A whole new spin on being at death's door.

     "What have we been doing all these years?" my wife asked, incredulously, as we worked our way under the towering limestone bluffs along the Eagle Trail in Peninsula State Park.
     I knew what she meant. She wasn't asking for a point-by-point recapitulation of our 38-year relationship, but wondering how we, who like the outdoors, like nature, like to hike, had nevertheless managed to miss Door County until this week.   
     My fault, surely. First, because most things are. And second, I do recall her mentioning a desire to go to Door County, one that I shrugged off because a) I had worked my first internship in Green Bay Wisconsin, from January to March, 1981, which did not leave me with happy memories of the place b) a few years after that we had gone to the Horicon Marsh in Fon du Lac, which I assumed was the same place, or near enough, but is actually 150 miles away and c) I tend to shrug off most things that aren't staying right where I always am, doing what I'm always doing.       

     Well, we're here now, at last, making up for lost time. We got a $38 annual Wisconsin State Parks pass, which might seem imprudent given it is mid-October, but hit the state parks four days in a row, so came out the better for it. Rain was predicted all week, but it politely retreated into the wings during our hikes, though once starting to sprinkle as we approached the van after a two-hour hike, just to show us what we were missing. I'm not going to write a travelogue — not while we're in the midst. We're staying in Ephraim, a pleasant if touristy spot — like a wee Wisconsin imitation of Bar Harbor, but with plenty of authentic fun, like the fish boil at the Old Post Office. We drove up to Sister Bay yesterday for lunch at the goats-on-the-roof place, Al Johnson's (the goats, alas, had the day off because of the aforementioned rain. Union rules). Excellent coffee, excellent herring, and Swedish pancakes with lingonberries that I assume were excellent. As I don't believe I've ever eaten them before, I don't really have a point of comparison. I finished them all.

      Being me, I started wondering where the "Door" in "Door County" comes from. I assumed it had to be from some person — Frederick Door, an early pioneer perhaps — or because the place is the entryway somewhere. It actually comes, quite spectacularly, from Porte des Morts, "the Door of Death," a name given to a region offshore where Lake Michigan meets the waters of Green Bay that many Native-Americans supposedly lost their lives traversing. I don't want to say it was worth coming just to find that out — it was the hiking, the hanging-out-with-my-wife, and the not-being-at-home-working parts that made it worth coming. But I was glad to learn it nonetheless.

Door County Headlands 

Flashback 2009: "And what's with all this singing?"

"Odd Fellow Complaining" By Thomas Rowlandson (Metropolitan Museum of Art)

      I'm kicking around Door County, enjoying some long overdue R & R. But don't worry, I'm not going to leave you in the lurch. Not when I have chestnuts like this one in the computer banks, perched alertly on the edge of its chair, hands folded in its lap, waiting to be asked to dance. I invited the Lyric Opera to share with me some of their complaint letters from patrons and, mirabile dictu, they did. This column came to mind last week when I was chatting with the folks at the Chicago Symphony Orchestra about possible future stories. 

OPENING SHOT . . . 

