R.J. Grunts at 50: cheating time with burgers

Rich Melman, front, and his family at R.J. Grunts in 2006.

     Allison Hall sounds like a girl’s name, but is not in fact a person. It’s a building, a residence hall on the south campus at Northwestern University. All-female, when I attended school there in the late 1970s. But in the basement, food service was provided. Undergraduates from nearby dorms would troop over for our cold cheeseburgers and slices of bland pizza and all the chocolate milk we could drink, which was a lot.
     Except on Sundays. On Sundays, the food service at Allison and across campus shut down, I’m not sure why. So cafeteria workers could thank the Lord, perhaps. Or to force students from under the wing of academia, out into the mean streets of Evanston to forage for ourselves. Part of the education.
     Or not. I seem to recall a lot of big coffee cups filled with several servings of Quaker Apple & Cinnamon Instant Oatmeal. Though we did also grab cheeseburgers at The Hut or, if we were feeling celebratory, head over to brunch at Fritz That’s It.
     Another odd name. Fritz was the second restaurant begun by Rich Melman, who would go on to a legendary career as the most popular Chicago restaurateur with his Lettuce Entertain You Enterprises. Fritz was food as fun, and offered something new and exciting: a salad bar. The one at Fritz had not only the usual bowls of iceberg lettuce and mounds of shredded cheese, but cream cheese with chocolate chips, and graham crackers to spread it on. Decadence.
     Plus caviar. I can still see my 18-year-old self, piling a Ritz cracker with the salty black caviar from the salad bar at Fritz and just staring at it, held six inches from my nose, marveling, agog that I, Neil Steinberg, a schmendrick with a bowl haircut from Berea, Ohio, was now gorging on caviar on the periphery of a major metropolis with my similarly blessed pals, skyrockets one and all, fuses lit, about to go whizzing toward unimaginable greatness.
     Restaurants are little stages upon which we live our little lives. And one of the incalculable losses of COVID-19, along with the 600,000 dead and the jobs vanished, weddings scrubbed and the trips not taken are all the meals, communal and solitary, savored and wolfed down, luxe and modest, that we did not eat in all the restaurants that were shuttered, some permanently.

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Flashback 2013: "Shifting sands mark art’s moment in time"

     "I was here," I said, pausing, as my son and I walked north on Wabash Avenue last week, past the Soka Gakkai International-USA Buddhist Center. Years ago. But why? I remembered a room full of people, chanting sutras. And I remember the year and season, oddly enough. It was the summer of 2013, just before I began this blog. The column had been suspended, and I took to plunging out into the city, looking for things to write about, determined to keep my legs churning until my irked masters sorted out their emotions. The ... Second Presbyterian Church was nearby, and I was here because the organist ... was a reader? No, I found that out when I revived. The church was being refurbished. I learned about the organist when I got there. A joy and privilege, to sit in the empty sanctuary, while Bach thundered out. I'll have to dig out that column sometimes. So I must have popped into the Buddhist Center on my way there, to take a look.
     Did anything get into print? Not that I can tell. But looking for something, I found this.
   

Joe Mangrum    

     Art is work, if you’re lucky. Hard work, sometimes. Sweat drips off the nose of Joe Mangrum as he crawls on the floor to dip his fingers into a clear plastic bowl, draw out a fistful of brightly colored sand, then dribble out arcing lines of purple. He stands up, crouches down, kneels — cushioned by a pair of industrial kneepads — then is on his feet again. Over and over. For eight hours.

