Saturday fun activity: Where IS this?

     WBBM has its wonderfully-named "Smart Quiz" in the mornings, asking listeners to answer a trivia question, and when they get it wrong, as they often do, I think, "If they were so smart they'd look the answer up on Google while they were on hold."
     Even my humble Saturday fun activity needs to take that into consideration. I had one photo that was basically a yellow mug in a generic coffee shop, and an enterprising reader -- King Dale, where have you gone? -- ripped through the photos in Yelp reviews of Chicago coffee shops until he spied a matching yellow cup. 
     I suppose I could install rules forbidding readers from consulting Google, but that would display a level of naive trust that I'm just not capable of expressing. Besides, I should be able to find images that defy Google. It's a challenge to me as well as you.
    I thought I had a winner with the above. But had the presence of mind to plug, "Decaying Ram mural Chicago" into Google, and up it popped, 400 N. Peoria, in West Fulton Market. 
    Not much of a puzzle.
    Okay, what about this:

     I thought a had a viable option, since "Running man sculpture Chicago" or "Jogging man sculpture Chicago" did not serve up the answer. That seemed too good to be true and, pressing onward, I plugged "Metal running man sculpture Chicago" and Google served up an article on its installation at O'Hare International Airport. 

     This is going to take a bit more ingenuity. 
     How about this carefully-cropped photo?

     Not readily Googlable. Orange triangle just won't do it. But still solvable, I believe—probably too solvable, to be honest. But I like the trio of triangles, black, red, white (not counting the white space, which could be a fourth). Plus I have a soft heart. Place you guesses below. The correct answer will receive one of my super-collective 2015 official Every goddamn day blog posters, signed and numbered, itself a kind of public art now that I'm wheat pasting them around town. Good luck. Have fun. Enjoy your Saturday. 

"A feast of joy, love, harmony and grace"

Barbara Gaines

     "Ready?" says Barbara Gaines, to the singers, technicians and assistants scattered around the otherwise empty Civic Opera House theater one morning last week. "Let's do it."
     "Here we go," adds stage manager John Coleman. "Act 4. Quiet please."
South African soprano Hlengiwe Mkhwanazi climbs the stairs at stage right, glancing tentatively around at her feet, looking for something, lifting the curtain and peering underneath.
     "L'ho perduta, me meschina!" she sings, in Italian. "I've lost it; unhappy me!"
     A handful of notes of Mozart sung in her strong, achingly clear voice is enough to jolt me out of the up-to-that-moment ordinary day. It's like someone popping open my skull and laying cool wet cloths on my brain. Ahhh.
     But only for a moment.
     "Stop please," says Gaines, leaping up. "Okay, great. We're going to change something."
     It's the third day of stage rehearsals for "The Marriage of Figaro," the first production of the Lyric's 61st season, which opens Saturday night. Gaines, on of Chicago's top directors, who founded Chicago Shakespeare Theater and has directed some 30 plays there, is back at the Lyric, part of a savvy strategy to expand its reach beyond the circle of people who, like myself, just love opera, to lure those who might be drawn in by a star director.
     Gaines' job is to sweat the smallest detail, like when Mkhwanazi's character, Barbarina, lifts the curtain, looking for a lost pin.
     "I realized we revealed the set way too early," said Gaines, explaining why she wants to delay the moment. "It works better with the music."
     Gaines reflexively reassures as she instructs.
     "Barbarina, you were perfect, " she says to Mkhwanazi, who sang a show-stopping "Summertime" in "Porgy and Bess" last year.
     Gaines made her Lyric debut in 2010 with Verdi's far grimmer "Macbeth" and is excited to have been asked to take a crack at something lighter.
     "So much more fun, a lot more laughter," she says, during a break. "The joy of it. It's all about love, and passion. It's all of us, all of our stories. It's not about those dark productions where the count is a miserable bastard. He's a human being with empty spaces in his heart and tries to fill them, like all of us do."
     Gaines promises, if not quite Robert Falls-Grade shock, then plenty of surprises.
     "Some of the things on this stage has never been done before," she says.
     Such as?
     "At the very end of the overture—the best overture ever written," she says. "We have two singers and an actress doing a little improvisation that tells you the entire story. It's great fun.  What it says to the audience at the very beginning: 'You can laugh, you can enjoy yourself, this is going to be fun up to the end,' which is hilarious, but totally a surprise. I don't think it's been done in the history of 'Figaro.'''
     And she wasn't referring to the entire second act being performed in an enormous bed, 25 feet across.
     Directing the cast, Gaines is constantly in motion, watching the action from various perspectives.
     "I'll just stay here," she fibs, tucking herself into a seat for, perhaps five seconds, before she is up again, leaning over the pit, on her toes, then on stage, stopping action again, Daniel Ellis, her assistant director, following her like a pull toy duck.
     "When they do things, it gives you ideas, and you have to institute those ideas before you forget them," she explains.
      Gaines has said you can't hear the 4th act and not feel that you are in heaven, "a feast of joy, love, harmony and grace."
     Readers ask—and complain—more about my occasional opera column than any other topic. Gaines, talking about the differences between theater and opera, nails it so well, we'll give her the final word on the subject.
     "You know what it is?" she says. "I am not a religious person. I don't like people telling me what to do. But when they start singing, when the count asks the countess for pardon—perdono—there's this whole song about forgiving. Please forgive me. I think ... there must be a God, because the music is so beautiful. I think it is some of the most beautiful music that has ever been written, the finale of this opera. It goes from this beautiful moment of grace and forgiveness to let's celebrate, get drunk and have fun and live."

