Meeting the Andrews Sisters at the Manhole

The Andrews Sisters

    Yesterday's celebration of Manhole Cover Monday, plus the passage of nearly 40 years and a certain don't-give-a-damness that settles upon a man in his late 50s, permits me to tell this story, which I used to love to recount to friends.

      Participants in what used to be called, with antique specificity, Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism, were expected to spend time working at a real newspaper. This was a central attraction of the place, if I recall. No hazy theorizing, no mucking about in sandboxes and playpens. Junior year, an entire academic quarter, booted into the real world to sink or swim.
     There were options across the country — some tantalizingly in Florida — but those all required the student to own an automobile. And I did not, nor would my parents buy me one or let me use one of theirs.  I don't think I even asked.
    That left one choice: the Green Bay Press Gazette in Green Bay Wisconsin, a town compact enough to cover on foot and by bus.  It was where all the carless students went.
     I arrived in early January — it was 17 degrees below zero when I showed up at the airport, which resembled, I would write my parents, "an abandoned bus station." Passengers got off the plane, ran to their cars and were gone. I dragged the steamer trunk I was carrying by its handle as luggage and went to the area in the airport labeled "Taxis" where a ruddy security guard was gazing out the window.
     "Where are the taxis?" I asked him.
     "It'll be back in a moment," he said. The "moment" was 30 minutes, while I mused at his use of the singular. "It'll be back..." As if the city had one cab, which maybe was the case. A cab did eventually pull up, the cabbie got out, walked over to the security, started to talk like the old friends they were. Then the driver noticed me. Oh, do you need a lift? He said. Yes, yes I did
      I went to the YMCA, to a dingy, loud room out of a Nelson Algren story. "Over fifty years old," I wrote my parents. "Smelly and dark, and really depressing, and not extraordinarily clean." But soon found residence a few blocks from downtown, the upper floor of an older couple named Schwartz. He had lost his larynx and spoke in an incomprehensible buzz by pressing a device to his throat. She took pity on me, and welcomed me with a basket of good apples and use of an electric frying pan. The apartment had a Murphy bed — the kind that swung out of the wall.
     I helped out on the police beat. My first story was on a bank bag of $1,700 that was lost but recovered. Life fell into the pattern of daily journalism, which for me involved visiting the local police and fire stations, on foot and by bus, and collecting the records of their ambulance runs.
    "I don't understand why every time an old woman has trouble breathing we have to put it in the newspaper," I remember griping. What I really wanted to write about was Wisconsin's state rock — I was charmed to find the state had a rock. The story grew and grew, but was never printed, despite my efforts. Like all interns, there was much screwing off. In my ample spare time, I used my computer to write short stories, which I thought would be my true career. They tended to be long, and in trying to print one out, managed to crash the Green Bay Press Gazette's entire computer system.
     Needless to say, I was not a popular person.
     When not at work, being 20 and an alcoholic-in-training, I went to bars, but those bars I recall as small, brightly lit places with the same gathering of flannel-clad Wisconsonites watching the same sporting events. It was early 1981, and John Lennon and Yoko Ono's "Double Fantasy" album had just come out. The first single was "Starting Over" and was on the jukebox. The B side was "Kiss Kiss Kiss," a classic bit of unlistenable Yoko Ono screeching, and my habit would be to visit a bar, have a beer, establish that this was the deadest place on earth and I would never return to it, pop a quarter in the jukebox, punch up "Kiss Kiss Kiss" three times ,and then head outside just as its opening shriek began.
      But then one night, as I trudged around  what passed for a downtown in Green Bay, I saw a different sight. From a distance, I could hear the whump of dance music. Lights were strobing. I paid a cover and went inside, The dance floor was packed. The air hummed with sweat and life. I beamed — finally! — and went to the bar and ordered a glass of red wine, slid into a booth, looked around the room. My happiness curdled and I said to myself, through gritted teeth: "There are ... no ... women ... here."
     I had never been to a gay bar; I probably had never have imagined their existence. The thing to do was to flee but a) I had paid a couple dollars to get in and b) I had a full glass of wine before me. There seemed no harm in finishing it.
     At that moment three men walked up, all dressed in identical white blousy untucked shirts, blonde wigs, make-up and dangly earrings. They identified themselves as "The Andrews Sisters" and slid into the booth around me. We had a conversation the nature of which is lost to me — no letters to my parents describing that — except when the guy to my right asked me to dance.
     "I don't know how to dance," I said quickly, in one breath, instantly thinking of every girl who had ever told those exact words  — I heard that a lot — and uttering a sincere and spontaneous prayer to the Lord in Heaven: "Please God, I hope I didn't seem to them the way this guy seems to me." I looked at him closely, at his sideburns under the makeup. He looked like the singer Joe Cocker. In drag.
    Time passed. I finished my wine. We all looked at each other. The only way to exit the booth would be to either climb over Joe, or ask him to let me out, and that seemed somehow ... rude.
      Instead, polite to a fault, I said, "Okay, let's dance."
     He sprang up and started dancing, eyes closed, head back, not really engaging with me at all, thank God. I surveyed the dance floor around me in a kind of wonder, and had a thought that stayed in mind. Usually specific thoughts at specific moments in your life don't remain, crystal clear, after decades. But this one did. The thought was:
     "Here you are, Neil Steinberg, Northwestern University, Medill School of Journalism, Teaching Newspaper Program, Green Bay Press Gazette, Green Bay, Wisconsin, in the gay bar, dancing with the homosexuals ... what is it like?"
     I looked around at the crowded dance floor. And the truth, the honest, unvarnished truth, is I couldn't quite believe it, couldn't believe these men were sincere. I thought that, if you turned the lights up, and clapped each one on the shoulder and said, "Hey buddy, you're in a gay bar. What are you doing here?" that each would have a tale similar to mine, of confusion, of finding themselves in the wrong place.
     I was 20.
     The song continued, and I danced away from Joe Cocker, toward the exit, then turned and fled into the cold Wisconsin night. Walking away, I turned and saw, for the first time, where I had been, spelled out, "The Manhole." I don't know how I missed that going in. Maybe I read it and missed its significance. That sounds right.
      Of course on Monday I told this story to my colleagues at the Green Bay Press Gazette, who did not take it with the humor that I did. They seemed sort of aghast.  Part of the trick to being a writer is knowing whether the tale you have to tell will amuse your audience or horrify them, and I hadn't figured it out. Maybe I never did.
       The coda to the story is this. I am on the elevator at the Press-Gazette building, some time later. The Swedish janitor gets on, rolling a wringer bucket with a mop in it. The doors close. He turns to look at me and says, "Zo, you vent to de 'Manhole, eh?'
 
