The Waitress
“The waitress is different; she is ignorant and coarse, but genial. She is often unwashed and her teeth are unfilled, but she knows life and she is not afraid of life, which is to her big, dramatic, brutal but vivid, full of colour.”
– “The Woman Who Waits,” Frances Donovan
Defining a waitress should be easy—the job isn’t hard, or so I’m told. A waitress is a woman who works at a restaurant, and whose job it is to serve customers at their tables. When I consult the definition, I am provided with short sentences as working examples: “She works as a waitress”; “they asked the waitress for the bill”; “she plays the part of the sexy, blonde waitress.”
A waitress is a plate carrier, a server, simple enough. But what’s harder to define is the way I am treated in the role.
I have waited tables off and mostly on for the last decade and a half, and I have loved it and loathed it in equal measure. I was 16 when I started, and to begin with I was terrible. I dropped plates and spilled wine and was so scared of the chefs I barely went in the kitchen. The restaurant manager sensed my complete ineptitude and pocketed my share of the tips—as well as multiple thousands of pounds from the restaurant—until he was caught and fired three months later.
Since that first taste of exploitation, I began to understand that, in order to thrive in this environment, a negotiated personality must be performed. There are requirements I am expected to fulfil from the moment I step onto the restaurant floor; it becomes a public arena in which melodrama must unfold. This perhaps explains the ugliness that occurs—that I feel—when I fail to act my part.
I learned that if I didn’t want this job to get the better of me I could not remain myself as I worked front of house. It was not enough to just be a waitress. To succeed, I had to become The Waitress.
The Waitress is a synecdoche: labelled by her function, a part substituted for a whole. She is an archetype, a character of the community who represents universal expectations of hospitality. A role for women all over the world, myself included, to step into, shaped by the women who have waited before them. A symbol of gender, labour, domesticity, and sexuality who’s always ready to serve. How can she help you today?
Who then do I become when I play The Waitress? I am not particularly interested in laying bare the last 15 years of my career to be gawked at while I figure the answer out. Life happens to you when you’re a waitress, and I don’t care to expose mine more than I need to. What interests me instead is seeing how waitresses are perceived by the world around me. Here I can turn to pop culture, where they have been imagined and utilised to excess, and so I do, feasting on waitresses across TV and film. Curled into the sofa, glass of wine in hand, coveting and collecting these characters with whom I share so much, and resemble so little.
I watch as they carry plates across my screen; smooth down their aprons before service; exhale into the cold, tiled surface of the kitchen walls after a bad day. They have been chosen for a reason, these women who wait, they reveal something of the way society views us and our work. They play to different facets of The Waitress—that she is at once a damsel, matriarch, celebrity, sex object, and blank canvas.
I watch to see if I can find myself in them, if their experiences can validate my own. I watch, and wonder: Have we been performing to the same audience this whole time?
Has anyone else played a waitress as often as Jennifer Aniston? She waits tables in Office Space and The Iron Giant, but it is in Friends that she is most memorable in the role—perhaps because she’s so awful at it. I watch in horror as her character, Rachel Green, spills coffee and forgets orders and ignores customers entirely while she gossips with her friends. Rachel is told to her face that she is a “terrible, terrible waitress.” And yet she persists!
This association of careless youth with waitressing goes all the way back to antiquity. The first classical example of a waitress was also the Goddess of Youth. Hebe, the daughter of Zeus and Hera, was the official cup bearer and wine pourer for the Gods. A divine domestic, if you will.
More recently, as Dorothy Cobble writes in Dishing It Out: Waitresses and Their Unions in the Twentieth Century, the connection between young women and waitressing was forged when dining outside of the home, particularly at tearooms, became more commonplace. The role was precarious and the pay bad—not much has changed in a century.
In 1913, Barbara Drake, a trade unionist, referred to the tearoom as “a halfway house between school and altar”—she spoke at a time when the Marriage Bar, which restricted the employment of married women, was still common practice. Waitressing became a place for girls to mature before marriage, before their public service returned to the domestic. Waitressing as something to do while you wait for your adult life to begin.
Maybe this is why waitresses make good love interests on and off screen. They are women who need to be saved—what is a damsel, if not in distress? Saved from their lowly position in society, from their mediocre paycheques, from the indignity of their work. Or perhaps saved so they can perform service work for one man only. Service, please, whenever it is required.
