Clark the Cub Redux

     One of the cardinal rules in this business, at least to me, is: don't linger. Obsessives quickly become boring. I always say, if I came across Jesus Christ delivering the Sermon on the Mount in Grant Park, it would end up as three columns, tops—a two-parter about Jesus' speech, if I could find a way to make it interesting enough, and maybe a third column of reader reaction and then on to something else. Otherwise, you risk being Bob Greene hobby horsing for 100, count 'em 100, columns on Baby Richard, and we all know how that ended up.
     In other words, I'm loathe to hit Clark the Cub for a second day.
     But there are just so many loose threads. When I set aside my column on Israeli/Palestinian relations, and decided to express a bit of the deep loathing I had tweeted for fun Tuesday night, my first instinct was to talk to artists I knew, to get their professional opinion. The first one I turned to was Tony Fitzpatrick, he of the brilliant  collages. Tony wrote:

Rather than subject the already  psychologically battered Cub fans to a watered down version of the 'Care Bear' Mr. Ricketts should try something novel and save some money--rather than that mascot--He should  paint his ass and walk on his hands during the 7th inning stretch -- from home plate to the pitcher's mound. He should do this until the Cubs win the World Series. They are now embarking on their second century of sucking.

      I couldn't just leave that on the cutting room floor. And then another pal, who asked that I not use his name because he is friends with folk who trapped in the corporate maw of the Cubs organization, but allowed me to say that he is a long-time season ticket holder and member of SABR, the Society of American Baseball Research.  His response was a marvel of insight and concision: 

Clark is a meaningless distraction.  Real baseball fans give as much mental space to various team mascots as they do to pigeons crapping on the concourse.  While the game broadly conceived includes lots of things that happen off the field (the experience of the stadium (sound, smells, sight), food and drink, keeping score, talking about the action), mascots are there to distract little kids.  So let the Cubs move boldly into the 1970s with this furry guy.  I lose no sleep over this, and any Cubs fan who is having palpitations should look at the pitching staff and the, third base and the outfield instead.  Any Sox fan who is gloating should just remember Ribbie and Rhubarb and the shameful firing of Andy the Clown.

     "So the Cubs move boldly into the 1970s" —you see why I love the guy. That's a phrase worth engraving on a coin.
      I'll spare you the rest, most praising the column, some responding with a variety of complaints, ranging from it being a waste of prime sports page real estate (as opposed, I wrote back, to the deeply significant matters typically dealt with in the sports pages) and those who were genuinely puzzled as to why I didn't like Clark (to whom I repeated Louis Armstrong's always-useful quip to someone who asked him to explain jazz: "If you have to ask, you'll never know.")
     I was truly thrilled to hear from both Wayne Messmer, he of the golden throat, and broadcast legend Chet Coppock. It was good to be interviewed for "All Things Considered" (which they never aired — I guess "Almost All Things Considered" might be a better name. Despite my frequent forays locally, I'm not really National Public Radio material — for instance, I was told they couldn't utter the name of this blog on NPR, which is just sad.  I bet if the blog were called "Goddamn the United States Every Day" they'd find a way). Anyway, it did stick in my craw a bit after I got off the phone and thought about it. Eighteen years writing a column for the paper, and Clark the Cub prompts National Public Radio to call.Here I'm worried about trifling with a cultural brouhaha for a day too long, when perhaps my problem is that I don't do it often enough.

Cubs find a way to strike out in the off-season

     I had a serious column on the Israeli situation all ready for today. But Tuesday night, I found myself at the ramparts on Twitter, howling— somewhat uncharacteristically — against this new Cubs mascot. In the morning, it seemed too much fun not to work up a version for the paper. The Middle East crisis will have to wait.

     What’s the No. 1 rule with mascots? And it’s OK to cheat, to flip open your textbooks to ‘‘Chief Illiniwek.’’

     Give up? Hint: It’s the same as the first rule for doctors: ‘‘First, do no harm.’’

     Mascots are not supposed to degrade the brand. They’re supposed to help, to foster goodwill, to spark enthusiasm and affection for your team/restaurant/ university. They’re not supposed to be awful, derivative, generic clip art that drives true fans insane and is a lightning rod for ridicule and contempt.

