Yup, got myself vaccinated, but won’t say how

      Yes, I got my first COVID vaccination on Monday. And no, I’m not going to tell you how it happened. In a manner embarrassing enough that I decided to never share the specifics. I didn’t lie. I didn’t body-check anybody out of line. Let’s leave it at that.
     The moment I made this uncharacteristic decision — discreet silence not being my forte — my immediate qualm was, “So what do I say if people ask?”

     And the fully-formed thought instantly flashing into mind was:
     “I’ll just say I got vaccinated at the synagogue with everybody else, in late 2019, just before the virus was released.”
     That’s a joke. I make jokes. It’s a twitch, a reflex, to cover unease at getting the life-saving shot that 88% of Illinoisans haven’t gotten yet. Is a good joke? Well, it plays on the psycho conspiracy theories that millions of Americans lap up like kittens around a dish of cream. Certainly not as wild as Secret Jewish Space Lasers.
     Is it a bad joke? Hateful? Anti-Semitic? Something that will lodge in the head of a nut? My gut says the Jews-to-the-front-of-the-line joke is not one whose unacceptability will only become clear to me after I’m flayed alive on social media. Yes, claiming that prejudice is mere humor is the traditional way haters dive for cover when called out on their bigotry. But jokes also have value, as a way for the targets of prejudice to process the contempt directed at them, making bigotry easier to live with, since it’s obviously never going away. Someone designed a “Secret Jewish Space Laser Corps” pin, and I thought of buying one, then decided people might think it was real, and that could be awkward.
     OK, OK. The vaccine. I have to tell you. So I volunteered to chauffeur a couple to Springfield to get their shots, because the woman can’t drive and the man shouldn’t, and I’m the nicest person ever. To Springfield, because many folks down there are numbed to the COVID peril by the barge of BS delivered nightly on Fox News, and so are uninterested in getting vaccinated. “It’s a gubment plot!”

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Deely Bobbers

John Belushi as a "Killer Bee" on Saturday Night Live.

     My column in the Sun-Times is limited to 719 words, unless I get special dispensation for something longer, and often tangents must be stripped away to get the column down to the proper length, like a wrestler wrapping himself in a mat to make weight before a bout.
     For instance. Wednesday's bit of fun about St. Patrick's Day originally contained a deep dive into the history and etymology of "deely bobbers," which I first remembered as "deely boppers," those plastic headbands topped with a pair of springs holding a variety of festive trappings: stars, balls, or, in my mind most definitively, shamrocks. They seem a necessary part of the clueless mis-celebration of Irish culture: the pints of green Miller beer, the grass green "Kiss Me I'm Irish" t-shirts, the painted faces, the deely bobbers.
     Fashion often disappears into the mist. But deely bobbers are quite specific, at least according to Wikipedia:

Stephen Askin invented the original deely bobber in 1981, inspired by the "Killer Bees" costumes on Saturday Night Live....Askin made prototype Deely Bobbers in his kitchen and test-marketed them at the Los Angeles Street Fair of summer 1981, selling 800 at $5 each. He sold the invention to the Ace Novelty Co. of Bellevue, Washington, which launched it in January 1982 at the California Gift Fair. The name "Deely Bobber" was suggested by the wife of John Minkove, an Ace marketer; it had been her schoolfriend's placeholder name for "thingamajig". It was previously a brand of toy block sold 1969–1973.

    I remember the "Killer Bees" as being a recurrent theme on Saturday Night Live. There was something inherently funny about seeing John Belushi in this ridiculous bee costume, and he would show up from time to time, almost randomly, dressed as a bee, and the sproingy deely bobbers bouncing around his head were part of the overall effect. 
     In looking at the clips for deely bobbers, I noticed an early New York Times story of June 7, 1982, "A New Fad Invades: Martian Antennae" which is distinctive in that it completely misses both the origin of the novelty, a TV show of some note broadcast not terribly far from the Times newsroom, as well as the headdress's actual name.  Yes, it's easier now with the Internet. But still. It couldn't have taken that much effort to figure out where they came from.

      And here I thought the general cluelessness of the Times cultural coverage is a recent deterioration. I have to remember that Spy magazine had no trouble in the 1980s running a densely-packed monthly column cataloguing the Times' flaws and follies. 

     . 

There’s still Irish soda bread and Eugene O’Neill

     Happy St. Patrick’s Day!
     No parades, alas, or packed pubs. Not so many knots of young folk in black plastic bowlers and shamrock-tipped deely-bobbers doing their day-drinking forced marches from one River North bar to another.
     The city did dye the river green, in a surprise bit of late coronavirus festivity — all together now, class: “THANK YOU MAYOR LIGHTFOOT! THANK YOU, PLUMBERS UNION!” — which worked, if only as a reminder that we don’t have to actually see stuff in person anymore as long as it flashes beautifully across Instagram.
     And continuing our festive, look-on-the-bright-side mood, there is still Irish soda bread. Not quite as valuable as Yeats; not far behind, either.  

