""Who's God but us?"

Sister Rosemary Connelly and Terry Morrissey, the self-proclaimed
"Mayor of Misericordia."

Fate keeps delivering me into the hands of Sister Rosemary Connelly. I was trying to track down Mary Dempsey, the former Chicago Public Library commissioner, who happened to be volunteering that afternoon at Misericordia. So I phoned there, trying to find her, ended up on the line with Sister Rosemary and accepting her invitation to lunch. That's set off a chain of circumstance—almost against my will— that placed her and Misericordia atop the Esquire profile I wrote about Rahm Emanuel that will be out in a few days. In this case, I went to a Misericordia luncheon Tuesday, again, not because of Sister Rosemary, but to hear Amy Rule, the mayor's wife, speak, under the naive notion she might actually say something. She didn't. But Sister Rosemary sure did. 

     People love Sister Rosemary Connelly for a variety of reasons. For founding Misericordia, the city’s pre-eminent home for those with Down syndrome and other cognitive disabilities. For being its fierce advocate, fundraiser, cheerleader. For the act of singular bravery that helped create the whole thing 45 years ago.

     Her original mission was to care for disabled foundlings who were dumped by their distraught mothers on the doorsteps of Catholic churches. Then, when they turned 6, she was to hand them over to state care.

     When Sister Rosemary saw the kind of state-run hellholes she was expected to deliver her charges into, she refused. She disobeyed. She demanded the archdiocese do something, and it shrugged and gave her the newly shuttered Angel Guardian Orphanage, which became the 31-acre Misericordia home. After nearly 40 years of her stewardship, the place has the feel of a high-end golf resort without golf, or a Wisconsin resort hotel. Imagine The American Club in Kohler if every guest had a disability.

     But that isn’t why I like her.

    I like her because she isn’t afraid to talk. Sister Rosemary will tell you what’s on her mind.

     And no, not the phrase she repeats with such delight, quoting our mayor,"Sister, you scare me ..." then a word with more sting spelled in a newspaper than spelled aloud, so let's just say it's eight letters long, begins, "S-H-I" and ends "L-E-S-S."
     Not that line. But other things she says. If the state isn't paying its bill on time, as it often doesn't, she tells you. If one-size-fits-all activists clamor against Misericordia because it doesn't mesh with their fantasy that every disabled person would be happier living alone in an apartment, she says so.
     She said something Tuesday before 400 people at a fundraising lunch that I've never heard spoken before, never mind by a nun.
     And no, it wasn't individuals have "not just a right to life, but to a life worth living," a tossed-off line of hers with enough power to make the whole Right to Life movement a lot more palatable to a lot more people, though of course that would shift their focus from shaming women to helping children, and they don't seem eager to consider it.
     It wasn't that.
     Sister Rosemary was telling a story about a mother who called her in despair. "She was crying," Connelly recalled. "She said, 'I'm a single mother. I have a 15-year-old boy who can do nothing for himself, and he's too heavy for me to lift. The only place I'll ever bring him to is Misericordia.' And I said, 'I'm so, so sorry, we haven't any room.' "
     Misericordia has a 600-person waiting list. The mother said, "Please, just see him."
     "And I said, 'Oh, I don't want to see him,' " Connelly said. "He becomes real then. It becomes dangerous." A tough cookie, she is, when need be. But of course she saw him.
     "It was heartbreaking," she told the crowd. "She could no longer lift him. She was worrying about his future. She didn't know what she was going to do. And I very piously told her that he was God's child, even before hers, and she had to trust."
      The standard, sorry-not-my-table shrug so many give to those in need. But it didn't sit well with Connelly, even as she said it. "And I saw her wheel this boy down the hall, going back to a very depressing situation, and I said to myself: 'Who's God but us? If we don't do it, it's not going to happen.' "
     "Who's God but us?" Who's God but us! Pardon me, sister, but daaaamn! Do you know how many people invoke God to justify their indifference? Their harshness? Their evil acts? Their dismissal of the very people they should most open their hearts to? And here's Sister Rosemary, trying out the platitudes, finding them hollow and basically looking up at God, giving him the stink-eye and saying, "OK then, Mr. Lord of the Universe, if you're going to fail this boy, I guess we'll have to do your job for you."
     Not that she just waved the boy to the front of the line. That wouldn't be fair either.
     "It took two years to raise the money and build the house," she said, "but that boy has been here 15 years now."
     Who's God but us?! That's edgy stuff, Sister, practically sacrilege. And a recipe for making faith more palatable to those who wonder what it's all for. For inspiring you to do what you should do anyway. Less worshipping the ineffable and more trying to pick up a few of the balls that Mr. Big keeps dropping. It isn't just a Catholic obligation. The Jews have a term for it: tikkun olam. Repair the world. It just helps to have someone like Sister Rosemary remind you.
     Footnote: After Sister Rosemary finished, Amy Rule, the mayor's wife, also spoke, her first public utterance as Chicago's first lady.

