Wednesday, June 7, 2023

Chicago has rolled with radio for 101 years



     Not many Chicagoans recognize the name George Frost. Typical for a city that shrugs off its technological pioneers. I also imagine most people here, even if they know the atom was first split by human agency on that repurposed squash court under the stands at Stagg Field on the University of Chicago campus in 1942, have no idea which human led the effort (sigh, Enrico Fermi, which will be better known when Columbus Drive is finally named after him, perhaps by the centennial in 2042).
     Frost is considered the first person to rig up a car radio, putting one in the door of his Ford Model T, in May 1922, in his capacity as president of the Radio Club at Lane High School.
     Somebody was going to do it — cars were all the rage and radio was all the rage, particularly in Chicago. (Ever wonder why the red wagons manufactured here for years were called Radio Flyers? What is “radio” about a kid’s wagon? The answer: Radio was wildly popular, and Antonio Pasin, the Italian immigrant who founded the company, wanted his wagons to be wildly popular, too. The “Flyer” part of the name was a nod to Charles Lindbergh.)
     That same year, 1930, that Liberty Coaster changed its name to Radio Flyer, another burgeoning Chicago company, destined also to build an empire based on mobility, Motorola, started selling radios specifically designed to go into cars. Founder Paul Galvin said he came up with the company name while shaving, a mashup of “motor” and “Victrola” (double sigh: a kind of early record player). The ST71 cost $110, and to put that in perspective, the average new car cost $600 in 1930, which means putting in that new Motorola gizmo would be like paying $5,000 for a car’s sound system today.
     Those expensive receivers were AM radios. The AM range of the electronic spectrum, from 535 to 1700 kHz, has been popular ever since, as it leads to a stronger signal because the waves don’t skip away out of the Earth’s atmosphere as easily as FM waves. AM reception has an improved signal-to-noise ratio, or less interference.

To continue reading, click here.

Tuesday, June 6, 2023

Art and the suburbs

"Factories at Clichy" by Vincent Van Gogh

       I have an amazing capacity to miss things: the big game, the hot concert, the hit TV series, the latest best-seller. General acclaim is off-putting to me — I avoided the Harry Potter books for years because I assumed anything that popular had to be crap.
      My Achilles heel is museums. If I go to a city, I want to visit the local museum, to see what they've got. There isn't much in Dallas after you've clapped eyes on Dealey Plaza, but if you slide by to convenient Fort Worth, the Amon Carter Museum of American Art does have Grant Wood’s wry masterpiece, "Parson Weems' Fable," and that's enough to make a trip to Dallas worthwhile, almost.
      Museum shows are even more compelling — unprecedented in-gatherings of great works from all over the world. You miss one, and it's never coming back. You can motivate yourself to go see a famous work that has taken up brief residence at the corner of Adams and Michigan. Or you can haul your ass to the Hermitage.
     Though I don't rush to be among the first. I've done that. I think it was opening day of the Monet show, years ago. The advertising had been particularly aggressive, and everybody else in Chicago had the same idea. I said to Edie, "This is like trying to look at art in a crowded 'L' car."
     And I don't come at the very end, because that too, is crowded with stragglers. (Though I do remember arriving 90 minutes before closing of a Georgia O'Keeffe show, flashing my press card and blowing in).

