Success doesn't mean victory

    The column in the newspaper can't be longer than 719 words. There isn't room. I'm not sure if that's the precise limit—my gut tells me I could sneak in 720— but that's the number I don't let myself go beyond to make sure it doesn't run 790 or 800 words, which wouldn't fit on page 2, where I like to see it smiling back at me in the mornings.
     Sometimes I bite the bullet—on Monday, when I was trying to explain the allure of manhole covers, I went 900 words and got the column sunk deeper in the paper.  But on most days, if it runs 720 words, I take one word out. It might say something, and not something good, that I didn't feel the need to request the same for Wednesday's column. It held up Mothers Against Drunk Driving as a reason for hope, if not a roadmap, in the frustrating battle against gun violence. MADD's success, and the nation turning away from smoking, show that change is possible.
      Even starting out with a Sam Kinison bit, I felt I could make my point in my allotted space. But at that length, some nuance is lost. When I sent the column to Mothers Against Drunk Driving—they had provided a high-resolution copy of the photo I wanted to use—their response had a certain tone of ... disappointment.
     "Sadly, while we have come a long way, drunk driving is STILL the No. 1 killer on our roads," wrote Becky Iannotto, MADD's senior manager of communications. "It’s no longer funny and thousands of lives have been saved, but we still lose 10,000 to 11,000 people every year. Still working to change attitudes, support enforcement and strengthen laws until we can really get to zero!"
      I saw what she was saying. Just as as addicts and alcoholics are said to be in recovery, but never "recovered," so MADD has successes without victory. The fight continues: this Saturday is "Saturation Saturday" in conjunction with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration's $13 million "Drive Sober or Get Pulled Over Campaign."
      I shouldn't write off overlooking that to tight space. The truth is, I was trying to make a point—MADD has accomplished great things against an entrenched killer, so can opponents of Armed America. To pause, and observe that despite nearly 40 years of gerbil-on-a-wheel effort, it's still an enormous problem, well, that would kind of take the air out of the message I was trying to inflate. 
     I should have mentioned MADD's ongoing fight.
     Nor did I mention Moms Demand Action, a grass roots organization trying to do exactly what I was suggesting: weaponize the pain felt by the survivors of victims of gun violence and use it against the entrenched and lucrative macho gun fantasy that thwarts any kind of commonsense action on the topic. 
       That's the beauty of the blog: it can add an asterisk where need be. Although, that said, the overwhelming reaction of readers was gratitude to read something at all hopeful about our current political state. So to the degree that my omissions might have reinforced the sense—or should that be "illusion"?—of hope, I suppose it was not an entirely bad thing.

     

Buh-bye to Dorothy Brown

     My sense is that Dorothy Brown figures, if she retires, then she can't be prosecuted, as the charges of corruption that have swirled around her office for years gather to gale force. A version of the ostrich's head-in-the-sand defense: "If I'm not in my office," she no doubt thought, in the kind of flash of genius that marked her nearly two decades as Clerk of the Cook County Circuit Courts, "then the feds will never be able to find me!"

     Fran Spielman spells out the latest news, as always. 
     The phrase Brown used, several times, is that it is time for her to "go to the next level."
     That's one way to put it.
      I was on the Sun-Times editorial board when Brown became county clerk in 2000—that's a scary thought—and remember the unsettling perkiness she exuded, which I came to see as a smokescreen for the ineptitude, arrogance and corruption—proved against her underlings, not against her, not yet—that followed. 

     Her department, who generally despised her, must be dancing in the hallways. I can't say I'll miss her: I've tuned Brown out for years. But I did think this might be a good moment to dig a few Dorothy Brown chestnuts out of the old vault. It's too early to breathe as sigh of relief: she hasn't quite gone away. But at least that happy day is in sight. It will be interesting to see which level she ends up sinking to: maybe she can join Carol Moseley-Braun in pecan farming and tea sales.

      What would be coming out of the clerk's office if Dorothy Brown hadn't ordered her employees to keep their mouths shut? As it is, they're dishing dirt like frenzied ditch diggers. Two great accusations came zipping my way: a) that Brown has her security detail empty out elevators before she uses them, and b) that this same security detail also pulls her boots on for her. Devoted to the requirements of the form, I ran this by Brown, who responded a) no, she uses the judges' elevators and b) no, they don't.
     At this point I thought the fair thing to do would be not to print these baseless charges. I checked with two editors here, who said:
     a) "Why start being fair now?" and b) "It's election season."
     See, it isn't just me.
                          —Originally published in the Sun-Times, March 10, 2004


     God bless Dorothy Brown. She's the perkiest person I have ever met in politics, bar none. The Cook County Circuit Court clerk has more spunk than an Olympic gymnast. She makes Katie Couric seem like Eeyore.
     Have you met the woman? Imbued with energy, excruciatingly well-mannered and the grace of God flowing from her like glow off a light-bulb. Her cringing subordinates might paint a different picture, but that's how she comes across during her visits to the newspaper.
     Of course, she can't run her own department, never mind run the city, not that she'll get the chance: Mayor Daley will crush her like an egg.
     Still, while she lasts, she should provide an interesting contrast to the morose Saul sulking on the fifth floor of City Hall: Daley, the sourest, most visibly unhappy man to hold elective office in America since Calvin Coolidge retired to Vermont, vs. Dorothy Brown, who seems about to bust out into song at any given moment. I'd like to pretend she'll give the mayor a run for his money and he'll only get 70 percent of the vote this time. But I doubt it.

      —originally published in the Sun-Times, Sept. 3, 2006

MADD success offers hope for progress with gun control

Cari Lightner, 13, was killed by a drunken driver a few hours after this photo was taken in 1980. Her mother Candace went on to found Mothers Against Drunk Driving

     It was good to hear Sam Kinison again.
     The maniacal scream, that wicked giggle.
     “Such a moral push, isn’t there in this country?” the comedian says on a 1988 album. “To try to get us to behave.”
     And here let’s leave out a few obscene gerunds.
     “Don’t drink and drive,” he sneers. “God, they have made such a big deal about this, haven’t they? It didn’t used to be such a big deal. You had a few drinks, you drove home. Now you’re a ....”
     We’ll skip a pair of crude anatomical descriptions - “... child killer!”
     The crowd whoops, ignoring that the one printable accusation is often literally true. Kinison explains the reluctant necessity of drunken driving: ”We don’t want to ... but there’s no other way to get our car back to the house. How are we supposed to get home? We’ve got to drink and drive.“
     That neatly sums up the public attitude at the time. Laws were pliant. In Texas, you could legally carry a beer while driving.
     Enter Candace Lightner, whose daughter Cari, 13, was run down by a thrice-convicted drunken driver in 1980. The group she formed, Mothers Against Drunk Driving, did not find drunken driving funny. It showed America what the joke cost, the faces of the more than 20,000 Americans whose lives were taken by alcohol-impaired drivers every year.
     Attitudes changed. Laws changed. You can’t legally drive and drink beer in Texas anymore — open containers were banned from vehicles in 2001. Now driving drunk is a serious crime. No one is laughing anymore.
     Where am I going with this? After the latest mass shootings, calls for common sense gun laws grew louder. They always do, after Parkland and Sandy Hook and America’s litany of shame. Then we go quiet again.

To continue reading, click here.

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.”

To continue reading, click here.

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.