The Matching Game.

    Are parlor games even a thing anymore? They can't be, because parlors — formal rooms reserved for entertaining — have pretty much vanished, turned into living rooms where we slump in front of the flatscreen (I originally typed "slump in front of the television" but "television" suddenly felt wrong, like calling a refrigerator an "icebox.")
    Is entertaining still a practice? Occasionally we invite people over, after realizing we haven't seen them in years. And even more occasionally we are invited over. But work isn't the only realm where we've retreated indoors to play Wordle. 

     Or maybe that's just me. Maybe you are partying with your pals like Holly Golightly. I don't want to forget Thoreau's essential dictum about never mistaking a private ailment for an infected atmosphere.
     Perhaps I should define my terms. I think of parlor games as the silly challenges hosts impose upon their guests at cocktail parties. (Cocktail parties! I remember those. Thirty years ago we had cocktail parties and invited our many friends. I'm sure young people still have them. At least I hope they still do. Cocktail parties were fun).
     Now we have family gatherings — lots of them. For Jewish holidays — Rosh Hashanah is coming up. Passover in the spring. Beer and brats at Hanukkah. And secular holidays. Fourth of July. Or  the Sunday before last, a joint Labor Day/Oldest Son in Town barbecue. Not a lot of people — 15 friends and relatives; we might have had 10 more, but several families were out of town.  We grilled hot dogs, chicken and salmon burgers.
    My sister-in-law and her eldest daughter had been shopping at the Skokie International Market on Lincoln Avenue, and were struck by the array of unusually flavored chips. Wanting a pretext to try them without saddling themselves with lots of bags of chips they could never eat, they  concocted a game: guess the flavor, dubbing it "The Matching Game."
     She prepared eight paper bowls, numbered one through eight. Then gave us sheets headlined "Matching Game: Identify the flavor of chips in each bowl!!" 

Game sheet

     

     Down the left side, numbers 1 through 8. Then a list of the flavors: Mexican Chicken & Tomato; Peach Beer; Beef Wellington; Steak Kebab; Roasted Cumin Lamb; Numb & Spicy Hot Pot and Roasted Fish.
     At the bottom, more instructions: "Draw a line to connect the bowl number to the flavor you think it is! " And then a final reassurance, given the number of vegetarians and vegans at any family event: "Note: these are artificially flavored .. none contain actual meat or fish!" (More exclamation points than I would use, being miserly in that department. But a key to games is to impart enthusiasm, so exclamatory zeal can be forgiven).
    We sat around the coffee table, passed the bowls, one at a time — this seemed important, for encouraging discussion. Much better than just having the guests have at the bowls in a random rush.  Fun was had,
    The most notable thing about the results were how indistinct most of the flavors proved to be. Only one really stood out and was universally declared — the really repulsive Peach Beer. I kept score, in my reportorial role. Some flavors completely stumped the dozen players — nobody identified Kebab correctly.  The most flavors anyone guessed correctly were three — the winners my wife and our 8-year-old grandniece. One player was disqualified for amending his answers as the flavors were revealed. The process took, oh, 20 minutes. It was fun.
     In retrospect, if you want to add spice (sorry) to the game, you can ask players to speculate what cultures enjoy which particular flavors. "Peach Beer" struck me as Middle Eastern, simply because I encountered a bottle of Mood Peach Malt Beverage in a taco place a few years back, and it hailed from Jordan.

    Wrong. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. While peach beer is a common beverage — I found this article on 26 popular American peach beers, Lays Wavy White Peach Beer Chips are imported from China.  I suppose we're going to have to get used to it.

Katy lied.

  

                   Katy lies
                   You could see it in her eyes
                   But imagine my surprise
                  When I saw you
                                 —Walter Becker/Donald Fagan

     Amazing how a word can slumber at the back of your brain for years, for decades, only to leap up, ready for duty, when the moment calls for it.
    "A katydid!" I cried, spying the gorgeous specimen atop my storm door when I returned from taking Kitty on her nighttime stroll a week ago Sunday, perching prettily atop the five coats of marine spar varnish.

