Flashback 1996: Culture is lovely, but bring on the fat lady

 

Latvian soprano Marina Rebeka, making her Lyric debut as Violetta in "La Traviata" in 2013
(Photo  by Todd Rosenberg, courtesy of the Lyric Opera)

      If I seem more attentive to factuality that the average bear, it's because I've left behind a paper trail. Thirty years of writing a personal column have a way of dispelling illusions.

     For instance. I would have sworn on a stack of libretti that it was me who was the opera buff, dragging my unwilling wife to the Lyric. Because there were times, in the heyday — the decade when I attended almost every opera and took 100 readers to a special night — that she declined, and I'd take one of the boys.

     But researching my new book, I was writing about being a public Jew — of not hiding my heritage, as some do — and became curious what the first reference to being Jewish was in my column. It wasn't some dramatic "I ... am ... Spartacus!" moment, but, fittingly, a light column about the opera, and how my wife was leading the charge to ... well, you'll see. 

     Thirty years is a long time. And it does please me that this seems solidly in my voice, the way I might write it today.

     A sure sign of autumn, as definite as the Canadian freezer air whooshing over the city: my wife searching for the big pasteboard sheet of Lyric Opera tickets, which arrived in the balmy days of summer and was squirreled safely away.
     She found the tickets, alas. I wasn't exactly rooting for them to be lost, but I wouldn't have been heartbroken, either. Six operas between now and Valentine's Day. Six.
      And mountaineers think their sport is a test of endurance. Hah! What can climbing the Matterhorn demand compared with sitting through five hours of "Gotterdammerung"? I did that last season, and should have gotten my picture taken afterward, thumb in the air, a look of giddy victory on my face.
      Granted, the music isn't bad. I even like certain operas. But nothing is so good that it doesn't start to grind you down after a while. If the Lyric offered an evening of naked supermodels performing the opera "Neil Steinberg Is Swell," I still would be fidgeting and glancing at my watch toward the end of the third hour.
     Of course I could have resisted subscribing. I always consider objecting, consider waving the "Money's tight!" flag that my wife so happily hoists whenever I propose an entertainment more costly than tossing cards into a hat.
     Marriage is a give-and-take, however, and I know that resisting opera would only come back to haunt me. I will be struck by some terrible disease, and want to go to the Mayo Clinic to see an expert, and my wife will give me that look and say, "Who's throwing money around now, Mister Fancy Clinic?"
     So I didn't say anything. Besides, she didn't ask me. She got tired of all my throat-clearing and eye-rolling, and just went ahead and got them, without consultation.
     So now opera is officially routine. An established part of our lives now includes plump middle-aged Italian ladies pretending to be German milkmaids at the top of their lungs in a language we don't understand. I'll just have to live with it.
     I know what my wife will say when she reads this. "But you like opera," she'll say, which only shows how successfully I've been fooling her all these years. I see too many of those grumbly, scowling hubbies harrumphing after their terrified wives.
     Can't be like that. Better to go and enjoy what I can and pretend to enjoy when I can't. Being Jewish helps. Like many Jews, I grew up attending services I only dimly understood, and years of neglecting my faith, such as it is, haven't made Hebrew any more comprehensible.
     Growing up, I was trained to sit through it, nodding along and waiting for the parts I could appreciate.
     Rather like opera. I'm surprised the two institutions, opera and Judaism, don't learn from each other. Oh, some synagogues have opera-singing cantors. But why not borrow more? Supertitles, for instance, those translations projected above the stage at operas. They might help enhance prayer services, too.
     Or not. Perhaps too much is lost in translation. While the singer is reeling off a mouthful of Italian — "Il mio sposo! Oh Dei! Son morta. Voi qui senza mantello! In questo stato . . . un ricevuto foglio, la sua gran gelosia" — the supertitle is always something like: "My husband! We're in trouble."
     Congregations might not be too happy to see some cherished prayer — Sh'ma Yisrael, Adonai Elohanu* — projected in front of them as: "Hey Israel! The Lord's One."
     Opera definitely could benefit from a synagogue tradition called "staying until the end." There is a final blessing and everybody kisses one another and shakes hands and goes home and gets something to eat.
     At the opera, about three minutes before the end, a shocking percentage of the audience leaps to their feet and bolts for the exits as if the place were on fire.
     Any subtle sense of pleasure the music may have instilled is wiped away by the shock of watching these people. If your time is so precious, if you can't wait 10 minutes for your coat or a cab, then why are you sitting through five hours of Wagner? Why go out at all? Stay home and work.
     My only hope is that these fleeing people, at some moment in their hectic lives, will realize they have lost their souls. I hope that, kneeling down beside Fluffy after she has been run over by a car, or watching their home burn, or whatever, they will look up and have a flash of insight: "This is because I left early at the opera. This is because we couldn't even stay and applaud for the 50 people who had just spent three hours singing their throats to a pulp. We have earned every bad thing that can ever befall us."
     Me, I clap heartily, big, potching claps, drawing my hands about 3 feet apart and slamming them together, cheering. This is the best part of the opera. It gets the blood, which tends to settle during hours of inaction, going. And I am genuinely delighted and enthusiastic - I mean, the thing is over and we get to home.

