In June of 2005, I’m hired as a hostess by Gladstone’s Long Beach, a seafood restaurant Downtown. I’d previously worked at a clam chowder deli during breaks from college, and I embellished the experience on my resume, hoping to be hired as a server. I wanted to be a server because my dorm suitemate was a server in Downtown Long Beach at a brewery a couple blocks from Gladstone’s. After she started serving, she had the things I wanted: True Religion Jeans, the same Jimmy Choo heels that SJP wears in Sex and the City, a rosary tattoo inked by Opie Ortiz from Sublime fame at American Beauty Tattoo in Sunset Beach, a first-edition LAMB sweater (unlike the knockoff from Buffalo Exchange I wore), and a Juicy Couture purse with its own branded box and protective cover. While living in the dorms, I worked at American Eagle in the Westminster Mall, a dilapidated strip off the 405 that didn’t have the stores my suitemate shopped at. After her shifts at the brewery, she would come into my room and count the stacks of money she received in tips, the ones crinkled and sometimes still damp with beer. When she bought the purse (from South Coast Plaza, the same mall teens on The OC shopped at), she slinked into my room, showed every bedazzled detail and secret pocket. It was Tiffany blue with Paris Hilton pink accents. This time she said, I feel a little guilty I spent so much. I begged her to keep the beautiful bag, but by the next evening she had returned it and put her two weeks in at the brewery, saying she didn’t like how all the money was making her materialistic. We moved out of the dorms for the summer shortly after, and I delivered resumes at every nice restaurant in town. I never worked in retail again.
In 2005, it’s hard to go anywhere without hearing one track from Monkey Business, the fourth studio album from the Black Eyed Peas (BEP for short), the second album since the addition of Stacy Ferguson (Fergie, they called her). By now, the group has a successful formula: will.i.am does most of the rapping while Fergie sings a catchy hook. The two other group members are present in the music videos—especially Taboo with his sleek hair, high cheekbones, oversized shades—but they aren’t as distinguishable as will.i.am rapping, or Fergie yowling on the track. In 2005, the Black Eyed Peas are the epicenter of pop music, their songs in McDonalds and iPod and Pepsi and Snickers commercials. The Wall Street Journal has coined them “The most corporate band in America.”
It’s worth noting that the Black Eyed Peas have three founding members—Allen Pineda Lindo, known as apl.de.ap, Taboo, and will.i.am—that there were two albums in the late 1990s before Fergie showed up, that they were considered a conscious hip hop group in the vein of A Tribe Called Quest and soul musician Kim Hill performed the hooks. As a hip hop group, their goal was to create music that was happy and goofy and silly despite the hardened gangster rap scene. As the Black Eyed Peas began to leave their underground status, performing on Soul Train and gaining national exposure, Hill quit the group because she refused sexualize her image with millennial trends, or as she puts it in The New York Times Op-Doc, Almost Famous, “I never wanted to be objectified while doing my music.” Macy Gray temporarily stepped in, and allegedly Nicole Scherzinger of Eden’s Crush was in the running, but she couldn’t record music outside her Popstars contract, so Interscope pushed the Black Eyed Peas into a new direction with the help of a white woman named Stacy.
I’ve been watching Stacy Ferguson on television since I was a little girl. First on Kids Incorporated, a Disney Channel variety show with child performers singing Top 40 hits. I was a dancer and a performer, so I watched Stacy, who was about my age, and I dreamed of being like that: special, on stage. After Kids Inc. was Wild Orchid, an RnB group composed of her former costar, Renee Sandstrom, and friend, Stefanie Ridel. I didn’t listen to Wild Orchid much, they weren’t popular despite how hard they tried: thirteen years of tours with acts like 98 Degrees, appearances on television shows like Jenny Jones and 90210, sometimes the magic just isn’t right. I did watch their lip sync competition, Great Pretenders, everyday afterschool on Fox Family. Another youth-geared program in the style of Kids Inc., but this time, no one sang, and contestants (real kids) were judged on their performance of the song, their theatrics and costumes and choreography. The intro of each episode was Wild Orchid harmonizing the theme: you’re greatest singers, you’re the greatest dancers, you’re the great pretenders, Ferguson often dead-center with her overdyed, over-styled blonde hair in a trendy 2000s outfit, bookended by her brunette groupmates who lacked the same star power. Allegedly, during one of the final Wild Orchid tours in 2001, Ferguson met will.i.am and discussed her solo album plans. By 2002, she left Wild Orchid, joined the Black Eyed Peas, and rebranded herself as Fergie, a hip hop vixen with street cred.
