The 20 percent

 

     I've been eating at Chicago restaurants hand over fist since 1975, since I slid my considerable teenage keister into a booth at the Blackhawk and watched them spin their famous—supposedly, at the time, if you could trust their word—spinning salad.
     Having eaten at thousands of restaurants since, little throws me. Yes, my wife and I were taken aback with the trend of tiny pieces of food lost on enormous plates in the 1990s—I remember going straight from dinner at Cafe Spiaggia on Michigan Avenue to Dunkin' Donuts on Rush Street to eat something. I never approved of the show-off-slabs-of-raw-meat tradition at steakhouses like Gibson's. Kinda gross. And some of those intentionally wise-cracking waitress places could set my teeth on edge. I remember trying to get through a meal at Ed Debevic's without saying, "Why don't you shut up and bring our food?" But I'm not the intended customer, my kids were, and they liked it plenty.

     Usually, it was nothing that couldn't be solved by never going back. When the Berghoff pretended to close in 2006, so it could fire its union waitstaff, then promptly re-opened as a sort of imitation of itself, I grieved for all the thuringer and rye that would never be eaten there, then moved on with my life. It was as if the place burned down, and for me it had, emotionally. In these cases, at least there was clarity. But I was just confused at Big Jones, 5347 N. Clark, Saturday. My wife and I were meeting a young judicial clerk of our acquaintance and his girlfriend for brunch. All was happiness; I've never been more primed to enjoy a meal. And I did, beginning to almost end. Okay, the coffee was a bit metallic. But it came in these gorgeous English cups. The beignets were thick with powdered sugar, the biscuits satisfactory. I avoided the heavier, sauce-laden fare and went for an omelet with a butter lettuce salad, which almost felt like austerity. The wait person was attentive and didn't rush us.
     Then the bill came. I grabbed it, as my role demands. About $70. Plus the 10 percent tax. Plus another 20 percent "Service charge." Which was what I would have left anyway. I'd never seen that before.
     "This is unusual," I commented to the table as I reached for my wallet. "Usually they add the gratuity only if it's a party of six or more...."
     At that moment the waitress swept in with well-practiced timing and explained that this was COVID related. The 20 percent was to cover the various plague-related challenges, and the blank tip space—which I had already drawn a line through—was for her. There was a note of entreaty in her voice. My wife suggested that perhaps they'd want to fold the COVID costs into the menu prices, and she said something about management change. So I broke a twenty—I've recently returned to the arcane practice of carrying cash—and left $15 for her.
     Walking out I felt ... well, ripped off. Slightly. Like I had been forced to leave $30 in tips on a $70 tab. More than 42 percent. I'm all for supporting restaurants, but the psychology of this is way off.
     Doing subsequent research, I see this that added COVID charges in restaurants has been an issue for well over a year. The surcharges range from 3 percent to a whopping 26 percent, which one restaurant promptly retracted when diners howled. At the very least, they should put a placard on the table, or a big red label on the menu, something to prep the diner for what is coming. I'm all for supporting restaurants during this time of crisis, but at least let us know what's coming.
     And clean your coffee pots.

    Editor's note: through a mutual friend, big jones owner  Paul Fehribach observes that the charge is also noted on the menu and web site. That is true, I later discovered after searching for it. But the menu also says the charge is "in lieu of tip," which makes me feel worse, not better. 

Remember COVID toll on Day of the Dead

Photo by Caren Jeskey 

 
     On Día de los Muertos, the Day of the Dead, the barrier between the world of the living and the world of those who have left it is thought to be thinner than usual. On the holiday, which begins Monday, we who still savor the frequent joys of life, for the moment, can reach across the chasm to embrace our deceased loved ones, at least in memory.      
     Originated in Mexico, a blend of Spanish and Aztec cultures, at first in the United States it was glimpsed as a kind of exotic after-echo of Halloween, the way we vaguely notice that Boxing Day follows Christmas in England, without worrying about details.
     But as the influence of Hispanic culture in the United States grows, despite furious attempts to thwart it, the holiday is being more generally felt. This year the city set up an ofrenda, an altar to the dead, in the middle of the lobby at City Hall, complete with food offerings, photos of the departed and friendly calaveras, or skulls, that represent the holiday the way decorated eggs embody Easter.
     If Halloween is a ritualistic thumbing of society’s nose at death, transforming morbidity into a happy occasion for children to dress as monsters and collect candy, the Day of the Dead is a more family-oriented plunge into all that is good in life — food, drink, music, flowers, color, companionship — and the warm presence of those we loved, undiluted by the unfortunate detail that they are no longer here. Families visit graves, create shrines, throw parties.
     Two reasons why this is a bigger deal this year. First, the ever growing Hispanic presence — in the 2020 Census, Chicago’s growing Latino population nosed ahead of its shrinking Black population for the first time. Chicago is now 31.4% white, 29.9% Latino, 28.7% Black and 6.9% Asian, according to the latest census.
     Not that political power has followed. Chicago still has 18 black majority wards and only 13 Latino wards. Though that is about to change, after the requisite political free-for-all.
     The second reason Day of the Dead is more important this year: the million plus people, 743,000 in the United States and 288,000 in Mexico, who died of COVID-19 over the past 22 months.

