Saturday, December 7, 2013

Visions of sugar plums danced in their heads

   
 There's not a lot of singing in "The Nutcracker." 
     Okay, there's no singing at all.  
     Which, as an opera buff, took me a while to get used to.
     Not a lot of plot development either. It's Christmas, in an well-to-do 1850s household. The boys get swords and bugles. The girls get dolls. Then a mysterious guest in a black cape arrives and dispenses more marvelous gifts, mechanical dolls that dance. An older girl, Clara, is given a nutcracker figure, which her naughty brother promptly breaks.
     As I watched the spectacle unfold Friday at the Auditorium Theater, opening night of the Joffrey Ballet's holiday favorite, which runs until Dec. 28, I idly wondered what it all was about. Not the story—that's plain enough, simplicity itself by opera standards. No mistaken identities, no jealous pharaohs or magic rings. But the subtext. What's the message here? Beauty, of course, and grace, and fantasies of young girls, and the luscious music by Tchaikovsky. "The Nutcracker" is about perfection, about heaven, achieved in our dreams at Christmas.
     In the first act, I suspected there might be some deeper, more subtle significance related to the boys, with their martial music, newspaper hats and drawn swords, swooping in and attacking the girls, on their knees, playing with their dolls. Maybe because earlier in the day I had viewed this video from Time magazine, "How Far We Haven't Come: All the Terrible Ways the Media Treated Women in 2013 in One Video." Gender politics was squirming uncomfortably in a chair at the back of my mind, waiting to have its say. 
      But "The Nutcracker" doesn't belong in Time's list. First, it's 120 years old. Nothing is more dreary than taking our supposed contemporary enlightenment and trudging off into the past to measure, judge and condemn things. It's ballet, an inherently sexist endeavor —the men lift the women, not visa versa. Chalk it up to biology, another inherently sexist endeavor, which still has a say in our world, whether we like it or not. And besides,  the Joffrey folk do the best with the material they've got -- Clara, I noticed, runs in and delivers a timely crack onto the head of the Mouse King, one of those see-we're-not-sexist moments so de rigueur in popular entertainments it is almost itself offensive. Or maybe I'm reading in too much. Maybe artistic director Ashley Wheater just needed to give Clara something to do at that point.
     Second, it's grand Russian ballet. I don't want you to think I sat there trying to extract great sociological meaning out of it. (I was trying to keep my eyes open — not to take anything from the performance, but it's been that kind of week). I just settled in my seat, occasionally pinching an earlobe, hard, with a fingernail to focus my attention, and listened to the music, watched the smooth, graceful, precise and beautiful dance, and enjoyed. As with "La Traviata" last month, I lack the technical facility or depth of knowledge to properly critique the thing -- nobody fell over, that I noticed, or dropped another dancer, or collided with any scenery a la the hippos in "Fantasia." The Sugar Plum fairy, April Daly, was a perfect specimen of dancer who seemed to do exactly what she was supposed to do with flawless precision. The children were delightful and enthusiastic. The costumes were lovely, dresses of teal and purple and rose and deep blue. The set too. I even enjoyed the audience, which was well freighted with tall, enthusiastic young girls with muffs and spangled headbands, one of whom, maybe seven, practiced her pirouettes at intermission in the lobby of the Auditorium, her hands folded over her head, spinning lightly around, a prima ballerina by the popcorn counter. That alone was worth going to see.


Photos courtesy of the Joffrey Ballet/copyright Cheryl Mann
     

Friday, December 6, 2013

A is for Atheist


     If people spent more time focusing on what they themselves believe and less time obsessing over what everybody else believes, or doesn't believe, we'd live in a better world. I believe I'd like to walk across Daley Plaza without having the earth's major religions conducting a weird holiday beauty contest one month out of every 12. It isn't as if Christmas — or Hanukkah, or Kwanza, or atheism—would get overlooked if the government didn't dedicate its land to drawing attention to it.