     Meet Clark the Cub, which the team introduced to the world Monday and which, I predict, will be quietly withdrawn sometime in 2016, if not before. Please God.

     My immediate, visceral reaction was horror. I could not have been more revolted had the Cubs unveiled as their mascot a severed calf head on a stick, dripping gore and buzzing with flies. ‘‘Holly the Heifer Head.’’ Nor was I alone. The Twitterverse lit up.
     ''Clark will never survive the true fans' wrath,'' Bob Godfrey of Michigan tweeted.
     Deadspin panned the pantless obscenity in a story headlined, with admirable journalistic detachment, ''TheCubs' New Mascot Is A Nightmarish Perverted Furry.'' Clark was presented as part of a Cubs program of ''systematically eradicating everything that's even remotely attractive about them,'' tying the abomination to the conversion of the neighborhood around Wrigley Field into the kind of charmless anodyne baseball mall from which the area once provided rare respite.
     What got me about Clark was the eyes — a pain in them, a kill-me-now sorrow cutting through its Smurf-like blandness. One thing about the Cubs, the team always had a vibe, a sense of graphic style — those Steve Musgrave-designed programs, the arcane beauty of Wrigley Field, those wool warmup jackets with 1908 Cubbie Bears on them.
     There was something so horribly familiar about Clark, I plunged into Google, looking. Care Bears? The Berenstain Bears? No, even cruder and more ratlike. Aha, Chuck E. Cheese. Closer. Maybe Cubby, the Draw Me Bear? Almost, but not quite.
     I appealed to Facebook, and the Hive Intelligence did not disappoint. Bill McCormick disinterred Kit Cloudkicker, from something called Disney's ''TaleSpin.''
     ''I can actually see Disney suing,'' he wrote.

      Let's look at them together; you decide. 

Kit Cloudkicker

Clark the Cub

     The new Cubs monstrosity created such a strong, uncharacteristic reaction of loathing in me, I tried to pull back and see it from the team's point of view. Children do seem to accept these homogenized characters — hence, the aforementioned Chuck E. Cheese — and this excrescence doesn't speak to actual fans but is designed to pacify the sick children it visits in hospitals (thus freeing actual players from the chore, a colleague even more cynical than myself pointed out).
     I phoned Grant DePorter, the author of a beautiful book, Hoodoo: Unraveling the 100-year-old Mystery of the Chicago Cubs.
     ''Way back then, mascots were lucky,'' said DePorter, who also is the CEO of the Harry Caray Restaurant Group. ''You needed a mascot to win the World Series. Maybe that's why they haven't won the World Series in many years - because they haven't had a mascot. If you look at it as a superstitious thing, you definitely want a mascot because it brings luck to the team. I'm an advocate for mascots, for sure. It might be the key we need to win the World Series.''
     Yes, yes, but this mascot? The love child of Kit Cloudkicker and Chuck E. Cheese?
     ''Have you looked at mascots around the country?'' DePorter asked. ''It's amazing how people respond to them. People love mascots.''
     I did as he suggested. Orbit and Paws and Screech and Sluggerrr, DJ Kitty and the deeply weird Mr. Red. Oh. My. God. Point taken. If the obvious intention of the Ricketts clan is to make the Cubs exactly like every other franchise, then they've taken another big step. What's next? Astroturf?
     So hold out hope. Maybe DePorter is right. Nothing is forgotten in baseball, and maybe 100 years from now, in some unimaginable bicentennial history, The Cubs: 200 Years of Bitter Disappointment, there will be Clark the Cub illustrating ''Chapter 69 - The Ricketts Years: The Blundering Continues.''

  

Ignorant or complicit?