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City Hall ofrenda

Flashback 1997: Reality is scarier than City Hall's decorations

City Hall, 2021

     I was hot-footing across the Loop to meet a pal for lunch Thursday and couldn't resist ducking into City Hall to check out their Halloween decorations. Most prominent was this ofrenda, or Day of the Dead shrine, complete with photographs of fallen Chicagoans and food offerings to their spirits. Nearly a quarter of a century ago, I also took note of the City Hall Halloween trappings, producing a snarky, young, rather Rex Huppke-ish column..

     When somebody told me that City Hall is decorated for Halloween, I had to stroll on over and take a look.
     It is a surprising sight, particularly if you enter from the north, through the Randolph Street door. You walk down the corridor to the central lobby and are presented with a choice.
     To the left, the unadorned elevator banks for the County Building. The only decoration: a sign touting Cook County Disability Awareness Month.
     To the right, City Hall and Halloween.
     Not only decorated, but decorated a lot. Pumpkins. Witch flags. They've built an arbor of sorts, with pots of flowers and a tiny field of cornstalks and a big grinning jack-o'-lantern.
     The reason: Mayor Daley is a big fan of Halloween.
     I noted the scarecrows and smiled, telling myself, "Of course, they'd only go so far as Halloween Lite. None of the heavy stuff; no bloody corpses, no terrifying ghouls. Not from the city. They wouldn't want to offend people."
     I was thinking how surprising it is even to see a big cardboard cut-out of Tweety Bird saying, "Twick or Tweet"—hasn't some assistant corporation counsel with a speech impediment complained by now? Then I saw them.
     The skeletons.
     Two big, life-size, scary rubber ones, sprawled on benches.
     I also noticed the ghosts—three little ghosts, with round mouths shrieking "Boo," wearing pointy black witch hats, trailing white sheets in tatters.
     Skeletons and ghosts at City Hall. Either somebody's got a wonderfully wry sense of humor or they're all dumber than even I had imagined.
     The ghosts are what really surprised me, given that ghost payrolling has been honed to an art form right on the premises.
     That federal probe into aldermanic corruption—what did they call it? Oh yes: "Operation Haunted Hall."
     Now that's an idea for next year. Why offer such a generic tribute to Halloween when we could take advantage of our city's rich heritage to put on a far scarier display?
     Next year, City Hall could present a big rubber Fred Busse, the mayor 90 years ago, clutching his famous safe deposit box full of stocks from a company that did business with the city.
     From the ceiling, flying aldermen, pinky rings aflame, fists stuffed with play money.
     And why settle for boring scarecrows when you could have a mechanical Ald. Tom Keane? He was to Richard J. Daley what Patrick Huels is to his son: close political ally and all-round big money boy. A recording could play Keane's crowing "Daley wanted power, and I wanted to make money, and we both succeeded." There's a boast that hasn't lost any currency despite the passage of decades.
     Keane was convicted on 18 counts of federal mail fraud and conspiracy, by the way. After a Sun-Times series exposed it all. Ooh. Eerie how some things never change.
     Come to think of it, why settle for sham rubber figures when we can have the real thing? Why not get Jesse Evans transferred over? Make his cell part of the Halloween display. He can lunge through the bars at passersby, maybe shouting, "Food! Food!" in honor of the ridiculous and shameful hunger strike he held to protest the workings of the criminal justice system. That would scare the kiddies plenty.
     In fact, lots of former aldermen, who are still around, could be hired at a fraction of their former city salaries to impersonate themselves in the City Hall Chamber of Past Ghosts.
     Why not set Louis Farina pacing back and forth in front of the elevator banks, dragging money boxes at the ends of chains wrapped around his body, a la Jacob Marley.
     Or Wallace Davis. The last time I saw him he was working in his catfish restaurant. He could make an appearance as a cautionary tale to all those power brokers in their Brioni suits and Hermes ties. "Be careful," he could say, "or you'll end up wearing polyester and snaps to work."
     Sure, it would shame them a bit, but didn't they shame us? Doesn't our city struggle to present itself to the world as a modern and progressive place, the home of Michael Jordan and Wrigley's Spearmint Gum? How many bad aldermen will it take before peasant children in China greet tourists visiting from Chicago by rubbing their thumb and forefinger together and saying, "Ooo, Che-ca-go! Gimme gimme gimme."
     Halloween is, if nothing else, a flexible holiday that changes to reflect the times. In past years the kids dressed as Power Rangers and ballerinas. This year maybe they'll be paparazzi and Marv Albert. Maybe next year you'll have 8-year-olds in imitation silk suits yelling "Trick or treat!" They'll make cuff links out of stray pairs of dice and put dime store rings on their pinkies.
     Going door-to-door, they'll collect their candy in shoeboxes and brown paper bags. Just like the big boys do.
        —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Oct. 26, 1997