       — Originally published in the Sun-Times, Sept. 15, 1996

       * In the original, I used the English translation, "Hear O Israel, the Lord is Our God, the Lord is One." But it really only works if I use the Hebrew.

Is truth whatever you want it to be?

Ryan P. Carney, of St. Charles, warms up in an alley before an appearance with the folk group Antony and the Tramps at the Glenwood Avenue Arts Festival in 2015.

     If you look down enough alleys in Chicago, you will eventually see a cellist in a bowler hat. I know this is true, based on personal experience. In 2015, I was at the Glenwood Avenue Arts Festival in Rogers Park, heard the distinctive low-rosined rumbling of a cello, turned my head and saw this fellow and his instrument.
     I later wrote something. At the time, I thought it was a story about ignorance, which has its own attractions, and knowledge, which bears its own disappointments.
     This is how I explained it:
     "When you are confronted with something enigmatic, you can do one of two things. You can either keep going about your business, accepting the gift of its mystery. Or you can investigate, plunge into the thicket, push aside the leaves of the puzzle and try to find the truth within. The former is probably the better path for a life imbued with tantalizing possibility and, even, magic. Had I kept walking, I would forever wonder."
     I didn't keep walking; I found out and wrote a blog post. When I stumbled upon it after more than a decade, something struck me, something more important that I missed at the time.
     The opening sentence is a lie.
     Most people, no matter how many alleys they gaze down, will never see a cellist in a bowler hat.
     What made me think otherwise? What made me believe a clear falsehood is actually a general truism? Easy. Because it happened to me. The fog of personal experience blinds us. Push someone with a strong opinion — immigrants out! — as to why they feel that way, and you inevitably find some minor incident. They were disturbed by music being blasted late at night, magnified into unshakable conviction because it happened to them.
     I crafted the opening sentence in 2015, affected by what had just happened. To me. But you weren't there; so why did you accept it? And I bet you did. You didn't stop, pound your fist and say, "No! I'm never going to see that."
     Why? Well, you read it in a newspaper. A trusted source. There is a photograph, right there, of a cellist in a bowler hat, in an alley. For all the AI hubbub, you don't distrust your eyes. Perhaps most importantly: the lie conjures up the romantic image of a city of unlimited possibility we want to embrace. Leading to an important truth: we believe what we want to believe.

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Works in progress: The Emmys Are Self-Sabotaging

 

Reina Sofia Museum, Madrid

     The Emmy Awards are Monday night. This critique is by Chicago teacher and writer Lane Lubell, who occasionally contributes to EGD, most recently in November, when he wrote on the oblique youth term 6-7 and Dictionary.com.

