"Your autograph please"

Rabbi Sally Priesand

    

     Do kids still collect autographs? I have my doubts; the practice must have been ruined long ago by eBay. Busy celebrities are turned off, assuming that their efforts, rather than being cherished forever, will end up for sale by the next afternoon.
     A pity. Because nothing says, "I stood in front of you," quite like an autograph. I probably would never remember meeting Margaret Meade, the giant in anthropology, were it not for her precise signature above the year, 1972 in my little book with "Your Autograph Please" emblazoned on the cover. 
     The first page, I worked practiced making the request by securing the signature of my elementary school principal, the gloriously-named "J. Earl Neptune." Meaning I was in 6th grade.
     After Meade, another autograph I am very glad to have — Lillian Gish, the silent film star. She now seems part of the far distant past. But when I met her, in 1972, the star of "Birth of a Nation" would have been 79.
     And if you're wondering how a bowl-haircut boob in Berea Ohio was bumping into several acclaimed women of the 20th century, the answer is that the sandstone capital of the world was also home to Baldwin-Wallace College, now Baldwin-Wallace University. Luminaries would come through to speak. My mother, hoping to expand my horizons, would take me. Thanks ma.

   Another name in the book is Sally Priesand, whose name won't ring a bell.  But when we visited the National Portrait Gallery last week, the picture above was one of the first we saw.
     "In 1972, Sally Priesand became the first woman ordained as a rabbi..." the placard begins.
     "I was there," I told my wife. Priesand went my synagogue, Beth Israel: The West Temple. I knew I attended her ordination, not because of the book, which did have her autograph. But because of a program, typed and photocopied and folded, that I tucked away after she signed it.
     Although. Now that I look into the history, the ceremony I attended was not her actual ordination — that was June 3 at Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati. This was two weeks later, a "Joint Service to Honor the Ordination of Rabbi Sally Priesand." 

      Ah well, close enough for baseball.  

      And kids do still collect autographs, according to Prof. Google. Though the practice is now wedded to Disney World, apparently, where visitors get autographs from the various characters prancing around the park. Those certainly are expensive, if not valuable. On eBay, I see that Sally Priesand signatures are starting at $50. Pretty good, though I'm not selling mine. 

'Every day that God gives you, use it'

 

      Loneliness is the curse of old age. Your friends are gone, your family distant, your life's work, a box in the basement. Most seniors struggle with it.
      But most seniors are not Edith Renfrow Smith, who at times Monday had a dozen visitors in her room at Brookdale Senior Living on Sheridan Road. And that was before the party celebrating her 111th birthday.
      Regular readers might recall meeting Mrs. Smith on her 107th birthday and learning about her extraordinary life. Born in 1914 in Iowa, she became the first Black woman to graduate from Grinnell College. She pooh-poohs it, but had her share of encounters with the famous, from Amelia Earhart to Muhammad Ali.
      Not to forget her grandparents, born in slavery.
      Or the boy across the street, Herbie, who taught her daughter Alice to play "Chopsticks" on the piano. Herbie Hancock, the future jazz great.
      I joined the crowd, and asked: How did the past year go?
     "Everything has been fine," Mrs. Smith said, precisely, not mentioning specifics.
      Such as in September, when Grinnell College named a dorm after her — Renfrow Hall. Not to be confused with Renfrow Gallery, or the Edith Renfrow Smith Black Women's Library, previous tributes bestowed by the college, which granted her an honorary doctorate in 2019.
      Two recent graduates, Feven Getachew and Valeriya Woodard, hung on the conversation. Dr. Tamara Beauboeuf-Lafontant, the Louise R. Noun '29 chair in gender, women's, and sexuality studies at Grinnell, observed from a distance.
     "I've been listening to Mrs. Smith and realized she is her family's historian," said Beauboeuf-Lafontant, who is writing a book on Mrs. Smith's matrilineal history. "She keeps the memories, she inherited the memories from her mother. It's extraordinary she has taken on an old West African role of preserving the memories of your family, your people."
      Mrs. Smith seemed content to let conversation flow around her, though I tried to pick out highlights from the last year. I asked if she voted in November, drawing a reaction near outrage.
     "I NEVER have not voted," she said.
     Does she still bake? Last year we watched her and Alice, 79, bake a pie with, all the drama that can be expected from a mother-daughter pair who have nearly two centuries of life between them.
      "Sometimes," Mrs. Smith replied. "Over there on the counter is a pie we baked yesterday. A cherry raspberry pie."
      The pie was brought out for admiration. Though the reason for its creation is even more noteworthy — her Sunday helper, Ebony, had confessed that she had never baked a pie. Mrs. Smith thought that a lapse worthy of immediate correction.
      "It was the first time she had ever made a pie," she said. "Her mother had taught her to cook, but never to bake. That's why I told her to take a piece to her mother. I like to do things; I don't like to do nothing. She was here to take care of me, and I said, 'Oh, we can make a pie.' So that's what we did. I said, 'You made the pie.'"
      Living to 111 is extremely rare. About 3 in 10,000 Americans live to be 100, or 0.027 percent. There are thought to be fewer than 1,000 "supercentenarians" — people who live to 110 — in the world. Making Mrs. Smith not one in a million, but closer to 1 in 10 million.
       I asked her what 111 feels like. She replied:
      "It feels just like every day..."

