Fort Lauderdale Hooters waitress competes for international title
Hooters waitress and model Briana Smith understands better than most the instinctive obsession with the human body, the careful study of its topography, the peaks and valleys of firm muscle sheathed in smooth, supple skin.
She’s just not creepy about OK, maybe a little creepy.
Smith, who works in the restaurant chain’s Sunrise location, will represent South Florida as Miss Fort Lauderdale when 80 women from restaurants across the U.S. and the globe gather today and Thursday in Lake Tahoe for the 2019 Miss Hooters International Pageant. The winner takes home a grand prize of $30,000 and a year-long role as the marketing face of Hooters.
On her way to the hot-body competition, Smith talked about why she prefers her bodies cold — she’s studying to be a mortician, with a particular interest in the embalming process that gives the muscle and skin of the dead a more lifelike appearance. She it. would be following in the footsteps of an uncle who is a mortician in New York City.
A 21-year-old Plantation High School graduate and daughter of an Air Force veteran, Smith is studying a lot of science and chemistry at Broward College when she’s not making music videos with the likes of Jason Derulo (“Swalla”) and DJ Snake (“Enzo”). Here she talks about her unusual interest in the dead, and her favorite horror movie.
Q: I find that I don’t really know exactly what a mortician does …
A: It involves a lot of things, but I want to do mainly embalming, to
clean up the body for the viewing. What a lot of people don’t know about morticians, is that they may clean up the body, but they also give hope to the living. Because when a loved one dies, you’re not looking at a dead body, you’re looking at a mother, you’re looking at a father, a son, a daughter. So you want to make sure you treat them as such. You want to make sure that the body is clean and that, for their viewing, it looks like they are in a nice place and that they are at peace. You want to give that family hope for something else to follow.
Q: That is very personal and sacred work. I
don’t know how long the embalming process takes, but I expect that you would form a relationship with the decedent and the family.
A: It’s probably best to stay as distant as possible, so you don’t fall into it. But you don’t want to be too distant, because you want to remember that this is a person, that this was somebody’s loved one. I feel like the most challenging part, my uncle said, would be children.
Q: Are you afraid of death?
A: I wouldn’t say I am. At the end of the day everyone is going to end up having to move on, or transition. You’re not invincible.
Q: What attracted you to such intimate work?
A: I don’t know. I love horror movies. That’s a thing. [Laughs] I was just drawn to it through my uncle. I was drawn to him as a kid.
Q: Do you have a favorite horror movie?
A: I really like “Saw.” That is my favorite. [Laughs] I’ve always been into horror films. My aunt [not the mortician’s wife] would always put them on for me when I was little, and we’d just watch them together and be scared and terrified.
Q: Did your uncle ever take you to the back of the shop, where he worked?
A: One day when I told him I really wanted to do it, he took me in with him and I watched him a little bit.
[Smith was 16.] He didn’t let me see much, but … I walked around and shadowed him. He didn’t really let me see him do a body, but he did show me some of them and, I don’t know, I was intrigued.
Q: I’ve read that the mortuary business has been dominated by men, but more mortuary students now are women. What effect will that have on the industry?
A: I think it will be very empowering. That’s really a great thing that I hope I’m able to do, doing mortuary science and, if I do win Miss Hooters International, to pass along to future generations. Little girls, seeing women doing all sorts of jobs, will believe that they can do anything that they put their mind to.