"Make not Allah's name an excuse"

     The first issue of Charlie Hebdo published after last week's massacre is coming out tomorrow, and in recognition of the free speech it represents, I thought I would dig this column out of my files. I wrote it March 30, 2006, when Christian Science Monitor reporter Jill Carroll was released after nearly three months of captivity in Baghdad. 
     But it was never published. 
     Reading the Quran had seemed like a good idea. All sorts of bad things were being done in the name of Islam—a driver had just plowed an SUV into a crowd and credited the Quran. So going to the source struck me as being worth trying. I tried to be moderate and respectful.
     My editor refused to print it, I remember him spooling out a variety of objections: I wasn't a religion expert.  I wasn't putting the Bible under similar scrutiny. 
     But it was bullshit; he was just afraid. 
    There was a lot of that going around, then and now. Despite all the "I am Charlie" bluster, the media have become timid on this subject, out of fear. 
     An unnecessary fear, I believe. Nobody is going to come kill you. Charlie Hebdo was an aberration. Not the new rule, or at least not a rule I care to live under. 
     The thing about a blog is, there's no editor, no permission to get, no one to blame for timidity. I'm posting the original column now because there's nothing objectionable in it. Not that person couldn't in theory object, but I don't write for that person. The only change I made is that originally I called the book the "Koran," but common usage is now "Quran" or "Qu'ran." The subheads are because the column ran over a full page.
     
     Opening shot
     "Fight in the cause of Allah..." the Quran tells us. "But do not transgress limits, for Allah loveth not transgressors."
     Thus not only should the West celebrate the freeing of Jill Carroll, the reporter held captive in Iraq for the past three months, but Muslims should be pleased as well, as her release is in keeping with their faith as laid out in their holy book.  
    Or as the commentary to the lines above elaborates: "War is permissible in self-defense, and under well-defined limits...Strict limits must not be transgressed: women, children, old and infirm men should not be molested."

     Go to the Source
     Like most non-Muslims, I had never read the Quran. Never considered reading it. Then a North Carolina man drove his sport utility vehicle into a crowd, injuring nine people, and justified his actions by citing the Quran.
     "Allah gives permission in the Quran for the followers of Allah to attack those who have waged war against them, with the expectation of eternal paradise in case of martyrdom and/or living one's life in obedience of all of Allah's commandments found throughout the Quran's 114 chapters," he said.
     Somehow, I doubted that the Holy Book of Islam tells believers to plow their SUVs blindly into crowds. But I really didn't know, because I had never read it and had no idea what it says, a void that called out for correction.
     So I trekked to the library, perched like a gleaming white spaceship in our leafy suburban paradise. As with the Bible, there turns out to be numerous editions and translations of the Quran, and I picked over them.
     While I was inclined toward a paperback version, for portability, my sense of aesthetics forced me to selected, despite its heft, a big royal blue, ornately decorated copy, in English and Arabic,
    "The Holy Qur-an, revised and edited by The Presidency of Islamic researchers, IFTA," printed in Saudi Arabia and donated by the Islamic Cultural Center in Northbrook—a good omen, as I've been a guest there for prayers, and as pleasant a bunch of regular, peaceful folk trying to live their lives and practice their faith you can't ask for. It also had a blue ribbon, for marking one's place. I like those ribbons.  
     I must admit, as I stood comparing the various versions longer than necessary, I realized I was hesitating. I was afraid. I tend to take a joshing view of life, and a joshing view of the Quran can get a person killed. Give credit to the respect-us-or-you're-dead approach to faith: it works.
    It struck me there were reasons for a certain respectful approach. As anyone who has ever read the Bible knows, it is filled with harsh assessments about people being stoned and cast into lakes of fire, and it would not be fair to view someone else's scriptures with a literalness that we don't view our own—except that the old Judeo-Christian ethic hasn't been stoning Sabbath-breakers much lately, having slipped into a more go-along-to-get-along approach. Since at least part of the Islamic world hasn't quite joined us there yet, it makes sense to at least see what's motivating some of them.
     Resolving to be as serious as possible—admitting at the get-go that I'm not scholar—I checked out a copy.
    I knew I had done the right thing when, arriving home, my wife seized the book and began eagerly reading it herself. For at least half an hour. She had never sen one before. I finally pried it away form her, and began to read myself. 
     The Quran begins like this:
    "In the name of Allah, Most Gracious, Most Merciful. Praise be to Allah, the Cherisher and Sustainer of the World's Most Gracious, Most Merciful; Master of the Day of Judgement."
    So far so good.
     Grace. Mercy—twice each. That's a promising start. The most noteworthy thing, to me, is that while the Bible begins by addressing the question, "Who are we and where did we come from?" the Quran takes great pains to define who Muslims are not, separating themselves from unbelievers—Christians and Jews—though the initial treatment begins benignly enough.
     "Those who believe (in the Qur-an) and those who follow the Jewish (scriptures) and the Christians and the Sabians, any who believe in Allah, and the Last Day, and work righteousness, shall have their reward with their Lord on them, shall be no fear, nor shall they grieve."
     No fear, no grieving—I'm all for that. But it doesn't stop there. Christians and Jews, while showing initial promise, are quickly shown as betraying their own faiths and losing the right to exist, their legacies taken over by Muslims.
    Jews, basically, deserve what they get:

