STAGE : Message of Homeless Women in YWCA Show Really Hits Home

From the moment the women in the chorus line stepped out in their red and blue spangled shirts for the rehearsal of their grand finale, it was clear that none were trained dancers, singers or performers.

They were of widely varying ages, heights and weights, and their faces and bodies had the well-worn look of reality. Still, there was something else venturing--at first timidly, then with increasing strength--from their eyes: an innocence and hope that made the words they sang send shivers down the spine.

The song was “I Am What I Am” from “La Cage Aux Folles.” And from the raw throats of the homeless women who will put on the third annual “Homeless for the Homeless Variety Show” at the Lyceum Stage tonight, the lyrics came out like a cri de coeur:

It’s my world and I want to have a little pride in

My world and it’s not a place I have to hide in.

Life’s not worth a damn till you can shout out loud

I am what I am.

“The message of the song is special,” Juanita Kaiser said softly, resting in a chair after the number. “We women lose our identities to our husbands and we don’t know who we are.

“You know the part (in the song) where it says, ‘I beat my own drum and I deal my own deck’? We do. That sense of independence, that sense of freedom--all of that came from here, the night shelter.

“It taught me who I was and that I did have choices about my life,” Kaiser said. “I learned that I make my own choices. I choose to make it or not make it, to struggle or to die.”

Kaiser, 40, is the only woman in the show who has participated in it all three years. She is also the only one of this year’s 24 participants who does not live in the YWCA’s Homeless Women’s Night Shelter, which organizes the show. For the past year, she has worked for an organization called Endeavors, which helps the mentally ill homeless.

But she said she will never forget that when she was beaten and thrown out on the streets by her husband three years ago, the shelter saved her life.

“If I ended up sleeping on the street with my self-esteem so low, I’d have ended up mentally deranged and suicidal,” she said.

Instead, two months later, Jeanne Dorsey, coordinator of residential programs at the Y, talked her into taking part in the first show. One month after that, Kaiser was out on her own. She keeps coming back for the shows, however, because of the loyalty she feels toward the Y.

“You can’t ever pay people back for all they give to you. But you can share it. That’s what I do when I come back here. I share the wealth.”

Dorsey said she helped organize the show when women in the shelter began trying to find ways to raise money for bus tokens or items for their children, such as shoes, toys or a meal at McDonald’s.

“So I played Judy Garland and, though there was no Mickey Rooney, I said, ‘Let’s put on a show,’ ” Dorsey said. “I told the ladies to get their material together.”

They did, and the result was a show that filled the auditorium at the Y and made enough money for outings, like the one last year in which Dorsey took the women in a bus to their first San Diego Pops concert.

“They’re still talking about it,” she said.

Dorsey sees one of the virtues of the show as boosting the women’s self-esteem by helping them to help themselves.

“You won’t believe how their self-esteem zooms up after this,” she said. “They’ve been put down so much verbally and physically. Over 80% have been raped and battered. But more than half of the women in this show will go into the mainstream.”

Kaiser said the show is also an opportunity to change the public’s attitude toward homeless people through the sometimes funny and often poignant skits the women write about their lives on the streets.

“The public has this idea that we are homeless because we want to be,” she said. “Something traumatic happened in all our lives to bring us to this point.

“My sister (who was homeless during the same period Kaiser was) said once that just because we were homeless did not mean that we did not have dreams, aspirations and desires. I think being homeless we have them more.”

Certainly, every woman interviewed had a trauma that brought her to the shelter. And each had a dream of getting a place of her own.

Clynetta Dunn, 34, due to deliver her baby any day, will be in a segment of the production showing fashions for pregnant women. Dunn resolved to leave her abusive husband after he dragged her, four months pregnant, down the street. She said that when he was challenged by a stranger, he responded: “It’s all right. It’s my wife.”

Elizabeth Mahone, 27, was thrown out by her husband when she refused to get an abortion. Tall and statuesque with enormous dark eyes and exquisitely carved features, the line she says in a skit about the mayor is: “A lot of people have complimented me on how I should be a model. Now, pregnant and homeless, I get my first chance.”

Robin O’Neil, 26, blond, blue-eyed, four months pregnant and unmarried, is in what is called Second Stage at the Y. She works in maintenance--full time, she stressed--and rents a room there.

“If it weren’t for this place, I’d still be living under the pier at Pacific Beach getting drunk,” she said.

Instead, her aspiration now is to save the money needed for first and last months’ rent on her own place.

O’Neil said she decided to get involved in the show when she heard about a number in which pregnant women in wedding dresses would be singing “Going to the Chapel.”

“I used to sing it to my boyfriend,” she said, her lips pursing in a wry half-smile. “I’d rather get a few laughs out of it and get on with my life than say: ‘Oh no, I’m pregnant and homeless. What am I going to do now?’ ”

After the show tonight, the women will head back to the Y, where they will sleep on exercise mats in the aerobics room or on the basketball court. But tonight at the Lyceum, they will be stars.

As Kaiser dances and sings, she may be thinking of another star she admires who also played the stage at the Lyceum recently: Whoopi Goldberg.

“I really admire Whoopi Goldberg because she remembers where she came from, and that’s how I feel about the Y,” she said. “I have a sense of family here. It’s like going to my mother’s house. I know I can go here when I don’t have anyplace to go.

“If I’m hungry, I know I can get a meal,” Kaiser said. “If I need to sleep here, I can sleep. I know there’s someone’s shoulder I can cry on, because the people here really do care about me.

“Because of the sense of family and the welcome I get when I come here, I’ll never be too busy to help out.”

The third annual “Homeless for the Homeless Variety Show” opens with a reception at 6 p.m.; the show is from 7 to 8 tonight at the Lyceum Stage. Tickets are $20.