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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Curse of the Amateur

   

     He saw that all the struggles of life were incessant, laborious, painful, that nothing was done quickly, without labor, that it had to undergo a thousand fondlings, revisings, moldings, addings, removings, graftings, tearings, correctings, smoothings, rebuildings, reconsiderings, nailings, tackings, chippings, hammerings, hoistings, connectings—all the poor fumbling uncertain incompletions of human endeavor. They went on forever and were forever incomplete, far from perfect, refined, or smooth, full of terrible memories of failure and fears of failure, yet, in the way of things, somehow noble, complete, and shining in the end.            

                                            —Jack Kerouac, The Town and the City

     Now and then I'm approached by an elderly gentleman. Sometimes at a speech. Sometimes over the phone. Usually by mail.
     And that older gentleman has written a book, or would like to write a book, and knows that I write books, and so wants to show me his book, or tell me about his idea for a book, for some purpose I can never quite figure out.  
     I'm supposed to see it, I suppose, recognize its genius, then go the the Magic Door to the publishing world that exists in my attic, turn the Golden Key, and deliver this newly-discovered manuscript or thrilling idea to a grateful world.  He seems to expect me to help him write it, or edit it, or publish it, or promote it, or all four.
     And I sigh, because I know what's coming. I passionately want to politely thank him and say, "Why no, as a matter of fact, I do NOT want to see your book. Thank you for asking."
     But I don't do that. First, because doing so would make me a jerk. Kindness, as Roger Ebert said, is so important. Second, I know the desperate hunger that writing a book creates, the desire for SOMEONE to say SOMETHING about what you have done. 
      So I take a look. And it's always, always, always the most whipped-together dog's breakfast of jumbled nothing. Cliches like stones in your shoe. An amorphous bowl of gelid blah. 
     And I've wondered, How can an adult do this? How they can spend their lives at a certain career, being accountants or lawyers or whatever, understanding that those fields require practice and skill, talent and years of work, and then, upon retirement, think they can just lurch into an entirely new realm and expect not merely to do something competent, but to be outstanding? They seem suddenly children, proudly showing off their first scrawl.
     The reason, I've decided, is what I call the Curse of the Amateur. A blend of ego and ignorance.  A kind of blindness. You think so much of yourself to want to immortalize your doings, to prevent the obliterating hand of time from effacing Your Precious Self, and thus want to share your unique life and perspective with the mundane world. You know nothing about the craft of getting people interested in what you have on your mind, and since working on it, even in a slapdash fashion, is hard, it seems more satisfying to go showing it around. And so go blundering into the world, waving your masterpiece, excited to be finally doing it, mistaking politeness for interest. You just demand attention and respect, as if it were your birthright and it's not.
     I try to give people advice. You have to edit your stuff. Again and again and again. And again. Then more. Being good doesn't mean it comes out good the first time, it means you see that it isn't good and you try to make it good. You need to realize that absolutely nobody cares what you have to say. You have to make them care. That's what writing is. Making somebody care about something they don't care about at all. Oh hey, I seem to be reading a three volume, 2,700 page biography of Lyndon Johnson, whom I hated, while he was alive, and had absolutely no curiosity about whatsoever. That's writing.
