Beautiful Waitresses – Contrary to my dusty love of side-of-the road dives and depressing Sam Shepard stories come to life in truck-stops and busted motel rooms, I have mostly worked in restaurants and bars where the glasses of wine aren’t cheap, and you definitely can’t order hash browns. They’re pretty much all the same. You get a few less genuine exchanges, you don’t get quite as many regulars, but those still do come along. They’re all just places where people come to escape real life and maybe fall in love with a stranger for the night, or forever. I worked at one candlelit Los Angeles perch where, for whatever reason, the bar-love was extra-rare. But once I met a man who seemed to come from every place I’d ever known, and maybe I got clouded by loss, and love, and grasping for straws of what was definitely not destiny, and maybe I let my heart break for too long. I also met women who are angels, actual rock-stars, weirdo women who made life feel good when life felt pretty chaotic and hard. Real friends. And other men. Men who made me feel good, men who made me very confused, men who maybe I’ve known from other lifetimes, and maybe I didn’t believe in other lifetimes, but maybe now I do. And maybe I never loved that job, but I fell in all kinds of love there. Even a “nice” bar is the same thing as a diner, and everyone’s just passing through, waiting for a human connection. | 2020 |