinara sauce he had placed in the refrigerator the night before splashed and splattered all over the walls, the floors and even in the crevasses behind the cabinets. He presumed that some of the women had dropped it while trying to prepare a midnight snack after getting back from a late night out.
This catastrophe triggers a not-so-fond memory for Yesconis. He puts down the egg he is holding and chimes in to mention the Hershey’s Syrup fight during his first year at the house that had him on a ladder cleaning sticky goo off the ceilings.
Lipstick and Sparkles and Hair, Oh My
The occasional kitchen cleanups don’t really compare to the heavy-duty cleaning Lidia Sapp completes daily.
Standing no more than 4 feet 11 inches tall, with a black scrunchy fastening her curly brown hair securely in a ponytail, Sapp is meticulous when it comes to housework. She uses a toothbrush to scrub around the faucets, and throughout her 16 years of work in various sorority houses, she has trained her eyes to spot microscopic stains.
Her eyes widen and her voice takes on a deeper tone as she describes the patches of bright red and pink lipstick she found smashed into the blue carpet just a few days before our interview.
“Good thing I have spray,” she quips in English with a strong Costa Rican accent. “That’s all I have to say.”
Though she does insist the young women in DPhiE are cleaner than the other women she has worked for, she admits that sparkles still haunt her.
Last year, the hallways of the dormitory part of the house were plastered with glitter. The young women must have been doing art projects in the house, she muses while adjusting the royal-purple scrub set she wears to clean. The speckles of sparkles took her at least a week to remove.
“I went to bed those nights, and I saw glitter in my dreams,” she said.
Above all, though, the biggest mess in any sorority mansion comes from the hair. Knotted piles of curly, straight, black, brunette, blond, short and long hair get stuck to the stark-white shower stalls and the carpet that paves a path connecting the bedrooms.
Every month, Sapp points out, she goes through four vacuum bags. She doesn’t seem to mind, however, because running the vacuum cleaner is her daily exercise, as is taking out the trash, which on Monday mornings can take up to an hour and a half.
All Work and No Play?
Despite the unpleasant messes, there are perks - for Yesconis and Brevoort, at least. Half-naked sorority women, like what you would expect while viewing Animal House, only “better.”
The Danes, cooped up in the sweltering kitchen and staring at each other for three hours, say the half-dressed women break up the monotonousness of their daily routine - preparing the salad bar and lunch buffet, cleaning the used dishes and refilling the pantry.
The women of DPhiE sunbathe in bikinis in the backyard of the sorority house during lunchtime and come in to the dining room when they are famished or thirsty.
They saunter in and mosey to the buffet, not caring that they smell like coconut tanning oil. It is then when the Danes say the less-than-appealing concoctions are born. Being part adventurous and part crafty, the women enjoy mixing, mashing and eventually eating items from the salad bar, the main buffet, the dry foods, such as cereal and chips that are always available, and condiments. Brevoort has seen it all.
“I don’t know who the hell ate it, but there were Lucky Charms in someone’s salad with balsamic vinegar on top,” he reveals while squinting his face as if he has just eaten a lemon.
That tends to be the norm, though. The Danes describe the noodles with ketchup, the marinara sauce with heaps of added sugar and the hard-boiled eggs with mustard and hot sauce.
“Everyone has different tastes, I guess,” Yesconis suggests.
Despite the young women’s strange habits and occasional untidiness, the three DPhiE staff members agree that the women are pleasant and thankful, always taking the time to strike up small talk and distract them from their demanding work momentarily.
Two of the sophomores bring their used dishes to the foamy bins near the kitchen, and they peek their heads in to thank Yesconis for making their favorite meal, chicken fingers. As Brevoort retrieves the dirty, soapy plates, the women hint that Yesconis should make his famous scones. Yesconis chuckles and mutters that he will keep their suggestion in mind. Right now, however, he wants to focus on making homemade dip to add to his lunch display.
For the Love of the House
Yesconis slides across his kitchen floor Risky Business style to get a plastic bowl to hold his freshly blended hummus. He hands it over to the sorority woman positioned in the kitchen doorway clad only in a striped bikini.
It’s 11:43 a.m., and nearly all of the food on the buffet is gone.
“Dane, can you refill the salad bar?” another woman (this one clothed) flirts.
So Brevoort stops cleaning the dishes and returns to chopping onions to restock the bar. Apparently, there’s nothing quite like pleasing the half-naked queen bees who make his job enjoyable, even if it means crying.