     The Manhole, at 207 S. Washington Street opened in 1976, and was "probably the first gay leather bar in Northeast Wisconsin" according to the History of Gay and Lesbian Life in Milwaukee Wisconsin website. It closed in 1981, and is now a parking lot.


 

More than steel discs that keep us from falling into sewers

     Happy Manhole Cover Monday!

Ushuaia, Argentina (Photo by Neil Steinberg)

Rome, Italy

     What, you aren’t familiar? Let me fill you in.
     One of the wonders of social media is it allows like-minded individuals to find each other. While we focus on the extremes — white supremacists and other assorted nut-jobs who try to inflate their significance by banding together — fanatics aren’t the only kind of person who connects through social media.
     There are, for instance, folks who not only notice the manhole covers most blithely ignore, but admire them, photograph them and then share those photographs. On Twitter. Every Monday.
     “There were two things I was constantly taking pictures of: birds, and random bits of infrastructure,” said Bill Savage, a Northwestern University literature professor. “I was riding my bike north on Halsted and noticed a classic sewer cover, a radial design with a golf ball at the center.”
     ”A few people, including me and Bill, were interested in the infrastructure of the city around us,” added Robert Loerzel, a freelance journalist. “Little things, like manhole covers. The idea of doing it on a Monday was a random moment that happens on Twitter. I had posted some photos — or maybe Bill — on a Monday, and a cartoonist for the New Yorker coined the phrase.”
     ”I love manholes,” said that cartoonist, Julia Suits. “Love the iron, the metal, because I was a sculpture major at the University of Iowa, I worked at Beloit Foundry and loved the idea of sand cast objects. I’m really interested in economy of design. I prefer simple ones, old ones, worn down by buggy wheels, feet, traffic. That’s what my eye’s attracted to.”
     She remembers Manhole Cover Monday beginning like this.
     ”Bill Savage posted the first manhole, and I jumped on that and said, ‘Yeah!’ and retweeted it. We kept going, and I said, “Hey, Manhole Cover Monday.”"
     "A joke by her became a hashtag,” Loerzel said. “Now throughout the week, as I’m walking through the city, I’m keeping an eye out for manhole covers, for a design I haven’t seen before. Not many are new or different. But every once in a while I’ll find something odd and save it up for a Monday. Now other people in other parts of the world are tweeting pictures.”
     From Barcelona to Bolivia, Montreal to Mexico. And those are just from one Monday in July.
     When I’m overseas, I’m on the lookout. I once made a cab stop, in traffic in Rome, so I could leap out and grab a shot of the manhole cover with “SPQR,” the same abbreviation that legionnaires carried into battle 2,000 years ago. In March, I was standing at the bottom of the world, Ushuaia, Argentina. Looking down, I saw a manhole with “Cloacas” — Spanish for “sewers,” but, as any bird lover knows, also the term for the avian excremental cavity. “This’ll rock Manhole Cover Monday,” I thought, snapping a photo.
     ”I feel a connection, especially when they’re historical,” said Loerzel. “Some are very old, referring to government units that no longer exist: In Grant Park, there are covers that say ‘SPC’ — South Parks Commission. Back in the days before there was a Chicago Park District.”

