Unhappy Valentine's Day, for those who lost loved ones

     I have been fortunate, in that I've seldom had to resort to the shadier practices of the journalistic profession. No sneaking photos of the deceased off the mantle during a wake, no pretending to be an assistant coroner to get information.
      The sketchiest thing I ever did, in my opinion was for this story: lurk in a cemetery and accost mourners communing with their dead loved ones. I had heard that cemeteries were busy on Valentine's  Day, and that seemed the best way to go about researching it. To be honest, the bereaved didn't seem to mind the intrusion. It didn't bother them nearly as much as it bothered me.

     "I love you," Ed Caldario said, out loud, in front of the stone marking his wife's grave. Weeping, he set down red tulips.
     "I always brought her flowers on Valentine's Day. She loved flowers. I used to send them to her at work."
     For the fortunate ones to whom Feb. 14 meant only kisses, romantic dinners and funny valentines, it might be good to pause and remember that for other Chicagoans Valentine's Day was a bittersweet time of fierce love tempered by loss and sorrow.
     By noon Sunday, Mount Carmel Cemetery in Hillside was dotted with big heart-shaped arrangements of flowers, plastic valentine decorations and poignant valentine's cards.
     "For the one I love," read the cheery preprinted valentine affixed to a stick before the grave of a woman who died in her 70s. To the generic message of affection, her husband added: "We love & miss you very much."
     Pasquale D'Andrea took his hat off and crossed himself as he joined his wife Angela in front of the grave of her parents.
     "Valentine's Day is a day to remember loved ones," said D'Andrea, of Berkeley.
     Isabel Riveria and her sister, Mary Mendez, brought along a gardener's trowel to tidy up the grave of their nephew, Efrain Perez, who died nearly five years ago at age 18. They also brought some liquid laundry detergent, to clean off the reddish marble marker.
     Riveria said the Valentine's Day visit to Perez's grave is a yearly tradition, as is the visit to the grave of her brother. She said it doesn't detract from their other Valentine's Day festivities because they don't have Valentine's Day festivities anymore.
     "We don't party since they passed away," she said. "We don't celebrate the occasions like we used to."
     "Special days like this, it makes my mother real sad," said Mendez, who brought a red plastic heart reading "Happy Valentine's Day" to plant by the grave. "We try to keep it real quiet."
     Not too far away was the grave of a baby who lived for three days in 1986. Someone thought to bring a heart-shaped helium balloon, with metallic silver on one side, "I Love You!" on the other.
     The balloon was tied to the grave by a ribbon, and it twisted and struggled against its mooring in Sunday's strong breeze, as if trying to break free from earth and fly away.
              —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Feb. 15, 1993

Love, soldiers, gypsies and free tickets to 'Carmen'

  

Associate choreographer Sarah O'Gleby at rehearsal for "Carmen" (photo by Andrew Cioffi) 

     "L'amour est un oiseau rebelle . . ."
     "Love is a rebellious bird," Carmen sings, during her famous entrance in the beloved opera, "Carmen," which opened at the Lyric Opera of Chicago on Saturday.
     Just in time for Valentine's Day.
     What does "love is a rebellious bird" even mean? Later she explains: Love; you wait for it, it never comes. But stop waiting, there it is. Think you've caught it? It's gone.
     Sounds about right.
     This is the ninth year the Sun-Times and the Lyric have joined forces to bring 100 lucky readers to "A Night at the Opera," and this is perhaps the most exciting yet because, well, it's "Carmen." Spain. Handsome soldiers. Saucy gypsies. Men fighting with knives. Women fighting with knives.
     And the music. The soul of Spain distilled as only a Frenchman, Georges Bizet, could do it.
    We're going Feb. 28, and there's a party beforehand. Details about how to enter to win one of 50 pairs of free tickets are online. You can enter every day, and if I were you, I would.

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When you see a Bob Falls play, you remember it

Robert Falls directing "Don Giovanni" at the Lyric.

