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"Nobody objects to a woman being a good writer or sculptor or geneticist if at the same time she manages to be a good wife, a good mother, good-looking, good-tempered, well-dressed, well-groomed, and unaggressive. "
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Although I graduated high school with honors that could have earned me a full scholarship to many colleges, I chose instead to pursue a trade and paid my way through culinary school. I worked the next ten years as a pastry chef in restaurants down the eastern seaboard from New England to New Orleans, perfecting my craft while learning the ways of the restaurant business and the larger world. My vantage from several of the finest restaurants in the country offered me the most poignant lessons in inequality I have yet encountered: as I stood between customers ordering Beluga caviar and illegal-immigrant laborers washing dishes, between high-priced escorts dining with their companions and male bosses sexually harassing their female employees, between waiters whose paychecks totaled $0.00 or less and the homeless searching the dumpster for the day’s leftovers, I began to sense the larger political, social, and economic forces at work in my own life and the lives of the people I encountered each day. The stories of these people and their places is the necessary starting point for the questions I will ask while pursuing a Ph.D. in Urban Studies and Planning at Portland State University. And so it begins...
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