Valentine's Day sneaks into town

Couple at the Renaissance Faire in Bristol, Wisconsin

     Tomorrow is Valentine's Day —I hope I'm not the one to tell you. Or maybe it doesn't matter. There seems to be a pronounced lack of commercial Valentine's Day hoopla this year. I was walking across the Loop Wednesday, hoping to take a static and enigmatic photo of some stark red heart-shaped commercial come-on to post here, and found basically nothing. No Valentine's Day specials. No chocolate promotions. Nothing red in the windows of Walgreen's. Nothing from the Potbelly. No "Happy Straight Person's Valentine's Day" in the window of the Chick-fil-A. No red sprinkled heart-shaped donuts at Dunkin's.
    Weird. I'm at a loss to explain it, but can toss out a few theories: A) the economy is still sagging, promotions cost money, the wad was shot at Christmas, so businesses decided it was best to limp on until spring; B) the Winter Olympics sucked all the hoopla out of the room; C) Gay marriage, having ruined the institution of wedlock, is now corrupting romance itself; D) it's Obama's fault. 
      I certainly didn't write anything for the newspaper about Valentine's Day this year. Been there, done that. At this stage of the game, Edie and I don't want to ignore the holiday—that would be sad—but don't beat ourselves up commissioning jewelry and engraving love sonnets on grains of rice either. We know. This is where tradition comes in so handy. Tradition takes the place of surprise—you're doing something, but nothing that's going to roil the placid waters of matrimonial harmony, or break the bank. So we will be lunching, quietly, at Prairie Grass in Northbrook, where we always go, where I hope they will have Door County Sour Cherry Pie, as they have on Valentine's Days past. 
    For those who want a little additional perspective on the heart-shaped holiday, a piece of Valentine's Day candy from The Vault.  Five years ago, I waved the flag in surrender:

     Sure, Valentine's Day is commercial, but then so is getting married. You obtain a license, as if you were opening a bar. Objects of value are exchanged. Oaths are taken. You may even sign a contract. Mine was in Aramaic.

     Those guys who airily announce they won't let themselves be bullied by the Hallmark Corp. into putting on a display of affection on command doth protest too much, methinks.   The implication is that they'll do something special later, on their own terms; the reality is, they never do. I can see them sprawled on the couch all day Sunday, watching basketball, while their honeys glare at them, disappointed.

     Even birds know that love demands you fluff your feathers and show off. At least occasionally. Otherwise, love becomes little more than a shared routine, a practical domestic joining of forces. True, love can't be on display, can't be splendid, all the time. The truth is, love changes year by year, day by day, sometimes second by second. Love is multifaceted, extraordinary, strange and wonderful, fleeting and forever. It stops you in your tracks and makes you run up the stairs. It is the boy tugging on the girl's pigtails and the aged widow who lives for years with the mummified corpse of her husband.

     The mystery of those mummified mate stories falls away when you place them into the continuum of marriage -- enough decades go by, and you don't harp on your partner's peculiarities.

     If you're lucky enough to have a partner. There's a whole lot of lonely in the world. Before decomposition sets in, if you love them, show them. If not on Valentine's Day, when?

"This is not the hill to die on."