     A round-headed katydid, I think. One of the 14 species of amblycorypha. 
     Not very well camouflaged in this context. Taking a risk to closely inspect my work. Nor am I 100 percent sure it's a katydid — it could be a false-leaf grasshopper — the decisive head is a bit tucked down. Though now that I look at it, it does seem a little grasshoppery.
     Either way, you have to admire the way the camouflage leaf on its back includes the veins of the leaf — details are important in any deception. An art form all their own. Vladimir Nabokov, a devoted butterfly lover, savored this sort of thing. "The mysteries of mimicry had a special attraction to me," he wrote. "Its phenomenon showed an artistic perfection usually associated with man-wrought things. . . When a butterfly had to look like a leaf, not only were all the details of a leaf beautifully rendered but markings mimicking grub-bored holes were generously thrown in." Details no predator would ever notice, Nabokov cooed.

      The next morning, I spied a monarch flitting about a milkweed — they lay their eggs in milkweed. I couldn't get a good photo, I'm afraid, as the beastie was instantly on the wing. 

     But it does lead to an interesting question: two insects, both trying to survive, one by hiding, the other by advertising itself boldly. What's the difference? The katydid would make a tasty snack, while the monarch is poisonous, like the milkweeds it feeds upon as a caterpillar. So the bright orange and black coloration is a big lepidopteral "fuck you!" to potential predators. "Go ahead, eat me. It's your funeral."

     Which has to be encouraging to us toxic, out-in-the-open sorts. Leave hiding in the shadows to others, the timid leaf munchers. Fear nothing; our poison protects us.

      When I opened the screen door, the katydid oafishly moved to the lip of the door frame, where closing the door would crush it. Good thing its ancestors cooked up that leaf disguise, over countless millennia, and willed it to their progeny, because they're not very bright, the trademark curse of heirs and legacies everywhere. Kind soul that I am, despite my venom, I shooed it away and let it live to hide for another day.

Flashback 2005: "Fancy lamps"

     The assignment was to write about a Chicago factory. Any factory. I remember flipping open the business-to-business Yellow Pages — it was that long ago — and settling on a small company that made dental tools. Because who writes about that? It could be me. But the owner or, rather, his brother, didn't want to talk to the media. So I settled on Cooper Lamp, because I drove by their factory on the Kennedy. And, by the time I was done, found myself comparing it to the Ford factory on Torrence Avenue. It's a long piece, but I'm away for a while, so I thought I'd share it with you to pass the time.     

