Flashback 1987: Wrap session — pros prep pretty parcels

     Christmas is almost upon us. And I imagine more than one reader still has presents left to wrap. Luckily, I have just the thing to help — this 36-year-old chestnut from back when I worked at the Adviser, a section of the paper that did exactly that: advise readers on how to do stuff. It breaks the heart, a little, to consider the newspaper once had a special section, with a staff of three, devoted to dispensing practical information. A quick search of the internet could find the same information now.

     Or maybe not. Reading this over, I'm struck by the tone — a certain insouciance that gives the story a certain flair, even if you, like me, don't have any gifts to wrap, nor Christmas to celebrate. 

    There are a few aspects of historical interest — Carson Pirie Scott is long gone: it's a Target now. And I'd never dare mention the Uncle Remus "Tar Baby" character in any context.

     In an ideal world, you would never have to wrap a gift. Your gifts would be wrapped at stores, by professionals who know what they are doing. You would watch.
     But in the same way that you occasionally are called on to change a tire, the day will come when you will be forced to wrap presents.
     Perhaps the line at the gift-wrap center will be intolerably long. Perhaps you are giving so many gifts that the $2 to $6 most stores charge to wrap gifts will start to add up. Perhaps you got the gift at a place that doesn't gift wrap.
     For whatever reason, you find yourself face to face with a present (or, worse, several presents, or, far worse, several presents of odd sizes). You can't just thrust it, unwrapped, into the recipient's hands, though that idea might seem preferable to trying to learn how to wrap.
     An unwrapped present is almost worse than no present at all; no matter what care and time you put in to buy a present, without any wrapping, the gift screams: "I bought it on my way over."
     Actually, gift wrapping need not be an ordeal, if you know what you are doing. Before you spend the money on gift wrap, tape, ribbons and the like, only to get yourself all tangled up like Brer Rabbit and Tar Baby, spend some time looking over the shoulder of an expert, such as Carrie Bobo, who has been wrapping presents at Carson Pirie Scott & Co. for 17 years.
     First, you need the right equipment. Bobo uses a large, heavy tape dispenser so she can tear off pieces with one hand. Odds are you don't have one, so plan to use a small roll of tape that requires two hands.
     The problem is that you have to take your hands away from the gift you're working on, making it that much harder to wrap neatly. You end up trying to do things with bits of tape stuck to your fingers. So a dispenser may be worth the investment: After all, Christmas comes every year, not to mention all the birthdays and anniversaries in between.
     Bobo begins by placing several sheets of white tissue paper in a box. Since the paper is longer than the box, she makes an "S" fold in the center, drawing in the ends until they are the right length, then creasing the fold down. (Tip No. 1: It is always neater and quicker to fold something instead of cutting it. You also can redo a fold if it is too short, but if you cut it too short, you have to start over.)
     Amateur wrappers often overlook the tissue, in the mistaken notion that only department stores have access to it. But tissue is available almost everywhere wrapping paper is sold.
    "The tissue is very important," Bobo said, putting a leather jacket into the box and folding the tissue over it. "It keeps the merchandise so it will be nice when it's unpacked."
     After securing the tissue with a Carson's sticker (you can use tape or a sticker of your own), she begins the actual wrapping of the gift.
     Before doing anything, Bobo taps the four corners of the box with the handle of her scissors, to blunt the edges and keep the box from ripping through the paper.
     Cutting a piece of wrapping paper so that it will just overlap when wrapped around the box, Bobo then places the paper on the table, design side down. (Tip No. 2: If you want to save money on gift wrap, use materials around the house. The Sunday color comics can be used for children's presents, and the stock tables pages for a gift to a stockbroker.)
     Then she puts the box, top down, in the center of the paper. She takes the end of the paper closest to her and folds it up and over and tapes it down, so the seam is just in the center of the bottom of the box (which, remember, is facing up). It's a common mistake not to do this, out of a reluctance to affix tape to the box. A key to wrapping a gift is tightness: A loosely wrapped gift looks sloppy.
