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."

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Thinking about memorials

        Just as predictions of the future are far more accurate reflections of the time in which they are made — the hopes and fears of the moment — than they are any kind of augury of what is to come, so monuments embody the era of their creation in a way that rivals the events they are supposed to commemorate.
     This came home to me when I noticed that the cornerstone for the Jefferson Memorial was set by Franklin Roosevelt in 1939. Suddenly all the warnings about tyranny flashed in stark relief; this marble temple isn't about protecting the rights of 18th century Virginia planters, but about steeling our noodle national spine against Hitler.
      That is most clearly seen in the Franklin D. Roosevelt Memorial, a vast garden of large stones and waterfalls. I remember the controversy when it was built — disability rights advocates complained that FDR's wheelchair was largely obscured by his Navy cape, while his partisans countered that he would not want to be portrayed that way, defined by a disability he struggled to hide. 

       I wrote a column, which I'll have to dig up, pointing out that the wheelchair wasn't exactly a state secret — H.L. Mencken wrote in 1932 that the man was too much of a cripple to be president. And FDR himself mentioned his condition, in a speech before Congress no less, when he apologized for not standing because of the steel braces on his legs.

    (Our gossip columnist, Irv Kupcinet weighed in, that when he was a boy, he didn't know FDR had polio and I, with the cruelty of youth, observed that when Kup was young, FDR didn't have polio, having contracted it in 1921, when Kup was 9). 
     You can also see his hands arranged where his omnipresent cigarette should have been — I was tempted to buy a pack and tuck one in, and certainly wouldn't be the first.

Vietnam Memorial's trio of soldiers.

     The memorial was dedicated in 1997, with an additional statue of FDR, clearly in his wheelchair, added as a sop to activists in 2001, the way a statue trio of soldiers was tacked onto Maya Lin's Vietnam Memorial for those who couldn't bear to have the disaster commemorated with a pure marble scar in the earth. 

     I was prompted to check when the Americans with Disabilities Act was passed — 1990 — as the FDR Memorial is a tribute to accommodating people with disabilities as much as it recounts his three and a twelfth terms in office. No stairs, little bronze models of the statues for blind people to feel, plus bas relief pillars and walls, with the story in icon form. And Braille. And recorded messages. 
     This isn't a complaint, mind you. I'm a big tent kind of guy — curb cuts benefit us all — and  have many friends and neighbors who struggle with various physical challenges. As will I someday. And you, and everybody else, sooner or later. I think it's cool that Northbrook's Prairie Grass Cafe has periodic low "sensory-friendly" dining hours so people on the autistic spectrum can enjoy a restaurant meal without over-stimulation. That's both kindness and good business.

World War II Memorial

    Of course once you start assessing monuments as creations of their time, the tendency is to keep going. At first it's easy to dismiss the widely scorned World War II Memorial — the Washington Post called it a "hodgepodge of cliche and Soviet-style pomposity" with "the emotional impact of a slab of granite" though I settled on "horrendous" — as a product of our cretinous president, George W. Bush, since it was unveiled in 2004. 

     But that's unfair, since it was years in the planning, and Bill Clinton was president while the mortuary plaza of wreaths, headstones, stars, and an aviary worth of eagles was being designed. I can only suggest that Clinton had better things to do than micromanage monuments. Though he did break a string of eight consecutive presidents who wore a uniform in World War II (nudging LBJ into the fold since he suited up as a congressman riding along on a bombing mission). So maybe the president famous for caring didn't care too much when it came to this.

Martin Luther King Memorial

      I'd mentioned my monument theory to my wife, and at the Martin Luther King Memorial, she asked what it said about its time of creation — the first decade of the 21 century. The best I could come up with, on the spot, was that by the 2000s it was all too clear that civil rights had been only a partial achievement, a work in progress, and you can see that in the way King emerges halfway from his stone of hope, itself freshly quarried from the "mountain of despair" directly behind him. We aren't finished.
     The Lincoln Memorial was unveiled in 1922, a few years before the Klan was boldly marching up Pennsylvania Avenue (the centennial is next month for those who want to bake a cake). It certainly doesn't reflect Lincoln's era in the way a more contemporary monument does — if you've ever gone inside the Soldiers' and Sailors' Monument at Public Square in downtown Cleveland, dedicated in 1894, it feels as if you've stepped into the 1860s. 
      The Marine warfighting manual refers to the "fog of battle," and lately I've recast that phrase into "the fog of the present." It's very hard to see outside our current moment, especially forward into the future, but even back into the past. We're too biased by how we are now. Monuments help us look backward, to a limited degree. Although I have to use this opportunity to put a plug in for the FDR Memorial, if only for one of the better sculptures of a dog on public display.
    "These Republic leaders have not been content with attacks on me or my wife or my sons," I announced, in my best imitation of Roosevelt's plumy, patrician voice, "they now include my little dog Fala." He'd been accused of sending a Navy destroyer to retrieve his beloved Scottish terrier. 
     My wife smiled, indulgently, and said nothing.

