"It can hit you like a bus"

Susanna Phillips

     Opera is about love, or should be.
     The love that characters have for each other — or, tragically, don't have for each other — in tales unfolding in splendor on stage, awash in gorgeous music.
     And the love audiences have for the productions.
     Or, less tragically, don't have. I must admit, earlier this season, after 91 deeply felt minutes enduring Alban Berg's cacophony "Wozzeck" — "deeply felt" as in a sleepless night spent on a bed of broken brick — "love" was not the concept that sprang to mind, other than love of it ending.
     But as with following professional sports, sometimes you are left exasperated. Your team doesn't win every game, you don't enjoy every opera. That's an aspect of love too.
     Not that this will be an issue with "Romeo and Juliet," which premieres Feb. 22, when I'll be bringing 100 readers along in the 8th (!) annual Sun-Times Goes to the Lyric Contest. (I couldn't bring 100 readers to "Wozzeck" without worrying about being brought up on charges at the Hague.)

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"You'll be here forever"

     I've been to a lot of newspaper staff meetings over the past 29 years, but today's was extraordinary.
     In the wake of Sun-Times' owner Michael Ferro purchasing the largest single share of the Chicago Tribune's parent company for $44.4 million, the Sun-Times' staff gathered in the lunchroom and met the new chairman of our board, Bruce Sagan, who explained what the purchase means for us.
    "The people involved in the last Sun-Times purchase believe in two newspapers," he said. "There it is, a second voice."
     He said heading the Tribune removes Ferro from managing our paper's affairs.
     "We don't talk to him except to complain about the quality of printing," he said—the Tribune prints and delivers the Sun-Times.
     Ferro will now have a major role in running the Tribune.
    "You made a mistake," Sagan said. "You educated him. He came here a rich guy who didn't know anything about journalism. The rich dabbler got the message from you."
     The Tribune is $400 million in debt, Sagan said. The Sun-Times has no debt. 
    "They took the deal because they needed the money," said Sagan, the longtime publisher of the Hyde Park Herald, who used the money he made there to invest in the Financial Times, the New York Times, where he started the Chicago News Cooperative, and the Sun-Times. "If you are going to bet on something, better bet on us. They're in disarray. He left us a growing institution."
    He said that this development gives us a renewed sense of mission.
    "We now have a focus," he said. "The other guy's still the enemy. Our job is to create the other voice in town. We want to remain a brand that people trust."
     Someone asked about our web site. Sagan said it was terrible. Publisher Jim Kirk said it would be fixed soon. Someone asked about the Sun-Times' future.
     "If I have my way you'll be here forever," Sagan said.
     Maybe you had to live under the sword of Damocles for a decade, watching the thread fray, to really understand the impact of those words. While optimism is typically misplaced in the newspaper business, I found Sagan's appearance somewhere between encouraging and stunning, like the Officer in White showing up at the end of Lord of the Flies, representing civilization and order returned. I was sitting nearby, and when the meeting ended, I couldn't resist shaking his hand.
     "Where the hell have they been hiding you?" I said.


     
   

It won't make you fat if you can't eat it

     You just don't see products with "Fat" in their brand names. Everything is "Lean" or "Diet" or "Organic" or "Healthy." I suppose there are lots of products, if you include "Non-Fat," but that seems cheating. So I was intrigued by this line of FatBoy ice cream novelties, on sale at the new Mariano's at Dundee and Skokie.

      Can you think of another example? I tried. There's Fatburger, in Los Angeles, but that's a restaurant chain. Chicago has a Fat Rice on Diversey—Chinese culture seems to still get away more with glorifying fatness; maybe it's all those buddhas or, more likely, a symptom of rampant hunger.  Given the profusion of wacky beer names, it shouldn't surprise there is a Fat Tire Amber Ale, though with its retro bicycle on the bottle. 

  Even products with chubby mascots put them on a diet—the Campbell's kids come to mind.  And with good reason: a study published by the Journal of Consumer Psychology last summer suggested that children eat twice as much cookies and candy at a sitting after viewing lumpy characters than children who are shown thin characters. 

     You know where the affection for fat children comes from? Back in days when people struggled to get enough to eat, and unchecked infectious diseases scythed children down, you wanted those apple dumpling cheeks as further evidence your child didn't have cholera. Everyone was going to die at 45 anyway, so the raft of chronic illnesses brought on by obesity, cardiac disease and such, were rarely a concern. 

