Hey Waitress!: The USA from the Other Side of the Tray.(Book Review)

Hey Waitress!: The USA from the Other Side of the Tray. Alison Owings. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002.

Alison Owings's fine book is based on a series of interviews with waitresses from all over the United States. This book reads like a hybrid of Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed (2002), an expose of the life of the working poor, and This Day: Diaries from American Women (2003) by Joni B. Cole, Rebecca Joffrey, and B. K. Rakhra. What it has in common with Ehrenreich's book is the depiction of life for Americans who live on the edge, with no health insurance, no savings, kids to feed, and rent checks to write. What it has in common with This Day is the extraordinary collection of voices presented.

Owings sandwiches her interviews between the "brief, and subjective history of waitressing" and her own undercover experience a la Ehrenreich in which she is humiliated by her incompetence as a waitress (7). Her history of waitressing offers all sorts of historical tidbits. Readers learn that in 1750, a New York tavern owner was criticized for "fomenting the break-up of the family" when he served businessmen lunch (9). In 1827, when Delmonico's, the country's first formal restaurant, opened, people did not know how to react. Dining out as entertainment seemed very strange to most Americans.

The interviews make this book so compelling. Like the editors of This Day, Owings selected excellent subjects and let them speak for themselves. We meet Ima Jean Edwards, who worked the now-famous Woolworth lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina, in 1960. We learn not only about Ima's life serving food, but we also read about the early days of the civil rights movement. We meet waitress and union organizer Beulah Compton, as well as Gladys Gilbert, a wealthy ...