Official Graduate Student

Crayons were not on my supply list this year.  Sad.

Today is my first official day of grad school.  As I sit here enjoying my usual post-workout egg whites and oat bran, I am nervous, excited and anxious all at once.  I’ve already done homework.  I’ve met my classmates.  I am a student once again and after three years of working as a waitress it’s a strange feeling.

My MBA experience began with two days of orientation last Thursday and Friday.  Classes and expectations were outlined, teambuilding exercises were held and I was bored off my half-asleep ass; you know how orientations are.  We began with the usual introductions – all fifty of us.  Of course being that this is business school, it was apparent people were trying to be impressive with their ventures and business experience.  It made me nervous.  As I am so often, I was left to decide if it was appropriate to bring up Hooters.  Would I offend anyone?  Would I lead a professor to stereotype me?  Would it prudent to just not bring it up at all?

As the woman next to me finished her introduction, I slowly stood and gathered my breath.  I started talking.  Out came my name and where I got it, along with my hometown and undergraduate history as a college athlete.  I spoke with ease and before I made a final decision on whether or not I wanted to bring up Hooters, I already had.

“And after being an unfortunate casualty of budget cuts my desk job ended and I – like so many new graduates – found myself working as a waitress.  Lets just say that the place involves owls.”

I got quite a few chuckles and then nods of what I hoped was appreciation as I went on to bring up my blog, it’s surprising success and the experiences that led me to my opportunities Hooters Magazine and Hooters of America.  I spoke about my time in Miami and the social media work I was given that so intrigued me.  I finished by saying that I hoped to continue working for Hooters and move into a corporate position when the timing was right.

I sat down feeling a mixture of relief and apprehension.  I had gotten the Hooters thing out of the way early.  But had I appeared ambitious or pigeonholed myself?  I mean it’s obvious that people were judging me, it’s human nature after all, I just didn’t know in what way. 

When we had a break a short time later, I was approached by several people and asked about my blog.  Not only were they interested they were seemingly somewhat impressed.  Yes, I was a Hooters Girl, but it was the ambition that people apparently noticed.  Even a professor asked about my writing in a positive tone.  I couldn’t help but feel relieved.  It turns out that maybe Hooters wasn’t so big of a deal after all.

So while I’m nervous on this first day, I’m looking forward to what this first semester will bring.  My course load is heavy, I am still working and I’m going to be busier than ever.  Luckily, I have an ambitious streak that will hopefully serve me well.  I’m not just a Hooters Girl.  I’m a Hooters Girl/blogger/MBA student/freelance writer/social media guru/girlfriend/fitness competitor/glorious individual.  And I’m so proud of all of that.

June = Awesome in the Life of Sauce

June has never been very modest.  Even in '51.  CREDIT.

Sometimes you have those days when you wake up and things seem to be going really freaking well.  Everything is happening the way it should and shit is just awesome.  Well as of June first, that's pretty much how this whole month seems to be shaping up for me.  Yes, the forecast for my month of June seems to be sunny with a 90% chance of total baddassness.  It may be rainy and cold in real life, but my June is so totally legit I can ignore that.  That's how high June's wonderful quotient is.  I am already loving these thirty sweet days.

I started my June by finding a new place to live that isn't smaller than most celebrity - or even some rich normal people - closets.  After a year and half of paying way too much money for way too little space I am finally going to call a real apartment home.  An apartment with real rooms and doors separating those real rooms.  I won't be able to touch my oven from my bed.  Not mad about it.  I'll be in a cute little apartment with character that just so happens to be three blocks from downtown and three blocks from campus.  I call that perfection.  

But what makes of this even more exciting is that I wasn't just apartment hunting for me, I was apartment hunting for my sister who currently lives 5,000 miles away in Amsterdam.  Did I mention that my sister lives in Amsterdam currently?  Well she totally does.  That's how cool and international my family is.  Unfortunately there is nothing cool about international apartment hunting for someone who can be picky as shit.  That is hard as hell.  Finding this place - that I get to move into on the eleventh - ends an arduous two month search that had to meet approval from half way around the world.  Now here's hoping she actually likes it when she moves back in August.  I'm already in love.

Beyond the apartment, I'm just feeling really good about my life.  I've been working out more than my usual half-assery and decided that I shouldn't waste my 6:00 am workouts by eating the way I usually do (healthy with an extra healthy dose of "I'll cheat with this huge burger because I'm drinking copious amounts of alcohol later").  The exclusion of alcohol and eating immaculately 100% of the time has put me in the best shape I've been in since college track.  I'm finally seeing real results and am amazed about how good my body feels.  All I did was make a few rather small changes and my body is finally thanking me after nearly two months.  Just in time for bikinis.  You have impeccable timing, body.

