Flashback 2000: Gary offers a few things to make visit worthwhile

     When a writer you respect gores your ox, it stings. So as fun as my latest vivisection of John Kass was, it did decry the painful erosion of civil rights in the former newspaper columnist's new home state , judging Indiana severely for it. Several readers living there raised a finger and said, in effect, "Ouch." While the throttling of freedom in Hoosierland does deserve constant, full-throated condemnation — Friday they passed an almost complete ban on abortion — there's no need to tar the whole state completely with one broad brush. It does still contain people — a majority, actually — who would yet breathe the air of liberty, if only they could, and the state does contain several pleasant spots. Just last year we enjoyed lunch at a brewery in Hammond. And in 2000, prodded by a line in the New York Times about tourism in Gary, I actually visited that star-crossed city to take in the sights, such as they are. I offer it as a conciliatory gesture to my Indiana readers, and afterward give an update on some of the people and places encountered below.

GARY, Ind. — How deep is this town's image problem?
     Driving here, I worried about my suit. It was my good suit: Would the air in Gary somehow ruin it? Corrode the cloth, melt the fabric into a crusted, spotted motley? I had decided to risk it in the name of image.
     Driving east on the Chicago Skyway, past the groves of high tension electrical wires and the rolling brown industrial scrubland, I detected changes in the atmosphere — first hopsy, then acrid, a definite tang, a tickle at the back of the throat -- and wondered if I had made a mistake.

     I was on my way to visit the tourist sights of Gary, which will host the Miss U.S.A. Pageant for the next three years. The beleaguered city is giving Donald Trump $1.2 million to bring the spectacle here to spur economic development and introduce the nation to the attractions of Gary, which would be better known were it not for "years of brainwashing by the media about the negatives of the city," according to Spero Batistatos, the president of the Lake County visitors bureau.
     As a passionate foe of media brainwashing, I felt obligated to go to Gary and assess its potential as a tourist destination.
     I started my day at U.S. Steel's Gary Works, probably the most prominent institution in Gary. Having enjoyed corporate tours from Ben & Jerry's in Stowe, Vt., to the Tabasco sauce plant in New Iberia, La., I thought I'd touch base at the visitors center.
     "Ain't got nothing like that," said the guard and, after taking a moment to savor the grim Dickensian splendor of the Works, I wheeled the car around and headed down Broadway.
     I remembered Broadway as one of the most shocking and dismal urban tableaus I have ever seen — 40 blocks of empty abandonment.
     That hasn't changed — maybe a few more people about. I appreciated the historic display of shuttered 1950s-era stores, signs and typefaces, generally untouched by progress or economic development.
     The man from the Lake County Convention & Visitors Bureau had suggested I meet him at the Interstate Visitors Information Center, which isn't actually in Gary, but Hammond. By then, I had learned that those promoting Gary take a rather, umm, expansive view that defines the Gary Metropolitan Area as extending from Wilmette to Indianapolis.
     You can't miss the Center (I-80; 94 to Kennedy Avenue South). An odd building designed around themes; in giving nods to the farm and steel industries it looks like a cross between a jet engine and a grain silo.
     Inside is clean, airy and modern — it opened just in December — with an engaging exhibit of poster art in the main hall and a permanent John Dillinger Museum filled with displays that are both intelligent and downright cool: authentic weaponry, period outfits, a Hudson Terraplane 8 auto, plus interactive displays (go into a bank lobby, then recall from memory details of the crime in progress). I thought my trip amply rewarded just for the letterhead of the Indiana Reformatory, which showed a portrait of a bespectacled old lady and the motto: "There is no love like the good old love, the love that mother gave us." I'll bet that melted many a hardened criminal heart.
     I was met by Shawn Platt, an enthusiastic young man vaguely resembling Charlie Sheen, who was going to take me to a few of the sights.
     But first, lunch. There is only one good restaurant in Gary, judging from the people I asked — and I asked half a dozen — who one and all recommended The Miller Bakery Cafe on Lake Street — and Platt and I repaired there for a festive meal.
     Gary Sanders, the chef; owner, joined us, and when I said I was visiting Gary's tourist attractions, he actually laughed, said, "Really?" and shot Platt a bemused, eyebrow-arching look.
     We dined on crab cakes, cornbread custard, and avocado-lime chicken on a risotto cake — all quite good, at least according to my admittedly broad tastes. I asked Sanders what he thought was the prime tourist attraction actually in Gary, and he sent us to the Aquatorium.
     The Aquatorium is the new name for the old Gary Bathing Beach changing house at Miller Beach. It sits right on the lake, a crumbling concrete structure with a certain aura of elegance: The concrete is formed to resemble Greek columns.
     "It's amazing in the summer how many people are on this beach," said Platt, as we walked among the deserted dunes. "It's just packed."
     There was a beautiful view I had never seen before — the skyline of Chicago, a distant gray toy city to the right, a wide gap, then the industrial sprawl of Hammond and Gary to the left. Quite pretty.
     "We don't claim to be a place where you could spend a week for a major vacation," said Platt, showing off the lobby of the Radisson, which isn't in Gary either, but has a waterfall. "Just a weekend getaway."
     That may be overstating the case. But I could see, when the weather gets warm, a person with either an unusual interest in Dillinger or two children between the ages of 5 and 15 might enjoy replicating my day — an hour at the Dillinger Museum, lunch at the Miller Bakery Cafe (they'll give the kiddies spaghetti for $6, and you New Zealand rack of lamb for $14) then a quick visit to the beach, which was deserted and lovely, with eerie, weed-topped dunes and a certain desolate beauty.

