The Gee Bee's Moment of Glory

The Granville Gee Bee Super Sportster R-1.

     I mentioned the Granville Gee Bee in Monday's column about the USS Zumwalt because it was an example of a cool airplane: my favorite, in fact. I figured it was pretty obscure, and was pleasantly surprised when several readers chimed in their agreement, one sending me a photo of his mailbox, built to look like a Gee Bee. I mentioned to another that I had written an article about the Gee Bee, many, many years ago, and he went in search of it online, even though I told him it predated the Internet and he wouldn't find it. 
     He didn't. While I am not a big fan of sharing juvenilia, I try not to frustrate readers either. So I tramped down to the basement and dug this up, from a publication called Nostalgia Scrapbook, dated April, 1986. Its utter mediocrity can be forgiven—I was 25, and hadn't learned the importance of banishing cliches from your writing.
    The notes in my folder are interesting. How did I get these photographs, in the years before the Internet? Effort. I called the Smithsonian. And the Cleveland Public Library Photo Collection. And the Berea Historical Society (my hometown was next to the airport where the air races were held). The Bettman Archive, the Springfield (Mass.) Library and Museum. Finally, I ended up getting them—I was proud to make this leap—from the archive at United Technologies, which owned Pratt & Whitney, the makers of the engine for the Gee Bee.
    I also phoned Lt. Gen. James H. Doolittle, at his home on Cass Street in Monterey, California, to produce an utterly mundane biography that I will spare you here, so don't ask. Having taken the American hero's time—he led the famous first bombing raid over Tokyo during World War II—I should have come up with something better. But we all have to start somewhere.
  
     After World War One, aviation left its wire and wood infancy and burst into a giddy adolescence. In the '20s and '30s speed was king and the various air races—the cross country Bendix Trophy, the Schneider Cup for seaplanes, the 100-miles closed-course Thompson Trophy—were enormously popular.
     The nation viewed the planes, and their pilots, with intense interest. But, of all of the famous racing pilots, and all the famous racing planes, no pilot gained more acclaim than Major Jimmy Doolittle ... no plane neared the notoriety of the Granville Gee Bee Super Sportster. 
     Thus, it was a special moment in the annals of air racing when the famous pilot, who had flown so many planes, and the infamous plane, which was to claim so many lives, came together for a few days during the 1932 National Air Races in Cleveland.
     The Gee Bee had burst onto the scene the year before, at the 1931 races. Nicknamed "the flying milk bottle" and "the bumblebee," the yellow and black Spirit of Springfield, flown by Lowell Bayles, roared around the triangular Thompson course at what the New York Times called an "exceedingly fast time" of 236.239 mph, 35 mph faster than the winner of the year before.

Zantford Granville

     "Exceedingly fast" is an apt description; the plane was definitely faster than it was safe. The chunky racer had tiny wings—75 square feet of wing area to lift 2,280 pounds of plane—and a stubby tail to reduce drag from wind resistance.  
     Into this plane, no longer than a subcompact car, was dropped a massive engine—an 800 horsepower Pratt & Whitney Wasp T3D1—twice as powerful as usually put into a plane that size.
     As one observer noted, the Gee Bee had "no center of gravity."
     The pilot of the Gee Bee in its first victory was also its first victim. In December, 1931, Bayles sought to top his Thompson win by grabbing the speed record set by the French in 1924. During the attempt the right wing of his Gee Bee buckled, sending the plane into the ground at 300 mph.
     Fragments of the plane were thrown 600 feet. An unforgettable newsreel of the crash shows the fiery explosion hurling Bayles' flaming body from the wreck. The cause of the crash was never determined, but experts at the scene guessed the extreme stress simply ripped the tiny plane apart.
     It was odd that this volatile plane should find itself in the hands of a cautious pilot such as Jimmy Doolittle. Having learned to fly on a Curtis Jenny in 1918, Doolittle first came to national attention in 1922 when he attempted to cross the country by air in less than a day. Doolittle was a skilled, professional pilot and won many contests, including the Schneider Cup in 1925 and the first Burbank-to-Cleveland Bendix Trophy in 1931.
     A strange twist of fate put Doolittle in the Gee Bee for the 1932 races. He already had a plane—a Laird Super Solution—but while training in Kansas, a week before the races began, the Laird's retractable landing gear jammed up in flight. Doolittle was forced to make a wheels-up landing, damaging the plane enough to make competition the next week impossible.
     Meanwhile, Russell Boardman, the pilot of the Gee Bee R-1 went into the hospital after he spun out in a different Gee Bee.
     Zantford Granville, whose little factory in Springfield, Massachusetts produced the Gee Bee, called Doolittle on August 27 and asked if he would pilot the R-1 in the races.
     Doolittle knew the reputation of the plane—he had seen the film of Bayles' death—but he needed a plane and the Gee Bee was the fastest thing in the air. He flew to Springfield August 28 to pick up the R-1, and left for Cleveland the same day.
     During practice runs, the Gee Bee's temperamental nature began to show. Doolittle needed all his skill to keep the plane under control—it had a tendency to do sudden snap rolls.
     "It was the touchiest plane I had ever been in," Doolittle later recalled in his autobiography. Flying it was like "balancing a pencil on the tip of your finger."
     September 1 the races began with the "Shell Speed Dashes." Planes needed to average 200 mph around the course to quality for the Thompson race. Doolittle's average time on his first run was 293.193 mph, breaking the old land speed record by 15 mph.
     But, on landing it was discovered that race officials had not install a barograph on the plane. The device measured altitude, and was required to make a speed record official.
     September 3 dawned hot and muggy, the sun hidden by high clouds. It was a perfect day for flying, except for a slight ground haze and an 8 mph crosswind over the course.
     Doolittle had not planned to fly—he had already qualified, and thought he might burn up the Gee Bee's engine before the big race. He watched other pilots make their runs.
     William N. Enyart, a race official, walked over to Doolittle and told him that, if he wanted, there was time for him to make a flight. Doolittle calmly nodded, and walked over to where Granville and officials of the Pratt & Whitney Engine Company were already fussing over his Gee Bee Super Sportster R-1.
     Doolittle flew once over the course, then turned out a mile over Lake Erie, returning with the throttle full out, just 50 feet above the ground, barely clearing a grove of trees.
     After maneuvering to avoid a passing squadron of Army planes, Doolittle threw his Gee Bee over the course, "flashing past the watchers like a meteor."
     When he landed, after six laps, he had set a new official world's speed record: 296.287 miles per hour.
     The Thompson race, two days later, was almost anti-climactic. A crowd of 50,000 people in the stands, plus thousands more on tops of cars, clinging to trees, and dotting hillsides beyond the airport, saw Doolittle beat the fastest field ever assembled for the races, including Lee Gehlbach in the sister Gee Bee, the R-2.
     It was Doolittle's last race. Perhaps, it was flying the cantankerous Gee Bee. Perhaps it was the fact that photographers hovered around his wife and children during the race, waiting to snap their reaction should the plane crash. But, after Doolittle flew the plane back to Springfield and "gratefully got out," he announced that it was time for aviation to leave the "thrills-and-spills era ... and give attention to safety and reliability." Doolittle was finished with air racing. he was, however, to go on to other, even more thrilling exploits.
     A Gee Bee never again won a race, although three more men died before this fact was borne out. The R-1 flown by Doolittle rolled over and crashed during the 1933 Bendix Race, killing Russell Boardman. In 1934, Z.D. Granville was killed attempting to land his Gee Bee in Spartansburg, South Carolina and the last Gee Bee, the Spirit of Right, crashed in the 1935 Bendix Race, killing its pilot.
     The Gee Bee's speed record lasted exactly a year and a day, until broken by James Wedell in his Wedell-Williams 44 at the 1933 Nationals. 
     As Doolittle predicted, the days of the great air races were numbered. Racing was suspended at the outbreak of the Second World War, and though efforts were made to resume it afterwards, planes were now too fast to fly around pylons. Also, the war had handed the development of aviation technology over to the military and big business, which did not want to display their newest planes in public spectacles.
     But, we are left with the memory of a brief, amazing era; of splendid planes, like the muscle-bound Granville Gee Bee Super Sportster, and of brave pilots, like Jimmy Doolittle.

