Cleaning House

SOMETIME in the early 1990s I wrote the outline for a musical. I was still entertaining the idea of being the next Cole Porter/Stephen Sondheim and made it a regular habit to fully think through the concept, major plot points and even sketch out some of the numbers for the next great American musical. One of those ideas was about a cleaning woman in an office. As someone who spent much of his early professional life as an Executive Secretary (we weren’t yet called Administrative Assistants), I spent a lot of time after hours with the cleaning crews that came in at the end of the day. In New York in the late 80s early 90s most of them were from Mexico and Central and South America with the odd Eastern European here and there; many of the maintenance folks were black men…the same age and generation as my parents. None of these people were stupid or incompetent regardless of their language skills. They were all working hard to support families and often putting children through expensive schools. They were understandably proud of what they did.

My idea was a story about a woman who cleaned the office of a rising junior executive. Unbeknownst to her, it was the office of her own son. He Americanized his name and fabricated a story about his parents being dead…so his boss and the office didn’t know about his mother…let alone that she was a cleaning woman…let alone his cleaning woman. Basically, both the mother and the…