The most important part of why my June is going to be extra awesome has nothing to do with my new living situation or my physical fitness.  Most awesomely, I'll be leaving for Miami in two weeks.  On June eighteenth, I leave to spend nine marvelous days in Florida.  But this isn't a simple vacation.  Hooters is sending me to the International Swimsuit Pageant.

Now before you get all excited and jump to the conclusion that I'm competing, let me tell you that is not the case.  Instead, I'll be a Hooters Girl correspondent of sorts conducting interviews, attending events, doing some PR and of course giving all of you a behind the scenes look at the Pageant.  Now to my knowledge, I am the first girl being given an opportunity like this.  That's pretty amazing.  Of all the thousands and thousands of Hooters Girls around the world, I get to have a Hooters first.  I am downright ecstatic.  And downright ready to parlay this opportunity into a corporate position one day.  Seriously.  That's what I want for my future.  I clearly love Hooters.

So that's why my June is going to be awesome.  Add all that to the fact that I start my first grad school class right after I get back - which I'm also very excited about because I'm a super nerd - and this month is pretty much perfect.  If I could round it out with buying a winning Powerball ticket I'd have the best month of my life on my hands.  I should probably run to the gas station now and buy a handful of quick picks.

Or Maybe Corporate Isn't Coming

After all of that cleaning and scaring the absolute shit out of the new girls, corporate isn't coming after all.  It seems that sometimes air travel just doesn't want to cooperate with flying across the country.  With delay after delay, it just didn't make sense for our trainer to trek out to Montana just to turn around again and leave.  I am both disappointed and entirely ecstatic.

Imagine my carefully made up dismay when I arrived to work only to find out there would be no visit.  Not only had I bought a brand new top and pouch for the event, I'd painstakingly cleaned my Sketchers to make them as white as possible.  Beyond that I had gone the extra mile and went full on glamour with fake eyelashes.  Now I love fake eyelashes, but I don't love them enough to get my ass out of bed to wear them in the morning without a damn good reason.  Sleep wins over 100% eye perfection every time no matter how good that shit looks.

Needless to say I was looking like a slice of Hooters Girl perfection.  Wasted on a Monday morning.  At least my customers probably thought I looked amazing.  Or entirely overdone for a Monday morning.  Either way.

So guess who gets to teach Image and Renegade Service class during the season finale of her all time, totally nerdy, favorite show tomorrow?  Yup, this eyelash wearing, overachieving, total corporate ready girl.

You just wait till next time, my corporate friends.  I've been eating like a champ and lost 2% body fat after my first month of bootcamp.  I'm getting toned as shit.  Add that to the eyelashes and I'll be so corporate ready it'll hurt their eyes.  See you soon.

Corporate is Coming

Tomorrow marks the first day of a whirlwind training visit from the corporate office in Atlanta.  The visit will consist of training new certified corporate trainers for both Hooters Girls and bartenders and doing image and service classes with all the girls hired in the last year.  Basically we’re getting a visit to make sure we continue to be totally awesome.

Luck for us, we run a fairly strict store.  This means that we do a pretty good job of keeping up corporate standards day in and day out.  Not only does this make us more successful as a restaurant, it means that when corporate decides to show up we don’t look like total asshats.  Instead of freaking out and doing a total overhaul of our store, a little cleaning is all it takes to be corporate ready.

I mean let’s be honest here, when corporate shows up it’s sort of like your parents coming home after a long weekend away.  It’s not like we’re the type of kids that have crazy keggers, we’re more the type that let the dishes pile up and forget to water the grass so that it goes a little brown on the edges.  A bit of elbow grease and time and mom will never know that we ate Hot Pockets off the good china.

In addition to a little extra cleaning, we’ve worked toward uniform perfection as well.  I won’t sugarcoat, some of us who may have worn xxs shorts when we were hired, might need to go up a size today.  It’s not that me resizing a girl’s shorts is mean, it’s a way to keep her ass from hanging out in unflattering ways.  And trust me, I’m not even a quarter as blunt as corporate will be.  Better to fix the problems now.

So all the provisions have been made and corporate will be welcomed with open arms.  Of course last time I was told my lips needed to look fuller.  That has not been fixed.  But besides my lips, I’m totally ready for corporate.