Miserable is the price
For which they have sold
Their souls, in that they
Deny (the revelation)
Which Allah has sent down
In insolent envy that Allah
Of His Grace should send it
To any of His servants He pleases:
Thus have they drawn
On themselves Wrath upon Wrath.
And humiliating Chastisement
Of those who reject Faith.

None of this 'Son of God' stuff
     Christianity hardly fares better—its very existence is an insult to Islam.
    "They say: 'Allah hath begotten a son, Glory be to Him.' Nay, to Him belongs all that is in heavens and on earth; everything readers worship to Him."  
     A footnote to that passage explains: "it is a derogation from the glory of Allah—in fact, it is blasphemy—to say that Allah gets sons, like a man or an animal. The Christian doctrine is here emphatically repudiated. If words have any meaning, it would mean an attribution to Allah of a material nature, and of the lower animal functions of sex."

Don't be pals with other faiths
     The official, American administration, rose-tinted-glasses view of Islam is that terror is an aberration, and while there is support for that, as mentioned above, there is also plenty to back up the idea of a besieged Islam battling a hostile world.:

Never will the Jews
Or the Christians be satisfied
With thee unless thou follow
Their form of religion 

     I haven't found anything about plowing your sport utility vehicle into crowds—but I've read only the first 100 pages, with a couple thousand left to go. Some of it is tough sledding, but given how the conflict between Islam and the West has defined the past five years, and might very well define the next 50, it seems worth trying.
     My hunch is that like the Bible, like the Torah, like technology, or any other human artifact, the Quran can be used for good, or can be used for evil, depending on what is in a person's heart.
     Even the Quran seems to recognize this, and to speak to those who might have argued in favor of cutting off Jill Carroll's head instead of releasing her:

Make not Allah's name an excuse in your oaths against doing good or acting rightly. 
Or making peace between persons; 
for Allah is One who heareth and knoweth all things.

    No argument here.

     
   

Puppetry Week #2: Puppet Helps Deliver Baby

     With the International Puppet Theater Festival beginning Wednesday, I'm presenting Puppetry Week on Everygoddamnday.com, looking at aspects of this often-ignored art. Today's is a more personal tale, which could have been titled: "How Do You Make a Woman Laugh During Childbirth?"

