It wasn’t ‘Give me liberty AND give me death!’

La Jeune Fille et la Mort, by Marianne Stokes (Musée d'Orsay, Paris)

     No, I did not wear a mask when I stepped into the Goodman Theatre lobby Monday evening. Yes, I had read the explicit instructions in their email earlier that day.

     “Remember that face coverings are required for all patrons attending the performance, regardless of vaccination status. We will provide a mask if someone in your party is in need.”
     Why? The usual selfishness that greases our slide through life. I got my vaccination in April. So I’m OK. Besides, you never know how strict such instructions are. An actual, bar-you-at-the-door requirement, like the Lyric Opera’s iron rule that if you arrive 10 seconds past curtain you have to stand there like an idiot, watching a monitor? Or mere cover-your-butt legalese winked at by those in the know?
     I grasped it was the former when a polite young man intercepted me three steps through the door, offering a basket of paper masks. I apologized, fumbling for the familiar lump in my pocket. I had brought my own, just in case.
     Why not? I shovel the sidewalk in front of my house, use my turn signal, all the usual concessions to being part of a community. I can do a mask, too. Though I am human, and don’t like being inconvenienced. Sitting in the theater beforehand, it occurred to me that once the play starts, I could slip my mask down in the darkness and nobody would be the wiser.
     “All patrons must wear a mask before, during and after the performance,” a voice announced. Twice.
     Darn, I thought.
     I didn’t fear that if I slipped the mask under my nose, someone would hit me with a handheld spotlight, the way Blue Man Group shamed patrons slipping into the theater after the show began while a voice boomed “Late! LATE! LAAAAAAATE!!!”

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Flashback 1988: "A Tale of Two Twins"

Latona and Her Children, Apollo and Diana, by William Henry Rinehart (Metropolitan Museum)

   

      A reader from Harper Woods, Michigan wrote, and in my reply, I mentioned that the first place the paper ever sent me on a story was Detroit. Trying to connect, I suppose.

      Surrogacy was in the news, and a Michigan woman made headlines because she gave birth to twins and the family took the girl and left the boy. Our city editor, Alan Henry, told me to get to Detroit and write a story. I phoned the surrogate mother first — that seemed prudent. She had been on the round of morning TV shows, "Good Morning America" and such, and was burnt out by the publicity. She wasn't interested.  

     Okay, I said.

     A few minutes later Alan passed my desk.

    "I thought I told you to go to Detroit," he said.

     "The woman isn't interested," I replied. "She feels she's had too much publicity."

     Alan gave me a long, pitying look such as only a newspaper city editor is capable of.

     "I don't care," he said. "Get to Detroit. Talk to her neighbors. Write a story."

     I grabbed the phone, called her again, and told her that I had given it thought, and while I completely understood her not wanting additional publicity, because the press made her seem like white trash who sold her baby — that was my exact phrase, "like white trash who sold her baby" — that is why I feel it so important to tell the true story, to set the record straight, and the bottom line is I'll be at her door tomorrow morning with coffee and donuts, please let me in. 

     Then I bolted to the airport and caught a plane to Detroit, so quickly that I didn't bother to stop at my apartment and pack clothes or toiletries. I knew exactly nothing about the city except the Renaissance Center was a hotel, so I took a cab there.  I washed my shirt in the sink, hung it up to dry in the bathroom, then sat in front of the television, working my way through the contents of the mini-bar, waiting for dawn. When it came, I got dressed, bought a dozen donuts and two large cups of coffee, then headed over to her house. By 9 a.m. I was holding the baby while we talked.

     I remember flying back, filling a page of a yellow legal pad with versions of the opening sentence. It was my first front page headline: "TALE OF TWO TWINS."

