Tiny scientists mobilized to study eclipse

     I didn't want to get political on this post, but as I was watching this one fledging, ad hoc science program at one pre-school in Chicago, I couldn't help but think of millions of children in tens of thousands of pre-schools across the country being indoctrinated in the sort of magical thinking and mendacious myth that gets a Donald Trump elected president. 

     Jason Henning is a post-doctorate fellow at the Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics at the University of Chicago. He's been to the South Pole three times, working on the university's 10-meter telescope there.
     On Tuesday morning, he found himself advancing science in a place it doesn't frequently go: sitting on a too small chair in a basement classroom with the lights dimmed.
     "Who's ready for an eclipse?" he asked a group of 4- and 5-year-olds sitting around a table at Bright Horizons at Lakeview, a preschool.          

     The youngsters didn't exactly squeal "Yes!" in unison, but they at least cast their attention in his general direction. Henning proceeded, using a small model Earth, moon and, as a light source, a lamp with a dinosaur base.
     "Does anybody know how you make night and day?" asked Henning. "Does anybody remember?"
     "Spin the Earth," squeaked Emily.
      Henning was joined by Joshua Sobrin, a U. of C. physics graduate student, also with Kavli.
     If it seems odd that a pair of such advanced scientific talents would spend time instructing children who might miss the eclipse Aug. 21 because it arrives in the middle of their nap time, well, there's a simple explanation.
     Sobrin's wife, Sweta Sobrin, is a teacher at Bright Horizons.

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Picketing a building over something important but we won't tell you what

     I don't understand people. 
     Or maybe I do; they're slow. And timid. 
     Maybe I better just tell the story.
     So Thursday, I'm meeting a friend for coffee on Wells Street, in Old Town. Quick two stop trip up the Brown Line. Easy stroll a few blocks east along North Avenue. 
     On the way back, I notice this gentleman, Bob Sheahan, picketing a building all alone. We stop and chat pleasantly. "Any relation to Mike Sheahan?" I ask. The former Cook County sheriff. No, lots of Sheahans. 
     Why did I stop? I'm in a union too, and I like to show solidarity with picketers, because nothing is worse than picketing. It's lonely. It's dull. It's often pointless. I hate it, and feel pity for anyone forced to do it.
     The building behind him, Sheahan said, was built by union steelworkers. But the framing out is being done by non-union (and, therefore, the implication is, inferior) labor.  
     Hence the picketing. They'd been picketing for six months. 
     Six months.
     He was eager for me to know about the situation, and I would take no issue with him. But I asked one of those probing questions journalists ask.
    "What's this cross street here?" I said, glancing around for a sign. For some reason that prompted Sheahan to usher me over to someone in higher authority, a guy in a car parked down the street whose name I didn't catch. The guy in a car was on the phone—maybe strategizing how to get more media attention—and didn't want to get out of the car or talk to me. He suggested I talk to someone at the Chicago Regional Council of Carpenters.
    Who?

    "Gary Perinar," he said. "And the phone number?"  He gave me a number. When I got back to the office, I phoned and left a message: saw the picket, interested in the issue. Please call me.  

     Nothing on Friday. Nothing on Monday, so I called again. Nothing. Silence.
     Hmmm...you picket a building for six months, why? You want the word out, right? You want people to know, to be aware that this particularly building is not being built in a desirable fashion. And all that time, these poor union carpenter foot soldiers, holding their signs—not the most efficient use of communications technology—to an audience of cars whizzing along North Avenue. The heart breaks. Support your guys.
     Yet should the distracted beast of the media pause and pay attention, they all scatter. Maybe it's the same publicity phobia you find in cops and fire fighters. Fear of the Man. They don't want to stick their neck out. Maybe they're like corporations. The gears turn slowly. I'll hear from them in a week.
     Whatever the situation, indifferent or a defensive crouch, silence doesn't  work in this information age. One reason it's so easy for unions to become punching bags is they don't speak up for themselves, not even when you give them an engraved invitation to do so. The paper is owned by unions now, though honestly, I'm not worried about them telling us what to do. Just the opposite; with unions, as with any organization, it can be a challenge just to get them to pry open their yaps and let words out. And the sad thing is, now they'll call. To complain.  

Russian artist fighting to make America her home

Yulia Kuznetsova

    Fiona McEntee is an immigration attorney. Born in Dublin, she has practiced law in Chicago for the past 10 years. Hundreds of would-be clients have found their way to her office, seeking her help in maintaining their tenuous finger hold on the American Dream.
    Only one, Yulia Kuznetsova, made her weep.
    "I actually cried, and I never cried in a consultation before in my life," said McEntee. "This is a really emotional situation. I felt the weight she has on her shoulders. She is just so talented."
     Kuznetsova is an artist, a painter from Russia. Twenty-four years old, she was 19 when she was accepted to the School of the Art Institute. Her parents sold their apartment in Moscow to pay her tuition.
    There's a lot of that going around. Some 900,000 foreign students come to this country, where American colleges accept them—and their rupees, pounds, euros and rubles—with open arms. Then the students graduate, and the United States tries to boot them out, just when they're ready to be productive. A cruel trick, really.
   As I dug into Kuznetsova's life, now-you-cry part eluded me. There seemed to be a dark buried something that I couldn't put my finger on.
     I spoke with one of her teachers at the School of the Art Institute.
    "She's very agile with paint," said MaryLou Zelazny, a professor of painting and drawing. "She's masterful, and has got a tremendous facility. She comes up with images that are very heartfelt and personal."
    Can't a person paint in Russia?
    "No," replied Zelazny. "Not with the censorship they have now."

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Asombro en el agua

Photo by Matt Beard

      I didn't think they could do it. Not again.
      My strongest memory of the first time I saw Cirque du Soleil,  some 30 years ago, was walking out of a tent by Navy Pier with open-mouthed wonder. I had never seen anything like it; they had taken the circus, trimmed away all the problematic animals, and created a show out of pure whimsy and athleticism, twirling acrobats gibbering in an invented language, wicked clowns snatching eyeglasses from audience members and depositing them on faces far away. I felt like a child staring at the stars.
     Since then I'd seen the show a few times, in various incarnations, the most recently a decade back, with the family in Disney World. It was still very good, but that sense of miracle had faded into something expected: 80-pound Chinese acrobats forming a pyramid.
     But they invited me to the Friday opening of "Luzia: A Waking Dream of Mexico," playing until Sept. 3 in a big top in the parking lot of United Center, and my wife and I went, hoping for a diverting evening, nothing more. What we got was amazement. "Wow!" my wife kept saying. "Wow!"
     Any one stunt—aerialists leaping from swinging platforms, tumblers dressed as birds diving through hoops, a lady performing in a rolling ring, strong men bracing against high poles—might have been merely well-done, a perfectly executed trick seen before. But taken together, the music, the costumes, the sets, colorful and redolent of Day of the Dead iconography, worked together to nudge it toward magic, not a word I use lightly. Lucha libre wrestlers, bird people, musicians, a Mexican carnival come to life.