Santa Monica Notes: The Little Engine that Couldn’t

     I worked in Los Angeles for three months when I was in my 20s and never even saw a movie star, never mind hung out with one. But then, Caren Jeskey is living a far more interesting life than I am. Her Saturday report:

     Summer 1995. A handsome young man walked into our regular little coffee shop on Wilshire Boulevard in Santa Monica. He was overdressed in the rumply elegant way of a rich person wearing fine fibers, juxtaposed by our cut-off jean shorts. My friend and roommate Jayne and I spent hours at that shop. We’d play backgammon addictively, smoke Marlboro lights, and drink coffee for hours on end on our days off. 

     With a warm smile and bright, beaming eyes, the tanned, brown haired stranger asked if he could join us. “Of course,” we said. Why not? The three of us sat around an oval table drinking coffee and tea, and he got a scone. He and Jayne talked The Birthright Israel and Kibbutzim.      

     He leaned back in the sturdy wooden chair a few times, and rested the back of his head on clasped palms in a pleased way. I was not privy to the thoughts in his head, but can imagine them now. “This is nice. They don’t know who I am. I can just be another guy today.” 

     After a while he looked at the time and said “I have to get going. My wife was getting her hair cut next door and she’s probably done by now.” We said our goodbyes. When he left the owner looked at us, laughing. “That was Alec Baldwin.” 

     My first thought was “Kim Basinger is next door.” I just loved it. I’d always rather liked Alec, especially in "Glengarry Glen Ross." During my time in Lalaland I managed to meet Al Pacino, Robert DeNiro, Sinead O’Connor, and now a Baldwin brother. 

     This must have been shortly before Alec assaulted a photographer a few days after Kim gave birth that October. It was 12 years before he called his 11 year old daughter a “little pig” and threatened to “straighten [her] ass out” with a strangely cool tone. It was 16 years before he was removed from an airplane at LAX when he became belligerent after being told to stop playing Words With Friends on his phone. 

     I had not listened to the aforementioned message, nor did I know much if anything about his list of aggressive outbursts, until this week. Halyna Hutchins’ death hit me really hard, as I am sure it hit a lot of you. I actively followed the story this week, compelled to learn more. I sobbed at the horror of it all. Ms. Hutchins should not be dead. As I learned more about the chaos on the set, it got even sadder. Someone should have pulled the plug before this fatal disaster. 

     In 2008 I read a long profile Why Me? about the now infamous Baldwin in The New Yorker. I remembered thinking, at the time, “this poor guy. What a mess.” My heart went out to him back then. 

     I revisited the piece this week and could not stomach reading much of it this time around. The writer describes Alec as full of regrets and “very conscious of what’s lacking in his life.” It’s revealed that his brother William says, for Alec, “there’s always something to whine about.” 

     In the piece, Alec imagines himself as successful at Leo DiCaprio and declares ““I wish I were a horse—strong, free, my chestnut haunches glistening in the sun.” 

     He also dreams of versions of himself as a restaurant critic, the owner of an inn, and a radio DJ. Anyone but himself. With multiple awards and a great deal of financial and career success, he was still discontent. He pondered what it could be like to live a simple life rather than trying so hard to steer himself to an imagined better place. 

     There are multiple instances of Alec using aggressive language and glorifying violence. When he biked the wrong way down a New York street and got stopped by the police in 2014 he Tweeted “New York City is a mismanaged carnival of stupidity that is desperate for revenue and anxious to criminalize behavior once thought benign.” Um, just don’t bike the wrong way man. 

     He suggested beating the shit out of a drunk driver “for a couple of hours" as a just punishment. He claims that he is “not afraid of anybody. I don’t have a drop of fear in my whole body. Never. Never.” Clearly I’m not buying it. It seems that his whole life is based of a fear of not being seen. How ironic. 

