Waitresses fired for being too short sue nightclub

Two New York City cocktail waitresses, twenty-seven-year-old Stephanie Jaggers, and twenty-four-year-old Faye Rex, have filed a five-hundred-thousand-dollar lawsuit claiming they were fired from their jobs at an exclusive nightclub for being too short. They are also alleging gender discrimination, saying the height requirement only applied to women and not men.

The aspiring actresses were employed at the Boom Boom Room — now called Top of the Standard — a trendy club on top of the Standard Hotel in the Meatpacking District that's been called the new Studio 54. It plays host to A-List celebrities, and features clipboard-wielding hostesses blocking paparazzi and waitresses dressed like flight attendants. (Stefon from SNL would approve.)

According to the lawsuit, following club renovations last summer, Standard Hotel management hired women appearing to be "willowy, svelte, and statuesque runway models." Then they gave the diminutive-by-comparison Rex and Jaggers their pink slips, saying they were "not up to par." Both Rex and Jaggers claim that they've been unable to get comparable-paying jobs, with Jaggers also alleging she suffered such severe emotional damage that she is now seeing a psychiatrist. Both women appear to be attractive to me, so perhaps the suit is more well-founded than a case of wounded vanity.