Flashback 1999: On the allure of `Xena'

 Xena, played by Lucy Lawless, left, shared adventures in a vague heroic past with her particular friend, Gabrielle, played by Renee O'Connor (Photo: ©Universal Television / Everett Collection)

     Rick Garcia, a key figure in the Chicago gay community, died last week. I've known him for decades — he's the reason my memoir, "You Were Never in Chicago," ends at the Chicago Gay Pride Parade: he invited me to ride on the float for his new organization, Civil Rights Agenda. Riding a float in the pride parade on a fine day in June is one of those peak Chicago experiences that you are lucky to do once in your life, like reciting at the Uptown Poetry Slam or watching a Cubs game from inside the scoreboard at Wrigley Field, or climbing one of the television masts on the John Hancock Building, or going down the Deep Tunnel. 

     I spoke to Rick a few times over the summer. Like many, he was having a hard time after the death of Lori Cannon. I tried to help, but wish I'd done more. Rick was a big-hearted man, but even the largest of hearts can break, and give out from overuse.

     My colleague Mitch Dudek wrote a fine obituary for Rick, explaining how nuns helped crack calcified resistance against gay rights by Catholic aldermen. He also said how he "became the first person many news reporters would call for a quote on gay issues." I can vouch for that. Back in the 1990s, Rick served as a kind of Gay Everyman. He shows up in a number of columns of mine — this is from when the column appeared Sundays, Tuesdays and Thursdays, the latter two days being briefer, lighter efforts in the feature section. While the unapologetic male gaze in this might cause trouble today, we didn't think anything of it 26 years ago, and I believe I can repost it without getting in hot water. Besides, right about now people might appreciate reading a cheery trifle. I know I did. 

     Ever since "Northern Exposure" went off the air, I don't watch TV regularly anymore.
     Except when cleaning the kitchen. You need something to distract from the slop and the grind. This is easy in the evening, when you can count on something newsy.
     Weekends are different. Nothing's on. The choices are "Xena: Warrior Princess," auto racing or golf (who watches that? Anybody? I don't believe it. A whole round?).
     Of course I settle for "Xena." Not for the plots: tepid Dungeons & Dragons-type myth run through a food processor of squishy 1990s morality. But if you're going to look up from scouring the sink and see something, you might as well see a few heaving bosoms and battling babes.
     I have accidentally enamored our 3-year-old son with "Xena." Now it's his favorite show. I probably should be concerned because of the fighting. But I find it sweet.
     "Hey, your girlfriend Xena's on," I said Sunday afternoon, and he scampered upstairs. Wearying of the kitchen, I joined him, and the family, all camped out in front of "Xena."
     I must never have really paid attention to the show before, while cleaning, other than ogle whoever was on screen (it's like one of those Russ Meyer women's prison movies, but set in ancient times).
     About two minutes' worth of watching were enough to establish the, ummm, intense relationship between the Xena character and her petite blond sidekick, Gabrielle.
     "This makes `Ellen' seem like `Bonanza,'" I said to my wife.
     That raised a question.
     "It's huge among lesbians," said gay activist Rick Garcia. "I've only seen it a couple times, but that's all you need to catch the extremely heavy lesbian overtones. They talk about feelings. They're in tune to one another. It's almost a cliche."
     Rick put me in touch with a friend, who explained the appeal.
     "First of all, it's just a very feminist show," said Alicia Obando,* 35, a lesbian who is a legislative aide for Cook County Board Commissioner Mike Quigley. "She is a very strong person, physically, mentally, emotionally."
     I asked her if she thought the overtones were accidental, imposed on an innocent adventure show, or intentional.
     "They supposedly do it on purpose," said Obando. "She knows she has a strong lesbian following."
      Lucy Lawless, the New Zealand-born actress playing Xena, has admitted as much.
     "We are aware, and we're not afraid of it," she told a Scottish newspaper. "This is a love story between two people. What they do in their own time is none of our business."
     North Sider Melissa Stanley, 28, who dressed up as Xena for two of the past three Halloweens, pointed out that the implied relationship appeals to more than simply lesbians.
     "I'm not sure if it's for the women viewers or the men," she said.
     I wondered how, considering the big hoo-haw that erupted over "Ellen" two years ago, that "Xena," the most popular syndicated show on TV, could craft itself into a lesbian fantasy epic without public tumult. Stanley had an intriguing theory.
     "For one thing, they never made a political agenda out of it, like `Ellen' did," she said, pointing out that Ellen DeGeneres really is a lesbian, while Lawless merely plays one, maybe. "I think people have a better time with straight people playing gays than with gays playing gays."
     Now why would that be?
        — Originally published in the Sun-Times, April 13, 1999

