Big company welcomes kids — but not everyone would

GenderCool Project participants Chazzie (from left), Daniel, Landon, Gia, Nicole and Stella gathered at the Cliff Dwellers Club after their appearance at Conagra Brands. The group encourages acceptance of transgender youth.

     Six young people, ages 12 through 17, sitting on a pair of leather sofas at the Cliff Dwellers Club on Michigan Avenue, talking about their day: Chazzie, Daniel, Gia, Stella, Nicole and Landon.
     Regular kids, in most regards — maybe a little more poised than typical middle- and high-schoolers. Each shakes hands firmly, making eye contact. They come from across the country, Massachusetts to Texas, and had just visited one of the largest corporations in Illinois.
     "We met the CEO," said Stella. "That was pretty cool."
     "It was really fun," said Chazzie. "Because they gave a lot of food."
     They'd better; they sure have enough. The company was Conagra Brands, the $8 billion packaged food giant headquartered in Chicago, and the kids are part of the GenderCool Project, a non-profit group working to show transgender youth for what they are most of the time: not victims of bullying, not suicides, not individuals whose bathroom habits are fair game for public critique, but unique individuals filled with enthusiasm and creativity.
     The effort was begun early this year by two Chicago-area women, Jen Grosshandler and Gearah Goldstein, in reaction to the Trump administration decision to trash school guidelines for transgender students.
     "If we don't tell their stories, then people will think that anyone who identifies as transgender is not right," said Grosshandler. "It's not true."
     Their appearance Thursday coincided with National Coming Out Day.
     "I came out to my parents at 7," said Daniel. "I always knew that I was trans and I was meant to be a boy. I was just in a girl's body."
     "I transitioned when I was 13, in seventh grade," said Nicole. "I don't think there was a defining moment. Whenever people ask me, 'When did you know?' I ask them, "When did you know, that you were a boy or a girl?' My body didn't match to who I know I am."
     Two details in Nicole's life are worth mentioning: first, her father rejected her after she came out. "I haven't seen him in four years," she said. A reminder that while these children have loving parents and live in accepting communities, not everyone does.
     "It is and can be difficult for a lot of us," said Landon. "But having the support of those in our lives allows us to thrive and succeed just as much as anyone else can."
     And second, the world is changing with extraordinary rapidity regarding transgender youth. Nicole's father rejected her, but the Boston Bruins hockey team embraced her, allowing the budding entertainer to sing the National Anthem at their Hockey is for Everyone Night in February.
     They were a hit at Conagra, too.
     "I was extremely impressed by them," said Khalilah Lyons, the company's manager of diversity and inclusion. "They were beautiful, bright, bold, courageous and very open individuals."
     Lyons makes an important point. Inclusion isn't just ethical; it's also good business.
     "We're creating an inclusive culture, making sure people feel like they belong and they can bring their authentic selves to work," she said. "It needs to be part of everything we do here at Conagra. It's definitely good for business, and provides a competitive advantage when we're creating a space for our talent to be fully engaged."
      Everyone drags a burden of preconceptions around with them, and the visit caused me to re-evaluate my unexamined notions about both transgender people and giant companies. I had expected smears of mascara, sequins, feather boas—something far more arch and theatrical than the understated GenderCool kids, who I wouldn't give a second glance if they passed me at the mall. And Conagra I somehow associated with combines, coveralls and burlap bags of hybrid seed.
     "We are purely a packaged food company, completely focused on brands," said Daniel Hare, a communications specialist at Conagra, noting they're wrangling brands such as Healthy Choice, Hunt's, Slim Jim, Reddi-wip, Frontera, Bertolli and P.F. Chang's.
     Despite their polish, there was only so much quizzing about their lives that they could take. After about half an hour I recognized a certain shift remembered from my own two boys—attention had waned, impatience set in. Time to free them. The six sprang up to admire the view from the Cliff Dweller's Club, consult their phones, and head to the bathrooms, which were put to use without rattling the foundations of the 101-year-old club.
     "Look at them," said Grosshandler. "They're just kids."

Forbes Week #3: The Power of Large Numbers

    The Internet was a very different place a decade ago, as this piece illustrates. The public was still wrapping its head around the concept that you could produce something enjoyed by hundreds of millions of people and not get anything for it. While services like YouTube have gotten better about sharing the bounty, we are still seeing the big social media services hoover up profits that used to go to creative individuals.
    Speaking of which, this was the last piece I wrote for Forbes, unless I'm missing one. When I tried to track down the editors I had worked with, they had all been fired. That sort of thing used to happen a lot.

