Judgment call

Mrs. George Swinton,by John Singer Sargent
(Art Institute of Chicago)

     My wife works in the Loop on Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays, and usually comes down to the kitchen to get her lunch together about 7:30 a.m., while I'm sitting at the kitchen table, drinking coffee and scanning the papers — okay, pretending to read the paper and drink coffee, actually just lingering, there simply to enjoy the pleasure of her company before she vanishes for the next 10 and a half hours.
    On this particular day, this past week, she was wearing white linen pants, a robin's egg blue knit top, and a sort of a shirt-jacket that brought the blue and the white together. A very soigné ensemble. I thought of taking a photo; then thought better, and didn't. A private person, she.
    As much as I like to use the word soigné — French, for "elegant, put together" — I did not say that. What I did say was, "You look very summery ..."
      The next thought came to me, and I manfully resisted it for a fraction of a second, then gave in to the inevitable, adding, "...if you will forgive a summery judgment."

      We both froze a moment. 
     A pun, for you non-lawyers, on "summary judgment," when a party asks the judge to, in essence, decide a case before it goes to trial, based on some aspect of the facts and the law. 
     Yes, she groaned. But it was a good groan. A groan of appreciation. Or so I tell myself. 

'Why would you want to write about things that hardly anybody cares about over and over again?'

The Vent Haven Museum in Fort Mitchell, Kentucky, a haven for ventriloquist dummies, is one of the countless subject that nobody gives a shit about, at least until I write about them. Then they tend to.

      As a rule, I try to let the commenters on my blog post comment, and not get involved in the discussion unless there is some question I'm in a position to answer. I've had my say; now the readers get theirs.
      But sometimes questions are raised that merit my involvement. Such as this, after Friday's post on museums, from Bill:

Question,

There's two different kinds of people which one are you?

When you go to a place That's open to the public say a restaurant or a museum for instance and there's almost nobody else there do you say to yourself I'm so lucky I'm so smart nobody else came here out of the 7 billion people on earth I'm the only one here lucky me or do you realize that no one else gives a s*** and that's why you're in there alone because it's of no interest to anyone else?

You are a very fine writer most of the time you write about things that a fair number of people care about why on earth would you want to write about things that hardly anybody cares about over and over again?
Are you writing for you or are you writing for us?

I know that's more than one question but I figured you got to write about something

     In another mood, I might not have even posted that — the "I'm so lucky I'm so smart" is nearly an accusation — I'm an arrogant bastard — the standard MAGA mind trick of imagining something stupid and then projecting the thought into the mind of people they hate. "I'm lucky I'm so smart" is not a thought I have often, certainly not compared to, "I'm lucky I blundered here through blind fate, despite the fact that I didn't want to come here because I never want to go anywhere."
    But he said something complimentary. And that "Write about things that hardly anybody cares about over and over again" is fairly accurate. 
     I considered, and answered on the blog this way:

That's a valid question. The short answer is: I'm writing for me, absolutely, 100 percent. The fact that other people who aren't myself want to read it is a continuing marvel. As far as the nobody gives a shit aspect, I would reply with a question: 1) "Who appointed you their spokesman?" and then make an observation: "And yet you're here." But this seems a topic worthy of expansion, so I'll write tomorrow's blog post about it. Thanks for asking.

     The reader preference feedback loop is the bedrock of much social media — you click on a video of a turtle being cut out of a net by a diver, and suddenly your feed is inundated with aquatic animal rescue, Artificial Intelligence thinking, "More animal rescue!" 

      And we worry AI is going to take over the world.

      "Give the lady what she wants," was the slogan for Marshal Field's. Instead, I see myself as a sifter. I go to these very dull and ignored subjects that for some reason catch my attention, dig up handfuls of facts regarding them and toss them onto my fine-mesh sieve of a mind. Then begin to shake. Out drops the parts that not only aren't dull, but interesting. Those, I share.

    I'm the guy who, 30 years ago, wrote a chapter in my book on the National Spelling Bee. This was before all the novels and plays — in fact, I like to think I had a small hand in creating the literary bee genre. The spelling bee was an obscure and strange American institution that got grudgingly reported on and generally ridiculed at the end of May. I followed a girl through a year of the bee, beginning in her middle school, then proceeding to  state, and ending at the national bee in Washington, D.C.

     The chapter, called "Shiver Like Rhesus Monkeys" is one of my favorite pieces. It gives every word my champion, Sruti Nadimpalli, received in a year of the bee, but is never dull, and others joined me in that estimation.  Granta, the esteemed London literary quarterly, republished it on their cover.