"You mealymouthed paper mache-headed wussweasel..."

     Once upon a time, columnists would occasionally put their feet up and run a day of reader mail, a chance of them to take a breather and let their audience to gape in wonderment at the carnival of humanity that is out there, lurking in the shadows. 
     That died with the Internet, when space in the paper became too precious to waste, and online comments sections made us all wearily familiar with just how mean and crazy people can be.  You couldn't have a two inch news story about a kid being hit by a bus without a Greek chorus of malice offering a peek under the rock.
      Mere anthropological interest isn't why I present this letter from a reader in Bensenville, written last month but delivered only Tuesday--he seems to have held onto it for a while, adding fresh thoughts as they came to him. 
     Typically I get such letters and read a bit, and toss them out. But this one struck me as having value, in that it answers the vexing question, "Just who in God's name supports Donald Trump?" far more eloquently than I ever could. He printed his name legibly on the envelope, but I'm going to let his scrawled signature protect his identity — no malice here. 
     For those reading on their iPhones, it might be a bit hard to decipher; wait for your coffee break and call it up on the computer at work; it's worth the effort, I think, because you see the sort of reasoning at work. This is why Trump is doing so well. Any further comment from me would be unnecessary. Enjoy or, I suppose, more accurately, despair.

"The moving walkway is now ending; look down."