When I start working at Gladstone’s, everyone is beautiful. My new coworkers are models, singers, rappers, actors, dancers, playwrights, hot moms, sorority sisters and frat dudes, everyone has a big personality, an LA dream, and that sparkle in their eye. It’s the summer so bodies are tan inside the required uniform: khaki shorts, white crew socks and athletic shoes, a bright-colored t-shirt with an oversized G on the back, my coworkers’ smiles dinging like cartoons as they greet a table. Among the shiny happy people, my assistant manager Lori stands out, but she’s used to it at 6ft tall (72” of fun, she calls herself). Lori is beyond beautiful—an enigma to me fresh from the dorms. She oozes effortless charisma that belongs on stage or television, and though she’s retired from her modeling days, out of all my coworkers, she has it—that magic. She calls me Peaches because I’m given the least desirable orange t-shirt during training, and in her compliments, the orange color earns a sudden currency with my coworkers. One slow shift, Lori helps with my summer school homework at the front desk, a recitation of “You’re” by Sylvia Plath, a poem so full of silly wordplay that she decides to memorize it too. She’s only a few years older than me but not in college, still, she’s so funny and humble that I respect her more than other bosses I’ve worked with. She teaches me everything about hospitality and the restaurant industry, and in watching her lead, I see that it’s possible to direct without becoming a tyrant. After meeting Lori, working at the restaurant doesn’t feel a side job to pay my bills anymore: it becomes a vision of an attainable adulthood, and I feel myself shift from the dormkid without a plan into a restaurant person, a server.
In September of 2005, when it’s still summer in Southern California, the Black Eyed Peas release the third single off Monkey Business, “My Humps.” Before the track is officially released, the song explodes through digital downloads, which is how I hear it first, on a Limewire-burned CD in someone’s car. It’s months of cult listening and radio play and gossip (Did you hear that song?) before BEP releases “My Humps” as a single with a music video, and I download the song from iTunes without purchasing the whole album. “My Humps” opens with an unmistakable trumpet call (a signal to hit the dance floor) before the breathy bass: ahhh, ah ah, ahhh, ah ah. There’s not much musically: an electronic drumbeat behind those breathy breaths, and a sample of Sexual Harassment’s 1983 funk hit “I Need a Freak,” providing sax-like whine in the background. This isn’t about the musicality though: it’s likely you’ve never even thought of the sound while listening to “My Humps.” This is about those ridiculous lyrics, and how anyone alive in 2005 can recall every word in order without a stutter. It’s the first Black Eyed Peas single to feature Fergie prominently as the lead, and she performs most of the rap manifesto about expensive labels, being hot, and how she isn’t going “sex” any of the men in the club, but they can buy her things. will.i.am, Taboo, and apl.de.ap can be heard rapping about all the money they are spending trying to get close to Fergie and her humps. Humps, lumps, and bumps, the rhyming wordplay is a not-so-secret unattractive code for the curves of a woman’s body—so stupid that it’s irresistible. Critics say it’s “the single worst song ever written.” Despite every negative review, the song wins a Grammy for Best Pop Performance by a Duo or a Group with Vocals in 2007.