     Readers sometimes accuse me of being an atheist, based on my complete non-belief in God. I always correct them. I am not an atheist. Atheists are zealots, too, elevating denial of the divine into a kind of faux religion, complete with pieties, and manage to be as aggressive and joyless as those who at least can blame a higher power for making them the way they are.
     Rather, I am an agnostic. Agnostics know what we know but don’t make such a fuss. We’re the Unitarians of the non-belief community.
     Why? Rob Sherman for one. Anyone who has lived here long remembers the Buffalo Grove atheist gadfly, storming into board meetings, trying to get crosses off of water towers in such a heat of unpleasant legalistic dudgeon that it indicted the very notion of opposing government-endorsed faith. Northbrook could paint the bleeding heart of Jesus Christ on its water tower and I’d hesitate to complain, thinking of Rob Sherman.
     Maybe that makes me timid.
     For instance, I was not glad to see that the Freedom From Religion Foundation has erected a white plastic “A” at Daley Plaza.  
     "Very Hester Prynne-ish" my editor sniffed, though it stands not for "Adultery" but for "Atheism" and "Agnosticism" and a bunch of other free-thinking concepts.
     Let's put this new public pronouncement of belief, or rather, non-belief, in context.
     There is the 57-foot official Chicago Christmas tree, a gorgeous Colorado blue spruce festooned with 51,000 colored lights.
     Then, a polite distance away, a brutalist 20-foot stainless steel menorah — the sort of menorah the Germans would have erected at the Nuremberg rallies if, you know, they were into that kind of thing.
     Next to the menorah, a life-size Nativity scene with real straw and, lest anyone miss the point, a chiding placard noting that it was paid for by private donations from those who "wish to keep CHRIST in CHRISTMAS." (And who is taking Him out? We nonbelievers, striding into your churches, disrupting your services? No? Oh, you mean people who don't share your faith pointing out that they live here too and maybe you should consider honoring your particular religion in your own church? Yes, that is tough).
     Not that I mind. Honestly. Have fun. I like Christmas. Carols. Lights. Cookies. It isn't my faith, true, but then Scarlett Johansson isn't my wife, yet I don't mind seeing her either.
    The distinction I make is between celebration and castigation.
    The city tree is a celebration. The creche and the rest, castigation. Protected speech, true, though you wonder what happens when Muslims and Buddhists, Scientologists and Taoists all stake out spots. What the war-on-Christmas crowd doesn't get is there are lots of religions, and if they all set up shop on Daley Plaza soon there wouldn't be room for the big faux German Christmas folk village that's already taken over the place.
     When you're not really a victim, pretending to be one feels good, to you, because you don't understand suffering, so can shroud yourself in the unearned dignity that those who have actually felt oppression — at the hands of your forebears, as it turns out — are entitled to. Those who complain about Christmas being edged out of the public realm are like singers who complain that they can't put on blackface and sing "Swanee River" in a minstrel show. Yeah, that's a shame, but there's history here. Christians have been shoving their faith down people's throats at pain of death for a thousand years, and the key miracle of modern society has been prying their fingers off the levers of government, science and education. Maybe if Christian zealots weren't ripping pages out of textbooks, maybe if they were weren't yanking contraceptives out of women's purses, then Christmas would be welcomed by all faiths. But they do, and thus holiday trappings are a reminder of who has the whip hand, still.
     Agnostics get this. Atheists, well, they're putting up their big plastic A between the shame-on-you creche and Albert Speer's menorah. With a placard, "to encourage the non-religious to come out of the closet."
     OK. I'm out. And here's what I wish you atheists would do. Find something you think is significant and do it. On the day of the winter solstice, don elk antlers and prance around a bonfire at Daley Plaza. I'll join you.
     People sincerely expressing their religion in a public space seldom run afoul of anyone. The Chicago Police do not chase carolers off city sidewalks. Hasidic Jews can dance their brand new Torahs off to new homes. Muslims find a quiet corner and pray.
     For some, that isn't enough. They want to take their faith, or non-faith, roll it into a tube and bop the rest of us on the head. It's not subtle and not joyous and not welcome.