Photo by Matt Beard

    The show opens on a treadmill--a butterfly dancer running before a giant horse, one of several enormous puppet creatures Cirque employs to good effect. The seamless integration of the contraption amped up the wonder, the first of several mechanisms well integrated into the show. Particularly the "rain curtain," which added comedy—a lanky clown trying to fill a canteen—difficulty, for artists doing once familiar stunts, now in a downpour, and visual interest, as the water was manipulated into marvelous shapes, fishes and birds and flowers.
    It's a difficult performance to convey in words, or even in pictures. Looking at the press photos, I kept thinking, "No, that it isn't it at all." They were fine photographs, not a question of their quality. But separated from their context, from the trilling enthusiasm and happiness of the performance and they were beetles tacked to a board, beautiful, but lacking the life that was pulsing through them.  Like stills from a gorgeous movie.
     If I said there was a juggler you might shrug—we've seen jugglers— but this juggler, blazing, intent, energetic to the highest pitch, doing the fastest juggling I've ever seen, six sparkling pins in the air, was breathtaking. If I said a man and a woman came out and free-styled with a pair of soccer balls, you might reply "So what?" But to see them do it, the balls one moment spinning on their heads, the next deftly held in the arch of their foot, moved around their bodies as if on a track, was a wonder to behold. And the contortionist—at one point I had to shield my eyes. Creepy and incredible.
    Earlier in the day, at the paper, I told a colleague that I was going to "Cirque" and he looked at me strangely. "That doesn't seem your type of thing," he said, or words to that effect. And yes, while I'm more given to "Medea" or "Valkyrie"—which starts tech rehearsals soon at the Lyric—I really think you'd have to be dead not to be thrilled at "Luzia." My wife already wants to go back. And at the risk of politicizing a circus in our very political times, to present such a joyous and amazing romp through the lens of the rich culture of Mexico, a country constantly scorned and mocked by our toxic shame of a president, well, that's icing on the cake. 
      There's so much going on in "Luzia." Aerialists, acrobats, clowns. At one point, three cast members came onstage dressed as cacti, a bit of comic relief. "Look at the cactus in the middle" I said to my wife, and she laughed—a strategically-placed stem jutted suggestively from his mid-section. We both did, smiling at the bobbing cactus part; it was funny, both understated and in plain view, at least in profile. You had to admire the directness of it, of the whole thing, the entire enterprise, from high to low, soaring aerialists and flights of comedy, taking the familiar, cherished Cirque du Soleil formula and somehow making it fresh and fantastic once again.

Saturday fun activity: Where IS this?

     As with last week, I was going about my business, not thinking of the blog at all—it does happen—when I noticed a tableau that fairly shouted: "Saturday fun activity!"
     On the plus side. Very few people could have been in the room with this avian menagerie. It isn't some public spot that readers are constantly traipsing past. So that ramps up the difficulty factor.
     On the negative, someone knowledgable about the circles I travel in might hazard a guess.
     Which makes it doable and, who am I fooling, if history is any judge, it'll be cracked at 7:03 a.m., as always.
     Still, a guy can dream. Right? Right?! I mean Trump hasn't banned it yet, has he?
     So where is this flock of birds? The winner gets my already-five-years-old-Christ-I-can't-believe-it book about the city, "You Were Never in Chicago." Place you guesses below. Good luck. 

What are you doing up?

     It's Saturday, and once again I've blundered onto grist for the Saturday fun activity. Which posts at 7 a.m. G'night. 

     Oh, and it's not the place above. I just picked that photo. 

Two women share their thoughts on the Holocaust, abortion

Paris Pantheon

     The names Simone Veil and Brittany Carl probably shouldn't be mentioned in the same sentence. It's an insult to one; I'll let you figure out which.
     Veil was an icon of French politics, its most significant stateswoman in the past half century, twice the nation's minister of health, the first woman president of the European Union. She died June 30 and was interred in the Paris Pantheon, a rare woman honored among French heroes such as Voltaire, Victor Hugo and Emile Zola.

Simone Veil, left, and Brittany Carl

     Carl is the communications specialist just hired by Gov. Bruce Rauner, part of a group of hard right ideologues our billionaire governor brought in after sacking much of his loyal staff. The new crew proved instantly embarrassing — or would have, if Rauner could be embarrassed, an open question — because of their various racist, sexist and homophobic baggage. Rauner's valet, or "bodyman" as they're called, was fired Monday, the day he started work.
     Carl's lapse is no less odious but probably survivable, in that it doesn't directly attack a particular group but merely perverts history. Besides, it's so well-worn. In April, Carl wrote a piece for the Huffington Post airing the standard anti-abortion trope comparing a medical procedure voluntarily practiced every day by women around the world to the Holocaust of the Jews during World War II.
     A subject Veil knew something about, having been sent to Auschwitz when she was 16.

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Smell the roses

     "This is not life!" I said, with all the severity I could muster.
    An odd remark, given the setting. Our bright kitchen on a lovely summer Sunday morning. My wife at the stove, preparing an iron skillet filled with salami, onions, eggs, red and green peppers. Me helping out, slicing Italian bread for toast, setting out plates and silverware, brewing coffee.
     She had just said, "Could you put those cherries in a bowl? They're already washed,' and I leapt to do so, going to the buffet in the living room, selecting a whimsical handmade bowl from the Boulder Artists' Cooperative, pouring the bag of cherries in, and setting them on the kitchen table with my bold declaration.
     "This is not life!"
     Maybe it was too obvious. But she reacted not at all, not even a flutter of perplexity, which is sort of my goal. The remark, she knew instantly, even if the reader does not, was playing off the bowl of cherries. This bowl of cherries is not life, or, more commonly, "Life is not a bowl of cherries." She got it immediately, which I noted with silent satisfaction. 
     Another woman would have murdered her husband long ago and no one would blame her. But bless her, she tolerates it. Writers and their idiosyncrasies. In my case, I have a certain affinity for cliches in real life. You don't often get the chance, and opportunities must be seized. It's a kind of duty. I once cut across Grand Central Station in New York City, just so I could pause, look around, raise my hands and declare, "What is this, Grand Central Station?"
     No it's not funny. But somehow, immensely satisfying. At least to me, and I'm the guy I have to hang out with all the time. 
     Over time—and my wife and I have been keeping company for ... 34 years now—some lines become, well, if not enshrined, then at least expected.
     We were at the Chicago Botanic Garden. This was years ago. And my wife said, "Do you want to walk through the rose garden?"
     I replied, "Well, I never made any kind of formal commitment that I would."
     A curious remark.
     "Excuse me?" she said.
     "I mean, I made no kind of vow, or oath regarding the rose garden..."
     A kind of a hint.
     She chewed on that for a while as we walked among the beautiful roses, then realization dawned.
    "I never promised you a rose garden," she said, and I smiled inwardly, pleased she had unraveled the little puzzle. 
     Now, whenever we walk into the rose garden, if I don't say it, she seems almost disappointed. Almost. 
    Then Sunday, it finally happened. She paused before a huge pink bloom, and gave it a deep sniff."
     "It's important..." she began. "That we, you know, stop, and..."