““Have I needed saving all this time, I wonder? I find I do not trust the men who are only attracted to me in my role as a waitress. What is it that they require from me? Subservience? I have none to give!””
Have I needed saving all this time, I wonder? I find I do not trust the men who are only attracted to me in my role as a waitress. What is it that they require from me? Subservience? I have none to give!
I feel this distrust when I watch Waitress. Keri Russell plays Jenna Hunterson, the titular waitress and a gifted pie maker trapped in an abusive marriage. She works in a diner with a crumbling facade smeared black with car fumes—“I don’t care if she is a pie genius, I wouldn’t trade places with her,” her colleague gossips of her. Jenna’s life is desperate, it is clear. Someone needs to do something about it. But who? Waitresses cannot save themselves; that is what the men are for.
Illustrations by Hannah Robinson
Luckily there is a doctor who has a thing for diner workers and their uniforms, ready to cheat on his wife and rescue Jenna in the process. The sex is good, but times are hard and it is not enough—it is never enough—and in the end it is the money of another male benefactor who gives Jenna her freedom. The freedom to be single, to be enough on her own two feet, to take ownership of the diner and to have autonomy of her pies.
Money is always the answer, and when you are a waitress there is never enough of it. If you stumble into opportunity, you leave. By the end of Friends, Rachel has matured, and her character has progressed from being a bad waitress to making coffee for colleagues at Fortunata Fashions to finally securing a position at Ralph Lauren. I watch as she grows up and away from the need to serve.
And yet, a good waitress can hold a lot of power. I think of Michelle Pfeiffer in the 1991 movie Frankie and Johnny. She plays Frankie, a sensible woman with a secret past who waits tables with a hardness. Waitressing has made her tough, life has made her tough, and now she is a maintainer of boundaries. When a group of female customers is rude to her—“WAITRESS!” they yell, and I flinch—she calmly, coarsely informs them that the restaurant has now closed.
Then there is Raimunda in Volver, breathtakingly played by Penélope Cruz, who exemplifies the resourceful, capable waitress. Sure, her husband may have been murdered by her daughter after attempting to rape her and yes, Raimanda may have stored his body in the freezer in a derelict restaurant and, of course, there is a pile of bills to be paid. But Raimunda is smart and beautiful, and she uses these qualities to her advantage. Commandeering the derelict restaurant as her own, bartering and bargaining with neighbours for supplies and labour to make it all work, she hustles to provide hospitality in exchange for much-needed money.
Raimunda is fiercely competent, but she also must work to hide the truth, to put on a brave face. You learn quickly that to be a good waitress requires this removal of the self. This is what sociologist Arlie Hochschild meant by “emotional labour,” before the term became ubiquitously misused.
In her 1983 book, The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling, Hochschild analyses the work of flight attendants (what is a flight attendant if not a waitress of the sky?). She defines their performance as “the management of feeling to create a publicly observable facial and bodily display.” Waitressing is a labour of domestic chores, sure, but it is also a labour of emotion.
““After all, The Waitress has many customers, but a customer only has one waitress.””
After all, The Waitress has many customers, but a customer only has one waitress. It is important that her character remains consistent throughout the performance, that she maintains her position of nurture, warmth and hospitality, regardless of how she feels that day.
As Hochschild asks, “When rules about how to feel and how to express feeling are set by management, when workers have weaker rights to courtesy than customers do, when deep and surface acting are forms of labor to be sold, and when private capacities for empathy and warmth are put to corporate uses, what happens to the way a person relates to her feelings or to her face?”
There is a disconnect between my front-of-house self and my actual self, a performance of charm is required from me in my work that I don’t always possess outside of it. I’ve struggled with this tension, the knowledge that some of my feelings, expressions, and reactions were wrong for the work, that there were aspects of myself I must limit. I knew this emotional control was required, and yet I experienced the thoughts and feelings regardless. Did that make me a bad waitress? Did that make me a bad person?
I think of this tension while watching Helen Hunt play wisecracking waitress Carol Connolly in As Good As It Gets. Carol waits on Jack Nicholson’s character, Melvin Udall. She, a vision of patience and maternalism; he, a bigoted romance writer who struggles with OCD. His ugliness acts as protection, it keeps people at bay, in their place—it is a tactic I know well. The film is an exploration of boundaries, of The Waitress’ role in the lives of others, of obligation.
