Members of the Casa Bonita United union met up at the iconic restaurant last Friday to eat lunch and chat with their fellow entertainment workers before delivering a letter to management.
Only they didn’t deliver the letter: Brooke Shields, actress and president of Actors’ Equity Association, did.
The union called on Shields, star of “Pretty Baby” and “The Blue Lagoon,” to have a late lunch in the giant pink entertainment complex. With a reservation under a different name, the goal was to surprise management and bring attention to the union's demands. Shields sat at the end of the table, and actors both on and off the clock stopped by to speak with the actress.
After lunch and a Sorsoro show, Shields presented a letter to Stacy Gaudioso, the head of entertainment and director of entertainment operations.
“You can’t guarantee respect,” Shields said. “But you can ask for protection.”
Gaudioso did not comment.
"At Casa Bonita, we value all of our team members and their well-being. As a policy, we do not comment on ongoing labor negotiations,” Casa Bonita management wrote in an email.
Ongoing fight with management
Casa Bonita’s extensive performance staff — including cliff divers, puppeteers and pirates — have been at the bargaining table with management for about a year over pay and safety concerns. Dozens of unionized workers went on strike for a few days last October.
But the union says they haven’t made much progress.
Andrea Hoeschen, the Actors’ Equity lead negotiator for the Casa Bonita contract, said management has been unwilling to bargain more than once a month and said that’s made progress “very difficult.”
“Most of the performers on the floor make less than the servers. The divers make less than the bartenders, and our performers aren't in the tip pool,” Hoeschen said. “We cannot get management to agree to any kind of wage raise that's anything more than a few pennies an hour.”
Safety and pay are top concerns for Casa Bonita workers
Decked out in pink hoodies, the workers shared their concerns with Shields [over plates of tacos].
“We're not asking management to account for 100% of incidents. This is a big restaurant. There's four bars. You can't account for all human behavior. What we don't have right now is a set of policies that are clearly in place about how to tackle rowdy customers,” said Riley Holmes, performer and a member of the union's bargaining committee. “What are we as performers allowed to do for our own safety? We get a very nebulous, ‘If you feel like you're in danger, you can leave.’”
Rachel Suter has been a diver at Casa Bonita for three years. Last year, after she got a concussion underwater, she said she was out for three months.
“Not only are we performing and doing many different duties within this job, but also kind of risking our bodies and that sort of thing, which I don't think management appreciates at all,” Suter said.
The union has written: “The Cliff Divers face extra danger on the job, but management won’t commit $4 a week to supplemental workers' compensation to protect them in the event that something goes wrong.”
In the letter Shields delivered, workers claimed that the immersive restaurant does not pay its performers a living wage or industry standard. A total of 91% of the entertainment workers signed the letter, organizers said.
“Servers, bartenders, bussers, line cooks, and others make the same or more than entertainment … Entertainment does not have access to the tip pool, even though customer messaging suggests that we do,” the letter states.
Issues with middle management
The restaurant is a well-known piece of Colorado kitsch and nostalgia, offering a surreal dining experience in what is basically a theme park, minus the rides.
Part of a chain at the time, the Lakewood location, now the last-standing Casa Bonita, opened in 1974. "South Park" creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker bought it in 2021 after it shut down during the pandemic. They spent tens of millions renovating and restoring it.
Rob Christie, who used to play the character Black Bart, worked at Casa Bonita in 2023 during the reopening. He said since the reopening, there hasn’t been continuity from above.
“Once it opened, (the owners) kind of went back to whatever their regular routine is and handed it off to people who have, what I believe, are just bad intentions and don't really care about the legacy of this place or what it means to the community,” Christie said.
One character the entertainment staff performs as is ManBearPig, a character from “South Park” that is a now-rescinded dig at Al Gore.
The character has a handler, but staff says they can only do so much to protect the person inside the suit as they run around and pose for photos.
“Most performers here who get in the suit, it's not an ‘if’ but a ‘when’ you're going to get your butt grabbed, your breasts grabbed. You add alcohol to that, and there will be people who will be jerks, and they will get drunk,” Holmes said. “It's not okay, but it's more so about management not having a clear set of procedures that we are made aware of.”
The performers also pointed out that there’s no signage stating not to touch the performers, like the messaging someone would see at a haunted house.
“We love it so much here. That's why we're fighting so hard,” puppeteer Johnna Smith said. “Once you start working here, you become truly a part of this family. And we just want to feel like we are not just our entertainment family, but we can be a family as a building, and we can be respected by our managers, by the rest of the building and by the people.”
However, the family feeling is not fostered by management, said the performers.
“Back at the bargaining table, they did tell us we were disposable,” Holmes said. “They said they don't see it or even (need) to change our wages as long as they can keep hiring people.”
“I don't care if you respect me, just pay me like you do,” he added.