     Pulling hard, Bobo draws the other end around and, because it is too long, folds the end under until there is just a little overlap. Then she tapes that end down as well, keeping it taut and using small squares of tape. (Tip No. 3: Small pieces of tape work as well as long strips, which tend to fold over on themselves and ruin the job. You want the gift wrap to stay put, not be watertight.)
     Now she has the left and right ends to take care of. Using both hands, she folds the two sides on the left of the box in, creasing to create a top and bottom flap. The top flap gets folded down and taped. Then the bottom flap goes up and is taped as well. (Tip No. 4: If you want a more professional look, use double-sided tape, which can be tucked under the flaps, out of sight. But be forewarned: Double-sided tape is trickier than regular tape). Bobo repeats the process on the right side: tw o sides in, top flap down, bottom flap up.
     Here you might cheat a bit and slap on one of those pre-formed bows and be done with it. Bobo doesn't, because pre-formed bows tend to get crushed. She uses a cloth ribbon instead. She makes a loop around the width of the box, staples it (tape won't hold cloth ribbon very well), then adds a loop around the length of the box, and staples it.
     Where the two lengths of ribbon cross, where the staples are, she makes a bow by cutting two short lengths of ribbon, folding them over, and stapling them in place. Then she cuts a tiny ring of ribbon, staples it around the center of the bow, and rotates the ribbon to hide its staple and the others as well.
     As a final touch, Bobo snips the loose ends of the bow into points. (Tip No. 5: For added pizzazz, curl the ribbon. Holding it taught against a scissors blade, draw the ribbon across the scissors blade.)
      You can make simpler bows. For a snowball bow, you need to curl about 8 yards of ribbon, then gather the curls into a ball shape and tie them in the center with a separate piece of ribbon. Then attach it to the gift.
     Making a tie bow also is quite simple: Just take a piece of ribbon, tinsel or yarn, loop it back and forth several times, tie it in the center with a shorter piece, tug the loops into shape, and attach to the gift.
     Finally, before slipping the finished gift into a shopping bag, Bobo makes a small ring out of a strip of cardboard and tucks the ribbon inside to keep it from being crushed. (The ring, of course, is removed once the gift has arrived at its destination.)
   If you are wrapping a cylinder shape, like a liquor gift box or an oatmeal box (within which, it is assumed, you are hiding a more desirable gift than oatmeal), there are two ways to go about it: the difficult way, and the not-so-difficult way.
     To wrap a cylinder the difficult way, trace two circles on the paper, using the bottom of the box as a guide. Cut them out. Then wrap the cylinder in paper, taking care to leave a bit overhanging on top and bottom, and tape this paper in place. Take a scissors and make small snips in the paper sticking out from the top and bottom, and tape these tabs down. Then tape the cut-out circles to the top and bottom to hide the tabs. Slap a ribbon on top, and voila!
     The not-so-difficult way leaves the gift looking something like a Tootsie Roll. Wrap the cylinder in paper that is about twice as long as the package, with half a length projecting past either end. Gather the excess together and tie it with ribbon or yarn, then cut the leftovers into strips, which can be curled or left straight.
     The key to wrapping odd-shaped gifts is to put them in boxes. The whole point of gift wrap is to create a moment of suspense, a thrill of expectation, before the happy recipient claws through the paper with a giddy "what is this?" look on her face.
     Some countries take this to extremes. In the Netherlands, for instance, there is a tradition known as julklapp, where gifts are wrapped in layer upon layer of elaborately prepared wrapping, designed to hide the nature of the gift. Thus, a piece of jewelry might be wrapped up in paper normally used for candy, then wrapped in brown paper, layers of cloth and, perhaps, baked in a casing of dough and then wrapped in a few more boxes.
     For ultimate convenience, new gift bags are the perfect solution. The bags resemble small shopping bags and are gaily decorated. Pop the gift in, toss in some crumpled tissue paper, and: instant present. It may not have the wallop of a Dutch julklapp, but if the present inside is nice enough, no one will mind.
                       —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Dec. 13, 1987

Ed Burke’s unwelcome birthday present

Graphic by Harebrained, used with permission.