     A chilling Tweet he published in 2017 is circulating on the web: “I wonder how it must feel to wrongfully kill someone.” I just wish Alec had grown up sooner, admitted his part in things that have gone wrong in his life, gotten help to learn to manage his anger, and perhaps gained some humility. If he had stopped chasing his elusive version of fame sooner, the world would be a happier place today.

Art history never seemed so important before

     Some columnists hobbyhorse an issue, hitting it again and again and again. Me, I try to be a one-and-done kind of guy. Why? Because if I bump into Jesus Christ delivering the Sermon on the Mount in Grant Park, and decide to stretch that into a two-parter, with a third column for reader reaction, by that last day, I promise, you’ll be thinking, “What, again with Jesus?”
     But the Art Institute firing its white docents en masse deserves a second visit. It both speaks of our uneasy racial moment, and has the makings of being one of those evergreen PR disasters still talked about 25 years later, the way when I pass bottles of Perrier in a supermarket I shiver and think, “benzene.”
     The Perrier benzene contamination was in 1990. Maybe it’s me. But people generally have long memories for anything negative.
     The good news is that disasters do eventually fade. This isn’t the Art Institute’s first public blunder, you know. Who remembers that the museum once carelessly stashed three Cezanne paintings in a janitor supply closet? From where they were stolen, the theft going undetected because Art Institute procedures were so lax. That wasn’t sunk into the distant heroic past. It was 1978.
     And nobody at all remembers that students from the School of the Art Institute once gathered at the museum to hold a mock trial of an artist, whom they condemned for “artistic murder, pictorial arson, artistic rapine, total degeneracy of color,” among other crimes. They burned reproductions of his paintings and would have burned the artist too, in effigy, had the police not stepped in.
     The artist was Henri Matisse.
     All right, that was in 1913, and the School of the Art Institute was and is a separate place from the Art Institute. (The school is much older; the museum began as a gallery for student works.) But nuance doesn’t enter into these scandals. I personally think the museum acted in a defendable manner when birthing this fiasco. Every step a rational one, in the desired direction, right off the cliff.

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Flashback 2008: "Grandiose and Biedermeier and tragically defunct."

      I called my old friends at Atlas Stationers on Lake Street Wednesday to order my 2022 Brownline Daily Planner. Which led me to this, and I thought I'd share it with you. First, for the word jazz over office supplies. And second, well, I gotta say, I'm proud to have once called the National Weather Service to ask if the clouds are lovelier of late. It's from when the column ran nearly a thousand words and filled the page, so some patience might be required. I've left in the original headings.

OPENING SHOT ...

     JetBlue charging $7 for a pillow and a blanket reminds me of a business tip I've meant to give to struggling upscale restaurants for a while now. Two words:
     The napkin.
     Hear me out. Restaurants already plump their bottom line by gulling diners into splurging on luxury water instead of plain old tap. Like there's a difference. Why then should patrons settle for boring white linen napkins, when they could chose from a "Napkin Menu" offering rough silk, antique lace or fine Egyptian cotton? Think of the publicity value—far outstripping the $100 Kobi beef hamburgers that clever chefs have long used to gain a headline or two. If napkins are too over-the-top, think about the revenue stream possibilities of salt. Why sprinkle your $90 Tempura of Spot Prawn with Braised Kombu with the same sodium chloride the Morton Salt Girl has been flinging around for a century when you could savor imported hand-pestled French sea salt for an extra $9 and get to keep the little crystal shaker as a souvenir? I'm surprised nobody has thought of it before.

A CLOUDY DAY CAN BE A GOOD THING

     It is a mantra of mine that the world does not change; rather, we change, and then blame the world. Life does not start as an exciting, dynamic, possibility-laden enterprise—coincidentally when we are young —and then suddenly shift, deteriorating into a grim, dull, unappealing, entropic mess about the time we grow old.
     Thus I viewed with suspicion—at first—my growing conviction over the past few months that the clouds are lovelier and more numerous than usual this summer. I dismissed it as a trick of memory, a passion, an amour fou, the symptom of some overwrought emotional state.

Maxfield Parrish clouds

     And yet. Day after day, I'd look up, and stop. Enormous Maxfield Parrish billows piled up in a corner of the sky, churning, lit pink and yellow and gold by the setting sun. Sheets of wispy stratus clouds, whirls, fantastic displays that lacked only cherubs with harps.
     I placed a call. Are the clouds lovelier this year?
    "I noticed that," said Frank Wachowski, a National Weather Service meteorologist who has been closely watching the Chicago weather for the past 62 years -- since he was eight. "In the afternoons, lots of build-ups."
     More than usual?
     "We really don't keep records on clouds," he continued. "But there's been a lot of cumulus clouds, a lot of thunderstorms. Some tops of thunderheads go as high as 70,000 feet. In the last 60 days or so, lots of what we call cabbage-type clouds: cumulus-nimbus, and with the jet stream, lots of cirrus clouds—the middle-type, 12,000 to 15,000 feet. I'd say the last two months have been exceptionally different than most summers."
     Well, that's a relief.