     Mere coincidence? Or is this proof ancient astronauts once walked the Earth, thousands of years ago? Exactly two years ago, I posted something also about punning marital wordplay, using entirely different examples. 

Roses, Chicago Botanic Garden

Trump is doing exactly what supporters want him to do. Over and over.

     Ah. Now I see. Finally, finally I get Donald Trump. It all makes sense to me now.
     Took long enough.
     He has been president for nearly six months — the grim half-year anniversary is Thursday — all the while I, along with the rest of the mainstream media, have been baffled, thickly pointing our trembling index fingers at all the promises he repeatedly made and then glibly broke. There would be no border wall, never mind one paid for by Mexico. No overturning Obamacare. No infrastructure renewal. Coal's still dead, manufacturing still sputtering.
     But when we document this to his supporters, they don't care. They just shake their head and smile, or rather, sneer, pityingly at us, the lamestream media. "Sad!" they mocked, echoing their hero. They still love him.
     How can this be? It's easy to dismiss them as dupes, as ripped off, gulled, credulous marks who, pockets turned inside out, would rather hold tight to a fantasy than confront a difficult truth. And I did that for a while. But as the months clock on, castigation seems too simple. Too easy. Dismissing the other guys as mere idiots is what Republicans do. It makes a person feel good, perhaps, but leads nowhere. An empty high.
     So I looked again. And realized that in one realm, Trump constantly and consistently delivers: invective, a steady stream of insult, against the media, against politicians like Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, against elites and whatever unlucky individual falls under his basilisk gaze. Machine-gun chatter of "Disaster!" Funny nicknames and repeated fabrications. This isn't the sideshow. It's the main act. Not a flaw but a feature.
     That's why he was elected. Donald the Destroyer, the scourge of liberals. And that dynamic makes perfect sense. The game was up, the world trotting toward its future. Part of the liberal miracle over the past 60 years is to take marginalized people—minorities, gays, women—and invite them into the tent. Good for them, bad for people who used to own the tent and now feel threatened by these interlopers. What about their hopes and dreams, of a white America that manufactures stuff out of iron? They were not going to be ignored.
     So they elected Trump, to flay the infidels. They'll hate me for saying it, but there's a clear parallel between right-wing America and radical Islam. Both see themselves mooted by a world they can only lash out at as it flies by. Both spend their lives bitterly resenting who they aren't rather than joyously being who they are. If you think America should be frozen in 1953, with Hispanic serfs hidden back in the kitchen, what do you do? The same as if you think any woman who isn't veiled is a whore: extract vengeance.
     Trump never has to create a job or lay a brick. All he has to do is say he will, any moment now, and keep a constant bead on those already long demonized by Fox and Friends. The soil was prepared for him, turned and broken and fertilized. Ready for Trump to bloom.
     The media has been slow to catch on. We are used to it playing news certain way—we keep reporting each new development in the Russian scandal, not realizing that Trump's shape-shifting supporters simply morph. Big thumbs up to Putin and the Russian Federation, our new best friend in the world.
     Then again, the media always tends to lag; newspapers still create a product out of mashed wood pulp that is thrown at customers' houses every morning. We still print comic strips. If a giant meteor were discovered that would end the world tomorrow afternoon, we'd report it on the front page but the baseball schedule for the rest of the week would still be in the sports pages. Slow on the uptake.
     And what would that headline be? "Earth to end today." Too weak. "Rock shock!" Better, but a bit New York Post-y. "WE'RE DOOMED!" feels about right, though we might want to save that one for Wednesday, Nov. 4, 2020.

Drying out

     Last week's heavy rainfall caused flooding across the Northwest suburbs. The Chicago Botanic Garden was closed for a while—the entire place is one vast, flower-strewn retention pond. We stopped by Sunday afternoon and found it mostly dry and in fairly good shape—some limp and muddy hostas, a few trails and bridges closed off due to lingering floodwaters. It could have been much worse, such as at Highland Park Ford Lincoln, where more than 100 new and used cars, worth $5 million, were destroyed. Which called to mind this story, visiting ruined businesses downstate after the Great Mississippi Flood, nearly a quarter century ago. 