     From the street, the factory housing the Frederick Cooper Lamp Company is not as ugly as most. The building was originally a ladies undergarment plant, built around 1900; it has a courtyard and windows, luxuries that would later be dispensed with in most factories. The four-storey brick building, with a square tower double that height, is a reminder that a factory was once the centrepiece of a neighbourhood, second only to the local church. The tower, like a steeple, catches the eye; it advertises the product with a sign informing the 260,000 cars that pass every day along the Kennedy Expressway leading out of Chicago that Cooper produces lamps of elegance.
     ‘Elegance’ can be taken as an euphemism for ‘costliness’ and Cooper lamps are indeed expensive. The lamps are made of brass and copper, maple and marble, bronze and china, silverplate and gold leaf. No one has any idea how many different styles they make and the number keeps changing. The cheapest costs $200, and from there prices soar into the thousands for crystal chandeliers.
     None of the luxury of Cooper’s product extends to the factory itself. The entrance is through a single flight of narrow stairs leading to a small, not particularly clean, reception area. This was last decorated, from the look of it, in the early 1970s: pea green carpeting, and fake wood-panelled walls. A few well-tended plants, a carved eagle and some handmade sparkly butterflies on the bulletin board save the room from dreariness.
     The public face of Cooper Lamp is more attractive: Suzanne Lauren, an energetic woman whose dangly bracelets bear an uncanny resemblance to decorative elements of certain Cooper lamps. She has worked at Cooper for twenty-three years and is now the vice president of design. She is accompanied by her dog, Cooper, a German shepherd that has the run of the front office, a room as cluttered as the reception area is bare. One wall is given over to manila folders; the desks are piled high with catalogues and promotional materials; lamps in various stages of assembly crouch in the corner as if they have wandered off the factory floor.
     A lamp is divided into four parts. First is the shade—a screen of paper or cloth that softens the harshness of a bare bulb. Second is the electrical socket that receives the light bulb. Third, holding the socket aloft, is the base which is often decorative. Anything can be used for a lamp base—bowling balls, football helmets, toy trains—but given Cooper’s high-end market, the bases tend to be brass urns, china vases as well as an eclectic range of objects that seem designed to appeal to wealthy widows: brass elephants, bronze bulldogs, Chinese horses, verdigris dancing frogs, copper Nepalese horns, metal palm trees. Floor lamps tend to be more uniform because of their larger size, their bases simple brass poles or turned wooden posts.
     Under the base is the part that most non-lamp people never consider: the mounting. This is a little circle of wood or stone or, in less expensive lamps, plastic, that acts as a buffer between base and table top. The mounting is like a pedestal for a statue. Without it, a lamp looks unfinished, like an urn with a lampshade on top.
     In practice a lamp has many more pieces than just these four main components; each part consists of many more parts. A mounting might be three circles of wood, each a bit smaller than the one below. A base might be an urn that is assembled out of a dozen various rings and handles and curving sections. An electrical socket includes a cord threaded through a metal channel and a plug and a harp (the loop of brass that holds the shade). A shade can be a complex confection of cloth, metal, cardboard, or even a decorative fringe consisting of one hundred inch-long threads, each one holding a colourful glass bead.
     This multitude of parts—wooden feet, stone discs, copper tubes, glass beads, porcelain dogs, brass finials, tin pineapples—dictates the set-up of the 240,000 square foot Cooper factory. Most of the plant is given over to rows of shelves and bins and tables to hold the thousands of dusty parts. The pieces are stored where they are made since the Cooper plant consists of a series of shops. This makes the factory unusual in this age. The typical modern factory either makes something—forging steel rods, moulding rubber tires, dipping chrome plating; or it assembles something—putting together bicycles. But Cooper does both, out of necessity.
     ‘All the small businesses in the Chicago area stopped—wood carving, plating, metal forming and casting,’ says Frederick Gershanov, who owns Cooper Lamp with his older brother Peter. ‘So all those operations we took into our company.’

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You be the ethicist

"La table surréaliste" by Alberto Giacometti (Pompidou Center)

    
     I'm fortunate to work in a business where ethics are important. I'd have a hard time keeping my job otherwise. Yes, newspapers try to make money, like everybody else. But most have parameters. We have our limits. Notwithstanding what the GOP imagines, we don't just make up what we think will get the most clicks. Our stories reflect matters that can be verified or disproven. Looking at Fox News, I can understand that having values might be a handicap. As porn stars and scam artists know, immorality sells.

     That said, ethical problems can still be vexing. I had one in April that bears recalling. I wrote a story looking back at Chicago history — how the paper covered disasters over 75 years — and sent a photographer to take a portrait of a person quoted in the story. Sometimes I'd show up for one of these sessions, to hang around and mother hen. But this time I didn't, mainly because the story was already done and too long as it was.
     The photo got taken. The next day the photographer called, and said, in essence: there was something troubling about that photo shoot. We took it in the subject's basement, and the man had a Nazi flag hanging on the wall.
     Did you ask him why it was there? I wondered. Maybe it was a souvenir. Maybe his uncle took the flag from Berchtesgaden when he was with Patton's 3rd Army.
     No, she said. She didn't ask. She was by herself. She didn't feel comfortable raising the question. I can't say I blamed her.
     To me, there were two immediate priorities. First, we needed to decide if the Nazi flag meant we shouldn't use the quotes and/or the photo. And second, I had to make sure this photographer's concerns were given full consideration. That she felt seen.
     "What do you think we should do?" I asked. She said she didn't know, except that we should be aware of it. I told her I'd discuss this with my editor and get back to her.
    I was tempted to call the source back and ask, "What's with the Nazi flag?" Either it was a relic, displayed from a lack of sensitivity — though you could debate whether you need to be sensitive with displays in your own home. Maybe we were wrong to notice or care. 
     Or it could be a display of personal conviction. But if that were the case, could you really expect an honest answer? "I'm glad you asked that, Neil, I put the flag up because I think Hitler is a great guy." I didn't make the call. Shutting up is an art form.

