Twin Peaks

There's no doubt in my mind of minds that Twin Peaks, a "breastaurant" - twin peaks? get it? get it? - is a terrible place to work. Like Hooters, like the Tilted Kilts, members of the wait staff - comely young women, all - are hired for their looks and for how good they look wearing revealing outfits. 

In presumable return, they can make good tip money from the leering men who like to be waited on by cute young things in tight tops and short skirts. 

In my younger days, I was a waitress - both during summers while I was in a school, and full-time when I was out of college and casting around for something to do. It pretty much goes without saying that I didn't work in any place that required racy garb.

For one thing, they didn't exist back in the day. Sure, there were strip joints, but there weren't "family restaurants" (burgers and wings) where the "girls" dolled up. For another thing, if there had been such restaurants, they wouldn't have hired me even if I wanted a job there. Which I most decidedly would not have.

My first waitress job, age 18, at a Big Boy's, had a really alluring uniform, which looked like it had been designed by a nun, in consultation with my mother. We wore knee length brown skirts, white cotton blouses with round collars and pin-tuck pleats, and brown clip-on bow ties. White waitress oxfords, of course. For accent color: orange aprons that matched the leatherette banquettes. We were also required to wear "lunch lady" hairnets. 

We were issued nametags, and were warned to wear them up high enough so that no one would get fresh and ask what the other one was named. Ho, ho!

When I worked at the Union Oyster House and Durgin Park, our uniform was a white nylon dress purchased at a cut-rate nurses' uniform store. Knee length. White waitress oxfords, natch. Waitresses at both of these places ranged in age from twenty-something (that would include me) on up to women in their seventies. We were working girls. Just not that kind of working girl. 

(I really can't count the one shift I worked at Valle's Stakehouse in October 1972. The uniform was standard white nurse's dress.)

My final waitressing gig was at a basement pub beneath the long-defunct Admiralty Room, which was considered a relatively swank dining establishment at the time. Unionized men worked in the fine dining room. Un-unionized women worked below ground in a casual pub atmosphere. In keeping with the nautical theme, the uniform was a bright blue polyester sailor dress (with kippy white with red trim sailor collar) - so rigidly non-natural in fabric that, when you took it off, you could almost stand it up. The dress was pretty short, but this was in keeping with the times, and I had great legs. 

I didn't work there long. Terrible food. Not great money. And mostly boring (although I did see a woman give a guy a hand job at the bar one time). I can still remember what the guy looked like. He was a regular, and we referred to him as HJ.

But I never worked a house where the point was to look and act sexy. (Good thing.)

Anyway, on the current restaurant front:

A group of 34 former employees of Twin Peaks, a restaurant chain featuring scantily clad waitstaff, filed a federal lawsuit Thursday alleging their uniforms and a system for grading their bodies amounted to sex discrimination and harassment.

The suit, filed in U.S. District Court for Northern District of Illinois, alleges Twin Peaks “preys on vulnerable young women” and is “run very much like a commercial sex ring.”

Central to the allegations are claims that managers at the start of every shift assess the tautness of female servers’ arms, stomachs, legs and backs and assign them “tone grades” that are used to determine who gets to serve the best sections of the restaurant. Those with low scores are told they are fat, and some have been threatened with termination unless they lose weight, the suit alleges.

The suit alleges staff must work in lingerie or bikinis during special costume weeks, and if they refuse, they don’t work.

The environment resulted in “rampant sexual harassment,” with other employees catcalling and customers able to touch and say things to the female staff without consequence, the suit alleges. (Source: Yahoo)

I believe each and every word of this. No doubt in my mind that management was disgusting, the customers crude. As for other employees "catcalling", well, has anyone ever been in a restaurant kitchen? 

At Union Oyster House, the fellow who put together the salads and shrimp cocktails was a heavyset fellow with a cigar stub perpetually in his mouth. Each time I came over to his station to get a salad and/or a shrimp cocktail, which was multiple times per shift, he'd mutter, "I had a dream about you last night, Marlene [as he called me]. We was making love."

Did it occur to me to complain to management. Or even tell him to shut up. Hell no. This was 1970. This was a restaurant. Trash talk was as much a part of the scene as the numbers runner. (Do numbers runners still exist?) All it merited was an occasional eye roll. And, yes, I'm delighted that women no longer put up with shit like this.

And I really do have sympathy for the women who've experienced the lousy Twin Peaks work environment. The managers should be better behaved instead of disgusting sexist louts. But I do have to ask what employees expected when they went to work at a restaurant called Twin Peaks, which had its waitstaff wearing "sexy" uniforms. It's kind of like working at the Bada Bing on The Sopranos and becoming incensed if Silvio Dante asked you to pole dance. 

It's a terrible time to be a restaurant worker, and I wish all the litigants here well. But, seriously, when the restaurant biz comes back from the dead, I hope they find new places to work. No one wears a white dress to wait any more. But there are plenty of places where the wait staff wears black pants and a white shirt. Or a polo shirt. And you can probably make decent money without subjecting yourself to the grossity of a restaurant like Twin Peaks.