O'Hare is the World's Busiest Airport (this week)

Heathrow Airport, London — 2009 

     Willis Tower is the tallest building in North America, still, if you consider its roof as the top and ignore the dubious antenna stuck atop One World Trade Center in New York.
     Not that the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat ruled that way.
     Of course, if you consider the altitude of buildings, then any warehouse in Denver beats our tallest building, since their ground floors start a mile up, and Chicago is a paltry 600 feet or so above sea level.
     Not that people measure buildings that way; it’s a complicated business.
     As is “world’s busiest airport,” a title that our reflexively proud Mayor Rahm Emanuel reclaimed for O’Hare International Airport.
     “Busiest airport in the world,” the mayor said Wednesday. “O’Hare International Airport has regained its status as the world’s busiest airport for flight operations,” the Department of Aviation announced.
     Which is odd, because just last week, CNN reported that Atlanta’s Hartsfield is busiest for the 16th year in a row, with 94.4 million passengers passing through in 2013.
     Sharp-eyed readers will note different measures being used here: The mayor is referring to “flight operations” while CNN is talking about passengers.
     From January to August 2014, according to the Federal Aviation Administration, 580,000 flights took off or landed at O’Hare, nudging us past Atlanta, barely.
     But before we start printing up celebratory T-shirts, maybe we should squint a little harder at those stats.
     First, notice they're only for eight months. Atlanta squeaked by us in 2013, even in flight operations, with 911,000 takeoffs and landings to O'Hare's 883,000. The race isn't over.
     "There's still more year left," noted Tony Molinero, spokesman for the FAA in Chicago. While there's nothing wrong with feeling victorious in first place while the season is still going on - baseball teams like to enter the All-Star break on top - you don't want to chill the champagne either.
     Because that's a game other people can play. Tiny Wittman Regional Airport in Oshkosh, Wis., also claims to be the world's busiest airport, and they, too, have facts to back them up, since there are 25,000 takeoffs and landings during the Experimental Aircraft Association's annual convention there in July. Slice the time window small enough, and any given airport can, for the moment, be the world'sbusiest.
     So which airport metrics are the best? My gut tells me, when Joe Average Flier is thinking about busy airports, he's not thinking of how many FedEx planes are taking off and landing empty, but how many passengers are thronging the terminals. On that measurement, Chicago is not only currently being creamed by Hartsfield, but we're in sixth place, behind airports in Beijing and Dubai, London's Heathrow, Tokyo's Haneda and - prepare yourself for a shock - Los Angeles International, which snuck ahead of us since last year, serving a million more passengers than O'Hare so far in 2014.
     Not to be Debbie Downer here. O'Hare's nosing past Atlanta, even for a few months, is not insignificant. This is a horse race.
     "For the first four months of the year, Atlanta had more, the next four months of the year it was O'Hare, so it's been fairly close," Molinero said. "It's been many years since O'Hare had more monthly flights than Atlanta."
     He noted that the FAA does not track people.
     "Whether a plane has one person or 100" doesn't matter, he said, for FAA purposes. Putting more planes through the place is a sign of health.    
     "A busy airport is good for the economy," Molinero said, noting that the mayor's boast does represent "good, legitimate, real numbers. There's strong data there, absolutely."
     Maybe that's the problem: Chicago is boasting about passing Atlanta in one of three airport metrics over an eight-month period, as if hurrying to do it before we slip back again. Has it come to that?
     The key is to make sure O'Hare is the best transportation hub it possibly can be, not to make red circles around whatever stats tell ourselves we're No. 1. Believing yourself to be tops is dangerous in business. Galena was once No. 1, considering itself superior to Chicago. It had that all-important lead ore mine and the mighty Mississippi. So when the Illinois Central wanted to go through Galena, the city refused. Chicago, less proud, welcomed the railroad. Good call.
     Telling yourself you're No. 1 might feel good, even on flimsy evidence. But I'd prefer a mayor who says we're not No. 1 and need to fight like hell. That's closer to the truth.

"Three, two one —Happy 5775!"

