Saturday fun activity: Where IS this?

     This portrait of perhaps the whitest Jesus, ever, is in the window of what is one of my favorite truly weird places in Chicago. I assume everybody who passes by has puzzled over this oddity; I actually went inside and tried to figure it out, and will post the column I wrote about it, years ago, after someone cracks the place.
      Where is this portrait, with the glyphic writing in the background (and the ode to the Constitution displayed atop the blog). Even though it might be easy, I just got a crate of "You Were Never in Chicago" from the University of Chicago Press, in hardback yet, and if you guess—remember, no Dales please, at least not until I walk him over his prize from the last time he won—I'll sign it to you, or whomever you please. Remember to post your guesses below. Good luck. 

"No, no... actually, it never struck me before..."

Margaret Dumont

    Much humor involves embarrassment; we laugh instead of cringing with shame, on our own behalf or for the sake of others. The Marx Brothers' crazy hijinks wouldn’t be nearly as effective performed by themselves in a locked room as they were in the middle of an elegant dinner party hosted by a horrified Margaret Dumont, struggling to maintain her dignity and a sense of order. Borat would have just been a disturbed Eastern European oaf, but played against a backdrop of earnest American politeness, he was hysterical.
     Of course, when something embarrassing happens to you, at the moment it is occurring and, often, for years afterward, that sense of fun can be elusive.
     Look at this bunny statue. It’s positioned by a tree in the front yard of a house on my block. I see it almost every day, walking the dog in that direction, and I think of ... well, I’m getting ahead of myself.
     Look closely at the photo. Note the position of the rabbit's paws The juxtaposition of the tree. What does that bunny look like he's doing?  Any thoughts? Perhaps does he look like someone relieving himself in an alley in Wrigleyville, right? Disposing of the last few innings worth of Old Style while glancing over his shoulder to check that the coast is clear, yes?
   Hold that thought a moment.
   I couldn’t tell you the bunny owners' name. A pair of landscapers. I wouldn’t recognize on sight. That happens with surprising frequency in suburbia. People keep to themselves. I've met this couple only once, that I recall, but it was memorable. Being introduced, looking for a topic of conversation, I  said: “I really admire the bunny statue in your front yard.”
     They looked at me blankly, and expression I took to mean: "Admire?"
     “I mean, it’s very wry, peeing against the tree like that. Wherever did you find it?"
     “I beg your pardon?” the wife said, confused.
      “Well, it’s a peeing bunny, right?” I said, trying to maintain my bright demeanor, but the smile slowly dying on my face. “It’s urinating against your tree.”
     They drew back, slightly.
     Gosh, the husband said, or words to that effect, exchanging embarrassed, where-did-this-idiot-come-from glances with his wife, “we never thought of it like that.”

     "No, no," the wife agreed, obviously horrified. "Not at all..."
     I’ve gone over the conversation a dozen times, and I really wish I could suspect they were dryly teasing me—I mean, look at the thing. How could you not view it that way? How could somebody not notice? But I don’t think they were pulling my leg. They were sincerely baffled.
     That’s why people are so often politely silent, and reluctantly make any kind of observation about anyone else. It's only smart. Because what seems obvious to you, might not be obvious to them. We are a world that slides along on the lubrication of self-deceit.
     To cite another example. I was at Harry Heftman’s final birthday party a few years back. Harry was, you might recall, the much-loved owner of the hot dog stand at the corner of

Harry Heftman, left

Randolph and Franklin whom I often wrote about. As I mingled, a column lede formed in my mind. The opening sentence would be: “Harry Heftman is looking old. Which is only fitting, because Harry Hefman is old.”
     That sounded good. But I know enough about people that I didn’t want to cause any distress to my friend Harry. So I cornered his daughter and asked, “Do you think Harry would mind if I called him 'old' in the paper?” I assumed she'd assure me that I should go ahead.
     Her face fell—she was genuinely horrified. “Oh no, you can't, “ she replied. “Harry would hate that.”
     Harry Heftman was 103 years old. I wrote nothing about his birthday party.
     It says something about vanity, about illusions, about the nature of our society, that a man turning 103 cannot be described as "old," just as I know I’d get in trouble if I called a 300 pound woman “fat.” The obvious is not always obvious, particularly to the person with the closest view.
     To their credit, the couple did not remove the bunny after I cast aspersions on its pose. I'd have hated that. My theory is that it was a comic bunny that they bought sincerely, missing the implications of its posture. Or heck, maybe it's an innocent bunny, and I've simply pissed against too many walls in my day and it's clouded my judgment.