     Choose your favorite fruit. A granny-smith apple, a fuji apple, a Macintosh apple, a red grape, a honey crisp apple, or green grape? Personally, I love apples and grapes, but this list hardly reflects the variety of fruits on the market. No one would look at this list and say that the winner is the definitive king of the fruits because only apples and grapes are represented. This lack of variety reflects precisely what we have been given to choose from at this year’s Primetime Emmy awards.
     Over the years, Emmy nominees have become hyper-concentrated. In other words, a handful of shows are receiving an outsized proportion of nominations. The Academy is aware of this problem, and yet, they seem unable to resolve it, as admitting it exists threatens their ethos, and so, it was left to fester. Now, the Academy must either face reality or become complicit in their own demise.
     For the majority of the Emmys nearly 78-year history, handing out awards for television was a simple enough task: watch the shows live on-air and vote for best ones in a given category.
     Between the 40’s and early ‘70s, most shows on television had substantial viewership among Academy members. That makes sense. After all, there were only three channels. This pool meant that a heterogeneous voting body could reasonably be expected to have knowledge of most of the shows on television. Many would be devoted fans while others may have only seen an episode or two, but almost everyone in the industry would have been familiar with every series’ premise, genre, and look. This awareness was fundamental to the success of the Emmys. After all, how can you vote if you don’t watch all the shows?
     However, this math has changed dramatically over the last 54 years.
     Matters first became complicated around 1972 when HBO first went live. They introduced an entirely new class of shows on an entirely new kind of channel. These shows were not limited in content and rules; they could be edgier, more risqué. The Rubicon had been crossed.
     Soon after, television evolved again, with the introduction of cable networks. Major broadcasters like TBS, MTV, and more crashed into our living rooms and forever changed how we watch TV. Accordingly, cable networks experienced a boom. Suddenly, there were channels for kids (Nickelodeon, Disney, and Cartoon Network); channels for the academically inclined like Discovery, Science, and the History Channel (before they gave all their airtime to prehistoric ufological conspiracists); channels just for golf and college sports. Reality networks like E!, Bravo, and the hilariously misnomered Learning Channel (TLC) added the melodramatic squabbles of the elite into the lexicons of the commoner. Eventually, Comedy Central burst onto the scene with South Park and The Daily Show. Meanwhile, The Food Network and HGTV entertain the lackadaisical voyeur. More premium networks, like Showtime and AMC, soon joined the fray, while Turner Classic Movies fueled the Silents’ nostalgia.
     Gradually, voting became increasingly difficult. By the late aughts, there were hundreds of episodes premiering every day. Viewing every show would be impossible, even with the creation of TIVO.
     Voters’ jobs became even harder with the introduction of streaming. Suddenly, hundreds of new shows with seemingly endless budgets, began popping up. House of Cards, Stranger Things, Ted Lasso. Seemingly every tech company began touting a streaming arm, and were willing to dump billions of dollars into series unable to recoup their losses.
     Today, the Academy finds itself a frog in a boiling pot, wondering when the water became so hot.
     With viewership spread so thin across so many networks and streamers, it has become increasingly difficult for a show to gain sufficient momentum for an award without a robust For Your Consideration (FYC) campaign (i.e., ads and events promoting a show for awards), something many stations simply can’t afford, allowing for a very small number of shows to dominate the awards cycle while others get left behind.
     Moreover, with streamers folding or being absorbed over the last five years, the number of shows that receive those costly FYC has become increasingly slim. Instead, that money is consolidated into backing their subjectively strongest horse. After all, why should HBO campaigns for 15 shows when they know they can get The Pitt across the line?
     So, let’s take a look at some of the Emmy categories this year. How about Best Guest Actress in a Comedy? This is a category that should be extremely diverse because it only expects people to have watched one episode in order to have seen their entire Emmy-eligible performance. So let’s see what we have:

Jamie Lee Curtis — "The Bear"
Betty Gilpin — "Widow’s Bay"
Leslie Bibb — "Hacks"
Cherry Jones — "Hacks"
Laurie Metcalf — "Hacks"
Kaitlyn Olson — "Hacks"
Lauren Weedman — "Hacks"

     Yes, you read that right. Out of all of the guest performances on all of television, five out of seven best just happened to appear in the same ten-episode season. (Gilpin won.)
     This type of hyperfixation is not a one-off either. In the drama category, The Pitt managed to score 13 acting nominations (for a total of 25) for a show about… doctors realistically being doctors. Do their bedside manners really represent the best acting on all of television in every category?
     Look at the nominees yourself. The pattern will be obvious.
     By hyper-concentrating nominees, the Academy denigrates the majority of programming by denying those shows, which serve as the backbone of Hollywood, recognition and promotion. When even one actor receives an Emmy nomination, their entire series benefits. More awards mean more eyes on the show; the more eyes on their show, the more eyes on the show’s less famous actors, which leads to more work for said actors. The chain reaction directly contributes to the economic success of the entire industry.
     Moreover, this concentration results in fewer viewers of the Emmy broadcast. After all, people tune into the Emmys to root for their favorite shows. People won’t watch if they’ve never seen the nominees. If you haven’t seen one of six shows "Pluribus," "Hacks", "Beef," "The Pitt,", "Widow’s Bay," or "Shrinking”, then you might not see a single award go to a show you’ve seen. That's not a healthy way to run a primetime awards show.
     Luckily, all is not lost. There are a couple of ways the Academy can address these problems. The easiest thing they can do is limit FYC spending. This would theoretically allow less-campaigned shows the ability to gain traction with voters.
     More urgently though, the Academy can set limits on the number of actors or episodes nominated in the same category. This rule would give other shows a chance to shine, as there would be more open slots to fill.
     Additionally, the Emmys could adopt a Best Cast Ensemble award. Such a prize would mean that anyone deemed to have a significant role on a series could receive an award alongside their castmates. In turn, you can expect more varied nominations in the individual acting categories, as voters would be less concerned with whether or not actors from their favorite show will be nominated.
     The Academy will never be perfect. However, it is up to the Academy, not the studios and their tech-bro overlords, to create a more equitable and reflective lineup of nominees in the future. Let’s hope that they do.