     So I wanted to see the Dali Show before it closed. Even though I don't particularly like Dali. Why? The paintings are small, distorted, dark, weird. His showman's aspect. His paintings are circuses in oils. His whole personality. The waxed mustache. The affectations. The way Dali let himself be taken advantage of at the end, signing stacks of blank paper. All art is fraud, but Dali overdoes it.
     But you never know. Sometimes the comprehensive museum show of a particular artist will win you over. I didn't think much of Andy Warhol, either, until he got the full Art Institute treatment. You had to be impressed with the skill, the creativity, he shifted from an ad illustrator drawing shoes to the darling of the creative world. This was Dali's first major exhibition at the Art Institute.
   Plus my wife really wanted to go. She had seen an early 1925 Dali portrait of a woman turned away from the viewer, when we were in Barcelona at the Reina Sofia, and it struck her.
     The optical illusions were not without charm, though his phallic tower seemed more juvenile than transgressive. Fame and art are generally at odds, and there he was, part of the 1939 New York World's Fair and on the cover of time. He's more in the realm of Peter Max of artists famous for being famous more than famous for being good. Though I invite readers who disagree to make their case.
     After dispensing with Dali, we headed to the "Van Gogh and the Avant-Garde: The Modern Landscape" show. Such are the riches of the Art Institute that I didn't even realize the Van Gogh show was there until we walked in. 
      I am not, as a rule, a big landscape fan — I like people in my art  — but this focused on the tortured Dutch painter and his circle of younger artist friends lighting out for the suburbs to find their muse — as a suburbanite myself, I enjoyed the narrative that Van Gogh had to escape the narrow confines of Paris and find his true artistic self in the suburbs an hour away.
"The Seine at Saint-Ouen, Morning," Charles Angrand
     It groups five artists — not just Van Gogh, but Georges Seurat, Paul Signac, Emile Bernard, and Charles Angrand, who painted together, argued, inspired and disgusted each other between the years 1882 and 1890 during the three months he painted at Asnieres, Clichy and the Island of La Grande Jatte. One was Charles Angrand, and I admired a painting of the Seine that was mostly green and blue dappled water.
     Indeed, I found myself appreciating the words of the lesser-known artists even more than Van Gogh, who could include these stiff little figures in his landscapes, and had not yet entered into the blazing glory of his final phase.
     The show not only discusses the artists and their work, but the societal changes going on at that exact moment, as greenery gives way to train stations, bridge embankments, and the factories that Van Gogh captures so charmingly above.
     If the "Grand Jatte" above sparked an association, you've seen the Georges Seurat masterpiece "A Sunday on the Isle of Grande Jatte." He was among the group of painters working in the Paris suburbs — the first to fix on the bucolic retreat in the Seine between Neuilly-sur-Seine and Levallois.
     He did hundreds of sketches and preliminary studies for the enormous canvas, a number included in this show, and one of the takeaways for me was just how much trial and effort it took for him to get the composition right, arranging and rearranging the trees, playing with the angles of their limbs, experimenting with various groupings and individuals.
     Some of the quick studies were themselves engaging works of art, such as trying to get the exact angle of a woman turned away from the viewer in this Conte crayon sketch, and it's only now that I realize it's something of a mirror image of the Dali work at the top of this short summation that captivated my wife. Birds of a feather. 
      We spent a lot of time reading the commentary of the show. Van Gogh died at 37, but Seurat was even younger, 31, when he succumbed to an infection. If "Grande Jatte" weren't singular enough on its own, it's the only major painting he created, along with "Bathers at Asnieres." 
      On that note, it's probably best for me to start my day and let you go about yours. My apologies for this awkward veer into art criticism — a reader in the comments section yesterday asked for it, and I figured, it's as good a theme as any. 
      The Dali Show only runs until June 12, so you'll have to get a move on if you want to see it.  The landscapes exhibit — Van Gogh's name is in the title, but only 25 of the 75 works on display are his, opened mid-May, and will run all summer, until Sept. 4. Many of the works are from private or obscure collections, have never been publicly displayed before and might never been seen again. Now's your chance.


Monday, June 5, 2023

‘Swiftian’ takes on a new meaning as Taylor Swift fans descend on Chicago


     My wife and I joined the legions of Taylor Swift fans heading downtown Friday afternoon, clad in white cowboy boots, little fringed dresses and pink sequined cowboy hats.
     The fans, that is. My wife and I wore regular clothes appropriate for a 60ish couple visiting the Art Institute (sigh, all right. Me: black jeans, sky blue button-down shirt and blue boat shoes; my wife: lovely in a deep red flowered skirt, black blouse and sandals).
     Our journey had nothing to do with the big concert at Soldier Field. But the timing certainly was fortunate. The ingathering for the first of the weekend’s three Swift shows cast a festive tone.
     Most people waiting on the platform in Northbrook for the 1:35 p.m. Metra were Swift fans, though not all dressed for the occasion. To our left, a 30ish couple in standard-issue suburban dishabille, the man carrying a backpack. Heading, he said, to check into a hotel before the concert.
     “Smart!” I replied, the “What’s a few hundred dollars more on top of the several grand you laid out for tickets,” being unvoiced.
     Not to pass judgment. You put your money where your passion lies, if you’re lucky enough to have both money and a passion. My wife and I blew ... ah ... a Taylor Swift ticket worth of greenery to plant this spring. Those bushes and flowers will no doubt be dried husks buried in landfill while memories of the concert are still glittering bright.
     To our right, five young women in two groups. A pair in the aforementioned white boots and fringes. A second group of three teens, a father flitting around them. As he left, he turned to us — like an actor breaking the fourth wall — and observed that sending them downtown is the easy part. The challenge will be driving to Soldier Field at midnight to retrieve them.