     I suppose there are Jews who automatically know what year it is, Hebraically, all the year round, without checking. 
    But I am not one of those Jews. I'd guess most aren't. The year is one of those things that slips through our fingers. It could be 5345 or 5825 and I wouldn't notice the difference—the "5" sticks in mind: I don't think somebody could get away with "Happy 6934!" I'd sense something out-of-place. 
    Though this time of year, I do know, because I check, so  I don't get it wrong in print:  5775. Cool, it's a palindrome numeral, same forward and backward. That's got to be lucky. Only one in our lifetimes. 
    That's 5,775 years since the creation of the universe, by the way, though again, neither I nor anybody I know actually believes that. We take it with a wink. Shame other faiths couldn't master the "Wear the less factual parts of your faith lightly" skill that Jews often have down pat: they'd save a lot of time wasted trying to dress their long-held myth up as science and hoping people buy it (though give them credit: they succeed, amazingly. If I tried to get the state of Texas to put The Book of Life in their literature textbooks, I'd probably not have half the success that Creationists do). 
      Rosh Hashana is when Jews are inscribed into The Book of Life by God Almighty— nonsense, of course, but I don't want to be a killjoy and draw too much attention to that, beyond pointing out that it's a belief held so casually that it's aired once a year and never referred to again. If a Jewish person gets really sick in July, they don't say, "I know I'm going to be okay —I was inscribed in the Book of Life last September."
      We had a special dinner, with round raisin challah, for a sweet year, lit candles and said prayers. Piffle, of course, but familiar piffle. Nonsense we've been saying forever. No need to harp on that either, no need to upset people. All religions are pails of hooey — the rituals, that is, I'm not suggesting that religions don't do good, in between the fairytales and various tics and rhetorical spasms of symbolism. But for some reason people get insulted if you don't meet their credulous twaddle with at least a polite silence, which is also unfair. I wish upon stars as a matter of habit—I did tonight, after synagogue—but I'm not going to get into an argument with you about it about its efficacy, or feel disrespected, if you don't wish upon stars along with me. 
      We trotted off to synagogue—my wife and I did, anyway. The 17-year-old refused, and I couldn't quite see forcing him: sort of contradicts the whole idea. Compulsory spiritualism though again, much of the world seems keen on that. Teens are supposed to rebel. God designed them that way, and who am I to go against His Mysterious Will?
      We went to Shir Hadash, a Reconstructionist synagogue, which we attended for a dozen years before taking a step away, after the boys' bar mitzvahs, in the traditional cigarette break from the faith.  Though now we seem to be tiptoeing back because, really, you have to pass the time somehow. Reconstructionism might be unfamiliar to you. I consider it "Judaism as if you meant it." More singing, more joy, certainly more than the arid fields of Reform Judaism I tilled as a youth, with, which I finally decided is Conservative Judaism stripped down for those who feel compelled to show up somewhere and utter some Hebrew. A sort of Cliff Notes Judaism.
     "We don't see Judaism as a spectator sport," said Fred Andes, a board member at the synagogue, summing up Reconstructionism nicely. If you're going to do it, do it, and do it like you mean it.  
     I went to services to accompany my wife—had she wanted to go bowling, I'd have been good for that, too. But I was sincerely interested in what Shir Hadash's rabbi, Eitan Weiner-Kaplow, would have to say at this delicate moment in Jewish contemporary life. With the war in Gaza still smoldering on the world's consciousness, and anti-Semitism on the rise, while Jews argue heatedly about our stance on Israel, I would not want to be a rabbi sitting in my study, pursing my lips over my keyboard and wondering what to tell the thinning ranks for the faithful. How would he navigate the lion's den?
      Rabbi Eitan spoke of Jews tendency to complain, to "kvetch" and how we actually have little to complain about, and it's better to focus on being happy. "We're supposed to be happy, not kvetching," he said. 
    Can't argue that. Sometimes the best way to address something is to let it be. Plus there was a second sermon, which might sound excessive to those used to dull sermons, but these were interesting; more interesting, to me, than the prayers.
    Fred Andes, in his speech, did gingerly approach world events.
    "I hear from people who are very scared about things in the world," he said. "What can we do about that?"
    He laid out a path sure not to ruffle too many feathers.
    "All we can do is to resolve for each of us to try to make the world better, a little bit," he said. "Think about these issues. That's the essence of the holiday." 
     Maybe I was in the holiday spirit, seeing familiar faces, singing the old songs. But that made sense too; it was refreshing not to have somebody pointedly explain exactly what the problem is and what, in his or her opinion, should be done about it, immediately. We are allowed to reflect, to consider—we might as well; it isn't as if the people causing the problems in the world are eagerly awaiting our instructions before proceeding with their folly. Sometimes we pretend that the more we fight and argue with each other, the quicker our problems will be solved, and it doesn't work like that. Anyway, Happy 5775...at least it'll be an easy one remember. Have a happy one, since none of us will be around in 5885. 