     There are four things I remember about Lamaze class.
     First, we all had to bring pillows, to help position the pregnant mothers-to-be and make them comfortable. But toting the pillows added a strangely apt sleepover/kindergarten vibe to the experience, of a dozen or so couples meeting in a hospital conference room, the women large-bellied, the men, beetle-browed, trying to focus, clutching pillows.
     Second, there were several breathing mantras ground into us so thoroughly that I can repeat them today: "Ah-hee, ah-hee, a-hee, ah-blow!" Almost like sailor shanties, now that I set one down. Designed to keep the woman breathing during the pain of contractions. Breathing is important. We spent a lot of time practicing this.
     Third, there was a lot of talk of things that could go wrong. Which was supposed to help prepare us, to be ready for any complication, which childbirth can certainly serve up. But these precautions also terrified us. Terrified me anyway. I remember thinking Lamaze was like driver's ed: they're supposed to be teaching you how to make a left turn, instead they're showing you movies of mangled bodies being pried out of wrecks. Gee thanks, State of Ohio Department of Transportation. I don't think our Lamaze instructor actually showed us a video entitled "Coping With the Death of Your New Baby." But that's the sense I took away from some of these scenarios.
     And fourth, the focal point. You were supposed to bring in a tangible object that the woman could concentrate on while pushing, while breathing. I have no idea how that helped, or why a thumb wouldn't do, but they told us to bring something, and we did. It didn't matter what. I suggested we use a hand puppet, so I could make the puppet deliver Lamaze instructions to her in a falsetto puppet voice. But she made a face, and we didn't have a hand puppet, so we settled on a small, sort of phallic orange toy dinosaur that I won as a consolation prize at a fair, if I recall properly. Stuffed, a few inches high. 
     We used the dinosaur. "A hand puppet would really work much better," I'd say, now and then, and she'd roll her eyes, because that was stupid. 
      In the weeks leading up to her delivery date, we prepared, laid in supplies, got a backpack filled with clothes and essentials. On Broadway there was a toy store, "Toyscape," that carried the high end playthings we Boomers loved. No Barbie dolls, but tin wind-up toys and imported Swedish trucks and handmade knit items. I picked up this pink-nosed hand puppet whom I dubbed, in my mind, "Mayor McCheese," even though he looks nothing like the McDonald's character. I think because of the top hat; it gave him an air of officialdom.
     I did not show the puppet to my wife, but tucked him into a pocket of the backpack.
     Now it is Oct. 25, 1995, the day our oldest son Ross was born, or will be born, as soon as my wife can get him out. We've had to rush to hospital because my wife picked one way the heck up in Evanston and I stupidly went to work to cover a bus tragedy in Fox River Grove—she was having contractions, but we figured it was a false alarm. It wasn't.  We raced to the hospital, just barely got Edie to the emergency room (the advice I give to prospective mothers is, if they find themselves in an ER but not receiving the immediate service they expect, drop to their hands and knees and let out a scream: it focuses the hospital staff's attention magnificently).
      We were rushed to a room, where labor began in earnest. Edie paced around a bit, but as the big moment approached, and she had to start getting this baby out in earnest, I whipped out this ridiculous puppet.
     "Now we're going to count to three and push!" I had the puppet say, in a high, piping voice, out of the corner of my mouth, waggling his white felt hands for emphasis.
     Edie laughed.
     Over the 32 years we've known one another, I've made my wife laugh many times during a wide variety of circumstances. It's why she married me, she always says. But I think that one laugh, guffawed through clenched teeth behind damp hair hanging in her face, is the one I'm most proud of. Of course, I can't take all the credit. The puppet helped too. 
     

The Don Quixote of the Highway Sign

     

     Steven J. Bahnsen is on time, of course. His 2009 Chevy Cobalt with 329,000 miles on it pulls up in front of the newspaper at exactly the appointed hour.
     "I'm a man that's on time," he says.
     Bahnsen is also a man who knows how to file a Freedom of Information request, how to comb public records and master federal guidelines, how to attend public meetings, persist with government officials and nag media representatives.
     He also gives a good tour.
     "I'm looking for Interstate 90/94. Where is it?" he demands, as we sweep toward the expressway.
     I point out a green "90/94" sign just up ahead, to the left.
    "That's one of the signs," he replies. "They're supposed to have a sign that says 'Junction 90/94' before it. You don't just pop up all of a sudden and say, here's an interstate. You're supposed to have a sign that says there's a junction there."
     A fine distinction perhaps, but you are not Steven Bahnsen, a man in relentless pursuit of his passion: to make sure that the street signs of Chicago are exactly as they should be. It's a big job: in 2014, IDOT repaired or replaced 35,000 street signs and installed another 3,000 new ones.
     We are on our way to Englewood.