DEI at DC memorials ripe for purging

The statue of Thomas Jefferson in his Washington memorial. Built during World War II, the memorial highlights diversity, equality and the need to always oppose tyranny

     WASHINGTON — The statue in the Jefferson Memorial is 19 feet tall, but it's the words carved in stone around the bronze figure that are truly monumental.
      Such as these, from Jefferson's Declaration of Independence:
      "WE HOLD THESE TRUTHS TO BE SELF-EVIDENT, THAT ALL MEN ARE CREATED EQUAL."
     "Again with the equality," I thought, forcing back a smile. And the diversity — "all men"? Really?
      Can't have that. Not in 2025 America, where the same government that went to the expense and bother of erecting this palace to DEI is now scrubbing references to unfavored groups from official websites and giving certain people the bum's rush — out of the military, out of the country.
     How long will this offense be tolerated now that intolerance is the latest dance craze? Envision a trio of Three Stooges administration lackeys. The same crew who flagged for removal from Department of Defense pages images of the the Enola Gay  — the plane that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima — because, ewww, "gay."
      Imagine them showing up at the Jefferson Memorial in a blare of calliope music, a jumble of ladders and drop cloths and eye pokes, splattering plaster as they efface that forbidden "EQUAL" and slap on a more acceptable sentiment along the lines of "ALL MEN ARE CREATED ... MANLY."
     "Nyuk nyuk nyuk, Moe, we soitenly are!"
      Their next stop would have to be the Lincoln Memorial, where the Gettysburg Address covers one wall and goes straight into the DEI weeds: "FOUR SCORE AND SEVEN YEARS AGO" (let's revert to lower case. These memorial caps look fine in marble but scream in print) "our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal."
      "Alllllll men"? Yikes! Even immigrants who came here seeking refuge? Can't they be unceremoniously bundled in a van by masked police and shipped to East Africa?
      Or men who identify as women? Of course they can be cashiered from the armed forces because ... well ... I'm not sure what the excuse is. They make our leader uncomfortable, perhaps.
      Meanwhile, my friends on the left will drill down on "men," pointing out that women weren't included in all this hoo-ha about freedom. Flash: There was no electricity, either.
      Are these really our choices? History as George Washington chopping down the cherry tree. "Father, I cannot tell a lie, I did it with my little hatchet." Or history as Thomas Jefferson, rapist and enslaver, who also did some other stuff?
      Does it have to be celebration or revulsion? Can't we have the full spectrum? Glory and shame?
      When I wasn't minding (though not jiggling or kissing) my new granddaughter in her new home, I strolled over to memorials. Not just the Jefferson and the Lincoln, but Martin Luther King Jr., who of course was caught speaking publicly about "dignity, equality and freedom." (I imagine the MAGA stooges will plaster that over with transcripts from J. Edgar Hoover's surveillance tapes.)
      The underappreciated and thoughtful Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial — contrast it with the explosion of wreaths, stars and eagles that is the insipid World War II Memorial — seems practically ripped from the headlines.

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Uber is for the weak

Young people aboard the LaGuardia Link.

  

      "We're the oldest people on this bus by 30 years," I said, then gave a second look around and revised. "Maybe by 40 years."

     It was true. Everyone else on the LaGuardia Link Q70 seemed in their mid-20s. A time when money tends to be tight.
     Money isn't tight for me; at least we can afford ride shares and taxis. But I can also do math. And spending $111 on an Uber from LaGuardia to Jersey City, a trip that would take about an hour with traffic, didn't make sense. Not when you can make the same trip for $7.75 — the free shuttle from the airport to 75th Street, the $2.50 subway down to the World Trade Center, and then five bucks or so — I didn't even take notice if the exact price — for the PATH train under the Hudson to Exchange Place.
      Sure, it took closer to two hours, with the pause at the Oculus Starbucks so my wife could grab a revivifying cappuccino. But we weren't in a rush.
      I've enjoy taking public transportation. Great way to become familiar with a place. I spent weeks in cities from Tokyo to Paris and never gotten in a cab or, more recently, called an Uber. (Not that I'm condemning the practice; I take Uber too, when necessary. The headline is a glib brag, not a blanket condemnation you need to get agitated about). 