     Postscript

     "Subtle" is not a word I associate much with religious practice. But Shir Hadash did something for their daytime Rosh Hashana service on Thursday that I admired for just that reason. The Torah portion for today is Hagar, Abraham's handmaiden, being send out into the wilderness with their son, Ishmael, to make way for Isaac, who shows up unexpectedly, a child of Sarah's old age. He gets the birthright, they get to go die in the desert. Who said life was fair?
      While Rabbi Eitan Weiner-Kaplow was reading and commenting on the portion, a member of the congregation, dressed as Hagar, showed up, and they had an ongoing dialogue.
     She bemoaned being kicked out, through no fault of her own.
     "And now I'm the foreigner, 'Hagar the Egyptian,'" she said, recounting how she had dwelled in Abraham's house for years. It led the rabbi toward discussing how people are considered.
     "People who are called names, or are nameless, are invisible," he said. At one point he asked the congregation for suggestions for Hagar, what she should do now, having been expelled from the land. I almost raised my hand and said, "Build your country with the borders that you've got," but nobody else brought up the subject so roiling the Jewish world, and I didn't want to be the one to do it. 
     With congregations so touchy on the subject of Israel, and Gaza, and the Palestinians, these words were never used. But the message—at least to me—was plain. 
    "They have names, they have lives," Rabbi Eitan Weiner-Kaplow said, of unknown people generally. "Think of a group of people being made anonymous in the public eye. Practice the mitzvah of considering bringing them to mind on a daily basis or getting to know them. See each person as created in the image of God, each person with a value and a worth and a story."
     It could easily have been seen as a homily on the need to be friendly to the bank teller, and I'm sure many congregants felt that way. But there was a larger message, at least to me, and I thought it was very cleverly done, timely and important. 

Hopes, fears lurk within a can of coffee

     The Sun-Times newsroom has packed its bags and moved to the 10th floor of what I still consider the Apparel Center but is actually     now called ... checking ... River North Point.

     Well, mostly they’ve packed up. A handful of us office-dwellers linger on 9, transformed into a depopulated junkscape of massed office chairs, bundled wires, stacked gray dividers and various discarded books, tape dispensers, and, I noticed with keen interest, one unopened can of Stewarts coffee.

     Now Stewarts isn’t the best coffee — a bit pricier than Folgers, back in the day, but not Peet’s, not Green Mountain, nor any of the high-end coffees lined up at Whole Foods. I couldn’t recall ever tasting it. But it’s coffee, and I drink a lot of coffee. And while coffee is free at work, coffee at home costs money. So I figured, how bad could it be? If somebody didn’t want this can of coffee at the office — we get Starbucks on the 10th floor, so why would they? — I could find a use for it.

     I tucked the can of Stewarts into my briefcase and brought it home in triumph.

     “What’s with the coffee?” my 17-year-old said, seeing an alien can on our kitchen counter. I explained how I had found it in the ruins. He did not share my enthusiasm.