     There are so many ways to say it: between a rock and a hard place, between the devil and the deep blue sea or -- for you classics fans -- between Scylla and Charybdis, the dilemma Homer rolls out for his seafaring hero, Odysseus, in The Odyssey.  
     Scylla is the six-headed monster, "the yelping horror," in Robert Fagles' essential translation. "No one could look on her with any joy. She has twelve legs, all writhing, dangling down and six long swaying necks, a hideous head on each, each head barbed with a triple row of fangs."
     Charybdis, the sucking whirlpool, gulping water down, vomiting it back up, is hardly better, "like a cauldron over a raging fire, all her churning depths would seethe and heave—exploding spray showering down ... she swallowed the sea-surge down her gaping maw the whole abyss lay bare and the rocks around her roared, terrible, deafening." 
     Steering clear of one means straying into the clutches of the other.
     For embattled New Jersey governor Chris Christie, the choices are ignorance or complicity. Either he was in the dark as his top aides shut down the George Washington Bridge in a truly insane effort to create a days-long traffic jam to punish the mayor of Ft. Lee, New Jersey for the laughable offense of not endorsing Christie in the last election, plus the additional acts of political pay-back that have already begun dribbling out, with the promise of more to come. 
     Or he knew. And with it going on, not as a lapse, but a habit, he almost had to. Unless the notorious bully really was in the dark about the bullying go on in his name all around him.
     Which is worse?
     Had to decide. I suppose knowing is always worse, from a criminal point of view. But ignorance, the figleaf Christie tried to squeeze his bulky humiliation behind during his already infamous two-hour press conference, carries its own price. How can a guy who wants to be president of the United States shrug off that he was at the center of an idiotic carnival of dirty tricks involving his closest and longest-serving aides? "I was aware of it" gets him hounded from office, and "I was blind to it," kills off the political future that he obviously craves. 
    Those are the only two options, frying pan or fire. There isn't really a third. 
    Odysseus, by the way, opts for Scylla, figuring better to lose a few sailors than risk losing them all in the whirlpool. And he does, three crewmen plucked from his deck like little fish snagged by an angler. In the same way Christie, allowed his compromised underlings to be jerked off the political stage, one by one. Odysseus, his heart wrenched, continues on his voyage toward home. But no safe port for the governor of New Jersey, looking more and more a figure out of Greek tragedy himself. I'm betting that, reeling from Scylla, Chris Christie ends up blundering right into the swirling vortex of Charbydis. 

Reading books for a living

     Audible, the audio book company owned by Amazon, issued my 2008 recovery memoir, Drunkard, as an audio book this week, which drew my attention to the growing popularity of listening to recorded books. 
     To me, audio books are to written books as Tastykake pies are to real pie. That is, they belong to the realm of accommodations made for long car trips. Audio books are something to put on the CD player to lull the boys in the back seat into passivity and help the miles click past. I've only listened to one audio book outside an automobile and that was more than a dozen years ago: To Kill a Mockingbird. And that only happened because of a confluence of circumstances: a) the audio book company sent a box of tapes; b) I had never read the Harper Lee classic and c) Chicago picked it as the first book featured by its "One Book, One Chicago" reading program.
     The experience was wonderful. I would sit down on the train, become lost in the story and then, poof, we'd be at Union Station. One of my happiest summer 2001 memories, in the weeks leading up to 9/11, was lingering on the walk from the station to work, sitting in the warm September morning on a bench at Daley Plaza, stealing a few extra minutes to listen to the book read in a rich, Mississippi drawl by actress Roses Pritchard.
     Yet somehow, as pleasant as that was, I never sought out another audio book. Blame habit.
     When Audible contacted me, they asked who I'd recommend to read my book for them. They have quite an A-list of performers, Ethan Hawk, Nicole Kidman, Kenneth Branagh. I listened to a bunch, then picked Jeff Woodman, just because his voice sounded right, and he had done a number of best-sellers such as Life of Pi and Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. Maybe a bit of that mojo would rub off on me, maybe he could add some upmarket shine to my own little wheezing steam engine of a midlist career. (Not that it would affect me financially—Audible drives a hard bargain, and takes all profits for the next eight years in return for their lump payment. At least at my level—I'm sure Stephen King cut a better deal). In the weeks before he taped my book, Woodman phoned to go over the pronunciations — my hometown of Berea ("rhymes with Maria") the socialite Mary Cameron Frey (rhymes with "cry.")
    I was impressed with his preparation, and that a person could make a living reading books. Audio books are having a renaissance -- this is one creative field that technology is not killing, but supercharging. What loped along with cassette tapes, then DVDs has exploded with downloads. Audible alone recorded 10,000 titles in 2012. Woodman himself has done, what, 300?
     "I've done 400 plus," he said. "I lost track at some point, about 200." A few others have done more, but he's "at the high end of the output."
     Is it fun? As a guy who reads books out loud as entertainment, or did, when my kids would allow me, it seems a delightful way to make a living.
     "It's a chore, it's a lot of work," he said. "One thing people don't realize."
     At least fiction and memoirs are a chore. Self-help and instructional books? "That's gravy," he said.
     The difference is preparation. Self-help can be read cold. With books such as mine, with memoirs or fiction (I've heard it argued that those two categories are the same genre under different names) he has to read a book in its entirety first and make notes about developments with dialogue, character and action.
     "I read it to myself, start marking it up," Woodman said. "The manuscript is a mess by the time I'm done. Notes to myself about where this character is going, what you need to be thinking." Since moods and emotions change over the pages, an actor needs to set the stage if, oh, a character is going to be crying at the end of a chapter.

