Tuesday, April 30, 2019

South American Diary #14: Quesos


     I do not speak Spanish. 
     So when I went into this tiny shop in the small seaside town of Castro in Chile I did not know what the sign meant. I might not even have noticed it. I was looking for lapis lazuli jewelry, and scarves, and whatever other presents I might find to bring back home.
     But as a professional journalist and generally quick on the uptake, I immediately figured out what sort of establishment I found myself in.
     It was very small. And while I was taken with the display of inventory, and the calm of the proprietor, I am not the sort that I could just reach into my pocket, take out my phone and start snapping pictures. I was dealing with a human being. Dignity must be maintained.
     Thank goodness the guide from the bus was there. I asked him to negotiate a deal. Two dollars worth of cheese, please. While the owner reached for brown paper, I asked if I might take a picture of the owner. I could. I asked his name. "Don Juan." Maybe so. Maybe a pseudonym, a nom de fromage.
      The cheese, by the way, was excellent. Don Juan sliced it into convenient sticks, and I handed some to what shipmates were shopping nearby and ate the rest myself, one fresh, creamy slice after another. But I was particularly taken with the shop itself. Those quiet loaves of cheese on the shelves—like objects in a Joseph Cornell box. There seemed to be a lot of cheese here for a town so small. He must sell it all. 
      A person doesn't travel halfway across the world to go to a cheese shop. It would look silly on a schedule of adventure and exploration. But I can't communicate how glad I was to visit this place, how surprised and happy it made me. To meet these stolid cheeses and serene owner. To sample the cheese.
      Heading out, I snapped a photo of the red storefront, with the sign I had overlooked going in: "Quesos." 
     Do I have to actually say it? For the record, I suppose, yes, I must indeed. 
     Spanish for "Cheeses."



     




Monday, April 29, 2019

Don't panic, Democrats: Joe Biden is here to save us, maybe




     As the 2020 presidential election looms into view, like an iceberg on the horizon, some liberals are muttering that if Trump wins again, freedom will crumble and democracy collapse. Which is both an exaggeration and defeatist, twin sins Dems suffer from enough without advertising them, apparently as an attempt to spur ourselves to confront a task that should require no exaggeration to take seriously.
     Is not the prospect of four more years of Donald Trump motivation enough? Do we really need to toss in the death of the Republic to keep focused?
     Besides, the essential truth — and this can't be said enough — is Trump is a symptom, not a cause. The United States reached a certain level of dysfunction and then conjured him up. First the rock split, then the demon emerged from the sulfurous crack.
     Maybe we must experience the presidency of Ted Cruz to understand that.
     Ample evidence can be found in George Packer's 2013 book, "The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America," where a cast of fellow citizens illustrates our national shattering. Some are ordinary — Dean Price, son of a tobacco farmer, chases the will-o-the-wisp of biofuels. Tammy Thomas, navigates her Rust Belt ruins. Some are famous — Newt Gingrich, whose Dems-are-traitors worldview did so much to poison American political discourse.
     And some straddle the two worlds. Jeff Connaughton is a University of Alabama business student when he is first wowed by a young senator named Joseph Biden.
     Readers of "The Unwinding" grow disillusioned with Biden along with Connaughton, who works for him. And that is before Biden plagiarizes a speech by a British politician. Connaughton's moment of grim realization comes when, after his years of loyal service, Biden won't place a phone call to help him.