     “Couldn’t someone poison it with arsenic and then seal up the can?” he wondered.
     Kids. They have such a bleak view of life. Where is the dewy optimism of youth?
     I told him the odds of that happening are slight — the sad truth is, nobody cares enough about journalists to want to kill them, at least not in this country.
     Though, now that I had brought the can home, I had my own concerns. The orange and green tartan on the metal can, it seemed light, almost faded. But I figured it was the printing process used by Stewarts. The can couldn’t have sat neglected in our office for years, could it? I gazed at the bottom, looking for numbers, a telltale “1983” maybe. Four digits: “2064.” Either a lot number or brand new and good for another 50 years.
     Finishing up the primo costly Cafe Du Monde coffee I typically drink, I grabbed a can opener and twisted my way around the can. Taking the blue, lucky, makes-two-perfect-cups-every-time measuring scoop that I’ve used for years from the old can, I dug into the light brown Stewarts grounds with a satisfying granular “chhhh” sound.
     The spoon hit something. Something hard, buried within the ground coffee.
     My first thought — my very first thought, unfiltered, no pun intended and embarrassing to relate — was: “Treasure!” It had to be a platinum bracelet or a gold ingot or some valuable item illegally shipped into the country, sealed within coffee cans. That sort of thing happens all the time in the movies.
     That hope rose and fell in a one moment.
     My second thought was: “ewww-how-old-IS-this? Can coffee grounds congeal?” It obviously wasn’t contraband — silly me — but a clump some hardened mass of petrified coffee, solid due to the extreme age of this can that I, in my bottomless thrift, had taken home from work to kill myself with.
     I dug with the blue scoop and pried to the surface the mysterious hard thing. Not a diamond bracelet, not an ossified clump, but a red plastic spoon. Oh. Stewart’s comes with its own coffee spoon, for customers who are scoopless. Something ordinary.
     Now I want to draw your attention to the thought process at work here, because I don’t think it is unique to me. In fact, it is sadly common. I detect a single fact, one data point — something hard in the coffee. Before exploring further, I entertain possible explanations based on A) my fondest hopes and B) my darkest fears. The wildly inaccurate, insanely overblown possibilities get analyzed first. Only then does actual experience bring up the mundane reality.
     A familiar pattern, huh? We see “A” with those who glimpse a flash in the sky and conclude, “space aliens!” Party politics works that way too. We see a guy on our team, find something we like about him, then run with it. It’s as if I felt the hard thing in the coffee but never brought it to the surface to see what it was. “See this can of Stewarts? It has a broach inside. I felt it …”
     And we see “B” everywhere. Not only do people form conclusions based on a sprinkle of reality blended with their own personal anxieties — ‘‘Barack Obama had to be born in Kenya, since, geez, he’s black, just like people in Kenya are, and he has an African name” — but having done so, they stop investigating, lest they prove themselves wrong. How do we get people to look inside the can?
     The Stewarts, by the way, tasted like hot water with a brown crayon dipped in it. I tucked the can away, for emergencies.

Why change yourself when you can demand the world change instead?

Centennial Park, Nashville

    I don't use these posts to air reader's comments, mostly, because there is a space aplenty at the bottom of the blog for that, and any comment on their comment can be rendered there.
    But this email, well, while it touches upon a small matter, there is a universal truth in it, so I am sharing it here.  
    A regular reader, whose name I shall shield, writes:

     A recent column re: riders crossing around the gates, brings to mind another train problem that I have.
     Freight trains taking enormous amounts of time at crossings.
      Aside from just having annoyed motorists ramming the freight cars, would this make for an interesting column?
      You contact the National Transportation Agency, (I assume they oversee the railroads in the country), and suggest that FREIGHT TRAINS RUN ONLY DURING NITETIME HOURS).
      I, for one, would anxiously await their answer.

    "You contact the National Transportation Agency"? What am I, a short-order cook?

    But that wasn't my reply. 

    I read his note on my iPhone, riding the train home Monday night. And it struck me, that not only had he missed the entire point of the crossing column—avoid pointless hurry, be safe, wait—but he was missing it in dramatic fashion. I wrote back:

        Wouldn't it be easier for you try practicing patience, before you set out to recast the rail freight system in the country? Just a thought.

     Not to pick on this guy, who at least is civil. But how often is there a problem where, rather than make a slight change to ourselves, we instead prefer to endeavor to recast the whole world? As if that were easier. This is nothing profound—"Better to light a candle," as the saying goes, "than to curse the darkness." As if it were some physical law: we don't change; somebody else should. We see people doing that all the time. They try to yank books out of libraries—I don't want to see this so nobody should see this. They try to convert the world to their faith, rather than attempt to wrap their heads around the implications of other people believing other things.
     It seems a symptom of always being right, in your own head. Maybe I'm getting zen in my old age. But I've begun to realize that, usually, the solution involves, not an impossible recasting of reality, but a far less difficult (though still sometimes hard) rejiggering of myself. I wasn't even fully aware of the dynamic, which is why I'm sharing the reader's email. Hmm, be more patient as freight trains pass OR endeavor to shift all freight trains to run during the night time, when nobody could possibly be bothered ... hmmm ... I wonder which one I should try?
     Not to end on a negative note, but the reader did not reply. Perhaps investigating ways to shut down the entire email system.