Jeff Woodman

    Not every professional book reader prepares this way. Woodman's rule about alway reading the book all the way through before recording came from a time when he wasn't able to read the passages he would be reading until the morning of the recording sessions, and it got him into trouble.
     "The plot hinged on whether a guy was named 'Werner' or 'Verner,'" he said. "We had discussed how heavy an accent to use, and didn't want to go the "Vee haff vays to make you talk,' route. In the end it was a plot point." They had chosen the wrong pronunciation, and had to go back and overdub -- something they do only in extreme circumstances, as studio time is expensive, and actors are paid by the finished product hour, so whether it takes three hours or 80 minutes to create an hour's finished product—which Woodman can do on a roll—the pay is the same, in his case from $225 to $350 per finished hour. (Top stars can command more, up to a six-figure salary for a big Hollywood name to read a best-seller).
     Though well-paid — Woodman got more to read Drunkard than Audible paid me for the rights to sell its sonic version  —audio books don't receive quite the notice that books themselves do, though he has had his share of praise. "Anyone who was beguiled reading John Berendt's  saga of venality and voodoo in Savanah will be bewitched listening to Jeff Woodman, who doesn't misplace a breath or a pause in 15 hours," People magazine wrote of his reading of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. That said, audio book narrator is not a particularly bright star in the constellations of either literary or thespian fame.
    "Joseph Mankowitz said the playwright's wife is the lowest form of celebrity," Woodman said. "That's because in 1950 the audio book narrator hadn't been invented."
    Actually, it had. In 1932, the American Foundation for the Blind received a $10,000 grant from the Carnegie Foundation and began Talking Books, as a way for the blind to be read to. At the time, a 78 rpm record was heavy, fragile and played for about five minutes, which made them impractical for book purposes. You'd need dozens. It was technicians working for the AFB who developed the idea of 33 1/3 rpm records on a lighter, cheaper, less-fragile new material called "vinyl," as a way to make audio books more practical and affordable for the blind, and incidentally ushered in the era of long-playing records.
      They began recording passages from the Bible, the U.S. Constitution, Declaration of Independence and works by Shakespeare.  The first living author to have her work recorded was, fittingly, Helen Keller, though she herself was against the idea of recording books for the blind, as a needless extravagance in the Depression, though she eventually changed her mind.
     The federal Works Progress Administration got involved, hiring actors who would later become well-known -- Lloyd Bridges recorded several books in the late 1930s. Authors also read their own works: Thomas Mann recorded Buddenbrooks in 1941; Harry S. Truman read his Year of Decision, in 1956. In 1970, Maya Angelou recorded I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. Books on Tape was founded in 1975, Recorded Books in 1979, and in the 1980s the practice of listening to taped books, on Walkmans and car stereos, began to take hold.
    Woodman said that the skill needed to narrate  book is under-appreciated.
     "You can make or break a book by naration," he said, mentioning a celebrity, whom he didn't want to criticize by name, mangling a book. "Obviously he hadn't pre-read it," Woodman said. "Reading it cold, he didn't make any choices, so couldn't make a wrong one." The result was flat, uninteresting.  "You have to perform a book, it's a performance. If you don't bring that to it, you can kill the book. A good book needs a good narration and a bad book needs a great narration, you have to keep all these balls in the air. Which is really tough when you have bad writing."

