What is Hollie Burr doing, selling hot dogs from a cart on a sidewalk in Cherry Creek?
Let’s just say Burr, 34, does not fit the hot-dog-hawker mold.
For one thing, Burr does not wear around her waist one of those aprons used for change, although her hips could easily be draped in a gauzy skirt. A ballcap does not sit on her head, covering up her long, blond hair. Sneakers probably won’t protect her feet, but if it’s summer, expect a pair of groovy, fashionable, leather sandals.
She has a “jewelry fetish,” she says, and it shows, on her wrists, fingers and neck.
Burr, tall and willowy, could pass for a Broncos cheerleader. But she’s a hot dog vendor, and she’s been slinging sausages for two years.
“It definitely beats being cooped up in an office,” she says one broiling afternoon at her cart on the corner of East Second Avenue and Detroit Street. “I was a floral designer for 10 years and burning out on it. A friend of mine was in the business and said it was good money and good hours. I wanted to be my own boss. And I love to cook.”
Hers is a compact little world, surrounded by the wide open. She has her umbrella-topped, custom-made cart, with Colorado Gourmet Hot Dogs and paintings of her offerings scrawled on the sides. She has her pair of Rubbermaid coolers full of ice and drinks. She has her beige beach chair and her little table, which holds a solar-powered radio and a small mirror backed with a Frida Kahlo painting.
“I love Frida Kahlo,” she says while preparing a “Glenwood” — a spicy Polish sausage, some melted pepperjack cheese, a pickle spear, yellow mustard — for a customer who knew her name (which, after hanging out with her for an hour, seems to describe most customers).
When people aren’t ordering Glenwoods, Denvers or Breckenridges (among others) — all featuring hot dogs and sausages made in Colorado — Burr hangs out in the sun, listening to Top 40 on 95.7 FM or ’70s tunes on 103.5 The Fox.
But when a customer stands before the cart, she slaps dogs on her tinfoil-lined grill and starts chatting.
Her grill is important, she says.
“When you boil them, it sucks all of the life out of the dog and puts it in the water,” she says. The soggy dogs, in fact, are partially responsible for a less-than-lovely impression many people have of her business, she says.
“People have such a mentality about hot dog carts,” she says. “There is a stigma. But (hot dogs) are an all-American pastime.”
Burr grew up in and around Denver, where her father was in the real estate business. She moved with her mother to Montrose in high school, but returned to Denver as soon as she graduated. She missed the city.
Some of her best memories, she says, revolve around sausages.
“When we were kids, my parents took us to the Wienerschnitzel every Friday for Polish sausage sandwiches,” she says. “It’s just a memory. Me and my brother and my parents going through the drive- through.”
But she says the Friday excursions had nothing to do with her embrace of the sausage business. She just wanted a more flexible lifestyle and a decent paycheck. She’s not rich slinging dogs, she says, but she does well enough to have fun, travel, and support her 16-year-old son. Burr was married, but in January her husband died of a heart attack while vacationing in Mexico.
Despite the tragedy that struck her family in Mexico, she says she dreams of splitting her time between Denver and someplace south of the border.
“Be here in the summer, and then leave in November and spend three or four months in Mexico on a beach,” she says.
The hot dog cart, she says, helps give her the freedom to live the dream.
Douglas Brown: 303-954-1395 or djbrown@denverpost.com