     Born in St. Louis, Mangrum came to Chicago to attend the School of the Art Institute. He graduated in 1991, lives in Brooklyn now, and has done nearly 600 of these sand paintings on the streets of New York, where oblivious striding businessmen, attention fixed on phones, and untethered toddlers often make abrupt alterations to his work.
     “You have to be aware,” he says. “You have to have eyes in the back of your head and your guard up to prevent that. Some days 30, 50 people walk into my work. It’s not something I can get upset about.”
     Not a worry on this day. His canvas is a 17-by-12-foot grid of tiled floor, safely set off the beaten path between a Gateway Newstand and one corner of the Alonti Market Cafe in 300 S. Riverside Plaza, a sprawling office building on the Chicago River, south of Union Station.
     Artists appreciate wealthy patrons — they did in Roman times and they do today — and while Mangrum sometimes works for donations from passersby in New York, he was brought to Chicago by the real estate firm that manages 300 S. Riverside, the idea being his work will interest building tenants. Mangrum drove here with his wife, Deborah, and Papillon pup Pancho, toting 500 pounds of Sandtastik play sand in all 35 colors the company makes, including “Ultra Violet” — his doing. “They were coming up with a new color and asked me to name it, because I was buying so much sand,” he says.
     (“He’s awesome,” Sandtastik general manager Bert Sabourin says, from its Ontario, Canada, headquarters, confirming the story. “If he needed a special color, we’d do it for him. The work he does is phenomenal. To put that much effort in and then sweep it up.”)
     Not that this painting meets that fate, not yet. Sand paintings are thought of — if they are thought of at all — as a Buddhist commentary on the transitory nature of life. Rather than attempt to preserve an oil painting through the centuries, under the illusion that it will remain “forever,” they create gorgeous sand mandalas, utter a prayer and sweep them away.
     That isn’t what Mangrum is doing with his work, which is set to remain in place through the summer.
     “I don’t call them ‘mandalas,’ simply because it’s a very culturally specific term,” he says. “What I’m doing is drawing from all these ancient templates but then mixing it up with my own contemporary work — I just call them sand paintings so that people from all over the world can relate and not put it in what I call the ‘Eastern Philosophy Box.’ ”
     As Buddhists do with mandalas though, he starts in the center — a single, dime-sized dollop of yellow, bright as an egg yolk. He builds out, ribbons of orange, of purple, paired with yellow. Mangrum has no set design, but builds from images in his head. “It’s all improvised,” he says. “I put down a couple dots and circles and start branching out.”
     There are no sketches, no preliminary design. All he knew beforehand is he’d create “some organic round shape that has a certain organic symmetry to it.” Everything from “op art, one of many influences ranging from ancient designs all the way to sci-fi, ‘Avatar,’ Dr. Seuss, quantum physics.”
     Even the most savvy artist can’t sell sand poured in the street, however, so Mangrum creates limited edition photographic prints of his work. He also has been commissioned to do his work all over the world, from Beijing to Copenhagen to San Francisco. Mangrum has appeared on “Sesame Street” and in the Corcoran Gallery Rotunda in Washington, D.C. He also does weddings.
     As with all artists, Mangrum’s journey has been serpentine. He waited tables, worked construction. “I’ve worn a dozen different hats,” he says. Initially, he created his images out of found objects — leaves and flower petals and seeds. He didn’t start working in sand until 2006, when he had a painting to make but no materials at hand. And while he distances himself from more spiritual sand paintings, he does see his work as, “a metaphor for life. We all pass away and regenerate, spring into fall, fall into winter, then spring anew again.”
     While here, he also created two works at 540 W. Madison. He will return to 300 S. Riverside Plaza to talk about his art and answer questions from 1 to 2 p.m. today.
     The building roped Mangrum’s art off with stanchions. The day after he created it, most people stream to work — 300 S. Riverside Plaza is home to JP Morgan Chase, AIG, National Futures Association, among others — and pass by without noticing. One in 10 turns a head or slows stride. And a few rare individuals actually stop, most taking photos with their phones — as if that were permanent.
     But Derick Evans, who works in the building’s messenger center, does stop, and stands there, beaming.
     “It’s magnificent,” he says. “How does he have it all in his head? It’s a gift, just a gift. I love it. Just goes to show what’s with this human being. This was not something you are taught. This is something you are born with.”

    —Originally published in the Sun-Times, June 13, 2013

Joe Mangrum still does his distinctive sand art. You can find his home page here.