    Childhood obesity had been growing for years, but now it has leveled off, according to the Centers for Disease Control, at about 17 percent, with a direct corollary to parental education. Among parents with a college education, the prevalence of obese children is half that of children of parents who didn't go to college.   

     When I first snapped the above picture, I didn't actually buy the FatBoy ice cream sandwiches. I don't eat that kind of thing. In fact, I go to Mariano's for their low-prices on Yasso bars—frozen yogurt on a stick and only 80 or 100 calories, depending on whether they are pure flavors, like chocolate and vanilla, or have 20 calories worth of chocolate chips and cookie dough pebbles tossed in. I go through one or two a day.

      But that seemed a failure of imagination and, with this post in mind, I picked up a box of FatBoy bars when I was there loading up on Yasso. 

      FatBoy is made by Caspers Ice Cream of Richmond, Utah. The company began in 1925 when Casper Merrill started selling ice cream nut sundaes on a stick made from milk from the family's cows. The FatBoy came soon after, so named because of its square shape and unusual thickness.  The company is run by Merrill's grandson, and the two original products seem to be the only items Caspers sells, though the FatBoy sandwiches come in 11 varieties and flavors, including key lime. For a 90 year old product, it doesn't seem to have had much impact on American cultural life, but that might be a factor of it being slow to get out of Utah.  

     I headed into the basement Wednesday after dinner, thinking to grab a Yasso bar, and noticed the FatBoy box, sighed, and brought one upstairs: 210 calories, which I cut by 50 calories by enticing Edie into eating a quarter. We both took a tentative taste. 

      "Buttery," I said. 

       "The wafer part doesn't taste chocolatey," she said. "It doesn't taste like anything."

      She tossed the quarter she had nibbled into the trash. I finished my FatBoy, hoping that my own boys, neither of whom is anywhere near fat, would handle the other five FatBoy sandwiches when they come home from college this spring. You want local foodstuff with unusual names to taste splendid, and I guess buttery ice cream might be splendid to some folks. But not to me. Neat retro name, though.

Autism spins kid, mom

     Jasan is 6 years old. He loves printers, elevators, and anything that rotates. With that in mind, his mother, Heidi, and grandmother Sherry are spending the morning with him at the TLC Laundromat in Crystal Lake.
     "He's always loved washers and dryers, for some reason," Heidi says."Number one, it's mechanical. It spins. He's always loved spinning things, even when he was a little baby. I have a picture of him at his 1st birthday party, sitting in front of a fan. I didn't know he was autistic then."
     Autism is a complicated brain disorder affecting about one in 68 children, according for the Centers for Disease Control. The cause is unknown, though genetics are definitely a factor. So is being male, like Jasan: five times more boys than girls develop autism.
     Autism presents itself as a spectrum, ranging from severe, life-limiting disabilities — a quarter of people with autism are non-verbal — to those who display unusual-but-manageable quirks and mannerisms. Forty percent of people with autism have elevated intelligence...

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29 days for black history, 366 for white

     February is a Leap Year this year, which means there are 29 days for the dual-edged sword of Black History Month instead of 28.  Valuable focus on a neglected and vital part of American life or another forgotten ghetto? I've tried to sort it out over the years and come up short.

     February is upon us, and with it Black History Month. Which revives the perennial question: If blacks are a vital part of American history -- which of course they are — then why put them in a separate month? Is this not segregation? What's wrong with their history being neglected . . . whoops, I mean, being taught year-round, with the rest of American history?
     It's an irreverent question, of course, but one I suspect lurks at the back of many white minds. Where's our month? If February is Black History Month, why not make March White History Month, and the papers could run thumbnail sketches of, oh, say Richard Petty, Saul Bellow and the polka.
     Well, the answer is rather like the response parents give smartmouth kids who ask why there's a Mother's Day and a Father's Day but no Children's Day: "Every day is children's day." Every month is white history month, and while the legacy of neglect has been addressed in recent years, its effects are still there.
     When I learned my American history, back in the 1970s, blacks showed up suddenly in 1770 in the form of Crispus Attucks, who is promptly killed in the Boston Massacre. ("Isn't that like the white man," I imagine some readers thinking, "he brings a black man into the history books just to kill him.")
     A couple more flashes -- the Civil War, Selma -- and that was it.
     So perhaps a little catch-up is in order. Besides, the problem isn't teaching black history in February -- it's not teaching history the other 11 months. If you want to make March into Memorize the Presidents Month, I'll stand with you.