 


     

Put down that tiki torch, take up a harpsichord!

     There are several ways to characterize my Sunday night.
     First, it was musical: horns and chorus, a performance by Music of the Baroque.
     Second, it was religious, Christian specifically, as this was a Christmas concert, with tunes such as Bach’s “Ich ruf’ zu dir, Herr Jesu Christ” and “Ave Maria” by Robert Parsons.
     It was architectural: we sat in the vast sanctuary of the Divine Word Chapel in Northbrook, though “chapel” is a rather paltry term for such soaring marble splendor.
     And finally, it was connubial. My wife, who has been on a Music of the Baroque kick, suggested going — our third concert since summer — and I, dutiful spouse, agreed, particularly because she had never seen the inside of Techny Towers, and I was eager for her to see this unexpected European holy space incongruously situated in the leafy suburban paradise.
     All those elements were at play.
     What I did not consider the evening being was “white,” a part of white culture, even though the performers and sold-out audience did indeed all seem to be white. Not until I foolishly checked my email during intermission, and read one of a weekend’s worth of reader agony regarding my Friday column about how supporters of Donald Trump will plague our country long after his orange hugeness is tossed upon the ash heap of history.
     “Donald Trump is president today because Barack Obama, by any number of measures, was the worst president in U.S. history,” wrote … well, he never did sign his name. He then offered up the standard Fox News laundry list of supposed Obama flaws, ending, with this delicious conclusion. “Perhaps worst of all, he took campus politics and made them a national phenomenon.”
     Safe spaces — thanks, Obama!

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"Lord, what fools these mortals be!"

Sam Kebede as Puck, left, watches Melisa Soledad Pereyra's Hermia held back by Tyrone Phillips' Lysdander in her brawl with Cristina Panfilio's Helena in Chicago Shakespeare's "A Midsummer Night's Dream." 

     The Chicago Sun-Times has had small roles in a number of big productions, such as movies and TV shows. From that cameo headline in The Fugitive to an entire TV series, Early Edition, a late 1990s bauble built around tomorrow's newspaper magically delivered today.
     Not to forget plays. Forgive me for starting my remarks about Chicago Shakespeare's Theater's consistently excellent A Midsummer Night's Dream by focusing on a trifle: my inky mothership's brief appearance in this colorful and creative, funny and frolicking production that opened at Navy Pier Friday. Nothing big: for a minute or two the paper is ruffled by Snug the Joiner,  playing "Lion" in the sweetly ragtag amateur band's Pyramus and Thisby play-within-a-play. "Slow of study," thanks no doubt to the Old Style he keeps swilling, he sits back and checks the paper, the way any regular Chicago Joe would.  
    Not that this was the play's highlight. Far from it. I could easily point to Sam Kebede's radiant, athletic, sexy Puck, or Joe Dowling's generally joyous and frolicsome direction. But for me, the zenith has to be Cristina Panfilio's marvelous line reading as Helena, part of the ill-starred love quartet at the heart of the comedy. I can't remember hearing Shakespearean verse tossed off so easily, so naturally and conversationally. Her back-and-forth verbal duel—clad in their underwear yet—with Melisa Soledad Pereyra's Hermia was as raucous and enjoyable a piece of theater as I've seen in a while. Shakespeare, done right, should always be fresh. 
     I wasn't reviewing the play and hadn't planned on writing anything. So I'm not going to give full credit where due, nor react to Kris Vire's review in the Sun-Times, which gave the show the backhand as busy and confusing. My wife reviewed the review, with a blunt, Anglo-Saxon barnyard term, and I didn't argue with her. This was only the most recent of regular putdowns that this particular play has been receiving for centuries. Samuel Pepys, seeing a production in 1662, noted in his diary he had just witnessed "the most insipid ridiculous play that ever I saw in my life.
     Pepys was wrong.  Shakespearean scholar Harold Bloom all but calls it the Bard's best work. "Nothing by Shakespeare before A Midsummer Night's Dream is its equal and in some respects nothing by him afterward surpasses it. It is his first undoubted masterwork, without flaw."
     That might be a bit over the top—the play-within-a-play put on by the endearing band of rustics goes on too long, but then, again, it's probably supposed to. And if elements are insipid and ridiculous, are we not now living in insipid and ridiculous times? Perhaps our era's defining characteristic. So maybe reality has caught up with all this magic forest silliness. I didn't have the trouble following the play, and thought Puck radiated charm and personality. Not only was this particular comedy a whole lot of fun, but it redeemed the realm of Shakespearean comedies for me. 
     I've always been a passionate fan of the tragedies: give me King Lear, Hamlet, Richard III, the bloodier the better. But this production of A Midsummer Night's Dream is so beguiling, so smooth and musical, it made me for the first time re-evaluate that preference. With real-life tragedy unfolding all around us in the news, a good laugh in a magical forest is almost mandatory, and this play provides it. This is the comedy where Bottom—here granted the innocence the character deserves—famously transforms into an ass, a process that the entire American body politic has been undergoing for the past three years. The good news is that — spoiler alert — Bottom returns to being fully human by the end. We should all be so lucky. 