Flashback 2010: They came for Muslims; I was not a Muslim

 

Fajr — morning prayer, Morton Grove, 2013 

     Rosh Hashana, the Jewish New Year — 5787, for those keeping track at home — began Friday night. My wife and I decided to rouse ourselves and go to synagogue, this being a time when it behooves Jews to manifest being Jewish a little more than they might otherwise, to both remind ourselves and show others. Use it or lose it. Rooting around in the old archive for Rosh Hashana stories to share here, I found this chestnut from a time when Jews weren't getting beaten up as much as they are now over the pretext of Gaza, even though the average Jew no more dictates Israeli policy than we tell Donald Trump what to tweet at 2 a.m. 

    It's worth posting, I think, even though the line about Jews not being condemned by politicians stings a bit, since it's no longer true. But the column does serve as a reminder. Jews tend to go to bat for others when they're down. Maybe those others will decide to return the favor. I'm not holding my breath. But anything's possible.

     'How much do we back down?" Terry Jones, pastor of the Dove World Outreach Center, a grandly named flyspeck of a church in Gainesville, Fla., asked, as he was preparing, or not, to burn a stack of Qurans on Saturday to mark the anniversary of 9/11. "How many times do we back down?"
     Funny you should ask, pastor — your big guy addresses that very question.
     "If someone strikes you on your right cheek, turn and offer the other one also," says Jesus, in the Sermon on the Mount. "And if he sues you and takes your coat, give him your cloak too."
     It would be easy — and fun, too — to use Jones as a poster boy for Christianity. I could trot out a snide line of mine: "Christianity is a very loving and tolerant religion, a fact that would be better known if more people actually bothered to practice it."
     But then I'd be indulging in the same vice resorted to by those who tar all Muslims based on the actions of some mullah in a cave, a twist of logic whereby we are allowed to define any group we fear by its worst members. The truth is that, Jones notwithstanding, the vast majority of ministers are indeed preaching love and dignity, as are the vast majority of imams and rabbis. But a few idiots can cause a lot of harm, as Jones demonstrates. Hostility and ignorance are not monopolized, alas, by any one creed or religion.

"Ich schweige; ich war Jude."