Robert Falls crafts his latest "heartless monster"

     But what I really want to do is watch Bob Falls direct ...  I've been asking for years, at both the Goodman and at the Lyric. For some reason now the clouds parted and I got my chance. I wish this piece could have been longer—he's such an interesting man. But I'm glad I was able to get this in the paper.

    Don Giovanni is not your average hero. Serial seducer, rapist and occasional murderer, he gets by on his good looks, his money and a relentless, serpentine charm. 

     Nor is Robert Falls your average director. Provocateur, trickster, his productions have a sharp contemporary edge and lots of good old-fashioned violence and sex. His “Measure for Measure” last year at the Goodman, set in 1970s “Taxi Driver” New York, left audiences gasping and angry. A critic denounced his 2006 “King Lear” as too grisly. Falls reaches into the body of a work, draws out its essence, twirls its guts on a stick and thrusts it in the audience’s faces. 

     Needless to say, I love it. If I wanted the drip-drip-drip of tedium, I’d stay home. 

    “You were born to direct this,” I whisper to Falls, joining him last week in the Lyric Opera’s second-floor rehearsal space for the first full run-through of Mozart’s “Don Giovanni,” this season’s first show. 

    “It’s the ‘Measure for Measure’ of operas,” he agrees. “Sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll. It never stops; the perfect opera in many ways. Starts like a bat out of hell, with an attempted rape and a murder. Here’s five sequences of violence and gun play — because it’s set in 1920s Spain. The singers are unbelievable; they’re running, fighting, kicking.”

     Watching Falls in action — if “action” is the right term for a man mostly sitting, grinning, jotting on a pad — you quickly scrap cliched notions about what a dynamic director does. Falls is no tyrant bullying his cast. He listens as much as talks, if not more.

     “It’s a total collaboration,” Falls says.

     Donna Elvira, played with ferocity by Ana Maria Martinez, appears pushing a gleaming vintage motorcycle and side car. 

     Falls wanted her to cut across in front of the motorcycle, but her instinct is not to. She asks Falls if that’s OK.

     “Whatever you want to do,” he replies. 

     But a moment later he is up on his feet, the motorcycle is coming in too much. “It’s too far; it’s never been that far,” he says.

     So a balance. Sometimes his vision, sometimes the performers’. 

     This isn’t the cast’s first rodeo. Polish baritone Mariusz Kwiecien has played Don Giovanni in 19, count ’em, 19 previous productions. Yet he’s learning from Falls. 

     “He is from outside the opera world, bringing new fresh ideas,” Kwiecien says during a break.  “Sometimes I wouldn’t even think of this kind of interpretation for that aria. He is pushing us to try, and when we try, we are discovering absolutely new dimensions. He is open to new ideas, and recognizes good and bad ideas. So do we.” 

     When Don Giovanni and ex-lover Donna Elvira spar, Falls beams, looking around as if searching for someone to marvel with at a wonder. “I do like to share it with everybody,” he says. “I love this because they know it so well, yet are still fresh and open.”

     Falls is the longtime artistic director at the Goodman, and if you’re wondering what he’s doing here, thank Lyric general director Anthony Freud, who tapped Falls the moment he joined the Lyric.

     “I knew about him for many years because he’s a major international director,” said Freud, who was in Chicago, interviewing, when he went to see Falls’ 2010 “The Seagull” at the Goodman. “I was incredibly impressed with it. Really extraordinary. I’m someone who believes passionately that the best opera is the fusion of music and theater.”

     The music is ethereal — “supernatural,” my opera dictionary calls it — but Don Giovanni, well, he’s a bad man. I wonder: We’re all so touchy, what if the Lyric’s audience doesn’t like this guy?