     But it is a reminder that you should always be careful when pointing out something that you assume your listener is vastly familiar with. They may not be.
     It's funny to observe. The definitive example of this is found in Monty’s Python’s classic “Travel Agent Sketch” Eric Idle plays a would-be holiday traveller introduces himself as “Mr. Smoke-Too-Much.”
     “Well, you better cut down a bit then,” Michael Palin's travel agent ripostes.
      “What?” Idle says, taken aback.
      “You’d better cut down a bit then.”
      “Oh I see," he says, realization dawning. "Cut down a bit ... for Smoke-Too-Much."
       “Yes,  Ha ha. I expect you get people making jokes about your name all the time.”
       “No, no" the traveler says aghast, "actually, it never struck me before.”
       An exaggeration, of course, for comic effect. But only a little. That's how people actually are in real life. And why it's funny. When it happens to someone else.

"I would advise everyone I love not to mix with it."

     Honestly?
     The big Republican win Tuesday night didn't bother me much.
     I'm not sure why.
     Cynicism triumphant, perhaps. 
     Given what the Democratic majority in the Senate could accomplish—not much—the Republicans probably won't be able to inflict a lot of damage before they, in turn, are swept out, and it'll be fun to see them try.
     Of course, I'm not one of the 10 million Americans who got access to health insurance for the first time last year under Obamacare, and it'll be difficult to have it yanked away.
     Frankly, I can't quite imagine the Republicans are really going to do that, really kill a successful health care program out of their hatred of the man who created it. But maybe they will, though dismantling a system that is working pretty well, despite their best efforts. That isn't quite the path to the future, is it?
      Then again, none of what they're doing is the path to the future, and that's why I'm not too broken up about the current crop of right wing politicians who, playing our political musical chairs, found their ample butts squeezed into an elective office when the voters lifted the needle off the record.
     This all is cyclical, we should know by now, and the more the Republicans try to drag us back toward their cherished, imaginary past, the more we'll lurch into the future on the backswing, if we just wait a little. 
     The waiting is difficult, I know. But always remember: we're a nation that can't get rid of the penny. Change, even tiny, necessary, change, comes hard to us, to our shame.
     The bottom line, for me, is that while Republicans can ignore facts, facts do not in turn ignore Republicans. They live in our world too, though they don't seem to know it, to realize the realities underlying all this are true for both parties. Sure, they can build their coveted Keystone Pipeline now. But global warming is still real, and at some point we're going to have to pull back from fossil fuels. Maybe the damage won't be as bad as they predict; the world, after all, never did choke on overpopulation, did it? If Republicans have a way of ignoring looming disaster, Democrats have a way of overstating it. Nobody's perfect.
     The incoming Congress can seal the borders. But the country still grows more Latino day by day, and one fine day they're going to wake up, look blinking at one another, realize their numbers, and boom. Suddenly  immigration reform will happen, the way gay marriage suddenly happened, shifting from impossibility to done deal, seemingly overnight (to latecomers; for those fighting the good fight, it didn't happen so fast).
      Keep gay marriage in mind. Sure, Republicans might try to roll back the astounding progress we've made as a society, trying to keep their base of ignorant haters happy. But the change is already done. You can't unring a bell, as the lawyers say. The granite floor to the issue, the bedrock of fact—it can't be repeated enough—is that gay people make no worse spouses or parents than anybody else. Once we're standing solidly on that, it's going to be difficult—I think impossible—for the Republicans to shift the landscape so it's once again based on their little puddle of fear and religious bias. 
     I'm not so sure it won't be diverting to watch them try.
     The Democrats certainly have their share of blame. President Obama has been passive and aloof for months, if not years. I read a lot, yet have no idea what he stands for or what he intends to do, what he's willing to take a risk to achieve. Maybe he has no idea either. In the final analysis, when historians try to figure out what went wrong with him, you won't need too many masters degrees to realize he should have failed more, not less, should have engaged that golden mouth of his for a few causes he really, truly believed in, assuming they exist, no matter how well or how poorly they polled, and tried to ramp things up before the midterms, not put his ethics in a blind trust until after, cravenly trying to avert the disaster that came anyway. 
     Maybe if he had bothered to tell the American people what this election was about, before, they wouldn't have decided it was about him forgetting to be president. 
     I dislike politics, as a rule. It's like sports: the same thing happening over and over. The same overpaid egomaniacs spouting meaningless platitudes. I'm glad this election is over, and maybe we can have a few months respite before the next one begins, assuming it hasn't begun already, which it probably has.  These are not proud days for America, the country is lost in fog, sunk into inertia, screwing up at home and overseas. The Republican victory feels suited to the times. Here's the keys to the country, kids. Try not to smash it up too badly. Bring it back by 2016 when the Democrats will take it for a spin. 
     Then again, this is nothing new either.
     "Politics is such a torment that I would advise everyone I love not to mix with it," Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1800. Advice worth taking.