             — Originally published in the Sun-Times, March 5, 2000.

     Spero Batistatos was with the Lake County visitors bureau for more than 30 years before being let go in 2021. He's now studying for a master's degree and teaching at the White Lodging School of Hospitality and Tourism Management at Purdue University Northwest. Shawn Platt left the South Shore Convention and Visitors Authority shortly after this story ran, did communications for Bank of America and Fifth Third Bank, and is now chief of staff & chief communication officer at Continuum Ventures in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Gary Sanders closed the Miller Bakery Cafe in 2010; it was reopened by new owners in 2013 and closed again in 2019. Sanders died in 2020 at age 53.

The Aquatorium marked its centennial in 2021.

North Shore Notes: Coyote

     As I padded upstairs at 3 o'clock in the morning to edit today's post from North Shore Bureau Chief Caren Jeskey, I reflected on how different she is from me. And how good it must be, I imagine, after six days of Neil Neil Neil (sigh, Neilneilneil) for readers to be placed into the hands of another writer, one of such boundless energy and mystic passion. 

     As if to illustrate that difference, today's post was particularly spiritual and celebratory. My edits were entirely stylistic — spell out numbers up to 10, spaces on both sides of a dash. I did add one word in the first sentence, "Pavilion." I'd never heard of the downtown concert venue simply called "the Pritzker" and to me that conjures up visiting the governor. And Caren later pointed out that the "the" could then go. 

     I almost plucked out the "ethically gleaned" and "ethically gotten" in the fifth paragraph, as a favor to her. They seemed over-the-top, to me. As if I wrote something like, "And then I ate a candy bar (paid for; not stolen)." But then, that is me, and I stayed home Friday night because it was hot outside and we were tired, my wife and I deciding not to picnic at Ravinia listening to the CSO, as we had planned. A writer has an obligation to be who they are, and an editor has the duty to let them. I satisfied myself with adding hyphens to the word pairs then, after studying the rules for compound adjectives, taking them out again, because they make perfect sense the way she wrote them.

By Caren Jeskey

"There's no comprehending
Just how close to the bone and the skin and the eyes
And the lips you can get
And still feel so alone."
     —Joni Mitchell, Coyote

     On Monday night two friends and I headed to Pritzker Pavilion to see Gabriel Garzon-Montana and headliner Ana Tijoux, part of the Millennium Park Summer Music Series. It was the best kind of Chicago night. In the 80s, no chance of rain, with a late sunset.
     My friends slid into seats near the stage at the center of it all. The wide open grassy field called my name, so I sat on a bench at the edge of the arbor that frames the Pavilion grounds, with the expanse of the lawn and the stage in front of me. But who was I kidding? There’s no way to sit on a metal bench when thick, fragrant, perfectly manicured grass is calling. I found myself barefoot in the green stuff, laying back and watching the occasional cloud, instinctively stretching my body as I loosened up.
     After the show, my Spanish-speaking friends filled me in. Ana Tijoux is a Chilean-French songstress whose parents were exiled from Pinochet’s Chile. She spoke a bit in English about the plight of little children trying to make the treacherous journey straight into the colonial U.S. of A. Right into where armed boys are proud. 

