Hand the baby to Fireman Joe

     You wake to the scream of a smoke alarm in a bedroom filled with dense black smoke. Gasping, you roll onto the floor and belly-crawl to the baby’s room. There, you reach up, eyes stinging, and pluck the howling tot from her crib. Trying to leave, you are driven back by flames sprouting in the hallway you had just left. At that moment an axe crashes through the window, a burst of broken glass, noise, light and air. Through the shattered window frame steps a firefighter in full mask, helmet, and bunker gear. He reaches out his gloved hands. You:
     A) Crawl as fast as you can toward the flames.
     B) Ask him how he scored on his physical.
     C) Hand him the baby.
     If you answered “A” you are a Trump Republican, yearning for four more years of institution- and morality-scorching conflagration that, in some fashion I’ve stopped trying to comprehend, makes you feel good about yourself and your country. You like the flames of American freedoms and traditions burning to ash — they’re pretty — and you don’t perceive any harm because, when you’re not oohing at the fire, you’re gawping at Fox News, lost in the pyrotechnic fantasy display they’re putting on.
     If you picked ”B,” quiz the fireman, you are like many automatic pilot Democrats right now who, slow to accept the obvious situation (house burning down) cling to past rituals of long-vanished normality. (Exactly who is this fellow I’m handing my baby to?) They’re busy kicking the tires of the fire truck, musing: “Fireman Joe ... he’s not exactly young, is he? How is he on ladders? Let’s pick apart that assault accusation from 1993 ...” Parsing the details so closely they never bother to look up at the guy he’s running against, someone accused of worse by dozens of women. Ignoring the flames licking the doorframe, they focus on the carpet. It could use a vacuuming!

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Eugene O'Neill, not Hollywood, made Brian Dennehy a Chicago star

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

     Brian Dennehy would have laughed.

     “He would have found  'Tommy Boy actor dead at 81’ fucking hilarious,” said Robert Falls, artistic director of the Goodman Theatre, of the headline that raced around social media Thursday. “I find it pathetic. The guy lived such a rich and full life, in the grandest sense.”
     The Tony Award-winning actor died Wednesday.
     While the world might have known Dennehy as a movie star, from Chris Farley’s popular, cringeworthy comedy or from “First Blood” — he was the sheriff giving Sylvester Stallone’s Rambo a hard time — or other Hollywood tripe, Chicagoans knew better.
     “This was one of the great actors of our generation,” said Falls, who directed Dennehy in nine productions, including such classics as Eugene O’Neill’s “A Long Day’s Journey Into Night” and Arthur Miller’s timeless tragedy “Death of a Salesman,” which Dennehy starred in at Chicago’s Goodman Theatre in 1998, then took to Broadway and performed 450 times, winning a Tony.
     The two met in the mid-1980s when the old 121-seat Wisdom Bridge Theater on Howard Street presented Ron Hutchinson’s drama “Rat in the Skull.” 

     “Brian wanted to play this Northern Irish cop,” said Falls. “He just wanted to do this play. He was thrilled to come to Chicago. It was love at first sight.”James Lancaster (left) and Brian Dennehy in a scene from the Wisdom Bridge Theatre production of Ron Hutchinson’s “Rat in the Skull” in 1985.
     The two men became friends and frequent collaborators.
     “We bonded over Irish Catholicism, alcoholism running through our family, and a love of Eugene O’Neill,” said Falls. “From the beginning, and I know this sounds crazy, but Brian said: ‘We’re going to do a lot of plays together. We’re going to do the big ones, the really difficult ones.’ I said ‘OK.’ ”
     Falls kicked off his artistic directorship with Dennehy in Bertolt Brecht’s “Galileo.”

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Attorney Ed Genson, friend of the guilty

    

Ed Genson at home, 2019

     Left to my own devices, I probably would n0t have written Ed Genson's obituary. First, because there is a comprehensive Chicago magazine profile of Genson, written by Steve Rhodes, and I hate to follow in anybody's wake and try to reinvent the wheel. Second, just last year I wrote a column where Genson said his client R. Kelly was "guilty as hell," and perhaps there is something sketchy in having the guy who recently caused the deceased distress then turn around and summarize his life. And finally, I have scant interest in the organized crime world where he dwelled. But this task fell to me, so—helped greatly by Maureen O'Donnell and Jon Seidel—so I tried my best to execute it. 