Thursday, December 5, 2013

Ignore the pea pods


     Work is always there. It waits for us, or sometimes doesn't wait. Sometimes it stalks us.
     Lately it has been, not just stalking, but smacking the back of my calves with a stick whenever I've paused for breath. Not just the column four days a week, with additional days tossed in here and there as need be. That's a given, like getting dressed in the morning. Nor the book, which is actually done, but has entered into a tricky legal phase, securing literary permissions, which is even more arduous than writing it was. This daily blog, of course, but that's like the column, just part of the fabric of the day. Nobody objects to breathing, to brushing their teeth in the morning. You have to do it, so you do it.
     That's the baseline work. Then other tasks are added,, it begins to pile up, and the extra load tends to make the old camel's back sag a little. In New York, Audible is recording an audio book of my memoir "Drunkard"—beginning today, in fact —and I had to work with the actor doing the recording, checking pronunciations and such. Plus —idiot that I am—I started sending him re-writes of sections that got changed in the book, parts that I hated being changed, including a new ending. So there I am, in the basement, dragging old manuscripts out of boxes. A normal person would have let it go, but as I always tell new writers, if you don't care about your writing then nobody else will either. Then add this -- better not say exactly, so as to not jinx it —big honking profile for a big honking magazine I've been writing for the past month, a story that just gets bigger and more honking as I try to make it smaller and smoother. The magazine says, "Great work, do this and that and this and that." By now, I just wish somebody would take the damn thing away from me, which probably means it'll go through another few re-writes. Then I had promised a pal in Paris that I would write a post to run on her blog next week while she's away in Sri Lanka, so I put together something on Com-Ed faux buildings hiding electrical substations. And....
     This isn't complaining. At least I hope it isn't complaining, or bragging, at least not complaining or bragging too much. I like to work. This is what I built up my whole life to do, and I'm grateful and happy to be doing it, albeit a tad on the giddy, punchy, exhausted side for the past few days. When people ask me how I get so much done, I fix them with a steady gaze and say in a flat tone, "I don't watch television. I don't play golf. I don't have friends in the usual sense of the term. All I do is write." It is a joke, sort of, and they laugh, which they're supposed to, but as with any joke, there's a vein of truth running through it. Not regarding the friends—I have many good, old friends, so don't please, don't get your noses out of joint and stomp off, sulking for years, the way my friends sometimes do. No slight intended. Love you guys, the ones who are left, I mean. But they do tend to live in distant cities, which is probably how I've kept them as friends, and those who don't, well, they aren't bursting into the room like characters in a TV show to tell a few jokes and move the action along. Which is just as well, because I've got all this work to do.
     One thing I've noticed about work, and this might be particularly true in writing, but I'm sure it applies to all professions, is that it's self-limiting. If you do it too much your quality breaks down. I hope my quality hasn't broken down too much. Though I woke up this morning and my head felt like an empty shoe box held on to my shoulders with Scotch tape. I waited for it to pass and it did, thank God, and I was able to get a good grip on the stone and roll it a little up the mossy, steep hill. But it also was a message to take a breath. Not here of course. These posts are fun. But time for a break from the other stuff—thank God my younger boy and I are going to Colorado to visit my folks at the end of the month, and even ski a bit. Can't wait. You need to know when to ignore the pea pods for a while, as this woman at the China Town Restaurant on Dempster in Morton Grove was doing on Friday. When I took the photo, drawn by the big pile of green pods, I assumed she was doing the books—my fault for stereotyping—but if you look closely, she's isn't doing work, she's playing some kind of video game. 



