Sorry, Charlie! Kings aren’t Chicago’s thing

King Charles III

     In 2009, I had to go to London to give a speech, and wondered what else I should do while in town. Tea with the Queen of England sounded fun. So I phoned her press office at Buckingham Palace — nothing ventured, nothing gained! Not that I really expected to sit down with her, serf à la reine, and sip Earl Grey, I explained, in my brazen American way. But maybe she’d be cutting a ribbon somewhere and I could join the crowd.
     “The queen,” the press person explained, “will be at her castle in Balmoral.”
     Just as well....
     However, the press person continued, seizing the opportunity to bring up Prince Charles. He had a project. Something about architecture. I don’t think she wanted me to go over rolls of drawings with him. But he had some royal initiative she dangled before me. No matter, because at the mention of “Charles” my cognitive functions shut off. Sorry, Charlie.
     Charles never counted. Maybe it was the ears. Remarking upon people’s physical attributes has gone out of style, and I would apologize, but I am not expressing my own bias, but merely reporting the world’s. There is something squinty and inbred about the man — his parents were third cousins, remember.
     Charles was awkward and unpleasant, even before he cuckolded the world’s favorite princess and sent her hurtling toward her rendezvous with death on a Paris street (actually, “cuckold” applies only to men; a woman whose husband betrays her is a “ cuckquean” which is not a word even I would spring on you, unexplained, except to observe it was the only kind of queen Diana got the chance to be).

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'Stand up to bullies'

John Hewko, left, CEO of Rotary International, Ivo Daalder, president of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, and Steve Edwards, right.

     The first 89 minutes of the dialogue Monday night about the situation in Ukraine was compelling. Ivo Daalder, president of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, who has just returned from that war-torn country, talking for an hour and a half with John Hewko, CEO of Rotary International, at Rotary's headquarters in Evanston, moderated by former WBEZ host, Steve Edwards.

      The general tone was optimistic, despite 432 days having passed since Russia invaded Ukraine, with no end in sight.

      "Vladimir Putin has already lost the war," Daalder said. "He never had a chance because the Ukrainian people never gave him a chance."

     With a big assist from the United States, both in intelligence and some $40 billion in weaponry. Sometimes we get things right.

      Interesting, but not something I'd rush to share here. Then, with a minute left, Hewko — who I wrote about a year ago — asked the key question. Americans often tune this sort of thing out, particularly as it drags. We get bored. So, he wondered, what's the "elevator pitch" — the brief argument for why we're persisting, why we're continuing to invest our time and money and reputation in this war. Why we need to stick with this.

     Daalder's response is worth sharing:

     "We have a tendency in the United States to listen to the loudest voices, who usually are wrong," he began."But in this case the majority of Americans are right. Why do they believe that? The argument is twofold: one, it's a principle. Understanding that if you start to live in a world in which bullies can get away with bullying, in this case using military force to change borders, and to say 'What's mine is mine and what's yours is mine.' We understand that's not a good world for us to live in. 

     "And then secondly when people decide to stand up to bullies, we should be with those people. People understand that at a very core level. That when missiles are raining down and destroying apartment buildings, that cities are being bombed, that 13 million people out of 40 million are on the move because of a war, we should be with them. We can do that in little ways, by financial support, by providing other humanitarian ways, and Rotary is based on the concept that a lot of little things come out to a very big thing. Or make sure your representative votes the right way in Congress on these issues. At its core, you don't want to live in a world in which  the bullies get their way. You don't want to live in a world where guy just because he has the capacity decides to take what's not his want to live in a world where people stand up against that. You can talk about larger issues, security of Ukraine, security of Europe, but at its core, it's about how we should behave in the world."

    That makes a lot of sense to me. And to most Americans. Something we should be proud of, in an era when Americans could use something to feel good about. We've done the right thing, so far. Now all we have to do is keep on doing it.