To continue reading, click here.

Flashback 1999: Close friends, comedians gather at `wake' of dying Second City icon

 

Vanitas still life, by Pieter Glaesz (Franz Hals Museum, Haarlem, The Netherlands)

     A reader said that he went looking for documentary evidence of the 1999 Del Close wake mentioned in Sunday's post, and came up short. Another reason to regret that, unlike some papers, the Sun-Times does not have its archive online (though you can find it complete on NewsBank). I told him I'd post my story written about it at the time.

     Memory adds a few details. We had an entertainment editor, Darel Jevens, who adored comedy — he studied improv with Close — and would have plucked this story for himself. But there was some unavoidable scheduling problem, so he handed the plum assignment to me. 

     It was a challenge. The room was packed. My encounters with the stars were awkward. When I came face-to-face with Bill Murray — close enough to smell the booze on his breath — I blurted out something stupid, along the lines of, "So you trained under Del Close?" to which he twisted his face into an expression that eloquently conveyed, "I'm HERE, aren't I, idiot?"

     Harold Ramis, the director of "Groundhog Day," had been featured in the paper that week, a piece by Dave Hoekstra. I observed that Dave seemed to do a good job — a safe intro — at which Ramis winced and exclaimed.  

    "He got something wrong!" 

    Oh no, I said, that isn't like Dave, what was the mistake?

    "He referred to my 'Buddhist ATTACHMENT' and he meant 'Buddhist DETACHMENT." 

     "And you're displaying that now, big time," I thought, but did not say.

     I wrote this immediately upon getting home, and it ran in the paper the next day, the day Close killed himself, which is why his death isn't mentioned.

     Illinois Masonic Hospital was only a few blocks from where we lived on Pine Grove Avenue, and I remember walking home, thinking, "Wow. Some job I have."

     With their friend and mentor on oxygen and battling for his life, Chicago comedy legends whose careers were shaped by Second City icon Del Close gathered in a basement room at Illinois Masonic Hospital Wednesday night for an unusual celebration that was half birthday party, half "pre-wake."
     "I think he needs a little encouragement; I think that's all he needs," said film star Bill Murray. "Whatever he's going to do next, whatever his next project is."
     About 50 people, including a pagan priest and priestess who performed a brief ceremony, feted the actor/director as he sat in a wheelchair while a film crew from Comedy Central taped the event.
     Close, 64, a former drug addict and alcoholic, is suffering from complications due to emphysema.
     "He was dying," said Charna Halpern, who co-founded the Improv Olympic theater with Close, adding that the event seemed to perk him up. "Del is a true comedian, a true performer who when faced with an audience comes back to life."
      Students and professional associates came from as far away as Los Angeles to attend the party.
     "I owe a lot to Del. He has been a major influence," said Randy Dixon, who owns the Market Theatre in Seattle.
     "He is the dark and wonderful sinister influence on comedy over the last five or six decades," said Kelly Leonard, director of Second City. "Second City, `Saturday Night Live,' `SCTV' —anything great and funny and a little bit in bad taste is in part due to Del. He was an amazing teacher."
     Messages of goodwill were read from people as varied as actor Peter Boyle and 1960s icon Wavy Gravy, who wrote, "See you in hell." Robin Williams called earlier.
     Close was philosophical about his fate.
     "The death of a working man at an American hospital doesn't have to be the traumatic agony that people think it is," he said.
     Murray, who paid for the party, spent several minutes in serious conversation with his former Second City director. They spoke mostly of their salad days.
     "You can have a pretty good life pretty cheap. I didn't know that until I was dying," Close said.
     "I found it was better to live in New York when I had no money than when I had some money," said Murray, who asked Close if there was anything he could get him.
     "That chocolate martini you were talking about," Close said.
     "Del was, is, the single most powerful force in improv comedy in America," said writer and director Harold Ramis."He's the intellectual and moral standard that guides us all in our work. He taught everybody the process."