     Woodman has turned jobs down -- the Left Behind series of fantasy Christian apocolyptic nuttery. And some books require work you wouldn't imagine. One Mississippi, by Mark Childres, is about a high school student who performs a musical called "Christ!" "The author had written these hysterically awful lyrics, and I had to write melodies for the audio books," Woodman said.
    I couldn't help but ask Woodman what it was like to read my memoir.

     "Doing Drunkard was a great deal of fun," he said. "I just found it was so full of humor, and that was my way into it. It's a pretty harrowing story, but becasue there was so much humor in it, that was one of the appealing things. The narrative voice had so much humor."
     Of course, the book he read was a little funnier than the published book. The palladins at Dutton had been concerned that the book was too funny -- this is rehab, gosh darn it, you're not supposed to laugh. So my editor took his cleaver to a few of my favorite lines, which Woodman gamely re-inserted into the text, at my request, adding the original ending, which was deemed too light to use and lopped off. So that's a bonus.
     Five years after its publication, I still hear quite frequently from people who read Drunkard and are moved, or are helped on their own paths, and I'm glad for that. All authors want is to have their stuff linger on, and I take the book being recorded as a flicker of life. I enjoyed meeting Woodman, a serious artist who also does live theater -- you can see him in "Hellman v. McCarthy," which runs from March 14 until April 13 at the Abingdon Theatre on West 36th Street in New York City.
    Perhaps unsurprisingly, Woodman doesn't listen to audiobooks himself, for recreation.
     "I get lost," he said. "I get distracted, all of a sudden I realize I have to back up. Besides it would be sort of a busman's holiday."
      Re-reading Drunkard isn't a party for me either. I haven't listened to the audio version yet — it's a harrowing enough story when it isn't your own life. But I imagine I will, sooner or later. 

You can listen to a sample of Jeff Woodman reading Drunkard by clicking here.

The tragedy behind those "Falling Ice" signs

     The warnings are out in force. Yellow plastic tripods. Big metal signs. “CAUTION: Falling Ice.” They cause a flash of unease — what to do? Look up and get a plummeting icicle in the eye? Look down and hurry past, hoping for the best? That’s what most pedestrians do.

     And wasn’t there some tragedy? Years ago. Someone killed on Michigan Avenue? 
     Yes there was. The accident dwells at the periphery of mind for many Chicagoans, a place of half-remembered horror, like an urban myth except, of course, it actually happened 20 years ago.

     Donald Booth, 48, of Brookfield, Wis., a Milwaukee suburb, was escorting his 16-year-old daughter, Amanda, to Chicago to take a college aptitude test. He was a hardworking manager at Briggs & Stratton, and a loving family man with a warm smile. Taking a day off work to ski with his children, or go to Great America, or join his middle child on the train to Chicago to take a test to see what kind of career she might be interested in was exactly the sort of thing he loved to do.

     It was Feb. 28, 1994.