     "The bulk of these are on the South Side," he says of missing and deficient signs.
     "Why the South Side?" I ask.
     "Why does the South Side get garbage all the time?" replies Bahnsen, who lives at Michigan and 29th Street.
     Bahnsen is 62. He wears a coat and tie, a blue raincoat and a fedora. Born in Iowa, he has a well-developed sense of How Things Should Be, maintaining a simmering indignation over a variety of government lapses that most people barely notice. Nor are missing signs the only official misdeeds that stick in his craw. Chicago Police driving their squads in Schiller Park, which is definitely not in Chicago, is another. He mentions it several times.
     Bahnsen is no stranger to government himself; a retired postal carrier, he navigates the city effortlessly.
     "I delivered mail in Garfield Park," he says. "Once you can handle that, you can handle anything. The rest of the city is Disneyland."
     Not that he is engaged in a purely altruistic pursuit. At some point, his sense of personal grievance, built up over years of pursuit of the quest, competes with the quest itself.
     "There are two factors at play here," he says. "One is the bad signs. The other is IDOT's attitude about me. It's a toss-up about which one is worse."
     And what is that attitude?
     "We are discussing a letter instructing him to cease all contact with IDOT," William R. Frey, then-acting director of highways at IDOT, now retired, wrote on Dec. 5, 2011, in an email obtained by Bahnsen through an FOI request. "His claims are frivolous, take up staff time and cost the taxpayers money. He's been doing this for years."
     Forty years, according to Bahnsen.
     In an hour with him, I did not find outrageous signage voids. More like missing details. An "Exit" sign on the Ryan that's supposed to include the exit number. Vague signage pointing out an expressway obviously in front of you.
     Although he does have a point about all the signs pointing to the "22nd Street" exit on the Dan Ryan. "There is no 22nd Street!" he exudes, almost joyously. "It's Cermak Road!"
     The name was changed in 1933: apparently not everyone has gotten word.
     The Illinois Tollway is also on the receiving end of Bahnsen's endless queries, though it doesn't have a problem with Bahnsen.
     "We've been corresponding with Mr. Bahnsen since 2011 on the placement of exit signs on the Tollway," says Wendy Abrams, chief of communications for the Tollway, calling Bahnsen "helpful." "He has been a patient and persistent advocate—writing to us from time to time and attending public meetings."
      Bahlsen never tires of pointing out the problem.
     "Now this is 31st Street," he says. "Say you're coming from the west on 31st. And you were told to take I-94 to go downtown. What do you do? Where do I turn? Are there any signs for I-94? There used to be [signs] over there but they got knocked down and they won't put them back up."
     Why is this important to him?
     "It just shows to me the way government's not working," he says.
     As reluctant as I am to invite so diligent a man into my world, I have to admit that I like Bahnsen, though I could see that changing as the years wore on. Most people care about themselves only: their jobs, their family. Rare is the person who cares about much beyond themselves, and then it is a passing, hobbyist interest. To care deeply about something as abstract as proper highway signage, well, I'd say that there is a certain purity to it, one that demands respect, if not awe. Yes, what Steven J. Bahnsen cares about passionately might strike you as trivial. But what do you care about that's more important? Not only care about, but act upon? What?

Puppetry Week #1: "Puppets are fighting for respect"

     

Cynthia VonOrthal displays a shadow puppet at her puppetry studio in Evanston.

     Puppets are the ambassadors of the obscure and the uncanny. The history of the art form is "easier researched in police records than in theater chronicles" according to Peter Schumann, founder of the Bread and Puppet Theater, an entertainment forever mired in "its own secret and demeaning stature."
     Puppets are by definition low-tech: if there isn't a person with his hand up that sock, or manipulating those strings, or running the show somewhere, then it isn't really a puppet, it's a doll or a robot.     