     So I went to this Iftar two weeks ago and had fun. We ate dried dates, to start, as tradition indicated. I had never been to an Iftar before, so I can't say if it was an outstanding or a ordinary Iftar, but ...
     What's that? You want to know what an Iftar is? Oh, sorry. Nothing to feel embarrassed about. I didn't know myself, up until I went. An Iftar is the evening meal that Muslims eat during Ramadan, a monthlong festival requiring they fast during daylight hours.
     Let me start a different story of a different religious meal I also attended.
     So I went to this Rosh Hashana dinner Thursday and had fun. We ate matzo ball soup, to start, as tradition indicated. I've been to many Rosh Hashana dinners, so ...
     My guess is that Thursday's dinner requires less explaining to the average reader, who is at least dimly aware that Rosh Hashana is a holiday — the Jewish New Year — and that a matzo ball is a dense dumpling that sits in chicken soup.
     The reason for this is that Jews, having spent decades and centuries bashing our heads against the brick wall of fear and bias surrounding American culture, finally reached a tentative level of acceptance. We aren't seen as scary outsiders with strange habits who just stumbled off the boat anymore. McDonald's sell bagels.
     Sure, Fox hosts still complain about a few hurdy-gurdy Hanukkah songs tucked into the renamed Holiday Pageant. Sure, there is the occasional spray-painted swastika or brick through a window.
     But we don't suffer through full-blown national meltdowns like the New York Islamic center crisis. Nor is our faith condemned by supposedly legitimate politicians like Newt Gingrich. Nor are any pastors burning Torahs this Saturday.
     That's the Muslims' lot, now, and it shocks me that Jews, gathering together for the High Holidays, a time when we normally recognize the peril de jure, can fail to see — blinded, I suppose, by the ire rained down on Israel — that Muslims here are experiencing the same ordeal that we suffered, for the same reasons. They're new, few, different, and the nativists and haters — the muzzling of whom is a recent and maybe passing phenomenon — are in full bay, having been let off the leash by their irresponsible leaders.
     Is there a real chance that America is going to yank its welcome mat away from Muslims? I hope not. Is it perhaps overdramatic to invoke Martin Niemoller? (The German headline means "I remained silent; I was a Jew," a play on his famous sermon on how Nazis first came for the Communists, unionists and Jews, but he did not speak out because he was not any of these groups, and when they came for him, there was no one left to speak out).
     Again yes. Our nation has a great ability to self-correct, to veer away from folly.
     But this current flareup is a fire bell in the night that has been ringing for a month. And for Jews to shrug, to maybe even think, "Hurts, doesn't it?" and to mill about in the crowd of onlookers, silent, is to forget both our faith and our history.
     Don't be deceived because people know what a matzo ball is and you can check into fancy hotels now. Ostracizing the outsider because he's different and someone who belongs to his faith once did a bad thing can still work against Jews, too.
     Perhaps I'm showing the bias of expecting more from your own club. But Jews know something about having their holy books burned. To respond to what Jones has been threatening with, "But they're not our holy books, not this time," is to miss one of the more glaring lessons of history.
      — Originally published in the Sun-Times, Sept. 10, 2010

Memories of 9/11 horror still fresh after a quarter-century

     On Sept. 11, 2001, my older son was 5, and some mornings played video games on my computer. So I wasn't plugged into the world that morning. I didn't know that American Airlines Flight 11 had struck the North Tower at 7:46 a.m. Chicago time. I did not own a cell phone.
     At the Northbrook Metra station, stepping onto the 8:17 Downtown, I heard a woman down the platform say something about the World Trade Center being hit by a plane.
     At Union Station, knots of people stood around, talking. I asked one: what kind of plane hit the twin towers?
     "A 767," he said. That startled me. I had assumed it would be a Cessna.
     "That's a big plane," I said, thickly.
     At Wacker Drive, people were pouring out of the Sears Tower, fanning out in all directions. I noticed that, as they hurried along, they looked up, scanning the sky. As if they expected to see a plane go into the building at any moment.
     There was a Billy Goat Tavern on Washington, open for breakfast. I stepped inside. Everyone was just standing there in silence, watching the North Tower collapse on TV. I joined them. You could hear the eggs sizzling on the grill.
     The paper was still at 401 N. Wabash. I was on the editorial board and walked into editorial page editor Steve Huntley's office.
     "How do you spell 'Osama bin Laden?'" he asked. I'd never heard the name but went to my office to find out.
     I used to say there were two shocks about Sept. 11 — the first was that it happened, that four planes were hijacked by 19 men wielding box cutters. Two crashed into New York's World Trade Center, toppling the towers. A third hit the Pentagon and a fourth crashed into a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, after passengers stormed the cockpit; 2,973 men, women and children died that day.
     There was a time when I wouldn't feel obligated to spell out the details. But more than a third of Americans have no living memory of Sept. 11, 2001, and it would not be surprising if 9/11 is news to some — just another crumb of dusty history they didn't learn in school.
     Leading to the second shock of 9/11: that it went away, or at least ebbed. Because for days and weeks and months, it seemed that 9/11 was a permanent condition, a radiating, bottomless shock, sorrow and stupefaction. But ebb it did, slowly receding, like a tide going out. And now 25 years have gone by, and attention must be paid again.
     We put out "Extras" in those days — special editions to update breaking news stories, hawked at newsstands downtown. Our first was headlined "UNSPEAKABLE HORROR" — I remember looking at "Unspeakable" and thinking, "Really? 'Cause we're trying to flippin' speak it." The second was better: "TERROR!"