     Booth left Amanda at the testing center. They planned to meet for lunch. With time to pass, he strolled south down Michigan Avenue on the unusually warm day. In front of the grand, pink granite entrance of the Neiman Marcus department store at the precise moment a 100-pound block of ice the size of a microwave oven came loose 45 feet above.
     Booth was killed instantly. Passersby covered him. Amanda waited, and waited. Her dad was always prompt; his not showing up was out of character. She ducked around the corner for lunch by herself at a sandwich shop. The lady administering the test began making calls, eventually to the police, who were already looking for her. The test administrator walked her over to Northwestern Memorial Hospital, but they wouldn’t let her see her father, wouldn’t tell her anything. Amanda’s uncle eventually met her there, drove her to her aunt’s, and her aunt drove her home.
     And if the ice warning signs are unsettling to you, imagine what they mean to Donald Booth’s daughter, now Amanda Dwyer, having married last year and working downtown for the past decade.
     “I see the signs every year,” she said. “Living in Chicago, it’s hard when I see that every winter. Obviously a constant reminder.”
     Her attitude toward the signs is not too different than the reaction of most.
     “What the hell do they mean?” Dwyer said. “Should I stand right here? Should I stand closer to the street?”
     Actually, the signs, which multiplied after Booth was killed, are not put out for the benefit of pedestrians. They’re put out to provide legal cover for building management.
     “Their way of trying to protect themselves from liability,” said Tom Demetrio, a partner at the Chicago personal injury law firm Corboy & Demetrio. “Sometimes you will even see buildings put out little ropes to make sure you don’t walk too close to the building.”
      Demetrio represented the Booth family in their lawsuit against Neiman Marcus and Olympia & York, the company that manages the building. He said that the law states “building owners owe a duty of care to pedestrians lawfully using the sidewalks.” They have to clear ice or at least warn of it.
     Neiman Marcus did neither. Not only didn’t the luxury retailer fail to put out signs, but the building, designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, tended to collect ice and had a heating system designed to prevent ice build-up at the flip of a switch. But nobody flipped the switch. The department store and the building manager paid a $4.5 million settlement to the Booths in 1999.
     While that might sound like retire-to-Tahiti money, you have to remember that the lawyers get a third. For Dwyer, her mother, who had already gone back to work, and her two brothers, it’s more a chunk of cold comfort for the loss of their father.
     Dwyer graduated from the University of Wisconsin. For the past decade, she has worked as the national sales manager for Hostelling International USA, which has its second largest hostel in the country on Congress Parkway.
      “My dad would be proud that I came back and moved to Chicago and got on with my life,” she said. “I obviously think of him often.”
     She got married last year, to the comedian Pat Dwyer, and the couple is expecting their first child at the end of April.
     “I wish he could be here to meet his first grandbaby,” she said. “I’m not a very religious person, but I know he’s there. I feel him, here and there.” 
     While the threat of death-by-ice weighs on Chicagoans’ minds, and people have been killed by other falling objects—plywood sheets, crane booms—nobody in Chicago has been killed by ice since.
     “I haven’t heard of a similar type tragedy in our Chicagaoand area,” Demetrio said. “The Neiman Marcus case was unique.”
     But just because a hazard is rare doesn’t mean it doesn’t mean people don’t worry.”
     Demetrio worries.
     “I always walk loser to the curb of the street,” he said. “They usually don’t fall out that far.”
      Dwyer tries not to let it bother her.
     “I just try to keep living,” she said. “I’m not going to avoid every big building because something might fall.”
      Although.
     “I don’t shop or walk around Neiman Marcus,” she said. “I do not walk that block and will probably never walk that block.”
     Otherwise, she tries to use the memory of her father as a boost to get the most out of life. She studied abroad, in France, lived abroad, and credits her father’s influence.
      “I’m such a big traveller, and for me, that’s a big part of how I’m able to continue his legacy a bit,” she said. “A big part of this is try not to take any day for granted, I get mad at myself when I do, when I get caught up in silly, small things in life, as we all do. It made us all closer. I’m very thankful for my family, my mom, who is absolutely amazing, one of my best friends. I try to remember the bigger part: we’re here for a very short time.”