Eugene O'Neill

     That’s the trick nowadays. Turn losses into positives. For instance, yes, no big downtown St. Patrick’s Day Parade, no smaller-but-more-fun South Side Irish Parade.
     You know what else there isn’t? I haven’t heard a single aggrieved Irish-American complain bitterly that canceling the parades is a genocide against themselves and their culture, how their dead Irish ancestors who made the journey to Chicago will rise up from their uneasy graves to demand that those parades be held, COVID-19 be damned.
     I’m sure both Irish-Chicagoans and Plain-Old-Chicagoans in general aren’t happy about no parades. But even the more lackadaisical, mask-around-your-chin, pack-the-bar-tent-and-pretend-you’re-outside would-be revelers won’t stare grimly into the camera and claim this is being done to spite them. It’s encouraging to conjure sentiments so stupid that people aren’t expressing them. That gets harder and harder to do.

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An assist for the husband.

 

     A good marriage involves teamwork, and a bit of coordination. One spouse leaps in the air and floats toward the rim, the other fires the basketball at the perfect moment.
     It was my wife's soaring impulse to greet the return of our oldest, who likes to bake, with a stationary mixer. I passed her at the computer in the living room, online, looking at the Cuisinart Precision 5.5 Quart Red Stand Mixer. Good looking, sleek, and it would do the job for $200. I paused, looking over her shoulder.   
     Not quite.
     "I like your thinking," I said. "But get the KitchenAid."  
     She said thought of that, she said. But the KitchenAid is a lot more. Almost twice as much. This is a better value. It mixes.
     "Ninety-nine percent of the time we're just going to be looking at it," I said. "The KitchenAid is a classic. If I'm going to look at at mixer sitting on the counter for the next 20 years, I want it to be the good one."
     No, she said, that wasn't happening. Okay, I shrugged. No biggie. It was her project. She could get what she liked. It would still beat eggs.
     A while later—a half hour, a half day, three days, so hard to tell during the plague's second year, which looks like it'll be foreshortened, but ain't over yet. I saw her purchasing the KitchenAid in what I call "Tiffany blue." Well look at that. I smiled. I can't tell which made me happier: getting the cooler, better albeit more expensive, machine. Or the fact that I actually had had some input into the running of the household. An idea of mine was good enough to put into action in the living world.
     I was even happier when it arrived—heavy—and we opened the box and put it on the counter.

    "Our grandchildren are going to be using that," I said, looking at it closely. It gleamed like a gem.
    "You never even have to use it," I continued. "In fact, I prefer you don't. I won't get dirty that way."
     Here my wife, wisely, chose not to listen to me, and did use it, almost immediately. To bake pinwheels. It isn't like you can buy them anymore. The results speak for themselves.

‘The theater is a place for healing’

     For a solid year, the ghost light on the stage of the Goodman Theatre has shone in lonely silence on a classroom at the Aburi Girls’ Secondary School, the set for Jocelyn Bioh’s “School Girls; Or, the African Mean Girls Play,” nipped in the bud last spring.
     “Just a wonderful play,” said Robert Falls, the artistic director of the Goodman. “We were in previews, and the audience was loving it. We were three days from opening.”
     I called Falls because I was wondering, with vaccine being pumped into arms and hope of a returned world flickering, how the Chicago theater community might incorporate the past year. He’s the guy who put on Henrik Ibsen’s “Enemy of the People” right after Donald Trump’s election, so if anyone would be folding the COVID nightmare into his theatrical batter, it would be Bob Falls. But how?
     “A lot of theaters our size, they’re in a complete tizzy about how to open their seasons from scratch, having to choose a play,” he said. At the Goodman, they’ll dust off the set, get the actors back and pick up where they left off ... We can have this production up by summer.”
     That’s one approach.
     “You’ve got theaters across the country in mid-production, theaters that literally have a ghost light sitting on the stage,” said Michael Weber, at Porchlight Music Theatre. “They’re going to start up right where they were. Others, like us, have decided to shelve the season that we planned, and we’re rethinking an entirely new season, assuming we can get back. We’re hoping for the fall.”
     A “ghost light,” by the way, is the single bulb kept burning on a stage in a darkened theater, to keep people from blundering into the orchestra pit. In plague-darkened 2020, it’s become somewhat symbolic, the spark of life in the heart of a comatose patient.

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A crater in the heart of the neighborhood

 

     It was a long walk through Chinatown. Our little umbrellas barely holding off the cheerless drizzle. But that's where our oldest said to meet him, between taking one class and teaching another, so that's where we've went. One of the benefits of having children get past the look-up-to-you phase is the birddog-great-restaurants phase.

     Besides, we told each other. We're working up an appetite. And we're in New York City. Just walking down the street is fun.
     We weren't particularly surprised to find the place almost completely empty. A few diners scattered in the vastness, who promptly fled when we arrived, leaving the place to ourselves. It was, after all 3 p.m. Neither late lunch nor early dinner, and who goes to a Chinese restaurant for a snack? Still, there was an eerie, after-hours, depopulated quality. We couldn't help wonder if this was due to tourists avoiding Chinatown because of that new virus from China. As if residents here would have that virus, because of their ethnicity. People are the worst.