     "A Midsummer Night's Dream" runs at Chicago Shakespeare Theater through Jan. 27.


     

USS Zumwalt, ‘a slab-sided techno-iceberg’ of a ship, has Chicago-area captain

USS Zumwalt

     Everyone can name a cool car: Ferraris and Porsches race into mind, or even the Tesla S, with those sleek door handles flush to the body.
     And cool planes? That’s easy. There’s the B-2 Stealth Bomber, the Harrier Jump Jet and my favorite, the Granville Gee Bee Super Sportster, with its stubby wings and knob of a tail.
     But a cool ship?
     What would that even look like?
     Meet the USS Zumwalt, the Navy’s futuristic $7.5 billion stealth-guided missile destroyer. Commissioned two years ago to general wonderment (one military writer called it “a slab-sided techno-iceberg from the future”) at the end of November it received a new captain, Andrew Carlson, the pride of Romeoville, making this a good moment to introduce you to both, starting with the ship, of course.   

Captain Andrew Carlson

     “She’s an amazing ship to drive,” said Carlson, over the phone from San Diego. “She’s super sleek, likes to go fast and go straight, with the tumblehome bow, cuts through the water very cleanly.”
     “Tumblehome bow” — a new term for you, right? It was for me. Patience. We’ll get there.
     First we have to meet Captain Carlson.
     He was a straight-A student at Romeoville High School, where his father was principal. He was first in a class of 408, a three-team athlete who also sang in “Camelot.” Carlson graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy in 1995. His wife Heidi and four kids now live in San Diego, but he has a younger sister in Hyde Park, and his wife has family in Evanston and Glenview.
     Back to the ship, the first of what will be three “Zumwalt-class” ships. Those two pods on the fore deck are actually 155 mm guns: the housing swings away in action for the guns to fire. It has 80 guided missile pods and has a top speed of 33 knots. The uncluttered design is intended to make it hard to detect by radar. It is said to have the profile of a small fishing boat, though like everything in the Navy, that too is controversial. There is no shortage of experts who say the ship is as easy to spot as a battleship, which leads to the hotly debated “tumblehome hull.”

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Flashback 2006: Skipping into candy land

Vandal Gummy, Red, by WhisBe

      The Ferrara Candy Company announced last week it is moving its headquarters, and 400 employees, from Oak Brook Terrace to Chicago, specifically the Old Post Office, which is finally getting its long-awaited overhaul, after years as one of Chicago's most recalcitrant white elephants. 

     That reminded me of my visit to their Forest Park factory, a dozen years ago, and I dug it out of the archives. 

     Do you know how they make gummy bears? Of course you don't. You probably think they use metal molds to form the little squishy ursine confections. Ha! Of course not. The actual process is . . . Well, I'm not sure I should tell you. Because it's so staggeringly cool, maybe it should be a secret only a few of us really plugged-in cool guys know about. . .
     I didn't learn the secret of gummy bears until I went through Ferrara Pan Candy Co. in Forest Park. A dream of mine, to visit the home of Lemonheads and Red Hots and Atomic Fire Balls (There's an un-PC candy name for ya!) and gummy bears and sour gummy worms, which are made . . . no, no, not yet!
     The production line is vertical—that is, it uses gravity to cut down on the need for pumps. Sugar and corn syrup and flavorings and colorings start at the fifth floor, then are blended and mixed and cooked on lower levels, which feature tons and tons of a certain white granular staple.
     "One thing you've got to have is lots of sugar," said John Conversa, the plant manager, showing off one of a pair of two-story sugar silos, 16 feet across. "I believe this one holds 600,000 pounds."
     Sugar—or more precisely, our government's shortsighted and punitive sugar tariffs—have driven many Chicago candy companies to Mexico.
     Family-owned Ferrara Pan stays here, although it does have factories south of the border, and its more, shall we say, sugar-intensive candies are made there, such as Atomic Fire Balls, which are basically pure sugar with a heart of plutonium-239 (joking; they only taste that way).
     Not that sugar aplenty isn't being used at Forest Park; the factory goes through 200,000 pounds—the contents of a single rail car—every day.
     The dynamics of the plant are interesting enough to fill up three columns. Parts look just like a ship's engine, all pipes and retorts and gauges. What they're basically doing is removing moisture, taking liquid ingredients and cooking and drying them until the result is a miniature distillate of sweetness and flavor.
     Much of that flavor is sourness, which means acidity, and, as Conversa says, "Acid is very hygroscopic," meaning it draws water, so keeping tabs on the water content of the candy is very important.
     An extra 2 percent of moisture is the difference between a jelly bean that will sit happily on the shelf for years and one that will immediately begin to break down—"sweat" is the candy maker's term. Sweating candy is bad.
     Jelly beans, incidentally, are built up like pearls, around a center, a process known lyrically as "engrossment."
     They actually use three different types of sugar, increasing in fineness, to get the hard sheen on the outside, the way you would switch to finer sandpaper to finish a wooden desk.
     But I was going to tell you how they mold gummy bears. No, not a metal mold—imagine trying to pry a warm, sticky gummy worm out of THAT. No, they take corn starch, mixed with a bit of oil to make it clump like wet snow.
     Machines spread the beige starch in a low tray, then take a plate bearing hundreds of little steel bears and press their shapes into the starch, the way wet sand forms footprints. Then the trays slide under hundreds of little spigots—the whole place is automated—and the nozzles blurp just enough sweet/sour liquid to fill each bearlike impression. The candies are set aside to harden, then the trays are flipped over, the nascent gummy bears have their cornstarch steamed off, and are on their way to be packaged for their rendezvous with your mouth.
     Like most kids, I have an innate preference for the chocolate family of candies. But going through Ferrara Pan gave me appreciation for the whole sour/gummy subgenus.
     They truly are a wonder and, more so, a Chicago wonder.

     —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Oct. 30, 2006

The Saturday Snapshot #19

    
     I saw this photo and just gasped: hoarfrost on a stand of trees, taken a couple years ago by Tom Peters from Steger-Monee Road, just north of Momence.
     "I deliver flowers for a shop in Beecher so I spend a lot of time on country roads in the southland," Tom writes.
     Somehow, even the idea of flowers being delivered in rural areas jostles with our preconceptions. I'd think that the close-to-the-soil types would grow their own, or be too practical to pony up for a bouquet. But upon reflection, that can't be true. 
     What really makes this photo, in my opinion, is the use of color. The line of white trees cutting across it. The faint green of the grass, just barely pushing through the frost in the foreground. And then, off to the left, the pop of that deep, lucious, soul- renewing red, like a ruby set amidst a palmful of snow. 