Years ago, the principal of my kids' elementary school used a phrase that I had never heard before: "This is not the hill to die on." Meaning: no big deal, this isn't the issue you want to dig in and fight over. For some reason I liked that saying, and thought of it earlier this evening, when I got an email telling me that a few paragraphs had been sliced off the end of Wednesday's column for reasons of ... ah ... let's just say, in order not to inject insinuation into the Illinois political process. There was a time when that would have upset me, when I would have fled the dinner I was attending, called my bosses, argued my case, that we were supposed to shake things up, not smooth them over. Then at least I'd grumblingly write a few additional paragraphs so the column would be the usual length. 
     Instead—standing in the Notre Dame-like splendor of the University Club's main dining room, where the University of Illinois was honoring my late colleague, Roger Ebert—I looked at the email, shrugged and thought, "Okay then, the column will be short. This is not the hill to die on." Which is either a good thing, or a bad thing, I'm not sure. A similar phrase is, "you have to save your silver bullets." You can't fight every battle. Maybe that's maturity. Maybe it's growing old. But it felt like the right thing to do at the moment. This is the truncated column:

     The gay marriage debate seems to have largely ended in the United States. Even our timid, lick-a-finger-and-check-the-wind president decided that yes, by gum, gays are human after all and form relationships society should recognize. 

      Not all quarters have gotten the memo, of course. The same national nether regions still working their Can’t-We-Just-Go-Back-to-the-Past-Where-We-Felt-Comfortable game plan that includes holding out hope for teaching creationism in public school are dragging their feet on gay marriage, insisting they can stay as bigoted as they please so long as they claim God tells them it’s OK. 

      Good luck with that one. God is commanding me not to pay taxes, yet I’m not expecting my sincere beliefs to be respected.

      Fact is, it takes these debates a long time to end. The idea that gay people should hold jobs — teach school, be cops, deliver mail — might have receded from memory, but it still manifests itself, as seen by the hoopla over Michael Sam, a defensive lineman at the University of Missouri, announcing he is “an openly proud gay man” who wants to play in the National Football League.

      Now being a football player might be an exalted, highly paid job, but it is still a job, and it will be interesting to see, after the smoke clears, whether the NFL decides that an openly gay man should be allowed to slam into other men on a football field. 

      “Why didn’t he wait until after the draft?” one of my sons asked during our dinner table conversation. I said it seems the cat was already out of the bag; he had told his Missouri teammates, and scouts were asking his agent if he had a girlfriend. Rather than let rumor and the strange American fascination with parsing other people’s sex lives run the show, Sam cannily — and, I believe, courageously — decided to continue being honest about who he is. 

     Are there teams that won’t draft him because he’s gay? Without question. But there also will be a team — he only needs one — that wants a player of his skills and might even want the burst of publicity that will come with signing Sam. Or maybe not. Jason Collins, a free agent in the NBA, said last April that he was gay, and he is still looking for a team. 

     So if Sam gets drafted, what will he face? It’s 2014, so I don’t think he’s going to be the new Jackie Robinson, playing through a howl of catcalls. I think, and this is just a guess, that after years of gazing in fixed horror at the Westboro Baptist Church preparing its neon “GOD HATES FAGS” signs and picketing the funerals of soldiers, even a zealous football fan would pause, dripping brush above poster board and wonder if this is really the hill to make his stand on. Then again, sports fans are known for their savage abuse, so why should Sam get a pass? 

     What do we as a society think? Should gay people be allowed to hold jobs? Any job? Even football lineman? There are people, gay and straight, who think you just can’t hold certain jobs and be an out gay man. I would argue that is incorrect, that being out is the more honest, more open, more laudable approach than feeling compelled to lie about who you are. Of course it’s hard. But the hardest work has already been done, by people coming out in rougher times. Coming out now is landing on Normandy Beach a week after D-Day.

     Remember, we aren’t talking about doing the job. Gay men have already played professional football. It is the rest of us who are the issue here. What will we accept? Is the fear and ignorance that still rattle so many over this issue, combined with the close identification people have with their football teams, so great that Michael Sam will never get the chance to play in an NFL game? Possibly. Yet denying him the chance doesn’t seem the fairness that gets so much chin music in sport. On the other hand, Sam is not J.J. Watt — a player of such extraordinary ability he just can’t be overlooked. Better players than Sam have been overlooked. 