To continue reading, click here.

Sunday, June 4, 2023

A man walks into a bar

  
Tyler, bartender at Schuba's, 3159 N. Southport.

      Sometimes a man needs to go to a bar.
      Okay, "needs" is the wrong word. In my world, if you need something, then you probably should avoid it. What I needed was a convenient spot for dinner. The bar happened to be that place.
     This was last Tuesday. Our theater tickets were for 7 p.m. My wife got off work at 5 p.m. The venue, Theatre Wit, sort of a freelance stage for hire, is at 1229 W. Belmont. There was the matter of dinner. Schuba's is a couple blocks west, at the corner of Southport. Why not meet there at 6 p.m.? But first wondered if Schuba's serves food. Isn't it a concert hall now? A bit of online checking. Yes, there seems to be food — not much of a menu. But enough.
     I can't express how lovely it felt to stride into Schuba's — particularly after a solid hour on the expressway — all dim and airy, cool and summery. Tyler asked me what I wanted — some bartenders botch that part — and I asked him if they have any NA beer. Some bars still don't, particularly neighborhood places.  
     Schubas has a list. The first on the list was "Visitor," a Chicago-made lager, so I ordered that. Visitor was great, truly excellent. I finished it and moved down the list to a Paradiso IPA. Not quite as superlative as Visitor, but not bad either. I tweeted photos of the beers — originally I planned on echoing all those "Undisclosed location" shots that certain Chicago peripatetics  tweet from bars. Then I realized the Schuba coaster would give away the game, if I pulled the can slightly off it, and I went with "Disclosed location." That struck me as clever. 
     Admittedly, I don't spend much time in bars anymore. It felt very refreshing to be back for a visit, particularly to Schuba's, which I had been to before ... a thought came to me. "Didn't you used to have a photo booth?" My older son, about 5, when we still were in the city. His pediatrician was nearby. We must have grabbed lunch beforehand. I remembered crowding into the photo booth together. "It's still there," Tyler said, pointing toward the back. Most things change; a few stay the same.
     The bartender and I chatted. People came and went. My wife showed up, and told me she had run into our old friends, Cate and Ron — they too were going to see the play, "Shaw vs. Tunney," by Doug Post, the world premiere of a three-person character study about the unlikely friendship between the great Irish playwright, George Bernard Shaw, and boxer Gene Tunney. I wrote about it couple weeks ago. 
      We ordered, hummus and a salad with chicken, a draft cider for Edie. Cate and Ron showed up. More pints, and some brussels sprouts. Chairs were pulled up. The hummus was laden with grilled vegetables, the pita soft, the chicken on the salad was succulent, the butter lettuce fresh. Conversation ensued.
     Soon it was time to go. From what I had seen of bar life — a young woman my wife had noticed sprawled on the sidewalk with her friend; now threatening to tumble off her bar stool, drinking more — I can't say I wished I were one of the tattooed regulars, if that's what they were. But it was a nice place to visit. Schubas: the food and the service are great. And the atmosphere. And the location. And the exterior. It's actually quite a list. Yes, I know, the place is an icon — built in 1903, a "tied house" owned by a brewery, with the gorgeous Schlitz terra cotta work glorying the building. It hardly needs my endorsement. I'm not spilling the beans. ("When visiting Wrigley Field, look to the wall: there's ivy on it!") But I figure, maybe you could use a reminder — I know I did, in the form of a play luring me to the neighborhood. I'll be back.
     The play, by the way, "Tunney v. Shaw," is an engaging piece, well-acted and intimate. Richard Henzel stood out in the role of George Bernard Shaw, playing the Irish writer with captivating wit and sparkle. I was particularly impressed toward the end, how he transformed into an aged Shaw, not through make-up, but just by altering his mien. He just seemed much older. In an intimate space like Theater Wit, the play practically unfolds in your lap, and it takes a lot of artistry to make the thing work. "Shaw v. Tunney" works.
      I hadn't known much about Shaw before; I did know he was a famous atheist, but didn't realize that he ... spoiler alert ... struggled with his atheism. Watching the play, I felt at times it was Delivering a Message a tad heavy-handedly. Or maybe it just wasn't a message that I like to hear — faith conquering doubt after the most threadbare of miracles. At the after-party, I asked playwright Doug Post whether that narrative was fictional, and he assured me it wasn't, that the lines he put in Shaw's mouth about being a fallen atheist were direct quotes. 
     The play runs until July 8, and tickets are $38 and $40. It isn't "Medea." But it'll give you and your date something to talk about at Schuba's afterward. Edie and I and Cate and Ron certainly talked about what we had seen for quite a while, and that is the mark of a worthwhile theater experience.