     This is the dilemma. You go to the opera, your senses fully open, your ears straining to savor every sublime note, your eyes, eager to take in every aspect of the colorful pageant unfolding in glory before you.
     And yet. There are other things going on, in addition to the sound and action on stage. You're also in a room with 3,300 other people. People who are coughing. People who are shifting in their seats. People who are unwrapping mints, though it sounds like they're unwrapping Christmas presents just as the orchestra hushes and the fawn enters the glade.
     What to do? Here human nature cleaves into two groups. There is the ignore-it crowd—the majority—and there are those who complain.
     Every year, some 140 letters from opera patrons complaining about boorish behavior—or about completely innocent behavior—reach the desk of Jack Zimmerman, the Lyric's manager of subscriber services.
     They complain about perfume. They complain about fellow patrons clearing their throats. They complain about hairdos, and the size of people's heads. They complain of too few intermissions, or too many. They complain about other patrons complaining—one patron, dubbed "The Shush Nazi," had to be told to stop telling others to be quiet, as his outbursts were annoying more patrons than the outbursts he was trying to quell.
     Cell phones are a problem. The Lyric tries to keep distractions to a minimum by instructing people to turn off their phones before a performance. People complain about that, too.
     "Sad to think that grown-up, mature adults would have to be so instructed," wrote an Oak Park patron, complaining about applause before the end of the act. "I find the clapping to be annoying and disruptive."
     No aspect is too small for consideration. A loose screw in a doorknob. A word in the supertitles.
     "I am writing regarding one line of the projected titles for 'La Traviata,' '' a subscriber from Wisconsin wrote last year. "If I remember correctly, when in the last act Germont seeks to console Violetta this year's production translated a line, 'weep, weep and let tears soften your grief.' Am I correct that in the 2003 production, this same passage was supertitled, 'Weep, weep and let tears comfort your grief'? To me, the latter has an almost visceral punch which is lacking in the former. How much more poignant that tears could comfort the very grief which produced them to begin with. . . . Won't you rethink this for the future?"
     That letter was passed on to Frank Rizzo, the person responsible for the Traviata supertitles. In this era of form letters, not only does the Lyric respond specifically to each complaint, usually with a letter from Zimmerman, a novelist and former newspaper columnist, but he then tries to solve the problem.
     Sometimes this requires considerable tact. Phoning a subscriber and bluntly accusing her of wearing too much perfume seemed out of the question, so Zimmerman instead contacted patrons in the general vicinity, informing them of the problem and asking if they had been bothered by it. The offending patron got the hint.
     Opera fans must have some awareness of the tradition of complaint letters, because one cast his praise for the "Ring" cycle in the form of a gripe. "The Wagner works are simply not long enough," he wrote, an opinion perhaps never before expressed in the history of opera. "I really wanted to see the time stop."
     One of my favorite complaint letters to the Lyric was not so much a complaint as a request. A woman in Westfield, Wis., had tickets to an opera she planned to attend with her daughter, but first she needed to raise "an important concern."
     "When my daughter was growing up, we enjoyed some opera on public TV," she wrote. "Often the female singers wore distracting low-cut dresses. These indecent dresses portrayed the women as sex objects and took attention from their voices. I taught my daughter that Catholic-Christian women do not dress immodestly to provoke sexual impulses in men who are not their husbands."
     The woman requested, "if low-cut dresses are part of your usual wardrobe," that the brazen female vocalists be covered up during the performance she and her daughter would attend.
     "I don't want to pay to fill my mind with immodest images. These degrade family life, already severely damaged in our nation."
     There are two salient points that leap out from her letter. First, the daughter in question was 23 years old.
     And second, the opera they were traveling four hours to see was "Don Giovanni," Mozart's bawdy sex comedy that includes murder, beatings, attempted rapes, seductions and a recitation of the hero's 2,000 amorous conquests, all ending with the defiantly unrepentant rake being dragged down to the flames of hell by the vengeful spirit of one of his victims.
     The Lyric's files do not contain further communication from the Wisconsin lady, but her reaction can be imagined.
      —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Jan. 30, 2009

Tag, this is it.