Each society picks one of many paths

      It was a long week, between the crazy weather—a 50 degree shift, from 15 below Monday morning, to 35 degrees now—and more than the usual work. Phone calls and interviews and fact-checking. Whatever the reason, I just felt ground down. I even took the Brown line down to Congress instead of hopping on a bike.
      "Thank God it's Friday" I told co-workers on the elevator, not a usual cliche of mine, as I gratefully left the office and headed over to the Lyric Opera to see Johann Strauss' "Die Fledermaus," a sugary linzer torte of an operetta, with catchy tunes and dancing girls and a plot of masquerade and mistaken identity. The first act takes place in a sumptuous house, the second in a palace, the third in a jail, and it was good to see the Lyric return to its gorgeously ornate sets -- no bare stage with a strip of neon here—lush scenery and colorful, intricate costumes. No bats however — "Die Fledermaus" is "the bat" in German — but there was a guy flapping around in a bat wing costume, at one point.
     The superb cast is headed, aptly, by an actual Austrian, soprano Daniela Fally, who plays the saucy parlor maid hot to shuck her duties and head to a fancy party, unaware that she, like  the rest, is being drawn into a velvet trap -- "The revenge of the bat" — an elaborate prank, sort of the 19th century Viennese version of "Punk'd" with music and lots of Champagne.
      There are many reasons to love these Viennese operas -- Franz Lehar's "The Merry Widow" is also a favorite.  Not just for the music, but the wit, the easy immorality — everyone in "Fledermaus" is cheerily cheating on everyone else, or trying to. The constant drinking, the unashamed adoration of wealth. It probably wasn't all that great to live through, especially for the majority who weren't wealthy. But it sure is fun to watch.
     Despite the pure entertainment value, I can't help but find myself wondering where they went wrong, the Germans and the Austrians — Strauss was an Austrian, and his life overlapped for 10 year with his countryman, Adolf Hitler.  Here they were having so much fun. And then ... 
     Okay, stop. Not much upside in going there. History is set, done. But the future is not. It is yet to be determined. And the only thing to do after contemplating the Road Not Taken for the light happy people who wrote entertains like "Fledermaus" is to recognize the various elements at work in every country, in our own country. America is a light happy place, too, as well as a dark dangerous place, with deep poverty and ignorance, abundance and education, all grabbing at the steering wheel, trying to point our country in one direction or the other. It matters which direction we steer. Is health care a basic human right, or a kind of intrusive government oppression?
     So which will it be? If the United States is to become a xenophobic nest of heavily-armed haters, well, you can't say the seeds weren't there. Or if we are to somehow hold onto our progressive freedoms, our respect of diversity and social progress? We see the tug-of-war, and sometimes wonder if it's worth it. At least I do.  After Chris Christie ran into his traffic jam scandal this week, I dipped into the Troglodyte Right Wing press -- the Drudge Report, He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named at the Tribune, that sort of thing, to see how they were spinning it. Oh. My. God. It was almost breathtaking, the warped, nasty blowback, a realm of almost pure hallucination. How to argue with that? And what's the point? The temptation is to draw back, shiver with disgust, leave the field, lose oneself in art. Turn up the opera. Let them fight over this thing. 
     But art refreshes, thank God, and I left "Die Fledermaus" renewed to my purpose.  It was dark and rainy and slushy and Metra is still having trouble making the trains roll. But none of that bothered me. Seeing something so light and funny and happy, and done so well, is a bracing reminder to push for the good.  This is the point. To keep ideology from squeezing out our quirky musical selves. To hold onto what's good.
      And it is a good production. I won't review it, but the cast was outstanding. Emily Fons' archly scowling drag turn as Prince Orlofsky and Bo Skovhus' eagerly debauched yet somehow naive Gabriel von Eisenstein. Fred Wellisch's happily drunken turnkey Frosch has the best line of the night, trying to silence a singing prisoner with, "You're not in an opera house!" It takes a second to register and the audience laughs, because of course, we are in an opera house.  There's a lesson there -- we forget we're in a place where we can always hear music, but we really are. Frosch shuffles off with "and now it's time to make room for the Mayor of Toronto," one of the several topical references that help keep the humor fresh. He didn't say "make room for Rob Ford," because not everyone would know the mayor of Toronto by name, despite his extreme notoriety.  Which has to be encouraging too. Politics is forgettable and temporary, but important. Art is memorable and permanent, but unimportant, in that it doesn't set the policy of the day. But art is in another sense keenly important, in that it revivifies those who fight the good fight. Which starts up again on Monday.  There are also three more performances of "Die Fledermaus" next week, so if the walls close in, you'll know where to go. 

Photo by Dan Rest, courtesy of Lyric Opera of Chicago

Sort of like an app, only paper.