Hey Bruce, welcome to power, buddy!

      Well, umm, this is awkward.
      Bruce, I mean, Mr. Rauner. Or, rather, governor. Allow me to be the first from the media jackal pack to extend a paw in congratulations.
     I’m hoping we can work together, let bygones be bygones, striving as fellow Illinoisans to try to push our beloved state out of the ditch it has undoubtedly fallen into.
     Sure, hard things were said during the campaign, by both sides. Well, by me at least—you don’t say a whole lot, do you? 
     So hard things, said on almost both sides. But isn’t that always the case? (And heck, you should have seen the barbs that my editor cut out, reluctant to have anyone’s physical abnormalities held up to ridicule, even a rich and, judging by the late returns, suddenly powerful individual who does indeed have lips, thin though they may be. But ho-ho, the less said about that the better!)
     Although, I’d debate how much power an Illinois governor really has. Oh sure, back in the day, he could commute death sentences, and that put a little spine into what is in effect the CEO of a broke and struggling public company, to occasionally have the phone line kept open to the death house, the midnight vigil, the governor like Solomon, weighing the scales of justice, life and death. 
     George Ryan wrecked all that.  Now the governor is inspecting the latest butter cow at the Illinois State Fair and presiding over the general collapse of the American dream, as China sprints past us and we fade.
     What will you do to fix that? We need to gauge our expectations. Those of us who backed Barack Obama expected him to do something, and while the sorta health care system he kinda installed over the frenzied howls of people like you is indeed an accomplishment, particularly from the perspective of  all those who now have access to health care and don’t have to die, we thought there would be more. I sure did. When I look at his first six years, I thought he would close Guantanamo Bay, like he promised, and do something about immigration, and a few other festering problems that instead were left to fester for another 2,000 days.

    To continue reading, click here.

Workers of the Divvy world, unite

    

     The great thing about Divvy bikes is they’re always there, scattered around downtown, ready to go.  Pop in your key, pull out a bike, go for a spin, never thinking that someone has to move the bikes from jammed stations to empty ones, someone has to fix them when they break, someone has to shovel the stations in winter.
     Those someones—43 Divvy workers; out of 56 employees—stepped out of the shadows last week, when they filed signed union cards with the National Labor Relations Board, asking to join the Transport Workers Union Local 100/AFL-CIO.
     “A lot of us have been here since launch day, and over time noticed systematic problems going on with Divvy,” said Nicole Cipri, one of the Divvy employees leading the union effort.    “A lot of it is mismanagement.”
     New York’s Citi bike program unionized in September and were recognized by Citi the day before workers were to hold elections.
     “We’re building a national bike share union,” said Nick Bedell, of the 39,000-member Transport Workers, most of whom are New York City public transit workers.
     The hard Chicago winter was a factor in employees’ decision to try to unionize.
     “When winter hit, a lot of us ended up working full time hours, “ said Caleb Usry, a part-time Divvy re-balancer. “All we did was shovel all day, working full time without full time benefits.  We were misled and told if we hung in there, those of us who were committed would go full time, have benefits. I was told that a dozen times. It never happened.”
      Workers in Boston and Washington D.C. are also unionizing; Boston votes on Dec. 4.
Cipri said frustration with how Divvy management has been treating employees led to the organizing effort.
     "They have been dangling a lot of raises and promotions in front of us, then never following through," she said. "There are issues with the disciplinary system. Basically you can be fired at will without any chance of trying to fight or even having arbitration. Scheduling is a huge issue. We don't often know what our schedule will be."
     I have been in a union for 27 years and believe that while they have flaws — going to bat for goldbricks, those insane McCormick Place rules of years gone by, corruption at the top — in general they help balance a system that otherwise skews too far in favor of owners. That so much of the public has been turned against unions is a tribute to the effectiveness of corporate spin.
     "Unionizing gives workers a formal mechanism to have a voice of work," Bedell said. "Instead of individuals complaining about situations, it creates a collective voice."
     Cipri said she was hired as a field checker for $12 an hour when Divvy began, was promised a raise, then told that nobody was "getting those kinds of raises because New York organized."
     "How does that even work?" she marveled. Eventually, she got a 30-cent-an-hour bump in August, then recently was promoted to mechanic and went to $13 an hour.
     Divvy management declined to comment.
     Divvy is useful, fun, inexpensive transportation, but it is also a luxury, a lark for those who want to save cab fare and feel the wind in their hair. I would suggest that those who use Divvyare exactly the type of customers who would be most turned off if Divvy management plays hardball with the grease-smeared kids who make the system work.
     "I actually really like working here," Cipri said. "There are a lot of good people here, but a lot of us are getting screwed over. . . .We've been talking to management about this stuff for ages."
     I told Cipri it takes a certain amount of courage to stick her neck out and try to unionize. Most people wouldn't risk it.
     "I'm just a mechanic," she said. "It's been really scary because I'm a good worker. I feel like I do a really solid job. I don't know if they're going to try to fire me. If they do, there's not a whole lot I can do."
     She said she and Usry, because of their efforts, have "painted big old targets on both of our foreheads." And yet . . .
     "On the other hand. I'm single," she said. "I don't have any kids. I don't have to pay for a house. I figured, I'm pretty much a free agent. What I really want is an equal voice for the workers in how things are operated."
     With management, "most of them don't understand the day-to-day running of these operations. A lot of them don't have the background, so they brush things off. If you're re-balancing [Divvy stations] down in the Loop, with six stations emptying out and three stations filled, with only two people working the Loop; management is OK with that, but for us it's a nightmare. We really just want to be able to do our jobs better."

