I have to do something I hate doing. I have to give Gloria Allred some publicity. Sure, I have to mention her only in order to say that I think she's wrong and using the plight of women to further her own fame. But I still have to mention her, which is what she wants. It's a great system she's set up for herself: she wins even when people talk about how ridiculous she is.
But I can't ignore Allred here because now she is messing with something near and dear to my heart: scantily clad cocktail waitresses in Atlantic City. That's right, I live on the East Coast. That means I can't easily get to Las Vegas or New Orleans. That means occasionally I have to go get my gambling fix in A.C. If you've never been to Atlantic City, imagine Vegas after the apocalypse: everything is broken and rundown and more desperate-looking. It's pathetic. And you feel pathetic while you are there (until you start hitting some points and the table gets hot and you find yourself nailing a hard ten and it feels like the whole casino gives you a high five).
One casino was doing something about that depressing ambiance. It was getting rid of all of its old cocktail waitresses. Believe me when I tell you that this is an important move. Imagine sitting in A.C. down a grand at 4 a.m. and starting to think to yourself if there is any Swingers potential and then your watered-down drink comes back only it's brought to you by a woman old enough to be your grandmother. And so instead of trying to figure out how to have sex with the waitress, you're sitting there kind of thinking of how your mother would disapprove if she saw you in that moment. It's enough to make you want to kill yourself.
It's certainly enough to make you want to stop gambling. And now along comes Gloria Allred, trying to tell people that 50-year-old cocktail waitresses at casinos are still sexy, and can't be fired….
The Newark Star-Ledger has the basics of the lawsuit :
Attorney Gloria Allred said the latest lawsuit was filed this morning in Atlantic City on behalf of nine former beverage servers who were told they were fired from the casino because they did not "meet uniform requirements."
It follows a similar suit brought by other former Resorts servers in March, and another by former employees who performed other tasks and were let go when the casino changed hands in December.
"They were fired because they got older, because as beautiful as they are, they didn't met someone's definition of ‘sexy,'" said Virginia Hardwick, a New Jersey attorney participating in the case.
Here's all I need to know about the cocktail-waitress plaintiffs:
Margie DePamphilis, 54….
Elsa Hernandez, a 57-year-old grandmother….
Marie Stewart, 66….
Stop right there. Just stop. Surely we can live in a society where we can say 66 years old is too old to be a cocktail waitress without risking litigation. Surely I don't have to explain why maybe it's time for the 57-year-old woman to start serving drinks at Bennigan's instead of a casino.
And it's not like this casino had some kind of age cap where waitresses were automatically fired after they reached a certain age:
[O]lder servers were told they had to audition for their jobs in the new skimpy flapper costumes, were given costumes too small for them and were photographed in awkward poses that emphasized body fat. A panel put together by an outside modeling agency recommended who should stay and who should go based on photographs of the auditions, according to court documents.
See, they weren't fired once they got old, they were fired once they started to look old. Legally, that's a big difference.
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