     —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Feb. 2, 2007

INTERESTING BLACK HISTORY MONTH

     My beef with Black History Month is it implies that somehow black history is outside and separate from American history. It isn't. Black history is American history, and vice versa. That said, people of all races are so generally ignorant of everything that has gone before them, any artifice that helps fill the gaping void is to be welcomed.
     The problem is that most Black History Month efforts are directed at children — as if they're the only ones who require a vague idea of the past — and thus we get the same tales every year: George Washington Carver and the peanut; Martin Luther King and his dream.
     What about something for those who've mastered the basics? There is, for instance, the question of how outsiders viewed our system of slavery. Charles Dickens, at 30 the most famous author in Britain, came to America in 1842 to tour the new republic, visiting prisons and insane asylums and textile mills. He never made it to nine-year-old Chicago, settling for St. Louis instead. Dickens was a keen observer, repulsed by the ubiquitous American habit of chewing tobacco and experiencing a wave of guilt when, on his way to Washington to meet President Tyler, he found himself in a slave state. Dickens writes:

     We stopped to dine at Baltimore, and being now in Maryland, were waited on, for the first time, by slaves. The sensation of exacting any service from human creatures who are bought and sold, and being, for at the time, a party as it were to their condition, is not an enviable one. The institution exists, perhaps, in its least repulsive and most mitigated form in such a town as this; but it is slavery; and though I was, with respect to it, an innocent man, its presence filled me with a sense of shame and self-reproach.

           —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Feb. 11, 2008

Who buys a bookstore?

     On her 16th birthday, a high school junior named Allison Brown walked into the Book Bin and got a job as a clerk. Eventually she rose to store manager and now, 39, she became the Northbrook store's owner.
     That caught my attention. I've been a loyal Book Bin customer for 15 years, since moving to the leafy suburban paradise. As I amble on my rounds, from grocery to hardware store to post office, like the bear in a Richard Scarry children's book, I pop in to chat, buying books that catch my eye or are recommended. 

     I had to know: it's hard enough to find somebody who buys books, nowadays: what kind of person buys a bookstore?
     The same kind, it turns out, who walked in 23 years ago to get a job at one. She was not particularly bookish.

     “I was sporty,” said Alli, now married and going by Allison Mengarelli, as we had a cup of tea in the comfortable chairs at the front of the cozy store, with its fireplace and model train circling above the children’s section. “I played soccer year-round. It wasn’t that I was money-oriented.”
     If it wasn’t the books and wasn’t the money, what was the allure?
     “I just loved how I felt when I walked into the bookstore, ” she said. “For me, [I thought] ‘I want to feel that more, so I’ll get a job there.’ I think I was responsibility-oriented. I had a weekly baby-sitting gig from when I was 11 to when I was 18. I rarely missed a Saturday when I wasn’t baby-sitting for this family. I wanted them to count on me.”

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A visit from Lou Bovitch

      Yesterday's post about pausing to pray with some boys from a Jewish school prompted a Facebook friend to mention "Lou Bovitch," referring to the column below. It's flattering for someone to recall something that ran five years ago, so I thought it worth posting, not only for its own merits, but because it shows a certain softening in the author related to the visits. While I'd never go all pious on you—that would just be sad—it's natural for a veneer of religiosity to settle over man as the years go by, if only to guard against the various indignities of life.
     The poem "There is no God," by Arthur Hugh Clough captures this perfectly. It's from 1850, a reminder that those in the past weren't as rigid as we fancy them to be.

‘There is no God,’ the wicked saith,
   ‘And truly it’s a blessing,
For what He might have done with us
   It’s better only guessing.’

‘There is no God,’ a youngster thinks,
   ‘Or really, if there may be,
He surely did not mean a man
   Always to be a baby.’

‘There is no God, or if there is,’
   The tradesman thinks, ‘’twere funny
If he should take it ill in me
   To make a little money.’