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Hungry Bird

     There is a parable here, somewhere, trying to get out.
     A parable about how we can be trapped by our hungers, if we aren't careful. And are unlucky.
      The top fell off of the bird feeder. I'm not sure how. I must not have  attached it securely—lately I've been refilling it a lot, every day. The birds are hungry, and crowd around the feeder. Maybe it rattled off.
      Or maybe this small bird, unable to push past its bigger fellow birds and grab a few morsels, pried it off, and plunged inside. Doubtful though.
      Either way, a mix of appetite and misfortune. The bird fell, or, worse, hopped in. Then couldn't get out. 
      That happens. 
      But his luck changed.
      Heading to pick up some Thai food—hungry myself—I noticed the empty bird feeder. Then as I approached to fill it, saw the trapped bird, looking somewhere between indignant and  aghast at why he, of all the many hungry birds, found himself in this predicament. My heart went out to him: been there, buddy. 
      I studied the situation, then slowly removed the feeder from the iron hook and set it gently on its side upon the grass. The bird, sensing his chance, zoomed out of the feeder and onto a bush, without a backward glance of thanks. Beyond offering a reminder that the same indifferent fate that traps us can also set us free, if we are patient. And lucky enough to get a little help.  

The Saturday Snapshot: Spanish Steps

      Photos are persuasive in ways that words are not.
      But can you have your opinion changed by your own photo, years after you took it?
      Apparently yes.
      I read in Thursday's New York Times a story about how it is now illegal to sit on Rome's famed Spanish Steps. Of course I was aghast. The steps are a tourist destination, a local hot spot, alive at night with music, with young people gathering, strumming guitars, maybe passing a bottle. One of the most dynamic spots in the city. And now the municipal paper shufflers are dispatching their carabinieri to stop it all—eight of them at one time, according to the NYT's count, blowing shrilly on whistles and handing out warnings—for now. Eventually offenders will have to pay a fine of 400 Euros; or $450. 
     Quite a lot, really. 
     I figured, I must have taken a photos of the crowded steps. And I did. The one above. If the line of girls in the foreground looks a little awkward, I seem to recall it was a school group, singing.
     The Spanish Steps look ... crowded. Very crowded. And I seem to recall ... navigating them with difficulty. The place was certainly too jammed to linger.
      So maybe the Roman authorities are onto something. It's tough, running a city. I can't repost the NY Times photo, but after the law went into effect, the Steps seem ... empty, desolate. 
       Me ... I would have gone for a compromise. The steps are wide. Run a chain on bollards down the left and right sides, leaving those for going up and down. Reserve the center portion for sitting. See how that works. 
      I mean, in Chicago, people flock to the Bean, crowding around it. It can be hard to get a good photo of yourself reflected in its mirrored skin, because of all the people around. I'd hate to see them cordon off the thing, because people were smudging the polished surface with their greasy hands. That's what the Bean's for, why it's loved.  Cleared of humanity. the Spanish Steps are just a way to get up and down. I'm reluctant to go out on a limb and predict anything about a society as quirky at Italy. But I'll bet—or at least hope—the ban doesn't last.
     

‘Bienvenido al judaísmo’ to my Latino brethren

A mosaic from Templo Libertad in Buenos Aires, Argentina.  The hands in a gesture of priestly benediction. Their  resemblance to the "Live Long and Prosper" gesture is no accident; Leonard Nimoy used it as Spock in "Star Trek."