Guns a danger to their owners most of all

     Don’t buy a gun.
     Or do — it’s your choice. I don’t want you to immediately clutch at yourself and collapse to the floor, writhing and moaning how wronged you are. I’m so tired of that. Grow up. My saying “Don’t buy a gun” isn’t a command from the ooo-scary, all-powerful media.
     Rather, it’s just a suggestion. From me. A friendly suggestion. Please don’t buy a gun. Why? They’re dangerous, for starters. And apparently confusing, because the reasons that people typically offer for buying guns — to protect themselves and guard their families — are actually the top reasons not to buy a gun. Gun ownership imperils you and your family.
     How? There’s suicide, for starters. Two-thirds of gun deaths are self-inflicted. I don’t want to start throwing numbers at you, since people are flummoxed already. Be assured the odds of killing yourself leap when you buy a gun.
     Why isn’t this better known? Imagination trips people up. It’s far easier for men to imagine Freddy Krueger breaking through the door, while much harder to imagine themselves rashly deciding to end it all on some dark night of the soul.
     Guess which happens more often? It isn’t that you can’t kill yourself without a gun. Just that guns are such efficient killing machines. Three percent of those who attempt suicide with drugs succeed; 85 percent of those using a gun do.
     I know I’m applying rational thought to an area of emotion and frenzy. In the set piece fantasy of male power and safety, guns are a masturbatory aid. Why else would some guys get so worked up over them?
     Guns are part of the whole Republican fear junkie scramble. Not only the fear of somebody coming through the door. But fear that guns might get taken away, a terror that gun companies profit by stoking. A reader sent me a laughable letter from the National Rifle Association with “NOTICE OF GUN CONFISCATION” in huge letters on the envelope.

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Flashback 2005: "Ghost in the machine."

     There's something awe-inspiring, reverent, almost holy, about our first encounters with hugely successful corporations. Maybe an innocence, the berry-smeared tribesman, looking up from the rainforest at the first thwack of helicopter blades cutting the air. I remember thinking it was silly to name an online book store "Amazon." What do books have to do with a Brazilian River?

      Do you remember your first visit to Costco? I didn't, but then ran across this.

     For thousands of years, mankind struggled to get enough stuff—food, clothing, a few rude utensils.
     Now, abundance overwhelms us; another of life's little jokes. Every month, the news features another enormous meal-in-a-sandwich, some greasy, dripping, 1,500-calorie horror, and our reaction is half revulsion, half "gimme!"
     Then, there's Costco, the bulk discount club. I had never been to a Costco. "It'll be fun!" chirped my wife, urging me to join the family on a Saturday morning outing. Grumblingly, I went.
     It was worse than I could have imagined—an enormous space, staggeringly high ceiling, all white light and crisscrossing beams. So big it was like being outside. Wide aisles crammed with crates of food, unnatural double boxes of Cheerios, ketchup by the gallon, massed shoppers inching giant carts past one another, the carts so laden that shoppers had to lean really hard against them before slowly they began to roll. My face set in a kind of numbness that deepened as my wife happily shopped and my children ran from table to table, scarfing free samples: flavored water and power bars and chunks of cooked salmon.
     I was revolted to my core. It was too big, the juxtapositions too odd -- dinghies next to DVD players next to soda pop next to girls' dresses. The world unmoored, the proper order jumbled, dogs and cats lying together breeding unnatural horrors. I glared at my wife. All her fault.
     "I hate you," I wanted to say, "for being excited about this, for thrilling to giant packages of 18 rolls of paper towels."
     But that seemed, oh, hostile, and would have put a damper on the weekend. What I actually did say was, "Perhaps if I were in a different frame of mind I would appreciate this as much as you do."
     And then my perspective shifted. In a moment. The boys ran to me—they need permission to take each sample, I suppose to avoid lawsuits. One table offered packs of gum, and as I approached to give my nod, I saw what was being promoted was not gum, but Steven H. Jesser, Attorney at Law. He was a middle-aged man in a blue suit, hair thinning, Thomas Dewey mustache going gray. Jesser was handing out business cards and gum, offering "full-service business legal representation" right there, in the Costco, next to the wind chimes, birdbaths and potted peonies. An initial telephone consultation was available without charge.
     I introduced myself, and observed that lawyers are by nature proud, and some might feel a chill at the idea of drumming up business in a suburban Costco.
     "I have no shame in coming here," he said. "If people think it's demeaning, so be it."
     I shared my view of the place.
     "I like Costco," said Jesser, a Chicago-Kent College of Law alumni. "I've shopped in the finest stores, and it has a nice atmosphere—I've run into judges here. It's enjoyable to come here. I am not too proud to shop here because the prices are sensational, and everybody loves a bargain."
     That they do. Like a good lawyer, he had made his case, and I walked away impressed, my spirits lifted. Although I wasn't sure if it was because I had witnessed a quirky manifestation of the human spirit defying the deadening effect of materialism in bulk, or merely because I had found a way to get work done, and working makes me happy.
           —Originally published in the Sun-Times, April 6, 2005