     And should a source be barred from adding to a story because of loathsome, unrelated views? That seemed the famous cancellation we hear about.
     The editor circled back to the photographer and I did too. Are you okay? I'm sorry my assignment put you in this awkward position. We used the quotes and the photo. I didn't see why we shouldn't.
     Through an amazing coincidence, a week later another story caused me to phone the same source. While he was on the line, I asked about the flag. He said it was the size of a dish towel — the photographer had made it seem full size —  and framed with a front page announcing the end of the war. A historical display. That was a relief.
     This sort of issue is rare, but does come up from time to time. I just had a magazine editor flag a quote from a subject I spoke to at an awareness march. Did I realize that ten years ago he had been dismissed from a teaching job for exchanging inappropriate emails with a student? No, I did not. It's right there in Mr. Google. The editor cut his remarks out of the story and suggested that, were I on the ball, they never would have been in the story in the first place.
     At first I pushed back. Is this how we do things now? The main subject of the story could have cheated on her taxes in 1997. I didn't try to find out. I almost said, "You know who's writing this, yes? I come with baggage of my own." But rather I said, No, if I'm confident a person is who they purport to be, I don't deep dive into their personal background.
     But times change, and we change with them. I admitted that Google-searching every proper name in the story and checking for dirt seems like "sound practice." And it might be, if it leads to finding out that the people you're quoting in some benign context are in fact bad people.
     But it's more likely, in my estimation, to create ludicrous situations: "'I think chocolate ice cream tastes good,' said Todd Blandersnoot, who was charged with shoplifting in South Dakota in 2005." 

     What do you think?

You be the historian.

  
     Social media bombards us with information, from the true to the misleading,  the skewed to the dead wrong. The focus is on political deceptions, and rightly so. But that is only the beginning.
     To be fair, the most vetted of history books contain mistakes. My most recent book, "Every Goddamn Day," published by the rigorous University of Chicago Press, nevertheless has a typo — a dropped "t" — which is unfortunate, though perhaps inevitable in a nearly-500 page book.
     The story I always tell is of Paul Johnson's "A History of the American People," a majestic survey of our national story, written by an esteemed historian, published by HarperCollins.
     One fact that really stood out for me was on page 355, when Johnson is talking about the national bank under Andrew Jackson. "The fact that Senators Clay and Calhoun put together a committee to inspect the vaults and reported them full did not convince the President, coming from such a source. (He thereby inaugurated an American tradition which continues to this day: every year, the Daughters of the American Revolution send a committee of ladies to visit the vaults of Fort Knox, to ensure that America's gold is still in them.)
    "They do?!" I thought, immediately wanting nothing more than to accompany them. I could see it plain as day. The elevator deep into the sunless secure vaults. The ladies, with their big handbags, delicately peering between the bars at the piles of dense gold bricks. A call was placed to the DAR offices. "We've been getting inquiries about this," a nice woman said, or words to that effect. "We just published our history, and found no information about that."
     "Oh the old biddies are lying to me!" thought I, reaching out to the U.S. Army news affairs at Fort Knox, who said, in essence: "No American citizen has laid eyes on that gold since 1942."
     Ah. Simply wrong. An error. No wonder the book was so interesting. Johnson was making it up. (Unfair, I know. But it only takes a little spit to spoil the soup).
     Look at the photo above. Why, at a glance, is it obvious that whatever the picture is of, it is NOT from the 1893 World's Fair? We'll let the comments explain why.