     I caught my breath as I imagined what’s happening there, right in the same moment that I — often ungrateful me — was gazing up at one of the world’s greatest skylines on a spectacular night. My only problem is trying to pull myself together with the privilege of having the safety, time and space to do so. Or at least to try. No one is chasing me.
     I’d brought a pair of (ethically gleaned) coyote bone earrings for my friend Sylvia to give to her beautiful daughter Vero. For years, (also ethically gotten) coyote teeth earrings were my go-to. I felt I had to have them on almost every day, and without them I felt naked. Last fall I accidentally pulled one off on a sidewalk in Humboldt Park one night. It fell to the ground and disappeared in the fallen leaves. A kind couple brought flashlights out and we searched forever, but it was not to be. I felt I’d lost a piece of my soul. I bought the bone earrings to replace the teeth, but it hadn’t worked. It felt right to pass them on.
     When my close friend Laura Rose — who’s now a mountain mama in Black Hawk Colorado — saw the huge teeth framing my face once, she commented. “That’s powerful medicine. Are you sure you want to wear those?” Her use of the word “medicine” to describe an animal reminded me of the teachings I’d had from Lakota and other people indigenous to the Americas.

     I’d studied with teachers of the Lakota ways for seven years. I was welcomed to participate in inípi ceremonies (also called sweat lodges) and chanupa (also known incorrectly as a peace pipe) ceremonies. The curanderos and curanderas (medicine people) taught us to connect with Mother Earth, and to connect with our ancestors. To honor our heritage, and thus to honor who we are. The inípi itself represented the womb of Grandma, and the red hot rocks that warmed us were Grandpa. We sat on the dirt in the inípis we’d built, which were housed on a farm in Kingston, Illinois called Spirits Whisper Acres. It was a horse rescue farm, with a smattering of random “four leggeds” as my Lakota teachers called them. It took an army of us to get an angry bull back into the barn one time. Luckily, no-one was gored.
     When I came across a war manifesto written by Lakota people on the Pine Ridge Reservation that railed against anyone who taught their ways to white people, I decided to take a break and did not return to that group. Since then I've spent just one long day and night in an inípi just outside of Austin, Texas. I met a gorgeous black horse there, and we hung out. Animals are so much easier than people sometimes. Oftentimes.
     After that big night out on Monday, I spent the next three days days inside my cozy cottage, missing out on some of the best days and nights Chicago has to offer. Last week I said that I was trying to look at it as hygge, and I am still trying; however, it felt more like going in and out of states of agoraphobia where I’d almost leave, punctuated with a feeling of rawness that seemed to expose every nerve in my body, as though my insides were on on the outside, topped off with a few heart-thumping panic attacks. But hey. Other things went very well this week and I am grateful to be alive, muddling through with the best of us.
     Finally, on Thursday after my last client ended at 5 pm, I put on some shoes and grabbed my helmet. I got on my bike and just went where the wind took me.
     As I rode down Old Orchard Road next to Dignity Memorial Cemetery I noticed a coyote standing in the grass next to the bike path, watching the cars go by. I wondered if he or she (they look alike unless you are closer than you should be) was considering crossing the busy road. I briefly considered halting traffic to make a safe path but then remember this is not a Disney movie. The coyote gracefully glided back between the slats of the metal gate, gave me a couple of good long looks from a safe distance, and laid down. They did a bit of grooming, then settled, head and eyes in my direction, ears perked up. Time stands still in moments like this.
     Later that night my friend Jesse Ray sent me a photo of a hawk’s feather. My main Lakota teacher’s name is Red Tail Hawk. Jesse discovered it in a bit of sticky tar on a freshly paved road near his house. Yesterday as I left for a doctor’s appointment I was pleasantly shocked to find a feather of my own. I realized that there are hawks in the trees all around me that I’ve been missing in the business of my overthinking mind. I will keep an eye to the trees and hope to spot one soon.

“Synchronicity is an ever present reality for those who have eyes to see.” 