     
     The future we were promised never came.
     No jet packs, no spandex jumpsuits, no robot maids—that little round vacuum thing just doesn't count.
     Sure, we got certain whiz-bang devices we didn't expect: the phone/camera/computer in our back pockets. But that wasn't really part of the classic Space Age Dream.
     Moving sidewalks were. Why walk, why go to the bother of using your legs when you could be whisked to your destination through the magic of our friend, technology?
     Now some of those futuristic wonders are going the way of Space Foods sticks, at least at O'Hare International Airpot, where United Airlines announced it is taking out the eight moving walkways in Concourse C.
     "Our observation shows that removing the walkways in Concourse C will enhance the experience for our customers by reducing congestion and improving flow through the concourse," said Luke Punzenberger, a spokesman for United Airlines, based in Chicago.
     They'll also move faster.
      "Moving walkways are the only form of transportation that actually slow people down," said Dr. Seth Young, of Ohio State University, one of several scientists to study the sidewalks and find that they delay pedestrians by obstructing their paths or encouraging them to stand while traveling at a slower pace than they'd walk unaided. The walkways also take up room that could be used to increase airport shopping, a trend of the world we find ourselves in, as opposed to one we once dreamed about.
     For those with a fondness for United trippy 850-foot walkway between Concourses B and C, with undulating glass walls, under what was billed as the longest neon sculpture in the world, worry not: that will remain.
     "We're only looking at Concourse C," said Punzenberger. "There are no plans to remove the connector walkways."
     People who are elderly, or have physical limitations, might be concerned about the removal of the walkways, which do offer a respite from the lengthy slog between Point A to Point B.
     "We recognize that some customers have special needs or concerns when flying, and we will continue to provide transport to customers who may require additional assistance,"  Punzenberger said.
     Like the fascination with trips to the moon, moving sidewalks appeared in Victorian times then took off in earnest the 1950s. The first debuted at the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago.  Several other fairs around the world featured them, but it was only in 1954 that they first showed up in as part of urban transportation hubs and, in 1958, jet age airports, when the first was installed at Love Field in Dallas.
     People are always worrying about our machines turning on us, and moving walkways actually did. There was at least one death: On New Year's Day, 1960, a toddler, 2-year-old Tina Marie Brandon, visited Love Field with her family to see relatives depart and was crushed to death when her coat sleeve was caught by the walkway. Before anyone could react, her clothing constricted her so much she suffocated.

     Even when they don't kill you, the walkways in C offered an unwelcome conundrum. What to do? Stride athletically through the non-moving part of the concourse, or meekly hop aboard, knowing you'll have that slightly unsettling "The moving walkway is now ending, please look down" moment when you were projected back into the pedestrian realm of foot travel?

     Better to get rid of them, and not just for the way they can make it harder to get to a particular shop, or the energy consumed, or the expense of maintaining them—or not maintaining them, as the case may be. In 1999, an electrical fire in one of the walkways shut down flights in Terminal One for two hours.
     Four of the eight walkways are being removed now and will be gone by Thanksgiving, when there will be a pause in construction for the holiday traffic nightmare.
     "We expect to complete work by spring," Punzenberger said.
     Good riddance. Moving walkways are like food pills: a better idea than a reality. Cool concepts, perhaps, but turns out people prefer walking and eating. Walking is a joy—okay, in airports, not so much. But it's still good for you, and all things being equal, you should walk more, not less. Ditto for nutrition pills. People didn't really want them; they want artisanal bread and organic apples and lettuce grown in the backyard.
     The future never actually arrives, and considering the strange stuff we fooled ourselves into believing we wanted someday, that's a good thing.

