Today's column: Bringing your dirty laundry to the dry cleaner
Dry cleaners are the new hairdressers. While there used to be many things in a person's -- OK, a woman's -- life that only her hairdresser knew for sure, those secrets are now hardly worth keeping. These days, everybody highlights. Minimum.
In fact, there's not much that passes for private anymore. Except your waist size. And the keeper of that particular secret -- your friendly neighborhood dry cleaner -- has come to take on a unique role in modern life, one that is a perfect hybrid of confidant and busybody.
News geeks around the city were buzzing this week about "Dennis," the dry cleaner who called the Roe Conn Show on WLS-AM, claiming to have chatted with one of his customers, a juror in the George Ryan corruption trial, about how the deliberations were going.
Lots of pundits seemed shocked that someone would share such valuable -- and off-limits -- information with such a peripheral figure. I'd be shocked if only one juror spilled the beans while dropping off a pile of shirts.
There's a kind of intimate anonymity that surrounds a visit to the cleaners and the confessions it requires: yes, that's red wine; no, that button just doesn't seem to hold; maybe those trousers do need to be let out yet again.
Mrs. Lee, who, until a recent fire temporarily shut the place down, held court at Song's Cleaners on Webster Avenue in Lincoln Park, served as a kind of precinct-captain-cum-surrogate-mother-in-law for the gaggle of young families who patronized her small business.
We have ways of making you talk
Pregnancy -- who is reproducing, who isn't and who should be (hint: everyone) -- is her favorite subject. As a conversation starter, it tends to break down the walls of propriety pretty quickly. On certain Saturday afternoons, I've found myself disclosing certain decades-old family secrets just to steer her off-topic.
But Mrs. Lee, a petite and ageless woman of seemingly unlimited energy, has other interests as well. She keeps track of who has been traveling, who has been attending lots of fancy parties, and which couples no longer run all their errands together.
She offers up these tidbits in fairly generic terms, but she always seems to have them at the ready, deploying them as comfort (lots of people are as harried as you) and, when necessary, motivation (other people do seem to be getting out a bit more than you).
She knows, too, when my husband has a new client (more suits) and when I've been working more at home (fewer blouses). If one of us had jury duty, she'd surely figure that out as well, and file it in her mental Rolodex under "justice system, flawed."
Of course, I'd like to believe she wouldn't then turn around and report this on talk radio, but concerns such as personal privacy and court-imposed gag orders don't necessarily register with cheerful busybodies -- Malcolm Gladwell uses the more social science-y term "connectors" -- in the same way they do with the rest of us. I tend to think that "Dennis," though his name and Midwestern accent tend to put him somewhere outside the mainstream demographics of Chicago dry cleaners, saw himself as being helpful, just moving the conversation along, when he phoned in to WLS, rather than maybe getting someone in big trouble.
Familiar anonymity
Most of us don't really know our neighbors anymore. And when we shop, we head out in our cars in search of the coolest, cheapest, big-boxiest deals.
But our dry cleaning still stays in the neighborhood. More often than not, we transport it on foot, in two-week-sized bundles.
We show more of our true selves -- our spills and rips and smelly stumbles off the nonsmoking bandwagon -- in these brief interactions than we do all week at work. So it's no surprise, really, that a juror might have let a little something confidential slip into a conversation about the origins of a mustard stain.
Our dry cleaners know us -- really know us, including our weakness for eating chocolate frosted doughnuts in the car -- but in a different way from everyone else in our life. It's a relationship without a context, existing outside our usual circle of friends and colleagues. The familiar presence of the dry cleaner, who is like a barrista, only less busy, creates a kind of faux-friendship in which gossip can be exchanged without any real risk of actually identifying the subjects in question, since customers almost never know each other by name. We're all friendly, but none of us are friends.
So it's easy to believe our secrets are safe, kind of like they are in an Internet chat room: It's OK for people to know the most intimate things about you, as long as there's no real danger of them telling your brother-in-law.
If Judge Rebecca Pallmeyer really meant for the Ryan jurors to keep everything secret from everyone, she should have been specific. She should have said not to discuss it with anyone. Including your hairdresser. And even your dry cleaner.
Otherwise, it was fair game.