By September, I’m already running food, a shortcut to serving. The kitchen is hot, the cooks at Gladstone’s aren’t as shiny or happy as the servers, and I work in close quarters with Chef Pete, who yells often and pours beurre blanc on everything to make it a special. In addition to delivering food, the runners are responsible for stocking hot bread and clam chowder. The bread warmer is behind the line, but bread is baked further off stage in the kitchen. When the bread is low, a runner must call “mas pan a la linea” on a small microphone attached to the line, sending the message to speakers in the prep room, and in minutes, a prep cook is replacing the trays with more golden buns, lumps and bumps of sourdough washed with butter.
It’s the server Matt—the cute one—who starts it. Weekend night, full restaurant. He approaches the line to run more food, but grabs the microphone instead: Whatcha gonna do with all that junk, all that junk inside your trunk? In unison, the back of the house all the way to the prep kitchen answers, the lyrics echoing: Imma get get get get you drunk, get you love drunk off my hump. There are three food runners, myself and others, a handful of servers waiting for hot plates, and it starts the way I’d always seen it start on television, the singing and the dancing. We hit the chorus, instinctually bumping our own humps to the nonexistant beat, as if our nonslip shoes were Jimmy Choos, twisting our tan bodies in that camp counselor uniform to the plates clattering in the dishpit and someone breaking a glass: My hump, my hump, my hump, my hump, my hump, My hump, my hump, my hump, my lovely little lumps, Check it out. Another server returns from the dishpit, pauses at the soda machine: I drive these brothers crazy, I do it on the daily. Someone joins him: They treat me really nicely, They buy me all these iceys. It’s five or more of us now, maybe the cooks too despite Chef Pete’s yelling: Dolce & Gabbana, Fendi and that Donna, Karan they be sharin', All their money got me wearing fly. The line is communal spot, the bar terminal beside it, and all the Front of the House employees must wade through, compelled to join with their own recitation of the lyrics, the great summer earworm of 2005: They say they love my ass in, Seven Jeans, True Religion, I say no but they keep givin'. Servers and runners pouring clam chowder, pulling lumps of bread from the center of the sourdough for a bread bowl while bumping their own lumps on each other: So I keep on takin', And no I ain't taken, We can keep on datin', Now keep on demonstratin'. When we get to the bridge, My love, is when the bubble bursts, when the General Manager enters the kitchen asking how long for the entrees on table 20 like a record scratch at the club, and then the fun is over, and we are no longer in the music video fantasy we have imagined, the one where we are stars on stage, but back to reality, waiting tables, serving food, so people will give us money.
And it’s a lot of money. Once my tips roll in, I always have cash in my wallet, my pockets, my apron, cash around my apartment, dollar bills crumpled in my car cupholder. Making rent is only a couple shifts away, new jeans and shoes a shift away, everything I want or need is measured in how many shifts I have to work, so I count days on the calendar like tip money. I spend it without much consideration: regular haircuts and full-foils of bleach, acrylic nails, fake tan, trips to South Coast Plaza and the LAB anti-mall where I can shop at Urban Outfitters without staying in the sale racks. Now that I’m industry, I eat most meals at Gladstone’s or other restaurants—no more dorm-ramen or microwavable dinners. My first time hanging with Lori outside the restaurant, she calls the front desk, and I happen to be the host that answers. She had left her digital camera at work, and she needed someone to deliver it to The Madison, a steakhouse Downtown. So I clock out, and walk the few blocks at night, feeling so special in my orange t-shirt, like a member’s only jacket for the coolest club in town. Inside, at the immaculate bar, she orders us Lemondrop Martinis (I’m twenty, but nod that I’m old enough), we eat a three-course meal with filet mignon (Never order above medium rare, she instructs) and lobster tails (The bib is better than ruining your blouse, she says). Meals like this become a regular thing: after work or on our days off, the Gladstone’s crew meet to eat and drink like kings, or the people we wait on who eat and drink the same: She's got me spending, Oh, spending all your money on me, And spending time on me. Crab legs, drunken noodles, late night happy hour, coconut shrimp, sushi rolls, teppanyaki grills, martinis, shots, shots, shots, calamari and crab cakes, red-headed sluts, scooby snacks, at least a dozen oysters, washington apples, blow jobs, filets or ribeyes or baseball cut sirloins from Outback, only appetizers or one of everything on the menu, cab ride home, cab ride out, cash for the bill, big tips, all that junk and then some.
