There’s a server at Gringo George’s Pie House in Sioux City who sprinkles broken glass on a plate of scrambled eggs and eats the mixture unscathed. Her name is Luanne Smithers. No one knows how or why she does it in terms of science or rationale. The truck drivers who used to be the diner’s primary clientele found it amusing. They got a good laugh and tipped her well. She gave them something to think about for the miles ahead on the open road. She’s tried the trick with other foods—a bowl of oatmeal, a wedge of pie—but ended up in the hospital with a torn tongue and throat and an improbable story doctors insisted on rewarding with a psychiatric evaluation. Scrambled eggs are the only medium.
She discovered her ability years ago, by accident, when her coked-up father buried shards from a beer bottle in her supposedly adulterous mother’s breakfast to teach her not to put things in her mouth that didn’t belong there. Luanne grabbed the wrong plate and, to her father’s almost simultaneous horror and relief, scarfed the weaponized eggs down to no ill effect. She’ll never forget the cold feeling she got as her father stumbled all over himself confessing why he reacted so dramatically. Nothing takes the pep out of a room like a father with no excuse for himself. But it wasn’t long before he recovered and convinced her to replicate the trick. He had an eagle’s eye for anything that might turn a profit without requiring an ounce of work. It was Luanne’s father who put her in the hospital for the first time when he ground up an old windowpane into her spaghetti…
Gringo George’s opened in the spring of 1953 and Luanne Smithers has worked there half the time since. She wears big hoop earrings, smokes Marlboro Reds, and doesn’t date men who served in the Armed Forces. She’s as patriotic as any, but most fellas her age in the area served and she likes a challenge. On her breaks, she reads gossip columns about British royals. She doesn’t believe any of it but likes to be reminded there are places that aren’t Iowa. For years, the diner didn’t advertise her skill. She trotted it out on a whim to cheer up lonely truckers hunched in their booths. It doesn’t matter white egg, brown egg, or quail egg—if it’s an egg and it’s scrambled, she can season it with glass and swallow it.
One trucker’s son, the first in his family to go to college, decided to make a documentary with friends in the cinema studies department about the strange cast of characters his dad told stories about when he returned from the road. Luanne, the glass-eating server, featured heavily. The documentary gained traction online, receiving accolades from indie film blogs and press on Twitter as a refreshingly unsentimental if sometimes juvenile exploration of oddball Americana. The film secured a rash of first feature-length and student director awards.
Luanne’s own son, Charlie, a recidivist who received brief attention in the documentary for his latest crime and sentence (smuggling unlicensed poultry, ninety days), sued the filmmakers for libel. He blasted his negative portrayal, attributing his personal proclivities and his mother’s curious habit to genetics rife with mental instability and addiction. He cited Luanne’s lifelong abuse of narcotics, a tendency which goes unmentioned in the film and which Charlie claimed she inherited from her father. The filmmakers played up the absurdist comedic angle linking the son’s poultry-related crimes to the mother’s poultry-themed talents. The misappropriation of barnyard fowl runs deep with these two, was one soundbite extracted from an interview with a longtime family friend. Charlie’s lawsuit named his serious umbrage with the film’s exploitation of his misfortunes and its depiction of Luanne as a benevolent, self-sacrificing mother. Quoted in a Sioux City Journal article covering the legal proceedings, Charlie’s lawyer grossly overstated the relation of Luanne’s quirk to her personal revenue stream, saying, What kind of altruist engages routinely in highly dangerous behavior for money’s sake?
Charlie later dropped the suit when he won a Powerball ticket worth $65 million. Questioned by the Journal about her son’s accusations and his subsequent eyebrow-raising legal flip-flop, Luanne said simply, Charlie’s doing what he does best: trying to make the quickest, easiest buck. I taught him that, like my daddy taught me. Can’t say I’m proud, but I’m not torn up about it either. She declined to comment on the mental health or drug allegations but followed up her apropos turn of phrase by elaborating that nothing’s certain, chaos is the only guarantee. Even if you don’t eat your eggs with glass, your life could test the limits of conventional wisdom just about any damn second, she said.
The documentary was purchased by a big studio and rereleased for mass audiences. Now called The Cape after the Guy Clark song recounting the healthy enduring effects of a fertile imagination, the rerelease took for an epigraph Luanne’s line about the inevitability of chaos. Flushed with success, the documentarians abandoned journalistic scruples about paying interviewees and permitted Luanne an under-the-table cut from the film proceeds. Charlie even bought her a house on Storm Lake and two jet skis with his lottery windfall. But despite her newfound notoriety and material comfort, Luanne still eats glass and eggs at Gringo George’s, though only at set times as the diner’s become something of a tourist trap. Thanks to The Cape, there’s a schedule and autograph signings and mingling without even schlepping around a pot of coffee, Luanne says somewhat sadly. They even make me wear jeans with rhinestones on the butt.
Truckers avoid the diner now as it’s no longer in and out. There are crowds and selfie-takers, and there’s merchandise like rock salt crystals marketed as glass for consumers’ own Luanne-style glass-eating experiences. I miss those big lugs, Luanne says of the truckers. To them I was just one of the gang.