Saturday, June 3, 2023

Flashback 2007: "Take pride in slave past? At least this country admits shameful history"

     I don't like to repeat myself. Even across a span of years. So Friday, when I was beginning a column where I told a story about my older son and acid. Then I paused, and wondered: did I already write this?
     Sixteen years ago. And while I don't imagine many readers would rattle their papers and say, "Heyyyy, I read this already, in 2007!" I do have my pride. I'm glad I wrote it down then, because memory is fallible. Remembering it now, it was the boy, not myself, who found the chemical house selling the acid. Anyway, best let that column tell the story. 
     This was when the column filled a page, and I've left in the original subheadings, and the lame joke at the end. I hardly need to point out that the opening argument is now sadly untrue, as portions of the country have decided that failing to teach children our nation's tragic racial history will somehow make them feel better, when all it does is guarantee that their children will be as ignorant as themselves, a safe bet already, no action necessary.

OPENING SHOT . . .

     You want to feel good about this country? Talk about slavery.
     How, you may ask, can this shameful peak of human cruelty, whose lingering bad effects are felt to this day, be a source of pride to the nation that tolerated its existence for nearly a century?
     Because at least we recognize it. We are aware of it; we teach about slavery in schools. We can talk about it. And if we don't face facts as much as we should, then at least debating them isn't against the law.
     Compare that to Turkey. A nation of 72 million people, Turkey is the most westernized Muslim state in the world. And yet, a Turkish writer would commit a crime and risk prison just by writing this sentence: "in 1915, Turks oversaw the murder of 1.5 million Armenians, the largest European genocide before World War II."
     To Turkey, this is slander. So now, our alliance is endangered -- Turkey has recalled its ambassador, and is threatening to stop helping us wage our losing war in Iraq -- just because a House subcommittee voted to label the 1915 deaths a "genocide.''
     Why do they act this way? National pride, and inability to process difficult truths. A too common problem in this world. The United States might have its moments of shame, like any other land. But at least we can talk about them. We should be proud of that.

Footnote:

     I do think about this stuff, you know. I don't just toss some Boggle cubes and transcribe the result. When I wrote above that this nation tolerated slavery "for nearly a century," that is because the United States came into existence in 1776 and the Emancipation Proclamation was issued in 1863. Before 1776, we were English colonies, and slavery was legal in England until 1807.
    Some try to stretch it to centuries, beginning with the moment that Columbus set a toe in America in 1492 up until yesterday. That seems disingenuous to me. The truth is bad enough; no need to stretch it.

1 DOWN, 127 TO GO . . ."

     There's that moment when a dad hears a phrase from his kid for the very first time and thinks: "Oh boy. I wonder how many more times I'm going to hear that?"
     A bit of background. A while back, when Son No. 1 started growing his hair long, I made a conscious decision not to make him cut it.
     "I'm not fighting about hair," I kept telling my wife, thinking back to all the pointless, get-a-haircut-hippie arguments that have been tearing up families for the past 40 years. I'm not going there. This isn't timidity -- not entirely -- I want him to listen to me because when I put my foot down about something, it's important. No, you can't drive the car. No, you can't play with hydrochloric acid unsupervised.
     How long a boy's hair is isn't important.
     Friday morning, he's hustling out the door to school. I say goodbye and try to plant a kiss on top of his head -- tougher to do lately, but sometimes I pull it off.
     "Don't touch my hair!" he says, twisting away.
     "He's got it just the way he likes it," my wife explains helpfully.
     "OK, then," I say, watching him as he hurries out the door.