Grab a squeegee; cleaning up after Trump will not be easy

     “Government is like a pump,” Adlai Stevenson said during the presidential campaign of 1952. “And what it pumps up is just what we are, a fair sample of the intellect, the ethics, and the morals of the people, no better, no worse.”
     That’s true, sadly, though a hard truth to stomach in the era of Trump. Eww, yuck. Where did that come from?
     Oh, right; it came from us. Half of us anyway, nearly.
     We’ve become so accustomed to this daily spew of presidential bile: rage tweets, bald lies, outrageous claims, the whole wretched vomitorium, that it’s easy to become frozen in the moment, staring transfixed at today’s slurry, bubbling up from the depths, hardly daring to hope that at some point in the indeterminate future the man is going to be booted off the stage.
     And then what?
     Cue the celebration, right? Like the end of a Star Wars movie: trumpets blaring, banners flapping, Ewoks dancing, Luke and Leia exchanging coy smiles.
     That’s what people seem to anticipate, with growing expectation, as Robert Mueller picks off Trump’s confederates one-by-one, and the bloodhounds of justice bay, closer and closer. The end is in sight!

     Pretty to think so. If you are feeling that way, well, spoiler alert. You might want to stop reading here.
     As comforting as it is to imagine that all our problems will be over, that, alas, is as much an illusion as The Donald's claim that electing him would make all our dreams come true. Trump is a symptom, not a cause, and the same knee-knocking fear, moral rot and intellectual dishonesty that heaved him from the bowels of our national experience will disgorge a new version. Maybe even a more dangerous one. Another hard lesson of our era is that there is no shortage of men ready to betray their country and its ideals for adulation and power. The pump is still chugging. Who knows what it will dredge up next?
     What to do? Stevenson never got to be president. He was the original egghead, a term coined in tribute to his bald dome. I won't portray that as a tragedy. He had a certain smug, fey, self-satisfied quality that rubbed people the wrong way.
     We need to avoid that. Stevensonian superiority is a trap that even he recognized. During that 1952 election, in Chicago, he said: "Government in a democracy cannot be stronger or more tough-minded than its people. It cannot be more inflexibly committed to the task than they."
     And that task is? To look beyond Trump, to the heart of the problem: his supporters. To coax them away from the Trumpian nightmare and back to the American dream. It won't be easy. The first step is understand them. They are not evil, they are not stupid, necessarily. Dismissing the Right the way it dismisses the Left, as traitors and idiots, is not helpful. Then how? Since Trump is a con-man; it might help us to consider them The Defrauded.
     Think of an elderly person who gives her life savings to a Nigerian prince. Why? Because he reached out to her and offered her a vision—a cool $20 million USD, in an aluminum suitcase.
     When you sit Aunt Betty down, and tell her the bad news—your money's gone, there is no prince—sure, she might respond with appropriate shock, regret and embarrassment. But that requires a savvy that would have shielded her from this folly in the first place.
     More likely, she grabs the checkbook back, screams "NO!" It is you who are lying, saying these awful things about Prince Haruum. The dream is not easily surrendered.
     And before you scorn that person, look at your own life. Being clear-sighted isn't difficult when the view is nice. If you have a good job and a supportive spouse and acceptable kids and a not-bad house, then sure, those clutching at a con can seem inexplicable. For many Americans, Trump's slimy, bogus dream, his goose-stepping superiority, is all they have, and if you're going to laugh as their dream turns to ash, well, where is that empathy you are so proud of?
     Like any patriotic American, I'm looking forward to the day when Trump and his cohort are squeegeed into the storm drain. When that happens, the really hard work will begin: dealing with his duped followers.

Void filler

     My sense of humor can be ... odd at times.
     We finally got chairs for the kitchen, to replace the counter height quartet that, after 15 years of sledgehammer onslaught from Steinberg posteriors, had begun to wobble. The new chairs, from Pottery Barn, came individually packed, carefully wrapped in styrofoam sheeting. The space between the chair back and the seat was filled with these smaller boxes, each box empty and labeled "VOID FILLER" I suppose to prevent customers from assuming that something was supposed to be inside and then complaining that whatever they imagined wasn't there.
     "This is just what we need!" I exclaimed to my wife. "I felt an absence ... I couldn't put my finger on it. And now we have this!"
    With the boys away in law school, well, I'll admit, a chunk of life seems missing. I didn't want to complain—with the real losses and tragedies happening every day, the less said about this lacuna, the better. All is as it should be.
    Still ... the void was real. It would manifest itself toward dinner times where I might—or might not—wanly inquire of the wife, "Hear from the boys?" 
    And she would say yes, she had gotten an email from this or that boy about this or that concern. A couple pebbles to suck on for a day's trudge through the empty nest desert. 
    Often not even that. Nope, nothing, they're busy, I'm busy, we're all busy, beavering away at our work. Which fills the void nicely, except when it doesn't. And for that, I have these convenient boxes. 
     Actually, I don't. My wife took one look at them. "Ha ha," she said, and instructed me to dispose of them. Which I did. 

If I win that Banksy, will I own it, or will it own me?

     Who are the most important artists in the world?
     No, this isn't a trick question. Though I wouldn't blame you for sensing a trap and responding: "Nobody. None of them are important." Because if poetry, in the much-quoted phrase of Auden's, "makes nothing happen," that goes double for art, hung in galleries, traded for money, admired and revered, but essentially outside the slipstream of human history, with its wars and hunger and scrabble up the greased pole.
     That stipulated, you could still list those who are a big noise in the art world and thus considered them important: Damien Hirst, with his cows in formaldehyde; Jeffery Koons, of giant chrome inflatable bunny fame (I hope that last phrase is as fun to read as it was to write).
     Had you asked me, I'd have said, "Banksy," the London graffiti artist turned global trickster. But I've been asking everyone I run into if they've heard of Banksy and most haven't. Can you be important if people don't know who you are? Sure, ask Tim Berners-Lee, inventor, in 1989 of something that came to be called the World Wide Web.
     Who is Banksy? An anonymous, more or less, British graffiti artists whose stencil wall paintings hit a sweet spot between spare beauty and pointed social commentary. A dove in a flak vest on a wall in the occupied territories. Security forces going through Dorothy Gale's wicker basket. A masked protester hurling a bouquet of flowers.
     His work is also a running commentary on artistic value, an essential subject in a world where a supposed Da Vinci can draw $450 million at auction. Banksy paints on buildings, mostly, in essence giving his work away. Some building owners paint them over, while others break out concrete saws and cut them out. There's a fascinating documentary, "Saving Banksy" about what happens after the artist does a spate of paintings in San Francisco.