    This originally was posted Sept. 24, 2008.

     Judson Laipply's act has been seen by nearly 100 million people. Matt Drudge boasts a daily audience of 25 million. Sen. Dick Durbin's mail from constituents in Illinois shot up 700%.
     Those huge audience numbers impress us. There is strength in numbers because they exude a power, implying fame, wealth and significance. Nothing testifies more to the popularity of an entertainer, the success of a Web site or the significance of a cause than counting the millions of people who are paying attention.
     But how much should they impress us? What do those big figures mean in a digital age, and do we tend to give them more importance than they actually deserve?
     Take Judson Laipply. His name probably means nothing to you, but odds are you've seen his "The Evolution of Dance," a six-minute clip of the trim, balding Clevelander gyrating to 30 snippets of songs that long topped the YouTube chart of most-watched videos of all time--viewed a staggering 99,451,300 times and counting.
     If those were record sales, it would be equivalent to the splash the Beatles made in 1964.
     But 100 million YouTube views are not record sales or movie tickets or a network TV audience. Laipply makes no money from his online success, at least not directly.
     Someone does profit from all those eyeballs--YouTube runs ads for Revlon and Circuit City and other top companies. But its split with content providers such as Laipply remains 100/0, so the only benefit the motivational speaker received was indirect.

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Forbes Week #2: Dude, Where's My Videophone?

     Often freelance jobs are one-shot deals. The list of publications I've written one article and no more for stretches from Sports Illustrated to Brides to the New York Times Sunday Magazine. But Forbes liked my piece on Dante and failure, and asked me to follow up with the stumbling history of video telephones, which STILL haven't taken off and, I would suggest never will.  This was originally posted on Forbes online Oct. 15, 2007. 

     Today, the future is cloudy. But we all know what it used to look like: sleek people in Spandex catsuits talking to each other on wall-sized video telephones.
     That's how they chatted on Star Trek. And on The Jetsons. And 2001: A Space Odyssey. And a thousand other science fiction films, books and TV shows.
     Yet video telephones never took off in real life, even though they have been pushed on the public for more than 40 years, since the first "PicturePhone" was demonstrated at the New York World's Fair in 1964 with a hook-up between the Bell Pavilion and Disneyland in California.
     When the PicturePhone was rolled out as an actual service, later that year, people were expected to line up to use the wonder, having first made reservations at a PicturePhone center in New York, Chicago or Washington, D.C., where they could ogle someone in a distant city as they talked, at the rate of $27 for a three-minute call between Chicago and New York, or about a day's pay for an experienced high school teacher at the time. The company stressed the usefulness of the phones in allowing proud grandparents to see new grandbabies and deaf teens to chat in sign language.
     Cost and inconvenience kept the service from taking off, but AT&T—which ended up spending more than a billion dollars developing video telephones—persisted, ignoring futurists who quickly put their finger on a central problem holding back the devices.
     "Will you be able to see as well as hear the person at the other end [of the phone line]?" wondered Arnold B. Barach in his 1962 book, 1975 and the Changes to Come, which accurately saw the rise of cable TV and call-waiting. "Such a service could be arranged now, but until there is a popular demand for 'phone seeing' to go with telephone calling, it is not likely to come to pass. Prospects of that demand developing in the next 15 years are not considered especially promising."

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Forbes Week #1: Looking Failure in the Face

Statue of Dante, Florence, Italy

       Anyone who writes a book wants it to echo. And while my books are certainly not reverberating around the world and over the decades, they do vibrate quietly at certain times in certain places. A dozen years after it was published, "Complete and Utter Failure" stuck in the mind of an editor at Forbes, enough that he would ask me to write something on the topic, which was enjoying one of its periodic revivals in interest. I think that the opening sentence was inspired by the novelty of writing for a business magazine—this was posted  in the online edition March 2, 2007, and later ran in the print magazine itself, which pleased me greatly, since in that far off era it meant they paid me a second time.
  