THE CHEMICAL PARENT

     That line about hydrochloric acid, by the way, isn't some bit of comic fancy I pulled out of the air, but a real issue from daily life that actually occurred and merits mention.
     Normally I like to present a united front with the wife when it comes to child rearing. Even when I might have decided differently about a situation, I tend to back her up once she has laid down the law.
     Otherwise, the boys play us off each other and things get nuts.  
    Yet somehow, in this particular situation, inspiration struck me, and I felt compelled to break ranks.
     My wife was busily seeing how many ways she could say "No" when I butted in.
     "Sure, we can get some hydrochloric acid for you to experiment with," I told my 11-year-old son, who must have read about it in Stephen King. "I'll go online right now and find a place that'll sell it."
     His face lit up. "Really?" he said. My wife shot me a look that itself was rather acidic -- say a pH1 -- as I retired to the office to scout cyberspace.
     To be honest it took some doing -- most chemical shops want only to send acids to schools, but I finally located an industrial chemical outlet that asks only for assurances its products will be used for an educational purpose -- which is the plan.
     Four ounces of acid, by the time we paid for special delivery and hazardous materials handling, would cost about $50.
     "That's a lot of money," I said to him. "So if I'm going to shell that out, I want to make sure you know what you're doing."
     I handed him a sheet of guidelines for the handling of chemicals printed off the Ohio State University Chemistry Department website.
     "Familiarize yourself with these," I said. "And study this." I set down a piece of paper explaining acid, base and pH. "Then I want you to write out what acid is and exactly what experiments you intend to do with your acid. And as soon as you've done that, I'll place the order."
     Needless to say, he never mentioned hydrochloric acid again, to my mingled relief and disappointment. And I felt I had made a strategic parenting breakthrough. So if next time he comes and says, "Dad, can we get a grizzly bear?" instead of arguing about it, I'll say, "Sure, but a bear like that will need a big pen: you'd better start building. But first, research the law regarding keeping wild animals in suburban yards . . ."

TODAY'S CHUCKLE. . .

     A joke from Robert Hawkins in honor of the Army hitting its recruiting goals by lowering its standards:
     I joined the Army because I was 18 and bored with the 10th grade.
              — Originally published in the Sun-Times, Oct. 14, 2007

Friday, June 2, 2023

Sleepy Joe flashes his steel


     My wife pays the bills. A few paid by check, an antique practice akin to churning butter. Most paid electronically, online. And a few, key expenses deducted automatically from our checking account. Which means ... well, I really have no idea what the actual process entails. A bundle of electrons sent by the Firm Handshake Mortgage Company meet once a month in some dim silicon chip alley with another clump of electrons sent by our bank account. A microsecond exchange occurs, some digital version of flashing gang signs, and we’re good for another month. I’ve honestly never thought about it before.
     My contribution is some of the money. Being otherwise excused from this process has been one of the great boons of my life, like being the son of an atomic scientist or owning a dog.
     But let’s pretend I did have a role in the physical bill-paying process. Let’s say that, due to some banking regulation, I was required to ring a big gong to make the payment of bills binding and official. A round circle of bronze the size of a garbage can lid, hanging from black silk cords on our porch. For some obscure reason, I had to be the one to hit the gong — a long, quavering boooonnnng — to seal the transaction.
     Now let’s say that I decide I won’t do it. Not until some long-running household dispute is settled in my favor. Not until we buy all new dish towels. My wife, a frugal gal raised in Bellwood, uses a motley of worn dish towels of all colors, shapes and sizes, some decades old, in shades of horrendous brown. I, grandiose, would like to simply throw the old, disreputable dish towels away, and replace them with a new stack of white French dish towels from Williams-Sonoma.
     So I refuse to ring the gong. Not until the dish towel situation is addressed. Meaning the bills won’t be paid, threatening to cause the bad things that happen when you don’t pay your bills — demands from aggressive collection agencies, bad credit ratings, salary being dunned, and so on. That would hurt me, too, since I live in the same household. But I don’t care. I want new dish towels. So I blackmail my wife.

To continue reading, click here.