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Sunday, April 28, 2019

Flashback 2009: Showing the world: Blind people shop

     
     Ali Krage, who we met briefly yesterday while reading "Romeo and Juliet" in Braille, stuck in my mind at age 16, navigating the halls of Willowbrook High School with astounding dexterity or, below, plunging into a Best Buy to pick up a DVD for her sister.   
     Plus she wanted to be a writer—that's a memorable ambition in any teen.  I couldn't post this without finding out where she is now, a decade later. 
     I'm happy to say she followed through on her writerly ambitions.
     "I write guest posts for the Easterseals blog," said Krage, now 26. "It's fun. I like it."
Ali Krage
      She's a student at Northern Illinois University, living on campus in DeKalb, studying human development and family science.  
     "I only have one semester left," she said, adding that she's hoping to become a mental health counselor. 
    She still likes to read, but more audio books than Braille, which tend to be big, thick, heavy multi-volume sets. 
    "No way I'd be able to lug those around," Krage said. "The only Braille I typically read now are exams."
     She started school studying criminal justice at College of DuPage, where she was the only blind student, then transferred to NIU, where she lives on campus. "They have a pretty large disability community here," she said. "That's one of the reasons I chose the campus." 
     Here are a couple of deft essays by Ali, this one on dating blind people, and "7 Advantages of Being Blind."


     "Nice to see you again," I say, shaking hands with Ali Krage, a sophomore at Willowbrook High School.
     Though I had met her before, writing a story about the classroom of visually impaired students she attends, I immediately do sort of a mental backflip, thinking, Whoops! "Nice to see you again." Good work, Mr. Sensitive. Maybe not the best thing to say to a person who is completely blind.
     Apologize or blunder forward? I blunder forward, musing that one advantage of a physical disability is you at least know what your challenges are, while the rest of us have to confront our limitations anew at random times during the day.
     That kind of interaction is actually the reason I'm here. As a blind child, Ali needs to practice going out into the everyday world, and the visual world needs practice—as my trouble even saying hello amply demonstrates—adjusting itself to the people with visual disabilities.
     It's an open question who has more trouble.
     "You still get the stares, the stigma," says Christopher Weinman, an orientation and mobility specialist with SASED, a DuPage County service cooperative.
     Brittany Koresch, a teacher at Willowbrook, marvels at the overreactions her blind students can evoke from the public.
     "They jump out of your way and go against the wall," she says. "We've been to restaurants where people pay for our food."
     "And that's bad?" asks the media sponge, long accustomed to dining out on somebody else's dime.
     "You don't want the pity, though," Koresch explains.
     "There's something called 'learned helplessness,' " says Weinman. "The majority of our kids are helped so much, by family and friends, that they're getting older, and they lack skills they should have already."
      Such as the ability to go to a big store to make small purchases. So Ali and Weinman pile in a van and drive to the Best Buy in Lombard.
     "Do you know how much you were given?" he asks.
     "Sixty dollars," she says. Three twenties. "I'm buying the movie 'Quarantine,' and I have to find a data card for my sister."
     Ali phoned Best Buy the day before to tell them she was coming. Sometimes that helps; sometimes it doesn't. She once had a store—a Border's—say they couldn't help her, and Weinman called back to read them the riot act—or, more precisely, the Americans with Disabilities Act, which requires that stores take reasonable steps to assist customers such as Ali.
     "Ordinarily, they're pretty good about it," says Weinman. "We tend to choose stores like Wal-Mart or Best Buy, where there are greeters, so the minute she walks in, she can say, 'Can you help me locate these items?' "
     In front of the Best Buy, Weinman gives Ali a small walkie-talkie—she can communicate with him if she gets in trouble—and leaves her at the door.
     "I don't get out of the car," he says. "I like the lesson to be as if a taxicab dropped them off."
      "What's the most important thing?" he asks Ali.
     "To go with them," she says.
     Weinman explains she shouldn't just stand there while the clerks go fetch her purchases, but accompany them through the aisles.
     "It forces Ali to grab the arm of a stranger—[blind kids] can be nervous about taking the arm of someone they don't know—and makes the public more aware of working with a blind person," says Weinman, who is always telling his students: "We have to show the world that blind people do shop."
     Ali unfolds her white cane and walks briskly inside. A man in a yellow shirt and a headset is stationed at the door, and beckons a manager.
     "How you doing, miss, how can we help you?" the manager says. "Do you need someone to help you around the store?"
     After a brief wait, a pert salesclerk, Gisell DaSilva, 21, appears. Ali takes her arm, and they stride into the vast store.
     "Is there anything specific you're looking for?" DaSilva asks.
     First on the list is "Quarantine"—like many teens, Ali is a big fan of horror movies; her mother or sister describe the action to her.
     "Very, very scary," DaSilva says.
     Then to the memory chip aisle, where, after some deliberation, they find the right one.
     DaSilva rings up the sale. "Do you want the receipt in the bag?" she asks, then leads Ali to the door.
     Back in the van, Weinman goes through the post-mortem. It turns out that Ali just took her change but didn't have DaSilva count out and identify the bills—three fives and a one.
     "Being a blind person, it's always important to ask what bills you get," Weinman says. "You've gotta be a self-advocate and say, 'What bills are these?' "
     "I tried my best," says Ali, who shows off the DVD of "Quarantine."
     "I want to watch this movie so badly," says Ali, and I smile—"watch," that probably means I was OK with "nice to see you."
                               —Originally published in the Sun-Times, April 19, 2009