One less GOP hopeful to laugh at

     The parade of dunces that the Republican Party has been marching through America's living rooms over the summer was just too entertaining to last. Inevitable that the lowest, most rotten fruit would drop away. Last week it was Rick Perry collapsing in a heap, after making a game but failed effort to overcome his humiliating gaffe of 2012, when he demanded the closing of three federal agencies, but just couldn't name that third one, not off the top of his head. The new glasses did not help.
    Monday was Scott Walker's turn to cease—no, no, "suspend," his campaign, a mere pause just in case the nation wants to fall to its knees and beg him to stay in the race. 
    Won't happen. The pride of Wisconsin, who most recently polled at 0.5 percent of the likely Republican voters, declared that other doomed candidates would take his lead and quit too so the party could focus on finding somebody to counter Donald Trump, who's been spanking their bottoms for months now. He seems to be forgetting that his whole problem is none of the voters care what he says or does, so the odds of his erstwhile opponents doing so are pretty slim. 
     Walker made the mistake of believing that dominating Madison made him fit to conquer the world. He actually said that if he could face down 100,000 angry union members, outraged over his keelhauling of government employee rights, he could take on ISIS too. Though my favorite shred of Walker stupidity was when he appeared on Meet the Press, and told Chuck Todd that building a wall along the 4,000 mile border with Canada was a "legitimate" idea to keep out the terrorists who might start pouring over any moment now. (Add his recent invitation to Ben Carson to drop his trousers and reveal his shameful bigotry, and Chuck Todd is becoming the go-to guy for egging on self-immolating Republicans) .
     Walker's downfall seems to be that he was out-crazied by Donald Trump. The charisma-challenged Walker lost the lunatic fringe and thus the footrace to the bottom of the American soul. 
     So a big bye-bye as Walker bites his lip and confronts a future where the harm he can do is limited to Wisconsin. 
     Now the question is: who's next? Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal would be a natural, though there is real doubt whether he possesses the self-awareness needed to quit. Lindsey Graham does, at least, have the photo receptors and ganglionic clump that Jindal lacks, which might inspire him to look around, see where he is on the evolutionary scale, and go home. He does have a sense of decency that makes him unelectable as a GOP contender -- he actually chided Carson for his vile bigotry about Muslims, which, in Republican circles, is the equivalent of joining Jane Fonda for an inspection of North Vietnamese gun emplacements. But Graham did moderately well at last week's loser consolation undercard debate, and that probably splashes enough water in the face of his swooning campaign that it can endure a few more turns of the thumbscrews. 
    No, Rick Santorum is the next baby GOP baby bird to be pushed out of the presidential campaign nest. Santorum, whose very name has morphed into a term for a gross sexual byproduct — a usage that is certain to outlive him, the way "bowdlerize" lived on long after Thomas Bowlder — couldn't even distinguish himself in the pageant of midgets, his performance drawing comments like "lackluster" and "weak." Given the blats of ridicule he receives, expect him to slink off with whatever injured dignity he can muster, I'd say by St. Crispin's Day, or Oct. 25. 
      My wife, by the way, using her generally spot-on intuition, announced at supper Monday night that Marco Rubio will get the nomination and win the presidency because he is young, handsome, and seems able to gull GOP diehards into thinking he's crazier than he actually is, then reversing course and tacking toward a generally acceptable flirtation with rationality when the general election rolls around. We could do a lot worse.
     