Norwood Park Notes: Embracing Neophilia

    One mark of a good writer is knowing when to raise questions and when to answer them. In today's post, Norwood Park Bureau Chief Caren Jeskey fills some holes in her resume.

     Denial is not just a river in Egypt. It’s an excellent coping tool too. In the biz, we used to call it a “defense.” A gentler and less stigmatizing way of talking about a so-called defense, or “resistance” to self-awareness, is to view some human behaviors as adaptive coping mechanisms. Why not deny, deflect and avoid things that bring us down? Is it better to dwell on all that is horrible in the world? All that is going wrong? That’s easy to do, especially in these times of mayhem and exhaustion.
     My personal mayhem circa Summer 2021 involves a very painful broken toe, a weak internet connection (and I work from home), and planes that continue to wake me up a couple times before my alarm goes off. Have you tried to find a decent apartment rental in Chicago lately? Let’s just say it’s not fun. This leaves me feeling ungrounded and worn down.
     What’s the solution? Mindfulness. Getting through stressful moments with grace, and savoring calm and joyful moments. Putting one foot in front of the other and taking each day one hour at a time. Knowing it’s OK to not feel OK sometimes, and reminding oneself “this too shall pass” when the worry kicks in.
     Today was my beloved eight year old nephew’s birthday. I originally moved to Austin in April of 2014 to be her (yes, her), nanny. (Please read this if you have questions about gender pronouns). She was 9 months old. I had texted my sister who was living in Austin during a polar vortex to say "Hey. How are you?” She said “not so good. The nanny quit with 2 weeks notice.” I said “well, why don’t I move down there and take care of him [we referred to Anthony as him then] until you find a new nanny?”
     She agreed, and within three weeks I was there. Arrivederci polar vortex! Farewell 6’7” Green Mill bouncer who lived in the apartment above me and laughed in my face when I asked him to please be quieter when he came in during the wee hours of the morning! Farewell job that hired me with a bait and switch! (They hired me to work from home, told me after orientation I had to go into the office in the West Loop during the polar vortex, and then dropped the big bomb: I’d have to drive 200 miles in one day to visit clients in rural Illinois. And I did not have a car).
     I sold and gave away almost everything I owned with the help of friends who swooped in and dug in to get me out of there. It would have been impossible without their help. (Thank you Ellen, Harry, Bob, Tara, Mom & Dad, from the bottom of my heart). I stored some boxes and a few pieces of furniture at my folks’ place. (Sorry guys, I know you want your space back soon).
     I arrived in Austin with a couple of suitcases. What I thought would be a few months of caring for precious little Anthony turned into two and a half years of living with my sister, brother-in- law and my favorite little person. I do not have children and the closest thing I will have to feeling that I’d definitely jump in front of a truck to save someone happened when I met Anthony. Anthony was the easiest child I’ve ever taken care of. We’d spend the first part of the day on a porch swing in the backyard, snuggling and listening to doves as Anthony would practice standing. We spent shoeless (and for Anthony, clothing-less) days in the yard, we checked out all of the cool animals at the Austin Zoo (a rescue sanctuary) and hopped on the train that circled the zoo a few times, much to Anthony’s delight. We biked around Arbor Trail in South Austin, and spent hours running around grassy fields at the Ladybird Johnson Wildflower Center. Anthony would call out “I am running through a field!” That sheer delight warmed my heart to the nth degree.

     When Anthony sees me now—and we’ve seen each other five or six times since I’ve been back (13 days), she beams with the brightest eyes ever and exclaims “Peaches!!!!” Her nickname for me.
     Isn’t this what life is all about? It’s not about the travels, meals at Alinea. It’s all about the shining eyes of a child, and touching family and friends again. It’s also about the heartfelt hugs my parents and I have been sharing.