     The history of modern life is, in part, the story of the mainstream accepting that heretofore marginal groups can actually do things they once supposedly couldn’t — that women could vote and run companies and perform surgery, and blacks could be soldiers and quarterbacks and presidents. Thus allowing gays to openly play in pro sports is an inevitable step. I hope it comes now; it’s an embarrassingly retro conversation to be having, like wondering now whether football players should wear helmets.

CVS exits the cancer business

     "A cigarette is the perfect type of a perfect pleasure,” Oscar Wilde wrote, in ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray.” “It is exquisite, and it leaves one unsatisfied.”

      I can vouch for that. In springtime, years ago when I was dating, the combination of nice weather and a night on the town would spark in my wife-to-be the desire for a cigarette. Dutiful swain that I was, I would trot off, first to the bar to get $4 in quarters, then to the inevitable cigarette machine tucked back by the restrooms, for the long pull of that raspy mechanical knob, rewarded by the gentle thud of a pack of Marlboro Lights falling into the stainless steel tray.

      I would return with the cellophane-wrapped pack. She would smoke her cigarette and I would smoke the other 19, one after another, enjoying the little cool thumb of relaxation that nicotine presses upon the vibrating anxiety center of the brain.

     Smoking late at night was bliss. The next morning, however, after that tobacco orgy, my mouth felt like the floor of a cab, my lungs did not breathe with their usual avidity, and as much as I wanted to keep the party going, I couldn’t pop another $4 for a pack — another life saved by cheapness.

     More lives will no doubt be saved by CVS Caremark announcing last week it will stop selling cigarettes at its 7,600 drugstores. Not so much because smokers won't be able to buy tobacco—there's always somewhere else, though other chains, particularly No. 1 Deerfield-based Walgreen, will surely follow—but from CVS giving a big turn to the vise of social disapproval that has been tightening on smoking for my entire life.
     When I was in kindergarten in 1965, 43 percent of Americans smoked. That was the year after the surgeon general's report linked cigarettes with cancer. Neither of my parents smoked—my mother didn't despite her mother urging her to, for her figure. But they kept a drawer of big glass ashtrays, because when people came to your house, hospitality demanded you let them light up.
     No more. Now guests would no sooner smoke in our living room than go to the bathroom there. Businesses have similarly transformed. When I joined the Sun-Times in 1987, reporters stubbed out their butts on the newsroom's tile floor. Then smokers were banished, to foul "smokers' lounges" or, more often, kicked to the curb to form the shivering phalanx of nicotine addicts mobbed around most building doorways, despite the signs shooing them away. Then airplanes snuffed out smoking. And bars.
     Smokers howled, as if inhaling smoke were some sort of constitutional right.
     Not this time. The most interesting thing about the CVS shift, beyond the fact they did it, is how little public chatter there has been. Maybe because CVS is a business, and the Complete Liberty for Me crowd thinks everything businesses do is right. Maybe smokers, now 18 percent, have crossed some Rubicon in their long retreat from being considered patrons of a "perfect pleasure" to being seen as a tiny minority indulging in a puzzling, shameful and deadly vice, rather like Philip Seymour Hoffman's heroin use.
     They're all birds of a feather, you know; tobacco and nicotine and booze and drugs and sugar, all ways to hotwire the pleasure centers of our brain that nature intended only to fire when we were making kids or escaping tigers or digging into a platter of roasted mammoth. People who were goggling at Hoffman's death—23 years sober, how could he?—miss the point: Each of us has a balance between our pleasures and their consequences, between the primal lizard brain and the higher intelligence holding tightly on its leash, or not holding, and every 300-pounder, every drunk, every drug addict, every one of the nearly half a million Americans who died from smoking-related illnesses, let go of that leash and then had to face the consequences. You don't need to mainline bad heroin to die from your addiction; it's only more obvious that way. Ironically, the protraction of smoking deaths help shield them from us; if people died match in hand and cigarette on lip, we'd see it more clearly; but they have 10 years of horrible suffering first, hidden in hospitals, so the connection is harder to make. Ironic.
     Some pleasures have no limits. Though I used to warn my studious sons about the dangers of "word poisoning," you cannot in fact read too much. You can't OD on religion (well, you can, and people do, but not in the same sense). But those are subtler pleasures. You never say, "I need music now!" Otherwise, it seems the world is perversely set up that, the more enjoyable a thing is, the steeper the eventual price. Or, as Montgomery Gentry sagely sings, "For every ounce of pleasure there's a pound of pain."

