Waitresses

Sylvia Mesa's knees ache and stiffen after hours of serving plates of drumsticks and mashed potatoes at Mrs. Knott's Chicken Dinner Restaurant in Buena Park. Then after spending most of the day on her feet, the veteran waitress gets on her bike and rides two miles to the apartment she shares with her daughter and granddaughter. The bike is one of several money-saving tactics she uses to make ends meet on the modest salary she has collected at the restaurant for the last 35 years.

To create "Counter Culture: The American Coffee Shop Waitress," Candacy Taylor's master's thesis-turned-coffee-table book, the writer spent the last decade crisscrossing the United States, interviewing women over age 50 who had spent their working lives in American diners. As a result, "Counter Culture" combines 26,000 miles of chance encounters, heavy research, snippets of oral history and more than 100 new and archival photos to fashion a surprisingly complex portrait of a thoroughly unglamorous occupation.

Frank Fertitta Jr., a bellman turned gaming mogul who pioneered the concept of neighborhood casinos in fast-growing Las Vegas, died Friday. He was 70. Fertitta, who founded Station Casinos Inc., which was publicly traded for more than a decade, was being treated for a heart condition at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles when he died, the Las Vegas Review-Journal reported. Fertitta opened his first neighborhood casino -- simply named the Casino -- in 1976. The 5,000-square-foot gambling hall, attached to the Mini-Price Motor Inn and a short drive from Las Vegas Boulevard, gave the Strip's dealers and cocktail waitresses their own after-work hangout.

It has to be one of the few restaurants still used for motion pictures, weddings and fundraisers even though it stopped serving food four decades ago. But, then, few have settings like the Fred Harvey Restaurant at L.A.'s Union Station. It's a wondrous time capsule from the mid-20th century, with a three-story-high ceiling, black, red and brown floor tiles in the pattern of a Navajo rug, high-backed lunch booths and an Art Deco bar with bubble glass.

When customers sit beneath an intricate gold mural, order kung pao chicken and confide that they've just lost their jobs, waitress Alice Lau understands their hurt and fear. She's feeling the pinch too, as the repercussions of decisions made by others trickle down to her. Her hours at the Great Wall Chinese restaurant have been cut because regulars such as Rogelio Valdez can no longer afford dinners out. Some customers come in for one last meal to tell her they've been laid off, then disappear.

Carmen Rocha, a waitress at El Cholo Mexican restaurant in Los Angeles for many years who is credited with introducing the city to nachos, the now-ubiquitous appetizer of tortilla chips, cheese and jalapeno peppers, has died. She was 77. Rocha, whose photograph appears on one of the restaurant's souvenir postcards, died at her home in Los Angeles on Oct. 9. The cause was cancer, according to Rand Salisbury, whose family owns El Cholo.

Alice Broude, 89, a colorful character at the downtown Los Angeles restaurant-bar originally known as the Redwood House, where she worked as a waitress for more than 50 years, died Monday at Kaiser Permanente Medical Center in Hollywood after a stroke, her family announced. Mobsters and movie stars were fodder for her stories -- she said gangster Mickey Cohen was a great tipper and joked that she hadn't washed her hand since customer and actor Burt Reynolds had kissed it. Many regulars were Times journalists because the Redwood's longtime location on 2nd Street near South Broadway was near the newspaper.

The Los Angeles diner's big-screen moment is fleeting in "Pretty Woman," yet Barb's Quickie Grill shared much with the fairy tale of a film. While actress Julia Roberts plays out her Cinderella story in the restaurant window, a wise-looking Barbara Knox can be seen nearby. Knox already knew something about Hollywood-worthy endings -- she received the diner as a gift after working there 33 years as a waitress.

The romantic dramedy "Waitress" (Fox, $30), arriving today on DVD, is a thoroughly delightful film about a young woman working at a diner (Keri Russell) with a penchant for baking, who finds herself trapped in a loveless marriage to a brute (Jeremy Sisto).

No matter how hard the casinos try, you won't get a live-action stadium experience watching pro football games in Las Vegas: no collective sigh of relief when the opposing team shanks a field goal in overtime; no tidal waves of joy when the home team snags an interception; no leggy cheerleaders (usually). Not to worry.