Never again did I have to work any truly crap jobs.
I was able to start my cartooning and illustration career there and I never looked back. Honestly, I was very fortunate after I left the restaurant and moved to New York. What was it about waitressing at Mama's that compelled you to write about it?
You must have had other colorful jobs since the late '70s. I caught up with Pond to talk about The Customer Is Always Wrong before her Oakland book launch at the Starline Social Club in Oakland on Thursday night. Pond’s fluid style resembles New Yorker illustrations, and - if only given a cursory glance - would suggest a less seedy narrative. Drugs in cars, sex in dressing rooms, cheap thrills in a kitchen pantry - all of these degenerate scenes are artfully rendered in single-color green watercolor. “Folly," in this instance, consists of shooting up in public restrooms, ripping off drug dealers, and embarking upon ill-advised late night missions into unwelcoming parts of town. The snappy one-liners that set a tone of sassy camaraderie in the first book persist, but the characters begin to suffer consequences for their folly. Though she includes a disclaimer that this is a "fictionalized memoir," some of the stories and characters are taken directly from real experiences. The Customer Is Always Wrong picks up where Pond's first graphic novel, Over Easy, left off. So strong of an impression, in fact, that it provided the foundation for not one, but two thick graphic novels some 40 years later. Still an aspiring cartoonist, she earned a living between freelance National Lampoon illustration gigs by slinging hash alongside a veritable rogue’s gallery of punks, junkies, and bar-stool philosophers who expanded her world view and left an indelible impression. A scene from Pond's 'The Customer Is Always Wrong' (Drawn & Quarterly)Īround this time, art school dropout Mimi Pond found herself waiting tables at the beloved Oakland breakfast spot Mama's Royal Cafe. Copious amounts of free love garnished with mountains of cocaine were representative of two of the four basic food groups that fueled art and culture. The detritus of '60s idealism manifested in widespread “moral ambiguity” - a.k.a., it was sleazy.
Back then the Black Panthers helped pave the way for the city's first black mayor, Lionel Wilson the A's won three consecutive World Series titles Sun Ra recorded his Afrofuturist masterpiece Space is the Place and punk was cropping up in dingy nooks all over town. The last time Oakland enjoyed a spotlight so bright may well have been the 1970s. Though much of the recent lauding of its “artistic renaissance” can be traced to gentrification, some have always preferred the more rugged side of the bridge. Once regarded as San Francisco's troubled stepchild, Oakland over the past few years has become the belle of the ball.
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