     This odd subcellar of culture, part sculpture, part folk art, part vaudeville, also has personal appeal to me. There is a kinship between journalism and puppetry. Both require dedicated craftsmen, albeit in dwindling numbers, practicing a profession that neither thrives nor vanishes, but somehow remains perpetually defunct. Both are rough simulacra of life; both had some legendary moment in the cultural spotlight in the hazy past—Hayden composed puppet operas for the royal court, a popular puppet dinner theater was steps off Michigan Avenue—but now linger on in the margins, practiced by various oddballs and misfits. I've never told anybody who asks me what I do for a living that I'm a puppeteer, but were I to, I'm certain it would be met with the exact same blank look. mixing pity and indifference, that "newspaper columnist" elicits.

     My take on puppets wasn't always so complicated. When I first joined the paper, puppets were merely the kind of marginality that caught my interest. I would flip through the phone book, looking for strange subjects to write about. A scribe. Chicago's last coal hauler. I was entranced that there was a Chicago Puppetry Guild, and a number of puppet theaters, which led to this article 20 years ago. I didn't even have any kids yet.

     On Wednesday, the Chicago International Puppet Theater Festival kicks off in Chicago. And while theatrical puppetry has an airiness that I generally shun—I'd rather see a "Punch and Judy" show on a portable stage in a public park than "Oedipus Rex" performed by marionettes at the Goodman—I thought I would dub this week "Puppetry Week" on EGDD and feature a puppetry-related post every day for the next seven days. I will talk to the festival's founder, attend what events I can, publishing new stories and photos and reprinting old articles written over the years about Chicago puppetry.

     I'll also remind you of recent puppet posts, such as my visit to the deeply-strange Vent Haven Museum in Fort Mitchell, Kentucky over the summer.

     And for those who just can't bear the prospect of that much puppetry, I won't neglect the non-puppeting world: Monday's column from the Sun-Times will be posted here at 12 noon, and each afternoon of Puppetry Week, I'll make sure there is an update from elsewhere. But at least give the puppet stuff a nibble. It's a surprisingly compelling realm, or so I've long thought. 

     As always, thanks for bearing with me. 


      You've probably never seen one of Dave Herzog's marionettes take a bow. It does not snap forward at the waist, jerkily, the way the adjective "puppetlike" would suggest. 
    

     Rather, the bow is a graceful sweep downward, head inclined just so, with one hand fluttering modestly in the vicinity of the mouth, the other trailing behind, arched, a bit of suppressed theatricality. 
    

     Many might be surprised to still find puppets at all—bowing, juggling, leaping, dancing - in the small AnimArt Puppet Theater on North Kedzie, one of half a dozen puppet theaters and troupes making a living in Chicago. 
    

     The puppets, today a circus of mice, go through their paces in front of 60 squealing, delighted schoolchildren who, despite the deadening impact of video games and VCRs and cable television, still enjoy this ancient entertainment. 
     
     "Puppetry is probably the oldest theatrical art form in the world," said Herzog, also is president of the 75-member Chicagoland Puppetry Guild. "There is not any culture in the world, any race of people that does not have a form of puppetry." 
     
     The children are first- and second-graders, prime age for most puppet audiences. 
    

     "The performance window is getting much smaller; by the time they are 9, 10 years old, they have been exposed to so much high-tech entertainment that anything requiring the use of imagination has less appeal to them," said Herzog. "Puppets are not high-tech." 
    

     Yet puppetry is not just for children. The first thing a puppeteer will tell you — after explaining that, no, these puppets are not store-bought, they are meticulously handcrafted — is that puppetry is an art that can be enjoyed by adults. 
    

     "Puppets are fighting for respect," said Michael Schwabe, artistic director of Hystopolis Puppet Theatre, 441 W. North. While kiddie shows are the theater's "bread and butter," Hystopolis also performs work for grown-ups: plays such as Elmer Rice's "The Adding Machine," or its new production, "King Ubu" by the French surrealist Alfred Jarre. 
    

     Bill Henderson, president of AnimArt, is working on the production of an evening of Becket plays. He admits that the notion of puppetry as kiddie entertainment is difficult to overcome. 
    