      Sometimes public transportation is a challenge —  last year I was offended that there was no direct public transportation route from Boston to Boxborough, so cobbled a complex public transit odyssey together. It was almost an adventure. Even when publications are paying. I don't have many rules when traveling, but I seldom take a cab when a bus works, or a plane when there's a train going the same place. 

     I remember going to cover the 2016 Republican National Convention in Cleveland. I checked into my motel — nothing fancy here at the old Sun-Times — and then got in the queue for the bus, smiling quietly to myself, thinking about a colleague who ran up nearly a grand in taxi bills, supposedly, in London and almost lost his job over it. 

     "You'll just have to find another reason to fire me," I thought, paying my fare. Plus there was a captive audience of talkative Clevelanders waiting for me there.

    When there is no public transportation, there is always walking. We had a magnificent lunch at the Old Ebbitt Grill in Washington. When we finished, we considered calling an Uber. It was hot, and a half hour walk back to where we were staying. We walked.

Nothing distracts like a new baby

     My wife asked if I wanted to cover the mirrors. A Jewish tradition in a house of mourning. At first I said no. Many pressing practical concerns had been raised by my mother suddenly dying that morning, but her soul becoming trapped in a mirror wasn't among them.
      Then I immediately changed my mind and agreed. Rituals comfort. The tradition had been retrofitted for modern times, in that nimble, adaptive way religion employs, scrambling to stay both timeless and relevant. Now covering mirrors is supposed to discourage vanity among the bereaved. I'm all for that. We could all use less vanity. Imagine where our once-proud nation would today be if fewer people were consumed by unchecked self-regard.
      "Suddenly" is the wrong word. My mother had actually been steadily dying for years — ailment upon indignity upon deterioration. Every time I'd visit, I'd make sure to kiss her goodbye and tell her I love her because I really wasn't sure if I'd see her again. The last time, a week earlier, I'd gone to show her a photo of her newborn great-granddaughter.
      My mother, increasingly indifferent for the past few months, perked up, and even phoned her sisters, whom she'd uncharacteristically ignored, to share the happy news. We agreed that this was the most beautiful and perfect baby in the history of babies, and as soon as the tot could travel — probably at Thanksgiving — she would be personally presented for approval. Though I had my doubts of that ever happening, and stood in the doorway a long moment, just gazing at my mother, until I realized she was glaring back at me with a "what-are-you-looking-at-bub?" expression, and turned away.
      The next time I saw her she was dead, in bay 48 of the emergency room at Elmhurst Hospital. Not a moment I'd prepared for. I don't believe I actually turned to my wife and implored, "Do something!" But I certainly thought it. My mother sang as a young girl — on the radio, on television — and sang to us all our lives. Last month was the first time she didn't call on my birthday and sing "Happy Birthday to You," In those last few moments together, I sang a couple brief lullabies she'd sung to us: "Rock-a-Bye" and "My Bonnie," an odd Scottish dirge she's somehow turned into a bedtime song, speaking of retrofitting. But apt in its sense of loss and longing. "Bring back, bring back, bring back my Bonnie to me, to me."
      We went directly from the hospital to Golden Haven in Addison, where our parents lived. I told my father that his wife of 69 years had died. "How old was she?" he replied. I said 88, He nodded and observed that 88 is a good age, then let the matter drop. If he brings up the subject again, I plan to say that she went to the hospital, which is true, and leave off the rest. Who wants to re-discover, even vaguely, that his wife has died, over and over, every day, if not every hour?
      Jews get our own into the ground fast. My mother died on a Saturday, and was buried the following Wednesday. I'm not sure how we picked Shalom Memorial Park — that was my brother — but I admired how smoothly the whole process was handled. My mother had a keen eye for the mistakes of others, a trait I've inherited in full. But the only wrong aspect to the process in my view was there are no headstones jutting out of the ground — the Arlington Heights cemetery is a memorial garden, all bronze plaques, flush with the grass. When we drove through the place, I was uncomfortable with that absence, and considered insisting we find somewhere else, where she could have a granite tombstone.. But I decided to go with the flow, speaking of suppressing vanity, and not insist upon my own preference. Maybe covering those mirrors had an effect after all.

     The paper told me to take as much time off as I liked, and most of a week was consumed with planning the funeral and then holding it, removing her effects out of her apartment and donating them to charity.
     But in one of those examples of lucky timing that would look trite in fiction but life doesn't blush to serve up, 48 hours after we buried my mother, my wife and I flew to New York City to meet my new granddaughter, and help her parents pack up their apartment and move to a different city. Because merely having a baby isn't difficult enough.

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