     ALTON, IL—Moving slowly, like astronauts in outer space, executives from the Bearing Headquarters Co. wade cautiously into knee-deep, yellow-green water and approach the front door of their office and warehouse.
     Gingerly, the door is pulled open and a wave of rancid humidity rolls out. John Decker, the branch manager, surveys the surreal, dimly lit scene Thursday of rows of shelving. The upper portions are stacked with piles of damp catalogs, soggy brochures and ruined records. Paper work floats in the water like seaweed.
     "Man, what a mess," he whispers.
     All over the Midwest as the floodwaters recede, people are beginning to tally the enormous cost of this unsurpassed natural disaster. Estimates are being offered, but the reality is that it will be months, if not years, before any reliable figure is attained. And the cost is rising - as floodwaters recede in some areas, they inundate others. The disaster is not over.
     Despite dramatic pictures of homes being crushed by the water, most damage is not caused by the water's impact, but by its ability to corrode and spoil.
     A pair of contractors accompany the Bearing Headquarters executives, to assess what it will take to undo the damage.
     "The office is a total loss; there is nothing there that can be saved, as far as I'm concerned," says Larry Colvin, an electrical contractor. He points his flashlight beam toward the ceiling of the 13,000-square-foot warehouse. "The moisture content in these fixtures - they're going to corrode. Look on the beams. It's rusting already."
     A general contractor pulls away a part of wall, showing how the insulation is soaked. It, too, must be replaced, as well as the floors, the shelving and many other parts of the building.
     Alton, a town of 33,000 north of St. Louis, is one of dozens of towns where the floodwaters caused serious infrastructure damage. Here, the tremendous pressure of the Mississippi River formed sinkholes and fissures in streets. Sewer lines burst and parking lots buckled. The levee did not break, as the people in Alton note with pride, but the river pushed its way in underground, sending geysers shooting out of Main Street.
     The mayor of Alton, Robert Towse, estimates that infrastructure damage to his town alone will be $ 5 million, and he calls the government's initial grant of $ 4.7 billion in Midwestern flood relief "a tenth" of what will eventually be needed.
     Water treatment facilities, electric plants, bridges and highways in several states were damaged by the flooding. Edwin Harper, president of the Association of American Railroads, estimates that it will take $ 250 million just to replace or repair submerged train tracks, but he admits that it is just a guess.
      Then there is lost business. Next door and up the hill from Bearing Headquarters is Tri-City Nissan Mazda. The bearing company, which moved its costly bearings out before it was deluged last week, is operating from scattered temporary locations, but Tri-City will not be back in business for weeks.
     Conn-Agra, the big silage concern, juts out of flooded downtown Alton like a mountainous island. Its 200 employees are lucky, however: Their salaries are being paid, and they are being sent out to help in the cleanup effort around the city.
     The six employees of Hudson's Jewelry Store have not been paid since July 13, when the store was last open. But clerk Matt Contarino shows up as a volunteer to oversee pumps in the basement.
     Tourist spots have been hit hard. While traffic to the Gateway Arch in St. Louis is so heavy the Park Service had to bring in extra rangers to help, communities such as St. Genevieve, Mo., a historic town about 50 miles downriver from St. Louis that was founded by the French in 1735, have no tourists during prime season.
      In Illinois, officials monitoring the state's $ 15 billion a year tourist industry estimate it is down at least 70 percent in the western portion of the state.
     Thousands of private homes were also destroyed or seriously damaged. In Grafton, 15 miles upriver from Alton, 900 of the 1,000 residents have been displaced from their homes - some of which were totally submerged.
     Tooling through downtown Grafton in a boat used to ferry residents, observing the city's houses submerged to the roofline, resident Vern Rominski ponders the question of how much it will cost to clean up the city, and how long it will take. He squints into the rain which is still somehow, incredibly, coming down hard.
     "I don't think they'll know until the waters go down, son," he says. 

      —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Aug. 9, 1993

Chicago Botanic Garden, July 16, 2017

Bacon is hot: Meet the guys who helped save bacon's bacon

     Sometimes pulling the thread on a single question can lead to an unexpected story. Here, I was trying to find out when precooked bacon came into being, and happened upon its largely unknown genesis. If after reading this, you just have to visit a pig slaughterhouse, one of Chicago's last, you can do so here.

     My mother never cooked a pork chop. Never once did a holiday ham grace the table of our modest suburban home. For a simple reason: we're Jewish, and such things are forbidden.
     But bacon was another matter. We had bacon all the time. With eggs of course, but also piled high on BLTs, the wheat toast smeared with mayonnaise. She served hot dogs wrapped in bacon.
     Faith is fine, but bacon is "the most beautiful thing on earth," as comedian Jim Gaffigan put it during a routine on the beloved cured meat. "Bacon's the best!"
     Isn't it though? The public agrees. Bacon sales have surged over the past decade. Bacon prices are up 20 percent this year, with supplies at their lowest in 60 years, stripped by voracious consumer demand for everything from bacon donuts to bacon-infused vodka.
     Amazingly, not long ago bacon was in decline. I was examining historical data and found myself reading the bacon entry in The Encyclopedia of Meat Sciences. It noted that in the late 1970s bacon was wilting; a study found that female heads of households were consuming far less bacon, due to cost, the bother of preparation and the trend toward quick, simple breakfasts.
     "As late as 1989," the encyclopedia noted, it was believed "bacon consumption is evidently in a long-term eroding trend."
     What happened? One problem with bacon was that you had to cook it, a messy process. It spattered and popped in the pan. You had to scrub your stovetop or microwave every time you cooked bacon.

To continue reading, click here.

Chicago might not be hog butcher to the world, but it still butchers hogs

Market in Florence, Italy

     Over the weekend I was researching bacon, writing for Monday. Which made me remember my visit 10 years ago to Park Packing, still in business today, one of three remaining slaughterhouses in Chicago. The article came about because I used to print a joke at the end of every column, and the USDA inspector at Park sent one in. I thought I should link to the story in my bacon piece tomorrow. Only I never posted it here. Now I have. A warning: not for the squeamish. And as a reward, tomorrow we'll have bacon. 

     Nine pigs are driven into a small pen. The metal door clangs shut and a man in green rubber boots and a yellow smock goes to work.
     First he takes a hose and washes the pigs down. They seem to like that. Then he reaches for the instrument of death. It is an appropriately crude device: a short metal T-shaped pole, wrapped in electrical tape, with a cable running out one end and two round electrodes protruding from the other.
     The worker —named Daniel—presses the electrodes to the back of a pig's neck and down it goes, kicking and convulsing.
     Pigs are smart animals, and the others instantly realize something bad is happening, and begin scrambling over each other, squealing and shrieking, eyes wide, trying to get away, back through the metal door.
     But there is no escape.
     When two pigs are down, Daniel binds their twitching hind legs together with a chain, and hoists the pigs into the air with a winch. He moves them over a square metal trough. With a deft thrust, he jams a thin knife into the throat of each pig, and berry-red blood gushes out into the trough. Though the pigs are stunned, it is important they still be alive. Otherwise, the blood won't drain properly.
     "Once they've been stunned, they're brain dead," says Ray Ramsey, the Illinois Department of Agriculture inspector monitoring the process at Park Packing, 4107 S. Ashland. "It supposedly makes them insensible to pain. But they never come back to tell me whether it's true or not."
     I met Ramsey after he sent me a pig joke and mentioned where he works. My reaction, like that of everybody else I've told about the plant, was amazement that pigs are still slaughtered within the city limits. The greatness of Chicago was built on the processing of animals—"Hog Butcher for the World" as Carl Sandburg famously wrote.
     But the stockyards closed in 1970, and finding live Iowa pigs trucked daily into Chicago to begin their conversion into sausage is like discovering Al Capone still getting a hot lather shave every morning at the Lexington Hotel.
     "There's not too many left," admits Tom Bairaktaris, owner of Park Packing, which caters mostly to smaller mom and pop stores.
     Park Packing employs 40 people and, today, will butcher 182 pigs, two by two. After their lifeblood drains away, the pigs are lowered into scalding water.
     "I have to spot check everywhere," says Ramsey. "They can't go into the water while still alive."