    Dante Alighieri had a very bad fiscal 1302. His mission to Pope Boniface VIII ended in a betrayal, political rivals burned down his home in Florence and he was forced to flee into exile and condemned to die if he returned, accused of the rather ordinary and unpoetic crime of skimming money off municipal road repairs in his capacity as superintendent of widening and straightening roads, one of the many mundane duties the poet performed for his beloved native city.
     But Dante made the best of it. While scrounging his living, he began writing Inferno, the first part of his Divine Comedy, inventing a fiery Hell and meticulously placing his enemies--including Boniface--one by one into it. The public embraced his creation. Dante was celebrated, both in his lifetime and without pause for the next 700 years, lauded as one of most important writers of the modern world, a titan alongside Shakespeare and Cervantes.
     All in all, a fair recovery.
     We all fall down in our lives at one point or another. Some stay down; others get back up. Failure is such a common human experience that it is difficult to find a general observation about it that doesn't sound trite, like something off a high-school locker room wall. "Winners never quit, and quitters never win." "If at first you don't succeed, try, try again." And on and on.
     Despite all the truisms about failure, and despite it being universal, we still tend to ignore failure. We leave the disappointments off our resumes, and we overlook them in the lives of others.
     How many people, watching Steve Jobs announce the iPhone, the latest hot product from computer giant Apple , paused to remember that he was once a notorious has-been? That in 1985 Jobs was forced out of the company he co-founded before blowing $100 million on NeXT, a start-up computer company that arrived stillborn?
     Not many. Because success eclipses failure. We think of George Lucas as the creator of Star Wars, not the guy who produced Howard the Duck. When we see Dustin Hoffman chatting with David Letterman, he is the star of The Graduate and Tootsie, not the star of Ishtar, one of the biggest bombs ever made.

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Sailing the ocean blue was only a start: Columbus Day more complex than it looks

Portrait of a Man, Said to be Christopher Columbus, 

by Sebastiano del Piombo (Metropolitan Museum of Art)

   Columbus Day, again, and time for the ritual re-staging of the Italians v. Indians skirmish, two marginalized groups fighting over a shred of dignity. I wish the Italians could gracefully give in and find somebody else to honor—hint: Fermi—but they are as yet  incapable of that. Time will do the dirty work, as it always does: I can't picture the younger generation caring about their special day, but maybe I give them too much credit. Holidays come and go; Columbus Day has passed its sell-by date.

     Once upon a time, American history was a simple story we told to feel good about ourselves. George Washington chopped the cherry tree; Columbus sailed the ocean blue. Problems arrived only to be solved—slaves were hardly mentioned until right before Lincoln freed them.
     The nation was run by white Anglo-Saxon men, and naturally they cast themselves in all the hero roles.
     Eventually, the forgotten supporting cast grew tired of being in the shadows—women got the vote, blacks demanded civil rights, immigrant groups inserted themselves into the American story. That's why Monday is Columbus Day, one of just 10 federal holidays.
     "I'll tell you how it happened," said Dominic Di Frisco, president emeritus of the Joint Civic Committee of Italian Americans. "The Italian immigrants arrived after the German immigrants, after the Irish immigrants. They saw events like the Von Steuben parade and decided they needed a political hero. Christopher Columbus is not much of a figure in Italy. They said, my God, this country is named after him—the District of Columbia, Columbus in Ohio, in Georgia. He was the hero, a symbol of Italian pride, the first immigrant."
     Columbus was on coins and stamps. Chicago held its World's Columbian Exposition.
     So what changed? Why is Columbus now frequently a villain? Well, the same process that put Columbus Day on our calendar—heretofore marginalized people insisting their part in the story be told—kept going, to include Native Americans. They don't feel Columbus discovered anything—the Indians knew they were here all along—and given how quickly the Europeans began murdering, enslaving and pushing aside indigenous peoples here, to them there isn't much to celebrate, which is why there's a card widely posted on Facebook: "Let's celebrate Columbus Day by walking into someone's house and telling them we live there now." A fair synopsis of what happened, minus the genocide.
     And yet perhaps because I learned the 1970s history catechism, where national unity trumps the complaints of each individual group, I feel for the Italians, who just want to be part of the story and celebrate themselves without having to wipe the blood of the slaughtered off their hands every October.
     What bothers me most about the "Let's celebrate . . . " card is the casual declaration of free-floating guilt that we liberals seem to have mastered. What are you saying? You're sorry the nation was founded? At least Native Americans have a reason to say that, though, like everybody else, their narrative is also self-serving—heavy on "Dances with Wolves," light on the hearts-torn-out-atop-pyramids-to-honor-Quetzalcoatl.
     The Aztecs were the most violent state in recorded human history, so it isn't as if, had Columbus never arrived, the American Eden would remain to this day. To post that card is hypocrisy. Europe's still there. Go back if you feel so guilty about living here. I sure don't. My ancestors never killed an Indian or owned a slave. They were selling rags in Poland when all this was going on, and America was the golden door a handful fled through before the most cultured and sophisticated society in Europe put the rest in ovens. That still doesn't prompt me to show up at German Unity Day and wave pictures of Auschwitz. The past is a lousy place to live.
     So I have sympathy for Italians on Columbus Day; though really—Columbus, Balbo, Berlusconi—there is a pattern of clinging to bad choices here.
     "He was one of the great navigators of history, and we've taken that away from him," said DiFrisco, "and reduced him to some kind of bloodthirsty, syphilis-spreading marauder, and that is not the case."
     Not the entire case. We live in a time when heroes are ritualistically tarnished and, frankly, everybody is better off with the more accurate, though less flattering, narrative than with the pretty story. It's easier for me to grasp the current inability of the government to confront our problems when I consider that it was formed on a lie—"All men are created equal"—that skirted the issue of slavery, kicking it down the pike to explode 75 years later. Ignoring our biggest problems is an American tradition since 1776.
     "Columbus Day is an Italian pride holiday," said Di Frisco. "We decry that fewer and fewer schools have it off. Here's a man who planted the flag of Christianity on the shores of the new world and teachers are systemically taking the image of Columbus we all knew and they've turned him into a villain."
     Speaking of the flag of Christianity . . . but space grows short. Happy Columbus Day.

