On a stage in East Rogers Park, the performer had piled objects representing what she remembered of her job: a heap of clothes, a whisk broom, cleaning supplies, a mound of earth.
But poet Lisa Alvarado, once a maid on East Lake Shore Drive, was not about to dish the dirt.
For the crowd that gathered Friday night at a church annex, she offered thoughts (but no names) arising from the eight months she spent serving one of Chicago’s wealthiest, most self-absorbed families.
“Why did I clean houses?” she wondered aloud. “Because I was all alone in a strange place. Because I needed the job,” she replied. She was speaking, she said, “for the generations of women of color and immigrants who built opportunities for their future generations by doing this work.” It isn’t easy.
To begin her one-woman play, Alvarado made a startling entrance, arising from under a pile of clothes–washed, but not sorted–that had covered her completely while the audience filed into the theater.
That drew a gasp.
It was, she said, her way of showing “the isolation, the invisibility of domestic workers.”
In homes where they work, domestics are “a whisper, a shadow, sliding in and out of rooms,” she said. Employers often have trouble remembering their last names, though they are frequently referred to as “one of the family.”
“She does not care what I know about her. What is important is that I know about Woolite,” reported Alvarado, remembering the woman who hired her in 1997 to do dusting, cleaning, laundry and a litany of other household chores in a large apartment on what demographers have identified as Chicago’s wealthiest block.
Alvarado, who got the job by answering a blind ad in the Chicago Tribune, became privy to all sorts of intimate family secrets, stories left behind in the form of spills, smears, fingerprints and soiled clothing.
It did not appear that her former employers, or their neighbors, were in the audience.
But the crowd came with questions–and praise–for the show, which ran two nights. It was sponsored by Insight Arts, which describes itself as an organization of “artists, community activists and liberatory educators.”
Alvarado has performed the piece in Washington and plans to repeat it in San Francisco.
“I want to thank you for the physicality of your show. It embodied that kind of work so well it was difficult to watch,” said one woman, noting Alvarado’s struggle against the ongoing forces of household grime.
“Does the family you worked for know about this?” asked another audience member.
“Well, I didn’t send them a copy of my book, but they’re free to buy it, at Women & Children First,” Alvarado replied. She was referring to her collection of poems, “The Housekeeper’s Diary” on which she based her play, and to a bookstore at 5233 N. Clark St., where she worked as a manager.
“If I need domestic help, what can I do to treat them right?” wondered a third.
“Pay a decent wage. Treat them the way an employee in an office is treated. Respect them. Know a bit about them. You don’t pretend your dental hygienist is a member of the family. Don’t do that with household help,” Alvarado replied.