Books that pop out at you

     We didn’t have kids, yet. So with plenty of time to burn, my wife and I sat on the sofa and worked through Nick Bantock’s “Griffin & Sabine,” the 1991 illustrated novel whose love story unfolds, quite literally, in a series of postcards and letters.
     I admit that “Griffin & Sabine” has not come to mind much in the third of a century since. Not until recently, when I found myself strolling with the curator of rare books and manuscripts at the Newberry Library, Suzanne Karr Schmidt, through the exhibit she created, “Pop-Up Books through the Ages.”
     With the exception of freakish epistolary adult best-sellers — “Griffin & Sabine” and its sequels sold millions of copies — pop-up books today are considered primarily a niche entertainment for children, where colorful three-dimensional contrivances rear out of pages as they’re opened.
     But the Newberry’s books, some nearly a millennium old — the oldest dates to 1121 — have dials and flaps showing calendars and cosmos, anatomical studies, and a town before and after a landslide. (Though several reveal a discreetly hidden naked lady).
     “The interactiveness of it makes the show fun,” Karr Schmidt said.
     I was surprised, looking at these amazing volumes, how often the technological wonder in my back pocket came to mind. We often sneer at our phones, for good reason. But when you see the lengths scholars and clerics went to in the past, trying to visualize information, it makes you appreciate what we have. We’re living their unattainable dream.
     “A lot of these books do many of the things that a screen does now,” Karr Schmidt said.
     “Pop-Up Books through the Ages” is particularly kid-friendly, with large pages of cut out dolls and offers a souvenir pop-up Newberry Library, created for the exhibit by Chicago illustrator Hannah Batsel and paper engineer Shawn Sheehy.

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Flashback 1988: "Loop's Ranch music bar seeking new homestead"

    Twitter gets a lot of criticism, and rightly so. But one well-placed tweet can send you tumbling back in time. Like this, from my fellow University of Chicago Press author Mark Guarino.

     Suddenly it was the late 1980s and I was on the 6 p.m. to 2 a.m. night shift again. One benefit of working midnights is you'd actually see the paper you wrote. Turn in a story at 8 p.m., and by 1 a.m. the stacks of tomorrow's newspapers containing it appear.

    For this story, if I recall properly, I started the evening at the country and western bar in the heart of the Loop, returned to the paper to write the article. Then, after I got off work, say 2 a.m., Tim Gerber and I cheekily went back to the Bar RR Ranch with a pile of the latest edition, featuring a story about the place. We were well-received.

     Things get hazy from there, because of the press of years, and, ah, other factors. I do remember singing "Tequila Sunrise" on stage. And I seem to recall Tim later climbing halfway up the Dubuffet sculpture before the police arrived and suggested he not do that, though I suppose that could have been a different night. There were also pancakes at the Golden Nugget at dawn, maybe. Anyway, I'm looking forward to reading Mark's book.

     What good is progress if it means a person can't find live country music in the heart of the Loop at 3 a.m., or settle down across from the Daley Center to enjoy a steaming "chili mac tamale ham and cheese bowl"?

Not the Sundowners

     That was the question raised by several hundred people who gathered at the R. R. Ranch, 56 W. Randolph, to soak up ambience and beer at the Loop fixture.
     The Ranch, which originally opened in 1948 on Clark Street, faces eviction from its latest home at the doomed Woods Theater Building sometime this winter.
     "This is fun, this is old-time country," said patron Joel Montgomery, of Chicago. "It's too bad they've got to close."
     "Just what we need, another office building," his friend, Julie Hodson, of Chicago, said about the 40-story structure planned for the site.
     Emotions flowed with the beer Thursday night, which was billed as the "Last Roundup at the Ranch," though the basement bar is expected to be open through the end of January.
     "We love this bar! This is our favorite bar!" said Catherine Champion, of Chicago, who was out with co-workers from Crate & Barrel.
     "It's so much fun, and we love the Sundowners," she said, referring to the rustic trio the Ranch has featured for the last 30 years. "They play whatever we ask them, and we get everybody to dance."
     Barbara Scheid, a co-owner, reminisced about the many famous people who stumbled into the bar.
     "Robert Duvall was here, singing like a crazy person," said Scheid, who also remembered the rock star Sting showing up one night. 

