Marble Spaghetti Dinner Fundraiser set for February 28

Sixteen-year-old Lucille Wallace remembers her Marble Spaghetti Dinner. She remembers the black and white outfits and drawn-on mustaches that she and the other fourth-graders proudly wore. She remembers the sense of importance she felt as a waitress. That was six years ago.

“I was ten, and everything was new and exciting,” Wallace said. “My two older sisters had already done [the spaghetti dinner] before me, so I was really excited to do it, because they had already done it, and said it was fun. It was like a rite of passage when you were in Marble Elementary School to do the spaghetti dinner, and you got to wear the mustaches.”

This year is set for Thursday, February 28 at Marble Elementary School. There will be one serving time at 5:30 p.m. and another at 6:30 p.m. The dinner includes spaghetti and meatballs, salad, breadsticks and dessert. It is run by parent volunteers and the fourth-grade students.

This year, the parent in charge of the event is Heather Hagan. This is Hagan’s second year heading the dinner; she also helmed the dinner two years ago. The spaghetti dinner is the biggest of all the fundraisers the fourth-grade class does to raise money for its year-end trip to Mackinac Island, which include collecting pop cans and collecting a percentage of the profit made by participating restaurants on certain nights. Hagan saw this as an opportunity to help the school and participate in a tradition that Marble students and members of the East Lansing community have enjoyed for years.

In the past, components of the dinner meals were made at home and brought in by parents, but the inconvenience of piled-up crockpots and dozens of parents cooking different food led the organizers to look to local restaurants for help supplying the food. For a few years, the food came from several local restaurants, but these days Olive Garden donates all the food, except for the meatballs, which are donated by Coral Gables.

“In the past, quite a few different locations have donated a certain amount, and we’ve just kind of meshed it all together, but going with one location where it’s to easier pick-up and deliver works 100 percent better than trying to get it from a lot of different places,” Hagan said.

Now that parents no longer have to cook the food, they work the take-out section and help the kids with their jobs. Weeks before the dinner, the students select what role they want to have at the dinner, and volunteers come to the school to teach “waiter” students about proper etiquette and how to be a good and polite waiter. This year, parent organizers have ordered chef hats and fake mustaches for the kids to wear.

The dinner is one of the highlights of fourth-grade for the students since the kids get a dose of adult responsibility while still having fun. And, it is all in preparation for the end of the year trip.

“Out of all the events that the fourth-graders do, this is the one they look forward to every year,” Hagan said. “They get excited knowing once they get to fourth-grade, they get to do the spaghetti dinner.”

Marble Elementary School is located at 792 Hagadorn Road.