"Death is not an event in life"

     Several months ago I gave a speech to a luncheon at Chicago's Standard Club. I didn't think much about the locale beforehand — the Standard Club was founded by German Jews, who thought highly of themselves, and used to keep out their unwashed Eastern European brethren. The line I like to float about the Standard Club is, "it's the rare Jewish organization that discriminated against Jews."
     That sense of smug jollity vanished when I walked in the lobby, and realized the last time I had been there, two years earlier.  Jeff Zaslow was in town, staying at the club. We were grabbing a quick lunch and met in the lobby. Despite his great success—author of "The Last Lecture" and other huge best-sellers—we managed to stay friends, I think, because we shared a certain level of workmanlike professional pride. We were two schleppers in the same trade, two Jewish wordsmiths, peddling our wares, shrugging and sighing and exchanging tales of the difficulty of pulling into a strange town with a handcart of sentences to sell. 
     When he died, in a traffic accident, two years ago today, I thought mainly of myself. I don't have a bunch of good friends, and now one of the best was taken. I wasn't going to write about it — I owed him that, not to turn him into material — wasn't going to go to the funeral. What would be the point? Jeff wouldn't be there, and I had only met his wife once. It wasn't as if she'd miss me.
      But Eric Zorn — a better man than I am — was going, and I would be damned if I was going to let him drive by himself to flippin' Detroit in this lousy February weather that had already killed Jeff. I didn't want him to go through it alone. So we drove out there, talking about Jeff, talking about lots of things, attended the funeral, which was gut-wrenching and beautiful, in turns, attended by a thousand people, and came back, 600 miles in one day. I'd like to say that the funeral gave some kind of closure, that I was glad I went, but it didn't and I wasn't. 
     The day after I returned, I was sorting things out, or trying to, and wrote the following column. Really just to make myself feel better. A strange column. Actually, it was even odder the way I originally wrote it. My relationship with Jeff was a joshing one, the kind guys will sometimes have. He was always more serious than me. I remembered him calling up, and I asked how he was doing, and he said, grimly, "Not so good — Randy's dying" — Randy Pausch, the Carnegie-Melon professor whose parting talk was the subject of "The Last Lecture."
     "Well he better be dying," I replied — alway the weisenheimer — "or else you're going to end up weeping on Oprah's sofa." "The Last Lecture" is based on the idea that Pausch was dying, and if it turned out he wasn't, well, good for him, but it sort of kicked the book's entire premise out from under it. Maybe you don't think that's funny, but that's what kind of guy I really am, and Jeff tolerated it better than most. 
     In fact, the original ending of this column got sliced off by a concerned city editor.  It ended this way:

    It was only the next morning, waking up feeling a fraction of the chill that his close friends and loved ones will be feeling for years, a thought came that made me smile, one that might even have made Jeff smile, albeit while shaking his head: “If there were a God, it would have been Mitch Albom instead.”  Cold comfort, but a start.

      "It's like you were wishing he were dead," the horrified city editor said. 
      "Better him than Jeff," I replied. But I saw his point, and wrote the ending the column now has. Though I figure, with the more freewheeling ethos of the web, and on a blog that has nothing to do with the Sun-Times, officially, and with the passage of time, I can get away printing it now. I can't imagine Mitch Albom, Detroit sports columnist and author of "Tuesdays with Morrie" and similar treacle, will give a damn one way or the other. 
     Anyway, when I go, I'd want my friends—assuming I have friends, and I'm already one short–to remember me in some way. So I want to re-post this column from the Sun-Times, as a Yartzeit candle to Jeff, who was a really good and decent man, who left a void in my life. "It is not often," E.B. White wrote, "that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writer." "Not often" is a wild understatement. I'd say almost never.

     Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus is a list of numbered propositions, each leading to the next. Number 6.4311 begins, “Death is not an event in life. Death is not lived through.”

