Cat missing his master

     Every day since Ross went away to college in California, his cat Gizmo has positioned himself on his dresser and just sat there, waiting.
     He never did that before.
     Normally the most ebullient of cats, Gizmo seems very forlorn, alone in the boy's abandoned room, gazing down in a dejected fashion. We try not to let him pine there all day; we'll coax him down with a treat, or to play with a clump of feather attached to a metal wand. But his little feline heart isn't in it—I can tell—and he slinks away to mourn in private.
      We've brought in Northbrook's best cat psychologist, who says this is a textbook case of PPS—Pining Pet Syndrome....

    Okay, I made up all of the above. Gizmo isn't even Ross's cat, not really. More of the family cat. The only true part is that Gizmo was on Ross's dresser, glancing down, briefly, and I quickly snapped a picture before he looked up.
     "Anthropomorphism" is one of those $10 words I like to toss about though, as opposed to "rebarbative" it has the value of representing a concept that can't be boiled down into a phrase shorter than the word itself.
     It's a handy arrow to have in your quiver, and means, "ascribing human qualities to animals, or inanimate objects" and it's something people do all the time, whether deciding that our goldfish like us, or projecting abstract qualities such as wisdom upon animals such as owls based entirely on how they look. The public laps it up—one of the more surreal moments when Robin Williams died was when the keepers of Koko, a gorilla Williams had spent a few minutes with 13 years earlier, was dejected by the news. "At the end of the day, Koko became very somber, with her head bowed and her lip quivering," the institute noted, as if gorillas had the tendency to blubber like toddlers. which they don't.
     None of the TV journalists interviewing the keeper could manage the adult response: "That's insane!"
     Why do humans do this? I suppose the short answer is we love ourselves, deeply, and are hard-pressed to find others who love us in the same bottomless fashion, so we press animals into service and interpret their various twitches are more praise for us. I'm as guilty as anybody: I interpret the eagerness that our dog Kitty shows for my arrival as wild enthusiasm for me, as an individual, though in the back of my mind I acknowledge that her enthusiasm might be directly completely toward the treats I give her, and when she sees me her little plum of a brain is thinking, "Hooray, it's Mr. Treat Chute!"
     Assigning animals human qualities goes back to ancient times. Aristotle found partridges to be indecent, crows chaste. In Georgics, Virgil's book on farming, the author of the Aeneid describes bees as "stout-hearted warriors in their waxen kingdoms" and outlines their battles in heroic terms worthy of Ajax and Achilles.
    We see what we want to see, and if it isn't there, we squint, or frame the parts that suit or premise and ignore the rest or, heck, just make it up. The eagerness of people to lie—or, if you prefer, tell stories—is one of the great underappreciated facts of our existence.
     I suppose doing so makes the world a more interesting place, and I'm all for that. Whatever the prosaic truth is—Gizmo saw a mouse run past that spot and he's waiting for it to come back—doesn't hold up to the fairy tales we prefer to tell ourselves.

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.