Connie Sturgess: Ms Manners
Five minutes into my meal with Ms Manners, Connie Sturgess, a harsh realization dawns on me. For the past 30-odd years, I have been eating my dinner rolls all wrong.
Five minutes into my meal with Connie Sturgess, a harsh realization dawns on me. For the past 30-odd years, I have been eating my dinner rolls all wrong.
Sturgess, etiquette coach and principal consultant of Western Protocol & Etiquette Services, has been putting me through my paces to demonstrate her “executive dining” seminar. “We don’t butter our bread in the air,” she says, after gracefully offering me a roll. “We take the butter we think we’ll need – would you like some butter? – and we break the roll into small, bite-sized pieces as we want to eat it. And we always butter it on the bread plate.”
My past life flashes before my eyes: work-related luncheons, dates and the dinner I had recently at a business function, in which I confidently ripped a dinner roll in two, slathered it with butter – in the air! – and cheerfully chomped away. I may have even (oh dear Lord, no) dipped it into my soup. If there is such a thing as retrospective mortification, I’m experiencing it now.
It only gets worse. It turns out, once a piece of cutlery is used, it never touches the table again. That means if you’ve got to abandon your utensils for a moment – say, to break off a bite-sized piece of dinner roll – you place them on your plate in upside-down V; fork on the left and knife on the right. Who knew?
And who knew anyone could be so passionate about etiquette? Sturgess, who grew up in a large Doukhobor family on a farm in Saskatoon, says her interest dates back to her childhood when she visited a classmate’s home in Grade 5. “I was not comfortable at all, and I really quickly recognized that they did things differently than we did at home.” That realization sparked a lifelong interest in manners, eventually leading to studies at the Protocol School of Washington (D.C.) in the late ’90s.
Apparently, I’m not the only one out there who’s evidently clueless when it comes to dining comportment. Sturgess has a steady flow of clients wanting to brush up on their social graces.
“The number-one issue I hear is people not knowing which is their bread plate and which is their water,” she says, before dispensing a handy tip: just remember BMW, which stands for bread, meal, water or wine, going from left to right.
Next time you sit down with the boss, you’ll be glad you had that info. I sure was.
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