     It was all going to be just a simple business transaction.
     Last summer, a wealthy Michigan couple agreed to pay Patty Nowakowski, of Ionia, Mich, $10,000 to be artificially inseminated with the husband's sperm, carry the child, then deliver the baby up to them.
     What happened next split apart a brother and sister, caused a father to reject a newborn son, and added a cruel twist to the tangled issue of surrogate parenthood that even its critics hadn't contemplated.
     "Nauseating, is what it is," said Noel Keane, the lawyer who represented the adopting couple, who have not been identified. "This is probably one of the most upsetting cases I have ever heard of."
     Nowakowski was artificially inseminated. "A horrible experience," she recalled with a shudder. Halfway through her pregnancy, she had an ultrasound scan that showed that she was carrying twins, and that at least one was a boy.

     The Michigan couple was informed of this and didn't seem disturbed, said Nowakowski.
     But then, two weeks before she gave birth, the couple informed Nowakowski that if the twins were male, they did not want them because the wife was too frail to raise boys.
     "It was a shock," said Nowakowski in an interview Friday at her home. "I never thought anyone would turn away their own children. They came over here, to our house, and told us. I thought they wanted to meet our kids, out of curiosity. I couldn't believe it when I found out why they came."
     Three weeks ago, Nowakowski, 27, gave birth to a twin boy and girl. Shortly afterward, the biological father took the girl away. Nowakowski was left with a baby boy she didn't know what to do with.

     Keeping him didn't seem to be an option. Their family was set. Her husband Aaron, 30, had even had a vasectomy two years earlier. On top of that, she had been telling her three children, ages 2, 4 and 5, that the babies she was carrying were for someone else. Nowakowski gave her baby to a foster family.     

     "I had to think of my husband, who all along thought of this as another couple's child," she said.
     But not for long. "I just kept thinking: `that poor child,' " said Nowakowski. In the end, she and her husband decided the child "deserved to be raised in a stable family environment."
     So Nowakowski went back to the foster home, laid claim to the son they now call Artie, and brought him home, where he is today, about to celebrate his first hectic month of life.
     "He's beautiful," said Nowakowski, displaying the fat-faced, fair-haired boy, wrapped in a blue blanket. "He is going to be a part of our family. So, in the end, we come out ahead. We have him."
     Nowakowski says she will be honest with her new son and tell him the unique circumstances of his birth when the time comes. As for his relationship with his twin sister, Nowakowski says she will "take steps legally" to see that the two are allowed to know each other. 
     Keane, who also negotiated the deal that led to the infamous Baby M trial in which the surrogate mother fought unsuccessfully to keep her child, said Nowakowski may have little legal recourse if the adopting family does not want the male twin to visit his sister.
     "The law allows exactly what happened," said Keane, who pointed out that, in circumstances such as divorce, brothers and sisters are periodically separated. "Perhaps not morally speaking, but legally, there is nothing wrong with it."
     The Nowakowskis' ordeal did not escape the notice of the government in Michigan, which is struggling to become the fourth state to regulate surrogate motherhood.
     State Sen. Connie Binsfeld, the sponsor of pending legislation to outlaw paid surrogate motherhood, said she was still surprised by the Nowakowski case.
     "I have thought through many different scenarios," she said. "But I never thought of this. That children should be separated like that. I was shocked."
     Reflecting on her decision to become a surrogate mother, Nowakowski said: "It wasn't the money. It wasn't being pregnant again. I wanted to help someone else. . . . Though now I do regret doing it for someone with children.

     "As for now, I'm putting all this past me. I have to protect my kids. As for Arthur J., he's a miracle and I can't imagine not having him."  

          —Originally published in the Sun-Times, April 24, 1988.

    Note: After a custody battle, the Nowakowski's ending up keeping both children. Such surrogacy agreements are void and unenforceable in Michigan, and participating in one is a misdemeanor, though they are legal, with restrictions, in Illinois. I began looking for Arthur Nowakowski, who would be 33 years old now, but noticed he's never, as far as I can tell, participated in any kind of media beyond his birth year, and the odds are slight he'd want me to be the first.