     “Do you like Tony Soprano?” Falls asks. “Do you like Walter White in ‘Breaking Bad’? Do you like Don Draper? We’re living in such an era of antiheroes, where horrible soulless people carry a television show for years. I don’t really care if you like Don Giovanni. Personally, I think he’s a soulless, heartless, somewhat monster. That’s the point, for me, to kill the romanticism. Trying to balance the comedy and the violence with the seriousness is what makes it exciting.” 

     Well, exciting, except for one brief patch at the end of Act One.

     “In an hour and a half first act, there’s one 60-second dullness,” Falls frets. “Giovanni is trying to get Zerlina to go to the party and Masetto doesn’t want to go. It’s just dull. It just sits there. The first act is constantly in motion, constantly moving — snaps — and we get 60 seconds that stop. Partly because I was trying to do something and the actors thought it was so stupid they said, ‘Eh, I don’t want to do this.’ ”

     Falls wanted them to join hands, nine days ago, but Kwiecien rejected it: “I hate Masetto, why would we join hands?” Falls now huddles with his staff. “I don’t know yet, but my brain trust is working on it,” he says. They have a little time. “Don Giovanni” opens Sept. 27. 

Cardinal George wasn't loved, but brought a certain grim purpose to his job

   

      I've written some critical things about Cardinal George, particularly when it came to his cruel, immoral view of gays. But when the paper called last night and asked me to put together something on his 16 year (!) tenure leading Chicago's Catholics, a gentler tone seemed in order. 

    When the Rev. Francis George, archbishop of Portland, Oregon, learned that Pope John Paul II had named him as the successor to Chicago’s much-beloved Cardinal Joseph Bernardin, the unassuming priest asked in surprise, “Are you sure the Holy Father has considered all the options?”

     He had.

     The former Northwest Sider became Cardinal Francis George, the city’s sixth cardinal and the first priest born within the Chicago Archdiocese to be called upon to lead it, which he has done with seriousness and a firm hand. On Saturday, Pope Francis named Bishop Blase Cupich, of Spokane, Washington, as George’s successor, according to the Associated Press.

     Considered conservative at the time of his appointment — he was named head of the Chicago Archdiocese in April 1997 and elevated to cardinal in January 1998 — George tried to set an accepting tone for the archdiocese’s 2.3 million Catholics.

      “The bishop is to be the source of unity in any archdiocese,” he said the day he was introduced to the city. “The faith isn’t liberal or conservative.”

George, 77, has been struggling with cancer for the past eight years after being diagnosed with bladder and prostate cancer in 2006. It returned for a third time in the spring, and in August he began using experimental treatments to combat the disease.

    To continue reading, click here.

Before rejoicing in a kilt, there's something you should know....

     My only thought on Scottish independence was "Don't do it," but that was wisdom pretty much lifted from reading The Economist, and you didn't need me to for that. But Friday I posted to Facebook a photo of myself wear a kilt, taken four years ago, which was indeed Scottish, and funny—far funnier than I realized when I was wearing it, as the second column in this set from May, 2010 reveals. A reader asked what the story was behind the get-up, and I promised I would pass it along, my way of celebrating the Scots doing the smart thing. 

     The big thing that everybody wants to know about a kilt is: What does a man wear underneath?

     "You're supposed to go commando," my boss said.

     "That's what we all wondered," my mother said, speaking of her girlhood friends in Cleveland.

     "Are you. . . ?" my wife asked.

     I wanted to know, too, since I had to wear a kilt for the first time Thursday. Heading out the door of the kilt shop, my tartan and jacket in a bag over my shoulder, I turned to ask the lady clerk, "What do I wear under it?"

     "Nothing!" she enthused. "Nothing's the tradition!"

WINDY CITY INDEED

     I am not a man given to sporting distinctive ethnic garb.... Not even the minimal headgear of my own clan. The only time I ever wore a yarmulke -- a head-covering the size of a small pancake -- on a public street was while walking in Jerusalem. And even then, I viewed it as a kind of location-induced temporary derangement, the way sedate Lutherans, shocked to find themselves actually in the Holy Land, will sometimes become unhinged, strip off their clothing and declare themselves the Messiah.

     So when an editor stuck her head in my office and suggested that, in advance of this weekend's Celtic Fest at Millennium Park, it might be a worthwhile exercise if I were to wear a kilt downtown, my reaction was not enthusiasm, but a kind of vertigo.

