Check out this touching account of Stephen by Daily Kos user (and SC’s former co-worker) behan in 2010. The post is a little old, but given the recent references to Stephen’s Chicago/ waitstaff days, couldn’t be more timely. Prepare yourself for eye misting:

“As I’ve mentioned a couple of times before, I worked with Stephen Colbert at a well known Italian restaurant in Chicago, by the name of Scoozi. Stephen worked the lunch shifts, and then headed over to Second City for evening comedy improvisation shows. I worked the night shifts at Scoozi to finance my college education.

In the evening we had the luxury of three member teams of front waiter, back waiter, and busboy. We hustled for eight to nine hours straight without breaks, and made very good money in a hectic, but never frantic pace.

The daytime shift by comparison was horrendous. The busboy/backwaiter position was combined. I found myself carrying seventy five pound trays full of dirty dishes,over my shoulder back to the kitchen, and then scurrying out of the kitchen to retrieve several checks filled out by the front waiter that needed processing on a computer terminal for the kitchen staff to activate orders. The contrast from brutal grunt work to reading, scanning abbreviations for food items written in waiter’s scrawl was dizzying.
The lunch pace was a shotgun two hours straight, and then everything slacked off. At this time, the main waiters would gab about auditions that they were up for in films like “Uncle Buck.”

What was interesting about my day shifts spent working along Stephen Colbert is that the guy seemed to avoid the trappings of the waiter gabbing about his ship about to come in routine. Instead, Colbert helped the backwaiter/busboys with all sorts of tasks that weren’t his responsibility. He loaded giant sized aluminum oval shaped trays placed on bus stands with dirty dishes. He was essentially busing tables which he didn’t have to do.

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