     But they don't listen, these seniors with their pamphlets. They don't really want my advice. The particulars bore them. They've done their work; they're ready to move to the praise part of the program. They want me to tell them how wonderful they are.  
     Because, in their heart, they think the whole thing is easy. A scam. Part of that is that other people's jobs always look easy—what, you play a ball game for a living? What fun!— because we know almost nothing about what doing those jobs actually entails, while our own jobs, well, we're well-versed in their complexities and know how hard it is. 
     Of course this isn't limited to senior citizens pushing their unpublished memoirs. The Curse of the Amateur often afflicts wealthy men in late middle age. Having succeeded wildly in one field, their egos and ignorance are such they assume they can march into some other completely unrelated area and master that too. Henry Ford, fresh from his success at selling Model Ts, decided he would end World War I. He didn't. Bill Gates, having made a fortune in software, decided to end the woes of Africa. He didn't. Those woes turned out to be a problem bigger than money.
      Can anyone glance at Republican gubernatorial candidate Bruce Rauner and not recognize the Curse of the Amateur? Here's a guy, 57 years old, who never ran for anything, forget being elected to any public office.  He's someone who has never performed any kind of public service beyond very recently, after he decided he would be governor and started  suddenly funding schools and firehosing the money he has so much of this way and that and calling it civic mindedness.
    So he campaigns. And his ignorance of, his contempt for, the job he would take on, is so great, that he presents his utter lack of experience as his most enticing attribute. It's pure hypocrisy. Who can imagine that Rauner would accept that logic in his own affairs? Who believes that anyone could go to him and say, "You know, your Excelo Widget Company isn't doing so well. I am uncorrupted by any sort of experience making or selling widgets, so am just the man for you to bring in as CEO." 
     Does anyone imagine he would snap at that opportunity? He expects us to. 
     The good news is, amateur authors go away quite quickly. Another amateur hallmark: lack of persistence. They quit, because they don't have faith in themselves, not really. We will see Bruce Rauner's true lack of commitment because, after he loses, which I believe he will, since Illinoisans are hard pressed but not fools. Like Peter Fitzgerald, he'll vanish in a puff of green smoke. He'll go back to his nine houses and never be heard from again. Like so many larking rich Republicans before him. Because he didn't really care about the state or have any idea what to do to help it. He just was bored being a rich guy doing whatever complex financial bullshit he does to get rich, and thought he would take a break and run our lives for us and of course soak up all the praise for saving Illinois. Because, really, how hard could fixing our state really be? A piece of cake for a rich man. Whatever people think of Pat Quinn, nobody accuses him of not working hard to solve Illinois's problems which are so deep and varied they defy easy solution. And he was bad at it, for the first few years, but then got better, and actually started to make some progress. It's a daily grind, like all successful projects. He's been doing it, working at it, and having some success, and the notion that Bruce Rauner can waltz in a fix everything in some undefined magic way—his message, essentially—is amateur self-delusion. I don't believe people will fall for it and, if they do, well, we'll deserve the Keystone Kops chaos that will follow.
    Amateurs fool themselves, a task they accomplish with breathtaking ease, and think it is just as simple to fool everybody else. It's not. 