     My mind flashed to 20 years ago. In a fit of sartorial experimentation, I had purchased a bow tie. Knotting my new bow tie, I wandered into the Loop in an agony of self-consciousness. The sidewalk seemed to pitch like a ship in a storm. Every snatch of conversation, every peal of distant laughter, struck me as being about my bow tie. "I could not have felt more uncomfortable," I confessed later, "had I been wearing a cotillion gown."

     But "no" seemed the path of the coward. And I have mellowed in 20 years, and learned an important lesson: People don't care, not really. Don't worry much what they think. Be yourself, hold your head high.

    That said, I did have two concerns. First, I wanted to check that this wouldn't be offensive -- not that I'm against offending, when necessary, but there's no reason to antagonize a group known for its bellicosity on an editor's whim.

      Every Scot I asked thought it a bonnie idea, however, and, indeed, young men of all nationalities wear kilts nowadays without drawing complaints. In my view, Scots display a refreshing lack of aggrievement, despite having been relentlessly taunted for the past 350 years, and by the English no less.

     Even the staid Encyclopaedia Britannica begins its rumination on Scottish civilization this way: "Scotland has retained much of its cultural identity. Superficially, the external perception of this may descend to an image of whiskey-swilling, tartan-clad highlanders in mist-enshrouded castles, looking backward to bloody battles and romantic tales."

     Not quite Groundskeeper Willie, but not a compliment either.

     My other stipulation was: I wanted the full get-up. Not a plaid blanket wrapped around my waist, but the kilt, the sporran -- a furry purse worn in front, since kilts have no pockets -- the special socks.

     This rig was acquired at the Scottish Shop on Archer Avenue in Summit. In the window was a huge sign, "Kilt Rental," which left me wondering why men might rent kilts, though not for long.

     "When's the wedding?" asked the clerk, who decked me out in a Black Watch tartan -- the green matches my eyes -- and a formal jacket.

     Thursday, I began kilt day with oatmeal, an inside joke (the definition of "oats" in Samuel Johnson's great 1755 dictionary is "A grain which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people.")

     At the train, people noticed, obviously, but politeness kept them mute. Only one comment, from an acquaintance.

     "I don't have to ask who won the bet," he grinned.

     Striding across the Loop -- from Union Station to the Sun-Times, from the Sun-Times to Petterino's -- it seemed that nobody noticed the kilt at all. Only later, looking at the photos, did I realize that pedestrians were just waiting until I passed to gape.

      Scotland is a small place -- about half the size of Illinois, with about half the population of the Chicago metro area -- yet had a significant role in founding Chicago, in the meat-packing trade, and starting several noted businesses, including Carson Pirie Scott, unsurprisingly.

     The festival sounds fun but, alas, the kilt is due back Saturday morning. As to the central kilt question, well, I think a bit of mystery is appropriate. Though I did worry more about updrafts than is usual.

     TODAY'S CHUCKLE . . .

While there is no shortage of kilt jokes and thrifty Scot jokes, there are too many notorious put-downs not to share a few, as the greats of English literature lined up to condemn Scotland for being a land not unlike their own populated by a people not unlike themselves.

     "A land of meanness, sophistry and mist," wrote Lord Byron. "Each breeze from foggy mount and marshy plain/Dilutes with drivel every drizzly brain."

    "Scotland," Sydney Smith quipped. "That knuckle-end of England, that land of Calvin, oatcakes and sulphur."

    Boswell's Life of Johnson is 1,500 pages of continual Scot-bashing, but I'll try to give Boswell his due on Sunday.

     The sharpest line is John Cleveland's couplet from 1647:

      Had Cain been Scot, God would have changed his doom.

      Not forced him wander, but confined him home.

                                                                    —Originally published May 7, 2010

Oh that it ended there. But that was just the beginning....

OPENING SHOT

     Humiliation is a lapse in perspective. Your focus narrows to the 300 people jeering at you in the theater, your mind is entirely filled by the one gaffe in a two-hour speech.

     It's agony, nausea. You want to die, but you don't die, generally, and then a miracle occurs -- your perspective opens back up again. All it takes is a generous dose of time for life to magically expand. You realize that 99.999 percent of the world doesn't know about you, never mind your errors. Those who do know, who care now, will care less soon and forget about it in time, while your family forgives, as families do. The idea of shame sticking to you -- of Lord Jim wandering the Far East, while the stigma of his cowardice aboard the sinking Patna follows him around like a faithful dog, is the stuff of literature, not life.