          —Carl Jung

 

Taiwan on knife’s edge of freedom

     Most souvenirs are garbage. Cheap carvings made around the globe from the place supposedly being commemorated. Decorative spoons. Useless stuff.
     So it’s noteworthy when you have a keepsake that’s actually practical, like the 11-inch cleaver I’m looking at now, produced by Maestro Wu. A single piece of metal, lightweight and balanced. Flick your fingernail against the blade, and it rings for five full seconds. Sharp as a razor.
     I got it on the Taiwanese island of Kinmen, 2,000 yards off the coast of China. I had flown to Taiwan to interview Annette Lu, then vice president, whose route to what she called “soft power” took her through the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and Chicago, putting her on the Sun-Times’ radar. She admired how freely people could protest here.
     My accommodating Taiwanese hosts asked, while I was in the neighborhood, if there was anywhere else in the country I’d like to visit beyond the capital of Taipei. I rather boldly asked to visit the island of Kinmen. As a fan of history, I knew that part of the Kennedy-Nixon debates centered on whether the United States would go to war with China over the fate of Quemoy and Matsu — “Quemoy” being what Westerners called Kinmen then.
     I bring it up because the nation is in the news, after U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi stopped by to visit on her Asian tour. When news of the trip was leaked, there was a disappointing outcry that it shouldn’t happen, that we need to be nice to Communist China so they don’t bully us even more than they already do.
     Some background, for readers unfamiliar: Taiwan, also known as the Republic of China, is a democratic nation of 23 million perched in uncomfortable proximity to the People’s Republic of China and its 1.4 billion population. The communists increasingly insist they own Taiwan because ... well, they want it.
     As to why China, a nation of 3.7 million square miles, needs to absorb Taiwan, not half of 1% the size, well, it’s the same reason Russia needs Ukraine. They don’t. They simply feel entitled, the way any bully feels entitled to your lunch money. Because they think they can take it.

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Shrugging at fame

Rush Pearson performing the Mud Show, 2013.

      Other than Google insisting for years on crediting me with producing the early Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen movies — a different Neil Steinberg —my involvement with moviemaking has been scant, limited to documentaries. I talk about the joys of philately in 2017's "Freaks & Errors: A Rare Collection." And comment on happiness in Jennifer Burns's 2008 "Vincent: A Life in Color," a gorgeous reflection on the life of Vincent P. Falk, who used to conduct fashion shows for passing boats off the Orleans Street bridge, when he wasn't running the computers at the Cook County Treasurer's office. 

     That's about it. Though I almost produced a movie of my own, or tried to. Burns was a waitress at Smith & Wollensky and financed "Vincent" by putting $35,000 on her Mastercard. It won some international awards, was shown at the Siskel Center, reviewed favorably by Roger Ebert. But "Vincent" never made any money, and she ended up back at the steakhouse, waiting tables. Which I felt was tragic.
     Particularly since I had the perfect subject for her next film: Rush Pearson. I'd been fascinated with Rush ever since college, when he was the star of the Practical Theatre, a troop of Northwestern students, mostly, including future Seinfeld cast member Julia Louis-Dreyfus. She was really funny, but Rush was the stand-out talent. He kept his dramatic chops sharp by performing at renaissance faires, a set-piece of vaudeville jokes and pratfalls that culminated in a faceful of mud, and was off in Texas at a ren faire there when Saturday Night Live sent a producer to pluck four, count 'em four, Practicals to appear on NBC. Rush, the most brilliant of them all, missed out. Eating mud. Down in Texas.
     I used the episode in the Bad Timing chapter of my book, "Complete & Utter Failure." He was gracious, philosophical.
    Rush kept eating mud with fellow Sturdy Beggars John Goodrich and Herb Metzler for the rest of his career. Forty years went by. Rush's oeuvre was making people laugh, 50 at a time, on summer days in small towns, collecting crumpled dollar bills, then doing it all again an hour later. He was my age, the tail end of his 50s. He couldn't do the show forever. Before his body failed, before he hung up his jester's rags, I decided, Jennifer Burns would capture him, make him immortal, do her next movie on the Mud Show. I would raise the money — I had gathered $34,000 to pay the legal permissions for my literary recovery book, "Out of the Wreck I Rise." I could do this too.
     I dragged Jennier to Bristol, Wisconsin to see the Mud Show at the Renaissance Faire. Of course she loved it. Everybody loves the Mud Show. She went to see Rush do his one-man show of Gogol's "Diary of a Madman" and thought it was brilliant. Because it was brilliant. Rush is a powerful, visceral actor who nevertheless spent most of his career eating mud. There was an irony, a larger truth here. There had to be. Jennifer was completely on board. 
     I was excited to tell Rush — he was gonna be a movie! — and took him out to lunch to give the news a bit of drama. Jennifer Burns and I would be making a movie about the Mud Show. I'd be producing it. His creation, his show would not be allowed to pass into memory undocumented. He and his friends would be remembered, their work preserved against time and death. 
     That's nice, Rush said, or words to that effect. But he didn't want to be immortalized. He wanted, he said, to pass through life without leaving a ripple. Doing no violence to the world, carving no trench. No legacy. Like a man passing along a trail through the woods. Leave nothing behind. 