     For the person who has died, that is. That person is whisked away to whatever reward or void awaits us after death.

     It is those of us who have not yet died who live through death, big time, who must cope with it, particularly accidental death, which radiates outward, sending shockwaves, first to those at the scene, stunned to find death intruding onto an ordinary day. Then to the officialdom who must deal with death regularly and handle the particulars. Then exploding into the lives of family, who suffer the most and, finally, the thunderclap reaches the outer world, where people hear it and look up, moved to the degree they knew the deceased.

     Jeff Zaslow died in a car accident Friday, as you’ve probably heard. Longtime Sun-Times readers will fondly recall his thoughtful, human and funny advice column that ran from 1987 until 2001, or his best-selling books such as The Last Lecture.
     I don't do grief well — I'm self-centered and over-analytical, a bad mix — and no sooner feel loss then immediately start questioning it, to see if it's legitimate. Jeff's death came as a sickening shock, yet I instantly pulled back, certain that I occupy too distant an orbit among his concentric circles of friends to be entitled to feel awful, which is reserved for his wife and daughters and family, the true epicenter of suffering. Any hurt I feel must be ersatz, overdramatic.
     No matter how I tried to focus my thoughts on others — Jeff's genius, the key to his life: he was a big-hearted, generous man, a true friend — I kept returning to my own experiences with him. Memories bubbled up, random stuff, as if my brain were venting everything it knew about Jeff Zaslow, from the fact that at birth, he was delivered by Dr. C. Everett Koop, the future Surgeon General, to his sister's hand-made picture frames, to his love of Bruce Springsteen — we once went to a concert together — to the day, almost 25 years ago, Jeff was being given his welcoming tour of the Sun-Times newsroom and I hurried over, curious to discover just what kind of idiot leaves a job writing front page stories for the Wall Street Journal to advise women how to get stains out of a broadloom rug on page 27 of the Sun-Times.
     If a Russian novelist tried to create two separate characters to split the spectrum of qualities a writer can possess, he might cook up Jeff (happy, concerned for others, frenetic, sincere) and me (melancholy, self-absorbed, shambling, sarcastic).
     Jeff wanted to help everybody. He held those enormous Zazz Bashes at Navy Pier because he got so many letters from lonely people, and wanted to fix them up with each other, to give each one a shot at the joy he found with his own wife, Sherry.
     I thought he was crazy. "Jeff," I'd say, "You're not a social service."
     When I got the awful news — we have the same literary agency — I dutifully phoned it into the newspaper. "Do you want to write something?" an editor asked. I said "No." The planet of my ego is such — think Jupiter — I knew it would be impossible to launch a tribute to Jeff without having it circle back and crash into myself.
     "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent" is the final line of Wittgenstein's book. Good advice. I wanted to honor Jeff by shutting up, an underappreciated art form.
     But silence felt even worse. We Jews bury our own, and standing at Jeff's graveside, mutely waiting for my turn with the shovel, I stared at my shoes and tried to block out the sound of his daughters weeping. "This is the worst thing in the world," I thought. "I hate this I hate this I hate this."
     Silence has no utility, it isn't a sharp enough blade to scrape at the icy loss that Jeff's death frosts over the world. I wish I could wrap this up tidily, with an inspiring thought that counterbalances the tragedy in the world and leaves you with a smile. Jeff was so good at that. Alas, he is not here, a hard fact that touches on the often cruel nature of life, one that we lucky enough to have known Jeff will struggle with for a long time.

It's a dirty, thankless task...

     At some point over the past several weeks of this endless winter, one of the nearly 1 million passengers who use the Chicago Transit Authority’s bus system every day contrived, in a manner best not contemplated, to transfer a wad of chewing gum from his or her mouth, to a spot on the floor toward the rear of one of the city’s 1,859 buses. It eventually became a quarter-sized black splotch.

     Now Venus La’V Caston has to clean it up.

     It is just after 11 p.m. in the sprawling CTA bus depot at 358 S. Kedzie, one of seven facilities around Chicago. It is where, after a day of navigating the salty slush of Chicago streets and ferrying passengers who — in another process best not considered — will leave soiled adult diapers behind, plus food wrappers, newspapers and all the more traditional dirt and trash, the city’s bus fleet is hosed down, scrubbed up, swept out, looked over, and in general readied to go through it all again for another day.