     But some never learn that lesson, and then it's too late.

'PLEATS IN BACK!'

     Saturday morning errands. Coffee, "Rigoletto" and a 40-mile drive down to Summit to return a rented outfit. Park the van on Archer Avenue, swing the red plastic hanger with the rental kilt, jacket and sporran over my shoulder and head into the tiny Scottish Shop, past the rows of hanging tartans and plaid ties.

     "What's the name?" owner Jack Thompson asks.

     "Steinberg," I say.

     "You wanna know something?" he asks.

     "Yes I know," I say.

     "You had the kilt on backwards," he says.

     "Yes I know."

     "The pleats go in back," he says.

     "Yes I know."

     "The plain part, in front," he says.

     I turn to one of the grinning men in the store and ask: "What part of 'Yes I know' do you think isn't getting across?"

     Thompson taps his finger on a page from Friday's Sun-Times -- my column -- torn out, waiting on the counter.

     "We've got the picture," he says. "We're putting it up."

     "Be my guest," I say,

     As an inadvertent expert in shame, let me share a secret with you: It's a process. You have to soldier on, to endure, one day at a time, and if you don't -- forgive my injecting something so serious into a lighthearted column -- you end up stepping in front of a commuter train like Metra executive director Phil Pagano did last week.

     The shock of humiliation grabs you, squeezes, distorts your reason. Perspective gone, you forget the crime of financial impropriety pales compared with the horrendous harm inflicted on your loved ones by killing yourself.

     Nobody wants to lose his job or see his reputation ruined, so rather than experience that, Pagano did something far worse. To avoid . . . what? Sixteen months in jail?

     Compare this tragedy with what Dan Rostenkowski did. The powerful congressman went to prison, head held high, came out, 50 pounds lighter and was warmly welcomed by his friends and family.

     We are taught the only way to avoid embarrassment is by never doing anything wrong.

     That is ideal. But the truth is, your moment can come even if you're both honest and careful. You don't have to be Tiger Woods and invite destruction -- you can be the award recipient who forgets his speech, the Gold Glove winner who drops the ball. You don't have to be John Edwards; think Howard Dean -- one over-exuberant cry and you're a laughingstock.

     Nothing to do but wait and try not to care. That's hard. When the first "hey idiot your kilt is backward" e-mail showed up, 7 a.m. Friday, I tried telling myself it didn't matter. How many people know how to properly wear a kilt anyway?

    Quite a lot, it turns out. Cops especially — they have that bagpipe band, and so are familiar with kilts, and experienced at forcefully pointing out the missteps of others.

     But I knew it would pass. That's a crucial understanding. They should teach embarrassment in school: "Handling Humiliation." Kids could spend an afternoon wearing the special Hat of Shame through the halls, a pointed affair, with bells.

     Because while screwing up is sometimes the result of misdeeds, where punishment is deserved, more frequently it is the result of trying stuff. It was my first time in a kilt, and while I had done my prep work — spoke to various Scots, quizzed the clerk fitting me — there was a lot of information to absorb. How does the sporran go and how do the sock flashes work and how does the kilt wrap and of course the underwear question. The concept of there being a front and a back presented itself when I was putting it on at home. I picked what looked best and guessed wrong.

     "Own the sin," our Colonial forefathers said. Don't cringe from your mistakes, but embrace them. Yeah, embarrassing as heck — but nothing to do about it now, short of going back in time, and the necessary time travel technology just isn't there yet.

     Never commit a crime, certainly. But also, never make a mistake, never do anything that might attract mockery and you run the risk of becoming the kind of overly cautious guy who never dances because he can't stand the idea of looking stupid.

    Everybody looks stupid dancing. Looking stupid now and again builds character, and is a sign that you are still trying. Driving back from the Scottish Shop, mulling over the above, I started laughing, out loud. At least this is a more elevated embarrassment, compared with previous embarrassments, I thought. Progress of a sort.

     Laughter is cleansing, when you're the one laughing.

                                                             —Originally published May 10, 2010