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"Rogers Park without the Heartland seems absurd"

Nicholas Tremulis

     Honestly: we rarely go to the Heartland Cafe as a destination in itself. The groats-and-granola menu put it in a distant orbit in our culinary universe, as did its rough, we-slapped-this-together-the-weekend-before-we-opened decor. 
     But I do have a habit of being called there, either to meet people we're joining for an evening at the nearby, excellent Lifeline Theater or, in the 2009 column below, hunting an elusive Facebook friend.
     So while not exactly a fan, I thought I would acknowledge the sadness felt by aficionados of the place, which Block Club reports is closing at the end of the month, by reposting this encounter with local musician Nicholas Tremulis. The good news is that he is still rocking: he'll do a Christmas show at the Blue Nocturne (the lower level of the Chopin Theater) 1543 W. Division, on Dec. 16. 
     I thought I'd catch up with him, and ask for his thoughts on Heartland closing. He replied:

     Some places, you just equate with the neighborhood they reside in. Rogers Park without the Heartland seems absurd; like your parents getting a divorce. This was a place where radical, pinko-commie hippy/punks could meet to plan a little subversive action back in the day. Those who walked the talk. Another landmark of the left disappears. Seems fitting to me that the only other time I played there was to backup John Sinclair reading poetry. Goodbye to the oldest beatnik in Chicago.

     'I'm looking for a boisterous Norwegian woman," I explained to the maitre d' at the Heartland Cafe.
     "Well, there are a lot of women here," she said, gesturing to the dark, crowded bar, where the clientele did indeed skew female. "Whether they're Norwegian or not . . . "
     Earlier, my wife and I had been downtown, at Harry Caray's Italian Steakhouse, where Dutchie Caray, Harry's sposa cara, was given a surprise 80th birthday party Saturday night ("Do you think it's a good idea to surprise an 80-year-old?" I wondered beforehand. "I mean, could it be dangerous?") Dutchie took the shock in stride -- sharp as a tack, she of course knew something was up, but expected a family gathering, not the hundreds of friends who turned out.
     After 90 minutes of coconut crab risotto and conversation, my wife and I couldn't resist the temptation to head north. My earthy Norwegian Facebook pal, Gry Haukland, whom you might recall reading about last spring, is visiting Chicago, a development that initially alarmed my wife, until I explained that she's staying with Lee Klawans, a fellow she met on my Facebook page. The happy couple let me know they'd be listening to music at the Heartland in East Rogers Park, and that seemed reason aplenty to swing by.
     We scanned the bar and saw no one radiating Gry's striking Nordic beauty. We did, however, find Nicholas Tremulis, on the small stage in the back room at the Heartland, playing without a band. His name sparked a flash of recognition, the pale gleam of a WXRT-stoked local celebrity from 25 years ago. "Let's stay," I told my wife. "We're already here. The cover charge is only seven bucks. "
     Tremulis cut a curious figure—his pants a shade of light orange associated with children's aspirin, a brown leather jacket over a well-filled maroon shirt, thin mustache, goatee, dangly ball earrings in both ears and a giant newsboy cap. The get-up would look fey on a trim 20-year-old, but on a guy my age, or maybe a few years older, well, let's say that it put the oft-humbling trade of professional journalism into a more attractive light. There are hells below mine. Tremulis was playing the most beat-up, cheapest-looking nylon-stringed guitar I've ever seen in the hands of a working musician.
     But the songs were good—"I Can't Stand the Rain" by Tina Turner, whom he once opened for, "Sweet Dreams," by Patsy Cline—and we stayed until he ended his set.
     "This is a tune I usually play for really drunk people," he said, scanning the crowd of tea drinkers at the Heartland. "But I don't see any."
     I think it was his battered toy guitar that affected me, coupled with the knowledge that we've both been kicking around Chicago for the past quarter century, playing our modest songs with less success than our fevered dreams of glory might have hoped for. A person could feel bad about that, or a person could feel good, and Saturday night, listening to Nicholas Tremulis, I chose to feel good. Hey, it's a living.

TODAY'S CHUCKLE . . .

     Nicholas Tremulis reminded me of these stanzas from Emily Dickinson—not quite a joke, but perhaps humorous enough to pass as a chuckle:

     I'm nobody! Who are you? Are you nobody too? Then there's a pair of us— don't tell! They'd banish us, you know.     How dreary to be somebody! How public, like a frog To tell your name the livelong day To an admiring bog!

—Originally published in the Sun-Times, Aug. 4, 2009

Department of Coffee and Social Affairs

     Philip Johnson's 190 South LaSalle is one of my favorite buildings in Chicago, from its funky, post-modern summit to the vast, gold barrel-vaulted lobby.  It's a whimsical shrine to mammon.
     So when I walk by, I can't help glancing inside. And on Friday, I was rewarded by a view of this oddly-named coffee shop: "Department of Coffee and Social Affairs" For one confused second, I thought it was some kind of Kafkaesque goverment bureau, so perfectly is its quasi-official name suited to the vastness of the building. Though actually it's part of a chain started in London in 2010.
     I had time, and a need for caffeine, so sauntered in. I've been trying to get a good cup of espresso lately—prodded by memories of tiny cups of steaming perfection in Italy—and ordered a cup, just to see what they could do. Not much, I'm afraid. With all the money and creativity expended on the location, the decor and the name, they just couldn't get the ball those last few yards and score on the product itself. The espresso had that familiar wrong note—maybe try a finer grind and longer pull; just a suggestion. Not a complete waste: the clerks were friendly, the room grand enough, a pleasant place to stand and ponder why something the humblest snack bar in Florence can manage to serve up for $1.50 eludes the fanciest American coffee shops charging twice as much. It can't be that hard. Can it? Does anyone know anywhere in Chicago to get a decent cup of espresso? Tell me, please.

Flashback 2008: The FBI hauls away Rod Blagojevich

Prison scene, by Francesco Piranesi (Metropolitan Museum of Art)

  

     Ten years ago today, FBI agents burst into Rod Blagojevich's Lincoln Park home at dawn and dragged the governor away in handcuffs. He remains in prison, a reminder that refusing to recognize your crime magnifies your punishment. It can be argued that Blagojevich wasn't guilty of anything beyond the vile horse-trading that goes on every day in politics at every level. But that isn't true. He was guilty of hubris, and stupidity: he did his vile horse trading into an open FBI wiretap, one that he knew was there, or at least should have suspected was there, and carried his shake-downs beyond the implied into the unescapable. And I had forgotten about him lashing out at Children's Memorial Hospital because its CEO didn't give him money. He should rot in jail for that alone. 

     I had seen the arrest coming—during the election I wrote that the race was really between Judy Baar Topinka and Pat Quinn, since Rod might end up in prison. But still it came as a shock and I think I processed it fairly well, raising the oft-repeated trope of four out of our past eight governors being in prison. I think it's sweet that I naively ran over to the Thompson Center, expecting some outward sign of our inner rot. I've kept the section headings the column had at the time. 

