I left school and found out that I was inadequately trained to do anything useful, so I decided to do something useful which was to be a waitress. And as you can imagine, actually, I wasn't a very good waitress either, but then again I learned that restaurants, like markets and streets and museums, are also theatrical places where human beings interact with each other and drama happens. And if you work as a waitress in the same restaurant for many years, as I did, whilst I was doing bits of pieces of kind of designing things—I designed the restaurant’s interior, the menus, tables, and all the rest
—you learn to watch people and to listen to them. Not in the way a writer listens to dialogue. But to listen to how they behaved in their space. They were performing in that space, and in a way, we waitresses were the audience for their performance. Men would come in with women at lunch time, however men are at lunchtime with women, and then come in the very same day in the evening with a different woman. And we waitresses were young women, we began to understand lots of things about how people perform in spaces.
What I did in that restaurant was, I set up, in a way, a gallery. We're talking 1976 in Britain. This is a time where restaurants were places you went to eat a meal. You couldn't go in a restaurant in Britain at that time where I have a meal, you have a cup of coffee, and you have a beer. You went to restaurant to have a meal, and if you wanted to drink you had to go to a pub. You couldn't do this French brasserie kind of thing. Then at some point after I had become involved in this restaurant, we needed something on the walls. And there wasn't much money. So I asked friends of mine who I’d gone to art school with to exhibit in this space. And I began to realise that the work on the walls could initiate conversations between groups of people who had gone out to eat and who didn't have anything to say to each other. So I understood that art could make conversation happen.