1 TO 2 PERCENT TOO ILL TO EAT

      From the water, the pigs are shunted to a large device, made of curved ribs of metal. The device tumbles the pigs to remove their hair. Each pig weighs 185 pounds, about the size of a human, and is a pinkish hue very similar to Caucasian flesh. Pigs can sunburn. The sight of a pair of large, wet, freshly killed pigs loudly tumbling around and around is not pleasant.
     After, their hooves are removed and the back legs are attached to a gambrel—a metal armature—and the pigs are hoisted up. They are conveyed from station to station along an overhead track, an invention that revolutionized meatpacking a century ago.
     The remaining hair is burned off with a torch, the pig is shaved, and the process of cutting apart the pig begins. The rectum is removed—they call it "dropping the bung"—and the pig is split to the chin.
     Ramsey draws a knife, reaches into a hog carcass, and begins slicing up a large, bean-shaped bulb of flesh—the mandibular lymph node.
     "We're supposed to cut them as many times as we can," he says, making thin slices. "I'm looking for inflammation, hemorrhaging."
     The innards are taken out, a wet, sloppy sack, liquid still sloshing around within the translucent yellow intestines. They're dumped on a metal table. Ramsey palpates the purplish brown liver with his fingers.
     "Sometimes you find worms," he says.
     One or two in 100 pigs are rejected as too ill to eat; most have ailments that don't affect their edibility.
     "About 80 percent of the pigs have bronchitis or pneumonia," he said. "That doesn't mean the meat is unusable."
     Loud Spanish music plays—except for Ramsey, the workers are Hispanic, many related, most from the same city, Guanajuato.

ALL PARTS CAN BE BOUGHT

     A living pig's temperature is slightly higher than a human's—about 102. It takes six hours for the pigs to cool to 37 degrees. That's when Ramsey stamps them with an Illinois-shaped stamp; the purple ink is really blueberry juice.
     Then the pigs are cut apart—heads off, torsos divided into loins, shoulders, ribs and hams —by workers using band saws, cutting so quickly it makes your fingers tingle just to watch.
     The pigs go out like that—customers divide the large sections into individual chops and ribs. The plant also has a small retail store, stocked with every pig part imaginable, and if you are in the market for pigskin, perhaps to make your own football, it's 49 cents a pound. Pig blood is $45 for a 5-gallon bucket, enough for your backyard production of "Carrie."
      Ramsey's job can be seen as a balancing act. He is charged with enforcing a stack of regulations a foot thick, rules that would give him justification to shut the plant down at any given moment, were that his goal.
     "Our overall mission is to make sure the meat from here is safe," he says. "You have to make a judgment. You have to pick your battles."
     He ends up giving the plant four or five citations a month, demanding that a restroom be cleaned, or that carcasses not be removed until they are sufficiently cooled.
     "You become the bad guy," he says. "But by lunchtime, you're friends again."
     Ramsey is 32, married for the second time, and has found his life's work.
     "I'll probably do it as long as I can," he says.
     It's lunchtime when I finish my tour, so I step across the street to a Mexican diner and order a pork chop sandwich. It seems the thing to do.

     —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Aug. 10, 2007

Saturday fun activity: Where IS this?

     The moment I stepped into this distinctive lobby I smiled and thought, "Ooo, Saturday fun activity time!" It's spare, but telling, and while I imagine it is solvable—they always are—it might take some careful cogitation.
     Where is this rather ship-like tableau? What vastly-interesting place is it the portal for? I was there Friday, preparing a story for the paper. I can't imagine many readers find their way there.
     A suitable prize is in order—since this spartan assemblage is located in Chicago, a signed copy of my memoir, "You Were Never in Chicago." And just in case people are stumped until this afternoon—my fervent hope—then I will post a photograph of what was on the coffee table in this particular room, as a hint, so you might want to return then. 
    Good luck. Please place your guesses below. 

Shhh, go to bed. Nothing to see here.

     It's midnight, I know. But tomorrow I'm posting a surprise, one-time return of the Saturday fun activity, which as you might recall traditionally posts at 7 a.m., in order that non-night owls might get a chance to solve one.
      So go to bed. Nothing to see here for seven hours. And if you simply must think about something, look at the above picture, and wonder why I posted that image and not another. It's fairly plain. G'night. 

Trump isn't the problem; it's that people support him

     So I go to the corner to buy a racing form. On my way home, a neighbor runs up, shouting: "Your house is on fire!" I smile and tell him that no, it can't be on fire. He is just trying to alarm me, reflecting his lingering malice because my tea roses placed higher than his in the All-Cook County Tea Rose Competition last summer.
     "No!" he cries. "Look at the smoke!" And sure enough, big billows of black smoke are rising from the direction of my house, a couple blocks away.
     "That's not smoke," I chuckle. "That's just dark clouds. Or if it's smoke, how do I know it's not the house behind mine that's burning? Eh? Besides, what's so bad about a little fire? Happens all the time."
     Welcome to America, 2017. As satire does not always scan in a daily newspaper, I hasten to observe that I do not buy the daily racing form, nor cultivate tea roses, and my house did not burn.
     It's our nation that is burning. Try to find an area that isn't on fire. Congress pours gasoline on health care for millions of the neediest Americans and keeps striking matches, hoping for a bonfire that'll warm rich people. Our recent presidential election was manipulated by our staunchest enemy. Our nation is grilled by global ridicule, our institutions smeared with soot. The president set in power by that corrupted electoral process is a liar, bully and fraud — and since readers sometimes object at that trio of terms, let me point out that they are not insults, nor even disrespect for the office of president, but dry journalistic description, supported by facts. By "liar," I mean a man who continually tells untruths. By "bully," I mean someone who continually abuses those too weak to defend themselves. And by "fraud," someone who represents himself, again and again, now and in the past, as something he is not, profiting from the gullible, selling empty promises that he cannot fulfill.
     If you don't like that description, well, I'm sorry. I don't like it either. But what I like, and what is actually going on in life are two very different things, and it is possible to perceive situations at odds with what you wish were true.
     For instance: I wish I could get excited about the revelations regarding Russian conspiracy. The media, which can be fairly thick, has been intent on the drip-drip-drip of new developments, of Trump’s son Donald meeting with Russian officials promising dirt on Hillary Clinton.
     That is what we do — dig up pertinent facts and confront those involved. But as reporters go through the elaborate kabuki ritual of uncovering scandal, I can’t help but suspect it is a colorful pageant put on for an audience so sharply divided they aren’t seeing the same show. Those who are stunned by the news were stunned already; those who have torched their morality and conscience and patriotism enough to support Donald Trump in the first place aren’t going to renew it now in order to feel outrage.
     “I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn't lose voters, ” Trump said on Jan. 23, 2016.
     It was true then,, even truer now. Give the man credit — he is as he has always been. Trump is a problem, but he’s not the problem. He is a symptom. The problem is that 53 million Americans voted for him, and support him still, no matter what. They have created a closed system where contrary information can be shrugged off as “fake news.” Science is a lie. Courts are dubious if they rule against you.
     Getting rid of Trump will solve a problem, but not the problem. The problem is people support him and will continue to do so, no matter the cost.
     We began with a metaphor, let’s end with one.
     Your doctor says, “I have bad news. Look at this X-ray. This blotch is a cancerous tumor on your lung.”
     You jerk the x-ray away, crumple it into a ball and drop it in the trash.
     “Problem solved,” you say. “The tumor’s gone.”