                                 

  ”Many clients tell me, ‘We’re the new Jews,  we’re just like the Jews.’” 

                                                 — Dario Aguirre, Mexican-American lawyer

    Well hell, counselor, there’s a statement I just never expected to read on the front page of the New York Times. But there it was, Wednesday morning, alongside my grapefruit and toasted English muffin.
     I’m honestly not sure what to say. A hearty “Shalom amigos!” comes to mind. But maybe that’s trivializing the real fear that Latino Americans feel as Donald Trump’s hateful words are turned into murderous actions by his dimwit supporters.
     I could take the opposite tack — a sneering “You wish.” What’s wrong with being Jewish? You make it sound like a bad thing. 

Of course it is possible to be both Latino AND Jewish, as this
 South American synagogue reminds us.  

 And I guess it is, in the crazy-people-always-wanting-to-kill-you sense. But hostility from murderous madmen is only part of Jewish identity, and I would argue a small part. When I was growing up in the 1970s, the Holocaust weighed on Jewish minds, and a certain Death Cult aspect settled upon the religion. I found that unappealing. And so did other Jews, who managed to pry their eyes away from the central horror of the 20th century long enough to find the joy in their religion. Reconstructionist Judaism can be a bit touchy-feely, with the guitars and life-affirming songs and more smiling than I'm comfortable with. But at least it suggests that life is a celebration, or should be.

      The task of all marginalized peoples is to not be defined by those who hate you, but maintain your own proud identity, a challenge which Jews — and, my impression is, Hispanics, too — are quite good at managing. Hounded and persecuted in every era and land, Jews have remained a cohesive people for 3,000 years while oppressors from the Babylonians to the Nazis have come and gone.
     Let’s be clear: I’m not speaking for all Jews. We don’t have a pope. We are not a fungible mass, which always comes as a shock to haters and, sometimes, to the hated too. Jews range from bearded, black-hatted Hassidim to that self-loathing Goebbels wanna-be Trump adviser Stephen Miller, who, to his regret and mine, is still Jewish.

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Flashback 2011: If only Rod read different Kipling

     There is fellowship among criminals. Each knows what they themselves are guilty of, and so harbors sympathy for those unfortunate enough to get caught. So of course Donald Trump, with God knows how many crimes and misdemeanors staining his soul, would look kindly upon former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich his brother-in-arms.    Thursday morning we awoke to reports that Trump is "very strongly" considering pardoning Blagojevich, seven years into his 14 year prison sentence for corruption. Expect it to happen, and soon. 
      That is actually good news, of a sort. By commuting his sentence, instead of pardoning him, that means Blagojevich probably won't be able to run for governor again. Heck, given the public's demonstrated taste for mendacious egomaniacs without the capacity for reflection, Blagojevich would probably win.
      The bad news is he will still be twirling in the limelight he adores, quoting Kipling, playing the martyr, Christ and Martin Luther King rolled into one. Don't expect him to merely fade away, like Mel Reynolds. Before he went into the big house, I mused on his cotton puff of a soul. If we are going to have to endure him again, a refresher course is in order.

     My God, the man quoted Kipling.
     If anybody doubted whether Rod Blagojevich, our disgraced former governor, could really come through his self-imposed ordeal unchanged, if they doubted that, despite the arrest, the two trials, the 18 convictions, the harsh 14-year sentence, Blago could really remain the same self-pitying egomaniac he was at the start, all they had to do was see him pause before the media, which has been forced to record his every pompous, blown-dried word, to invoke his favorite bard.
     "Rudyard Kipling, in his poem 'If,' among the things he wrote, was: 'If you can meet with triumph and disaster,' " Blagojevich intoned, as he left court Wednesday, " 'and treat those two imposters just the same.' "
     Again with the Kipling. Again with "If," which Blago has memorized and quoted at moments of difficulty throughout his tenure.
     "If you can keep your head when all about you/Are losing theirs and blaming it on you," he recited, three years ago, when he was still proclaiming his innocence and beginning the oblivious twirl in the limelight that no doubt earned him many extra years in the clink.
     More Kipling. Thanks for the life lesson, governor. Kipling is not just the bard of British imperialism, but has become the poster boy for conceited self-delusion. Blago seems to think he's fighting off the Zulus at Rorke's Drift, one brave man facing hostile hordes.
     That's not the tone he took when begging Judge James Zagel for mercy. But I have no doubt that the Blagojevich we'll see during the appeals process, or later in frequent jailhouse interviews (where he is certain to invoke Thoreau and Nelson Mandela), will be filled with injured self-pity and Gunga Din. To cope with that, we must keep our gaze locked on what, specifically, Blagojevich did wrong. When Barack Obama resigned his Senate seat to become president, it was the job of the governor to select a new senator. It is a big responsibility; a senator is a state's key advocate in Washington, determining how much federal money comes back to fund programs that millions rely on. I believe that any random Illinoisan, any housewife, cabdriver or busboy would instantly recognize the gravity of the task, and 99.9 percent would have acted accordingly.
     Not Blago. He viewed this as an opportunity to profit, period. "I want to make money," he said. That was the beginning and end of the calculation. That isn't "horse-trading," that's barratry, the selling of an office. Not just a crime but a sin.
     Were I the judge, I'd have given him less time in prison, because he is a pathetic figure, a lost soul, cut off from self knowledge. Even the Kipling he professes to admire could have saved him. Let's go back to "If:"