Wednesday, December 4, 2013

Block 37 — still cursed, but now serving snacks

     In the pantheon of urban development nightmares, there is really only one city block that can be described as famous or, more precisely, infamous: Block 37.
     Notorious as “cursed” and “a boondoggle,” the area bounded by Randolph, Washington, Dearborn and State sat mostly empty for 20 years, poorly masked by various half-efforts to hide its yawning vacancy in the heart of the Loop: an ice skating rink; an arts and crafts festival.
     In 1996, a book was published about the doomed efforts to make something take hold there. Ross Miller’s, “Here’s the Deal,” deemed it a “fiasco,” cataloging years of lawsuits and protests over the “gold-plated hole in the ground.”
     Finally, in 2009, a four-story mall opened.
    Then the trouble really began: bankruptcy; more lawsuits; 70 percent vacancy.
     It says something about the outer Neptune orbital ring of Chicago consciousness the north half of the block occupies — CBS Studios is on the southern part, lifting the curse there — when the idea of actually stepping into an establishment on Block 37 never crossed my mind until Monday, after I noticed the Doughnut Vault’s distinctive cornflower-blue 1957 van parked on the sidewalk directly under the Dearborn entrance to what is boldly (or foolishly) called “Block Thirty Seven Shops on State.” 
     If Block 37 exerts a repulsive force on profits and customers, the Doughnut Vault is the opposite, exerting a magnetic, indeed, mesmeric, power. I bought a doughnut even though I wasn’t hungry and didn’t want one.
     I was chatting with Derek, the guy in the van, when a frantic publicist, seeing my notebook, waylaid me, insisting on personally escorting me that instant into Block 37. It all happened so quickly, it was a little discombobulating, as if a hatch opened in the Bean and a gnome yanked me inside. I would have preferred a bit of ceremony, the way buses entering Jerusalem will pause to let the occupants weep and sing and pray.
     The mall has been open four years, but the second floor has the raw feel of a space opening next month. There is one store.
     Otherwise, a corner of the vacant second floor has been taken over by Nosh, the pop-up food fair that has been appearing at farmers markets like the Green City Market in Lincoln Park and in Logan Square.
     "It's a little slow," admitted Aaron Wolfson, owner of Chicago's Dog House, shooting for a Hot Doug's vibe with exotic franks. I tried the $8 smoked alligator sausage with caramelized onions and sweet chili sauce. Mmm. Another high point was Lindy's Chili, which you normally have to haul yourself to the South Side to experience.
     "We've been doing it a long, long time, so we've got it down," said Rich Wierenga, who owns "the best two" of Lindy's seven Chicago-area outlets, and who showed the proper South Sider's contempt for those north of Roosevelt Road. "It's interesting," he said, of selling chili in the Northlands. "We get a lot of requests for vegetarian chili." By "interesting" he means, I assume, "disgusting in a way that instills me with amusement and contempt" since Lindy's, open since 1924, does not sell vegetarian chili and never will.
     The various restaurants, caterers and full-time pop-up food purveyors won't all be there every day; they rotate. For instance, the Doughnut Vault van is not coming back. So there probably isn't much point to reviewing each of the various booths. Karl's Craft Soup ladled out an interesting smoked-pumpkin bisque, apologizing for failing to master the expected heating technology - one assumes they're fixing that. Gayle Voss has an interesting backstory. She represents Prairie Pure Cheese at farmers markets and found herself next to a Bennison's Bakery booth selling bread. Nearby, fresh butter, and thus was Gayle Grilled Cheese born.
     If you do go, after eating your fill, make sure you wander up to the third floor to gaze respectfully on the expanse of closed stores, noting the brave, sad mural showing the busy, successful food court that isn't there.
     Visit soon. First, Nosh (open 10:30 a.m. to 2 p.m.) disappears Dec. 13. Second, there is no reason to assume the block's woes are over. One expects a sulfurous hell mouth to open up next, sucking the building down, or a meteor to hit, or some other kind of strange, nowhere-else-but-here calamity. Nothing should be surprising at this point.
     What Block 37 needs is not pop-up food, but an exorcism. Get Bishop Paprocki up here from Springfield. If he can cast out the demon of tolerating gay people, then a simple city block that somehow ran afoul of the Great Karmic Wheel and became accursed by fate should be a snap.





Tuesday, December 3, 2013

Critical Cycles

    
    
    Somewhere along the line the idea of style and expense became fused in the public mind. Or maybe it's just me. I noticed this bike Monday, locked on Randolph Street, because of its clean lines and unusual orange rims and hand grips. Then the name on the frame,"Critical," leapt out, one of those moments when life seems to become a Greek chorus directing some kind of sly remark at you. "Critical? Why yes I am. What of it?"
     I assumed the bike had to be a costly couture bike, made of titanium perhaps, designed to be shown off more than ridden. Wrong. Critical Cycles, "America's on-line Urban Bike Shop," based in California, slogan "Happiness on Two Wheels." This bike, their Fixed Gear Single Speed Fixie Urban Road Bike: $219, with free shipping. Made in China, natch.
    I can't vouch for the bike itself. Some glowing reviews online, some dismissive ones, claiming that it gets beaten up too easily. But the machine sure looks nice. Doesn't it? One reason the front wheel is so clean is that it doesn't have any front brakes -- "fixed gear," if you are unfamiliar with the term, as I was, means that there is no mechanism that allows the pedals to remain stationary while the wheels turn. This saves weight, and means that you can also slow the bike down using the pedals, thus less need for front brake stopping power (some riders dispense with the rear brake too, though the company discourages this). Fixed gear riding also "gives you a feeling of oneness with your bike," the company claims, "similar to driving a stick shift."
     And "Critical Cycles"? You have to admire the name. Maybe from a closet electronics geek, "critical cycle delay" being a problem in integrated circuit design. Although, to me, it sounds like a term that describes how a particular writer or artist falls in and out of favor as time lopes along. "Strindberg passed through several critical cycles before reaching his current popularity." Now that I think of it, the company name has to be a stab at borrowing a bit of the cool from the "Critical Mass" bike rides that draw hordes of bicyclists to reclaim city streets by weight of numbers. Though between the Divvy bikes and the dedicated bike lanes downtown, it seems that bicycles have achieved a critical mass in the heart of Chicago already, with no packs of riders necessary. 
     A pretty bike, this, though I'm hanging onto my black Schwinn Cruiser, with its balloon whitewall tires, coaster brake and fat ass saddle.  So uncool, it achieves a kind of transcendent coolness all its own, in my own eyes if nobody else's. Of course that's nothing unusual: most coolness is both self-assigned and illusory.