Radio Flyer turns 100

    Once I pulled a little red wagon down the center of Sheridan Road.
    OK, there was more to it than that. It was the WOOGMS Parade, an eccentric East Lakeview neighborhood event marking Memorial Day and the beginning of summer. Sheridan Road was closed; my boys were perched within the wagon. I'm sure I have an unwatched video of it, somewhere.
    The wagon was a Radio Flyer, a gift, mirabile dictu, of the newspaper, which once upon a time distributed catalogues to employees so they could select presents to mark their various work anniversaries. On my fifth I chose the proverbial set of steak knives. For my 10th, the wagon. For the past decade or so, your gift is you keep your job.
    The wagon proved very useful in carting boys. Not the metal wagon of my youth, but the less aesthetic plastic. Still, it had a certain fat, pleasing roundness, and a compartment inside for storing things. I did not mind it. 
    Radio Flyer is marking its centennial this year. The venerable Chicago company doesn't construct its little red wagons here anymore—production moved to China in 2004— but at least it still makes them, which is cause for celebration. If you are reading this Thursday, July 13, you can join the fun from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. at Pioneer Court, the plaza just south of Tribune Tower. Radio Flyer will have their World's Largest Wagon, somehow fitting outside what once imagined itself the World's Greatest Newspaper. 
      Strolling out to the garage to snap the above, I reflected how sentimental it is to keep the wagon. The boys certainly aren't going to ride in it again, and by the time grandchildren arrive, if they ever do, they'll have wagons that hover, and no doubt the tykes will demand them, as tykes do.
    This is probably enough for one day but, in case you are interested in the history of Radio Flyer -- such as why a wagon company has a form of communication in its name — I explain that in this late 1990s Christmas story on toys that originated in Chicago. I've left the other toys in, though the entirety, like old toys themselves, tends toward woodenness. 

      Furby may be hot now, but just wait. Odds are he won't stand the test of time. Someday, the babbling little furball may be as desirable a Christmas present as a Hula Hoop; or a Pet Rock is today.
     But certain toys keep their appeal. While they may never have created the intense -- and passing -- mania that the Tickle Me Elmos of the world once inspired, they've done something that is perhaps more incredible: They've survived (though some just barely) and become classics, delighting generation after generation of children who found them under their Christmas trees.
    Here is a roundup of some cherished toys which originated in the Chicago area.

     The Radio Flyer: The definitive "little red wagon" is manufactured on the West Side of Chicago, and has been for more than 80 years.
     In 1917, an Italian immigrant cabinet maker named Antonio Pasin founded The Liberty Coaster Wagon Co., named for the Statue of Liberty. Originally the wagons were wood, but when metal stamping became popular for cars in the 1920s, he borrowed the technology for wagons, rolling the edges so they wouldn't cut little fingers.
     In the 1920s, the company took to naming its wagons after popular figures and phenomena. There was the Lindy Flyer, in honor of Charles Lindbergh, and the Radio Flyer, named for the hot new communications medium. That wagon was particularly popular, and in 1930 the company renamed itself the Radio Steel & Manufacturing Co. (It officially adopted the name "Radio Flyer" in 1987).
     The wagons are still made in Chicago, of wood, steel and plastic, and the company is still owned and operated by the Pasin family. And they still name their products after the latest wave of pop culture: Recent wagons have mimicked burly all-terrain vehicles and been given brawny, sports-utility-vehicle-like names such as "Voyager" and "Navigator."
     Lionel trains: For decades, no Christmas tree was complete without a Lionel train circling the base. The trains were the brainchild of Joshua Lionel Cowen, who, in one of those amazing quirks of history, also invented the flashlight.
     He put a small electric motor in a model train, and began selling them by catalog in 1903. The company had some close calls over the years. It nearly went bankrupt during the Great Depression, then came up with an offering that hit the public fancy: a handcar pumped by a Mickey Mouse character. The handcar was the top toy in the nation in 1934, and it saved the company. Today a large part of Lionel's business is the adult hobby market -- a basic set runs a hefty $ 150 or so -- but nostalgic adults still buy their kids Lionel trains at Christmas, whether the children want them or not.
     Raggedy Ann: Like the first teddy bear, the first Raggedy Ann doll was promoting something else. Johnny Gruelle, a political cartoonist in Downstate Arcola, had created the Raggedy Ann character (named for James Whitcomb Riley's poems "The Raggedy Man" and "Little Orphan Annie") to amuse his daughter, Marcella.
     But he also had the foresight to patent the Raggedy Ann image in 1915. His book on the red-yarn-haired beauty, Raggedy Ann Stories, was published in 1918.
     Marshall Field's created the first Raggedy Ann doll to place in its window to promote the book, but customers wanted both the book and the doll. Raggedy Andy showed up two years later, when a friend of Gruelle's mother handmade a brother.
     Ironically, after 80 years, Field's once again isn't selling Raggedy Ann. It has stopped carrying the dolls.
     Tinkertoys; : An Evanston stonecutter named Charles Pajeau was disillusioned with the gravestone trade. Fishing around for a new line of work, he noticed how children played, for hours, with pencils and wooden spools from thread. A classic toy was born.
     He formed the Toy Tinkers Co. in Evanston and introduced the product at the New York Toy Fair in 1913 (the same year another classic, now faded, was introduced: A.C. Gilbert's Erector Set). Tinkertoys were an instant hit -- selling nearly a million sets in 1915, the first year it went national.
     Tinkertoys sold millions of sets, with almost no advertising. And not only kids played with them. Illinois Bell used Tinkertoys to test skills of job candidates; Harvard University bought the sets, in bulk, to study executive decision-making.
     Tinkertoy has been buffeted, in recent years, by construction sets with more flash and sizzle. But it still carries on, its wooden dowels and hubs replaced with plastic, manufactured by Hasbro.
—Originally published in the Chicago Sun-Times, Dec. 24, 1998

Henry David Thoreau: More to the man than a shack by a pond

Walden Pond (Photo by Tony Galati)

     As much as I enjoyed researching and writing this, I enjoyed even more reading Pond Scum, a 2015 New Yorker article on Thoreau by Kathryn Schulz that longtime friend Bob Goebel shared with me Wednesday morning. I don't know how I missed it, but I did, and if you are interested in the perspectives I touch upon here you should consider reading her piece. It's excellent.