    To be honest, that attitude made me want to do the movie more. The unwilling subject. A rare purity, and there was absolutely something pure, childlike about Rush. But I had never tried making a movie, and to make one about a guy who didn't want it, well, it didn't seem fair to him, or to Jennifer. I let the matter drop.
     Still, I was dumbfounded. Me, I'm leaving claw marks on the world. Every shred of significance is hoarded like a glass jar of smooth stones, shells and colorful bits of beach glass, to be shown off to others. I was happy this week when Northwestern Perspectives ran a brief item on Rubber Teeth, the humor magazine I helped Robert Leighton found in 1979. It wasn't a very long article, and frankly my role is limited to a quote and perhaps the best photo ever taken of me in my entire life, leading a meeting with Cate Plys. We are identified as "contributors" not "editors," which made me wince, but that is exactly the kind of take-down that notoriety hands those who put too much stock in her. 
     I was pleased to see the article. Pleased to be remembered, pleased that therefore an endeavor I had taken part in meant something, enough that somebody who wasn't even born, whose parents were probably in grade school at the time, would nevertheless pay attention to it now.  That's success, right? A single whiff of it anyway. To do something that people recall, years later. That's meaningful.
    And then I thought of Rush, a man of such immense life force, paddling his canoe of talent through the lake of life, untroubled with such concerns — at least from a distance, I don't know him very well, so might be missing significant aspects. The entire reality must be complicated. But from afar, he seems oblivious to such trivialities, content to leave only ripples, not caring at all as they vanish behind him. Doing his act — he's contracted to do the Ren Faire this year and next — while shrugging at the fame that hurried past him to embrace other, lesser talents. Without bitterness, without remorse. Generating his own sense of worth and satisfaction. That seems success of a much higher order.

You, too, can visit Chicago without weapons!

Navy Pier is the most popular tourist attraction in Chicago.

     My first cousin’s daughter is ... what? My second cousin? No, those are more distant kinfolk who only share great-grandparents. My mother’s sister’s son’s daughter is my first cousin, once-removed.
     I think.
     Whatever she is, my 18-year-old relation and her bestie came to visit with us for almost a week in July.
     Six days. Having readily agreed to the visit, in concept, I did blink a few times when informed of the specific span, thinking of a Yiddish word, mishpocha, which means “family.” And the obligations thereby implied.
     Sure, I said, yes yes, of course, a week is fine ... though I still have to work. As long as I’m not expected to squire the teens about the city, they’re welcome to use our house as a base for their explorations.
     That said, the unwritten code of familial responsibility dictates that I pick them up at the airport, buy a welcome lunch and host their initial foray into the city. What’ll it be, girls? Navy Pier? Most popular attraction in Chicago. A ferris wheel. Plenty of shops selling tat. Fireworks at night.
     Or ... the Art Institute. The Cezanne show. I was secretly pulling for that.
     Or ... if you kids are tired from your long trip, we could just walk in the Chicago Botanic Garden. (The “easiest for me” was unvoiced.)
     They chose that last option. Youth is wasted on the young.
     Driving there, we passed a Walgreens.
     “We need to stop at Walgreens,” one of my visitors said.
     I know better than to quiz young women about what kind of necessity might inspire a visit to a drugstore. But the purpose of the stop was revealed: Before they could venture into Chicago, they needed to buy pepper spray. They would have bought it before leaving Boston but couldn’t take it on the plane.
     Ah.