   

Monday, December 2, 2013

Push back against the Chinese, but not too hard


Photo by Ross Steinberg

     Given how important China is to our economy, and what a pivotal role it will play in the global future, it's alarming how little Americans know about the most populous nation on earth. I would bet that not one in 100 could name its new premiere (Li Keqiang, and no, I didn't know either) and few grasp either the hostility that many Chinese feel toward the United States, or understand where their animosity came from. 

     Man-in-the-street interviews are usually the lowest rung of journalistic tedium. Tapping regular folk on the shoulder, collecting their unexceptional opinions about passing issues — “Why yes, it is cold.” “No, I prefer the fat Elvis stamp.”
     But one particular temperature-taking sticks in my mind and haunts me, more than a dozen years after I read them: the man-in-the-street chats with Chinese citizens after an American surveillance plane and a Chinese fighter plane collided April 1, 2001.
     The U.S. plane, an EP-3E Aries II, was a prop-driven mule — it looks like a passenger plane from the 1950s — plodding along at 207 mph when a Chinese J-8 fighter began buzzing it. The jet clipped one of the EP-3E’s four propellers. The Chinese jet broke in half and crashed; the U.S. spy plane was able to land on the Chinese island of Hainan.
     If anyone should have been indignant, it was the Americans. Our plane was operating in inter
national waters. The Chinese pilot caused the accident. But interviews with the Chinese revealed seething belligerence.
     "The United States thinks it can do anything it wants to us," a delivery man surnamed Wu told The New York Times. "Saying you're sorry isn't good enough. Americans need to know we aren't afraid of their bullying." They were hopping mad.
     As the two governments maneuvered to end the crisis — the crew of 24 ended up being held 11 days — the Chinese government seemed as worried about placating the intense nationalism of its public as they were about the Americans. A swath of the Chinese citizens viewed the incident, in which their pilot was killed, as the latest in a series of national humiliations going back to the Opium Wars that had to be avenged.
     "The battle is not over," Chinese officials reassured their public, which felt the U.S. was being let off the hook for its aggression.
     The episode gave me a sinking feeling that China won't be content forever churning out khaki pants and raking in our money. Once China's on top of the world, they're going to want to do something with it. Nobody ever bought a bike they didn't ride.
     The Hainan incident was eclipsed five months later by 9/11, an event greeted with glee in some quarters of China. But that feeling of aggrievement has not gone away, as evidenced by the latest Sino-U.S. faceoff.
     The issue is a block of airspace in the East China Sea, which the Chinese two weeks ago announced is now an "Air Defense Identification Zone" that could not be entered by aircraft from other countries without receiving their permission first.
     On Friday, a pair of American surveillance planes, accompanied by 10 Japanese aircraft, flew into the zone to see what would happen. What happened is the Chinese scrambled their fighter jets, and suddenly the world feels like a more dangerous place.
     The specifics are trivial; two uninhabited flyspeck islands that Japan controls but the Chinese say rightfully belong to them.
     Still, this is a high-stakes balancing act. If we back down and let China make whatever claims it wants, then we are living in China's world, and we will not like that world. If we press them too hard, however, we'll be fighting with China, and that would be bad.
     When dealing with China, time is our friend. Capitalist democracy is self-administering, and we've seen China soften, just last month announcing it was dropping its one-child policy and forced labor camps for political prisoners. That's still far from becoming Evanston writ large, true, but the longer we don't slide into World War III with them, the more remote that possibility becomes. Ten years ago we worried about war between China and Taiwan. Now China and Taiwan seem happily on the road to getting married.
     The Obama administration urged U.S. airlines to respect China's no-fly zone, even as U.S. military planes defy it. That makes sense. This situation won't be helped by a Boeing 767 with 300 people aboard being shot down by some trigger-happy Chinese top gun, a new Lusitania to drive Americans into the same kind of bellicose frenzy that some Chinese people seem already in.
     The Japanese, on the other hand, ordered their commercial carriers to continue to fly through the disputed space without offering notice, so as not to give the Chinese claims legitimacy. That makes sense, too. Yielding to aggression leads to more aggression.
     The American domestic situation has been so messed up, between political gridlock, government shutdown, economic morass, health care rollout fiasco and on and on, that we didn't worry much about the rest of the world. Now that seems like another luxury we can no longer afford. Hello China.