Saturday, April 27, 2019

Flashback 2009: Blind kids on the brink of being shown the door



Pair of eyes, bronze and obsidian. Greek, 5th century BCE (Metropolitan Museum of Art)

     I dug up more vintage columns than were needed during my trip to South America, but  didn't want to simply toss this pair of columns back into the vault. 
     So for today, a visit to a class for the profoundly blind; tomorrow, we go shopping with one of the students from the class, Ali Krage, and catch up with her today. The really astounding thing about this column is that the parents of these blind children didn't know they were getting the boot until they read about it in the paper. The Vision Room, to answer the question of several readers, was moved to Addison Trail High School.

     Joe Lamperis reads quite well for a boy with no eyes.
     "I am blind, legally," he explains. "I was born with anophthalmia"—a rare condition where infants develop without eyes.
     "They had to put these in," he adds, casually referring to the handsome blue eyes he seems to have.
     Glass? "Plastic, actually," says Joe, 16.
     He reads by running his fingers over the tiny raised bumps of Braille, sitting at his desk in a small classroom in Willowbrook High School.
     Officially it's "The Program for Students With Visual Impairments," but at Willowbrook they call it "The Vision Room." This room serves the region's most severely visually impaired students -- 92 school districts in DuPage and western Cook County together send just 22 students here.
     The program has been at Willowbrook in Villa Park for 10 years, but with the high school undergoing extensive reconstruction, the blind students will have to find another place to study come autumn.
     "We told them over a year ago that we could no longer house their program due to space constraints," said District 88 Supt. Steve Humphrey.
     Parents of the blind children have not yet been told about the pending move nor the current lack of anywhere for them to move to.
     "We haven't communicated to the parents yet," said Michael Volpe, executive director of the School Association for Special Education in DuPage County, which runs the program. "We wanted, hopefully to get a solution." The Vision Room is not a traditional class where one teacher leads a group of students. Rather it is a home base, where blind students come and go, receiving one-on-one guidance, since their abilities range widely, from Reginald Harris, 20, who is autistic and sits matching toothbrush cases, to Beatriz Chavez, 19, who is attending College of DuPage next year, and has the white hair and pink eyes—and related vision problems—of albinism.
     "Mr. C., I need your eyeballs," she says. "Mine hurt." Mr. C—teacher Mario Cortesi— slides over to look at the economics textbook she's studying.
     Computers and tapes help, but mastering the 180-year-old Braille system is still an essential skill.
     "They have to touch those words and feel them to learn to read," says Nick Hildreth, a teacher.
     Joe learned Braille when he was 4.
     "It was exciting for me and my family," he explains. "I read for pleasure. I read for education. I love reading." As does Ali Krage, also 16, who lightly places her delicate hands on what at first seems like a blank page and draws her left index finger swiftly across the subtle raised dots.
     "Unless thou tell me how I may prevent it," she reads—lines from 'Romeo and Juliet'—"If, in thy wisdom, thou canst give no help, Do thou but call my resolution wise." She is reading the 32nd of 41 volumes of "Elements of Literature, Third Course." Braille texts can run 80 volumes, and storing them is a challenge, as is getting materials that are both current and relevant. A teacher hands Ali a Braille copy of ESPN The Magazine from last November.
     "Oh joy," says Ali, with typical teen sarcasm, handing it back. She too started reading Braille as a toddler—as with any language, those who begin later have a much tougher time.
      Nearby, Mike Wade sits laboriously translating a sentence in Braille—"I enjoy going to Outreach"—using an egg carton and golf balls to help him understand the tiny Braille grids.
     "I?" asks Mike.
     "You got it," says Cortesi, guiding his work. "You missed a letter, though. Can you feel the 'O'?" Ali says she often prefers Braille books to books on tape, because she can proceed at her own pace, though there are drawbacks. "I'm tired of reading," she once told her twin sister, Nicole. "My fingers hurt." Ali heads upstairs to collect some biology notes, which her teacher has transcribed into Braille for her.
     "We just finished evolution and now we're studying bacteria," she says, admitting that biology is not her favorite subject. "It's really visual," she complains. "There are a lot of diagrams." Those who assume the teens' situation is somehow grim haven't met kids such as Ali, or Michael Hansen, 17, in his third year of high school.
     "Most of us blindy types do it in five years," he says breezily. "I consider myself a junior when it's to my benefit, a sophomore when it's to my benefit." Michael plays the cello and the piano and heads off to the music room to perform his "Lamentation in A Minor, Opus 7." He sits at the piano, folds his white cane into four sections and places it on the rack intended for sheet music, and begins his composition's haunting quiet passages and crashing Rachmaninoff-inspired chords.
     Though blinded by glaucoma, his eyes swollen, milky and often painful, Michael is steadily upbeat. Returning to the Vision Room at the same time as Joe, Joe's white cane momentarily tangles in Michael's feet.
     "Sorry, I didn't see you Joe," Michael deadpans. "I must be going blind in my old age."     