     Edward M. Burke turns 80 in a week. In an alternate universe, his half-century-plus on the Chicago City Council would be celebrated in the days leading up to Dec. 29. Instead, he could be going to prison.
     Before Burke was an alderman of the 14th Ward, he was a policeman, as was his father, Joe, before him — well, a Cook County sheriff’s policeman (and an alderman). Close enough. And though Burke was on the council for 54 years, the longest anyone has served on that body and a safe bet to be the longest anyone will ever serve, the swagger of an untouchable Chicago cop always clung to Burke. It was baked into his skin, his soul.
     Only he was touchable, as Thursday afternoon’s verdict showed. Heck, not merely touched, but beat down. Thirteen of 14 counts — bribery, extortion, racketeering.
     On one hand, the verdict was no surprise — based on the evidence presented in court, collected in recorded conversations with former Ald. Danny Solis, once of the 25th Ward, Burke sounded guilty, like a man who wanted to make sure that a Burger King franchisee used his law firm for its tax work in return for Burke’s not blocking the permit for a new driveway.
     On the other, it was pitiful. Not just to see the lion of the council humiliated — there was some satisfying payback in that, at least to anyone who ever encountered the Burke arrogance firsthand, so tangible it was almost a physical Chicago landmark, like the Bean. But the triviality of it, the pettiness, the way the Field Museum, having refused some kind of intern post to Burke’s goddaughter, scrambled to appease him somehow.
     In a nation where the inflamed ego of longtime politicians is driving us into the ditch on all fronts, it’s revolting to see it on a local level, a Chicago institution groveling before a man who feels his slightest requests should be acted upon, even without ever having to be made.

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Rocky mountain high

     The steady drumbeat of bad news — war in Gaza, fascism on the march abroad, "democracy hanging by a thread" at home — missed a beat Tuesday evening, as the good news radiated out from Colorado: the state supreme court had ruled that Donald Trump cannot be on the ballot there, since he was an insurrectionist in open rebellion against the United States government since Jan. 6, 2021, rendering him unfit to hold office according to the 14th amendment to the United States Constitution.

      A very satisfying, "The emperor has not clothes!" moment. For those of us dwelling in the reality-based world, anyway.
      Hope flickered. Maybe the legal system, abused and insulted, ravaged and humiliated — I almost said "beaten," though not quite yet — will surprise us by standing up, straightening her garments and telling Trump to get the fuck off her.

     That's premature. The United States Supreme Court is still packed with Trump's hand-picked toadies, and respecting the rule of law versus servicing their guy is probably too much to expect. Clarence Thomas is wholly corrupt — bought and paid for by right wing donors, not to forget his wife is practically a Jan. 6 insurrectionist. The chance of them upholding the Colorado decision is somewhere between zero and none.

    Still. Colorado reminds us that as bad as it is, the game is not over. As terrifying as the general support of Trump is — though not in any way mysterious. The duped are invested in the scam. Get your head around it — there are cards to play. As my son said when I asked him, in 2016, why he wasn't as frantic as I was and am, he said, coolly, "The institutions are strong."

     Not quite as strong now as they were before seven years of the most mind-blowing carnival of idiocy, venality and cowardice imaginable — actually beyond imagination. I would not have thought it possible. Just last month, Trump brought up, unprompted, accusations that he had been urinated on by prostitutes at an encounter at the Moscow Ritz Carlton in 2013. "I'm not into golden showers" the former and likely future president confided to his audience, who cheered. There were zero repercussions. A story you probably missed because it was immediately lost in the continuing shitshow of jaw-dropping wrong that is Donald Trump and Red State America. Even when things do linger, like his comment that he would be a dictator "on day one," few felt the need to observe that this wasn't really new, coming from the man who wanted the Constitution to be suspended so he could be declared president by fiat.