Saturday fun activity redux: Where IS this?

     Okay, that was too easy.
     The Saturday activity I posted below was solved in, like, a second.
     The Palmer House, of course. 
     I was banking on people not looking up.
     Which is crazy, because everybody looks up.
     And that would have been fine had I gone to bed.
     But I checked the blog again—stupid—and found that the gig was up.
     Okay, the full Boy Scout try. I haven't done two contests on a Saturday, but I couldn't stand the thought of hundreds of disappointed visitors finding the contest already solved. And seeing how October was a record month for pageviews, I had better start showing some pride and professionalism. I mean, there's no RULE that says I can't have two contests. There are no rules at all, in fact, except the new one: No Dales.
      So something more enigmatic, like this strange room, with books for light fixtures. This strikes me as being much harder. 
      Where the heck is THIS?
      You'll still get it. I haven't stumped you yet, to my shame. But maybe it'll be at 10 a.m., instead of 12 frickin' 17. 
      The prize is a bag of fine Bridgeport cofee—a $13 value. If you guess this one in a minute, you'll have to wait until morning to find if you are correct. Remember to post your guesses below. And remember our new rule: Dale can't play. Good luck. 

Saturday fun activity: Where IS this?

     Naked women, alas, just aren't the design element they used to be. I suppose the improvement in the status of women in our culture deserves the blame ... err, credit. It just won't do to have a modestly draped guy standing protectively over a buck nekkid lady—people would complain—and prominently displayed in a public place in Chicago at that. 
     Which is too bad. I could see a world where such motifs were possible again, perhaps with a twist though, now that I consider the possibility, we still couldn't do it. The truth is, were it the other way around, the woman in the back, the guy in front, showing off his assets, it would have been howled down long ago, and nobody would have the courage to try it today, which is sad. Our decor is dull and cheap with few human forms, the essence of beauty. 
      As it is, I imagine this one will get ID'ed fairly quickly. Not exactly off the beaten trail, this. I'm offering up, well, because it's pretty and right here and because I've arrived home at nearly midnight after watching the Bulls lose a heartbreaker to the Cavaliers. 
    Well, not a "heartbreaker," really. A close, well fought game, that went into overtime, but considering that Jimmy Butler, whose job it is to thwart Lebron James, was out with a bruised thumb, we did pretty well. Especially since Derrick Rose hobbled off the court early with a sprained ankle—you could hear the room go quiet when he pulled up hurt. I turned and socked my brother in the arm, since the last game he attended was when Derrick tore his ACL. 
    Besides, the refs gave the game to the Cavaliers. 
    But enough sports. I'm hot to toss this out into the world and get to bed. Good luck figuring it out. 
     The prize is another in the line of the fine Bridgeport coffee, 12 ounces of Guatemala whole bean coffee. Which reminds me: the contest has one rule, it's first: You can't win if your name is Dale. We had a Dale win twice in the past month, and while he seems a nice fellow, that's enough. So, with that rule in mind—no Dales—onward. Where is this amorous duo? Remember to post your guesses below. 
  

Chilly Halloween

     We are children for about 15 years, from the time we leave toddlerhood and start forming lifelong memories, to when we step away from our homes and into the adult world.
     Given that decade and a half, a surprisingly limited number of specific memories of being a child stay with you. Or, to be precise, stay with me. Maybe you can reel off your childhood day by day. I couldn't carry on at length, for instance, about being 7. Maybe a flash of an image, a shirt I wore on my birthday. Maybe not even that. 
     But the weather report, of all things, sparked a memory so strong that I could see it. 
    The weather for Oct. 31, that is. As we all know: cold, windy, chance of rain. Lousy for an outdoor holiday.
     I read the forecast—a tweet—and suddenly I was standing in front of my open closet, for some reason, on Carteret Court, in Berea, Ohio. The closet doors were open, I could see the pegboard inside the closet, and the green dresser that—could it be?—my father built inside the closet.
      My mother was kneeling in front of me, zipping up my Mighty Mac coat. Brown corduroy, of course. A metal bar, kind of a T, on the zipper—very sturdy zipper those Mighty Mac coats had.
     And I was aghast, horrified to my little single digit core, because it was Halloween, and the coat would cover my costume, and it all would be ruined. A year's wait wasted, the joy of escape, of running costumed through the streets, mitigated by this corduroy shell of parental concern. Happiness must evaporate in the morning sun, but misery rolls on through the years, unfortunately.
     But I'm not writing this to dredge up my past. I'm writing this as a plea, to put in a plug for coatlessness. No kid ever froze to death trick-or-treating. And parents are supposed to trail kids nowadays—I certainly did, when my boys trick-or-treated.  Though kids in eras past somehow survived without such close supervision. My father would no sooner follow me around as I went house to house than he would have driven me a friend's house, five blocks away, which I also did for my boys, routinely. 
     Anyhow, since you're there anyway, carry the coat. Let the kid ask for it. Or heck, let him go out without it—if he's cold enough, he'll come back for it. Or her, whichever. Then it won't be something you've inflicted upon the poor child, a shiver they'll be feeling whenever the last day of October drops into the 40s, as it sometimes will. 
     To be honest, I never remember, as a child, being cold outside, never, not once. Kids are immune to that kind of thing. They laugh at coats, and to force one over a carefully-chosen costume, it's something of a crime. No kid is going to put it to you that way, but it is true, and so I would rise to their defense.

A true Halloween fright: IRS seizing assets of the innocent

     History will sort out whether the bitter, right-wing hatred of Barack Obama was significantly greater than the bitter, right-wing hatred of John F. Kennedy or Franklin D. Roosevelt or any previous president.

     It sure feels that way, a six-year typhoon of endless shrieking malice, where whatever the president says or does, from saluting his Marine guard with a coffee cup in his hand to invading (or failing to invade) a particular country becomes that day’s reason to get worked into a lather of condemnation.

     That it hurts our country is without question. First, we can’t get anything done. Huge problems — immigration, global warming, infrastructure, health care costs, you name it — just sit there, unaddressed, festering.

     Second, though they don’t realize it, the poisonous passion of the right corrupts the causes they embrace. While I don’t view Obama’s term in office quite as a dud, I would expound on his failings more if doing so didn’t put me on the same bench with a bunch of muttering, tin-foil-hatted crazies.