During my training, I learn that everything the guest (not customer) sees is on stage, or the Front of the House (FOH for short). The restaurant is shaped like a boat, and so with the service staff in khakis the illusion is that we are all sailors like the sailors we wait on, yacht rock on the radio speakers, fish that we pretend is caught from our very own marina—buttons fixed to our t-shirts reading: Fish so fresh you could slap it. It’s necessary to look and act our best, even if we feel awful, and I’m trained to fake it. If a guest asks a question about a dish, and the answer can never be, I don’t know. How’s the Parmesan-crusted Halibut? It’s the best thing on the menu. The beer-batted fish and chips? So fresh, crispy and delicious. Thai Calamari? Our spin on the traditional, but unique and flavorful. If a guest calls for directions, and I’m unsure, I still tell them how to exit the 710 without checking MapQuest, smiling as if they can see me through the receiver. Our General Manager tells us to leave our troubles at the big copper door, and once I start serving, my check-in sheet requires that I have pens, paper, a server book, a wine key, a bank, and my PMA: Are you wearing your Positive Mental Attitude today? _____ We are great pretenders: I don’t tell anyone that the Fish and Chips arrive frozen in big cardboard boxes with Tuesday’s Sysco truck, or the reason the chowder is so good is an excess of cream and butter, that the mashed potatoes start as lumps of dehydrated flakes. Soon I learn the best servers are the ones who play the shiny happy game with their guests and each other. Stacy (a male server from Arkansas) tells me to wear big jewelry (a showpiece) or my glasses, Anything to set you apart from the others. Kevin acts straight for his guests, but teaches me to kneel before my tables, Stay eye-level, you’re human too. Doug wraps his table’s leftovers as a foil mermaid, olives for boobs, WikiSticks hair from the kid’s menu, the whole process takes an extra 10 minutes, but Mermaids make money, Doug says, crunching the tail of his lil bitch for the little bitch at table 34. He says, You have to make people feel like they are special, even if they are exactly like everyone else. The manipulation earns an extra tip on his checks, and he needs money to pay his dealer, he tells me, his smile sinister, an edge that I didn’t notice before.
Most of my coworkers need help to get through the shift, something to maintain their performance despite the demands. When I’m a hostess, one of the servers tells me to avoid her section for five minutes so she can do a few bumps in the bathroom. I’m naïve to this language, but she returns talking about potpourri, adjusting the neck of her shirt, saying, Hit me, referring to more tables. The Gladstone’s costume continues to unravel: I notice bartenders ducking from security cameras to take shots, the glistening of those tan bodies evaporating into beer sweat from drinks the night before. And there’s always drinks the night before, especially after a shift appeasing the waves of hungry tourists. When you work Downtown and go out after work Downtown, the server uniform is the symbol of celebrity. We never wait for drinks at The Gaslamp. Our tab is pennies at The Dubliner, industry discount, and the cooks send extra food for our VIP ticket. The shirtless bartenders cheers with shots of their own at Mick and Mack’s. The gay clubs become my favorite hangout because I can recreate choreography from the music videos without anyone trying to bump their lump on me: So don't pull on my hand, boy, You ain't my man, boy, I'm just tryin' to dance, boy, And move my hump. A couple Singapore Slings or Toyko Teas, and we are all Fergie from the video, robotically twerking our hips to the breathy part while posing with Louis Vuitton’s (we pretend: our server books as props). It’s in these late-night moments with my coworkers that I realize none of us will be the stars we dreamed—the server/actor’s scenes being cut from a Lifetime show, the server/rapper never earning a record contract, the server/playwright producing the show in his backyard, the other dreamers getting married, having kids. When I ask Lori what happened with the modeling, she laughs, swallowing a shot of wine. She was Hooters girl before Gladstone’s, and now she dines there every year on her birthday, selfies before the framed photos of her past life, all the famous people she used to know.