     What I really wanted to do was ... direct. No, kidding. What I really wanted to do was conduct the interview with Bob Falls to mark his 30th anniversary at the Goodman. But my colleague Miriam Di Nunzio snagged that plum. As a consolation prize, though, she kindly allowed me to write about some of my favorite Falls productions. This is in the Sunday Sun-Times.

     It has been more than 30 years since I saw my first Robert Falls' production. While I haven't seen most of his output, I've seen many, and remember them all. They lodge in the mind because, well, he takes the raw material of a playwright's art, whittles it to a point and thrusts it into your eye. I could discuss 15 hugely memorable Falls' productions, but I have room for five.

     1. "In the Belly of the Beast: Letters from Prison" (1984): Performed in the small Goodman Studio Theater, you almost had to dodge William L. Peterson's spittle as he ranted and bashed his head against a filing cabinet. The lights came up after, and my friends and I blinked at each other, amazed to find ourselves back in the real world, in a theater, apparently, after having been hijacked into another realm by Falls' powerful staging.

     2. "Hamlet" (1985): Aiden Quinn walked onto the stage with a can of spray paint and, back to the audience, methodically began to paint "TO... BE... OR ... NOT... TO... BE..." He turned to the audience, jerked his thumb at the dripping paint. "That's the question!"

From the opening scene, in total darkness, the guards on the castle ramparts, cutting the night with their flashlights, to Gertrude, gazing at the king on a green room monitor, her face a Nancy Reagan mask of adoration, to Del Close's Polonius, a bumbling alderman, the play was one daring directorial choice after another.  My favorite: Ophelia, late in the fourth act, drawing on her face with makeup, hiking up her dress. My immediate thought was "She's crazy!" and then — duh! — it's Ophelia. Of course she's crazy. Falls makes the familiar new again...

Brian Dennehy with Pamela Payton-Wright in Goodman Theatre's 2002 production of "Long Day's Journey Into Night." | LIZ LAUREN PHOTO

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Black History Month: Why does society value white lives more?

     They call it Black History Month, though public attention has a way of petering out in the early days of February, ground down by the pro-forma parade of familiar icons—Martin Luther King and Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth and Rosa Parks. Though I suppose they must be fresh revelations to a certain segment of the population, unfortunately, and we shouldn't dismiss anything that slides them under the public nose. 
     But history—black or white or whatever hue it's cast in—shouldn't be rote. Not something dull you memorize. It should live, and be real, and talk to us, and relate to our present moment somehow. Otherwise what good is it?
     Look at this relic of the Civil War, the Memorial to Robert Gould Shaw and the Massachusetts Fifty-Fourth Regiment, by August Saint-Gaudens. The original version is a bronze on display on Beacon Street next to Boston Commons—this is the later, plaster version, in the collection of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., where I noticed it last June.
 

The Latin inscription translates as "He left all to save the Republic."