Also not the Sundowners

    

     Scott and Gail Robson of Chicago, who got engaged at the Ranch to the romantic strains of a Patsy Cline song, returned to sit one more time at the heavily graffitied tables and soak up the boisterous atmosphere.
     Chris Harmon, of the Friends of Downtown, circulated petitions asking the owners of the Woods Building to allow the Ranch to stay as long as possible.
     "We're trying to generate public support to keep the bar open while they search for a new location," she said. "The Ranch is a dynamic, different part of downtown life, and we don't want to lose it."
     The Ranch's owners said they are trying to find a new spot for the bar, which was first located on Clark Street north of Madison, then moved to 56 W. Madison and finally to its present location in 1977.
     "We've got a couple of things going, but we haven't been able to finalize them," said Art Brown, another co-owner. "We'd like to stay in the downtown area. The big core of our business is downtown."
     Brown said that despite problems with finding a suitably large location and the skyrocketing rents that have forced many colorful small businesses out of the Loop, the Ranch management was optimistic it would find a new Loop location.
     "We're always one step ahead of the wrecking ball," he said. "In our hearts, we're very confident."

       —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Dec. 30, 1988

Works in progress: Gene Weingarten

     Gene Weingarten is a humorist at heart, and as such is profoundly in touch with the inherent tragedy of life.  As a longtime columnist at the Washington Post, he won two Pulitzer Prizes, one for "The Fiddler in the Subway," where he put world class violinist Joshua Bell into the Washington Metro with his case open for change. What would have been a stunt in the hands of a lesser writer, like me, turned into a profound meditation on beauty, time and how we choose to live our lives. If you haven't read his collection, "The Fiddler in the Subway," you should buy it right now here.  The book contains some of the best-rendered, most heartbreaking, thought-provoking and worthwhile columns ever written. Reading it is awe-inspiring, like looking at the stars at night. I could never come anywhere close, but it made me proud to belong to the same profession, to be part of the same cosmos.       

     Besides being a professional inspiration second only to, perhaps, John McPhee, Gene has lately been a cautionary tale that has steeled me to meet whatever professional doom is hurtling toward me.  At the end of 2021, he tripped over his humor — fall-out from an offhand joke he made about Indian food that ran afoul of our exquisite cultural sensitivities. The Washington Post unceremoniously showed him the gate, a shocking coda that sadly encapsulates our moment in professional journalism.  Though it brought me both sadness and a strange kind of reassurance, almost comfort: if Gene Weingarten could be cashiered over a crack about curry, then I can be burnt at the stake and have no reason to complain nor feel fate had been unusually severe to me. In fact, I will lower my head, accepting my due, thanks to him. If he can take it, so can I.
     Not that Weingarten has surrendered quietly. Not his way. He launched a vibrant substack, "The Gene Pool." I signed up, and hope you do too. I asked him to tell us a little about it, and he honored EGD by agreeing to say a few words. Take it away, Gene:

     On my 21st birthday, when I was just out of college, where I was editor of the newspaper, I began my first day on the job as city hall reporter for a small afternoon daily in Albany, New York. The newsroom was dingy, the manual typewriters ancient and balky. The walls of the city room were faded to a wan yellow-orangish-green color that resembled the interior of one of those 1950s movie hotel rooms with a blinking neon sign outside the window ("Eats"), peopled by unshaven men in ribbed undershirts chain smoking unfiltered cigarettes down to the smallest stub, and looking nervously toward the street. Let's call the color "you'll-never-take-me-alive copper"
     Then the city editor told me what I was going to make: Just $72 a week. My jaw dropped. I was gobsmacked. These idiots were going to actually pay me for something I would have done for free.
     The Earth wheeled fifty times around the sun. I began earning a lot more money with jobs that had a lot more prestige at a succession of larger newspapers, until I arrived at The Washington Post in 1991 and nailed a great gig that gave me international prestige and rewarded me with significant prizes. And then, last year, when I turned 70, they jettisoned me.
     It's not easy getting a new position at 70;. A book proposal went nowhere. But the folks at Substack, a new online site that delivers publishing, payment, analytics, and design infrastructure. Would I be interested in starting a newsletter? It's a grueling endeavor that usually is not terribly lucrative.
     "Yes," I said, immediately. And I did. It's a blog-like thing and reader interactive chat called "The Gene Pool." It's doing pretty well. It has subscribers in 49 states and 72 countries. I am earning about a third of what I did at The Post. People have asked me why I did it. Why not just take a victory lap and retire? Here's why:
     These Substack idiots are going to actually pay me for doing something I'd have done for free.

Backlash over eyeliner just more anti-‘woke’ folly

     Myself, I’m proud to live in the state of Illinois. A hardworking, mind-your-own business kind of place. We wake up, do our various things, whatever they are, whether parking cars or assembling them, without constantly looking over our shoulders, worried about what everybody else is doing.

     Why are we so blessed? A legacy of freedom, I suppose, walking the same soil trod by Abraham Lincoln. Sure, there are dissenters, those downstaters who wish our wise and benevolent Gov. J.B. Pritzker had just allowed them to quietly die of COVID — honestly, sometimes I find myself agreeing with them, before the better angels of my nature object.
     Which brings us to other parts of the country, not as far along the Noble Eightfold Path as Illinois. Places to the south and west that seem a permanent carnival of anxiety over anyone unlike themselves.
     From a distance, it can seem simply nuts. Places like Florida, where they passed a law designed to gag school teachers from discussing sexual orientation, because parents are so good at that. The Walt Disney Co., burned by the backlash to the $250,000 it donated to backers of the bill, cleared its throat, raised an index finger and quietly objected. Setting Gov. Ron DeSantis on a mad, endless vendetta against Disney — using the full power of the state to punish the Magic Kingdom, Florida’s largest employer, which is now suing in federal court, trying to make them stop. You’ve probably read about it.
    The Bud Light tempest is even weirder. Every beer company has an endless amount of promotions and sponsorships. Hundreds — minor league ball teams, stock cars, barn dances, you name it. But let Bud send one custom can to one trans influencer, a certain Dylan Mulvaney, and red states have mounted one of the rare boycotts that actually works — sales of Bud Light are down 17%.

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Flashback 2010: New green looks pretty old-school

  

       With "The Cherry Orchard" marking the end of Bob Falls reign as artistic director at the Goodman Theatre, I've been in a Chekhovian frame of mind. I wrote this recent column on the play, and was looking back at my takes on previous productions, I couldn't help but share this. Though not directed by Falls, how can I not be proud of managing to combine "Uncle Vanya" and the Home and Housewares Show?  