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And John went down into the land of Indiana

   

     Facebook has been increasingly aggressive with its advertising. In my perception, anyway. Not only are there more commercial intrusions, but the plugs seem of a lower calibre, more off-point and unwelcome. Here, a kit of grooming devices and hair-removal creams for — I kid you not — men's balls. Immediately following, the columns of John Kass.
     Regarding the the former, I took the time to click a button so I'll never see it again, wondering all the while if I could have posted anything to make me a target for such a product.
     And seeing the latter, against my better judgment, almost mesmerized, I began to read his latest, “'Have Laptop, Will Travel,' and the Demise of The Chicago Tribune." Kass's July 27 offering. It begins:
     "When the editors of 'the paper' that I served faithfully for 40 years recently decided to team up with angry leftist trolls in a vengeful 'gotcha' exposé on our new home, I wasn’t happy about it."
     As a media savvy guy, I knew what he was referring to: Bob Goldsborough's July 13 Elite Street column, "Former Tribune opinion columnist John Kass purchases Indiana home for nearly $300,000," detailing the self-imposed Indiana exile of the erstwhile arbitrator of the Chicago Way.  I was alerted to the story on Twitter.

     The move makes sense to me. Illinois tacks increasingly blue, an island of freedom in a frothy sea of GOP rights-drowning red. Next door is Indiana, the Mississippi of the Midwest, home of Mike Pence and the Klan. The state practically echoes with the forging of manacles.

     Indiana might be a better fit for Kass. Perhaps there he will finally find that elusive sense of home, of security.  Among like-minded citizens who also fancy themselves the greased hub around which the universe spins, who don't see the point of following a moral code that isn't also being forced upon everyone else. So yes, good that Kass will be tightly swaddled in Indiana, warm, safe, enfolded by the similarity he obviously craves. Free of menace at last. 

      Wanting to join the fun, I tapped out a tweet: "You mean he moved to Indiana VOLUNTARILY!?" Then immediately deleted it. There's no upside in remarking upon Kass. I've already had my say early last year. And while I did enjoy the waves of love that resulted, there's no need to pile on. I accept that people read him, perhaps for the emetic effect. There's also a market for testicle shavers, apparently. Who am I to judge? The man quit his job and moved to Indiana. What greater punishment could I add atop that? When Dante encounters Judas being gnawed by Satan in the frozen bowels of hell, he doesn't kick him. Let sufferers be.

    Plus: so what? Kass could move to Mongolia and live in a yurt and his work could not become further removed from the day-to-day world of real life in Chicago. He could live in a box at State and Lake and the essence of the place would elude him.
    Besides, I am among the blessed, and the lucky shouldn't mock the unfortunate. Years ago, I made the decision to always be who I am, which by necessity means to acknowledge that I live where I actually live. Because once you start pretending to be someone you're not — perhaps even convincing yourself, if no one else — living somewhere you're not, the fear of being uncovered must be overwhelming. The tone of Kass's column borders on hysteria.
     “Why won’t they leave us alone?” Kass has his wife demand of heaven. He places a manly hand upon her quivering shoulder.
     "Because this is how they play," he intones, like the hero in a Left Behind novel. "This is who they are. They won’t leave us alone. They’ll never leave us alone."
     Kass then does that patented, Fox News mind-reading trick. He doesn't need to inquire; he knows the motivation for sharing news of his real estate transaction.
     "Some at 'the paper' are angry," he decides. "Bitter. This is not the old Tribune. It’s the new left-leaning Tribune. I see the woke media for what it is, what it’s done to the city, how they’ve avoided the truth of what’s happened to Chicago. And the left hates my guts."
     Another big difference between us. Were I curious as to why Bob Goldsborough wrote about my move to Indiana, I wouldn't simply slip open the gate of of my corralled nightmares and let the slavering beasts of my paranoiac id roam free. I'd  simply ask Goldsborough why he wrote what he did. That's called being a reporter. At least I would have to try. 

     Which I did. So why'd ya do it, Bob? Out of spite? On command from your vindictive Tribune masters? On direct orders from George Soros?
      "No," replied Goldsborough — not to be confused with his father, a successful mystery writer of the same name. "I never was ordered by my editors to write the story. I largely come up with story ideas on my own, and I had come up with this one on my own as well. When it first looked like he'd moved to Indiana, I ran the idea past my editors, months before Greenfield broke the news. And they were supportive of the idea. (I have great editors.)"
     The Greenfield he refers to is John Greenfield, who broke the story, spurring Goldsborough to return to his excavation of the Kassian Cheops established on the shifting sands of Indiana.
     "John Greenfield, who contributes to the Reader and is the co-editor of Streetsblog Chicago, got a tip that Kass was living in St. John and started tweeting about it," wrote Goldsborough. (Another reason to feel sorry for Kass; turned in by his own neighbors, perhaps, who might have dropped a dime to the media that he was cowering among them). "That spurred me to dig some more to finally confirm the Kasses' purchase once and for all. I have to hand it to Kass — he didn't make it easy for me to confirm that he'd bought the house in St. John."