     "You ARE blind!" exclaims Joe, whose sense of irony is not as keen.
      The blind students navigate the halls with confidence—even Ali, a freshman, who spent hours of orientation, feels her way around the school. She and her classmates will have to learn a new layout next fall.
     "We're just out of space," says Humphrey. "We're at a point where the program's gotta be moved." As to where they'll go, "we've got a couple of nibbles," says Volpe, adding that District 88 has been "very helpful and positive." 
     "They're trying to work with us," Volpe says. "It's important to the kids—it's tough enough to make a transition from one high school building to another without also having to leave the district." 

Today's chuckle . . .
     "You can't do anything about it, you might as well laugh about it," says Michael Hansen, rattling off the following:
     A blind man with a seeing eye dog walks into a convenience store. He grabs his dog by the tail and starts swinging him in a big circle.
     "What are you doing!?!" asks the horrified clerk.
     "I'm just looking around," says the man.

                                  —Originally published in the Sun-Times, March 18, 2009

Friday, April 26, 2019

Not only the oldest but one of the best: Mike Nussbaum on acting at 95



   “The longer you live,” a gravedigger sings, tossing skulls from an old grave in the new production of “Hamlet” at Chicago Shakespeare Theater, “the sooner you bloody well die.”
     That line is not in Shakespeare’s play, but a winking bit of business added by director Barbara Gaines, apt for the character but also something of an in-joke, since the actor doing the singing is Mike Nussbaum, who is 95 years old.
     “He’s not only the oldest actor working on stage in America, he’s one of the best,” said Gaines.
     The senior member of Actors’ Equity has a resume long enough to make three thespians proud. He’s appeared in productions at Chicago’s top theaters for nearly half a century and had noteworthy small roles in hit movies such as “Field of Dreams,” “Men in Black” and “Fatal Attraction.”
     And oh yes, he made his splash in the premiere of David Mamet’s “American Buffalo” in 1975 and went on to star in “Glengarry Glen Ross” on Broadway.
     “It’s wonderful to work with Mike because, like any artist, like any actor, he’s just unusual,” Mamet told Chicago magazine. “You’re constantly saying, ‘My God, where did that come from?’ It’s not coming out of a bag of ‘acting moments.’ That’s all bullshit. It’s coming out of — who the hell knows where? You either got it or you don’t, and Mike certainly does.”  

