Through several personal interviews the author helps the reader understand why people should tip why people do tip why some people are loathe to tip and what makes a few people
overtip. He discusses conventions surrounding tipping for several types of service employees as well as tipping conventions around the world offering especially interesting insights into the culture of tipping behind the Iron Curtain.
Everett likes to
overtip to shame the Metro Pizza staff into customer service.
I always
overtip. Probably because, having once worked as a waitress (I lasted two weeks) I know how long the hours and how poor the pay can be.
(Nor have the literary theoreticians: the usual course is to mutter a line or two about Schopenhauer and Nietzsche and ardent romantic agonies, and move on as though that dispenses of the matter.) Nor do the diagnosticians address the author's obvious penchant for, and naive enjoyment of, acts of destruction, nor the amazing innocence and naivete of his despair--he is something like an infant who has engaged upon a thoughtless feat of tower-construction without end (thus Martin Eden, toting up the books he has read and the essays he has written), and who is sincerely appalled when his blocks
overtip, as they must, because he never had any intention to stop stacking them, and was also vaguely looking forward to knocking them down, anyway.
Rather than
overtip, which tends to annoy resident members, it's better to offer the fee along with a small gift.
A couple of years before, I published an essay in Essence magazine titled "Nothing to be Ashamed Of." The essay was in to another piece in which the writer spoke about how, being African American, he has to be extra careful to
overtip waiters, so that they wouldn't assume that just because he was a black patron he was going to undertip them; and that when he went into department stores, he was very careful to exhibit the accoutrements of his middle-class status so that they would treat him well.
Woolley has refined the part of being a guest to a "near art form," he claims, and has developed four rules of guesthood: "take a pushy house present" (he defines a "pushy" gift as one "in the hundreds" or "something antique"); "provide at least one major meal"; "
overtip if there is staff"; and "make [your] own bed." The sad subtext to Going Once is that Woolley is dying of AIDS.
She
overtips in restaurants, she makes workmen bacon sandwiches and tea - even if they've brought their own and would clearly rather have them.
Also, fact that his most controversial lyrics are never highlighted here (they rush by in brief rapped or text form, when addressed at all)
overtips scale away from critics, toward self-justifying claims that he was merely "speaking ...