'Bitter Waitress' at Lilydale's Joke Joint Debuts Tuesday

When Republican gubernatorial candidate Rep. Tom Emmer proposed cutting the minimum wage for servers in Minnesota this summer, one response was to dump a sack of pennies on him. Watching a dress rehearsal for the comedy show "Bitter Waitress," premiering at Lilydale's this Tuesday, you get the impression the show's writer, director and main actress, Sarah Webster Norton, has been saving up a sack of invectives to spill on any politician—or customer, or co-worker—who questions a server's right to dignity, respect and a 20 percent tip.

"Bitter Waitress" is no community theater play. It is a comedy club show, full of expletives and gross-out stories. Norton put together a mix of monologues, video clips of interviews with restaurant employees and service industry-themed songs with original lyrics and music unapologetically lifted from sources ranging from singer Shania Twain to the musical "Sweet Charity."

Monologues have moments of humor, such as the bitter waiter's rant against the tithe-sized 10 percent tips of the after-church lunch crowd: "Unlike Jesus, I have bills to pay." But there are many mean-spirited rants that fail to be funny. "We would never actually say these things to people," Norton says. Saying these things about people, however, is the basis of the show.

The bitterness of the actors has real-life inspiration. Both Norton and Jennifer Merchant, the other singer/actress, worked as waitresses for years. And they both were fired from their last jobs. Norton lost her last serving job, she suspects, for staging a smaller-scale "Bitter Waitress" show; she now works as an event promoter at the Joke Joint. Merchant lost her job after serving an under-aged customer during a compliance check. She insists it was a one-time slip-up. "If I had been serving under-aged customers routinely," she says, "I would have had a lot more customers." At the same time, Merchant, a graduate of Savannah College of Art and Design, credits the firing with forcing her to focus on her jewelry-making.

The show's best moments are Norton's videotaped interviews with current service workers. (Norton promised not to use their names, though one bartender wears a shirt with her restaurant's name printed on it.) The interviews confirm diners' and servers' worst fears: massive spills, disgusting alterations of food for picky customers, vermin running wild in restaurant basements.

Even as the stories have the power to disgust, their schaudenfraude is enough to satisfy service industry veterans and voyeuristic diners alike. So if you can stomach monologues that make you wonder if you've ever been such an inept co-worker or despised customer, you'll come away from the show with some great gossipy tidbits about stupid human tricks performed at Twin Cities restaurants.

The shows are Tuesdays at 7:30 p.m., Jan. 18 - Feb. 8. Tickets are $12 in advance, available here, or $14 at the door; members of the service industry get 2-for-1 admission.