     Goldsborough dug into the story, not at the behest of his Tribune puppeteers or the woke mob, but inspired by Kass's own frantic efforts to hide his whereabouts. The guilty flee where none pursueth.
     "The house to which Kass and his wife were tied had an owner who had bought the home in 2020 through an opaque Indiana land trust (similar to the Chicago Title trusts that so many bold-faced names in Illinois use to try to mask their purchases). Was it the case that Kass had bought that house, but was trying to keep his ownership a secret? I didn't know."
     Do you notice something about Goldsborough's tone? A candor, a cadence of normal humanity, of a regular person doing his job, living in the world of the actual. Devoid of petulance or grievance. 
     As opposed to Kass's column, which ended ... which ended ... actually, I didn't get to the end. Not at first. Halfway through I bailed out — not out of hatred, I should add, but its polar opposite, indifference. Nothing is easier to cast aside than a column by John Kass.  Yes, I was smiling as I moved on, but not at the unintentional humor of the column or the relief at abandoning it.  

     Rather, I was smiling at a decades-old memory.
     In 2000, I moved to the suburbs. Since certain columnists were already manifesting their lifelong habit of presenting themselves as living on Evergreen with the ghost of Nelson Algren, warming their hands over scrap lumber fires in 55-gallon oil drums on Lower Wacker Drive, when in fact they were hiding in Western Springs, hoarding dried food against the collapse of civilization, I was very public about my move, even writing an article about it for North Shore Magazine , which ran a photo of me, my wife and kids sitting on the front steps of our 1905 Queen Anne farmhouse in Northbrook. Nothing to hide.
     This caught the attention of the very same Goldsborough, who noted that while I shared the tableau of a neighbor stopping her car in the street before our house and leaping out, door flung open, to demand, "How much did you pay for that?" I did not actually share the purchase price with my readers.
     "But Upper Bracket will share," Goldsborough chuckled. "Steinberg paid $370,000 in June (although the sale closed in October) for the house on a half acre, according to public records."
     Or, I blushingly point out, about 25 percent more in 2000 than Kass paid for his Hoosier haven in 2022, which should give you an idea of the relative worth of life in the Chicago suburbs versus life in the blasted conservative hellscape of Indiana. 

     My reaction to my private real estate deals ending up in the pages of the Tribune was very different from Kass's. I remember reading Goldsborough's report with surprise, raising an eyebrow, and thinking, "'Upper bracket?' I wish!"  No collapsing to the ground and clawing at myself. No dragooning my wife as a Greek chorus of alarm.

     There did seem a whiff of mischief about it. Since I asked Goldsborough about his motivation regarding Kass, I also asked he cast his memory back and see if I had missed the doorjamb-gnawing rage that Kass detects. 

      "You have a great memory — I did indeed write about your move to the suburbs in 2001," Goldsborough replied. "You took it the right way — I didn't mean it with any harm or really anything more than just a mild tweak."
     So what's going on here? You have to remember the central place that fear occupies in the conservative mindset. Kass dwells in the realm of panic rooms and alarm systems and doxxing, the fear — perhaps justified — of encountering the baked-in malice of people such as himself. The fear that the harassment they inflict on others might be returned. Then mix-in self-importance. Perhaps he is genuinely terrified that if the liberals he imagines are so tormented by his fierce sweeping beacon of truth knew what state he lives in, he might wake up one morning and find his lawn crowded with outraged trans protesters barking through megaphones, waving signs as young folk who believe in reproductive rights link arms with Jane Fonda and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and trample his petunias.          

      To be honest, I initially shared Kass's underlying conceit: this isn't worth writing about.  There's something disreputable, almost cruel, about highlighting Kass's deficiencies. It's too easy. He disgorges his words without critical reason ever being applied to them. So to abruptly shine the light of logic on them, uninvited, to flush out his thoughts, like blind albino worms, forced from their subterranean realm, yanked from lightless caves and exiled into the blazing noontime to wither and die under the relentless sun of reason. Is that not cruel? Maybe you're not supposed to think about what Kass writes; perhaps doing so violates some kind of unspoken contract. It's like bursting into a toddler's birthday party and ruining the magic show by explaining the simple tricks. Leave him be.