Thursday, June 1, 2023

Flashback 1993: "Shiver like rhesus monkeys"

        The 95th Scripps National Spelling Bee ends today in Maryland, and as usual, I cast a wistful smile back to a time, exactly 30 years ago, when I spent a year reporting on the bee, tagging along after Sruti Nadimpalli, 12, on her quest to win the 1993 bee  for my book, "Complete and Utter Failure." It was a creative piece of reporting, back then. Spelling Bees were not literary cliches, back then, Not seen as worthy of more than passing contemplation — and I can take a bit of credit for the bee-as-literature subgenre that later formed, as Myla Goldberg, in her novel "Bee Season," credits that chapter with getting the gears turning.  
     The bee often veered into tedium, and I used a technique I called "Showing the wires" — you see me, trying to report the story. This is from a chapter called, "Shiver Like Rhesus Monkeys" and this scene, at the National Bee finals in Washington, D.C., excerpt explains why:

      In the press room, I find three Scripps-Howard staffers — college kids, in spelling bee T-shirts. They are hanging out, having fun; and introducing myself, I join them. "You have to meet Mr. Bee," says Ellen Morrison, a DePauw University senior, taking me up to a 3-foot-high wood-and-wire bee figure. Mr. Bee has a pleasing, 1950s, Reddy Kilowatt feel, and I suggest they would sell more bee T-shirts if they put his picture on them rather than the present drab sextet of stylized words (a multicolored "spectrum," "staccato" written over musical bars, a striped "zebroid" and so on).
     We have a wide-ranging conversation about the bee. The volunteers are surprisingly loose with negative information. Joel Pipkin, a recent graduate from Midwestern State University, suggests that the bee is a good way for junior high school kids to pick each other up — he has seen contestants holding hands. Just joking, of course, he quickly adds. Ha-ha-ha. they tell me about nervous kids falling off the stage, and about the Comfort Room, a chamber off the ballroom where the failed contestants are immediately led to compose themselves after missing their words.
     "You won't be allowed in, because the kids will be upset," says Shannon Harris, another DePauw student.
     "And because you're a journalist," adds Ellen Morrison, who seems to have a thing against journalists, so much so that I ask why. She explains that a few days earlier the Washington Post ran a scathing article about the bee, and so everybody on the bee staff is skittish around reporters. I thank her for this information.
     They are so forthcoming with damning details about the bee that I find myself laboriously explaining the journalistic process to them. I say something like, "You understand that I'm a writer. I'm talking to you because I'm writing a book, which will be published and the general public will then read." Normally this speech is reserved for people I suspect of having limited mental capacity, given in the hope of helping them to comprehend what is going on and reducing the chances of their being surprised to see their words in print later on.
     The next morning, I get to the bee a half hour early, thinking I must sit with the parents since I haven't been accredited as a reporter. The first person I run into is Ellen Morrison, barely recognizable in her peach publicist's suit and done-up hair. She flaps over to me, a flurry of concern, worried that I will quote her candid comments of the day before "out of context."
     The concept of being quoted out of context was invented, I believe, by people who blurt out ill-advised statements and then regret them later. True out-of-context distortion — someone saying, "It's not as if I'm a thing of evil," and being quoted as bragging "I'm a thing of evil" — is rare to the point of being unknown.
     On the other hand, highlighting controversial statements over the more mundane is the basis of reporting. That's what news is. If I interview a kindly old kindergarten teacher who spends forty-five minutes telling me how much she loves the kids, and bakes them cookies shaped in the letters of their names, and then suddenly adds, "Of course, what I'd really like to do is to strip the little buggers naked and torture them to death with a potato peeler," her previous sentiments suddenly diminish in value. Perhaps, from her perspective, it is unfair to seize on a single sentence and obsess over it, ignoring for the most part her loftier expressions. But from the perspective of everybody else, I don't have much choice.
     I try to reassure Morrison that, Janet Malcolm notwithstanding, most journalists are not out to pointlessly skewer innocent subjects. We don't have to. The beauty part of the profession is that the guilty almost always find a way to impale themselves, with little or no assistance necessary.
     As if to prove my point, Morrison takes me in into the Comfort Room, which I have asked to see beforehand, since as a journalist I will not be allowed to enter once the bee begins.
    She gives me a quick tour of the narrow, elegant little room. Her narration, in the best and most in-context transcription I can make off my tape, is as follows, beginning with her pointing out a few objects in the room:
    "Mr. Bee. Food. Dictionary. Parents are allowed back here. No journalists are allowed back here. We'll have some upset kids back here. Usually we have a curtain across the middle so the ones that are crying usually go hide behind it in the corner and shiver like rhesus monkeys, you know: wooo, ooo, ooo."

     I'll never forget standing there, holding my little miniature tape recorder, as Morrison said that, thinking, "You people are insane..."