Any google search on Fergie shows at least one interview about her drug problem during those Wild Orchid days. The meth made Fergie hallucinate, and she credits her faith for her lasting sobriety, often retelling a story of hallucinating a SWAT team while she was high, waiting for her outside a church, how she left the building expecting to be institutionalized but found an empty parking lot instead. She told Billboard, “The drugs thing, it was a hell of a lot of fun… until it wasn’t.” YouTube clips of Great Pretenders show a glimpse of Fergie’s rough years, but it’s hard to tell whether her on stage persona was simply larger than life or if that was the drugs. Despite her obvious talent, Fergie has become an easy target to clown, and she still trends for her antics: singing cartwheels on Good Morning America, her jazzy rendition of the national anthem at the NBA playoffs, peeing her pants on stage while performing with the Black Eyed Peas, slurring the rap part of “Fergalicious” at the Billboard awards. With 2024 vision, Fergie joins Gwen Stefani and other notorious cultural appropriators of the millennium for wearing doorknocker earrings and braids (the “Pump It” music video from Monkey Business recently trended on Twitter with users commenting, I thought this chick was mixed). While rewatching Great Pretenders clips and reading old interviews, there’s an urban accent that doesn’t seem natural for a white girl from the valley, though the music video “Glamourous” shows a Hacienda Heights upbringing that clashes with her Disney image, but it’s possible that Stacy was pretending then too. After her performance of “The Star-Spangled Banner” elicited extreme hate, her ex-husband, actor Josh Duhamel, defended the performance on Ellen, saying: “I think she would probably admit that it wasn't her best work, but the girl's crazy talented, she really is. She's an amazing woman, an amazing human being, really.” Fergie has long admitted that “My Humps” was a joke, she didn’t even write the lyrics (Mix your milk with my coco puff, Milky, milky coco, Mix your milk with my coco puff, Milky, milky, Right—this is will.i.am’s poetry). She told Billboard in 2010: “So many songs are just a wink to the audience, but people take them seriously. ‘My Humps?’ C’mon!”
I work at Gladstone’s Long Beach for three and half years: it’s the best job I’ve ever had, until it isn’t, and when I graduate from college, I decide to work somewhere with “better atmosphere.” I secure a job waiting tables at Downtown Disneyland, excellent money, but I don’t make friends with a single coworker—not even one ounce of magic. A year of that before I’m back in Downtown Long Beach, working at Yard House in Shoreline Village, across the marina from Gladstone’s where I watch employees walking by after their shift to the parking lot. When I see those bright t-shirts, I’m struck by how awful the uniform is, how unforgiving, and I laugh at how I used to be out all night in it, at Belmont Station or Yankee Doodles, dancing in the middle of the floor like a superstar when I was only a server unwinding after her shift. After I leave Gladstone’s, I’m accepted to graduate school, and with new writing dreams developing, waiting tables returns to an easy side hustle. The stories I hear from my friends who still work at Gladstone’s no longer sound like that much fun. I learn that Lori’s been in an accident, there’s a DUI, and she loses her license, her boyfriend, and her job, retreating from the Downtown hospitality scene. I keep up with her online for years: always a birthday greeting for her Peaches and something about Plath, the poem she still has committed to heart. I begin to suspect, though, that she isn’t well. In photos, she looks pale—a stark contrast from my memory of her bronzed summer beauty. She leaves California and moves to Portland with a new boyfriend, becomes sober and starts painting rocks—images that she posts with #sprinkingsmiles—she documents lots of injuries, doctor’s appointments #findthefunny, and motivational quotes #mentalhealthawareness, still charming and beautiful, but different from the shiny happy person that I knew. In June of 2022, Lori passes in her sleep, six months shy from her forty-third birthday, and I learn like everyone else on Facebook, through the outpouring of grief from former coworkers—hundreds of posts from users sharing how she was kind and generous, how she sparkled in every room. A user I don’t know, someone who must have been hired after I left, comments that Lori called her Peaches and taught her everything about restaurants, and I realize that I wasn’t the only host in an orange shirt, but at thirty-seven, I know I’m not special.
