A little Randy Newman for Christmas

Randy Newman at Symphony Center in 1996
(Sun-Times file photo)

     On one hand, this is completely out of left-field. On the other, I'm supposed to have Christmas off, so I figured, "It's better than nothing. I hope." It's long as it is, so I couldn't go into his comfortable Jewishness. And I didn't dare mention his "Christmas in Capetown." I also ran a follow-up post of reader reaction to this column.

     Randy Newman is the greatest living American songwriter.
     Forgive me for sidestepping the usual introductory throat-clearing. Sometimes you need to cut to the chase.
    Particularly during the holidays. Everyone’s busy, wrapping gifts — I almost said “shopping,” but nobody shops anymore, right? Not in stores. Amazon just drops stuff on our doorsteps.
     At least we’re still listening to those Christmas carol collections. Apple Music is chocked with ’em. People complain about holiday music, but I love it. Great songs by timeless composers like George Handel and Felix Mendelssohn. (What, you didn’t know the former inspired the music to “Joy to the World” and the latter to “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing”? They did.)
     When the subject of great American composers of holiday tunes comes up, we’re left with Irving Berlin, whose “White Christmas” has not aged well, even though it’s about snow, supposedly.
     Raising the question: Who’s the greatest living American composer? Not Bruce Springsteen — his songs are too personal. Nobody sings a Springsteen song; it’s unimaginable. I’m tempted to say Tom Waits, just to hear that groan that goes up when I mention his name. “Hold On,” “Mr. Siegel,” “Train Song” and dozens of other classics. Fantastic.
     But he doesn’t compare to Randy Newman.
   Even if the name leaves you blank, you know his work, at least the soundtrack to “Toy Story.” Newman wrote “You’ve Got a Friend in Me” and no doubt cringes to consider his best-known song is a bit of hired fluff. He’s scored dozens of movies.
     Music is personal, and I should show my hand. Randy Newman songs have been the soundtrack of my entire life, from his first hit, “Mama Told Me Not to Come,” which came out in 1970, when I was in fifth grade, a hint of the sort of parties I’d seek and, to my sorrow, eventually find.
     Newman is a humorist and storyteller who sings in character. That would trip him up as his songs became hits, and listeners had to figure out he didn’t really, personally think short people have no reason to live.
     In 1988, he stepped out from behind the mask and offered up “Land of Dreams,” an obviously autobiographical album, since nobody could imagine “Four Eyes.” And how could anybody who ever showed up to elementary school in glasses not love him after that?

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Flashback 1988: Can school `choice' work?

     I see school choice is on its way out, again, according to my colleagues at WBEZ. A reminder that when you are confronted with an intractable problem, like the Chicago Public Schools, which reflects every woe in our society and can only be improved by addressing  those woes, the easier route is to cycle through old solutions.

      The story below,  a relic from when the paper sent reporters to other cities to study urban problems.  CPS has exactly 100,000 fewer students than when I wrote this, the result of parents fleeing Chicago or seeking out private schools. Yet they attend 50 more schools than 35 years ago, the result of Mayor Richard M. Daley opening 100 charter and magnet schools when he pushed choice as the panacea which — spoiler alert! — it wasn't. 

     Why? The piece is more than twice as long as a regular column, so in case that daunts you, I can save you the effort: school choice doesn't work because there are a finite number of excellent schools and a finite number of parents who give a damn, and the latter make sure their kids are jammed in the former, which is how every school system ends up working anyway.  Still, pulling away from one plan and embracing another creates the illusion of change, and I guess that's the best we can do.

     CAMBRIDGE, Mass. Mark and Elaine Haliday quietly slip into the back of a third-grade class at the Peabody School, a few blocks from Harvard Square.
     "Glove is to hand as boot is to . . .," teacher Mary Murphy is saying, as hands shoot up and enthusiastic students call out "oh, oh, oh."
     Mark rests his chin on a palm and suppresses a smile, studying the classroom. His wife leans over and whispers, "This is more structured."
     The Halidays are doing what all parents in the Cambridge public school system must do: select a school for their child. While the vast majority of school systems in the nation base their enrollment solely on where students live, and many districts permit exceptional students to attend special schools, only a handful allow all parents to choose any school in the district.
     No large city gives every parent a choice, but there's a movement afoot to make Chicago the first, as part of a general restructuring plan.
     "We're trying to do two things," said Donald Moore, executive director of Designs for Change, a Chicago school research and advocacy group. "One, give parents more of a voice in how their schools are run. And two, give parents more of a voice in choosing their children's school."
     Gov. Thompson's educational staff also is studying choice, for use in Chicago and throughout the state. Last month, the Illinois Board of Education recommended expanding Chicago parents' opportunity to choose schools.
     Choice, said Illinois Education Supt. Ted Sanders, "promises to foster diversity, healthy competition and school responsiveness to community concerns."
     But it also carries risks and poses logistical problems in a school system as large and diverse as Chicago's.
     Choice can take a variety of forms. In Cambridge, the process is known as controlled choice. It was implemented in 1981 as a route to desegregation. Choice is "controlled" because the final assignment of a student to a school is determined by racial quotas as well as by parental preference.
     In the East Harlem area of New York City, the program is just plain "choice." It was implemented in 1982, not as an integration tool (the area is almost completely black and Hispanic) but as part of an over-all drive for academic excellence in the junior high schools. Its main purpose was to draw parents into the education process.
     "If you can select your school, you feel you own that school," said Seymour Fliegel, assistant superintendent of the East Harlem district.
     "You treat what you own better than what you don't own. It's a healthy thing."
     In Chicago, most students must attend schools in their neighborhoods. About 8 percent get to choose other schools under the board's desegregation program, which relies on the bait of specialty magnet schools and programs - in foreign languages, for example — to create racially mixed student bodies where they would not otherwise occur.
     The results of Chicago's current program of limited choice are up for debate. While magnet schools are unquestionably beneficial for the students who attend them, critics say they hurt neighborhood schools that the more ambitious students leave behind.
      "The downside of magnets is they tend to skim out of the neighborhood the most resourceful families, leaving behind those less able to navigate those choices," said Mario J. Aranda, co-chairman of the education task force of the Chicago Partnership, a business and development coalition.
     The expanded system of choice being proposed for Chicago is closest to the East Harlem version. The main purpose is to improve schools by exposing them to the same competitive pressures felt by businesses. Under choice, schools would no longer be guaranteed a pool of students. Thus, they would be forced to improve to keep parents from transferring their children into better schools, and, in effect, driving ineffective schools out of business.
     Opponents contend that choice will only magnify the problems associated with magnet schools.
     "The more ambitious families would take advantage of choice and leave in large numbers," said Fred Hess, executive director of the Chicago Panel on Public School Policy and Finance. "Those schools would then be overwhelmed by less-supported and less-talented students. We could have a further widening gap between better-performing and worse-performing schools."
     There is evidence a significant percentage of Chicago parents might continue to send their children to poor schools just because they are close by. The biggest problem in Cambridge is getting low-income parents to shop around for schools. A massive outreach program, which went so far as to send megaphone vans into poor areas and volunteers into supermarkets to buttonhole parents with pre-school children and urge them to evaluate schools, had only moderate success.