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'Jesus won't you fuckin' whistle?' — Songs about recovery

     Facebook gets a lot of crap, and rightly so. What used to be a chance to keep up with your friends has degraded into a sewer of cheap ads and AI slop. I deleted the app off my phone yesterday — not worth the bother.

     But Facebook is great as a mnemonic device. Every morning I check it on the Imac, to see what was going on in years past. Eighteen years and counting; 18 years, flushed down the Facebook toilet.
     For instance, exactly 10 years ago my literary guide to recovery, "Out of the Wreck I Rise," written with Phaidon editor Sara Bader, was published. I've been seeing the various stabs at publicity I took, trying to market the book, and Wednesday saw this post, written for a web site called "Largehearted Boy," which asked me to join the likes of T.C. Boyle, Brett Easton Ellis and Amy Bloom in offering up a playlist that "relates in some way" to my newly published book.

    I didn't have to be asked twice. Music is not only a key to recovery — well, my recovery anyway  — but a number of songs are quoted in the book. I would have quoted more, if we could have secured the permissions.
     While my blog page has been grinding along since 2013, I was pleased to see that Largehearted Boy, written by Brooklyn author David Gutowski, is still at it, having begun practically in the antediluvian, 2002.
     I would have sworn I'd posted this list on EGD at some point — I did a post on my diabetes playlist — but never have. So this is a good moment to correct that oversight. It is, by necessity, a decade out of date. New additions would include "Sober," by Tool, which is playing Riotfest Sept. 19. Not that it is a new song, mind you — it was recorded in 1993. But I only recently heard it for the first time. I'm a fan of its sinuous bass line and, for some reason I can't explain, the line, "Jesus, won't you fuckin' whistle?"

     Though if you look at the video — a creepy piece of claymation — linked in the title, they change the obscenity, timidly, in my book, to "Jesus, won't you try and whistle?" I've linked to YouTube videos in all the titles. If you want me to triage the best, I'd say the top three would be Pink's — an eyeful, and I don't mean the establishing shots of gloomy Stockholm; "Some People Change," which is slickly done; and "Lust for Life," with the manic energy of the film.

"Liquor Slave" by Lucky Dube

One of the keys in understanding addiction is that it is not a bad choice, but an obsession. You don't destroy your life through substances because you're stupid, but because you're compelled, enslaved, or as the late South African reggae star sings, "a slave, a slave, a liquor slave."

"S.O.B." by Nathaniel Rateliff & the Night Sweats

Part tent revival, part 1950s demon rum scare movie, this hand-clapping surprise 2015 hit puts to music the give-it-to-me-now imperative and intensity of addiction, both the shrugging plunge, complete with shaking hands, crawling bugs and breaking hearts at the realization, even through the fog of intoxication: "This can't be me."

"Cold Turkey" by John Lennon

The former Beatle's agonized trek through heroin withdrawal, complete with desperate, groaning screams. "I promise you anything, get me out of this hell." In our book, which creates a mosaic connecting one thought to another to convey a narrative, it leads directly to Christopher Marlowe's: "Why this is hell, nor am I out of it."

"Detox Mansion" by Warren Zevon

In perhaps the most famous song about recovery, "Rehab," Amy Winehouse never gets there, with tragic results in her real life. For all the hard-partying rock stars, there are very few songs about actually going to rehab. "Detox Mansion," is among the best, conveying the weary cynicism mingled with hope that so often greets recovery. "I'm gone to Detox Mansion, way down on Last Breath Farm," sings Zevon, who struggled with alcoholism for decades, and was sober for 17 years before relapsing hard at the end of his life after he was diagnosed with cancer.

"Sober" by Pink

The pop pride of Philadelphia asks what is an essential question in recovery: "how do I feel this good sober?" Addicts must not only stop using, but construct a life they feel good about, where they find the kind of joy they used to find in substances. In the song, Pink sees herself clearly, a party girl running out of time, determined that this is not the way she wants her story to end.

"Some People Change" by Montgomery Gentry

This country duo is known for its smart, contemporary songs, blending faith and courage. "Some People Change" offers something that can be in short supply with the frequent reversals of recovery: hope. It limns the grimness of alcoholism in a few concise lines, the simultaneous submitting and hating that you're submitting, then celebrates those who can re-write the story of their lives: "Here's to the strong. Thanks to the brave. Don't give up hope. Some people change."