     Ready to dismiss the matter, I returned to Kass's column to read the end — unfamiliar territory, to be sure — and found something that absolutely demanded today's effort. As an act of mercy.
      "I can’t recall 'the paper' ever dedicating so much precious time, resources and space, when newsrooms are strained, to other columnists at the Tribune who bought or sold a home," Kass complained, ending with this coda: "Just me. Curious. Hmm."
     Oh poor John! To be singled out like that. It's so mean. He must be set straight. "Can't recall the paper ever dedicating..." A prod to action. "Just curious."
     We men in our 60s sometimes do fail to recall things, and how welcome it is to have your memory primed. To find a friendly face, filling in the lost details, showing you how to work the self-checkout, offering a helping hand. How could I not  step up and aid a fellow columnist? Besides, isn't a general lack of curiosity perhaps the defining characteristic of the writer in question? Here he is, finally wondering about  something; we can't then just leave him hanging. I feel compelled to reward this rare, perhaps unique, moment of inquisitiveness by providing an answer: Jan. 21, 2001, and, plus many, many other times, that would be clear to someone whose eyes were not thickly cataracted with fear, self-pity and injured pride.

     "He wasn't targeted any more than the column might 'target' a starting pitcher for the Cubs who buys a condo on the Gold Coast," Goldsborough explained. That's what the column does: write about the real estate doings of the locally familiar. 

    So the news, John, is good, and I'm happy to be the one to share it with you and the world. It isn't you being picked on, or victimized, or paid back for your daring ... umm ... whatever it is you do that has made you the cynosure of a Dick Tracy rogues gallery of villains, in your own mind if nowhere else. We are brothers here. I too have felt Bob Goldsborough's lash. Or his fleeting professional attention, anyway. The Trib's real estate Torquemada gave similar treatment to a newbie nudnik more than 20 years ago. So you aren't the victim of vast conspiratorial forces arrayed against you.
     Reassured? I didn't think so. See, that's the problem with the whole unable-to-process-new- information-contrary-to-your-own-long-entrenched-beliefs thing. But that's a column for another day. 

Changing careers to boost health at BIÂN

The Football Players, by Henri Rousseau
(Guggenheim Museum)

     “Bring one hand to your heart, one hand to your stomach, and just breathe. Start to feel gravity drawing the navel toward the back body. I want you to inhale, fill up the lungs with air. Exhale through your tailbone and your neck, heavy into the mat. Letting anything that happened before this class begin to dissipate. Filling up the body with air, vitality energy. Exhaling anything that isn’t serving you.”
     Jacob Frazier, a trim, superbly fit young man with a neat beard, leads three shoeless women and a male visitor through their paces in a softly lit exercise room, warmed to a gently challenging 85 degrees. We are at BIÂN Chicago, which once might have been referred to simply as a “health club” but describes itself as a “private, members club built on the foundation of holistic wellness, vitality and social well-being.”
     Three years ago, the space BIÂN fills with beige drapes, blond maple floors and large, blurry, vaguely Gerhard Richter-ish photographs was the empty shell of the former Japonais restaurant in the Montgomery Ward warehouse at 600 W. Chicago, and Frazier was a professional dancer.
     BIÂN opened in November 2020 at the height of COVID restrictions. Frazier was among millions of Americans— a Harris poll released last year said more than half of our nation’s employees want a career change — prodded by the pandemic to swap one profession for another.
     “There was no more work, at the time, for dancers,” explains Frazier, who danced professionally for five years. “‘I’d always cross-trained to sustain my body, so it just felt like a natural shift.”
     Leaving dance was easier than an outsider might imagine.
     “The life is very hard because you are living in poverty most of the time,” Frazier says. “So no, it wasn’t hard to give up. I was ready. I was sick of living that way.”
     If talking to dancers-turned-fitness-instructors and nibbling cucumber, apricot, pistachio and yogurt salad seems off brand for me, it was. I was slogging through my own COVID-induced doldrum when Justine Fedak — who used to be in charge of brand strategy for BMO Harris Bank and now does marketing for BIÂN — suggested a visit might perk me up.

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