OPENING SHOT . . .

     As if the Tribune Co. filing for bankruptcy protection on Monday weren't shock enough for one week, today the FBI arrested Gov. Blagojevich and accused him of trying to sell the vacant U.S. Senate seat from Illinois.
     My God.
     The storm clouds were gathering around the self-proclaimed reformer for months. And yet news of the governor's sudden arrest was met with open-mouthed shock.
     I hurried over to the Thompson Center, where the state government offices are located.
     Silly me, I expected that stunned state workers might be congregating in small groups, pressing their palms to their cheeks in alarm.
     No way. Business as usual, in more ways than one. If these charges stick—and the feds do not arrest a sitting governor at dawn unless they feel confident about a case—Blagojevich will be the fourth Illinois governor to go to prison in the past 35 years (for those at home keeping score: George Ryan is in the slammer now for bribery; Dan Walker in the late 1980s for his role in the savings and loan mess, and Otto Kerner in the mid-1970s in the racetrack stock scandal).
     If Blagojevich ends up in a cell next to Ryan, that will mean four of our past eight governors have gone to prison. We're batting .500. That's a lousy average.
     And Blagojevich will be the worst of the bunch, not only because he alone was busted while still in power, but his alleged crime—trying to sell a seat in the U.S. Senate—dwarfs the penny-ante pocket lining of the others.
     There was no commotion at the Thompson Center. People lined up behind the metal detectors—we're better at screening those who would blow up the government from without than those who wreck it from within.
     Near the elevators, a big sign, "HAPPY HOLIDAYS" in red letters, two feet high.
     Underneath, "Governor Rod Blagojevich," written in an unmistakable cash green.

'I WANT TO MAKE MONEY'

     U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald said it all when he summed up the governor's "appalling" conduct:
     "Gov. Blagojevich has taken us to truly a new low," said Fitzgerald in his press conference today. "He attempted to sell a Senate seat."
     Nor was that all. Each detail jars more than the next. Blagojevich had a raft of other "pay-for-play" shakedown schemes. He tried to pull back $8 million for Children's Memorial Hospital because its CEO wouldn't contribute to his campaign coffers. He was stealing from sick children. He tried to get members of the Tribune editorial board fired.
     The actions that led to these charges transpired within the past few weeks—that's the most incredible part of all—long after a rational corrupt official would know that the heat is on and he should lie low. Any idiot, any speeding driver with half a brain, at least slows down when he passes a squad car with a radar gun out.
     Blago sped up. What could he have been thinking? And what should we be thinking now?
     "This is a moment of truth in Illinois," said Fitzgerald.
     Indeed it is. What next? We owe it to ourselves and to our children to be shocked, to be embarrassed, to be outraged and to look hard at this obscenity of governance—Blagojevich may be the man going to jail, but many others have a hand in this system. Every time a scandal erupts, we vow this time will be the end. If this doesn't lead to reform, nothing ever will.
     —Originally published in the Sun-Times Dec. 9, 2008

The Saturday Snapshot #18

The first time I went to Paris, I was 17. Workers at the Louvre happened to be on strike, and the great museum was closed. This I refused to accept, not until I went up to the museum and tugged on the locked doors with all my teenage might.

Thus I have a pre-existing sympathy to those who visit distant cities and are denied access to artist wonders. I noticed this powerful photograph by my Facebook friend Mia Jung, and asked her if I could repost it here with a few words of hers. She writes:

"The Republic"

     I took my daughter for a college visit and softball camp near Philadelphia a couple of weeks ago. It was going to be a busy week for me and I had an assignment due for a photography class I am taking, so I decided to tackle a part of the assignment while my daughter was at the camp. With only about an hour and a half at my disposal, I did some online research and found that there is a Daniel Chester French sculpture in Philly’s Fairmount Park. Perfect!
      Daniel Chester French is the artist who sculpted the impressive 65-foot tall gilded statue called “The Republic.” The title may not mean anything to you, but if you have seen photos of Chicago’s 1893 Columbian Exposition, then you have seen that beautiful work of art towering over the Great Basin.     
       The sculpture that sits in Philadelphia’s Fairmount Park is an earlier work by French entitled “Law, Prosperity, and Power” (1880). It used to sit atop the U.S. Post Office and Federal Building in the City of Brotherly Love until the building was destroyed in 1937, when the statue was moved to its current location. I thought it would be perfect for my assignment, which was to pick a piece of public art and photograph it from varying perspectives (lie down on the ground and shoot up, walk around it, etc.).
     After checking out the park on Google maps and not seeing an actual parking lot in the vicinity of the statue, I called the Association for Public Art in Philadelphia to check on my options. The kind lady I spoke with said I should park at the Mann Music Center and that the art work was a short walk up a hill. Ok, all set!
     When I reached the park, a police officer told me I could park on a through-street and walk anywhere I wanted to. I parked and walked over to the Mann Center, but it was closed. Fencing prevented me from walking up the hill and behind the Center to where the statue is situated. I walked back to my car and drove around the Center and up the hill, parking in a driveway with my hazards on in case anyone came along. I discovered that the statue was enclosed in the fencing that runs around the entire Center and every single gate had a padlock on it. I couldn’t get close enough to shoot the varying perspectives that were required for the assignment, but that’s not what got me steamed. I can always find art work closer to home to shoot.
     What made me angry is that a piece of “public art,” owned by the citizens of Philadelphia, has been made inaccessible. When I got back to Illinois, I hit Google maps again and looked more closely at the aerial views. The fencing could have easily been erected to leave the sculpture exposed, but the decision was made to lock it in on the grounds of the Mann Music Center, rendering it only accessible when the Center is open (it is a summer outdoor concert venue).
     I took this picture of the art work with bars and padlock visible as an expression of my disgust over its inaccessibility. I posted it to the Facebook page of the Association for Public Art, which ironically touts Philadelphia’s “Museum Without Walls” program and they wrote:

     Association for Public Art We appreciate you bringing this to our attention. For a variety of reasons beyond our control, sites and contexts for works of public art can change over time. We worked with the City of Philadelphia to re-install "Law, Prosperity, and Power" in 1937, prior to the Mann Music Center’s construction and a fence was more recently installed as part of their renovations. We are sorry to learn of your disappointment and have updated our website to reflect the variable accessibility of the work. We do hope that you were able to experience some of the other incredible public art throughout the city. Thank you again for reaching out.

Are you eating enough cheesecake?