Sunday, December 1, 2013

Holiday weekend worst time to fly, except for all the others.


     Everyone in the media is scrambling to fill the endless expanse of the Internet while still maintaining professional standards — I don't know if we've gotten worse at it, or I'm just noticing more surprising lapses, such as this ham-handed post from the Daily Beast. On one hand, error is intrinsic to writing, and the fault you find in others today could be found in you tomorrow. On the other, we can't just let any blunder slip by unnoticed, escaping under the "There But For the Grace of God Go I..." clause.

     So I’m up at 5 a.m., too early to start working. Might as well browse online. As a change of pace, I slide over to the Daily Beast, the online remnant of Newsweek. Naming the site for the London tabloid in Evelyn Waugh’s comic novel “Scoop” surely seemed more clever when they first thought it up than now, when some slice of America must avoid it, assuming, with that name, it must be the house organ for Satan.
     I’m rewarded with “20 WORST AIRPORTS FOR THANKSGIVING TRAVEL.” A list! We readers love lists! It can be “15 Most Useless Facts to Waste Your Time Reading” and we’re there. Oh, No. 6, “Lists Like This One.” Yes indeed, spot on!
     Of course I want to know how Chicago fares after the Daily Beast analyzed its "reams of statistics" in order to name the worst airports to pass through, based on arrival and departure delays, both during the year and for Thanksgiving weekend.
     No. 1 was San Francisco (whew!), where a quarter of arrivals and departures are delayed on an average day, rising to 29 percent of departures delayed on Thanksgiving.
     I figured Chicago would be up there, and Midway is No. 2, though if you look closely, you see something odd: 20.2 percent of Midway arrivals and 30.7 percent of departures are delayed on average. But Thanksgiving 2012 stats show 18 percent of arrivals and departures are late. So it's better to fly at Thanksgiving than most times, which sort of undermines the whole point of the post.
     Newark, N.J., is third, with numbers that again suggest it's far easier to fly at Thanksgiving (27.6 percent arrivals delayed during the year versus 15 percent at the holiday; 25.3 percent departures delayed year-round; Thanksgiving drops to 14 percent).
     Nothing in the slide show—photos of waiting, frustrated travelers at various airports — addresses this incongruity. Do they read their own posts? O'Hare, at fourth, is the same: delayed departures during Thanksgiving are almost half average year-round delays, 14 versus 27.2 percent.
     Airport after airport, they're all like that. The headline should have been: "THANKSGIVING IS BEST TIME TO FLY." It's hard to say whether they just started with a concept — list the busiest, most-delayed airports at Thanksgiving — then didn't notice that the stats tell an even more incredible story: It's better to travel over the holidays, probably because travelers are scared off.
     I consider this more evidence we've grown so accustomed to complaining about air travel that it's become a reflex; we don't even think about what we're complaining about anymore. Jets are a modern marvel, and I wish travelers would stop bitching. You never see articles about people who live in refugee camps complaining about living under a tarp and lining up for potable water. They cope with it. But the media offers pampered airborne business folk and vacationers shaking their fists at their hard lot.
     Stop whining. Get to the airport two hours early and flying is usually a breeze. Expect to wait. Bring a book. Smile at the big, shuffling line for a security check that does nothing at all; it's almost like a religious ritual we do in honor of 9/11 ( that would be interesting. Instead of patting you down, the TSA should anoint your head with oil).
     Whatever happens, roll with it. I flew to Colorado with my older son in February to visit my folks. We didn't depart until 12 hours after our flight was scheduled to leave. It was still fun. The evening flight was overbooked, and they kept requesting volunteers to be bumped to the morning, something I'd never consider — inconvenient! But my son wondered, "Why not?" It helped that my mom had been carping about us arriving too late at night, and I realized being bumped would a) get us there the next morning, voiding mom's concern; b) reduce the invariable "Long's Day Journey into Night" span of the visit and c) put a pair of $400 vouchers in our pockets. Next thing I knew we were on a bus, bound for a nearby Holiday Inn. It was an adventure. Next morning, we used our meal vouchers to feast on a lavish Wolfgang Puck breakfast.
     We're going back to the airport to use those vouchers this Christmas Eve. If I have a 500-pound man in the seat in front of me and a pair of toddler twins with ear infections wailing in back, on a plane that is three hours late taking off, I will not feel ill-used. I'll have a good book, and if the plane lands wheels first, I'll consider myself lucky.