Lebanon holds grim warning for United States

 

Metropolitan Museum of Art

     One year ago, on Aug. 4, 2020, 2,750 tons of ammonium nitrate improperly stored at the port of Beirut, Lebanon, exploded, killing at least 214 people, injuring more than 6,000, and forcing hundreds of thousands from their homes.
     The world saw that video of a bride’s wedding portrait session interrupted by a shock wave just as the camera zoomed in on her bouquet, dramatizing the horror of the blast.
     If you’d already forgotten, don’t feel bad. It’s been a busy year. A lethal pandemic killed 600,000 Americans. The federal government reaction was initially botched, precious months squandered. A bitter, divisive election which Donald Trump tried to baldly steal, summoning a mob to Washington and setting it on the Capitol. A third of the country refusing to take basic steps to combat the COVID plague. We have our own woes.
     But there is a connection between the aftermath of the explosion in Beirut and our growing crisis here, one important to understand. Because we are on the same path to becoming a broken country, like Lebanon. Just as the claim of voter security is being used to corrupt our electoral system, so the goal of being a “great” country is used to erode our greatness and make us ordinary, the usual tinpot dystopia fighting each other over scraps. The world is filled with them, from Haiti to Brazil to Russia to Myanmar. We see what happens to failed states, where accountability has no place.
     After the blast in Lebanon, what happened in one year? Investigations? Hearings? Charges? Trials? Convictions?

     Nothing. No explanation for why the ammonium nitrate — the same material Timothy McVeigh used to blow up the Murrah Federal Building — was stored unsafely near residential neighborhoods. No accountability. They aren’t sure exactly how many people died. Nobody has even bothered to clean up the wreckage.

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Metropolitan Museum of Art

Making up for lost time: The Goodman turns on the lights

     Well it is the theater after all. So it was only fitting that before we finally saw the play that was three days from debuting at the Goodman Theatre when the city shut down in March, 2020, creative director Bob Falls conducted a bit of dramatic business under the marquee Monday night, welcoming the audience back and turning on the lights that had been dim for a year and a half.
     "After 17 months of darkness, it is such a. thrill to be here, to be relighting the lights of the theater and getting actors back on stage," Falls said. 

      Is it ever. The play, "School Girls; Or, The African Mean Girls Play," by Jocelyn Bioh, directed by Lili-Anne Brown, has a deceptively simple premise: a half dozen students at the Aburi Girls’ Secondary School prepare for a pageant that will point one toward the Miss Ghana contest and, perhaps, greater fame on the world stage. 

      I'm sure the Sun-Times will be reviewing it, so won't try to do so here, other than to observe that Ciera Dawn is exceptional as the queen bee mean girl, Paulina, the other standout being Lanise Antoine Shelley as the preening Miss Ghana, 1966, come to judge the girls, or, rather, impose her judgments upon them. The entire cast, though, is strong, with no trace of their performance having been interrupted by a year-and-a-half of global pandemic and disaster.

     I wouldn't call the play a drama, because it's laugh-out-loud funny, but the comedy is cut by real humanity and a stark reminder that the racial psychosis we cope with every day in this country is also felt the world over.
     The audience was masked and social distanced, and reminded before the play began to wear our masks before, during and after the performance.
     "I'm not used to sitting in a theater with a mask," my wife said.
     "I'm not used to sitting in a theater, period," I replied.
      Ninety minutes later, having been completely captivated by the world of this school and the unique personalities of the girls in it, I realized just how good it is to be back at a performance.
     "You can't make up for lost time," one girl says in the play, and another concurs: "The time is lost."
     But you can sure try.

Paulina Sarpong, played by Ciera Dawn (left) wants to be Miss Ghana, the way Eloise Amponsah, played by Lanise Antoine Shelley, was. But will she make it? To find out, you need to see "School Girls; Or, The African Mean Girls Play" by Jocelyn Bioh, directed by Lili-Anne Brown, at Goodman Theatre until August 29, 2021. (Photo by Flint Chaney).