     Folks, the holiday season is upon us. A time to reflect on what's really important in our lives: our families, the great city of Chicago we live in and around, this marvelous country of ours, the United States of America, and of course, Eli's Cheesecake. 
     I try not to make assumptions about my readers. But my guess is, it might have been a while since you're had a slice of Eli's Cheesecake. Am I right? Nothing to be ashamed of. Life gets busy. People lose perspective, and forget what gives life savor and purpose, overlooking the place in the pantheon of perfection that smooth, creamy cheesecake holds.
     Me, I just had a slice of Eli's Cheesecake after lunch on Thursday, and it was delicious. The hardest part was choosing among the three, count 'em three varieties I have in my freezer. I chose strawberry, its bright red top harmonizing with the red stripes in our beloved American flag. An hour on the counter and it was at cool perfection for eating.
     I'll be honest, I usually save the cheesecake for my oldest boy, who just loves it. That's what cheesecake means to me: family, love, tradition. Home isn't home without cheesecake. 
    But cheesecake is meant to be eaten, and as significant as Eli's Cheesecake is to, say, the economic vitality of the state of Illinois, or the lofty position of Chicago among purveyors of our nation's beloved comestibles, we cannot lose sight of just how soul-shiveringly delicious Eli's Cheesecake truly is.
     That said, friends, let me draw your attention to the photograph. The special Eli's Illinois Bicentennial Cheesecake, star of our state's 200th birthday party on Navy Pier earlier this week. I don't have to identify the gentleman with him: Honest Abe Lincoln, whose affection for cheesecake is well-known.   
     Eli's Cheesecake has become synonymous, not only with love and family, but with Chicago, and with our most cherished values. That is only in part due of the inherent wonderfulness of Eli's Cheesecake, but also thanks to the tireless efforts of my friend, Marc Schulman, owner of Eli's and son of the founder.
       For those few people who don't instantly recognize the superlative nature of Eli's Cheesecake, its 30 varieties, one for every conceivable taste, how other cheesecakes just don't hold up, plus Eli's pantheon of non-cheesecake delights, such as thick, soft, delicious cookies, and those tiny, single serving fruit pies well, Marc is sure to remind them. 
     Sure, cynics might scoff. They could point out that, among Marc's many heroic efforts to bring knowledge of Eli's Cheesecake to those unfortunates who might lack awareness, is the paid advertising that Eli's has always sponsored on this blog. Let them scoff. There is no quality so pure, no democratic ideal so important that naysayers cannot find an argument against it.  I do not believe that financial considerations affect my view of cheesecake in the slightest. I loved it before I ever met Marc, love it during our many years of friendship and mutually-beneficial economic arrangement, and will continue to do so, long after his sponsorship ends, onward to the end of time. He did not ask me to write anything concerning cheesecake, but I was moved by that photograph to pen this spontaneous outpouring of my sincere heart.
     Nor does his sponsorship prevent me from turning my critical judgment about Eli's Cheesecake. Since absolute perfection is reserved for the Supreme Deity, it follows that even Eli's Cheesecake has a flaw, one I was reminded of while my wedge was diminishing before me today. When you are finished eating any given piece of cheesecake, a sign lights up in your head: "More cheesecake!" And it was only with difficulty, with an act of will on my part, to resist defrosting a second slice—another advantage to keeping it frozen, to deter spontaneous consumption. Cheesecake is not exactly a diet food. There, I said it.
     So let no one claim that my critical blade was dulled by commerce. Let complainers carp and dieters doubt, miserably nibbling at their celery. Me, I'm sticking with my family, my city, my country, the flag that represents it, and Eli's Cheesecake. If you do not, as I do, have three flavors in your freezer, then click at the convenient link at left and order one for yourself or for someone you love or, ideally, both. Or two. Or three. You will be glad you did, as will I. Do it now. 

Flashback 1999: Dec. 7, "Everybody was in their own grief"

Marine Cpl. Stanley Stephen Swiontek

     This story stayed with me and 17 years later I followed it up, visiting with Rosemary's brother, Rick.

     Every Dec. 7 for the rest of her life, for years and years, after the war was over and most people turned to other matters, Rosemary Martinotti's mother took out her gold star, the star that meant you had lost a son in the war, and put it in the window.
     Then her mother passed away, and the responsibility for remembering fell to Rosemary. She keeps a picture of her brother, Marine Cpl. Stanley Stephen Swiontek, in her living room. She still has the little pillow, with fringes, and a poem about motherhood, and a picture of the U.S.S. Arizona, that Stanley brought home for Mother's Day, 1941, the last time she ever saw him.
     "What a great guy," remembers Martinotti, who is attending the city's ceremony today at Navy Pier remembering Pearl Harbor and honoring Swiontek and the six other Chicagoans who died aboard the Arizona. "We were thrilled whenever he would come home."
     Swiontek was 26 and a cook aboard the ship, but to the kids in Roseland, he was a big deal. His younger brothers and sisters adored him.
     "My brother Ted and I were the cabooses—the youngest of nine," she says. "We used to fight about who was going to polish the brass buttons on his uniform. We were just thrilled with this tall person. Ted would say, 'I'm going to polish his buttons,' and I would say, 'Then I'm going to polish his shoes.' "
     She was 12 years old when her brother took that last furlough.
     "You know what we loved doing? All the kids in the neighborhood?" she says. "We used to love sitting around in the backyard, and Stanley would tell us all these stories about being in the Marines, on the ship. We'd just sit there, going 'Wow!' We just ate it up."
     When the family heard that Pearl Harbor had been attacked, it was almost as if they knew something bad had happened to Stanley.
     "All of a sudden, a pall came over the house. Everybody was in their own grief," she says. "We didn't hear anything for days. Then we got the telegram."
     The Arizona had sunk in nine minutes—1,100 men were trapped inside and most are still there, entombed. Stanley's family never even found out the circumstances of his death, only that he had won the right to sleep in that day.
     "He would have been on land otherwise," Martinotti says.
     Nothing was ever the same for her mother.
     "Ted and I often wondered what Christmas was going to be like," she says. "Because every year she went through her son's death on Dec. 7. It was so traumatic. My mother would get physically ill. It was exhausting. She never got a chance to truly and honestly get over it because they showed it, over and over again, every Dec. 7, the Arizona sinking, and she could picture her son, her favorite son, inside of it. It just tore her apart.
     "You see, if a mother's going to have a favorite son, then Stanley was her favorite, simply because he was so gentle. He was so handsome. He was so kind. He was just great.
     Alone among her family, Martinotti has never gone to Hawaii to see his ship.
     "I just couldn't do it," she said. "I still cry."
     But she is making a point of being at the ceremony today.
     "Because he meant so much to me. I was so proud of him. I'd say, 'That's my brother in that uniform.' "
       —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Dec. 7, 1999

Menorah as middle finger

     Hanukkah began Sunday night. It's a more subdued holiday in our household, with the boys away at school. We did put up decorations, a kind of muscle memory. And exchanged gifts — Rolling Stones tickets! And we lit a menorah, which we stick in the window. That's actually my favorite part of the holiday. The world pushes hard against Jews, sometimes, and it's a small joy to push back in a small way, as I tried to describe in this column from 2004.