     "I once did a production of Ibsen's `Peer Gynt,' and people would call up wanting to bring their children," he said. "I would tell them that the opening scene is a rape, that there is full frontal nudity, and they would say: `It's a puppet show; I'm bringing my kids.' " 
    

     The very adult taste of opera is the sole repertoire of William Fosser's "Opera in Focus," a lush production of fantastically detailed puppets acting out famous operas on a splendid gilded stage. 
    

     Fosser was once artistic director of the Kungsholm Miniature Grande Opera, which Chicagoans of a certain age will remember as having once occupied the space where Lawry's restaurant is today. Kungsholm closed in 1971, and Fosser went on to a career in movie set design, on such films as "The Sting" and "Home Alone." But after retiring from the movie business he revived the puppet opera, which has now found a home, a bit incongruously, in the basement of the Park District building in Rolling Meadows. 
    

     After each performance, Fosser leads the audience backstage, where elaborate Egyptian costumes from "Aida" wait on tiny mannequins, and sets from "La Boheme" are protected by custom-made twill dust covers. 
    

     "I'm interested in their realizing this is an art form, and what goes into it," said Fosser, 65. "Some say the trip backstage is as exciting as the performance." 
    

     A puppet endures a lot of wear and tear—once, during "Lohengrin," the swan's head fell off in mid-performance. Constant maintenance is essential. 
    

      Before an afternoon practice run-through of "Faust," 
Fosser's assistant, Paul Guerra, carefully applies clear nail polish to Cho-Cho-San, the heroine from "Madame Butterfly." 
    

     "That way," he explains, evenly, lest his hand shake, "when the light catches her just right, people swear the lips move." 
    

     As much as Herzog, Henderson, Fosser and Guerra have to scrape by to make a living, they are the puppetry elite in the sense that they have permanent spaces to perform. 
    

      The majority of puppeteers are like Steven Finnegan, traveling to birthday parties, church picnics and senior centers. 
    

     "It's a dying breed. If I had to just make my living as a puppeteer I probably couldn't do it," said Finnegan, 45. "I'm also a clown." 
    

     Finnegan said he wished that parents looking to entertain their children would consider puppets, instead of automatically turning to magicians and clowns. 
    

     "Think about clowns," said Finnegan. "There are a zillion clowns and all of them work. I know a guy who charges $120 to bounce around in a Barney costume. I come in, set up a theater and a sound system and do a full production for 45 minutes — a much better entertainment value — and I can only charge $135 for a birthday party." 
  

      "People don't understand that it's a profession," said Herzog. 
                                                   

                     —Originally published in the Sun-Times May 29, 1994

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"Life Never Becomes Dull..."

     A Medill student came by my office the other day to research a paper—drawn, I was amused to note, not through the column, but through the blog—and asked why I became a writer. I thought about being a kid, staring out the window of Fairwood Elementary School, bored and trying to conjure up wonders to distract myself. I told him that I became a writer because I was trying to keep life interesting. 

      As I got older, however, I realized that life is always interesting. Endlessly complex and fascinating. It is we who either notice it or, all too frequently, don't.

      That is the theme of the 2015 Everygoddamnday.com poster, which I am happy to unveil. Like last year's, it was produced by Hatch Show Print of Nashville, Tennessee, with the help of Carl, one of their six, count 'em, six steampunk designers on staff.  I should also give a thanks to James Smith, our own award-winning designer at the newspaper. I assumed I would change the color scheme this year—shake it up—particularly after a reader objected that the black-and-red made him think of the Nazi flag.

One of my favorite spots, the Book Bin, 1151 Church St.
in Northbrook, was the first place to display the poster.

      But James argued against that, conjuring up McDonald's and the value of consistency in branding. Works for them, or did. So black and red it is, at least for another year.

     While last year I did get them up in store windows around Chicago, I balked at actually pasting them to walls outdoors—except outside Powell's Books in Hyde Park, which encourages it. It's harder to actually do that than you might expect, and after I passed a guy on a stepladder, vigorously taking a razor blade to a handbill stuck to a brick wall in an alley, I realized: everywhere belongs to somebody, and I wouldn't want anyone to see one of these posters and think, "Oh shit." 