     Shaw was a 25-year-old Harvard graduate, the son of wealthy abolitionists, put in charge of the first all-black Union Army unit assembled after Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation on Jan. 1, 1863. Its formation was controversial—racial biases were such that some felt blacks would not follow orders or comport themselves well under fire—and two of Frederick Douglass's sons joined the 54th.
     Their first battle was a suicidal storming of Fort Wagner, the well-defended battery that guarded Charleston, South Carolina. On July 18, 1863, Shaw led the charge and was killed almost immediately. Half the men in his 600 soldier regiment were killed or captured.
    "Not a man flinched, though it was a trying time," Lewis Douglass wrote to his wife. 
     Saint-Gaudens, America's greatest sculptor, spent a dozen years on the sculpture, hiring African-American models to pose for the 16 figures of the black soldiers. On the Boston Memorial, an inscription on the monument begins, "The white officers taking life and honor in their hands cast in their lot with men of a despised race unproven in war." As a reminder of just how despised, when the monument was unveiled in 1897, it contained the names of the white officers who fell, but not of the black officers, though their heroism was noted, and the fact that for the first 18 months they were unpaid. 
     Therein lies a tale. When the War Department approved the idea of black soldiers, it paid them $10 a month, versus $13 for white, and black soldiers refused the unfair slight, until Congress decreed that all soldiers, of whatever race, would receive equal pay. (The pay stand-off was a theme in Edward Zwick's melodramatic film about the 54th, "Glory.") Some 200,000 African-Americans served in the Union Army in the Civil War. 
    Three hundred black men killed or captured. One of those wounded, William Carney, became the first African-American to win the Congressional Medal of Honor. Awarded in 1900 for his role in the battle—Carney snatched the flag from its hurt bearer and, though wounded himself, carried it aloft throughout the fiasco. "Boys," he said afterward, "the old flag never touched the ground." 
    But the monument is to Shaw, whose body was pierced, pierced with bullets, was stripped and thrown into a mass grave with the corpses of his troops. Still, the inclusion of the marching men he led in his memorial was nearly incidental. Saint-Gaudens almost depicted him charging on horseback, alone, but was deterred because the charge was on foot, so the scene depicted is him leading his regiment out of Boston, on the way to fight, past the very spot where the bronze memorial stands.
     The Irish-born sculptor did a masterful job--some call it the greatest American sculpture of the 19th century, and when the version above was displayed at the Paris Exposition of 1900, Auguste Rodin is said to have taken his hat off and stood before it, head bowed in silent veneration. It represents a heroic view of memorializing war that Maya Lin ended with her Vietnam Memorial, a black gash of stone that Robert Lowell predicted in "For the Union Dead," his marvelous poem about the Civil War, memory and the Shaw monument, in these lines:

Shaw's father wanted no monument
except the ditch,
where his son's body was thrown
and lost with his "niggers."

    You can read the entire poem here, and should.
    But his work also reminds us that American society holds the personhood of African-Americans cheaper than whites. It did so in 1863, and in 1897. It also did so in 1989 when Edward Zwick made "Glory" ("I didn't understand why it had to be told so often from the point of view of the 54th's white commanding officer," Roger Ebert writes in his review of the film. "Why did we see the black troops through his eyes — instead of seeing him through theirs? To put it another way, why does the top billing in this movie go to a white actor?")
    Good question. And why does that primacy of white lives over black persist today? Knowing what we know now, why do we still act the way we do? Another good question. 

     

     

It's easier to wear a red hat than to actually be great

Caroline Brennan speaks with Syrian refugees in Lebanon. Women and children make up more than 70 percent of the Syrian refugee population (photo by Sam Tarling)

     The first word Caroline Brennan learned in Arabic was iidhlal —"humiliation." She was visiting refugee camps in the Middle East.
     "Apologizing that they didn't have more to offer, which I would never expect," said Brennan, emergency communications director for Catholic Relief Services. "They say, 'This is who I am. Hospitality is part of my culture and you're a guest here in this place.' How people show themselves is a stunning thing. When you see it, against a backdrop of madness."
     I phoned her because I was curious how those in the refugee business are faring in the current political climate. We were talking about what refugees actually are like, as opposed to what frightened people who never met any imagine they are like.
     "It was in 2011, in the Bekaa Valley, Lebanon," said Brennan. "I was meeting this woman—the refugee camp was just a sea of women and children. She didn't have anything, a makeshift tent, pieced together. She was reaching into the air, wanting to offer something. I felt like she was reaching for tray of tea but into thin air. She ended up plucking a flower out of the ground, giving it to me. When you're talking about loss, they're not talking about a savings account. Not even a a home. A deeper sense of loss. She was telling their story. Everyone wants to tell you about the house they had, the number of rooms they had, the garden they had. It's so important to them that you understand: they had a life before; that this place they're in doesn't represent who they are."
     This place they're in doesn't represent who they are. There's a lot of that going around.