     He arrived.  We scanned the menu, ordered plate after plate—who doesn't love dim sum? 
     We didn't rush to leave. Actually, we slipped into a mode I think of as "setting up base camp," consulting our phones, sipping our tea, plotting our next step—tickets to the Tenement Museum.  Not too far. One tour available. I always wanted to go to the Tenement Museum on the Lower East Side. My father's mother lived in a tenement and made paper flowers as a young woman. Then reservations for late dinner. We hit the street. A light rain. My son was off to teach his class, and my wife and I headed to the museum, and life rolled on.  

     I didn't think about Jing Fong again until this week, when the largest restaurant in New York's Chinatown closed forever last Sunday. There was a big tribute in the Times, "Closing of Beloved Dim Sum Hall Leaves a ‘Crater’ in Reeling Chinatown:
      It's the second restaurant we went to that weekend to go belly up due to COVID. The splendid one Michelin star Thai place, Uncle Boon's, was the first.
     Honestly? With 527,000 Americans dead, at first it seems squishy to mourn a restaurant, like raising a monument to the pets lost in World War II. Though it too is a loss, and no need to weigh each against the other. It's certainly a calamity for restaurant workers and owners, and to the community who celebrated their birthdays and wedding there, not to forget the precious fabric of ordinary daily life. As the Times put it, "The loss of Jing Fong hurts." Having only gone once, I couldn't develop too much of an attachment, and am more grateful I got there than sad it's gone, which is probably the best way to approach all loss.

Texas notes: Still here

William Schadow (Met)

     Austin Bureau Chief Caren Jeskey had the good sense to use the Plague Year to get outside more.

     This time last year the rug was pulled out from under us. As we heard about a deadly virus already in our midst, our President told us that COVID was nothing to worry about. He’d close the borders to certain people and the “China Flu” would stay away. He swaggered and droned on (and on and on and, well, this is the most apropos use of ad nauseam I can think of). His swaggering, pompous tone spat out the farthest thing from reassuring that a sane and helpful leader might be counted on to provide.
     We quickly tuned him out and increased the volume of a the much more useful voice of Dr. Fauci. Just saying his name seems to activate my vagus nerve, which is often referred to as the wandering nerve. This little powerhouse releases “‘inhibitory neurotransmitters’ such as gamma-aminobutyric acid, norepinephrine, and serotonin” (https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7115576). 

     I am a big fan of serotonin, our natural mood regulator. If one’s vagus nerve is under- stimulated there are ways to get it going, and I suggest giving it a Google. Exercise can help.
     My COVID walkabouts commenced— upwards of 10, 12, 15 miles or more per day— always distanced and masked. I became immersed in the minutia of the world around me. I have always found solace in nature, and now it was amplified. I started living outside almost all day, every day. Each step brought me closer to a sense of feeling grounded and well. I could tune out the world and just be. I was not in denial of the situation; I was simply in training. It was time to get my body and mind strong and focused as I planned my entry back into the workforce after abruptly losing most of my employment due to virus restrictions.
     Over the past year I’ve come to feel closer to other women of the road. Mildred Norman finished the 2,000+ mile Appalachian Trail in one season. It is said that for the next 28 years she wore the same clothes every day and carried only a few possessions in her pockets as she traversed the United States. She was also know as the Peace Pilgrim (https://www.peacepilgrim.org/).
     “Grandma Gatewood” also hiked the Appalachian Trail alone in one season. This was back in 1955 and she was 67. I recall reading a quote of hers once, something to the effect “hey y’all, just do it. Grab some Keds and plastic bags to use as tarps and get out there.” She did not have expensive gear, she just set out and walked. I learned recently that her only training was walking 10 miles a day to build up her leg muscles (https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/27/obituaries/grandma-emma-gatewood-overlooked.html). Perhaps I am on my way?
     Then there’s Sarah Marquis who walked from the American-Canadian border all the way south to Mexico, over 2500 miles. Several years later she trekked across the Andes mountains from Chile to Peru.
     There are too many of these women to name. I get it. Once my shoes hit the pavement and I decide to go left or right from my front door, the rest is a mystery and a journey ensues. I’ll look around sometimes and choose the path that seems the brightest and most inviting. This is how I happened upon the Elisabet Ney museum last year, and learning about Ms. Ney has made me feel stronger as a woman. In 1892 she build a castle-like home in Austin with money she earned creating sculptures. I am not sure how much time she had for walking, but I have a feeling Grandma Gatewood, the Peace Pilgrim, Sarah and I would have quite enough to talk about, or would enjoy silent company together for thousand mile treks, if such a thing were possible.
     Keeping active and finding beauty every day has taken the place of endless social interactions, movies, theatre, live music, coffee shops and near-constant stimulation. I don't think I’ll ever go back to that lifestyle of going going going, at least I hope not. Life seems shorter than ever and I feel that the past year has been a much needed reset. The tragedy of so many lives lost makes it feel like a battle unfairly won, though. It will be years before we truly grasp and start to recover from this tragic time, and I am well aware we are not out of the woods yet.