Every small town diner has one.
If you’ve spent any time in roadside restaurants, truck stops, breakfast joints, or the kind of place where the coffee is always on and the grill never really cools down, you know the type immediately.
In our case, in a small neighboring town, it was Loud Laura (not her real name).
Laura had a voice that carried. Gravelly, loud, and unmistakable. If she was in the building, you knew it. You could hear her from the other side of the room, sometimes from the parking lot.
And she sang.
Not professionally. Not quietly. Just enthusiastically. Whatever song happened to be playing on the speakers — classic rock, country, the odd bit of seventies pop — Laura would join in like she was the featured performer.
When the chorus came on, the whole restaurant knew it.
You could picture her in another era entirely. A scene straight out of a 1960s diner movie somewhere in the Arizona desert. You could picture her serving at Mel’s Diner on the sitcom Alice. Hair tied back, cigarette dangling from the corner of her mouth, flipping between two roles at once.
Server voice: “I need a plate of hash, two eggs sunny side up, home fries, a couple of piggies in a blanket and a cup of joe.”
Cook voice, without missing a beat: “Got it, honey. That’ll be up in two shakes of a tail.”
Laura could do both parts.
She was actually a pretty good server. Orders were right, coffee cups were filled, food came out fast. She knew the regulars and the regulars knew her. But she was one of those personalities that didn’t really blend into the background.
Some places thrive on that kind of energy. Others… not so much.
Eventually there were complaints. The singing was apparently drowning out the music and, occasionally, the conversations. The official story later was that she and her boyfriend split up and she no longer had a ride into town.
Maybe that was true. Maybe it wasn’t.
In small-town restaurants there’s always an official story, and then there’s the one people quietly suspect.
Laura was in her fifties, silver-haired, loud as ever, and very much a throwback to a different era of diner culture. The kind where the waitress might call you “hon,” the grill cook yelled orders across the room, and the coffee never stopped flowing.
She was nice, but oh, that voice that was so intrusive.
We don’t know where she is now or what she is doing, but who knows? Maybe she went to Hollywood and is playing a cafe server in some period piece.