     I did have a thought I would share with Republicans if it were worth bothering to share ideas with them: Aren't you tired of this? God I am. As much as I shudder at thinking of America becoming a Hungary-style dictatorship, I'm just so weary of the house-of-mirrors blather, the constantly lying, exaggeration, whining. Colorado, with its crisp mountain air, provided us a gust of that most bracing, invigorating and hard-to-find-lately scent: hope.

‘Art can take you to a particular place’

Claes Oldenburg "Ghost Version II" (Art Institute of Chicago)

     “Contemporary art, unlike modernism, is not a style,” said Giampaolo Bianconi, associate curator of modern and contemporary art at the Art Institute of Chicago, as we passed a Claes Oldenburg light switch sculpture. “It simply means things that are happening right now, in the present.”
     We were in an empty gallery on a recent Tuesday. The Art Institute is closed to the public on Tuesdays — thank you COVID! — but I was there on a singular mission: to better understand contemporary art.
     I’d gone to the museum with my wife, younger son and his fiancee. We naturally headed straight to the Impressionists — the museum practically funnels visitors there, through the entrance doors, up the stairs, toward Georges Seurat’s “A Sunday on La Grande Jatte.”
     Only the young lady announced she didn’t care for this pointillist nonsense. And off the happy couple went, headed for the Dutch masters. My wife and I were left behind, blinking.
     We met up later in the modern wing, for drumbeat denunciations of the what-kind-of-garbage-is-this? variety. I mustered the best defense I could, then realized reinforcements were needed.
     Bianconi and I paused to admire Alma Thomas’ abstract “Starry Night and the Astronauts.”
     “The artists we’re looking at here have asked themselves in a sense the same question your future daughter-in-law was asking ... ” said Bianconi.

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Remembering Frank Babbitt at Christmas

     Frank Babbitt approached me, maybe 15 years ago, after we stepped off a Metra Milwaukee District North line train that had just disgorged its passengers at Northbrook station, and were waiting in the crowd for the gate to go up. He said he enjoyed my column and, as usual in such circumstances, I said thank you and changed the subject to himself. Who was he and what did he do? He told me he was a violist for the Lyric Opera.
      This was a double thrill. First, I was a regular attendee, and took 100 readers every year to a night at the opera. And second, my older son played the viola. I asked Frank if he gave lessons. He said he did. Later, I asked Ross if he wanted private viola lessons. He did.

     Thus began my casual acquaintance with Frank Babbitt, a talented musician and deeply cultured man. He lived on Glendale Avenue, maybe a mile from my house, and I enjoyed dropping Ross off for lessons. 

    I also enjoyed picking him up, standing in the entryway for a minute or two, listening to the rich tones of the viola and Frank's thoughtful instructions, eyeing his shelves of sheet music, his piano, and various mementos from his travels with his wife, Cornelia, herself a musician who plays the cello, their instruments cast about in attitudes of readiness. They had three boys of their own, slightly older than mine, who would be coming and going.   My younger boy also briefly took voice lessons with Frank, who was a powerful singer.  He came over to our house once for a poetry reading party — we asked guests to bring a poem to recite — and his rendition put the rest of us to shame, an eagle among sparrows.

     Knowing Frank made going to the opera even more of an occasion. At intermission my wife and I would make our way to the front row, and wave to Frank in pit — he'd be there, immensely handsome in his tux, and if he noticed us he'd wave back. Sometimes we'd catch the train home together and talk about the performance.