     Henry David Thoreau's father owned a pencil factory.
     In between failing as a teacher and a writer, Thoreau worked in that factory. From the day in 1845 he moved to Walden Pond, where his fans will flock Wednesday to mark the bicentennial of his birth on July 12, 1817, to the day he left, J. Thoreau and Co. churned out high quality pencils.

      There is an irony here. Thoreau is remembered best as an early bard of appreciating nature. On Sunday, the New York Times described a line he uttered in a speech—"In wilderness is the preservation of the world"—as "eight words that in coming decades helped save that Maine woods, Cape Cod, Yosemite and other treasured American landscapes."
     They ignored the pencils that underwrote his work. I know why. It spoils the cherished image, to have Thoreau calling for preservation of trees out of one corner of his mouth and promoting the transformation of trees into pencils out of the other.
     Or does it?
     Do the two values, conservation and business, have to contradict? Our government certainly thinks so. The Trump administration began with a wholesale slaughter of environmental regulations. Dropping out of the Paris climate change accords is only the most visible. Clean water rules—that keep mining and metal companies from pouring waste into streams—are being relaxed Ditto for clean air regulations. And we don't have to worry about alarming increases in pollution statistics, since the EPA, now headed by one of its fiercest critics, is going to stop collecting certain air quality data.
     Thoreau describes the type perfectly—"He knows nature but as a robber."
     Thoreau had a gift for piercing concision. That is why I like him, despite his frequent descent into piety. He used his own experience. You need to be in line to inherit a pencil factory to write a sentence like: "I see young men, my townsmen, whose misfortune it is to have inherited farms, houses, barns, cattle, and farming tools; for these are more easily acquired than got rid of."

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Photo by Tony Galati

Blue lawsuit

     The innovative Cirque du Soleil bought Blue Man Group last week. As a fan of both ensembles, it seems a natural pairing, and sent me back over times I've written about Blue Man Group — in this one I presciently mention their eventual purchaser, in describing a particularly daft lawsuit.  It was a time when the column filled a page, and I've left in the subheadings. Afterward I'll let you know what happened with the case.

OPENING SHOT . . .

     Silly me. Over the years, I have endured countless horrors at the Lyric Opera of Chicago — been menaced by several dragons; seen doomed lovers sealed within a tomb; witnessed the lips of a harmless bird catcher sealed with a padlock, and even watched, aghast, as Satan himself emerged, singing, from the fiery pits of hell.
     And I never sued them. Not once.
     Dumb.
     Meanwhile James Srodon of California attends just one performance of the Blue Man Group at the Briar Street Theatre and files a lawsuit in Cook County Circuit Court claiming that their "Esophagus Cam" was shoved down his throat, knocking out fillings, damaging his windpipe and of course causing psychological distress.
     Now I've attended several Blue Man Group performances and have my own issues with their show, mainly that it ain't drama. People act like it's a play because it takes place in a theater, but it's not. It's entertainment, part Cirque du Soleil, part concert, part magic show. So long as that's clear, Blue Man Group is energetic, loud, clever fun. Duping the audience is part of the thrill.
     One highlight was a version of the Esophagus Cam: A member of the audience was invited onstage and then zipped into a canvas body bag while one Blue Man recorded the proceeding with a video camera. The sack was then dragged backstage — we follow the action on screen —where it was loaded onto a truck, driven away and, eventually, hurled off a cliff.
     By then, it dawned on the audience that they were not watching a man actually being murdered in real time, but a prank involving an unseen cutaway to a pre-filmed segment. The kidnapped audience member actually slipped back into his seat.
     At least one hopes they realized it. If anyone called the cops — "Oh my gosh, I just came from Blue Man Group, and they killed somebody!" — I'm not aware of it.
     Srodon was singled out for a similar bit. The Blue Men gathered around him and pretended  — emphasize pretended — to shove a camera down his throat.
     Now I wasn't there, so perhaps they slipped up, in a frenzy brought on by toxic blue-paint poisoning, and really did pry open Srodon's jaws and, as he claims, shoved a paint-and-food-befouled camera down his throat.
     Perhaps he truly is a victim of assault who needs our cherished legal system to deliver redress for his suffering.
     Or maybe — and frankly, I'm putting all my chips down on this — the Blue Men have done this bit 50,000 times over the last two decades, and were they in the practice of actually shoving cameras down patrons' throats, well, we'd have heard about it by now. Maybe it is a well-done illusion and Srodon, 65, a sensitive soul, was overwhelmed. A judge will decide, sadly.

LEVITATION, ESP, BIGFOOT, UFOS . . .

     There are two important lessons in this lawsuit against the Blue Man Group for a stage trick.
     First, as much as I admire lawyers generally — my wife is a lawyer — this is the sort of lawsuit that exposes the profession to shame and undermines the idea of law as a desirable part of society. This type of lawsuit just hands ammunition to big insurance company hirelings working to further restrict the ability of the truly harmed to receive compensation.
     Second, this sort of thing also ruins life for the rest of us. It is a big reason we live in the padded, homogenized, vacuum-sealed, fenced-off, gelded, oversafe, professional-driver-closed-course, do-not-try-this-at-home world we live in.
     You can't ride a merry-go-round anymore without being herded past a legal disclaimer as long as the Magna Carta, informing you that this is a ride that revolves and goes up and down, that you will be exposed to equine wooden figures but that no actual horses were harmed in their creation, and pregnant women, the fantastically obese, the motion sensitive, equinophobes and those allergic to calliope music should not participate.
     I'm surprised we have any entertainments at all. Most of the animals have already been exiled from circuses by fanatics, and I'm sure clowns are next. "Mr. Binky did knowingly aim and discharge a seltzer bottle in the direction of plaintiff Henry Prudock, exposing him to a stream of cold carbonated water, which wettened him, and drew the mocking laughter of his fellow audience members . . ."
     Second, consider Srodon's belief that the camera was actually jammed down his throat. I am sure he is sincere, and this genuine conviction should remind us just how suggestible people really are.
     It must be important to some part of the collective human ego that we ignore this obvious reality—to flatter ourselves, I suppose. So important that we prefer to embrace the existence of nosy visiting motherships from distant galaxies rather than entertain the possibility that our planetmates are a bunch of gullible dopes, dithering and pliable, soft-minded and open to all sorts of delusions, mirages, misapprehensions, panics and fantasies.
     That is, when they're not outright lying . . .
     Yes, humanity's ability to fall for anything has value — we wouldn't have magic shows, time-share condos or religion otherwise. But the downside is that we automatically assume that the witnesses really saw the criminal, that the testimony is not the product of brain cramp, that the lady was really sawn in half and replaced by a tiger.
     I hate to involve myself in legal proceedings, but if the Blue Man Group is looking for an expert witness, I offer myself. I will testify, under oath and on penalty of perjury, that people are, in the main, morons, and that James Srodon is definitely a person. The jury can draw their own conclusions.