      But I see areas in Wicker Park that are crammed with posters—it seems permitted—and I'm going to make greater effort to get more up this year. As with last year, if you have a business, a place of public accommodation, and want one, let me know and I'll not only send you one, I'll post a picture of it on display in your establishment. Publicity for the both of us. 

You can still buy the old one

    Otherwise, you can also buy them. I've decided to keep the price the same—a reasonable $15, plus $6 for shipping and handling. The poster will arrive in a handsome, sturdy, re-usable cardboard tube manufactured right here in the city at Chicago Mailing Tube, 400 North Levitt. 

     Mail your check to Neil Steinberg, 2000 Center Ave., Northbrook, IL 60062. The poster is suitable for framing, and I've appreciated when readers have sent me photos of their photos, decorating their libraries and dens. 

    I thought perhaps I should stop selling the old posters, out of principle, but I've still got a few, and so those will remain on sale for the time being.  

     I think the new poster conveys a useful message. Life is a long time (as T.S. Eliot said). Its joy and fascination can sometimes fade, particularly as the years grind on. It is incumbent upon ourselves, if we want to lead happy lives, to realize it is ourselves, not life, that occasionally loses its edge, and thus we need to renew ourselves, to sharpen ourselves. I like to think this blog can help in that process. I know I need it.

The poster in the window of Turn The Tables, a delightful upscale consignment furniture shop at 1955 Cherry Lane in Northbrook that also features the lovely refinishing work of its co-owner, Melly Schwartz. 

Saturday Fun Activity: Where IS this?

     Who knows how many churches are in Chicago?
     I wouldn't hazard a guess—one local TV station estimated 6,000, but they didn't source that figure.
     Though it sounds about right.
     Of course first, you'd have to define what you mean by "churches"?
     Does that refer to church buildings? Because some of those are empty, or have been pressed into other purposes. There's a church on the North Side that was made into condos. Is it still a "church?"
     Or a congregations? Because many of those meet in storefronts.
     It isn't as if the city keeps a master church list, to my knowledge. You don't have to register your church, or get a church license.
     This lovely structure caught my eye during my wanderings around the city this week, for its charming maroon-roofed tower, and its matching awning announcing "LOVE."
      (And yes, I plugged those into Google to see if they give the game away: they don't. Lots of churches, lots of love).
      So where is this particular church?
      I've gone through something of a transformation during the "Saturday Fun Activity" process. As much as I want to stump you guys, I think part of me will be sad when that finally happens, if it finally happens, the way the Boston Red Sox winning the World Series drained away a little of the specialness that came from their long string of defeats. As thwarted as I've been in my attempts to frustrate the Hive, I think when I eventually do—perhaps with this church, hiding in plain sight—it'll be a melancholy victory.
     Or heck, maybe I'll be triumphant. Hard to predict these things.
     So place your guesses below. The winner gets a package of excellent Bridgeport coffee. Except for Dale—he's already got his. When I shipped him his prize package for last Saturday, I tucked in an extra bag, as an advance against his next victory. Seemed an efficiency. I probably should have shipped three. Good luck to all. And if it's King Dale, well, I'm okay with that too. 

Postscript
     In case this put you in the mood for more photos of churches—and synagogues, and mosques—the winner, who photographed the church above last year, shared a website, "Chicago Houses of Worship" featuring thousands of pictures of, well, you know. 

"So these three terrorists walk into a bar..."

     

     The slaughter at Parisian satiric weekly is an attack against the fraternity of the irreverent.  We who don't accept the world as it is given to them, the way true believers and zealots do, but who scoff, who doubt, who question and criticize and complain.
     That's me. I've been a wisenheimer all my life. Snide, sarcastic. Even as a child. 

     When I grew up, and started writing, poking fun at stuff came naturally. The first piece of writing I sold for money was to National Lampoon in 1980. Since then I've written for Spy, for Esquire's Dubious Achievement Awards, for Rolling Stone. My column at the Sun-Times is not what I would call a beacon of gravitas.  