     Kofi Acquah-Dadzie, Assistant Registrar and Master, High Court of Botswana. Francois Bujon de l’Estang, Ambassadeur du France. Richard Melman, Chairman, Lettuce Entertain You Enterprises.

     If I were to come up with a new technology that would take your business information — name, phone number, address, the logo and particulars of your place of employment — and somehow worm that data into the lives of random people you met, where it would live for months and years and decades, popping up now and then, I bet I could score big on the technology front. Give it a funny name: “DataBlast,” sell stock.

     Alas, business cards are low tech, 31/2-by-2-inch rectangles of stiff paper. A centuries-old technology, the descendant of calling cards. And I’m finally getting rid of mine. All of them. 

     Ethan Matlin, Fiddler. Junaid M. Afeef Esq., The Council of Islamic Organizations of Greater Chicago. Roel M. Doherty-Roque, Police Officer, 20th District/Lincoln Station.  

     Blame it on not having a proper New Year’s resolution. I’ve already lost weight. I still don’t drink. Somehow my attention was drawn to all this clutter, drawers of stuff, papers and files and coral reefs of useless junk that I have set aside for some purpose and now are just in the way. I figured, get rid of it. I figured, start with the business cards.

     Why not? Some are for defunct establishments: LaSalle Bank, now part of Bank of America. Aigre Doux, now the Gilt Bar. The Division Street Russian Bath, now enjoying a second, snazzier life as "Red Square."
     Some are from defunct people. Phil Pagano, the Metra chief who stepped in front of a train. Did I really meet him? I don't recall. But I must have; I've got his card.
     Some I kept, intending to write stories. I have several cards from the Cactus & Succulent Society of Greater Chicago, picked up during its annual show at the Chicago Botanic Garden. I always meant to join, not out of any particular love of cacti, but out of the charmed notion that there would be all these comic political dramas going on in the society, bitter power plays and raging conflict. But it seemed too unhinged a project, even for me, and I never followed through.
     I did actually pay dues and join the Napoleonic Alliance ("William Hurlbutt, President") and found myself at its annual dinner, holding a glass of Champagne high and crying, "Vive l'empereur!" Can't make that up. The phone's disconnected now.
     Martin L. King, chairman, Rainbow/PUSH. Frederic P.N. Chang, vice minister, Republic of China. Colin Hall, Allen Edmonds Shoe Corp.
     The cards got me wondering — with email, LinkedIn, Facebook, you just don't go digging for business cards the way you used to. How are they doing, as a product?
     "People still need them," said Jack Serrano, partner/manager of AlphaGraphics, one of the larger producers of business cards in Chicago. "They're a good tool and a big part of my business. Especially traveling overseas. Huge in Asia. You can't say hello without a business card."
     That's even true in this country. People who don't have business cards are unemployed. (Though there must be a separate column in the jokey, grandiose faux business cards that newly retired men seem compelled to print up for themselves. They strike me not as dashing, but desperate.)
     Serrano said the trend is toward double-side, with shiny stock — like Susan Goodenow, vice president of branding & communications at the Chicago Bulls, whose card lists their six NBA championship years on the back and has rounded corners, another popular touch. Hers, I'll keep.
     The Chicagoland Chamber of Commerce has a square QR Code — you take a picture with your phone and it gives more info. It looks like a black blot, to me, but then a few years ago I thought people who wore their security passes on a lanyard around their necks look like sheep. Now I wear mine.
     Some cards yanked me back to where I got them. Touring UIC's Illinois somber Craniofacial Center with Dr. Mimis Cohen, Division of Plastic, Reconstructive, and Cosmetic Surgery — facial prosthetics. Some left me puzzled: Who is Alexander A. Babich and what is the American Multiethnic Educational & Promotional Center? No clue.
     I couldn't throw them all out — Robert W. Fioretti, never know when I need to call him. And some were personal. June Steinberg, Independent Beauty Consultant for Mary Kay Cosmetics (Hi mom!). Rabbi Mordechai Tarkieltaub, Certified Mohel. Circumcised both my boys without a hitch. In business? Dial the number. A come-on for a Bahamas cruise. "You'll have a fabulous time on your free Bahamas cruise. Press one now." Pass.