* She would go on to become Ald. Tom Tunney's chief of staff in 2003, serving for almost five years.

Works in progress: Jack Clark

   

     Much is going on with Jack Clark, who needs no introduction — he's a periodic contributor to EGD. There is a new memoir, "HONEST LABOR: Writing & Moving Furniture" (good title). I read an earlier version of it, so know it's worth your while. You can find it on his good-looking new website, the aptly named Jack Clark Books. What's up, Jack?

     It was a month or so after my birthday, the dead of winter, and I was in my office writing when out of the blue I started thinking about my next birthday. It was going to be one of those big ones. Eighty, my own voice whispered in my head. That’s old. “I’m well aware of that.” I spoke in a normal tone. If you’re going to talk to yourself — and I’m probably not the only writer who does — there’s no point in whispering.
     In the past, I’d never really thought much about age. You’re as old as you are and there’s nothing you can do about it. My sister Michele thought her life was over when she turned 21. I warned her that this would just keep happening and it has, which I see as a good thing.
     But 80? I mean that’s old. You can’t kid yourself anymore. Very few people make it to 100--and do you really want to be one of them? — which means you don’t even have 20 years left. Forget about that, I told myself and tried to keep my focus on the writing.
     Twenty years ago, I was 60, and that still seems like yesterday to me. For some reason I started thinking about my 50th birthday. It was one of those great nights with the usual crew, including my friend Randy who was also celebrating a birthday. We went straight up Halsted Street from the Greek Islands to O’Rourke’s Pub. Mary had stayed home sick, which meant her husband Steve didn’t have to worry about how much she drank. He could relax, drink her drinks too, and have a really good time. Somehow I got home. The next morning I woke with a hangover and a smile.
     That really couldn’t have been almost 30 years ago? It sure didn’t feel that way.
     Well, this went on for a half hour or so as I kept writing. I was never going to actually win a Shamus Award if I let a little thing like old age stop me. But I kept glancing backward trying to understand how all those years had passed so quickly with me barely noticing. I was in the middle of a sentence when I stopped dead. “You idiot.” And this time I should have whispered. “You’re only going to be 70.”
     I gave up on the sentence. I was a young man again. There was no need to hurry, I could finish that sentence whenever I felt like it. Seventy never sounded so young.
      How did I make that leap, you might ask. I don’t really know the answer but I do have a theory. I think I spent so much time preparing myself for being 70 that I thought I’d already passed the big day. I knew I had a big birthday coming so my mind jumped to 80. (About now you might be wondering why you’ve bothered to read this far.)
     I went around whistling for weeks. My friends kept asking what I was so happy about. How could I explain without exposing myself as a total nincompoop?
     This happened several years back. I just turned 76 last month — so only 24 years to that not-so-magic number. I don’t expect to make it. But if I can just keep lying to myself now and then, it might make the journey — however abbreviated — a little more relaxing
     And 80? Hell, I’m not worried about that. I was already there once for a while, and it wasn’t so bad. Really. Just a couple of uncomfortable moments that soon passed.