You Can Mount Anything But Short Shorts Better Stay Out of It

One of the many "responsibilities" of a Hooters Girl is to sign things.  This can mean anything; I've signed everything from pictures to menus to arms.  Mainly though, I sign T-shirts because for some reason being a Hooters Girl makes me relatively famous.  Thanks, I'll take the marginal impersonation of fame and practice my signature for when I'm actually famous for simply being fabulous.  Of course if I ever am actually famous I'll leave all those hearts and xoxo's and crap out of my name.

So with all the name signing and whatnot a girl likes to get a little creative and write cute little sayings.  These, much like the signatures, involve hearts, but they also involve creative uses of words like wings and hoots and sauce and the like.  My personal favorite is, "hoot, hoot, you're cute."  It's super lame, but people eat that shit up.  So I feed it to them.  It's my job.

Before the whole hoot, hoot thing, I used to always write:

"Roses are red, Violets are blue, The shorter the shorts, The better the view!"  

Now I can't claim this stunning bit of poetry as my own, but I can say that it suited my amazing handwriting quite beautifully.  Many a back is now dawning a shirt with this little poem scrawled across it.  Many a back pre-February of course.  That's right, the poem is now totally vintage.  Which is cool because vintage shit is totally in.  What's not so cool is that corporate put my favorite verse into washed-out T-shirt reruns because it was too risky for Hooters.  Actually, what's really not so cool is that corporate totally contradicted themselves.

This is just one example of said contradiction that showed up in our store lately:

Or perhaps fishing is more your thing:

Now isn't it a shame I couldn't find a picture of the one that says, "Camel Towing"?  Yeah, I'm disappointed too.

Ok, I can sell someone a shirt that says they'd "mount that" but I can't write a far more innocent poem about short shorts on it?  A poem about shorts that are a major part of what Hooters is?  I'm confused.

I love inconsistency.

Being a Hooters Overachiever Pays Off

On Wednesday I was asked to be a part time manager at Hooters.  Apparently all that overachieving and generally being awesome got noticed after almost two years of hard work.  I start training next week with two days in the kitchen.  I'll officially be a Hooters Girl/bartender/trainer/manager.  I must be some kind of multitasking queen.  It will be interesting to see the restaurant from the other side of the uniform a couple days a week, but I'm not ready to leave the shorts behind quite yet.  It seems I've developed quite an attachment.

And corporate, if you're out there, I'm working my way up here!  Feel free to take about ten to twelve more looks at my resume if you have any openings in your marketing department because I'm pretty sure I'm turning into a Hooters lifer.  And I like it.

Mr. Corporate

Our swimsuit pageant is judged by "celebrity" judges.  Usually, a local celebrity means someone like a local radio D.J. or the weather guy.  You know, important people.  This year however, we actually had a judge from Hooters of America.  Yes, we had a corporate judge.  This wasn't just some yahoo, but a man who actually knows about Hooters.  A man who knows what the perfect Hooters Girl should be.  The stakes were high.

Well really, it didn't make that much of a difference in the end.  We all did our thing and looked damn good.  But you know all that, you read the play-by-play.  It was after the contest ended that having Mr. Corporate around got a little interesting.  There we were talking and generally sucking up and it came up that I play the guitar.  This is what followed:

Mr. Corporate:  "Wait, YOU'RE the guitar playing Hooters Girl?!"

Sauce:  "Yeah, I guess that's me.  I do indeed play the guitar."

I then expected him to say that he had heard about me from another corporate employee I had played for.  In fact, that employee had played me through her phone for another corporate employee.  Naturally, at this point I assumed that had been Mr. Corporate.  I was wrong.

Mr. Corporate:  "The guitar playing Hooters Girl that blogs.  The Hooters blog."

Uh oh.  I am now totally unprepared.  I feel my face flush as I worry about what he may say next.

Mr. Corporate:  "I LOVE your blog.  It's great!  I read it and forward it and everyone just loves it."

Sauce:  Sigh of relief, "Thank you!  I'm glad I'm not overstepping my place as a Hooters Girl."

Mr. Corporate:  "Hardly.  Even the ones that rip on Hooters are great.  You give the Hooters Girl a human face."

So on and so forth.  All I know is that I think it's pretty cool that corporate reads my blog.  I think it's even cooler that corporate actually likes my blog.  Thank goodness.  I can't imagine what would have happened had he said they hated it.  Well actually, I can.  It would have involved a lot less blogging and a lot more deleting.  You get my drift.

Oh and corporate, if you're reading this I'd love to work for you.  I have a marketing degree you know.  And I'm awesome.  I could write for your magazine or maybe do some design work.  Drop me a line.