Monday, April 26, 2004 11:25 AM CDT
Gas station cashier's zany antics keep customers smiling
By BONNIE CLARK, Features Writer
It was the kind of dreary, rainy Tuesday morning that can make anyone feel out of sorts.
Customers at a local filling station were making their first stop of the day to fill up their tanks, get a free cup of coffee and postpone the beginning of the work day just a little longer.
The regulars knew — at least they had an idea — what was in store for them when they entered Lambo's Amoco Station on Lincoln Avenue in Charleston. For the uninitiated, however, stepping through the door was an experience not unlike, as one customer described it, "entering the Twilight Zone.
"But, it's really just the Rita Zone," he said.
Rita Bloxom, 53, of Ashmore had arrived for work at 4:30 a.m. that morning in a blue and white mu mu; her hat, a riot of colorful spring flowers stuck in the holes of a spaghetti strainer tied under her chin with ribbons. In place were the "Billy Bob teeth" she wears for special occasions.
She wore sturdy, white shoes, good for someone whose busy days involve being on her feet for long periods on concrete floors.
For the next eight hours, there was never a dull moment. People chatted, laughed, drank coffee and traded wisecracks with Rita and her fellow cashier Julie Bonwell, who sported a charcoal-smeared, two-day beard, bib overalls and rather risque ball cap.
The radio played, the cash register clicked its constant digital rhythm and nobody appeared to mind waiting in line to pay.
It was Tuesday, although it could as well have been any day of the week.
Not long after Bloxom started working at the station around 10 years ago, the atmosphere started getting lively.
"I had so many grouchy customers in the morning," she said. "People had forgotten how to laugh and how to enjoy life. We get so wrapped up in our problems and our worries, and we all have them. We've got to have something to laugh about."
Bloxom said it took her a little while to work up to the current state of craziness.
"At first, I wasn't used to the people, so I was pretty calm. I live in Ashmore, and everyone else knew the people and had worked in Charleston. I didn't know exactly what to expect. I took it as long as I could."
Her first foray into filling station comedy was creating and wearing silly hats. Number one was a cornucopia-based turkey hat.
"I put legs on it and those pretty feathers you can get and added some eyes and a big ole wattle."
She attached a poem that read: "The turkey is a mighty bird, a mighty bird is he, and while he sits upon my head, I hope he doesn't..."
The hat was a hit with customers, who kept asking what kind of hat she was going to make next.
They particularly like the hats where the meaning is slightly obscure she said, like the hat that featured a barnyard scene with an empty beer can alongside a rubber chicken lying on its back. "That was my stewed chicken hat," she said.
Bloxom also sponsored a hat contest one winter that drew 100 hat entries. The prize was $10 in gas.
"We put them up around the walls and on the counters and people voted on the one they liked the best," she said.
She also wrote poems on the day-old doughnut sacks, which improved sales.
"I think people were buying the doughnuts just for the poems. Some of the poems were nice and some of them weren't so nice," she said. "but they were all funny."
Students on school buses on Lincoln Avenue are often treated to the sight of Bloxom streetside waving at passing traffic dressed as the Easter Bunny, a leprechaun, a bald Santa, "Stupid Cupid," or a hillbilly in bibs and fake teeth.
On occasion, she also pumps gas, welcomes people outside the front door and even crosses the street to pass out candy to women working out at Curves exercise center across the street. "They need to keep up their energy," she says.
Mike Baird, station manager for owners Mike and Jim Lanman, said Bloxom sets the tone for the other employees.
"She's not normal," he laughed, "and she knows it. But, she makes it worth coming in. It's not even a job working here.
"We have fun with the customers and that's why they keep coming back. There's nothin' here they can't get anyplace else.
"For a lot of our customers, it's just a good way to start the day — better than a cup of coffee."
Baird said a sense of humor and the ability to get a job done and have fun at the same time is a prerequisite for being hired at the station.
"It's hard to get through to the cashiers that we want them to have fun. I tell them, ‘If you can't have fun, go someplace else.'"
The job isn't easy, Baird said. The cashiers have to watch the pumps, ring up purchases, make change, handle the lottery sales, and keep the coffee and cappuccino made.
"And one of the things we stress is cleanliness," he said. "We work hard at that.
"There's a lot to do, and it's really multi-tasking for Rita, ‘cause she's talkin' the whole time."
Bloxom says people she grew up with who haven't seen her for several years wouldn't know her now.
"I was really, really shy then. I think it came from moving around so much when I was a kid. We moved every year, sometimes two or three times a year.
"I guess I just got more confidence in myself when I got older."
Bloxom said she got her sense of humor from her mother, the late Freeda Shick. "She was a good woman and a wonderful mother."
Married to her high school sweetheart, Ralph Bloxom, right after he returned from Vietnam, Rita has one daughter and a grandson she says is the light of her life.
"He's going to have a sense of humor, just like me," she said.
Bloxom gets up about 2 a.m. every day in order to get to work on time.
"By the time most people come in, I'm already wound up. I'm ready to talk to them and help them wake up. I'm an awful tease, but I like it when they give it right back to me."
"Want me to shake you by your heels?" she asked a customer who was fishing in his pocket for change.
"We're beauteous today. Wha d' ya think?" she asked another.
While Bonwell made change for a customer, Bloxom grabbed another for a quick two-step in front of the counter.
"Ever see an old broad dance?" she asked, the extra padding she wore under her costume giving new meaning to the term "shake your booty."
"I'm not sure I can take the sexual tension in here this morning," said an onlooker.
Bloxom introduced Bob Dunning of Ashmore as "Neighbor Bob." He's known Rita for 30-some years.
"She's always like this," he said. "She just likes having fun. You can come in here in a bad mood and she always puts you in a good mood.
"People may come in here for gas, but they keep coming back because of Rita."
Contact Bonnie Clark at bclark@jg-tc.com or 348-5727.
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