     They are not getting any younger, and are my main reason for coming home. I missed them during that long COVID year. It helped me realize what’s most important to me. Family, friends, and a solid career. That will all happen for me in Chicago once I get settled.
     Neophilia is love of or enthusiasm for what is new or novel. Change is good. I keep telling myself this is true, in this time of strange uncertainty where change is the only constant. The inter-webs are peppered with research that shows exposing oneself to novel situations, rather than being a dogmatic creature of habit, seems to improve memory and brain function. Well, that’s a relief. There is nothing ruttish about my life right now.
     Living back in Chicago is not what I expected. Nothing feels the same. I am a different person. Being back in a city where there are happy and not so happy memories on many corners has me regressing at times. The pandemic has changed things. 
     This week I nursed a client through a suicidal day and got them to safety. Neil lost his cat Gizmo. Big things are happening all around us. How do we live with the chaos and still find peace within? I will keep finding my ways, and I hope you find yours.

Post-COVID Wrigley Field looking good

     The man sitting across from us on the ‘L’ Wednesday wore an official Cubs pinstripe jersey, open, with shorts; the uniform of easily half the passengers on the 12 noon Skokie Swift heading to Howard. Beside him, a girl, 4, had made a different fashion choice: a pink tutu paired with a raccoon mask.
     The man met my eye.
     “So nice everything’s fun again,” he said. Usually I’m the one making uninvited public overtures, addressing strangers, commenting on whatever is going on like a Greek chorus.
     I agreed. After 14 months away, at least, it felt great just being on a train. The fact we were heading to a Cubs game was icing on the cake.
     Regular readers know that baseball is not ordinarily my idea of fun. But my younger son had said, “We should go to a Cubs game.” A suggestion I promptly ignored, as the savvy parent will do when optional activities involving the expenditure of of time, effort and money are proposed by children. But he said it a second time, cannily attaching a specific. “We should go to the Cubs game Wednesday; they play the Padres.”
     My immediate unfiltered thought demonstrates how truly out of the swim I am, baseball-wise.
     “That’s an expansion team.” I thought, pouting. Meaning, “not quite worth seeing.” The Padres started playing in 1969. Since then, they’ve won more pennants than the Cubs over the same period (two). They’re the best team in the National League now.
     The last Cubs game I attended was the Fourth of July, 2016, for the reason I normally attend games: a pal gave me tickets. This time I bought four good upper deck seats for $45.92 apiece from a season ticket holder friend. I knew it wouldn’t involve him handing over four pasteboard ducats in an envelope. But I didn’t expect to have to download an app (MLB Ballpark) and fiddle with it for an hour. Eventually, utterly bolloxed and certain no relaxation at the ballpark could possibly counterbalance the frustration of doing this, I thrust my phone at my older son who, I kid you not, glanced at it, swiped it once with his thumb, the tickets magically appearing, and handed the phone back. “You need to refresh,” he said. Tell me about it.

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Flashback 2002: "What I did on my summer vacation."

     My colleague Mark Brown bought a kayak, and announced on Facebook that he is looking for someone to enjoy the sport with him off Montrose Beach. My first, unfiltered thought was along the lines of, "No Mark! Don't! Stop!" Then I realized he already had bought the thing. I began to wonder if he mentioned the kayak intentionally, to mock me. But that can't be. He doesn't remember this column. But I do, and offer it up to him, and you, as a cautionary tale. No kayaks.