     Not only does Nussbaum still have it, but he somehow guards his dramatic gift from the cruel physics of age and mortality. “I’m lucky,” he explained, relaxing backstage before Tuesday’s performance. “Genetic luck. I work out and I try to eat sensibly. I gave up smoking about 50 years ago. It’s just pure luck.”
     Luck, and some help. Nussbaum was married for 54 years, but his first wife died in 2003. He married again, and Julie comes up when I insist there must be something else beyond stretching keeping him going. He admits there is.
     “A great woman,” he said. “Probably one of the main reasons I’m able to do this.”
     Why?


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Thursday, April 25, 2019

South American Diary #13: Blue ice


Asia Glacier, Chile

    Pollution does more than merely spoil the environment. As bad as sooty air, plastic-clogged beaches and poisoned rivers are, there's another insidious element that can get overlooked. Pollution gets into your head, into your mind, twisting your expectations of the natural world, so that when I first saw these stupendous glaciers in Chile I thought, "Tide."
     As in detergent. 
    My frame of reference for things that looked like this was blue tinted plastic wrap and blue laundry soap and blocks of old styrofoam. 
Clear glacial ice
    It was difficult enough for the brain to process these enormous sheets of ice, some 200 feet tall and a half mile across. Their tint being, not just pale blue, but a dozen shades of azure, from powder to royal, made it seem not a thing in nature, even though it was entirely natural. Then add the seams of crushed rock, picked up in their slow journeys across the landscape, and the glaciers at first seemed not the pristine wonders they were, but dirty, littered, polluted themselves.  
     It took time to get used to them, to accept their majesty on its own terms and see them for what they are. 
     And more time still to understand where that blue comes from. 
     Powdery snow looks white because it's fluffy, puffed with air, allowing the multifaceted snow crystals to reflect the entire spectrum of colors which, mixed together, look white. (If you don't believe me, take a peek at the classic science class "Newton's disc" experiment).
     Or, better yet, pour yourself a glass of beer. The liquid is brown, the foamy head is white. Why? The bubbles in the foam, reflecting light.
      Glacial ice is old—the snowfalls from 10,000 years, or 100,000, each season compressed for millennia under the crushing weight of the seasons that followed. Over time, the air is pressed out, making the ice very clear, and thus able to let more light in deeper, where it is trapped instead of being reflected, particularly the reds: glacial ice absorbs red light six times more efficiently than blue light, which bounces back into our awestruck and disbelieving eyes. 

Garibaldi Glacier, Chile

   

Wednesday, April 24, 2019

RIP Rahm Emanuel: "the most Chicago of Chicago mayors"



 
     After the funeral of a college classmate, her sister asked me how the Catholic ceremony compared to Jewish rites. I thought a moment. There were the bouquets of flowers piled atop the coffin, buried along with it. That was different, and haunting, but not what I mentioned.
     "We tend to say something around the grave," I said.
     "I asked the priest if we could do that," she responded. "But he said 'No.'"
     And you listened to him?! I thought, and almost said aloud, but held back, out of respect.
     We Jews are indeed a chatty, argumentative race, no doubt about that, and we guide our clergy as much as our clergy guides us. Maybe more.
     So even though I am convinced that the ideal way to solemnize Rahm Emanuel's departure from the mayor's office is with stony silence—for the city to cough into our collective fist and fix our gaze on the middle distance until he goes away—I'm not going to do that.
     First, because of the certainty that Rahm will spend the next few weeks in hyperkinetic victory laps, huffing in circles around City Hall, both hands raised for high fives that aren't returned by passerby who twist away in revulsion as he flies past, legs and jaw churning, uttering the same constant stream of self-congratulatory spin he's been coasting along on, like a slug producing its own smooth track of slime, for the past eight years.
     And second, well, can't have a column that's five paragraphs long. My job has forced me to contemplate Rahm and, like any proctologist with a full day's schedule, no point in complaining. Might as well roll up our sleeves and take a look.

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