     'There's no such thing as a simple, honest love of nature," Dr. Astrov complains, in the excellent, Russian-language production of Anton Chekhov's "Uncle Vanya" on stage this weekend only at Navy Pier's Chicago Shakespeare Theater.
     Among the modern surprises in the 1899 masterpiece is a dose of environmentalism — no, our era didn't invent it — in the form of Astrov, who plants trees and studies animal population trends, boring the heck out of his companions.
     "The goats are gone?" exclaims Elena, arranging her features into a parody of pained alarm.
     Astrov is right. We've got recycling down pat, but it often seems oddly uncoupled from actual love of the outdoors — of hiking, birding, gardening. It's become a nonsecular ritual, a kind of ecological kosher.
     Not to suggest that "Uncle Vanya" is an ecology pageant — I might just be green-minded, having earlier this week spent hours at the enormous 2010 International Home and Housewares Show at McCormick Place, tagging alongside my pal, Lise Schleicher of BasketWorks.
     Commerce, like life, pulls us in opposite directions, as illustrated by two objects tucked into the big bag of swag I gathered at the show.
     One is a piece of "Comboware," a cornflower blue plastic plate with a knife and fork molded out of the same blue plastic, attached to either side. Thus, standing at a buffet, you need not dedicate a hand to holding plastic utensils, but can access them with a quick twist.
     The other item is a small hunter green cloth napkin from Litter Free Lunch, a company set up by a pair of Naperville moms, Megan Wojtyla and Felice Farran, whose children attend Prairie Elementary in that famously family-friendly town.
    "I couldn't find cloth napkins that were the right size for a lunch box," explained Farran. "I wanted to have a zero-waste lunch."
     Don't we all?
     The Comboware is designed to be thrown away — whoops, recycled. The LFL napkin is to be used again and again, as we conserve our way toward the New Jerusalem.
     The napkin — literally green — is in perfect harmony with the zeitgeist of this year's show, a festival of the eco-friendly and earth-aware, the recyclable and recycled, the reusable and renewable. There were dozens of brands of high-tech lunch sacks, countless types of stainless steel water bottles.
     Companies like Back to Basics, CynerGreen, Green Smart, Greenair, Fertile Earth, Reduce, Preserve, all performed the rather neat mental gymnastic of using conservation as a prod to encourage more consumption.
     (If you disagree with my hunch that much environmental friendliness is corporate hype, I want you to rinse out an old soda bottle and use THAT to tote your water for a week — it works fine — then get back to me)
     Contemplating the LFL cloth napkin raised a question: How is the used napkin to be returned home for laundering?
     Our Environmental Eden will involve a lot of washing, apparently, with much toting of soiled napkins.
     In addition to cloth napkins, Litter Free Lunch also sells fold-over cloth bags for sandwiches, which means that the young environmentalist would also bring home a bag that had held a sloppy tuna fish sandwich for mom (or dad) to wash.
     It's as if homemakers, having spent 50 years freeing themselves from the drudgery of scrubbing lunch boxes, are now working their way back. Next, we'll be replacing energy-hungry washing machines with corrugated metal washboards and galvanized steel tubs, all in the name of a need Chekhov grasped: the hunger to give life significance.
     "I know those moms," my wife said dryly, and at first I thought she meant actual familiarity with the Naperville pair, and then realized she meant weary knowledge of those who combat the soul-sucking demands of parenthood and the anodyne suburban grind by grasping at the pueblo lifestyle, building chicken coops in the back of their Land Rovers and cooking blue corn tortillas on a hot stone outside their million-dollar homes.
     "When you don't have a life, you dream," writes Chekhov. "It's better than nothing."
     Or is that cynical? My favorite object in the show was a bright orange Spaceboy XL, a rocket-shaped garbage can with a chrome push front made by the German firm Wesco, which has a flair bordering on genius for naming its trash cans — the Kickfox and the Wasteman, the Big Push and the Ashmaster.
     Not coincidentally, rocketship-shaped garbage cans reflect the hot trend of my youth, when we were all going to live on the moon someday in giant domes, and so products with vague connections to the space program — Tang, Space Food Sticks — sold despite the drawback of tasting awful.
     We reflect the eras that formed us, and the question is whether this zeal for environmentalism is another atom-burst wall clock — a passing consumer gimmick — or indeed is the flowering of a new eco-friendly age that has been building for 40 years.
     Maybe someday you wouldn't dream of using a toothbrush that ISN'T made from old yogurt cups, like the Preserve, which comes in its own "easy to Recycle postage-paid mailer" so you can send your used toothbrush back to Waltham, Mass., to begin its life anew.
     The uppercase, boldface "RECYCLE" is theirs. And now, I guess, ours too.
     It's a seductive dream.
     "If in a thousand years, men are happy," Dr. Astrov says, defending his odd tree-planting behavior, "it will be in part because of me."

     — Originally published in the Sun-Times, March 19, 2010