     This summer we had fun. We drove to Put-in-Bay. That is in Ohio. We hiked and played ball. We drank beer. It was fun! Except for the nearly drowning part. That was not fun.
     (Let's see: one, two, three, four, five . . . 36 words. Drat! Nine hundred more to go.)
     Whoops, sorry. Couldn't help myself. Fresh from vacation, with an autumnal coolness in the air and school starting soon (next week, in the leafy suburban paradise of Northbrook, where classes begin later because our kids don't skip out as much as other children do) the traditional first-day-of-school assignment bubbled up from somewhere deep within the recesses of my brain.
     Frankly, after so many years of vigorously suppressing those choppy, sing-song rhythms of elementary school, it was something of a joy to let them out again, bringing back memories of flip-top desks incised with graffiti and dotted with rounded bumps of dried Elmer's glue . . .
     Where were we? Put-in-Bay. For those who've never been (and I imagine most haven't; it isn't exactly Disney World) Put-in-Bay is an island north of Sandusky, a mix of Fort Lauderdale boat party and Colonial Williamsburg. The Battle of Lake Erie was fought there in 1813, and there's an enormous monument run by the National Park Service, right next to a strip of delightfully cheesy bars and burger joints.
     We stayed with my friend Jim and his family at their cottage on the shore. I've been going there most summers since I was 17, when Jim and I and a bunch of high school pals toted our skateboards there, to what was then his father's cottage. Now it's his and, one weekend a year, ours too. My friends tend to wind themselves into snits, storm off for reasons I never quite grasp, and never come back. They don't, typically, throw their family vacation homes open to me.
     Jim does. Our island agenda has changed with time, marriage and children, from long winery visits (Ohio wine tastes bad, but only the first bottle) to ritualized trips up the monument and to the carousel.
     Some things never change: Frosty's for pizza. Sitting in the battered easy chairs, sipping beer and gazing at the lake. The late night walk to town, where Jim and I pass through the barroom crowds of sunburnt, post-collegiate youngsters, looking for a spot to sit, invisible as ghosts.
     I suppose very soon my family will have to strike out on more ambitious trips—the typical Grand Canyon, Washington, D.C., Mount Rushmore circuit. We've been holding off, I suppose, until the boys are of an age when the experience won't disappear with memories of diapers and the womb.
     It is somewhat flawed, I know, to weigh the value of your vacations against whether your kids will remember them. Good times have a worth, even if forgotten.
     Next summer, I'm sure, we'll strike out somewhere farther than Ohio. I have very strong memories of the trip my family took to Washington, D.C., when I was 7—the FBI agent firing that tommy gun in the tour, the White House, the wonders of the Smithsonian. We'll go, and hope the experience isn't too diminished by anti-terrorism measures ("If you peer through those tank traps, razor wire coils and concrete barriers, boys, you'll catch a glimpse of the Capitol . . .").
     Of course we'll still go to Put-in-Bay, though sticking more closely to the traditional activities. Which brings me back to the near-drowning. This year, I actually got out of my chair and tried one of the ocean-going kayaks that Jim and his wife, Laura, bought for themselves.
     Jim's a tall guy, and had the bigger kayak, and I'm shorter, though rounder, so I jammed myself into Laura's kayak, which is like wearing a belt that is too tight and has a 17-foot fiberglass boat attached.
     We set out into the lake, heading around the coast, toward the monument, the sight of which must have awed me so much that I flipped the kayak over. It happened very suddenly--one moment, fine, then time for an "Oh, no!" before finding myself underwater, upside down.
     On ABC's "Wide World of Sports," guys were always flipping this way and that in their kayaks, in rocky white water rivers no less. Not so easy in real life. I was in deep water, thank goodness, but my kayak wasn't flipping anywhere. What I should have done is shucked the thing, putting both hands on the boat and shimmying out. Instead, I tried twisting my body to get my face above the water—the air was right there, close. I could see it, a big bright whiteness just a foot of lake away.
     My first try went nowhere. As did my second. A lot of time seemed to be passing, though it was probably only 10 or 20 seconds. Time crawls when you're upside down, underwater. I reflected on how this was a particularly ignoble way to go—held underwater by a kayak, drowned, literally killed by my own fat ass.
     Mustering all my resources, I finally pried myself out and bobbed sputtering and gasping to the surface. Jim, to his credit, did not laugh. I dragged the boat to shore, dumped the water, then paddled gingerly back to Jim's cottage and beached the deathtrap, taking special care not to flip myself into the rocks as I approached shore. I hurried up to the cottage, cracked open a beer, and settled myself into the battered easy chair in the living room, fixing my eyes upon the flat blue horizon.
                        —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Aug. 30, 2002