Cat missing his master

     Every day since Ross went away to college in California, his cat Gizmo has positioned himself on his dresser and just sat there, waiting.
     He never did that before.
     Normally the most ebullient of cats, Gizmo seems very forlorn, alone in the boy's abandoned room, gazing down in a dejected fashion. We try not to let him pine there all day; we'll coax him down with a treat, or to play with a clump of feather attached to a metal wand. But his little feline heart isn't in it—I can tell—and he slinks away to mourn in private.
      We've brought in Northbrook's best cat psychologist, who says this is a textbook case of PPS—Pining Pet Syndrome....

    Okay, I made up all of the above. Gizmo isn't even Ross's cat, not really. More of the family cat. The only true part is that Gizmo was on Ross's dresser, glancing down, briefly, and I quickly snapped a picture before he looked up.
     "Anthropomorphism" is one of those $10 words I like to toss about though, as opposed to "rebarbative" it has the value of representing a concept that can't be boiled down into a phrase shorter than the word itself.
     It's a handy arrow to have in your quiver, and means, "ascribing human qualities to animals, or inanimate objects" and it's something people do all the time, whether deciding that our goldfish like us, or projecting abstract qualities such as wisdom upon animals such as owls based entirely on how they look. The public laps it up—one of the more surreal moments when Robin Williams died was when the keepers of Koko, a gorilla Williams had spent a few minutes with 13 years earlier, was dejected by the news. "At the end of the day, Koko became very somber, with her head bowed and her lip quivering," the institute noted, as if gorillas had the tendency to blubber like toddlers. which they don't.
     None of the TV journalists interviewing the keeper could manage the adult response: "That's insane!"
     Why do humans do this? I suppose the short answer is we love ourselves, deeply, and are hard-pressed to find others who love us in the same bottomless fashion, so we press animals into service and interpret their various twitches are more praise for us. I'm as guilty as anybody: I interpret the eagerness that our dog Kitty shows for my arrival as wild enthusiasm for me, as an individual, though in the back of my mind I acknowledge that her enthusiasm might be directly completely toward the treats I give her, and when she sees me her little plum of a brain is thinking, "Hooray, it's Mr. Treat Chute!"
     Assigning animals human qualities goes back to ancient times. Aristotle found partridges to be indecent, crows chaste. In Georgics, Virgil's book on farming, the author of the Aeneid describes bees as "stout-hearted warriors in their waxen kingdoms" and outlines their battles in heroic terms worthy of Ajax and Achilles.
    We see what we want to see, and if it isn't there, we squint, or frame the parts that suit or premise and ignore the rest or, heck, just make it up. The eagerness of people to lie—or, if you prefer, tell stories—is one of the great underappreciated facts of our existence.
     I suppose doing so makes the world a more interesting place, and I'm all for that. Whatever the prosaic truth is—Gizmo saw a mouse run past that spot and he's waiting for it to come back—doesn't hold up to the fairy tales we prefer to tell ourselves.