     You find out about new products ... where?
     Well the newspaper, for us fuddy-duddies. Those big tech review round-ups in the Times. A constant stream of ballyhoo on Twitter and Facebook. What else? Billboards, I suppose. Television commercials, for those who watch television.
     Rarely...rare enough that I would remark upon it...do you learn about the latest technology by seeing it hanging on a hook in a store. Then again—and I don't think I'm alone here—COVID pretty much killed off the practice of aimlessly wandering around in stores, looking at stuff. You run in, grab what you need, run out. If that. Holding your breath, if possible. More and more, a brown box shows up on your doorstep.
     But my wife wanted to look at laptops. She wanted to lay her hands on the actual physical objects. And I go where she goes. So while she was poking around the dozens of possibilities at Best Buy, I sorta cruised around.
     Which is where I noticed the AirTag, Apple's gift for the forgetful. It's a small disc you slip into your wallet, or attach to your keys, or some other necessity you expect to lose at some point. The AirTag will then leave an invisible trail of electronic breadcrumbs so you can find it should mere memory fail. My first thought was that it could be used to track people too—just slip it in your pal's backpack—but the things are designed to thwart that, in theory. The discs will also let out a yelp on command. It's really worth glancing at the Apple page explaining it all.
     Not that I bought one. I wanted to. It seems a cool thing. But I couldn't think of what to do with it. Couldn't imagine having much hope of justifying the thirty bucks it costs by ever losing anything. I have a system of anxiety-fueled attentiveness far more advanced than mere Bluetooth technology. I've never lost my wallet in my life—I have a rule, for instance, when paying for something, never to set the wallet down. It's much harder to leave behind if it stays in your hand. That kind of thing.
     Yes, sometimes I'll tear my office apart looking for a certain book I know I have, or had, but can't lay my hands on at this particular moment, when I finally need it. But short of planning ahead and knowing I'll need that specific book and be unable to find it, and planting an AirTag inside the cover, I don't see how Apple can help me. Here persistence and patience—a shame Apple can't sell those for $29.99—usually win the day, eventually. There is a technique my wife taught me that I call, "The Thinking Trick," where you pause from frantically searching and try to recall the thing you are missing and when you last had it. If all else fails, there's strategic retreat—just waiting—the strategy my mother used to neatly summarize as, "You'll find it when you're not looking for it." 

Will Bears move ease suburban shame?

If this cute puppy can call Arlington Heights home, so can the Chicago Bears.

     Last week Ald. Harry Osterman said he wants the city to try to keep the Bears so he won’t have to drive to Arlington Heights to see them play.
     Mr. Alderman, you do know that Metra goes to Arlington Heights, right? Of course you don’t want to drive there to watch the Bears. Who wants to see the Bears? Or drive anywhere? Hop on the train, if you must. It makes life so easy.
     The other day I wanted to go to a reception at the Newberry Library. The event was an hour long, 4 p.m. to 5 p.m. and I paused, considering the “getting there” part. Leave home ... what? ... 2:30 p.m., to be on the safe side. Crawling down the Edens because everybody has to slow down and watch some idiot change a tire. Squeeze onto the Kennedy. Overland to Bughouse Square.
     Three hours of driving, round trip, for an hour’s mingling.
     Or ... I thought. There’s the Skokie Swift to the Red Line. Lets you off two blocks away, on Chicago Avenue. Also 90 minutes each way. But at least I’d be sitting down, reading.
     So that’s what I did. The reception was in the Newberry parking lot, and conversation was as interesting as I had hoped: about the history of handwriting (with the curator of a future exhibit), avant-garde women (with the curator of the current exhibit) and lots about Dante — OK, that was a logorrheic spiel I delivered to the head of adult classes, volunteering myself to give a talk on how the Divine Comedy is funny. I tried to stop, particularly when I noticed her shooting those little “Please somebody save me from this” glances in all directions. But once I get going, it’s hard for me to hit the brakes.

To continue reading, click here.

‘Everything went wrong’ — the Great Chicago Fire at 150

     I volunteered for this one. Working on a book about Chicago history, of course I noticed the 150th anniversary of the Great Chicago Fire was looming, and poked my bosses, months ago. Not something a newspaper wants to forget. My approach was dictated by a single fascinating—to me anyway—fact, the one that begins the story. From there, the structure of passing the narrative from witness to witness presented itself. I knew that my piece would appear after the Tribune had been hammering on the fire for weeks, and hoped to provide something fresh and different. 