Fighting the stigma of mental illness

Patrick Kennedy and Peter O'Brien

     Four hours before Republican presidential candidates faced off for the second GOP debate in California last Wednesday, a Democrat, former U.S. Rep. Patrick Kennedy, stood before a small gathering at the Chicago Community Trust headquarters and talked about something people don't like to talk about: mental illness.
     He was introduced by Peter O'Brien, owner of O'Brien's Restaurant on Wells, who began by remembering his son, Peter Jr., who struggled for years before dying at age 32.
     "Peter just couldn't accept that he had a mental illness because of the stigma and shame of mental illness," O'Brien said, explaining why he had started Kennedy Forum Illinois, the local branch of Kennedy's national organization that is trying to reduce the disgrace associated with mental illness and addiction.
     "A lot of Americans run away from it because they don't want to deal with the pain," said Kennedy, who has been public about his own battles with bipolar disorder, alcoholism and drug addiction, though brushing aside O'Brien's suggestion he had done so out of courage. "I got in a car accident that put me on the front page of every newspaper in American in 2006, and at that point I had no choice but finally acknowledge that I had a problem."
     Kennedy went from being an addict in denial to becoming the sponsor of the Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act, which requires insurance companies cover the treatment of mental illnesses to the same degree as physical ones and not impose different, inevitably lesser standards of care. He thought he would be one of hundreds of co-sponsors, but found his colleagues reluctant to attach their names to the law.
     "They worried people would say, 'You're sponsoring this bill,'" Kennedy said, extending an accusing finger, "Do you have a mental illness?"
     Treatment for mental illness or addiction still can be difficult to find or pay for, and most addicts never get help.
     "That's the law of the land but unfortunately no one knows about it, and the insurance industry is counting on you not knowing about it," he said.
     I sure didn't. Though, being a recovering alcoholic myself, I am keenly aware of the stigma, sadly familiar that there is a swath of people convinced that the whole thing is a sham cooked up to cover bad behavior, which I only wish were true. But it isn't. Addiction is a kind of mental illness, an obsessive-compulsive disorder that can be managed but never cured. Treatment can be life-saving.
     Kennedy's talk came back to me later that day, during the third hour of the Republican debate. New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, trying to project a tough guy image to counter his Squiggy hairdo, promised that as president he would go charging into Colorado and use federal law to bust the pot industry. Rand Paul, who seems to have embraced rational thought as his latest campaign strategy, pointed out Christie's hypocrisy: the GOP is all for state's rights when it comes to putting dinosaurs alongside humans in Alabama biology textbooks, but when whiffing pot from the Rocky Mountain State, Christie grabs the big stick of federal power.
     At which point former Hewlett-Packard boss Carly Fiorina invoked her experience.
     “My husband, Frank, and I buried a child to drug addiction," she said of her 35-year-old step-daughter who died in 2009. "We must invest more in the treatment of drugs. ... Drug addiction is an epidemic, and it is taking too many of our young people."
     When Patrick Kennedy, the youngest son of Ted Kennedy, and Carly Fiorina start saying the same thing, that's significant. Betty Ford revealing her alcoholism was an earthquake because first ladies didn't suffer from that kind of thing or, at least didn't admit it. That Fiorina's comment was almost lost in the cacophony is progress of a sort. The stigma is lessening.
     Not that it will crumble on its own. Kennedy quoted Frederick Douglass:
     "Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will."
     "We're citizens as well, in a country facing a growing epidemic of addiction," Kennedy said, calling on people to lobby their officials and put pressure on providers, and get involved. Chicago has a Recovery Walk in Garfield Park Sept. 26, and a national The Day the Silence Ends march in Washington, D.C., on Oct. 4.
     "We have no political power. Stigma eviscerates our political power," Kennedy said. "Twenty-three million Americans are in long-term recovery, but we're not organized; we're anonymous people, meeting in church basements. This is 2015, and we must talk about the most important issue for public health in our country."

Ben Carson excuses himself from consideration for the presidency

      Yes, I know we've sailed off the ends of the earth. 
      Yes, we've found ourselves in some political wonderland where the old values not only no longer apply, but are inverted. 
      Yes, Donald Trump's xenophobia, bigotry and idiocy has projected him to the top of the field of Republican boobs vying for the presidency.
       And maybe Ben Carson, jealous of that, thought he'd get in the game. 
       But no matter how low our expectations, no matter how up has become down and black is sold as white, there is some point where the joke is no longer funny, and we have to get serious, and say: Not in my country, asshole.
      That point came Sunday. 
      Carson, leading several polls, was asked by Chuck Todd on NBC's Meet the Press if a president's religion should matter.
     "I guess it depends on what that faith is," Carson replied, without hesitation. "If it's inconsistent with the values and principles of America, then of course it should matter. If it fits and is consistent with the Constitution, no problem."
    "So do you believe Islam is consistent with the Constitution?" Todd asked. 
     "No, I do not," said Carson. "I would not advocate that we would put a Muslim in charge of this nation. I absolutely would not agree with that. "
     Todd then asked if he would support a Muslim for Congress, and Carson backpedaled a little, allowing that perhaps, if he were a good person despite being a Muslim, that would be okay, apparently too stupid to understand that he had also undercut his initial reaction to the question.
      No matter.
      Any American, particularly any person from a group that has experienced prejudice, any Jew, any black, any woman, has the moral obligation to howl in protest at that. We have become so used to haters, to clowns, that we have been nudged by inches to accept the unacceptable. 
       Yes, Carson is only stating plainly what Trump, with the cowardice of bigots, implies. But it is such a clear, unambiguous statement that it cannot be allowed to stand. Islam is as consistent with democracy as Christianity or Judaism or any other religion, put to all sorts of uses by all sorts of people. To say otherwise is to single Islam out unfairly and hypocritically. It is hatred, pure and simple. For Carson to remain a serious candidate is to pull down the American flag and shit on it.