In the album-version outro of “My Humps,” will.i.am repeats the lyrics, so real, over a piano melody thirty-four times. This part of the song is distinctly different from the verses and chorus about money and labels and body parts, so the combination of repeating so real with real instrumentals after those lyrics, seems like the biggest wink and nudge to listeners that it was all a joke, if they made it that far without skipping to the next track. It's hard to imagine my life without serving, just as it’s hard to think about working at Gladstone’s without remembering Lori. In my memory, we were always dancing to “My Humps” in the bar or the club or someone’s car because it was playing everywhere, because we all memorized the lyrics, because it was funny and we were having fun together even if they called it working. Today, I wait tables three days a week, and though it's truly a side gig supplementing my day job teaching, I’m grateful I can still hustle good money, even if the only things I’m spending it on are bills and rent. My tables often compliment my honesty, as I’m quick to let them know how I really feel about a dish; however, the restaurant I work at now isn’t a franchise, but a chef-driven spot on the Michelin guide, so everything we serve is fresh and authentic. We don’t have any steps of service or corporate rules about guest interaction. We are urged to be ourselves.
Fergie’s breakout solo album, 2006’s The Dutchess, catapults her to even bigger fame and keeps people on the dance floor with hits like “London Bridge” and “Fergalicious,” the latter a cult favorite using the same Black Eyed Peas formula of Fergie rapping and will.i.am assisting in background (Hit it Fergie), earning her new fans almost twenty years later. She released one more solo album as well as two other albums with the Peas before they disbanded in 2017. At the 2022 MTV VMAs, Fergie joined Jack Harlow on stage, and in a return to form, she over-staged the young rapper who borrowed her hook from “Glamourous,” another hit from The Dutchess. will.i.am is still making music, recently collaborating with Britney Spears, producing her first single after the conservatorship, “Mind Your Business,” which sounds like an off-track from Monkey Business, same stupid raps and auto-tuned hook. Taboo has turned to writing in his post-BEP years, completing an autobiography, a children’s book, and a miniseries about Spider Man. Philippines-born apl.de.ap used his experience in the music industry when he coached The Voice of the Philippines in 2013, and he recently started his own record label BMBX Entertainment, focusing on Southeast Asian artists. While Fergie seems to have retired from showbusiness to co-parent her son with her ex-husband, rumors of a Black Eyed Peas reunion tour resurface every few years, most recently in March of 2023. The music of Monkey Business, however, will never fade from popularity, and “My Humps” still crowds a dance floor (like the one at my restaurant Christmas party in January of 2024), uniting us in the silly lyrics while we bump and hump and lump together: Whatcha gon' do with all that ass, All that ass inside them jeans? I'ma make, make, make, make you scream, Make you scream, make you scream.

Katrina Prow lives in Morro Bay, California, where she still listens to Fergie and works part-time in a restaurant. Her writing has recently appeared in Off Assignment, The Boston Review, Taco Bell Quarterly, decomP, The Journal, Pithead Chapel, Redivider, Passages North, and elsewhere. She holds a PhD in Creative Writing, Fiction from Texas Tech University, and she currently teaches Creative Writing at California Polytechnic University, San Luis Obispo. Her writing has been supported by residencies at Yaddo and Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. For more information about her work, visit katprow.com.