Chapter 2: The Waitress


  • The Country Club Diner. Yes, this is a real place. No, this did not happen there. Yes, there have been waitresses with the same gum-poppin' 'tude as Margie in the book. Yes, there were waitresses who worked there who were named things like BERTHA and MARGIE. No, I did not get with them either.

  • under the pink - tori amosThe Waitress is one of those titles that isn't taken from a Cure song. It's a Tori Amos song, off her second album, Under the Pink, which I got as a present the week it came out for my 14th birthday from Alissa Epstein. The party was in my parents' basement, which pretty much tells you everything you need to know about when I turned 14.

  • “Whaddyawant?”....I counted the words in my head. What. Do. You. Want. Four words, and she’d managed to condense it into a single syllable. There had to be a Nobel Prize category for that. I grew up speaking this way. Really. (I don't sound like that anymore -- well, not really -- if you're really curious, check out some spoken-word concerts from the Internet Archive.


  • Sometimes I hate to know what characters look like, and sometimes I'm desperate for more. But this ain't called the DVD extras for nothing. Not that this has anything in common with real life -- so let me hereby state for the record, legally or otherwise, that "Losers," the character of Jupiter Glazer, and people who end up living in warehouses has nothing in common with reality, and as far as I know, nobody's ever lived here.

    But we used to drive by this factory all the time when I was a kid, and it's right near my bubbie and zaida's house, and this is where I figured Jupiter would live right from the start:



    You can't really see it, but note as best as you can the shiny, smoky windows....imagine staring straight up at about 50 feet of them. Gorgeousness.

  • Where the Wild Things Are: There are a few things I try to work into every book. One of them is a character whose name is almost Matthue. I won't tell you the others,, but they're pretty easy to figure out. I don't think there's a Maurice Sendak ref in every book, but I can think of at least three offhand.

    maurice sendak + wild thing




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