RAVEN: “THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN A COCKTAIL WAITRESS AND A STRIPPER? TWO WEEKS.”
By many accounts, Raven Edwards is a typical Austin transplant. A 23-year-old aspiring chef and music lover, she moved to Austin because it is a mecca for music, entertainment, and open-minded young people. Having visited the city every year while growing up, Austin always struck Raven as a place she’d like to live one day.
Dallas, in contrast, was too fast-paced, too pretentious, and too Christian for Raven. She loves that Austin is laidback, she says, and that people don’t feel the need to impress each other here. She was also chasing a fresh start and a break from a tumultuous past in Dallas. To Raven, Austin is a place that feels like “I can actually be okay with being me.”
Since moving to the city in 2010 at the age of 19, Raven has worked at many of Austin’s most iconic businesses. She plated prepared dishes at the Whole Foods flagship store downtown; catered for Mandola’s Italian restaurant on North Lamar; prepped cold dishes at celebrity Sandra Bullock’s restaurant Bess Bistro on historic Pecan Street; and made salads at the healthfood restaurant Snap Kitchen.
However, Raven’s jobs haven’t panned out the way she had hoped when she first dreamed of moving to Austin and starting anew. She started working in the service industry at age 15 in Dallas, and estimates that she has held 16 jobs in the past eight years (half of those in Austin in the past three years), working in each position for only two to 12 months. She earned between $5.15 and $10 an hour. Some of these positions she quit; from others, she was fired. She worked back-to-back shifts for unreasonable supervisors. She put up with back talk from customers, and endured sexual harassment from coworkers and bosses. Her employers’ promises of promotions and raises never materialized. Guaranteed transitions from part-time to full-time work that would have provided benefits were ignored. She had little to no control over her work schedule, often learning of her shifts with only a few hours’ notice.
Raven has always worked at least two jobs in order to support herself, and despite this, still often cuts it dangerously close to broke at the end of every month. Facing an uncertain future with low wages and little autonomy, Raven turned to another line of service work in Austin: stripping.
During our first meeting at local coffee shop, Raven tells me, “There’s a joke: What’s the difference between a cocktail waitress and a stripper? Two weeks.”
Raven tilts her head back and laughs. “I literally went two weeks, it was my two week mark after my new cocktailing job that I first showed my tits for money. And man, do you make a lot more money than being a waitress.” But it is not only “for the money” that she dances and strips. Raven at times also finds more appreciation, stability, enjoyment, and independence working as an exotic dancer at a gentleman’s club than she does as a waitress in some of Austin’s most famous restaurants.