                —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Oct. 10, 2011

A little buddy for our friendly, many-friended river

 

     Given the number of times I've been to The Art Institute, or the Museum of Contemporary Art, or the Field Museum, or the Chicago History Museum, or even such obscure institutions as the International Museum of Surgical Science, or National Mexican Museum of Art in Pilsen, it surprises and saddens me to consider the museums in Chicago that I still haven't gotten to, like the DuSable Museum. 
     I crossed one long-missed museum off my list last week in completely serendipitous fashion. I was strolling along the busy River Walk, on my way to an appointment on the Gold Coast, thinking, "For all the things Rahm Emanuel didn't do, he certainly did do this," when I bumped into the McCormick Bridgehouse & Chicago River Museum, a little facility tucked into the southwestern pylon of the Michigan Avenue Bridge, steps down from Wacker Drive.
     I had a little time. I had a little money—the six dollars it takes to get in.
     As longtime readers of this blog know, I'm a fan of bridges—my very first post on EGD was an ode to the bascule drawbridge—and I was happy to quickly explore this tiny, five floor museum. I only had about 20 minutes, but I still learned far more than I have spending hours in larger museum. My favorite bit of information was that the energetic advocacy group, The Friends of the Chicago River, was named after the headline of a 1979 article in Chicago magazine headlined, "Our Friendless River," an inspiration to every writer or editor who ever puzzled over making a headline both sing and fit.  Sometimes these things resonate...
    It was also interesting to learn that our famously polluted Chicago River is no longer poisoned by industrial waste so much as by run-off—weed poison and spilled oil and such washing from our yards and streets and into the river, particularly during storms. A reminder that what you toss in the gutter ends up in our river.
     The views from the big round windows were a novel perspective on Michigan Avenue, though they could use a cleaning. 
     The bridgehouse museum (I'll be damned if I'll utter the colonel's hated name more than I have to, just because Trib money is somewhere behind this) isn't big on artifacts—a few bulky switches, gauges and levers from days gone past. The highlight is the actual mechanism of the working bridge, which you can see go through its paces whenever the bridge rises or falls, a treat I plan to enjoy as soon as I am able. The small museum is big on historical and environmental information, and warrants a revisit to study its riches at leisure.

    

The Saturday Snapshot #9

    Faithful reader Tony Galati sends along this snapshot of two New England salts, along with this explanation:

     I've been transferring some old Kodachrome slides to digital. I just did these from a 1972 trip to Nantucket that I took with a buddy the summer I graduated. The town of Nantucket was filled with really old people, hippies, and other assorted characters. We were somewhat of a minority. What better reason to travel?

   While this pair of gentlemen look as sharp as tacks, they offer an opportunity to plug a marvelous article in this week's New Yorker, "The Comforting Fictions of Dementia Care," by Larissa MacFarquhar. The story represents top notch reporting and beautiful writing about a vitally important subject, and I can't recommend it enough. It's almost a philosophical work, focusing on the untruths told to dementia patients to make their lives more endurable, and f you want to make the story even more unsettling than it already is, ask yourself, as I did, what it might suggest about the lies we tell each other and ourselves to get through our days.