     Perhaps I'm just not in the holiday mood. But am I the only one to think that Hanukkah is a pretty second-rate holiday? A minor festival which, due to its unfortunate proximity to Christmas, has grown to enormous proportions, somewhat hideously, the way the frogs in the pond at a nuclear power plant might grow to the size of footstools. Hanukkah music is tinny compared to the beauty of Christmas carols — we're grinding out "Dreidel, dreidel, dreidel" while they've got "Silent Night." Those chocolate coins taste lousy. Dreidel is not a fun game. There's no tree. Ordinarily, Hanukkah would have the cultural significance of Tu B'shvat — Jewish Arbor Day, which you probably never heard of but would be a huge event if it and not Hanukkah fell in December.
     The only reason Hanukkah gets celebrated the way it does — with gifts and decorations and fuss — is to ape Christmas hoopla, as a sop to the kiddies, who otherwise would drive their parents crazy out of gift envy.
     Yes, I'll munch my share of latkes. And yes, lighting the menorah can be a nice moment, if the kids muster the self-control to stop yammering "presents, presents, presents" for a few seconds.
     And there is one aspect I truly savor, something very personal: when I take the lit menorah and set it in the front window, which I've always considered a vigorous "Up yours, we're still here" to all the anti-Semites over the centuries and prowling the outside world today.
     I softly mutter my own little blessing to those people, a two-word benediction I won't repeat here, as I set the brass menorah on the windowsill. A small, triumphant moment.
     So maybe Hanukkah isn't so bad after all. It must be my mood.
              —Originally published in the Sun-Times Dec. 10, 2004

Flashback 2010: "The rich subtlety of sign language will knock you out"

  

     On a dare from a reader, I wrote an obituary for myself four years ago, and posted it yesterday on Facebook, part of my routine of tossing up old blog entries on their anniversary to garner a few dozen extra clicks. The piece mentioned, among the stories I had written, one about translating a show tune into American Sign Language, and another reader, with a deaf child, said he'd like to read that. I remembered liking the piece and dug it up.

     You never know when the gray thunderheads of routine will part and a beam of something bright shine through; call it grace, beauty, whatever. Something that lingers.
     It isn't in the overheated, windowless office of the director of the International Center on Deafness & the Arts in Northbrook, listening to a detailed rendition of her career. Nor on a tour of the center. Nor seeing many photos of famous alumna Marlee Matlin. Nor even watching deaf students choreograph a dance from "West Side Story," being staged at the Centerlight Theatre this February.
     Just as I start wondering when I can politely grab my coat and bolt, we come into a cluttered work room. At a table sit Christine Erickson, the theater program director, Gina Matzkin, a costumer and longtime program participant, and a teenage girl, Lauren Holtz.
     Each has a ring binder open in front of her. They are in the midst of translating the lovely lyrics to "Somewhere" into American Sign Language.
     "Right now, we're struggling with the first two lines; 'There's a place for us/Somewhere, a place for us,' " says Erickson. "We're trying to give that a really nice picture."
     There is no American Sign Language sheet music for "West Side Story." Translating word-for-word doesn't work, because ASL is not a mere visual approximation of English, but a distinct language (popular, too -- about as many Americans speak ASL as speak Italian).

EACH WORD HAS TO BE LABORED OVER
     "The words, 'There's a place for us,' " says Erickson. "The girl singing the song is not talking about it being for her and somebody else. What we're trying to figure out is, should she be signing 'us' meaning 'me and you,' or for 'them,' Tony and Maria, or for 'all of us.' It gets complicated."
     That it does. Take the third line, "Peace and quiet and open air." "This is going to be tricky. 'Peace' and 'quiet' are the same sign," explains Erickson, dusting her hands together and then spreading them apart, palms down.
     "I would prefer to keep 'peace' and do something else for 'quiet,' " Erickson says, suggesting the index-finger-to-lips gesture librarians are famous for, one that means, unsurprisingly, "hush" in ASL.
     "I like it," says Matzkin. Then there is the matter of keeping up with the beat. "Take my hand" is three syllables. The ASL symbol—one hand clapped over the other at your sternum —is one beat. The solution: break the gesture into three separate parts; the lower hand is presented, the upper hand claps over it, and the pair are drawn to the chest: Take my hand.
     "'Time to look, time to care,'—what does that mean?" asks Lauren, 15.
     "Life goes by so fast," says Erickson, shifting gears. "You have to stop, look around, spend time with the people you care about. What do you think it means?"
     "That," Lauren said, earnestly.
     We get into a discussion of ASL. There are regional accents—"Halloween," is signed differently in different parts of the country. People can sign loudly, softly, gently, strong. Men sign differently than women.
     In spring 2009, they did "Grease," which has a song going over various car parts.
     "I had to go home and ask my husband," says Matzkin (both are deaf). She signs "pistons"—a vigorous gesture of two fists driving up and down.
     "Somewhere" ends with a plaintive "Somehow/Someday/ Somewhere." They puzzle.
     "You guys overuse the word 'some,' " Matzkin tells me (By "you guys" she means the hearing world. Deaf society is the most militant of the various groups with disabilities, and if anywhere here I give the impression that ASL is pretty, I apologize for the insult).

     They consider "True how, true day, true where."
     "I'm not in love with the 'true,' but it might work," says Matzkin.
     They end up with "Possible. Future. Out there"—each gesture a double pump that echoes the two syllables of "Somehow, someday, somewhere."
     "From the top," said Matzkin.
     Lauren stands up, an elfin girl in a purple leotard. The freshman at Hersey High School in Arlington Heights is a quick study, and nails the lyrics they have just worked out while the song plays on a boom box, gesturing faster than I can write it down: a finger to her lips for hush, signing "together" by making O's out of her thumbs and forefingers and locking them together, then the big finish.
     "Someday"—she signs "future," palm at her temple, then slicing out.
     "Somewhere"—she signs "out there," thrusting her right arm, straight out, then her left, a gesture of Evita-like triumph.
     That the above description does not drop your jaw in delight, if you are not struck by the moment's charm, the fault is mine, limited as I am to the written English language. If you saw Lauren Holtz sign "Somewhere" in ASL, you'd know what I mean.
     But we all must labor under our limitations.
                    —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Nov. 28, 2010