               —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Jan. 27, 2008

    While the filing of the lawsuit was reported everywhere, the result was reported nowhere, as far as I could tell — a common lapse in journalism. In 2013, when another patron sued Blue Man Group after he was hit by a foam ball, the San Jose Mercury News caught up with Sroden's former lawyer.
     ‘The matter was settled for nominal dollars,’ Antonio Romanucci said. “I eventually withdrew from the case.”

You can look here soon for the water that used to be in your basement

     When I visited the new McCook Reservoir, I wasn’t exactly happy to be welcomed by rain pelting down in big summertime drops. I had brought my steel-toed boots but no jacket and no umbrella.
     But the rain was appropriate, considering that rain is what this is all about: the 109 miles of deep tunnel, the 10-billion-gallon reservoir this hole in the rock will someday become part of; all so the water that falls from the sky can find its way into a treatment plant without first detouring through your basement, a task that is getting harder for two reasons: the soot we put into the sky and the pavement we slap over the ground.
     “Forty percent of Cook County is nonpermeable surface, which means water can’t absorb where it falls,” said Mariyana T. Spyropoulos, president of the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District of Greater Chicago, who accompanied me on a tour of the site tucked between the Stevenson Expressway and the Sanitary and Ship Canal in Bedford Park.
     Here I interrupted her, incredulous. I’ve heard a lot of stark statistics about Cook County. But 40 percent? How can that be?
     “We have concrete,” she said. “We have asphalt. Rainwater cannot absorb into it. Yes, 40 percent. Combine that with the fact that we have climate change, we have more intense rainstorms. In the last 10 years we’ve had three hundred-year rainstorms.

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Just drumming is not enough to make you Blue

     Blue Man Group, the popular and increasingly-pervasive trio of mute drummers putting on a surreal show, were purchased last week by Cirque du Soleil, a marriage of like minds if ever there were.  I saw Blue Man Group when it opened on Broadway, and again a time or two over the years. In 2011, I stopped by to watch them audition future Blue Men.

     By 9 a.m., 10 men are standing in a steady drizzle outside the Briar Street Theatre on Halsted Street, waiting for their chance.
     "Cold, rainy, windy and damp enough to annoy you," says a 20-year-old with the Hollywood-ready name of Nathaniel Hawkins, first in line, having driven in from Cedar Falls, Iowa, the night before and been here since 7:30 a.m. "I always wanted to give this a shot if the chance came up."
     "The chance"—the first in Chicago since June—refers to the open auditions last Tuesday for Blue Man Group, the wildly popular mix of music, vaudeville and social commentary.
     If you think of Blue Man Group as three bald guys painted blue stuffing Cap'n Crunch in their mouths, you're behind the times. That was 20 years ago, when Chris Wink, Philip Stanton and Matt Goldman created the show "to celebrate the human spirit through music, science, art and theater."
     Now Blue Man Productions has some 600 employees worldwide with about 60 full-time Blue Men performing in seven cities: Boston, Orlando, Las Vegas, Berlin, Tokyo, New York, where it has played for 20 years, and at Briar Street, where it has run continually for 15. Not quite the Disney Co., but a long way from busking in Central Park.
     The Briar Street lobby is crowded with men, and a few women. (Two females have become Blue Men). They have driven from as far away as Nebraska. An acting professor at Notre Dame canceled classes to be here.
     Those waiting to be called sit on the floor, filling out forms, many drumming with drumsticks they brought with them, or with the flats of their hands on their chests.
     "I love music," said John Curulewski, 24, of Plainfield. "I want to play drums." Being a Blue Man would be "pretty sweet, it seems like a good job: be kinda crazy and drum."
     Were it that easy. Playing drumheads splashing brightly colored liquids is only part of the job, and the five-level audition process begins with neither craziness nor drumming, but an earnest two-minute interview, sitting in salon chairs facing casting coordinator Tascha Van Auken, who glances at each resume, makes small talk - "So how far is Plainfield?" - then asks about acting experience. Those with none find themselves quickly, but with notable gentleness, thanked for coming and sent on their way.
     "If you went out and got some acting work, we would totally be into it," she tells one. "It doesn't make sense to put you through the process now."
     Those who make it past Van Auken—and most do—are put, five at a time, through a pair of tough non-verbal acting exercises.
     Someone in the room has "a deep sadness" within them, explains Tim Aumiller, director of casting. "You have an opportunity right now to look at us once, just once, and you have to determine who in this room has this deep sadness.
     This weeds out those whose talents are limited to drumming, and the irony is, that test is next. The two skills just don't compare.
     "Almost anyone can learn to be the kind of drummer we need them to be," says Aumiller. "But it can take years to teach someone to be an actor."
     Those who make it this far stand, one at a time, at a drum pad on the Briar Street stage, facing Jeff Quay, the music director.
     "Track my dynamics," he tells one hopeful. "I get softer, you get softer." They mirror each other. "Excellent. Let's keep it going - you track my tempo changes."
     In the audience are current Blue Men Matt Ramsey and Nick Rush, 23, the one actor picked out of 150 auditioning last June.
     "Once I got to training, one of the directors said 90 percent why you get the job is the moment you walk in the door," says Rush. "You can just tell: He's a Blue Man."
     Of the 164 would-be Blue Men who tried last Tuesday, 18 were called back for more intensive exercises and auditions, leading to final trials, in makeup, in the weeks to come. All to get . . . how many new Blue Men?
     "One would be good," says Aumiller, noting that some city auditions yield none.
     A final thought, from hours watching this success funnel, with 164 earnest aspirants pushing themselves into the wide end and one, maybe, emerging from the spout:
     The American dream is that if you have ambition, if you truly believe in yourself and try, really hard, you will succeed, with a bit of luck. And that is sometimes true. But not if you're only a drummer, and what they're really looking for are actors who can drum.

—Originally published in the Sun-Times, April 25, 2011