"Fallen" by Sarah McLachlan

A song that manages to be despairing and triumphant at the same time. "Better I should know"—in four words, the Lilith-fair founder deflates the regret that those who have "sunk so low." feel at being forced to give up their addictions and confront their broken lives even though "there doesn't seem a way to be redeemed." But there is, for many, as the Canadian balladeer reminds us.

"New South Wales" by Jason Isbell

Sometimes you just get sick of being sick. Isbell takes the details of recovery, the coffee and the posters, the slogans and the meetings, and find them good. Giving up his old life "holds no trace of sorrow," while the program ferrying him to his new life offers salvation. "God bless the busted boat that brings us back."

"Mariner's Song" by Cowboy Junkies

A beautiful song about loss and yearning, with that trademark fluttering mandolin. It might have nothing to do with recovery, but I chose to hear it that way. "I look for you in every crest I ride, with every trough I travel through" conveys the way the thing stays with you. But one line in particular sums up the best reason to keep on the straight path. "The last of man's great untamed beasts"—what could that be?—"lies lapping at my door. And I would be happy to give it what it wants, but I do know it would just ask for more."

That's it. As tempting as going back might be, there's no end to it. The beast would just ask for more.

"Lust for Life" — Iggy Pop

Trainspotting, Danny Boyle's movie about the Edinburgh drug scene might ask "Who needs reasons when you've got heroin?" but if you listen to the song playing over the opening credits, Iggy Pop's bass-drum driven "Lust for Life," you get a quick course in the pleasure of breaking with all those Johnnies and their enticements. "No more beating my brains, with liquor and drugs," Iggy sings, and makes us want to bounce along with him.

Rejecting cruelty of a nation bent on squashing trans Americans

Moon over Alabama, by Richard Linder

     The war on trans Americans continues unabated. The government cashiers loyal and effective soldiers from the military while trying to quash health care for young people nationwide. Apparently, parents know what's best for their own children only when denying them vaccines. A scary time, and if you don't think it's your problem, then you're ignoring how quickly a cruel and arbitrary government can shift from one target to another. Hate is fickle.
     Civility shouldn't be. I've been defending trans people in print for 34 years. First, because I'm a Jew, and given our history of being on the receiving end of hatred, it's our responsibility not to limit the compass of our sympathy entirely to ourselves.
     But there's another reason, one I've never explained, So today I'll tell the story.
     As a young reporter, I quickly discovered there are two ways to do the job. You can wait for someone to assign you something, and end up covering fires and zoning board hearings.
     Or you can find your own subjects, ones that you are guaranteed to be interested in because you picked them yourself.
     I preferred the second path.
     So I'm combing the classified ads at the back of the Chicago Reader, fishing for leads, when I notice an ad for a boutique on Elston Avenue selling women's clothing in large sizes to men.
     "Now there's an interesting business," I thought, and headed over. Talking to the owner, I realized this is more than one shop. This is a world, a community. I saw an announcement for a dance, and decided to go.
     At the dance I met "Jenny," who I described in the opening paragraphs of my story this way:

     Jenny has sparkling blue eyes, a small, upturned nose and a cascade of curly blond hair tumbling over her right shoulder.
     With a rhinestone nail charm centered on each red fingernail, a dab of blush at her decolletage, and deftly applied make-up, it's easy to believe her when she says she spent three hours getting ready to go out.
     The shimmery blue and silver dress is custom-made, she says, and it's easy to believe that, too, since with the spike heels, Jenny tops out at perhaps 6-foot-7.
     "I'm a bigger girl, I know," she says, smiling radiantly. "I can't go out to a mall — hey, I've got a football player's shoulders."

     What I did not put in the story was my thought processes, standing there in the dim, loud dance, with my narrow pad and pen, as she spoke. Picture me, brow furrowed, gears slowly turning, as I looked up at this young woman, nearly a foot taller than myself.
     "Hmmmm...." I thought. "Three hours. That's a long time. She must really want to do this. You know ... most people do what they really want to do. And in that sense, I'm lucky that what I really want to do is go home and kiss the wife. Because if I wanted to do ... what she wants to do ... I'd be completely screwed. Because I could either do what I want to do, and be this loathed pariah skulking around the shadows. Or I could spend my life not doing what I want to do, and isn't that a sad way to live?"

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