     Where do you begin with Ed Genson? With the notorious defense attorney’s long list of famous clients? From singer R. Kelly to movie star Shia LaBeouf, from newspaper mogul Conrad Black to former Gov. Rod Blagojevich?
     Do you start there?
     Or with the Mafia hit men — alleged Mafia hit men, since many walked free, with Mr. Genson’s help — and mobbed up politicians? If Mr. Genson was famous for one thing, it was as the wily and effective attorney of the damned: “Devil’s advocate” is the headline Chicago magazine put on his profile in 2005.
     “I have no aversion to organized crime,” Mr. Genson said in 2003.
     Certainly his involvement with the infamous Chicago corruption probes — Greylord, Gambat, Silver Shovel, Operation Haunted Hall — should be prominently featured. Mr. Genson defended the accused in all of them.
     At what point do you mention that death finally came for him, filing one motion he could not quash? Mr. Genson died Tuesday at age 78. He had been fighting cancer in recent years, and long suffered from a neuromuscular disorder called dystonia that sometimes makes muscles contract involuntarily. He walked with a cane or used a scooter but even that, he used to his legal advantage.
     “When he was trying to do something in front of the jury, of course his limp got markedly worse,” said World Business Chicago CEO Andrea Zopp, a former federal prosecutor and first assistant Cook County state’s attorney. “I saw that happen more times than one.”
     But he did a lot more than limp.
     “Eddy was very, very prepared,” said Zopp.
     For nearly half a century, no criminal attorney in Chicago was better known or held in the same mix of grudging affection and open-mouthed amazement.
     ”He was half-Columbo, half-Perry Mason,” said former federal prosecutor Patrick M. Collins. “When Eddy was on a case, you knew you were going to go to trial (rather than a plea). He really liked a good fight. Eddy shot you in the chest. He didn’t shoot you in the back. . . .You had to bring your ‘A’ game as a prosecutor.” 

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Plague catches up with artist in Chicago

El Greco painted tucked four of his heroes — Titian, Michelangelo, Giulio Clovio and Raphael — in the lower right corner of “Christ Driving the Money Changers from the Temple.”

     Doménikos Theotokópoulos was lucky when it came to plague.
     The painter passed through Venice in 1575, the year the Black Death killed a third of the residents of that crowded maritime port. He was on his way from Rome, where he had studied under the great painter Titian — who himself would soon after die of plague — to Spain, where he would establish his own enduring fame as El Greco, “The Greek.”
     But his luck with plagues ran out recently, as a major show of his work, “El Greco: Ambition and Defiance,” opened at The Art Institute of Chicago March 7, only to go dark six days later when the museum closed to slow the spread of COVID-19.
     I was fortunate to see the show during the brief span it was open, admiring how it re-united scattered works that had not been in the same room for centuries.
     I couldn’t help but feel sympathy for the show’s curators, and wonder: what is it like to dedicate years of your life to such a project only to have it displayed to empty galleries?
     “I worked on it a long time,” said Rebecca Long, who curated the show for The Art Institute. “There were a lot of negotiations. Some paintings we weren’t able to get. All in all, solidly worked for four years. ”

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It beats the hell out of "squat"

  

Sigma Chi brothers at the University of Alabama "hunkering" in 1959

     For weeks, people have been saying it.
     "How's it going at your place?" I'll call to a neighbor, doing my best impression of bluff cheerfulness, as we warily approach each other on opposite sidewalks, the street safely between.
     "We're all hunkering down," he'll inevitably say.
    One state over, the Mississippi of the North is urging its besieged citizens to "Hunker Down Hoosiers." 

    And it pops up in headline after headline, of course.
     "Hunkered Down, and Suddenly Irritatingly Together" the New York Times wrote last week, as if some copy editor lost a bar bet and had to see how bad a headline they could get into the Grey Lady. (We can write one that means about the same but is shorter and better by the time you count to 10. Ready? One...two... "Safe from the virus but not from each other.")
     Far better is the pun atop Gene Collier's Pittsburgh Post-Gazette column, "The Hunker Games" though he then inexplicably lashes out at the word.
     "A stupid, inelegant, vapid word of dubious origin," Collier writes, before going on to nevertheless use it 19 times in a single column, a figure which, just to show off, is eight times more than we will require here.
     He is right about the uncertain provenance. I first started musing on the word a couple weeks ago and played my game of guessing the derivation. Its sound and meaning—retire to some safe defensive position—seems vaguely military. Maybe a derivation of "bunker." I vague recall "hunk" being early 20th century slang for Hungarian. Could that be it? Nah....
     Off to the Oxford, which, as Collier suggests, throws up its hands, "Origin obscure" before picking over various Dutch-sounding roots. The definition, "To squat, with the haunches, knees, and ankles acutely bent, so as to bring the hams near the heels, and throw the whole weight upon the fore part of the feet" is unfamiliar: it's one of those words whose figurative sense outshines the literal. 