Chicago voices #2: Howard Tullman on Jimmy Buffett

Howard Tullman

     I'm proud to have readers from across the spectrum — foaming MAGA maniacs and Sen. Dick Durbin,  the uneducated and the overeducated, some who have never been to Chicago and others who never leave.

     Today I'm sharing the thoughts of one of my most distinctive and voluminous correspondents, Howard Tullman, a hugely successful Chicago businessman, the guy behind the 1871 high tech incubator at the Merchandise Mart. I wrote about him six years ago when he sold part of his huge collection of contemporary art. 

     Tullman was one of the many, many readers who reacted to my critique of the somewhat tone deaf New York Times' obituary of Jimmy Buffett — the post led Charlie Meyerson's Chicago Public Square on Tuesday. I thought Howard's observations worth sharing, and hope that you do too:

     Everyone who ever worked with Jimmy Buffett, and I did, will tell you the same thing about him. Which is that they took far more away from the experience — however fleeting it may have been — than simply a love for the guy and his music. He was every bit as successful an entrepreneur as he was an entertainer, and he brought the same focus, passion, and enthusiasm to whatever he did.
     The insiders' joke was that he was about the least laid back "laid back" guy you were ever gonna meet. Whether it was music, his Margaritaville-themed businesses, charity, or politics, it was the same story — if he was in, he was in 110% and he did everything with a vengeance. Jimmy was direct, down-to-earth and deliberate in his dealings with you whether you were a peasant or a prince, although he never paid attention to those kinds of distinctions. And that openness, attitude, and approach never changed over the more than 30 years that I knew him.
     So, it's a little surprising to hear from so many people that they had no real idea that he was such a substantial businessman in addition to being a great writer and musician. I'm reluctant to add "philosopher" to the encomium because he always hated it when anyone used such "high-falutin'" terms to describe him. He was thoughtful and certainly took a great deal of pride in his craft and worked his butt off to make that happen.
     But he was also amazingly modest and always said that he was just one of the guys who got far luckier than he ever expected or deserved. And, he'd usually add that the luckiest thing in his life was his family. I know he usually meant his immediate family, but there were plenty of others in his various circles who felt that familial bond as well and knew that — if the need ever arose — he'd be there for you.
     There are dozens of lines in the lyrics that mean a great deal to millions of listeners as they applied his folksy and touching wisdom to their own lives, but very few that related to business as opposed to his mostly imagined aquatic, romantic and intoxicated lifestyle. However, if there's an entrepreneur alive whose long, lonely nights and life on the road who can't relate to Come Monday, I'd like to meet him.
     In any case, here are the three most important things that Jimmy shared with me over several projects and many years:

(1) Your work is what you do, not who you are.

     It's difficult for any new business builder to separate himself from the business — the best entrepreneurs never leave much of anything at the office at day's end — and taking things personally and to heart is critical to their eventual success. The ones who care the most win. But maintaining a healthy distance between what you do and your own identity and self-worth is crucial to your mental health.
     And when you're a celebrity, and a walking lifestyle, like Jimmy was, it's even harder sometimes to remember to separate your public "persona" from the work and the audience's response. No one's "happy-go-lucky" all the time — it's not part of the human condition. Performers face a far more immediate and regular test of their efforts every time they cut a record, perform, write something, or offer new material to the world because the world — especially these days - is a picky and nasty place. When he faced criticism, complaints, and even outright rejection or disappointment, Jimmy always took a step back and said that he could only do his best and that, as long as he did that, he could live with whatever came after. Success is fleeting, but excellence is forever. His work was a wonderful part of his life, but making a living was only a part of making a life worth living.

(2) Take your work seriously, but not yourself.

