CARA APPROACHED the counter, did a pirhouette while screaming, "Can I have some more silvuh-way-uh please?" Buddy backed off a bit, allowing his paunch some room to move, brushed his hair back and wiped the sweat off his forehead; Jim, the boss, whistled "Lonely is a man without love" for maybe the twentieth time since the morning, picked up a butcher's knife and snapped the links holding a strand of sausage together.

Gregory, he yelled over the sizzle of grease and blare of WBCN.

"Yah."

"Gregory," the cry went up again. "What do you think of this sort of music?"

"Yah, Yah," the short-order cook guffawed, going back to his potatoes.

"Chuck Berry. Do you know who he is?? He used to be popular in the 50s--Have you ever heard the Beatles sing 'Roll over Beethoven?'"

"Take out." Gregory yelled into the main room of the diner, and soon enough, one of the blue-jean clad ballerinas was there to escort the sealed styrophome container.

Gregory was more than a recent immigrant from Poland--a fact he proudly revealed by displaying a "Solidarnascz" (Solidarity) button above his postcard from Denver--He was a good worker and was respected for it. Jim talked about how Gregory moved up to the grill from washing dishes in a little over a year. "That's where I was when I first started here, too," he told me.

Buddy, the other cook, came from a locale far less revolutionary--Somerville, Mass. He was a local boy who knew when to stay quiet and let his co-worker have the limelight of other people's curiosity.

"How old are your kids?" I asked him late on afternoon, picking up from snippets of conversation that went by earlier on.

"Eight and four."

"Wow. You must have got married right out of high school," I exclaimed before I knew what I was saying.

"Yup. I guess so." He didn't look up and speeded chopping his salad greens up.

The waitresses were all clad in blue jeans and they all seemed to look alike. They didn't seem to have to work too hard, probably because the restaurant wasn't particularly busy. Their screams for more silverspoons, glasses, or little dishes had a disturbingly plaintiff tone, as if the dishwasher wasn't doing his job. "Why aren't they any forks and spoons out here?" I heard the clones cry out to me.

I'm really concerned about you," Jim told me, "You should be done with all the dishes, pots and pans, and peel a pot of potatoes, and be out of here by quarter after four. It's not even busy, and you're taking until after five."