Jon Basso and me

by Sandy Summers 

August 8, 2014 -- Today, after 8 years of protesting from afar, I had an impromptu in-person meeting with the Heart Attack Grill's owner, Jon Basso.

Earlier today I had a speaking engagment at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas School of Nursing, during which I asked participants to join me to protest at the Heart Attack Grill in downtown Las Vegas. Since beginning its operations in 2005, the restaurant's waitresses have been attired in naughty nurse uniforms--a practice which we have long worked against.

Getting volunteers was difficult--nurses seemed scared at the prosepct of a protest. Things learned from the experience included when trying to recruit nurses for such an event -- do not use the word "protest." After the fact, it occurred to me that nurses and nursing students I tried to recruit may have envisioned that we would be shouting, breaking windows, turning over cars and setting them on fire with torches. In reality, our event was no more ostentatious than a community blood pressure screening event. I should have said "come join me for some outreach to the community about the value nursing and the damage caused by the naughty nurse stereotype. Next time.

I managed to recruit 5 nurses (I captured 4 of them in the photo to the right). No students joined us, no men. We agreed to hand out flyers to the public passing by in front of the Grill from 5 pm - 6 pm. We stood loosely clustered together and approached passersby with our flyers, talked with them, some at length, urging them to consider how the naughty nurse image encourages people to think of nurses as frivolous sex objects whose job it is to provide sexual services to patients and/or physicians and how this global image, endemic in our society for the past 50+ years, fosters an environment that leads to sexually harassment of 70% of the nursing workforce.

In general people were receptive to our messages. We did encounter some resistence--most notably from nurses themselves. One nurse apparently had had her heart set on visiting the Grill with her husband for some time and though she said she agreed with our concerns, she went on in to the Grill for a meal anyway. She came out an hour later alive. I approached one man coming out of the restaurant with a group of male friends. He seemed receptive to our message and took our flier while one of his friends shouted "mind your own business" at me from the distance. I spoke with an older man who said he frequented the restaurant who assured me that he didn't think anything was wrong with the naughty nurse uniforms because the "nurses wearing them don't seem to mind." I reminded him that he was referring to waitresses wearing nurse costumes, and that they were not nurses. I told him the real nurses are right here and we're telling you that we object to it. He told me a story of when he served in the Vietnam war how the "ambulance drivers" he knew would take the long way to the hospital when they picked up a comatose female patient so they could "takes turns with her." It wasn't clear to me he acknowledged that this was rape until I told him it was. It wasn't a terribly evolved group of people, but it was empowering to educate them nonetheless. At 6 pm we were all exhausted trying to convince people of the value of nursing and decided we didn't have it in us to go beyond our goal of one hour.

I didn't organize this part of the "protest" very well, because I should have done this next part at the beginning, not the end. But I was a little reluctant for reasons I'll mention in a minute. So there were just two of us remaining, nurse practitioner Michelle and I. We decided to go get in touch with owner Jon Basso and have a head-to-head with him. Militant naughty "nurses" met us at the door insisting we had to step outside because we were carrying water bottles with us. Really turning into battle-axe territory but with the naughty nurse outfit on, clearly a "naughty-axe." We asked to speak to Jon Basso. She said she'd tell him, then threw us out. A few minutes later a "manager" came out to tell us Jon has left already and could she help. As we were talking with her, Jon Basso appeared out the door to greet us. He was ebullient, so happy to see me. Since 2006 we have been at loggerheads through many media exposures and we had finally met face-to-face.

The first thing he wanted to do was thank me for having "made-[him]." Before we launched our campaign in 2006 to get his naughty nurse uniforms off the menu he said he was struggling, did not think he would make it in the restaurant business. Now, he told me, his very successful with a big restaurant on Fremont Street in Las Vegas, a partially covered footmall 4-5 long blocks long in the heart of Las Vegas where performance artists collect tips and men and women partially unclad pose for pictures with those who give tips. He invited us in as if I was an old friend, but we couldn't find a way to do that and retain possession of our water bottles, so we spoke outside--he said it had something to do with his liquor license. Once we got the niceties out the way, I encouraged him to end the use of the naughty nurse uniforms. Naughty is ok with us, it's the nurse part we object to. At one point in an effort to show us how he does not just sexualize nurses He opened the door to the restaurant and showed us a young African American man in traditional blue scrubs to show us how sexy he was. Michelle and I told him that yes, he was sexy, but that was because he was attractive and had a nice body not because of how he was dressed. He was not dressed as a slut, as the naughty nurse waitresses are. We asked Jon to dress the femle waitresses in these traditional scrubs. He refused. I asked him to dress the waitresses in sexy fairy, sexy pirate or sexy anything else uniforms. He refused. I assured us that in today's Heart Attack Grill is attiring the waitresses in a much more chaste manner than the uniforms he previously had them wear in the 2006-07 era when he told us he "had them dressing like whores." We recall the exposed flesh and photos of waitress wearing short skirts and thongs. But now, Jon assured us that he is doing this restuarant scheme for the sake of public health. He has a big scale you could weigh a cow on outside the door. The brave have their weight displayed in huge neon numbers for all to see. Jon said that people come into the restaurant once and that's that--never again. Kind of like a scared straight model. We talked about how the nuaghty nurse image was undermining nurses and our ability to get funding for the nursing profession is people just think of us as friiviolous sex objects. He said even if he did cause some deaths by devaluing the nursing profession, he has saved so many more through his campaign to improve public health with his restaurant. Really.

We spoke for 20-30 minutes. He nearly giddy the entire time that we were talking together. We kept it pleasant. He was never able to answer why he wouldn't consider switching out the naughty nurse uniforms for a non-nurse uniform except that he alluded to his fear that it would upset his business model and the whole thing would come tumbling down. Yet he insisted he owed me so much and asked how he could repay me. I asked him to consider swapping out his uniforms to naughty fairy uniforms for one week and to see if his business could be sustained. No, he said, he had to repay me some other way. He couldn't do that. Then he rushed off-- said he was helping one of his waitresses find a different job and she was waiting for him to return.