     It's easy as an entrepreneur to convince yourself that the weight of the world is on your shoulders, that everyone inside and outside of the company is depending on you, and that the work you're doing is the most pressing and important work around. And it's sadly too short a step for too many people to translate that actual and awesome responsibility into the belief that your shit doesn't stink. An entrepreneur needs plenty of self-confidence, but that power and passion needs to be tempered from time to time with some self-awareness as well.
     Jimmy could always laugh at himself. He'd sometimes catch himself pressing a little too hard, lecturing out loud, or even pontificating and — full stop — he'd just shut up and shake his head and say: "Where'd I go wrong?" or "Who is this guy anyway?" He knew he could get caught up in the work and in the moment and he would never compromise the take or the music or the project. But he'd often take himself to task, take a short break and a mental reset, and then come back - a little sheepishly – and hit things twice as hard.
     He knew that, from time to time, the person most likely to get in the way of moving things forward was Jimmy Buffett and he always kept an eye out for times when he thought he was getting too full of himself or ahead of the game.

(3) Never expect to get what you give — not everyone's heart's as big as yours.

     I'm not sure that Jimmy ever got enough credit for his charitable work — not just the music appearances at all the big-deal group events over the years — but the gestures and the sleeves-rolled-up time he devoted quietly to a number of causes, people, and charities that were personally near and dear to his heart. But — not surprisingly — not everyone else in these ventures lived up to their end of the bargain, delivered on their promises, or even showed up when they said they would. What was completely amazing to me was how he never let these disappointments get him down, interfere with what he needed to do, or even break his belief that most of the people out there were solid citizens, well-intentioned, generous, and willing to help others in need. It would have been so easy to get angry, to hold a grudge, or to say, along with the Who, "we won't get fooled again" and walk away. But he never did. He didn't measure, he didn't compete, he didn't lose his faith, and he never stopped giving back. He did everything he could, never expected anything in return, and never tried to impose his contributions and commitments on others.
     There's never a best way to say goodbye or to close a piece like this, but I'm sure that Jimmy wouldn't mind if I take a line from Now and Forever which Carole King wrote in 1992: "We had a moment that will last, beyond a dream, beyond a lifetime." We'll be together, now and forever.

My team

My team.

     "Great research from you and your team," began a reader's email, referring to my column "Don't be like Texas' Murph."

    Which brought a smile ... a weary, knowing smile. 

     "My team," I said aloud, admiring the phrase like a Christmas tree ornament. For a moment they flashed before me, my team: the freshly-scrubbed, efficient assistant. "Here are those clips you asked for, boss!" The bookish researcher, hurrying up from the stacks. "Look at this, chief!" My legman, Scoop, simmering with the same ambition I had as a young man, unfurling his long legs, resting his heels against the window ledge at the end of a long day, while we share a convivial beverage and brainstorm about my next column. 
     Sigh. I've never risen, if that is the proper term, to the sort of columnist who had assistants or legmen, staffers who could make calls and get coffee and lend an air of significance to the operation. No Stella Foster for me. Which, I hasten to add, is why I'm still here. Legmen went along with big salaries and personal contracts, which eventually end. Allowing, thanks to the seismic changes in the industry and culture, the big salaried columnist and his fat contract and his legman to be shown the gate by always parsimonious bosses.  Jeff Zaslow was a fabulous, hard-working advice columnist with a secretary and a contract, and the last time it came up for renewal his bosses realized they could syndicate a spunky Canadian lady for a few hundred bucks a week. 

     I've always been a standard union drudge, protected by the standard union contract, albeit with a few extra incentives added when I seemed set to stray off reservation. Which isn't flashy, but better for racking up the years and miles; a 1952 Ford pick-up v. a Ferrari.  My low status is my lance, my obscurity, my shield.

     "Thanks." I wrote back. "'My team'? 😁 Oh, I know who you mean."

     I attached the above photo.

     Though both immigration columns had another helping hand. Someone who doesn't get nearly  enough credit and should be mentioned: my wife. She looked up from the paper, noting an article about a scarcity of bus drivers, and said we should just train the immigrants to drive buses, send their children to the emptied out Chicago public schools and house them in the abandoned offices downtown. None of which ended up in either column. But was the nudge that set the whole train of thought rolling down the track. 

     Or as I said recently to a neighbor who accused me of being smart:

     "I'm not smart. I'm just married to a smart woman." 

     She's all the team I need.