‘Whether there be,’ the rich man says,
   ‘It matters very little,
For I and mine, thank somebody,
   Are not in want of victual.’

Some others, also, to themselves,
   Who scarce so much as doubt it,
Think there is none, when they are well,
   And do not think about it.

But country folks who live beneath
   The shadow of the steeple;
The parson and the parson’s wife,
   And mostly married people;

Youths green and happy in first love,
   So thankful for illusion;
And men caught out in what the world
   Calls guilt, in first confusion;

And almost everyone when age,
   Disease, or sorrows strike him,
Inclines to think there is a God,
   Or something very like Him.

     Oh, and if you're wondering what the line about nothing being funny in the fourth sentence refers to, remember the date: Nov. 3, 2010. The Republicans crushed the Democrats the day before in the mid-term elections.


     Want to hear something funny? Of course, you do. Me, too. Though I'm not sure anything could be funny today, let's give it a try.
     So I'm listening to my telephone messages, and I hear the burly, salt-of-Chicago voice of one of our security guards. "Hello, Neil?" he says. "This is the 10th-floor desk. You have Lou Bovitch here to see you."
     That alone drew a laugh from me. Despite never having met, or heard of, Mr. Bovitch, I knew exactly who was standing before the guard, asking in vain to see me.
     I guess some background is in order.
     It was a Friday. That's important. Every Friday, almost without fail, for nearly the past decade, I am visited by a pair of teenage boys in black coats and big hats -- missionaries, though they'd hate that word -- from the ultra-Orthodox wing of Judaism.
     They want me to put on tefillin, those little prayer boxes that Orthodox Jews wear when they pray, and to talk to me about the Torah portion being read that week.
     Sometimes I'm not in my office and miss their visit, like this time. Sometimes I'm busy, or not in the proper frame of mind, and tell the guard to send them away.
     But they're kids, they get gold stars toward, I don't know, a baseball mitt or a new Talmud or something, for visiting wayward Jews and goading them to perform their duty. "A coffee break of the spirit," a rabbi called it. Or maybe they don't get gold stars, maybe the effort is an utterly selfless attempt to repair the world -- it's their ideology, not mine.
     So sometimes I let them come down and give their spiel about this week's reading.
     The education may go both ways -- I see them gazing around the office, wide-eyed, as if they've never been outside before.
     "Do you read the paper?" I once asked.
     "Oh, no," one said. "We're not allowed."
     Of course not. Religion isn't generally about expanding your scope in life, is it?
     Sometimes I even put on the prayer boxes and say the prayers, which strikes me as very odd: an agnostic indulging in this exotic bit of religious theater, one that most Jews dispensed with long ago, when jettisoning most requirements of their faith.
     I've asked myself why I do it. For me, the natural, automatic reaction to such a time-wasting demand on a Friday would be to send them away. Scram, boys, and don't come back! That would be easy enough.
     Yet I don't. I see them more often than not. That they're in their mid-teens is a factor. They're kids. Kids fall under the umbrella of indulgence that Girl Scouts fall under. The League of Women Voters could never get away with selling those too sweet, generic and not-really-all-that-good cookies.
     There is also a shock value in going through the motions of ritual. Our offices have glass walls, and sometimes I'll be there, arm straight out, wrapped in a leather strap, big square black box on my forehead and on the back of my hand, uttering the ancient prayers, and some colleague will come trucking down the hall and catch sight of this strange tableau -- me locked in some weird prayer ritual with two black-clad kids. Their eyes will widen, they'll lose a step and then hurry on, wondering what to make of that -- the resident Arch-Cynic, the Anti-Zealot, if not the Anti-Christ of Chicago, lost in religious ecstasies.
     Nobody ever asks me about it.
     Did I mention the sect is called the Lubavitch, an ultra-Orthodox group that busies itself urging Jews do the rituals that they would do unprompted if they actually believed any of this stuff? The school the boys belong to is the Lubavitch Mesivta of Chicago, at Morse and California.
     The Sun-Times' guard is new, so after the boys asked him to say the Lubavitch were here, he called me and said: "Hello Neil? You have Lou Bovitch here to see you."
     Well, I thought it was funny. Maybe you had to be there.
                                —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Nov. 3, 2010