FOR "Making Connections: Career Waitresses of San Francisco," Candacy Taylor has constructed portraits of women who have worked as waitresses in diners for as many as 55 years. The sympathetic portraits counter the common stereotype of waitressing as demeaning labor by emphasizing their relationships with their customers and coworkers. In Jean – Age 76, Al's Good Food, a woman with dyed blond hair reaches across a luncheonette counter with a yellow gum ball in her hand. In accompanying text she says, "When people walk through the door, something inside me changes. I just adore them. I really do." In Joe and Carol, Sears Fine Food Regular, an older white woman in a waitress's uniform stands watching an older black man sipping coffee at the counter, who in accompanying text is quoted as saying, "I like to come in and be waited upon by Carol. She's been special to me for a long time." The show presents waitresses as almost surrogate mothers, who provide comfort and affection to their patrons along with coffee and pie. Despite the title, the show isn't limited to San Francisco but includes portraits from diners throughout the United States, including Los Angeles, Arizona, Nevada, and Massachusetts. It presents "the diner waitress" as an American institution and, in copies of vintage photographs included in the show, traces some of the modern history of waitressing in America, including beehive hairdos and outrageously short uniform skirts. The show is celebratory and clearly articulates something like a feminist-socialist defense of the value of women's work. However, it is also deeply nostalgic, and its sentimentality risks effacing the realities faced by working women in the United States beneath a sheen of kitsch Americana. Mon.-Fri., 8 a.m.-8 p.m.; Sat., noon-4 p.m., 1 Dr. Carlton B. Goodlett Pl., lower level, S.F. (415) 554-6080, www.sfacgallery.org. (Clark Buckner)