     Some years, during the holidays, he performed a one man show, based on the 1868 reading script that Charles Dickens used for public presentations of "A Christmas Carol," accompanying himself on the viola. We saw him do it twice, first in 2011 at St. Luke's Lutheran Church in Park Ridge — parishioners brought home-baked cookies for the reception afterward, which enhanced the occasion. The second time, in 2016, at the Winnetka Community House, for maybe thirty people. I tried to drum up interest, both in the paper —"It’s an extraordinary, intimate evening of live storytelling and music, the tale delivered the way it was meant to be, in Dickens’ language, enhanced by Babbitt’s resonating voice and rich viola" — and on EGD, and remember urging Frank to make a bigger deal out of it — it was such a marvelous performance, he should be doing it at the Chicago Theater for a thousand people, not for three dozen in a church meeting room. But nothing ever came of that, nor of the opera about Clarence Darrow we talked about writing together, during one of the train rides we shared when we bumped into each other.
     He was also a proud member of SEIU Local 73, the musicians' union, and I remember him, joined by other musicians, briefing me on whatever labor difficulties were going on at the time. He taught music at Loyola, and contacted me when 300 non-tenured track instructors there went on strike in 2018.

     “For me, the question is: are your high-minded Jesuit social justice values anything more than a marketing ploy?” he said. “Do you really, truly live them not just in word but in deed.”

     The Babbitts moved to Chicago, and Ross put down his viola as too time-consuming, to my great sorrow. Frank always said he had a talent for it — good hands — and he did. We fell out of touch after that.

     Frank Babbitt developed a particularly aggressive form of cancer — in January, his friends set up a GoFundMe page to help with expenses, and by February he was gone. We miss our absent friends more at Christmas, and Frank doubly so, because of his wonderful embodiment of Dickens and "A Christmas Carol." The holiday classic famously ends with Tiny Tim not dying of his unnamed sickness, but living, which is a satisfying way to end a work of fiction. Alas, we do not live in a well-crafted story, but in a cruel and chaotic, all too real world, where beloved figures sometimes do not get better, but vanish offstage, trading music for silence, leaving a hole in the lives of those who knew them. It seems the very least we can do is remember they were here.

'Success is a journey'

     You don’t often see a judge cry.
     But Cook County Circuit Court Judge Lauren Edidin was repeatedly brushing away tears on Thursday — though she would be quick to point out it was not in her own courtroom but at a decidedly emotional event: the latest graduation ceremony of the Skokie Mental Health Court.
     “I’m really going to try not to cry,” she told those gathered at the 2nd Municipal District courthouse in Skokie.
     Mental Health Court is one of three types of Cook County’s 20 “problem-solving courts.” The other two are veterans court and drug court. Rather than trying to punish non-violent offenders — the accused must plead guilty to participate — these courts try to address the problems that pave the way for criminality.
     The work is time-consuming, often frustrating, occasionally rewarding environments where members of the legal community band together, often in their spare time — Edidin was praised for devoting her vacations to the effort — to help disentangle those caught in the legal system.
     “We help participants learn how to live and succeed with their illness,” Edidin said. “This program exists to help participants find long-term housing, set up treatment plans, receive job training, obtain insurance and Social Security benefits. The program formulates individual plans, based on participants’ specific needs.
    “That is so important. With that, they have a higher likelihood of success. Our program supports participants with kindness, understanding, tough love and encouragement,” she said.
     Emotions were high not only because Deborah L., Ashur N., Lamont O. and Kathy R. were celebrating their exit from the criminal justice system, but Edidin was retiring after 12 years on the bench. That was why Chief Judge Timothy Evans took the time to be there, along with about 50 fellow judges, public defenders, assistant state's attorneys, staffers and family members.

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Flashback 2010: Veterans Court assists vets the rest of us forget

      I attended a graduation ceremony at Cook County Mental Health Court on Thursday, for a column running in Monday's paper. It's one of three "problem-solving courts" the county runs. Another is veterans court, which I mention in the story, and have written about several times over the years. This is the first one, in a story timed for Veterans Day:

     Cyril Hall isn't the kind of vet you'll probably have in mind when you put out the flag tomorrow for Veterans Day. He didn't fight in Iraq or Afghanistan — he's 51, an Army combat engineer who did bridge repair.
     Hall doesn't have a job — he's on disability for a bad back. (The idea that vets as a group can't find jobs, or have trouble holding jobs, is a myth — the unemployment rate for all veterans is 8.1 percent, better than the rate for the general population).
     Hall has battled drugs, and was arrested for possession of a controlled substance.
     "It wasn't mine," he says of the bag of drugs that led to his arrest, which brought him here, to the Cook County Criminal Court Building at 26th and California. Blame was put on him "since it was closest to me."
     But in one respect Hall represents a military elite — he is among the 54 vets enrolled in Cook County's Veterans Court program, formed last year as a "specialty court."
     "We have drug courts, mental health courts — Veterans Court is an extension of that," said Criminal Division Presiding Judge Paul Biebel Jr., who heard about such courts in Buffalo and Tulsa and thought they were needed here. "A lot of people who come in here have issues."
     We are a nation that just went through a mid-term election and barely talked about the two, count 'em, two wars we are currently fighting. We can hardly force ourselves to pause from fretting about the economy to pay attention to soldiers fighting and dying on our behalf every day, never mind those who fought in previous wars, particularly vets who get in trouble like Hall. That's what this court does; it gives vets not a legal break, but support they are entitled to.
     The real work of Veterans Court does not take place when Circuit Court Judge John P. Kirby enters his courtroom and all rise; rather, the heavy lifting of helping these vets get back on track goes on an hour beforehand, at a pre-court meeting, in a room so crowded with staff — I count 19 people -- there isn't room for them to sit around the table. Representatives from the states attorney, public defender and sheriff's offices are here, along with those from the U.S., Illinois and Chicago offices of veterans affairs, plus probation officers, drug counselors, homeless coordinators, legal clinics.
     "Everybody was already up and running," says Kirby. "Every program here was in existence. We just put everybody in the same room and said, 'How can we work with veterans the best that we know how?' "
     One by one, Kirby reads the names of the vets on today's court docket, and the caseworkers involved report regarding drug tests and program participation.
     "Looks like he's been attending all his meetings . . ."
     "He came back positive for cocaine . . ."
     "We're just waiting for the results so we can fax them over."
     Kirby occasionally asks pointed questions: "Have we reached a member of his family? There was one there, early on . . ."
     To qualify for Veterans Court, an accused vet has to be charged with a crime the law doesn't require jail time for if convicted.
     "We don't take violent crimes or sex crimes," says Kirby. "We are looking for people who commit probational offenses."
     Afterward, the vets whose progress — or lack of progress — has been reviewed appear in court. Some are in custody, brought in wearing sand-colored DOC scrubs. Some are in street clothes — untucked button-down shirts mostly. Some are appearing for the first time.
     "I've been informed you are a veteran," Kirby tells a young woman.
     "I was in Iraq," she says.
     "What I am going to do is have you interviewed by our veteran's team," says Kirby.
     Veterans are a special class for two reasons. First, their service to the country implies that — at least at one point — they had more on the ball than the average street criminal. And second, as vets, they qualify for services that aren't available to non-veterans. Help is available to them, and Veterans Court tries to make sure they get it.
     "A veteran comes in, we want to treat that person as a whole, not just a case before us," says Kirby. "If he needs treatment, if he needs housing, we have Volunteers of America, Featherfist, for housing. If other issues, we send him to the John Marshall clinic."
     Not only is Veterans Court the right thing to do, but it works, as a crime-fighting tool.
     "The year prior, the individuals entering our program had 278 felony arrests total," says Kirby. "A year later they were four — that's a decrease of 98.6 percent."
     There are three other Veterans Courts in Cook County besides Kirby's, with another set to open in Bridgeview next month — that's where Hall's case was, before an alert assistant public defender suggested he transfer to Kirby's courtroom.
     "I wish they had this years ago," Hall says. "It is working. I'm not doing any drugs anymore because of it."
     None of this laborious attention is patriotic bluster. It's not what people have in mind when they stick a yellow ribbon magnet on their cars — and fewer even bother to do that anymore. But as the needs of vets grow, merely "remembering" them rings hollow, something we do more for our benefit than for theirs. All the unheralded people working to make Veterans Court happen actually help real vets to get their lives back. More of us should do the same.
     — Originally published in the Sun-Times Nov. 10, 2010