Wrapping our heads around a trillion, now that Alphabet is worth $4,000,000,000,000

 

     One is easy. Look in the mirror. You are one.
     Or a single basketball, tossed onto a court.
     Ten, no trouble. Ten players on that basketball court, running and passing that orange ball, sneakers squeaking.
     A hundred ... picture a grid, 10 on a side. Easy to imagine that. Or the crowded hall outside the gym door. Or a box of Kleenex, 100 tissues to the box. The thin professional boxes.
     A thousand ... more challenging. Not a figure that had much practical value during 99% of the 300,000 years of human history, where counting was One, Two, Three and Many.
     A thousand people crowd that high school gym to watch the game. A thousand days are almost three years. With its broadcast antenna, the Eiffel Tower is a little over a thousand feet tall.
     I like to do the math. To try to imagine numbers. So when the market capitalization of Alphabet, the parent company of Google, hit $4 trillion on Monday, after rising 65% in 2025, my first thought was "What's a trillion, anyway? Can that figure even be imagined?"
     The best approach seemed to work our way up slowly, by powers of 10.
     For 10,000, we can stick with basketball —about 10,000 spectators at an average WNBA game: 9,800 per game in 2024, over 11,000 in 2025. One week contains 10,800 minutes.
     For 100,000, we need to shift sports, and pack Soldier Field way past the 60,338 fan there last Saturday to see the Bears overcome Green Bay, to the crowd cheering the 1926 Army-Navy game — at least 100,000. Wall to wall fans, standing in the aisles, on the roof.
     A million? The population of Fort Worth, Texas. The center of the sun is about 1 million degrees, Celsius. Maybe your net worth — with the skyrocketing stock market, and inflation, there are some 24 million millionaires in the United States, the word no longer indicating extravagant wealth — no mansions, no yachts. Just some comforting ballast to keep your ship from flipping in the next storm.
     Ten million? Combine the area of the two largest countries in the world, Russia and Canada, and you have about 10,456,000 square miles.
     One hundred million? The distance from Earth to the sun is close, averaging about 93 million miles.
     One billion. Your heart pumps about a billion gallons over 25 years. And billionaires are the new millionaires. Those people are rich. If you spend $10,000 a day indulging your every whim, it would take you 2,730 years to burn through that cash. Which explains why the very rich, such as Elon Musk, tend to become unglued. The richest man in the world, he's worth $725 billion.
     Closing in on a trillion right there. How to conceive of a trillion? Light zips along very fast — taking 8 minutes and 20 seconds to traverse the 93 million miles from the sun to Earth. To travel a trillion miles, light takes about two months.
      A shame we aren't on the metric system. The Earth's volume is 1,083,208,840,000 cubic kilometers.
      I thought I'd cheat, and consult Google's Gemini AI, since its soaring market value raised this subject, asking, "How to visualize a trillion?"
     AI answered immediately:
     "One trillion $1 bills stacked would reach about 67,866 miles high, enough to go to the Moon and back more than once."
     See the problem with that? 

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"Combine" should suffice

    
      God bless the kids. They not only travel the world, but come back bearing all sorts of goodies: olive oil from Portugal, a ceramic jaguar head from Mexico.
     Or this attractive jar of Italian pistachio spread, bought because I am a notorious fan of all things pistachio. Kind of like a green Nutella. Festive on tea biscuits, but not what I would call delicious. I wouldn't bother writing about it, except for this, on the back.
      Take a quick read below. I'm sure what popped out at me will pop out at you. "Mix vigorously to amalgamate" — not a word that a native speaker would use. You'd think they could dragoon an American friend into checking their copy. Careless. Or maybe no Americans at hand. That's what social media is for.
      I see how it happened. The label writer must not have wanted to use the word "mix" twice — that's a value of mine, too, not to repeat words, except for effect. The fix is easy enough —"Mix vigorously to blend and bring out ...."

     But that left me wondering. When would you use "amalgamate"? To figure that out, we should know precisely what it means. "Combine or unite to form on organization or structure." That's why it clunks when applied to sweet spreads. I seem to remember "amalgamate" appearing in corporate names. There was an Amalgamated Bank of Chicago. I suppose the Sun-Times and WBEZ amalgamated into Chicago Public Media. 

