AGAINST THE GRAIN
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
In the first of three monologues in this one-woman show, written and performed by Caponera, we meet Mary Ellen Baker, Charlie’s wife, in 1980. She’s clipping coupons and planning the week’s meals–Charlie likes his meat, but he won’t touch chicken. She also plans her own activities–and again, she defers to Charlie and his work schedule. Her first words are “Don’t get me wrong–I love my family,” and her conversation with us covers such topics as the hanging of new curtains and the distressingly untraditional behavior of her daughter, who she fears will get pregnant before she’s married. “Choices,” she says. “In my day, you had one choice. You graduated from high school, you found a good man with a steady job–take you out to dinner once in a while–you had four or five kids and that was it!” Almost as an afterthought, she mentions that Charlie cried on the day the strike began.
In the second monologue it’s 1985 and we meet Charlie himself and learn why he didn’t want his wife to cook chicken. Charlie Baker used to be the firehouse cook, and his Chicken Marseilles–affectionately called Chicken Bakerman by the men who requested it–once won an award in a citywide contest. He hadn’t even known his coworkers entered him until the photographer from the Tribune came to take his picture. For Charlie, who admits to having “barely made it through the Army,” this accolade was high praise indeed, from the city and from his peers. But when the strike came, the bosses promised Charlie a promotion if he’d break the line. He entered the firehouse to see his best friend smash the award against the wall and say, “You ain’t one of us no more, Charlie.” Five years later, Charlie still doesn’t have his promotion and is still shunned by the other men. His first words to us, however, are: “Don’t get me wrong–I love my job.”