S. Rosen’s bun star of Chicago style hot dog

     If the Chicago-style hot dog were a hit TV show, the title character would, of course, be the star: a Vienna hot dog, made in Chicago.
     Beloved supporting characters would be yellow mustard, Plochman’s please, the brand mixed — ingredients in mustard aren’t cooked, just blended — in nearby Manteno. A pickle spear and neon relish plus, for that healthful touch, tomato wedges and onion bits. Followed, last and least, by the twin oddities of sport pepper and celery salt.
     If you actually like those last two, well, God bless you. I’d rather dress my hot dog with the vendor’s thumb, pickled and dusted in cooties.
     We could talk about those elements all day, and people do. Yet somehow, the endless Chicago-style hot dog conversation never gets to the foundation, the one unsung actor who literally holds the whole show together: the S. Rosen’s poppyseed bun.
     Let’s fix that.
     “We are the bun purveyor in the city of Chicago for well over 95% of all the hot dog stands,” said Mark Marcucci, president of Alpha Baking Co., which owns S. Rosen’s.
     He’s sitting on the second floor of the Lyndale Avenue facility, immediately south of Hermosa Park and three-quarters as big. The building used to house Mary Ann bakery —the logo is still on the floor in the entry — and though there is no sign whatsoever on the street, this is a spot in fast food history.

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Car for sale

 

     I keep reading about how there's a shortage of cars, both new and used, because of supply-chain issues, a certain microchip that is hard to find.
     Frankly, I don't believe it. When I drive around, I pass dealership after dealership jammed with cars. Plus all the car that anybody could ever want is sitting a few doors down from my house, just waiting to be snapped up by some lucky person.
     It's hard to miss this candy apple red 1966 Mustang convertible, which my neighbors, Ray and Terry Garcia, are offering for sale, well, because the time seems right.
     The car has about 99,000 miles, and has been garaged for so long I only learned of its existence a few years ago, when they pulled it out and took it for a spin. I was gob-smacked. How could someone own such a thing and the neighbors not know? But that's the Garcias: they are people of parts, as Shakespeare said, and I'm always finding new aspects to them. They travel and have a wonderful green thumb. Terry zips around the neighborhood on an electric bike. Ray was a Marine and worked for the Post Office and a master gardener and, frankly, if I heard he had been an astronaut and gone to space, well, I'd be surprised, but not really that surprised.
     Honestly, I'll be sad to see the Mustang go. I've enjoyed passing it as I walk Kitty over the last few days. Though I couldn't help but notice that their method of advertising—parking it at the end of their driveway with a sign—is not the most tech savvy in our interconnected world. So I volunteered use of my blog, where hundreds can be expected to notice it. First, because I'm a nice guy. And second, I need to repay them for having the coolest yard on the block, with its gorgeous, perfectly maintained beds of prairie plants and wildflowers, not to overlook their folk art display of found objects any one of which is a delight just to look at, plus all the cup plant seedlings they've passed along to me. It's a debt I can never repay. 
     They aren't asking a fortune—$19,000, which is less than what you'd pay for some anonymous piece of garbage that nobody would look at twice. And unlike most used cars, this can be counted on to keep its value.
    That's it. I would buy it myself, only for the lack of a spare $19,000—okay, that isn't true, but there are taxes and a new bathroom to install and pay for, and, maybe trips to take, so zipping around town in this sharp little baby is out of the question. For me.

     But maybe you made a wiser career choice, and have a more glamorous life, and can pick it up as easy as snapping your fingers. If that is the case, email them at tgarcia45@gmail.com and see what you can work out. But don't hesitate; it won't last long. 