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The dark before the darkness

     Maybe we are making a mistake focusing on the president and what he does.
     Not that it isn't important. It is.
     And when each day—sometimes it seems each hour—brings some jaw-dropping breach, well, hard not to pull up a chair, lean in close, and gaze in horror at the endless train wreck loop.
     But at this point, it has to be a given. Each new development is a shock but not a surprise. He's lying to make himself seem more successful than he is. Over and over. That's what he does. That's what he's always done. He's locked in cathexis, in a trance with his own reflection, and wants to draw us into his fantasy world. So we're in a trance too.
     Trances are bad. What I find more interesting is not the president, but the millions of Americans who got behind him, voted for him, and are sticking with him, if not cheering then quietly supporting him.     
     They are. Have you ever heard of someone who supported Trump and is now having qualms? The tiniest reservation? A second thought? Ever read a quote along the lines of "Whoops..."? I find that something worthy of at least some of the holy-fuck-look-at-that attention lavished on the latest tweet. Because if the media is fact-checking for the benefit of those who are already aghast at Trump, they are just gilding the lily. We need to think about those who look at Trump's flailing first weeks in office and nod with approval.
    Maybe the reason we don't look at that is because his supporters are even more ominous than the man they are supporting. What if Trump is only the first of a series of Trumplike leaders to come?  It isn't as if we were fine before, or we'll be fine after, not that we can indulge in the luxury of even considering after. 
      Nine out of ten Republicans trust Donald Trump. Game, set, match. As long as those supporters are there, we'll never get to "after." Through blind party loyalty, economic desperation, fear, ignorance and what I calling "framing"—focusing on a very narrow part of the total picture—they're not only backing, they believe a demagogue who is opposed to much of what makes America a free democracy: the press, the courts, a non-political military, public education, NATO, science, social services, affordable healthcare...there's more, but you get the idea.
     When do these people wise up?
     And now the bad news:
     Never.
     They never wise up. I can't imagine it. If they could, how did they get to this point in the first place? I keep thinking of Stalin. Died in 1953. Pushed policies that caused mass starvation in the 1930s. Purged intellectuals. Killed maybe 10 million Russians. Made a pact with Hitler.
     His approval ratings today? Forty percent. Yes, some of that is due to Putin propaganda, trying to soften up the public, to stoke nostalgia for tyrants like himself. But still. You would not think it possible. Germany might have served up a Hitler, but at least they're not still swooning for him. In the main, except certain pockets of East Germany where they're working themselves up to try to get him back.

     These are dark times. And while I don't agree with Rahm Emanuel's over-flip assessment that Democrats should "take a chill pill"—what a contemptuous expression to come out of a contemptuous man's piehole—I do believe that this is only the start. If I thought this moment right now is as bad as it gets, I'd have a big Trump Party, because this so far is feeble. Some travelers inconvenienced—not to diminish the pain of others, which is always temptingly easy. But not the Inquisition either. And a lot of incompetents, zealots and haters named to his cabinet. Scary, but just a start. My sense is, these first disorienting weeks are only the dip after the long climb up the hill on a roller coaster. A feint, before the true plunge begins.
    

Souvenirs of falling stars

     The timing could not have been better.
     A week after the Field Museum unveiled its new interactive meteorite display, a green fireball went streaking across the night sky above Sheyboygan, being captured on a number of squad car dash cams.
     Well, maybe a little better.

Philipp Heck

    
    "One could hit the Field Museum," mused Philipp R. Heck, a little wistfully. "A small one. Then it could be the Field Meteorite."
     Heck is the museum's Robert A. Pritzker Associate Curator of Meteorites and Polar Studies. If you're wondering about the connection between rocks from the sky and global ice caps, ponder the challenge of trying to find the meteorite that fell to earth Monday morning. It landed in a spray of debris in Lake Michigan. "If the lake were frozen, I might be out there right now looking for it," said Heck, holding a satellite photo map he received that morning from NASA showing the meteorite's "strewn field," the area where pieces might fall. A region of maybe 50 square miles where you would have to comb the lake bottom, 150 feet down, looking for rocks the size of peanuts.
     Or you could go to the South Pole—as Heck has, helping the Indian government develop its meteorite research program—where the shifting glacial ice has a way of consolidating meteorites and offering them up.

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