PENCIL JOTTINGS

     "I have known the inexorable sadness of pencils," wrote poet Theodore Roethke. "Neat in their boxes, dolor of pad and paper-weight. All the misery of manilla folders and mucilage."
     I don't know about that. Myself, I've known the joy of pencils—tumbling out of the box with a clatter, fresh recruits, interchangeable soldiers in their identical orangish-yellow uniforms, eager to serve.
     But then, I'm a sucker for office supplies. This autumn—as every autumn—I'll feel a pang at not being able to go to Woolworth's to stock up on protractors and rulers, pencils and scissors, tape and ring binders.  
     Pencils have an aesthetic beauty and an technical purity—engineering historian Henry Petroski wrote an intriguing book about their development, The Pencil. There is a reason Claes Oldenburg made paper clips and wheel erasers into giant sculptures—they're pure forms, and beautiful, or else throwbacks to an earlier time. What is more nostalgic than a rubber stamp? Novelist Nicholson Baker referred to the "black, weighted Duesenberg" of an old tape dispenser as "grandiose and Biedermeier and tragically defunct." Mmmm....  
     Perhaps it can't be explained—you either get it or you don't. I'm looking at a round metal can of Premium Best-Test White Rubber Paper Cement. It sits, red and white, on my roll-top desk—too beautiful to hide in a drawer, a delight to unscrew its round metal cap with "BRUSH IN CAN" embossed upon it, to remove the aforementioned black brush, enrobed in a viscous cocoon of milky glue, dripping slowly, languid as honey.
     And while I patronize the Office Depots and OfficeMaxs that crowd the suburban moonscape, there is a special place in my heart for Atlas Stationers, in the Loop, in a small iron-columned storefront right under the L at 227 W. Lake Street. Business sends me there every week or two, to purchase copy paper or grab a bubble envelope ("Cushioned/Self-Sealing" it announces, traits we all can aspire to) or gaze longingly at the green-covered ledger books and blue-lined accounting books and wonder who in God's name still uses them.
     You worry about a place like Atlas Stationers. They've been there since 1939, but how much longer can they survive? How much longer can they peddle Chisel Point Staples and Dixon Ticonderoga pencils, competing against the bargain behemoths? In that struggle, Atlas is holding its 21st annual sidewalk sale today. "Discounts UP to 90%" cries the flier they tucked into the bag with my four Uniball Gel Impact RT pens, two black, two blue. "Bigger and Better Than Ever! Come Often! Selection Changes!"
     That sounds exciting, doesn't it?
            —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Aug. 15, 2008

Filling the void left by absent fathers

Alberto Garcia (left) helps boys think about what it means to be a man. They were gathered at the Union League Boys & Girls Clubs’ Barreto Club in Humboldt Park. The conversation sometimes involves his numerous tattoos. “I have a lot of friends on my body,” he says.

     “What’s a real man?”
     Alberto Garcia writes that question and two others on a whiteboard in a social room on the second floor of the Union League Boys & Girls Clubs’ Barreto Club in Humboldt Park. Facing him are a dozen boys — eight 8 to 11 years old; the other four are teenage mentors.
     “I want you guys to think really deep,” says Garcia, 27. “Three questions. No. 1, male stereotypes. No. 2 is, ‘What is a real man?’ Then a mural idea. If you had a blank wall, or could put up anything. That breakout session starts now.”
     They divide into two tables to discuss the topic. At one, Shacole, 13, and takes the lead. He quizzes each younger boy in turn.
     “What is your definition of a man?” he asks the kid next to him.
     “Somebody who pays the rent,” answers Malachi, 11. “Who has a good living and a job. Takes care of himself.”
     They bump fists. Shacole turns to the next boy.
     “What is your definition of a man?”
     “Working hard,” says Tawan, 11. “Helping others.”
     “What is your definition of a man, Avian?”
     “Someone who cares, first of all, about yourself,” says the boy, also 11. “Respect everyone. Caring. Not just a man’s job to make all the money.”
     Shacole adds his own perspective.
     “Caring, self-respect,” he says, ticking qualities off on his fingers. “They don’t beat on people. It’s not the man’s job to make ALL the money.”

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