     — Originally published in the Sun-Times, March 4, 1999

'A silent and invisible killer of silent and invisible people'

 

     "Extremely hot — 106, an all time record. Like being hit with a hammer ... had idea about pulling literary quotes on the heat ... so I spent a pleasant hour in the library."
     — Journal entry, July 13, 1995

     Normality has a weight, an inertia, almost subject to the laws of physics. "Objects at rest tend to stay at rest." Habit sits there, slumbering, pelted by events, and doesn't want to stir, let mercury or flood waters rise.
    Thirty years ago, a murderous heat wave hit Chicago — 739 people died. Had they perished in Daley Plaza it would be remembered as an epic tragedy — the Great Chicago fire killed less than half as many. There would be a statue.
     But the heat wave victims died alone in scattered rooms, windows sealed, air conditioning broken. They were mostly elderly, though two were toddlers who fell asleep in the back of a day-care van, forgotten for one fatal hour.
     The government was slow to grasp what was happening. The media was slow. I was slow.
      I remember looking up at Cook County Medical Examiner Edmund Donahue doing a press conference on TV and sniffing: "Showboat. He's calling everybody who dies in Cook County a heat death ..."
      In our defense, being slow to recognize problems and then fast to forget them is an American folk illness.
      "The political lesson of the heat wave was you can deny and ignore and forget the disaster," said Eric Klinenberg, the New York University sociologist whose 2002 book, "Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago" is the seminal text of the disaster.
      "You can say it was an act of God. You can blame the victims for not taking care of themselves, and in American politics, that works. An enduring fact about this enormous Chicago catastrophe is that it just disappeared, almost as it was happening, but certainly after it happened."
       "Another wildly hot day ... Head off to the NU library where I got some good books. Dinner at the Davis Street Fish House; though I really wasn't hungry — a factor of the heat."
      — July 14, 1995
      The literary quote story ran that day and haunts me still. Coleridge's "summer has set in with its usual severity." A bit of light nothing whose underlying message was: It's summer. It's hot. Get over it.
       In my 2002 review of "Heat Wave," I wrote:
      "As I read over my droll little exercise, I couldn't help but think of some Sun-Times subscriber, an elderly man in a strap T-shirt, sitting in his sweltering, closed room on the West Side, reading halfway through, folding the paper, then quietly turning his face to the wall and dying."
      "How is this affecting people other than myself?" is not a very sophisticated question. Not rocket science. Though you can argue our political moment is based on the conviction that huge swathes of the American population simply don't matter and should be ignored, the parts of the government that aid them lopped away.
     FEMA was about to be disbanded when the Texas floods hit. Those girls who died at Camp Mystic in Texas were sleeping in cabins built by the river in an "extremely hazardous" floodway.
     What the Texas floods had was drama, visuals and the kind of victims the media can get excited about.
      "What's especially chilling about the Texas floods is, all these children who died; the drama of the parents looking for the children," Klinenberg said.

To continue reading, click here.

Flashback 2012: Sandburg awards dinner gathers literary celebs in glittery cavalcade

Typewriter Eraser Scale X, by Claes Oldenburg
(National Gallery of Art Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C.)

     I came home from Washington, D.C. Friday evening to find an eagerly-awaited advance copy of "The Gossip Columnist's Daughter," the new novel by Peter Orner. I immediately began reading, reminding me that I had enjoyed his previous work, and written something — but what? Which led to this too-fun-not-to-share report on the Sandberg Literary dinner. A rare bold-face, name-dropping column, doubly apt, given the novel's celebrity-rich setting. 