Johnson's dictionary gives a step-by-step guide.

     "Amalgam" is an interesting word. The Oxford English Dictionary traces it to "regular alchemical use in the 13th c. Usually taken as a perversion of L. malagma (in Pliny and the physicians) a mollifying poultice or plaster." Almalgamynge appears in Chaucer, and that opening "al" hints at Arabic origins. Al-jamca, "union, conjunction."
     The OED defines "amalgamate" as "To soften or dissolve (a metal) by combination with mercury" and, later, "combined, united into one body."

    Thomas Jefferson used it. "It remains to amalgamate the comptroller and auditor into one." Doing a quick check, I see it is a word never before used on EGD. Now it has.

     

Bears playoff telecast exposes dark truth of Navy Pier sign — glitchy bulbs

    

Photo by Kerry Reid

     In my 30 years — at the end of January — as a columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times, I've been tasked by readers with many odd missions. One gave me an urn holding a lady's ashes that he had been entrusted with. I handed the urn to her loved ones. Another reader, a VA social worker, drew me into trying to track down the family of a Marine vet, found frozen to death in a West Side doorway and headed toward a pauper's grave in Homewood. My column helped locate his family in Alabama, who had been looking for him.
     An elderly reader once asked if I could arrange for the newspaper to be delivered closer to her front door, as her driveway was icy. She was worried about falling. I knew that would prove beyond my capabilities, so went over and scraped the ice off her driveway myself, to her surprise, and mine.
     I tend to take such situations seriously, because I appreciate people reading this stuff, and try to help them, when possible. Ditto for those who cooperate with being put in the paper. When I profiled a homeless man living in a van in the Glen of North Glenview train station parking lot, whose dream was to work in Appleton, Wisconsin, I phoned the mayor of Appleton to see what could be done. Nothing, as it turned out. But the call was made.
     I don't always. "I'm not a social service," as I sometimes testily snap, to my wife's consternation. But certain situations just demand action. Such as this email, which arrived Sunday afternoon from Cathryn of Burr Ridge:

     "Hi Neil. Watched Bear’s game last night & admired how beautiful Chicago presents on TV. Until the shot of Navy Pier — some lights on Chicago Children’s Museum are burned out which looked second rate on the national stage. I thought maybe you’d know who to contact so it could be corrected before next game. Thank you. Your long time reader..."

     I'd watched the same game — my wife's suggestion. "Let's join the zeitgeist!" she said, cheerily. (Zeitgeist, German: "the spirit or mood of a particular time." Shows what can happen to a person if she hangs around me for 40 years.) I'd admired the swooping shots of the glittering city and did not notice any balky Children's Museum sign. That could have been during the third quarter when, with the Bears on the ropes, we got bored and watched an episode of "Victoria."
     Something about Cathryn's request seemed irresistible. It was a trust drop. No AI aggregator is going to ask the Children's Museum about their sign. I reached out to their PR guy, who put me in touch with Peter Williams, the vice president of exhibits and building operations at the museum. I forwarded the email. Williams replied:
     "Chicago Children's Museum has an old school neon sign on the Navy Pier Head House. Sometimes when it rains, a neon transformer ground fault interrupter (GFI) will trip causing three letters to go out. Typically, the GFI will dry out and reset in less than a day. The part of the sign that went out on Saturday night was back on by noon on Sunday."

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Don't blame me...

      What do you think when you see a Tesla Cybertruck? "Moron." "Headcase." "Fear junkie." There are a variety of valid reactions. Cybertrucks are even worse than Hummers, both driven by styleless, apocalyptic nutbags, no doubt stocking food and firearms, itching for the end of the world, so they can be king. Or lord of the block. Or something.