     This isn't its first burst of popularity. In 1959, it was briefly "America's most boring fad," at college campuses. On advocate called it "a respite from a world of turmoil. The main purpose of hunkerin' is to get down and hunker together. It's a friendship thing: get your friends to hunker with you. The man you don't know is the man you haven't hunkered with."

     Speaking of which. By his picture, Collier seems about my age, so it's odd he didn't point out an even better known pre-COVID-19 frame of reference of the word that wouldn't show up in the Oxford: it's one of Hunter S. Thompson's favorite buzzwords, showsing up eight times in "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" alone, most memorably here:
     “Every now and then you run up on one of those days when everything’s in vain … a stone bummer from start to finish; and if you know what’s good for you, on days like these you sort of hunker down in a safe corner and watch.”
     Excellent advice form Dr. Gonzo, from beyond the grave. Now if only we can take it.

Airlines safe, but Trump would let post office die

 

Smithsonian Institution American Art Museum

     You can’t vote by mail if there’s no mail.
     One of the many disasters that will ensue if the government actually lets the United States Postal Service go belly up, which it might do as early as September.
     A disaster to democracy, small “d” — the mail knits this country together in a fundamental way, like the interstate highway system — and I suppose to large “d” Democrats, too. That’s because their frequent majority — which is supposed to be the deciding factor in elections, remember — is constantly being undercut by Republican voter suppression.
    The GOP casts this anti-democratic (and yes, anti-Democratic) action as a campaign to suppress voter fraud, which is rich, like the guy breaking into your house and stealing your TV declaring it part of an anti-burglary campaign.
     At least we haven’t gone back to literacy tests and poll taxes. Yet.
     The USPS going bust would also be a disaster to already cratering employment. Unemployment shot up due to the COVID-19 pandemic: a record-shattering 16 million unemployment claims in three weeks. If the USPS goes, another 600,000 jobs — good jobs with benefits — go with it.
     The $2 trillion bailout package approved by both houses of Congress would have been the perfect time to help out letter carriers, since the volume of mail is down some 50 percent due to COVID-19.
     The package manages to rescue the airline industry; you’d think the mail would be a no-brainer. But even no-brainers are hard when you haven’t got a brain. Or, rather, when the rude ganglional clump that controls your actions only lights up when the topic is you.

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Facing coronavirus, we’re all in this together: ‘I see hope happening’

     Kevin Coval went to buy eggs at Tia Nam, a small Vietnamese grocery in Uptown. An old woman asked if he could help her reach three bags of rice noodles on a high shelf. As he did, he realized this was the closest he had been to another human being in days. He didn’t look at the store clerk in quite the same way, either.
    “I’ve been struck by those folks,” said the Chicago poet. “A month ago, they didn’t consider themselves to be first responders. Now, they’re risking their lives to get us fed. That’s pretty remarkable. I’ve always known working people to have a rigor and integrity. Now, we see them in ways we wouldn’t have conceived a month ago.”
     Chicagoans are keeping their distance, interacting in new ways while seeing each other in a different light. As the city and the region struggle to face a virus that doesn’t recognize distinctions of class or race or religion, longstanding problems come into stark relief even as people reach across old boundaries to help one another, and tantalizing possibilities suggest themselves.
     This all comes during a season sacred to three major religions, with Passover having begun Wednesday night, followed by Good Friday and Easter Sunday and Ramadan less than two weeks away.
     "We’re doing all this in these days of the Easter season, what we call the Easter Passover,” said Cardinal Blase Cupich, spiritual leader of Chicago’s Catholics. “What people are learning in this time is how connected we are. This moment is really forcing all of us to realize we are connected. We’re connected by this virus. Social distancing is telling us how related we are to one another. We have a drive to want to be connected to other people. We don’t want to live isolated lives. We are nourished by that.”
     The cardinal was referring to spiritual nourishment, but there is plenty of the other kind, too. Shuttered restaurants are donating food to pantries and to hospitals to feed besieged doctors and nurses working 12-hour shifts. Police officers, often the targets of criticism, find themselves embraced — from a safe distance, of course.

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