     Mine is not one of those columns studded with bold-faced celebrity names, mainly because the closest I usually come to mingling with celebrities is having an office right in between the offices of Richard Roeper and Bill Zwecker. But whatever malign force in the universe generally keeps me from star-choked events lifted Wednesday night, and I found myself at the annual Carl Sandburg Literary Awards Dinner, the advent of which I of course dreaded, predicting “a series of minor humiliations as punishment for the hubris of reaching toward a tiny honor.”  That’s how these dinners always are; I end up tucked behind a plant in the corner of a vast ballroom, squinting into spotlights at the distant speck of a well-known person accepting a cube of lucite, feeling like a supernumerary shuffling through the role of Townsman in a Cheap Suit in an elaborate pageant celebrating someone else.
     The idea that the Sandburg dinner was going to be different first dawned on me about five minutes into the opening reception, when I spied honoree Don DeLillo sitting at a small table. I plopped down in the chair next to him and introduced myself. He explained, in a whisper, that his voice is fading, no doubt the standard East Coast literary set line that major authors use to politely blow off intrusive small potato bores — not that it worked.
     “That’s OK,” I said brightly, “I’ll do the talking for both of us,” and proceeded to praise Underworld and White Noise and lay out my own career in an agonizing detail that I hope did not destroy the evening for him.
     After that it was off to the races. I cornered mystery writer Sara Paretsky, looking soigne, and talked to her about an email exchange she didn’t recall. Then I bumped into my old pal, New York University sociologist Eric Klinenberg, author of the influential Heat Wave and, more recently, Going Solo. I got a hearty hello from my pal Bill Kurtis and ran into director Robert Falls, whom I seem to run into everywhere. His wife, Kat Falls, whose sci-fi novel Dark Life is in development at Disney, was being honored, and we took turns happily sticking pins in a certain Wall Street Journal drama critic we mutually dislike and, speaking of which, I luckily detected Walter Jacobson in time to avert my eyes and rush off in the opposite direction.
     They arranged us in alphabetical order, so we could march across a stage and be recognized as Official Literary Sorts, putting me next to Sen. Adlai Stevenson III, who gave an update on his doings in China, and unspooled a tale of rescuing Carl Sandburg after he got trapped in the elevator of the governor’s mansion. Architect Stanley Tigerman borrowed a pen and impressed me by then returning it.
     Just sitting got old, fast, and I wandered over to say hello to Second City founder Bernie Sahlins, reminding him that I had not seen him since the wake Del Close threw for himself the evening before he committed suicide to cheat the Grim Reaper, who was about to kill him with cancer, a wild affair that included Bill Murray, Harold Ramis and a satanic priest who performed a dark ritual.
     Speaking of darkness, Rick Kogan was there, thank God, and we talked about his success as a host on WBEZ. He introduced me to poet and short story writer Stuart Dybek, and to Kevin Coval, founder of Louder Than A Bomb: The Chicago Teen Poetry Festival and we discussed the joys of the Uptown Poetry Slam at the Green Mill, and lauded our mutual friend, slam poet Patricia Smith.
     The marching across stage part took a while, and I tried to make small talk with an unloquacious Scott Turow — selling 25 million books must render you taciturn — who accepted plaudits for Presumed Innocent and his other mysteries. He did laugh, when novelist Peter Orner crossed the stage, and I said I had read his debut novel, Love and Shame and Love, and perhaps he could have more accurately titled it Shame and Love and Shame.
     Space dwindles, and I’m leaving folks out — Mayor Rahm Emanuel, Gone Girl author Gillian Flynn, folk singer Bonnie Koloc, NPR Saturday Edition’s Scott Simon, whom I badgered unmercifully, demanding that he feature my new book on his program. Walter Isaacson, who won the Sandburg award for non-fiction, shared tales of Steve Jobs, Nami Mun, given the 21st Century Award, who movingly told the 700 people gathered to benefit the Chicago Public Library about being homeless, and how homeless shelters and Planned Parenthood helped her get off the streets. Zenobia Johnson Black came up and said she is a big fan of the Sun-Times, and introduced me to her husband, activist, historian and icon Timuel Black, and I think I shocked the poor man by practically grabbing him by his lapels and demanding that he have lunch with me later, and he agreed, if only to escape my clutches.
     My wife, Edie, laughed at me all the way home in the car. “I got this dinner I gotta go to,” she whined, in an amazing imitation of a glum nasal depressive bemoaning his latest woe. “You wanna keep me company?”

     — Originally published in the Sun-Times, Oct. 18, 2012

Mea culpa, Uber

Only an idiot would have taken a photo of the rain. The tuna steak will have to do.

     Pride goeth before a fall. And a dousing.
     Yes, writing the headline for Tuesday's blog, "Uber is for the weak," I paused. Was this not hypocritical? I did sometimes take Uber. And preening? Still, it's a headline. It's supposed to provoke, draw the reader in. Sure, I could water it down. But no. If you've going to take Vienna, take Vienna.

     The watering down was coming.
     Dinner on Wednesday was at 7 p.m. — solo, I was meeting a pal, an old college roommate at Hamilton's, a happening 14th St. eatery. His pick. Rain was forecast, sure, so I had an umbrella in hand. It was a $33 Uber ride — the price doubled, because of the rain.