      Tesla brought out Cybertrucks in 2023, after Elon Musk bought X and began to establish himself, not only as the personal financier for the lunatic right, but one of the loudest voices of intolerance, nationalism, sexism and ignorance rampant. People who bought one knew what they were endorsing.

      But how about regular Teslas, particularly older models, that might have been purchased back when Musk was still a high tech visionary, the man who finally made the electric car work, and not the creepy and frightening bully he became. How do you communicate that you bought the car before its creator established himself as a fascist fanboy, a right wing agitator, a disseminator of hate and unvarnished predatory masculinity on his troll farm, X, and a general enemy of American democracy and freedom?

     I've noticed several varieties of the above bumper sticker, and recognize the dilemma.  The bold thing to do of course would be to sell the car, take your losses, and buy a Subaru, as a kind of penance. But that's asking a lot, and I think that establishing your choice of car should not be construed as an endorsement of current toxicity is sufficient. I mean, I still subscribe to the Washington Post, even though Jeff Bezos has shamed it, and himself, by using its editorial pages to blow kisses and making cooing noises at our nation's liar, bully, fraud and traitor. These are difficult times, and we all navigate best we can. 

I obscured the license plate, out of kindness.

    

Will taking Greenland by force make us feel like men?

     Trivia time!
     What is the biggest nation on earth? In land area, that is. I'm not talking about largeness of spirit or national heart, qualities that are not only unmeasurable but increasingly unvalued. At least in our country. What does "freedom" mean if you aren't free to protest your neighbors being dragged away by masked thugs? What does "democracy" mean when the president talks about canceling elections? What kind of nation is that?
     Sorry. We were talking about land mass. Any idea? China would be a good guess: 3.7 million square miles. Which allows me to trot out one of my favorite obscure facts: China is almost exactly the same size as the United States, at 3.8 million square miles. (Meaning ... we're bigger! We win! USA! USA!)
     Not so fast. Both China and the United States are eclipsed by Russia, at 6.6 million square miles. Even after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
     Still a massive country, spanning crossing 11 time zones. Land is not what they need. Yet there they are, fighting to claw territory away from Ukraine, 3% of its size. Estimates vary, but it's believed that around 250,000 Russian soldiers have died in the conflict.
     For what? I suppose you could muster some flapdoodle about resources. But it's really about pride. Russia is a failed state — when was the last time you bought something made in Russia? They don't even lead the world in export of vodka — that's Sweden. Followed by France. Then Poland. Putin attacked Ukraine as a lunge at former glory. Because Ukraine once belonged to the Soviet Union, and it's making Russia look bad — in Putin's eyes — by thriving without them. Russia can't make a toaster, but they can bomb apartment buildings in Kyiv. 
     Ditto for China — at a very big 3.7 million square miles, remember — which snaps its slavering jaws at Taiwan, 0.3% its size. A nation that was never part of Communist China. Invasion looms, even though doing so would knock over the global economy.
     Again, why?
     To argue a practical reason —oil, gas, land, whatever — is to suggest the school bully is beating up Timmy because he needs his pocket change. It gives the bully too much credit for practicality. Picking on weaker kids is what bullies do, to feel alive. To feel like men. To feel great.
      Which brings us to Greenland.
     "We do need Greenland absolutely," President Donald Trump said, preferring to buy the place, which belongs to Denmark and is not for sale, otherwise threatening to seize it by force.
     "I would like to make a deal the easy way," Trump said Friday. "But if we don't do it the easy way, we're going to do it the hard way."
     "Obviously," his adviser Stephen Miller explained. "Greenland should be part of the United States."
     Obviously?
     I want you to say that to the next person you see. "Obviously, the United States must have Greenland." See what kind of look you get. It's bonkers. Did we learn nothing from watching Ukraine not only fail to crumble before the Russians but fight back fiercely?
     Trump said if we don't snatch Greenland, Russia will. That's also nuts. Denmark is a founding member of NATO where, sadly, talk seems to be about how to placate Trump — the lessons of Munich 1938 still unlearned.

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