Chicago Notes: Great Lake

     Former Austin bureau chief Caren Jeskey casts her eye upon our inland sea:

     Lake is too small a word for the great body of water east of Chicago. That’s why I’ve started telling friends “I’m down at the ocean” during my regular sojourns to its shore. One friend responds in kind. She recently texted me “heading down to the ocean now,” putting a big smile on my face. It just makes life seem more exciting.
     The other night while at the oceanfront near Foster, a man in a kayak floated a few hundred feet off the beach after the lifeguards left. He was there for an hour or so, and I thought “what a kind soul,” thinking he was acting as the evening lifeguard once the city guards had cleared out for the evening. His presence was reassuring.
     Meanwhile my family and I struck up a conversation with a nice lady and her 7 year old daughter Sara. Sara and my 8 year old nephew Anthony struck up quite the beach friendship and before too long had dug a hole nearly as deep as they were tall. They were very proud and Anthony kept calling out “Peaches!”—my favorite nickname—“Come over here! Look!” with an ear-to-ear grin.
     A perfect summer evening.
     Sara’s mother told us that the man on the kayak is her husband. He was not actually lifeguarding at all— he just likes to float around out there to decompress. Still cool, and I am sure he’d have sprung into action if any of the night swimmers got into trouble. When he came back to shore we swapped stories about “Lake” Michigan.
     As you probably know, the Great Lakes (ok, fine. I guess I’ll have to call them what they are and not what they seem) comprise the largest fresh water body in the world. You also may know that Michigan has tidal waves called seiches (https://isgs.illinois.edu/seiches-sudden-large-waves-lake-michigan-danger) and is regaled with meteotsunamis on a regular basis (https://research.noaa.gov/article/ArtMID/587/ArticleID/2738/NOAA-research-shows-promise-of-forecasting-weather-driven-tsunamis).
     Sara’s father shared stories of people getting caught in whirlpools of water that form in areas of the lake disrupted with concrete docks. He told us that Foster beach is quite safe because the open space creates a climate of calm.
     Nearly 20 years ago I was out on the water with friends and an experienced sailor who docks his boat at Montrose Harbor. We had a lovely day and headed back to shore. Several people got off of the boat, including a friend and her infant son. El Capitán decided we’d head back out for round two, though the weather appeared foreboding. In fact, other sailors who had also headed back cautioned us against going back out. The captain would have none of it for we were hardy sailors.
     With trepidation I joined the group of fifteen or so—most of us landlubbers and the rest the small crew who’d keep us safe. Sure enough, what seemed to be out of the blue, a storm blew in. I have never been on a body of water so choppy. The crew flew into action while my friends and I sat in a circle above deck, holding hands and crouching together. We did not have life jackets on. There was no time. I heard the faithful praying fervently.
     At one point our 39.1 foot craft could not stand up to the waves. The boat was on its side, perpendicular to the water, and while we clutched each other we watched the crew work furiously to right the ship. They succeeded with much effort and what felt to be an eternity. We were able to make it back to land. Needless to say this was one of the most terrifying things I’ve lived through, and since then I have mostly shied away from invitations to sail on private boats in Chicago.
     Lake Michigan is no joke. Nothing to trifle with.
     I was once watching a surfing documentary with my brother John who lives in California and has always been a huge (real) ocean lover. I was surprised and delighted to see brat-eating, beer-drinking South Siders catching huge waves somewhere near the Illinois Indiana border. I can’t quite think of the name of the movie, but will share if and when I do. Dees, dems and dosers with bellies drinking Hamm’s and catching waves is too good to miss. (As a half South-Sider I am allowed to say these things).
      I can’t talk about the lake without talking about my maternal grandparents, Olive and Carl. They met at Oak Street Beach almost 100 years ago. Olive was adorable and young, and I can picture her in my mind’s eye, standing on a concrete post in her swimming costume. Carl must have taken that photo. Carl used to fish off of Navy Pier before it became a fortress, and we’d share fried fish at the little shack at the end of the pier.
     It’s so very good to be home.