     The summer of 1871 was terrible for Mary Todd Lincoln. Her adored younger son, Tad, 18, died in July, a month when no rain fell in Chicago, the city where the slain president’s immediate family moved after leaving the White House in 1865. Mrs. Lincoln, a woman heavily veiled in black who “suffered periods of mild insanity,” lived with her only surviving son, Robert, a lawyer, on South Wabash Avenue. By autumn, she sank even deeper into anguish.
     “As grievous as other bereavements have been, not one great sorrow ever approached the agony of this,” she wrote to a friend on Oct. 4.
     And then the city burned down around her.
     One hundred and fifty years after the Great Chicago Fire, much about the epochal event that recast our city and its people is unfamiliar to current residents. Not one person in a hundred knows Abraham Lincoln’s widow lived here and endured the calamity, while the one thing many believe they do know about the fire, that it was started by Mrs. O’Leary’s cow kicking over a lantern, is a baseless ethnic slur, a scrap of mocking calumny preserved in amber like an insect’s leg, surviving all efforts to dislodge it. Even though universally agreed to be untrue, or at least unsupported by any evidence, the lie endures.
     The most common causes of fires, the Chicago Fire Department had reported the previous March, were not cows or lanterns, but defective chimneys, carelessness with flame, and arson. There had been an average of four fires a day in Chicago the first week of October, started by tossed cigars, mischievous boys and oily rags bursting into flame.
     This was a city heated by coal, lit by gaslight, strewn with hay. The sidewalks and even some fire hydrants were wooden. Blistered by drought, “the dust was almost intolerable, the ground became parched,” wrote Chicago Theological Seminary student William Gallagher. “A furious wind from the southwest had been blowing steadily all day Sunday.”
     Whatever the cause, the fire certainly started in the barn behind the home of Patrick and Catherine O’Leary and their five children at what was then 137 DeKoven Street, on the city’s near Southwest Side. The hardworking O’Learys already had gone to bed. And they didn’t own a cow; they owned five, plus a horse and a calf. A drayman named Daniel Sullivan, out enjoying the evening, saw fire through the cracks between the boards of the O’Leary barn.
     “Fire! Fire! Fire!” he shouted.
     Sullivan went in the barn and untied the cows, thinking they would save themselves. They didn’t. He dragged the calf outside, badly singed.
     Joseph Edgar Chamberlin, a 20-year-old reporter on the Chicago Evening Post, arrived almost immediately, about 9:30 p.m., Sunday, Oct. 8, 1871, to find himself in a part of town he had never visited before.

     “I was at the scene in a few minutes,” he later recalled. “The land was thickly studded with one-story frame dwellings, cow stables, pigsties, corncribs, sheds innumerable; every wretched building within four feet of its neighbor, and everything of wood — not a brick or a stone in the whole area. The fire was under full headway in this combustible mass before the engines arrived, and what could be done?”
     The fire engines — steam pumpers, drawn by teams of brawny horses — were delayed because the alarm was slow being turned in. A pharmacist refused the alarm box key to a resident who’d seen the fire. Mathias Shafer, the night watchman in the Cook County Courthouse tower, saw the orange glow but thought it was light from the gas works. When he did send an alarm, he sent the firemen to an address a mile and a half from the fire.
     Later asked to describe what went wrong, one fireman would reply: “Everything went wrong.”

To continue reading, click here.

Ravenswood Notes: Blessings

 

     There is something decidedly Jewish about Caren Jeskey. I mean that as a compliment. I shouldn't be surprised that she gets that a lot. Her Saturday report:

    Baruch atah adonai eloheinu melech haolam. Funny earworm for an atheistic goy. Although I have almost no idea what those words mean, they have rolled off of my tongue since I was young. Growing up in West Rogers Park meant more menorahs in the picture windows of our Georgian homes in late November and early December, than Christmas trees later in the season. There was also the ranch style home on Birchwood near Sacramento with two picture windows, eight candles in one and a bedecked Fraser fir in the other.
     When my Grandma Marie came to visit us in Rogers Park, I’d drive her to St. Margaret Mary church on Jarvis near Western. If she was lucky, and I was being a good granddaughter, I’d attend a Saturday early evening service with her. More likely than not, though, I’d drop her off at the side door and leave her to kneel and genuflect, and I’d head back to whatever party was happening at my folks’ house down the street.
     There I’d stuff myself with delicious Polish sausages and other delicacies my foodie folks had laid out, and basked in the mutual admiration of family and friends. No piety for us. When it was time to get Grandma from church I was never late. I’d pull up along the side of the church, and she’d come out the side door like clockwork. Dependable, sturdy Marie. What I wouldn’t give to sit next to her at church again, inhaling her Emaurade perfume and hearing her sing the hymns loudly to demonstrate her fervor for the Lord.
     Rogers Park friends enveloped me into their culture growing up. I was the Hebrew school guest when a bestie and I could not pry our middle-school hips off of each other. I was a regular at seders, and hung on every word of the Haggadah even when my Jewish friends rolled their eyes and prayed for it to end. I even liked Gefilte fish, and I’d devour horseradish with wild abandon. These were my people.
     I have been called an “honorary Jew” more times than I can count. I realize that might offend some, so please read the sidebar of the blog. It happened. I’m simply reporting. Jewish families tried to “adopt” me, and told me that they were sure I had “Jewish blood” in me. Therefore, I was to propagate with a good Jewish man. They even had the Jewish husband picked out for me, and were sure we’d have many children. This never offended me. I was flattered.
     I remember once when I was working at the 2nd Street Bar & Grill in Santa Monica California— an Israeli couple at the bar became (albeit drunkenly) obsessed. They were SURE I was one of them (meaning Israeli, and Jewish), and they wanted to get me to Israel so I could see that I belonged there.
     My mother’s father Karol Krasnopolski was born in Budapest Hungary. With a name like that I’m pretty sure he was Polish. So why was he in Hungary? Did his family have to flee Poland for some reason? Were they Jewish? I don’t know, but it feels like a possibility. Just because my paternal grandfather may have been Jewish doesn’t mean I am, according to Jewish lineage rules; however, it might mean that the attraction I have to the Jewish world comes from an intuitive sense of belonging.
     Tonight, on this Friday, I am heading to a Shabbat dinner at a friend’s house. Or at least I thought I was. They invited me for “Shabbat dinner” but then today my friend sent a follow up email. Along with their address and the time I should arrive, they sent: “The only other thing is, I might have oversold the Sabbath. We don't actually do that.” I laughed. Perfect. Good thing.
     I am more than happy to gather around a loaf of challah, light candles, and listen to the incantations of my friends. Baruch atah adonai eloheinu melech haolam. I’ve done it so much I’ve committed it to memory. I love the ritual of it all. It feels so safe, simple, comforting, pure.
     But for tonight I’ll bring my Jewish friends a loaf of challah and some matzo ball soup that they can eat this weekend, and the three of us will break bread and have a grand old time. No one will be more or less holy than the person next to them.

 

Talk about a barnburner of a concert...

Theodore Thomas in 1898
 Alfred Cox photo/Rosenthal Archives of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra Association

     Here’s a joke that Chicago residents told immediately after the Great Fire:
     Question: Why is Theodore Thomas different than Nero? Answer: Because one fiddled away while Rome burned, and the the other roamed away while his fiddles burned.
     Not a thigh-slapper, to be sure. And for the joke to make any sense today, you need to know that Thomas was a famous orchestra conductor. When Thomas played a program of Johann Strauss in New York, critics said he wielded the baton better than the composer himself.
     Tickets going on sale for his October 1871 Chicago performance created a furor. The Tribune predicted the concert would be “one of the most notable events in the history of music in Chicago.”
     It wasn’t. The performance was set for Crosby’s Opera House on Oct. 9, 1871 — 150 years ago Saturday. By curtain time, Crosby’s, and much of the city around it, would be ash and ruin.
     The date of the Great Chicago Fire is remembered as Oct. 8, 1871 because that’s when it began, about 9:30 p.m. in the barn behind Mrs. O’Leary’s home on the near southwest side. But by midnight it was no historic fire; just another blaze on par with a big fire the day before.
     The next day — Monday, Oct. 9 — was when it earned the word “great,” leaping across the river, twice, first ravaging downtown, then jumping to the North Side.

To continue reading, click here.