     This winter has been particularly hard on the cleanliness of public transit.

     “In the extreme cold, more people are using transit, more people tromping in snow, ice and mud,” CTA spokesman Brian Steele said.

    Plus more people seeking shelter.
    "We have seen increase in number of homeless individuals on our trains," he said.
     Buses arrive after their runs, which could be two hours or 12. The bulk roll in between 8 p.m. and 2 a.m., when ridership plummets. First, the buses have their coin boxes removed and spirited to safety by the city's revenue department. Fuel tanks are then filled, and then one of two cleaning regimens is enacted.
     There is the daily "general clean." The buses go through a power spray, like in a car wash, and workers with long brushes scrub the wheels. Inside, the garbage is first swept out, then the salt and grime mopped off the floors, and windows and surface wiped. The entire process - refuel, wash, clean - is supposed to take 15 minutes, though that is a flexible goal.
     "There's no quota because you never know what you're going to find on a bus," George Cavelle, director of maintenance, said.
     That list of found things is very long, not always something you want to read over breakfast, and includes a microwave oven.
     Periodically, there is the "deep clean" - think auto detailing, but for a bus - where the stainless steel is polished and gross blotches of gum removed. The CTA tries to deep clean buses and train cars every 14 days, though now with the heavy winter use that real figure is once every 20 days. The deep clean takes about four hours for a 40 foot bus, six hours for the 60-foot "accordion" bus, though again, that is an approximation, as some buses come in heavily abused, or damaged, or covered in graffiti, and thus take more time to get ready to go out again.
     If buses seem cleaner than L cars, there's a reason: They are. L cars get used more and cleaned less, with a cursory operator walk-through at the end of the line, and the same deep clean every two weeks, but no nightly general clean unless an L car is flagged as being in urgent need. The L also lost 65 servicers in a felon work program, because of union complaints, so they moved over to cleaning buses.
     Cavelle said he has instituted some efficiencies. For instance, previously garbage would be swept out the door of the bus and into the depot, in a pile, "and then they would come back later and spend an hour cleaning up the mess they had made," said Cavelle, who changed that. "We took a step back and said, 'Why are we doing double the work here?' Culture is always the hardest thing to change."
     Technology lends a hand. If you've noticed less graffiti scored into the windows, thank a peelable protective plastic coating that the CTA started putting over bus windows in 2010, plus as many as 10 cameras per bus.
     Several of those cameras blandly watch as Venus La'V Caston takes a bottle of Intercon breakthrough, a citrus degreaser used to clean clogged drains and remove tar.
     "Just pour a little bit," she says, splashing the liquid on the splotch of gum. She takes a special tool — a little metal scraper with a grooved attachment that mirrors the grooved bus floor, and scraped away the gum. A few passes and it's mostly gone, a small victory in a tiny skirmish in a war that never ends.
     "Sometimes," says La'V Caston, 31, who lives on the West Side, "you have gum from back to front."

"Soon we will marry and our woes will vanish"

