Word: waitress
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...plot--such as it is--in which the signing-waitress in her father's Hoboken beer-garden, on losing her boyfriend, essays the New York stage and becomes a celebrity, is based to a considerable degree on the actual life of the show's star, Helen Morgan (1900-41), who told Kern and Hammerstein about her early years as a chanteuse in a German-style beer-garden named Adeline's. (A film biography of Morgan's life was made in 1957, starring Ann Blyth and Paul Newman...
...that they were mean to him, but when he did things like tell them shyly of a waitress at Brighams with whom he was madly in love (for two weeks, until she told him bluntly she never wanted to see him again), or when he decided to buy piranha (and then kept them in his room--Sam and Mark could hear him at night talking to them), or when he listened over and over again to a single passage from a Bartok concerto--well, it was hard to resist laughing a little...
...those systems are not perhaps products of human expression. On the evidence of Talking to Myself, Terkel has rarely sought out people who actually run things. An indefatigable romantic, he prefers the "mute, inglorious Miltons" among the underdogs: the Welsh miner with a taste for the impressionists, the Cockney waitress with a Bruegel print on her wall, the Swedish miner who quotes Gibbon. Terkel is moved by what he takes to be the oppression of such people. As he presents them, though, they seem to be doing very nicely indeed...
...assemble her disquieting portrait of the work life of the average woman, Howe interviewed scores of women, met with unions and management and even took a job as a sales clerk. The vast majority of women, she writes, are in "pink collar" occupations: beautician, office worker, sales clerk, waitress. Among the problems contributing to their generally low wages: too many applicants and not enough jobs, indifferent unions, and company policy predicated on "A and P" (attrition and pregnancy) to hold down the office payroll. Wherever she can, Howe skillfully animates dry statistics with the experiences of women who are figures...
Referring to these changes, and the creation of cafeteria-style dining in dining halls originally built for waitress service, Weissbecker says, "Every time we introduce something, the dining halls become more like picnic sites...