      If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you 
      But make allowance for their doubting too.

     What allowance did Blagojevich make? What allowance has Blago's father-in-law Dick Mell made, for that matter, that he can dare contemplate "the appointment of a political protege, possibly his daughter, state Rep. Deb Mell," as the Sun-Times has said, to his aldermanic seat? Gee Dick, haven't you inflicted enough relatives on us for one career?
     Kipling wasn't just an imperialist taking up "the white man's burden." He had depth—he despised corruption, for instance, and would have loathed our governor. I'd like to quote some Kipling far more apt than "If" to this sad case. "General Summary" begins:

          We are very slightly changed

          From the semi-apes who ranged

          India's prehistoric clay.

     And ends:

          Who shall doubt the 'secret hid'

          Under Cheops' pyramid

          Was that the contractor did

          Cheops out of several millions?

          Or that Joseph's sudden rise
          To Comptroller of Supplies

          Was a fraud of monstrous size

          On King Pharaoh's swart Civilians?

          Thus, the artless songs I sing

          Do not deal with anything

          New or never said before.

          As it was in the beginning

          Is today official sinning,

          And shall be for evermore.

      Kipling was a 21-year-old reporter when he wrote that in 1886. Alas, it holds up well.

                     —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Dec. 9, 2011

You can skip Rome; Bonci pizza is here

     The beauty of Chicago is that you never have to go anywhere else. Paris? We’ve got plenty of French Impressionists at The Art Institute. India? Stroll down Devon Avenue. Not precisely Mumbai; but close enough. Throw in Chinatown and the Taste of Peru and you might as well stay put. A week in Thailand, and I never ate a single mouthful tastier than anything off the menu at Star of Siam. I’ve been from Antigua to Zurich and everywhere in between. Trust me. Put your feet up. Relax. You’re not missing anything. 

Matt Warman, manager of the Bonci Pizzeria,
161 N. Sangamon, cuts a slice of mushroom.

     OK, Rome is nice. There is nothing here like Michelangelo’s fresco on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. That alone is worth the airfare. Huge, gorgeous, and — as if that isn’t enough— after you’ve spent a morning in stunned awe of the iconic masterpiece, you can stroll over to Bonci’s Pizzarium on Via della Meloria, just outside the walls of the Vatican.
     And the pizza there ... like the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, words can’t convey the experience.
     We rubes tend to think of pizza as coming in two forms: deep dish and flat. Being Chicagoans, we endlessly argue over which is the true pizza, where stuffed pizza fits in (answer: it doesn’t) and should flat be cut into wedges or squares (answer: who cares?). We have no clue there is a third, entirely different type of pizza, represented by Bonci: light, airy crust, with all sorts of toppings — over 1,500 — you must try, served al taglio, as the Italians say, “by the cut.” You tell them exactly how much you want, sampling an inch of this, two inches of that.  
     It’s worth flying all the way to Rome just to ... oh wait. Never mind. Turns out Bonci opened a second location at 161 N. Sangamon St. two years ago next week. (Yes, yes, it escaped my notice; I’m not New Pizza Parlor Central). Even if you know it’s there, do you know why, with the entire world to choose from, Bonci picked a spot 10 minutes from the Sun-Times for its second location?
     How did that happen?
     “I worked with Gabriele,” said Rick Tasman, president of BonciUSA, referring to Gabriele Bonci, “the Michelangelo of pizza.” “He had been wanting to come to the United States.”

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One secret of Bonci pizza is flour flown in from Italy.