Counter Culture: The American Coffee Shop Waitress (review)

In the 1970 film, "Five Easy Pieces," Robert Dupea's emotionally dependent girlfriend, waitress Rayette's most memorable line was "There isn't anybody gonna look after you and love you, as good as I do." Her character role in the film, which included an obsession with the tragic songs of Tammy Wynette, epitomized the class-based image of the American waitress and served as a foil to the hero's upper-class concert-pianist roots, reinforcing his quixotic attempt to shed that pedigree.

The women interviewed, described, and photographed in Taylor's book are anything but dependent, although in our class-obsessed, ostensibly "classless" society, we often respect neither them nor the work they do. It may come as a surprise to many readers that women all around the U.S. choose coffee shop and diner waitressing as a career and that those who excel in that profession's skills can actually make a decent lifetime living. The latter may come as an even greater surprise to those readers who have themselves waited tables "between 'real' jobs." Author, photographer, and oral historian Candacy A. Taylor is one of the latter and the stories she heard during her ten years in the trade inspired her to take on this project. She traveled twenty-six thousand miles throughout the U.S., interviewing in big cities as varied as Las Vegas, San Francisco, and Baltimore and small towns as disparate as Seligman, Arizona; Central City, Kentucky; and Gibsonia, Pennsylvania. From her travels and efforts, Taylor has produced both an award-winning exhibition of photos of waitresses at their workplaces and this remarkable book.

In the book's Introduction, the author explains her motivations for the project and how she proceeded to undertake it. From there, the book is divided into a comprehensive group of ten thematic chapters, each one beginning with an author's essay and then proceeding to edited autobiographical storytelling by three or four interviewed waitresses. In each chapter, the author's essay sets the tone for the respective theme and reveals various important and specialized aspects of the waitress's trade, many to the general public. The attendant autobiographical sketches reveal how each of these themes occurs in the life and the work of its subject.

Each sketch is an edited interview of an autobiographical statement. However, the sketches raise a philosophical question: Is an autobiographical character sketch based on an edited biographical interview a real oral history? The autobiographical sketches also beg the questions: to what extent do they represent the author trying to make a particular point? and did she edit the actual interviews to that end? Or, conversely, did the statements by the interviewees lead the author to the conclusions that appear in each chapter's introductory essay? Although I have no reason to doubt that Candacy Taylor gave her informants "sufficient time . . . to give their story the fullness they desire" (from the Oral History Association's "General Principles for Oral History" statement [www.oralhistory.org/do-oral-history/principles-and-practices/]), one may wonder whether 350- to 700-word sketches can adequately present the fullness that does justice to what was most likely a much longer interview.

Regardless of this misgiving and assuming, as I do, that the author did her best to adhere to the goals of oral history principles, Counter Culture is full of rich material. The surprising longevity of both the waitresses' jobs and the businesses that employ them implies that these are highly skilled workers, yet they receive no formal training or education in their profession. Those who succeed and persevere learn on the job, as novices, watching and getting advice from older, more experienced colleagues. Such skills as being able to memorize, on the fly and without error, several tables' worth of customers' complicated orders to gracefully carry loads of food-filled dinnerware to the tables and empty dinnerware back to the kitchen, and to remember the likes, dislikes, and personality quirks of longtime customers...