White or black, Lyric's "Porgy and Bess" is our history

 

     Sometimes it's better to be lucky than good. With November upon us, readers started asking about the Sun-Times Goes to the Lyric Contest, now in its sixth year. We'll be attending "Porgy and Bess" on Dec. 8, and I figured I had better get over there, watch rehearsals and think of something to write. It just so happened that, the moment I showed up, they began walking through this fraught scene with the detective arriving, searching for someone to pin Robbins' murder on, and its racial overtones just meshed too perfectly with post-Ferguson America. 

     Black people do not automatically cower when a cop walks into the room. They have to be taught, which Denni Sayers is endeavoring to do.

     “Everybody!” she says, to the performers gathered in the second floor rehearsal space at Lyric Opera of Chicago’s Civic Opera House. “When a policeman comes into the room, everybody turns away. Any of you are likely to get arrested, just for the color of your skin.”

     Nor does treating African-Americans with contempt come naturally, particularly to a Chicago actor like John Lister, who plays the detective in the Lyric’s production of “Porgy and Bess,” which opens Nov. 17.

    “You have no sympathy at all; you’re coming into a cage of animals,” Sayers, the opera’s choreographer and associate director, tells him. “It doesn’t matter who you arrest. Being a bully, you pick the weakest one.”

     This is the scene where friends of a murdered man are collecting money for his funeral when the law shows up. I’ve dropped in on this scene at random, in preparation for taking 100 readers to George and Ira Gershwin’s classic opera in December.

     Art endures because it resonates over time. "Porgy," far from being a musty 1930s set piece about a "lonely cripple" and a "liquor-guzzling slut," is all too current. It's hard to watch the residents of Catfish Row being imbued with the fear that Jim Crow demanded and not think of Ferguson, Missouri, and the unresolved racial issues that still simmer under the skin of America.
     Like many in the cast, Sayers has been doing "Porgy" for a long time, and it is scarily fascinating to see how she layers authentic details of the terrifying entrance of the detective, from having his deputy slam his palm loudly on a steel structure in the set to announce their arrival, to guiding Lister to gaze under the sheet at the body with a sneer of casual curiosity.
     This is Lister's first day of rehearsal. As an actor, he appreciates the details Sayers gives him, and the freedom to improvise his part. As a person, he finds it unsettling.
     "You feel bad. You want everyone there, who doesn't know you, to know you're really an OK guy," the Chicago actor says. (In a stroke of genius, only the white characters don't sing in "Porgy"). "Any time you're on a break, you're like, 'Hey! How are ya doing? I don't really hate you!' Because they don't know you. As far as they know, you're just a guy who walked in the room and started yelling at them."
     Black actors are challenged too. "It's hard to play that subservient character in the presence of bullying white folk," Sayers says. "Everyone's fought so long to not be that. But we are presenting a historical piece. People find it fascinating to go back and explore how things have changed and, in other ways, how they haven't changed at all."
     Sayers sees how black actors work their own experience into their parts: "Fortunately with this piece, so many people bring an awareness of their own family history."
     Such as Hlengiwe Mkhwanazi, 30, who plays "Clara," and grew up in Zululand.
     "First of all, I am South African," she says, during a break. "We are used to having that reaction when a white man comes into a room. So I know what it's like. Apartheid and all of that."
     Still?
     "It still happens. That's why 'Porgy and Bess' is so current. What happens is one of those things you never get past, it happens everywhere you go. You go to Europe, you find it. You go to America, you find it. South Africa. Wherever you go."
     "Sadly, it doesn't go away," agrees Sayers. "Which is why it's so vibrant a piece. It has resonance today."
     Not to give you the impression that "Porgy and Bess" is a grim history lesson. I would argue it's so vibrant a piece because George Gershwin wrote the music. I'm sure some who go will hear songs they've heard for years and never knew were in an opera. I didn't know "Summertime" was a lullaby until I saw the Lyric's "Porgy" six years ago. It is, opening the show, sung by Mkhwanazi to a baby who will pass through the hands of three mothers before the opera's done.
     Many have argued that four white folk (the Gershwins created the opera with DuBose and Dorothy Heyward) aren't allowed to convey the black experience in dialect yet. Some think they stole black culture.  
      "I disagree with that," said Karen Slack, who plays the widow Serena. "I don't think they stole it. I think they gave us a gift, a wonderful gift. By putting that time period with jazz and infusing it with gospel, they really stuck to the truth. They sat in the back of the church and soaked it up. It's a piece of Americana: black, white, it's our history."