     "Most people I show around here are white, middle-class people," said Mary Frawley, who conducts parent tours of the Tobin School in Cambridge, where the district is 45 percent minority.
     "A lot of parents don't want to go out of the neighborhood," said Daniel Kelly, a Cambridge elementary school principal. "No matter what you have at the end of the bus ride, it doesn't matter."
     Ironically, besides having a problem with the parents who fail to avail themselves of choice, Cambridge also has difficulty handling the parents who do visit schools.
     "Everything stops," said Frawley, noting that classrooms are disrupted by groups of parents trooping through. The Halidays were visiting the Peabody School for the third time, and some parents insist on visiting all 13 Cambridge elementary schools. Because of the disruption, Cambridge is considering replacing tours with videotaped presentations.
     East Harlem doesn't have a problem with parents visiting schools, because it does not see a need to educate parents about the schools they are selecting.
     "Most choice is made through word of mouth," said Fliegel. "Most parents know what the best schools are. Only educators think it's a big mystery to find out where the best schools are."
     Both programs are successful. Cambridge has desegregated its schools without inducing a lot of parent protest, and East Harlem is nationally recognized for the improvement of its district.
     While both districts include choice as an important part of improving the schools, neither district claims that choice alone produces improved schools.
     "If I give you the chance to pick one inadequate school out of six inadequate schools, I haven't given you much," said Fliegel, who stressed the importance of having schools at certain standards before choice is implemented.
     "There are no bad schools in Cambridge," said Margaret Gallagher, head of the Parent Information Office there. "We had a good system to begin with. The concept of choice is only as good as the choices you have to offer parents."
     But there are bad schools in Chicago. The nation's third largest school system, with 429,000 students attending 594 schools, Chicago suffers from a high dropout rate, poor teacher morale, decaying facilities and a litany of other woes. Some 70 percent of students are from low-income families.
     Advocates of choice in Chicago recognize the need to improve schools first. Their method would be to shift power from the central administration to parent-dominated school governing councils.
     "We don't think one will work without the other," said Moore. "The main thing that we need to do is train and organize parents to get involved with their schools."
     Parent involvement has been used, with good results, on a case-by-case basis, in Chicago schools.
     For instance, parents from Whitney Elementary, a mostly Hispanic school on the West Side, joined forces with parents from Mason Elementary, a predominantly black school on the West Side with a lot of unused capacity, to see if they could improve both of their schools. As a result, 188 parents agreed to bus students from Whitney to Mason, easing overcrowding at the former and improving the racial mix at the latter.
     "That's only one example," said Phyllis Aron, of the system's desegregation office. "We do all kinds of activities with parents encouraging other parents to participate in programs."
     Moore's group would allow only two years for the governing councils to produce improvements.
     Assuming that governing councils are put into place and a system of choice follows, new problems arise, such as paying to transport students to the new schools their parents have selected. Cambridge, with only 13 schools, found its choice system required stepped-up bus service, which accounts for a large part of the $1 million yearly price tag for choice. New staff was also required - including a full-time parent information coordinator and part-time paid parent liaisons such as Frawley at each school.
     Chicago advocates of choice don't see a need for hiring more workers, though. Teachers and parents could run the program at their schools, said Moore.
     Not everyone feels there is that much leeway in the system.
     "I don't think Mr. Moore knows what he is talking about," said John Kotsakis, assistant to the president of the Chicago Teachers Union. "There is no way that a teacher has enough free time to supervise and administer an additional program. They barely have enough time to do the paperwork and record-keeping required of them."
     The bottom line regarding choice is that, while it sounds good in concept and has worked in other smaller districts, a lot more thought must be put into how it would work in Chicago.
     "Whenever you say parents should have choice, that's like saying people should have fresh air; it's promoting apple pie," said Michael Alves, of the desegregation office in the Massachusetts Education Department. "How that choice process works in practice is what you have to be extremely careful about."

TUESDAY: Getting good principals.

— Originally published in the Sun-Times, May 3, 1988

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.