Isabel Leonard

     In desperate need of warmer climes, like most Chicagoans in this arctic February, or even a simulation of warmer climes, I slipped out of work Thursday afternoon and shivered my way over to the Civic Opera House, to plunge into Iberian sultriness for a few hours and, while I was at it, hear some music too. 
     The Lyric's new production of Rossini's "The Barber of Seville" takes place—and don't feel bad if you didn't see this coming—in Seville, Spain, and before a note is sung, set designer Scott Pask's arching doorways, wrought iron flourishes, Spanish tile fountain and orange and yellow light help the audience escape our icy confinement, the frozen grey-white mounds piled like prison walls outside. 
    Perhaps because "Seville" contains some of the most familiar operatic tunes that an American of my generation can hear—the soundtrack from Warner Brother's classic 1949 Bugs Bunny short, Rabbit of Seville, which we practically listened to in the womb, absorbing repeatedly for years while sprawled on the living room floor in our jammies before Saturday morning television—the music seemed exactly right. That overture, and Figaro's first aria, racing and joyous, almost an aural cartoon, is why we start going to opera. As much as I thrilled to it—the overture, composed when Rossini was in his early 20s, sounds like something written by Mozart on amphetamines—because it was so familiar, what really caught my attention were the secondary aspects of the production: the set, the lighting and, particularly, the acting, which is not always a strong suit in opera productions. Often the performers do little more than just stand there, stiffly, and sing, which can be more than enough, but here the music is delivered with considerable comedic deftness and dramatic finesse. It isn't quite a musical number from The Carol Burnett Show, but that did come to mind.
     Right off the bat, director Rob Ashford serves up an earnest, shuffling motley of hired musicians—Count Almaviva's threadbare orchestra, here to woo the lovely Rosina (played by New York mezzo-soprano Isabel Leonard, a woman of considerable beauty.  She is actually the first character we see, from the back, standing on her guardian's balcony and the thought — perhaps better left unsaid — occurred to me that this alone would be enough to provide an afternoon's entertainment, and the fact that people would soon sing and move around and a performance would be put on was a lagniappe, a mere added bonus).
     She ducks back inside, alas, and the count, played by Alek Shrader, sets the tone with a truly funny comic preening, as he is torn between showing off his best profile—he's no slouch in the looks department either—to the aforementioned balcony, now empty, and twisting his head to see if his beloved is on it. The count's disappointment is our own.
   

Nathan Gunn

   The winter-numbed Chicago audience must have been as primed to enjoy itself as I was, because this is the first time in my memory that a scene change at the Lyric received applause—though admittedly it was quite a scene change, from the arched exterior of the home of Dr. Bartolo, Rosina's tyrannical guardian, to the inside, a smooth transformation of shifting wrought iron screens and ferns and silhouetted characters and orange light, which unfolded like a mechanical egg and was delightful. There was another great moment in silhouette—the entrance of Figaro, the "luckiest man alive," a resourceful ladies man and general fixer, trailed by five adoring misses, to sing his famous ode (click here to hear it and see the Lyric trailer)  to himself and his life ("Work is easy and fun"), a fast-paced patter song which reminded me that the swagger of rap music is only the braggadocio of Italian opera, updated.  Nathan Gunn is a likable rogue as Figaro—he had a Huey Lewis quality, for those up on their '80s pop, with the same hairstyle, the same smug, yes-I-am-good-looking twinkle of self-satisfaction.
     Though I generally prefer dark entertainments — give me "Faust" over "Cosi fan Tutte" any day — there was enough edge to keep the show from slipping into treacle, from an aria — la calunnia — in praise of slander, one noting the silliness of old men who marry, and a discourse on the limitations of opera, by the aforementioned coot, Dr. Bartolo, played with a pleasing mix of leaping randy menace and nodding flustered senility by Italian baritone Alessandro Corbelli. 

Isabel Leonard and Alek Shrader

     The happy ending goes on too long for my tastes — sort of a Wagnerian death scene, only joyous. Here people do stand around singing a tad too much, as if this ornate music box of a show were winding down a little early, and maybe a few turns of dramatic business, some additional directing, could have helped. That said, Act II contained two great moments that I will remember for the rest of my life.
     One was Rossini's storm, which takes place just before the count and the ever-useful Figaro arrive with a ladder to spirit Rosina away. There is no singing, no characters onstage at all, just billowing sheet-like curtains, the surging orchestra and furtive figures hurrying around at the back of the stage, flashes of lightning, a general sense of foreboding and drama, like a half-remembered storm from youth, swirling portend that peaked for a moment of unexpected ... well, something verging on terror, a quick intake of breath and then it was over, but a deeply affecting bit of stagecraft. That five seconds alone made me glad I came.
    The other moment came toward the finale, when Rosina realizes that the poor man she fell in love with is actually the wealthy and powerful count. She steps toward the audience and her face does the slightest of twists. Not quite a lifted eyebrow, but a tiny flutter of delight, a Scarlett O'Hara flash of congealed sauciness —a count! — that drew applause just for its sly perfection.
      That's how well-crafted the Lyric's production of "The Barber of Seville" is—the audience applauded a set change and a facial twitch. The music is pretty good too. 

Photographs courtesy of Lyric Opera of Chicago