“Both authors skillfully build on their recollections to bring a vanished world to vibrant life.”
— Kirkus Reviews - Read the full review

The Dishwasher Dialogues offers a rare insight into the Paris of the nineteen seventies as few people knew it.

Here is a rich dialogue between a Canadian dishwasher/bartender and an American bartender/dishwasher at the legendary soul food restaurant Chez Haynes in the red light district of Paris. The staff were dreamers, writers, painters, actors, dancers, and photographers. They all survived thanks to the legendary African American Leroy Haynes, who knew everybody from the mayor and the stars of the day to the call girls deluxe. Between dishwashing and mixing cocktails, these two young exiles wrote and painted, talked art and death, and embraced their demons and muses. They lived it and never forgot.

In Paris. A city at the end of an era. The metro had wooden doors and many streets had public urinals. There were no computers, credit cards, or copying machines; most apartments had no phones or heating or indoor toilets. There were the big spenders in sable coats and Ferragamo shoes, the daily scolding from the waiters and shopkeepers, and the clochards dying of the cold at the metro gates. But freedom beckoned everywhere. The cops left you alone, the authorities looked the other way and the metro (plus a cheap carte orange) took you to every nook and cranny of the city. There may not have been much equality or fraternity, but liberty ran rampant.

Published by Orléans Press.