     Or take worry about government overreach. The balanced view is that government, like any entity, does some good things, does some bad things, and is capable of great success and great failure. On the whole I would say it works; too big, perhaps, but it functions, Congress notwithstanding.

     The far right — and here they join hands, ironically, with the far left — owns fear of government. To them, the U.S. government is a terrifying enemy, an occupying force.

     So when I felt the fear myself this week—and about that classic far-right bogeyman, the Internal Revenue Service no less—it was doubly unsettling: first feeling the fear, then recognizing whose fear I was sharing.
     Over what? The New York Times ran a piece on its front page that was terrifying. The IRS, looking for tax cheats, has a rule where banks must flag cash deposits over $10,000. So in an attempt to avoid this scrutiny, drug dealers and other criminal types engaging in illegal cash activities keep their deposits under $10,000, a practice the IRS calls "structuring" deposits.
     But legal small-business owners who aren't trying to hide anything, just get the money from their hot dog cart into the bank, also make regular small cash deposits.
     You'd think the IRS would differentiate between running a drug ring and running a bakery. But they didn't. The IRS was seizing assets from hundreds of small businesses that had not broken any law. Then it was up to those businesses to prove they had not committed a crime. Then maybe, though not always, they could get their money back.
     This is totalitarianism. It violates a wide swath of the Constitution, the Fourth (barring unreasonable seizure) the Fifth (barring punishment without due process of law) the Sixth (right to speedy trial) and, arguably, Seventh through Tenth amendments too.
     The story created the briefest ripple. It has to be the Boy who Cried Wolf Syndrome: After years of maligning government as an awful police state, evidence that an agency was abusing its authority didn't register. The IRS seizing your money when you have done nothing wrong, without having to prove its case or make an allegation, should be more alarming than Benghazi and Ebola combined. It sure is to me.
     I asked the IRS about this; they blamed Congress: "Whether the funds come from a legal or illegal source, structuring bank deposits or withdrawals to evade Bank Secrecy Act reporting requirements is a felony," the agency said in a statement to the Sun-Times. "The law, written by Congress, authorizes law enforcement agencies to seize and forfeit money and property involved in structuring violations."
     Still, they're going to dial back.
     "We recognize that small businesses and other taxpayers often make deposits under $10,000 without any intent to avoid the reporting requirements—that is not structuring," the statement continues. "After conducting a review of structuring cases (which predated the recent press reports), the IRS concluded that it will focus its limited resources on cases where evidence indicates that the structured funds are derived from illegal sources."
     Well that's encouraging. I can't decide whether I should be relieved that they're stopping, or continue being aghast that they ever did it in the first place. A little of both, I suppose. Mistakes do happen, and actions that make sense in an administrator's office have a way of seeming unforgivably stupid in the light of day. The country is a vast clockwork of systems and balances, and it's a big job to keep it all running in tune.

A Halloween Tale of Haitian Vodou

Figurines from the new Field Museum exhibit, "Vodou: Secret Powers of Haiti"

     This really happened.
     A long time ago—in the late 1980s—I went down to Haiti to write about Haitian voodou. 
     Now Haiti is a very poor country. At the time the daily wage, for those lucky enough to have a job, making baseballs or in the bauxite refinery or at the distillery, was $3 a day. A bus ride cost one gourd, or 20 cents.
     So the people were poor, but they were proud, and had dignity, and art, and their own religion, voodoo, or vodou as it is now commonly spelled, which I see as a kind of funky folk Catholicism, complete with its own set of saints, or spirits, which the Haitians call lwa. 
     I had gone down to visit my college roommate, Didier, who was working with Catholic Relief, helping the poor. But I figured I would keep busy writing a story about vodou while I was there. I had pitched the idea at The Atlantic magazine, and they said, sure, go ahead. I ended up spending about three weeks.

