Issue date: 6/6/02 Section: Culture

Media Credit: File UNM junior Lillian Beams is one of the waitresses featured in “American Waitress, New Mexico.”

The Santa Fe Film Festival sponsored a special premiere of "American Waitress, New Mexico" by Backseat Productions, Saturday at the Guild Cinema. Audience members waited in lines that stretched down the block for the film's anticipated opening. The screening was a benefit to raise funds for and promote the Santa Fe Film Festival.

"American Waitress" is a locally produced documentary by director Vanessa Vassar that explores the public and private lives of several New Mexican waitresses. Many of the varying environments, attitudes, perceptions and experiences of these waitresses are examined. The film attempts to unravel cultural systems, dynamics and the human nature that emerges within the service industry.

Vassar described the film as "a vehicle to examine power structures and how people treat each other when one person has power over the other."

To produce the documentary, Vassar interviewed more than 20 servers, busers, cooks, owners and customers in various restaurants around New Mexico. She then focused on four individual waitresses. Her goal, she explained, was to find characters who differed "in age, in the type of restaurant they work in, culturally, and in the reasons why they are waitressing."

The film is organized as a series of anecdotes told by the waitresses that touch on cultural issues. As "American Waitress" played, Vassar and some of the film's featured waitresses laughed and cheered enthusiastically from the back of the theater.

"I'm enjoying it more than anyone else," Vassar joked.

The four waitresses in the documentary are:

Lillian Beams, a third-year UNM political science and English major, works hard to support herself as a waitress at the Route 66 Diner. The audience follows Beams as she laughs with her hairdresser and reflects on her heritage and life without her daughter, who currently lives in another state.

Sonja Fairbanks is a renowned artist by day and a waitress by night at the Compound Restaurant in Santa Fe. She solemnly discusses the elite social system that she finds herself abused by while she is in uniform and worshipped by when she is labeled as an artist.

Karen Webb is a professional waitress at the Plaza Restaurant in Santa Fe whose approach to life is that no matter what you do, you should be happy doing it. Webb joked about how she enjoys dispensing tough love to her customers and demonstrates inner strength when discussing the adversity that has plagued her, as she consistently maintains a positive outlook.

Continued...

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