    Returning to Bill's question, my writing about things nobody cares about is not an accident. I set out to do that. Because the things people do care about — sports, celebrities, today's political crisis — are already covered like a damp shirt by a thousand other writers. Why join the scrum?    To me, the greatest accolade is to walk an untrodden path. And while people don't care about the topics before I address them, by the time I'm done, they care more than they did before. Sometimes a lot more.

     I loved visiting Neenah Foundry to watch manhole covers being made because it was a dream of mine, and took me about five years of badgering to get them to agree, and because what I found there was gold, well, okay, iron, but you get my point. Before the story ran, I took the time to check the Sun-Times, Tribune and Daily News files, and found that, in the 100 years Neenah has been making manhole covers for the city, nobody from the Chicago press had ever found a way to drive up there and write about the process. Not once. I was the first. That, to me, is something to be proud of, to be that guy, the guy who asked Cologuard, "Who opens the jar?" For many subjects, I'm the only one who wrote a particular story in the Chicago press over the past 40 years — the social lives of transvestites. A factory making table pads. What it's like to visit a dominatrix. The fact that nobody has written before, or since, and no reader was waiting for the answer, isn't a reason to pause. It's a reason to hurry forward. A plaudit. Icing on the cake.

    Does that help, Bill? Because if you don't find this stuff interesting, nobody is putting a gun to your heads. As I sometimes tell people who complain: But I don't write this for people who don't like it. There must be stuff you like. Go find that. Because I'm certainly not changing to suit the displeased.

 

Enjoy the national museums while they're still here

     Once upon a time, the Sun-Times had a jazz critic and an opera critic, a book editor and a TV reviewer. All those experts, that passion and specialized knowledge, were washed away in the endless internet storm. Now their titles seem wild indulgences plucked from the deep past, something out of Louis XIV France: the keeper of the king's slipper, the reviewer of rock 'n' roll concerts.
     I don't believe we ever had a museum critic. A shame, in a city like Chicago. I think I could step away from this general interest column hamster wheel and happily devote three days a week apprising you of what's up at the Art Institute, the Museum of Contemporary Art, the Field Museum, That Rich Guy in Florida Whose Name Sticks in My Throat Museum of Science and Industry, and all the lesser lights: the radiant National Museum of Mexican Art in Pilsen, the museum formerly know as the Oriental Institute. And on and on.
     When I was in Washington, D.C., as much as we enjoyed unpacking my son and daughter-in-law and tending, though never jiggling or kissing their new baby, my wife and I would occasionally slip away for a few hours to give the new parents some alone time. Believe it or not, as helpful we certainly were, they never once grabbed us by the lapels and implored, "No no, please stay!"
     First stop was the National Portrait Gallery, an underappreciated wonderland. The good news is the lobotomy that the current administration seems intent on inflicting upon our cultural institutions has not yet manifested itself here. One of the first portraits I saw was of Opal Lee, "the grandmother of Juneteenth," hanging in the entrance hall. I imagine it'll be crated in some warehouse in suburban Maryland next time we visit, replaced by a black velvet painting of Kid Rock. The exhibit of Civil War portraits was so fascinating, my wife and I almost never made it further.
     But I was interested in checking out the "America's Presidents" gallery.
     "I want to see if they're all Trump," I said.
     The other 44 predecessors are still there, starting with Gilbert Stuart's full length George Washington portrait. The past can both comfort and distress, but I've been definitely groping toward the former. I paused a long time before Chester Arthur, not one of history's favorites: He took over after James Garfield was shot by a disappointed office seeker.
     "Though Arthur had long favored this 'spoils' system, he endorsed the Pendleton Civil Service Act (1883)," the placard noted, "which created competitive examination for some federal positions and offered protections from partisan discrimination."
     The president giveth, the president taketh away.
     Arthur also signed the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, "the first significant law restricting immigration."
     There would be more to come, a welcome reminder that few jaw-dropping lapses of today are worse than what once passed as ordinary. We're running backward, true, but at least to a place we know how to escape. We've done it before.
     Another day, I popped over to the Hirshhorn Museum, and am glad I did.
     In 2021, the Hirshhorn gave Glen Ellyn native-done-good Laurie Anderson a room, which she painted with slogans and figures, white on black. I spent awhile reading the pithy (and oblique) Andersonian aphorisms.
     "Books are the way the dead talk to the living" and "If you think technology will solve your problems, then you don't understand technology — AND you don't understand your problems." I smiled seeing one — "I dreamed I had to take a test in a Dairy Queen on another planet" — a longer version of a phrase she had on a piece of magnetic tape on a violin bow, played in concert to great effect.

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"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..."

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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.

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