     Or a 30 minute walk. I had the time...
     There was a light rain, yes. Nothing to deter a hardy soul such as myself. Certainly walkable. Build up an appetite. I strode off confidently into the sprinkling twilight.
     For about 30 seconds. The rain immediately picked up. I angled the umbrella toward it, increased my pace. Suddenly, the sky burst into one of those downpours that comes in sheets. Cinematic rain. It looked fake, only it wasn't. I took refuge under a trestle. "This is a bad idea," I thought, soddenly. I couldn't call for an Uber there — a blind highway curve where no sane car could stop.  The rain rained.
    Nothing to do but go forward. The wind picked up. The rain somehow increased. Buckets. Firehose blasts. The umbrella turned inside out and was useless anyway. The rain seemed to be coming from all directions at once. 
    Drenched to the bone. Soaked. No way I could sit in an elegant restaurant like this. I turned back, fought my way back to my kid's place, a drowned rat. Slunk back, ten minutes after I'd left. Emptied my pockets — my wallet was a damp slab of wet leather. Toweled off, put on a fresh set of clothes. Called my friend — he'd taken the subway and found refuge in a doorway a block from the restaurant. Birds of a feather...
     Ten minutes later I was downstairs, getting into an Uber, a service which I now ululate and praise. Cool, dry. All hail ride shares, savior of the rainy day. I got to Hamilton's at 7:15, only 15 minutes late despite everything.
    Hamilton's was jumping for a rainy Wednesday night. We were seated in a large, gorgeous paneled room. Big Audobon prints of birds lined the corridors to the restrooms. We ate for two hours, talked, laughed, reminisced about old times, past restaurants — the great Lion D'Or, a Washington institution back when French cuisine was king. 
     Shortly before 10 we headed out into the night. The rain had stopped, the night, cooler. I walked my friend to his subway station, then headed over to the Metro center and caught a silver train to L'Enfant Plaza then walked the last 10 minutes. I'm still a fan of public transportation, but you have to be smart about it. Check the weather forecast. Sometimes bringing an umbrella is not enough. 

'Let no one mistake it for comedy'

Scopes trial, July 20, 1925 (Photo courtesy of the Smithsonian Institution)

     Chicago's most notorious attorney, Clarence Darrow, was riding high in 1924. He basked in the national spotlight while defending Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, two Hyde Park teens who murdered 14-year-old Bobby Franks for the thrill of it.
     Darrow admitted their guilt — which was undeniable — placing all his chips on saving the smug idiots from the death penalty. It worked.
     In the spring of 1925, Darrow was looking for his next mountain to climb. Meanwhile, the American Civil Liberties Union was trying to fight the Butler Act, a new Tennessee statute banning public school teachers from discussing "any theory which denies the story of the Divine creation of man as taught in the Bible and to teach instead that man is descended from a lower order of animals.”
     That law was advocated by another American titan, William Jennings Bryan. Like Darrow, he'd made his name in the 1890s, the "boy orator" who mesmerized the 1896 Democratic National Convention with his "cross of gold" speech advocating free silver. He ran for president three times and lost each time. By the 1920s, he had shifted into religious conservatism, plumping for Prohibition and battling Satan in the form of Darwin's theory of evolution being taught in public school.
     To have a case, the ACLU needed a defendant, and took out newspaper ads looking for one. The hamlet of Dayton, Tennessee, bit. Hoping to draw attention to itself and maybe make a few bucks, it enlisted a 24-year-old football coach and substitute teacher, John Scopes.
     He never taught evolution.
     "I furnished the body that was needed to sit in the defendant's chair" Scopes said.
      With Jennings on board, Darrow leaped into the fray.
     "At once I wanted to go," Darrow wrote. The trial began July 10, 1925.
     Limelight can scorch the uninitiated. Dayton, which surprised newsman H.L. Mencken by being "a country town of charm and even beauty," bit off more than it could chew.
     "Here was an ... almost a miraculous chance to get Dayton upon the front pages, to make it talked about, to put it upon the map. But how now?" Mencken wrote. "Two months ago the town was obscure and happy. Today it is a universal joke."
      Despite Darrow's famous eloquence, the trial's outcome was never in doubt.
      "The Scopes trial, from the start, has been carried on in a manner exactly fitted to the anti-evolution law and the simian imbecility under it," Mencken wrote. "The rustic judge, a candidate for re-election, has postured the yokels like a clown in a ten-cent side show, and almost every word he has uttered has been an undisguised appeal to their prejudices and superstitions."

To continue reading, click here.