   During the day, my friend would work at his job, helping the poor, which was pretty much everybody, while I wandered around looking for the telltale flags that showed a houngon, a vodou priest, lived there. Sometimes he was elsewhere, working in the fields perhaps, and I would wait while he was summoned.
     It was a culture of rumor, of hearsay, of gossip, of misunderstanding. The big scandal while I was there was over pigs. Haitians raised these scrawny pigs on scraps, and the Americans suggested, no, you need big farm-raised American pigs. You get more pig that way. Only the pale American pigs got sunburned and died, the story went, and the whole thing was laid down to the vast, 200-year-old U.S. conspiracy against Haiti. 
     Other times, the impressions people had about the U.S. were simply heartbreaking. Once I was sitting at a bus stop, and people were crowded around me—I was in the countryside where white people were not common, which again, was pretty much everywhere. And one man was pestering me: help me, help me, help to get a green card, help me come to America. 
     And I challenged him: why? What do you expect to find in America? What is so wonderful there?
     I didn't really expect an answer, but he took the question seriously.
     "In America, I understand," he said, "there are roads that go over other roads." Only then I realized I hadn't seen an overpass in the whole damn country, and if you had never seen one, well, the idea of a road rising up into the air, and leaping over another road, that would be incredible, hard to imagine, something you would want to see with your own eyes.
      I quickly learned that some time before I arrived, a BBC film crew—it was said—had given somebody $600 for something. To stage a ceremony for their cameras. Maybe they did. But that became a standard request, in this country where the daily wage was three dollars: "Give me $600 before I talk to you." They didn't know better, maybe one of these rich white men in their Land Rovers would cough it up. Worth a try. I wasn't in a position, however, to give anybody $600 for anything, and after a few houngons had stalked off, angrily, I realized I had better change my approach.

      It's the journalist bit, I decided, that's setting them off.  I need another story. I was in Cite du Soleil, a vast slum outside of Port-au-Prince. To this day, the proper whiff of smoke and garbage will bring me back there. So I made something up—a journalist lying, I know, shocking. But you do what you have to. To the next houngon I met, who pulled aside a curtain and we ducked to enter his peristyle. A small room, a hut really, with all sorts of polychromatic pictures of saints tacked to the walls, stained bags hanging from the low ceiling the contents of which I hesitated to consider. There were guttered red candles, dirty bottles containing rum and God knows what else. He sat on a stool and faced me, too close. I sat facing him. 
     "Je suis un Americain," I said. "Mon coeur est brise..." My heart is broken, I told him, because of all the women that I've known. Which I suppose was true enough. 
      Can you do something to mend my broken heart?
      This either meant nothing to him, or my French was so bad it got mangled. 
      "Do you have a picture of her?" he said. I had a picture of my girlfriend in my wallet, and I handed it over. 
      "I will make you a thing, where she will not look left, she will not look right, she will only look at you."
      At which I paused. Because while Edie and I had been dating for a few years now, I wasn't sure I was ready to make that leap, to have her never look at anybody else but me. But I figured, I'm in a hut in Haiti. What am I worried about?
      Also, I was getting sick. Bad crayfish or something. I would end up sitting up that night with a group of expatriates, playing poker, drinking glass after milky glass of pastis, which an old Cambodia hand said was perfect for driving off mal du mer. The next morning I would wake up outside, stretched out on a sofa in the yard, with chickens pecking around my head and a rooster crowing. 
    But then I was swaying on a stool, watching this houngon prepare a small parcel. It was made of folded paper, which he sprinkled with spices, wrapped in black thread, with twigs fashioned into crosses. At one point he started lopping the ends off needles with an old sugar cane knife. I looked at the needles and drew back—AIDS was rampant, and I decided if he tried to prick me with them, I would flee. But he didn't, though he did prepare some vile concoction of cologne and rum and smeared it on my cheeks with his thumbs, while I drew back, nearly swooning from the illness and the strong smell of spice and cologne and rum.
     Finally the packet was ready. 
      "Here is the thing," he said. "Touch this to your girl and she will be yours forever."
     I reached for it, but he grabbed my hand by the wrist before I could touch it.
     "Six hundred dollars!" he demanded.
     I will spare you the parlay that followed, kept polite by the sugar cane knife, that sat on the corner of his altar. I ended up paying him $15—five days' wage—which he accepted with disgust. I left without the packet, but the joke was on him. The magic was done anyway. The girl was mine, for the past 25 years at least. When people ask me, what possessed such a pretty, smart wonderful woman to become the wife of a knucklehead like me, I tell them straight-faced and in all candor: "I put a spell on her."