I think it’s also one of the most romantic movies I’ve ever seen. I watch as brash, scared and isolated Melvin grows and softens as a person because of the impact Carol has on his life.
“I wonder,” Melvin says to Carol as the film reaches its conclusion, “how people can watch you clear their food and clean their tables and never get that they just met the greatest woman alive.” This is when I cry. Isn’t that all The Waitress wants—for someone to look beyond her character and love her for who she really is?
To be The Waitress is to be a woman of, and among, the people. Or, as my friend Sophie once put it, waitresses are the celebrities of the neighbourhood.
““To be The Waitress is to be a woman of, and among, the people...the celebrities of the neighbourhood.””
Her venue is not the stage or the film set. It is smaller still, and offers her public an unprecedented level of access. She is the star of the restaurant, the bar, the cafe; she is the headliner of their lives.
As sociologist Ray Oldenburg described in his 1989 book, The Great Good Place, these third places are where people gather outside of work and the home, where they can exist communally, unburdened by responsibility, by chores. It is The Waitress who facilitates this idyll. She learns names and remembers coffee orders and adapts conversation accordingly. This is her realm to manage, and it is in her best interest that she does it well.
I think of this when I watch WiseGirls, which stars Mira Sorvino, Mariah Carey and Melora Walters as waitresses in a fast-paced, Italian-American restaurant that we quickly learn is Mafia-owned. I marvel at their ability to carry four plates on one arm, and the way that Mariah Carey’s character, Raychel, handles herself when she is touched by male customers without her consent. What do you do when it turns out you’re working for the Mafia? You get really good at your job, that’s what.
Mira Sorvino plays Meg Kennedy, a new hire learning the ropes. As Meg gets to grips with the restaurant and its people, she achieves a growing fame—her tips get bigger, she is requested at the important tables, and she becomes the object of desire for the owner’s son. But the more popular she gets, the more peril she must navigate. Tips become an apology for bad behaviour, and then an unspoken contract to keep quiet about events witnessed.
No one talks to you as an equal when you’re a waitress—instead they corner you in corridors, they glance at you sheepishly, they look after you with their money. Your presence can’t be helped, so your fame is turned against you and held for ransom. They expect you to keep their secrets in return.
“The development of an informal public life depends on people finding and enjoying one another outside the cash nexus,” writes Ray Oldenburg. But what if one person’s third space is the work of another? Do my customers enjoy me, or do they just enjoy that I work for them? The Waitress facilitates a community so well precisely because it is her occupation. Unlike her customers, she is explicitly driven by a cash nexus. Her livelihood depends on her popularity.
What is it that you want from your waitress? Efficiency, charm, a smile, care, attention to detail, an attractive physique, a winning personality, a sense of humour, wisdom, empathy, experience—the list goes on! All of that flair! No wonder she’s so popular!
But how much of a person are you really entitled to? The Waitress moves among her audience members, weaving her way past tables and into their lives. She works within her community—there’s that animation, there’s that exposure—performing for them as is the requirement of her work. How much should The Waitress give and how much should she restrain? How much are you paying for?
I don’t like being hit on at work but I do know how to flirt my way out of problems and into bigger tips. At a new job I was once warned a customer never tipped. Put him in my section tonight and we’ll see if that’s true, I said. 90 minutes later I received a 25% gratuity.
Boundaries are impossible to enforce when you’re a waitress, there are no clear-cut rules. When am I the exploited and when am I the exploiter? The Waitress knows that when society looks down on you, when they are quick to underestimate you, you can turn that around and use it to your advantage.
In his 1990 essay, Parasexuality and Glamour: the Victorian Barmaid as Cultural Prototype, social historian Peter Bailey coins and explains his theory of parasexuality. He describes it as a managed and controlled version of sexuality utilised by women working in bars, where sex is “deployed but contained, carefully channelled rather than discharged.”
He was speaking, specifically, of women working in Victorian taverns, but the idea, of course, applies to today’s waitresses. So many women’s livelihoods still depend on being liked, on being found attractive.
““If waitressing is a performance then gender is, too, and to perform as a waitress is to perform as a woman—or at least to perform to society’s expectations of conventional womanhood.””
If waitressing is a performance then gender is, too, and to perform as a waitress is to perform as a woman—or at least to perform to society’s expectations of conventional womanhood.
In Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, they expand on Simone de Beauvoir’s exploration of gender in The Second Sex. “If there is something right in Beauvoir’s claim that one is not born, but rather becomes a woman, it follows that woman itself is a term in process, a becoming, a constructing that cannot rightfully be said to originate or to end,” Butler writes. “As an ongoing discursive practice, it is open to intervention and resignification.”
The Waitress is a figure who is perpetually coming of age, sure, but what is she becoming? She is a construction of femininity, a reflection of the anxieties, insecurities and tensions around sex and gender in her society. She is aware of the performance required of her, as a worker and as a woman, and the sexual politics she must negotiate as a result. She must perform to an ideal of both. I’m performing for you now, am I not?
2018’s Support the Girls attempts to dissect this dilemma. The setting is a restaurant based on the Hooters model: Front-of-house workers are women only, and they wear low-cut, cropped, blushing pink tops and denim shorts so small they have little function.
One worker, Maci, inducts a group of new employees on customer-service interactions: “Touch-wise, a little touch on the shoulder, arm area, hands, that’s all good, but nowhere else. And try not to squeeze because that can get weird,” she explains nonchalantly. “If you’re not on your shift does that mean you’re still going to laugh at my jokes or not?” a regular asks an off-duty worker in a later scene.
Regina Hall plays the general manager and she is continuously trying to maintain these impossible lines. Her waitresses are allowed to pose for pictures with customers but when a customer takes it too far and makes a comment on their bodies they are thrown out. They have to wear a specific, revealing uniform for work—but when a new starter gets confused and exposes her breasts to a customer, that’s a step too far and the police get involved.
The boundaries between sex work and service work are often deliberately blurred. In 1902, the Glasgow licensing magistrates tried to ban barmaids due to union complaints that the women employed in taverns were more akin to sex workers than service workers. A perspective that speaks more to society’s views of both occupations than the individuals themselves.
I think to the man who told me, as his wife sat in silence, that because of the amount of money he’d be spending that evening he had every right to touch me if he wanted. As I took the table’s order he put his arm around me and he held my hand and I felt violated. When I told my boss he laughed.
The Waitress knows she can only control so much.
The Waitress is, above all, a blank canvas ready for projection. In her varied performances, in all the ways she keeps her true self at bay, she can be anything you want her to be.
Losing in Love works with this idea, albeit unimaginatively. Marty Papazian plays a writer fresh out of jail, struggling with work and life, as most of us are. He frequents a coffee shop so he can work on his screenplay—I know—and there he meets a waitress played by Marina Benedict. She is his waitress, sharp and smart, beautiful and adorned with self-inflicted scars. What better manic pixie dream girl is there? (I am reminded that Amélie of Amélie, the epitome of the whimsical heroine who inhabits a plane of dreams and fantasy, is also a waitress.)
Just as I find myself thinking that the waitress in Losing in Love is one bad boyfriend away from the whole caricature, she walks in on her partner sleeping with another woman. Shortly after, it’s revealed that she only waits tables because she couldn’t make it as a dancer.
I hated Losing in Love not only for its clichés but because it took so much autonomy from its waitress. The Waitress may be a blank slate, but perhaps she is more like a mirror. She reflects all the ways that people view women and their labour, that society values domesticity and service work, that gender is constructed and performed, that sexuality is wielded.
The Waitress is a reflection of who we are. Her melodrama is the ultimate performance of manners.
As my television screen has shown me these last few months, a woman is a waitress because she has little other choice. She is reliant on money and therefore customers, she needs saving, she is easy to exploit, she is incapable of building a good life for herself. But I don’t think that’s true. I am rejecting this narrative that has been relentlessly unfolding in front of my eyes. I don’t like the taste, it feels burnt and rancid in my mouth. Excuse me, please! I want to send it back!
I am not always a good person, and I am not always a good waitress. But waitressing has transformed me in ways no other job has. From a shy and scared girl who had her tips stolen to a woman who can handle herself, who is confident and chatty and understanding of the highs and lows of life, the ugliness and the beauty that are always intermingled, tripping people up, testing us. A woman who can be sharp and spiky and scary to some, soft and sweet to others. Who is learning what it is to hold grace for people in their multitudes, and to provide grace for herself in hers. A whole person, wonderful and awful in equal measure.
Life happens to you when you are a waitress, and I am grateful for mine.
