Dishwasher Pete

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"Dish-Washer" redirects here. For mechanical applience, see dishwasher.

Dishwasher Pete is the pen name for Pete Jordan, author of the popular Dishwasher zine as well as the book of the same title and whose goal was to wash dishes in every state in America. For more than a decade, he moved from city to city, state to state, washing dishes in restaurants, hospitals, cafeterias, ski resorts, camps, communes, a fish cannery, an offshore oil rig, a dinner train and just about anywhere where dishes were dirty. He was once invited to appear on the Late Show with David Letterman. He did not wish to be on national television, and so a friend of his took his place on the show, pretending to be him. Later, while promoting his book, Pete himself appeared on Letterman and the two discussed the earlier "appearance".

The fifteen issues of the Dishwasher zine are now out of print. Memoirs of Jordan's dishwashing years were published by HarperPerennial in 2007.

Dishwasher Pete has contributed to the following episodes of the radio program This American Life:

His writing also appeared on the Open Letters website:

Dishwasher Pete also volunteered as a healthy human guinea pig in drug experiments, and he contributed short articles to the zine Guinea Pig Zero: A Journal for Human Research Subjects.