{"id":3261,"date":"2014-04-02T05:55:53","date_gmt":"2014-04-02T05:55:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/stageraw.com\/oldStageRaw\/?p=3261"},"modified":"2014-05-22T05:36:45","modified_gmt":"2014-05-22T05:36:45","slug":"vaulted-ambitions-volume","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stageraw.com\/oldStageRaw\/vaulted-ambitions-volume\/","title":{"rendered":"Vaulted Ambitions, Volume I"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Waitresses<\/a><\/p>\n

Vaulted Ambitions<\/h1>\n

Stories From Where We Were to How We Got Here<\/h2>\n

BY MINDY FARABEE<\/p>\n

In a way, LA ladies, the news for us is actually pretty good. Last Thursday, the city controller\u2019s office released a snazzy infographic<\/a> illustrating the state of women in the city workforce. Turns out, we Angelenas earn 83 cents for every dollar a man makes. Nationwide, that statistic has been stuck hovering around 77 cents for going on seven years now.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Back in 1977, the gender gap paid women a little less than 59 cents on the male dollar earned, just one of the irksome stats fueling the next wave of American feminism. Then again, back in \u201977, carpool lanes were a new fangled idea. Prop 13 was but a gleam in taxpayers\u2019 eyes. The Mediterranean fruit fly had just arrived. And female artists in LA were staging a coup on the art world.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Among the insurgents: six women who collectively called themselves The Waitresses \u2014the troupe founded by then-art students Anne Gauldin and Jerri Allyn who bonded over shared experiences waitressing their way through grad school \u2014 and who for over nearly a decade put out a body of work that helped shape the LA performance art scene.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"spinning<\/a><\/p>\n

A fluid ensemble of female artists \u2014 originally comprised of Denise Yarfitz Pierre, Jamie Wildman-Webber, Patti Nicklaus and Leslie Belt along with Allyn and Gauldin \u2014the Waitresses staged guerrilla fashion shows in LA eateries, dressed up as dancing bananas in art galleries, brought female super-heroes to labor conferences, harmonized on their own Pacifica radio show, talked about sexual harassment in an NBC news special, took their act to universities, theater festivals and the streets of Pasadena and even performed overseas.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"one<\/a><\/p>\n

Like many young artists in 1975, Gauldin, born and reared in Whittier, already had a plane ticket to New York when she saw a flyer about a new feminist art project at a local bookstore. Meanwhile, Allyn, a Quaker from Pennsylvania studying at the San Francisco Art Institute, climbed aboard a carload of young women heading south to check out this radical new art program their professors were talking about. They all converged on and in the Woman\u2019s Building, a three story downtown LA performance and gallery-space-slash-fully-accredited-art-school-slash-consciousness-raising-tool that for nearly 20 years also functioned as a community epicenter and symbol for an era.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The Woman\u2019s Building opened in 1973, after artists Judy Chicago and Sheila Levrant de Bretteville <\/b>and art historian Arlene Raven all decamped from CalArts, determined to create an arena where female artists could work on their own terms. Their project touched nerves at its outset.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s a story about how they were scared the floor would crash at the opening,\u201d said historian Michelle Moravec, who has written extensively on the feminist art movement. \u201cSomething like 5000 people showed up. It was crazy; the place was packed. The energy was buzzing. It was probably the most visible center of the feminist art movement.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Cultural centers everywhere in the 1970s were shifting; case in point that an audacious scheme like the Woman\u2019s Building would spring up 3000 miles from the recognized axis of the art world, part of its ambition fed by a very West Coast belief in fresh starts.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\u201cIn part, the lack of solidified art scene in LA made it almost more possible, that and the ongoing utopian strand in California history\u2026 Feminists came here to be something they couldn\u2019t be where they were,\u201d said Moravec. In reaction to the foment of the times, \u201cthe New York art scene formed alternative galleries that paralleled the [traditional] art world. LA\u2019s Woman\u2019s Building turned its back on the art world.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"wonder<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The Waitresses first action, a seven-day series of public performances, panel discussions and workshops called Ready to Order?<\/i>, was conceived of as a teachable moment for the average restaurant goer. They produced work that played on pop culture memes, with skits such as \u201cWonder Waitress,\u201d in which Wildman-Webber overpowered an angry cook and a difficult customer. They played out personal fantasies, such as in the piece \u201cYou\u2019re All Wet,\u201d in which Gauldin, an erstwhile cocktail waitress, threw a tray of drinks one by one into the face of a sexist customer. In Coffee Cauldron<\/i>, the women donned waitress uniforms and created a ritual that turned coffee pots into metaphorical vessels, honoring the notion of service as a higher calling. It was one of several pieces that mixed the historical imagery of serious art with a political edge.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"diana<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cI always liked doing the Great Goddess Diana<\/i>,\u201d said Gauldin recently over some iced tea at a coffee shop near her Highland Park home. \u201cWhenever I wore the costume, I always got really strange reactions from the men. They weren\u2019t sure if they were supposed to find it sexy or if it was kind of offensive.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Mildly bizarre is one thing it was. Modeled on the famous state of the goddess Diana at Ephesus<\/a>, Gauldin\u2019s outfit included casts made from the breasts of each of the women in the group. She and Yarfitz would stroll into a crowded dining room at meal time and erect a shrine to the goddess, as a way of making transparent the underlying expectations that casts the waitress as mother figure, and mother as unending, self-sacrificing font.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\u201cHow could you stand it?\u201d their script read in part. \u201cSweat of reaching hands, open mouths, empty bellies \u2014 questioning, commanding, demanding \u2014 you must give everything to everyone at once, or be devoured! Friendly and smiling, giving menu, silverware, placemat, napkin, food, drink. White, wheat or rye? Eyes, ears, legs? Thousand, Roquefort, French?\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The Waitresses tackled themes of violence against women, pay equity and classism, the democratization of art and the economics of world hunger with a crackpot sense of humor. \u201cWe learned that five out of the six of us had been raped,\u201d said Allyn in a phone interview. \u201cSo sexual harassment took on a very different hue. In some ways, it was too heavy. So we resorted to humor.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

It proved to be a popular approach. To date, their All-City Waitress Marching Band, which began with about 35 pots and pans wielding entrants (and one baton twirler) into Pasadena\u2019s second annual Doo Dah Parade, has been reconstituted more than 10 times with a varying cast of characters, according to Allyn, including at LACMA in 2007, and most recently in league with the Occupy Wall Street movement.<\/p>\n

\"doo<\/a><\/p>\n