      Mockery is my business. I'm not of the Charlie Hebdo mold, only because they were so ... what? So French, with all those sloppy kissing cartoons. So European, meaning they slid into an easy xenophobia. They'd reply by saying they made fun of everyone, but you still had to wonder whose side they're on. Not my taste, but not something people should be killed over, either.  

     Friday's column required a balance, and I hope I pulled it off. Basically I wrote what I felt, what struck me as funny and, to my delight, the paper printed it. 

     And if it seems like I'm joking about tragic issues, well, you kind of have to. That's what Charlie Hebdo was all about, and our response should do no less.

     Knock-knock

     Who's there?

     Muhammad.

     Muhammad who?

     It better be Muhammad Ali, or you're in trouble.

     That isn't funny. But then, knock knock jokes are never particularly funny. They're more about wordplay ("Lettuce in, it's cold out here") and bad puns that cause 6-year-olds to spurt milk out their noses.

     Although, as jokes sometimes do, the one above, which was written by Eric Zorn of the Chicago Tribune (psst, non potential terrorists: it as-way eally-ray itten-wray by e-may) , illustrates a truth that might jar if stated plainly:

     Terrorism works.

     For all the "Not Afraid" bluster that came in the wake of the slaughter of 12 staffers at the Charlie Hebdo satiric newspaper in Paris, there is a chilling effect. There has to be.  "Will this get me killed?" is not a question conducive to humor. Even the Onion, in its typically dead-on response to the Paris massacre, sounded a note more somber than hilarious, under the headline: "It Sadly Unclear Whether This Article Will Put Lives at Risk," written in an intentionally unattributed, vague, will-we-die-if-we-say-this? fashion:

     "Today’s horrific events only reinforce the idea that we cannot and will not let extremist zealots dictate what we can and cannot say,” is a comment that we will quote, but one that we do with a legitimate sense of uncertainty over whether it could incite an attack against the speaker or their loved ones, a sense of uncertainty that feels awful, grotesque, and wholly unnecessary in this day and age.

     That isn't funny, or rather, is funny in a dry, puff-cheeks-and-sigh-kind of way. If you compare that piece to the one the Onion ran immediately after the 9/11 attacks, with the 19 hijackers shocked to find themselves roasting in hell, you can almost think that Western society has slid backward in 13 years, that our freewheeling freedoms have lost a step in the face of a constant stream of videos of journalist beheadings and bus bombings and the like.

     Myself, I never worry about that kind of thing, because I sincerely believe I'm not important enough to kill. Plus, at 54, I've already had the good part of my life and now comes the dismal denouemont of failing body, failing finances and descent into utter obscurity. Maybe having it all end in a white flash might not be such a horrible thing.
    

     No, I don't believe in mocking God for a variety of reasons. Everyone needs to claim false significance for something, and whether it's opera or football or a loving deity is merely a matter of personal style. If God is imaginary, so is Carmen, and I wouldn't want anybody claiming that makes the whole pageant a waste of time.
     Yes, one is tempted to blaspheme the prophet on general principles, to show that we can. The Chicago Tribune's Eric Zorn has coined a variety of explicit jokes about Muhammad that I would share, except I believe doing so is wrong. Muslims in this country are members of an extreme minority whose position is only undercut by brutal acts such as we saw this week. The irony is that the attackers are in silent conspiracy with haters everywhere. A fringe zero commits a crime, and others claim it somehow represents the whole. Arguing that the crime in Paris reflects on Islam is like insisting that Bernie Madoff indicts Jews.
     And no, Zorn hasn't really done any of that. He's a good friend of mine, or was, before I dragged him into this. I just think the notion of projecting these dangerous, imaginary insults upon him is funny.
     But that would change if somebody threw a brick at his house. Or mine. We have to hold, on faith, that we haven't passed some kind of tipping point where jokes are not allowed. I don't want to pretend that Islamic radicals invented terrorizing those who disagree with their dogma. We in the U.S. have a long, rich history of doing just that, from John Adams' Alien and Sedition Acts to the 1960s South, where supporting voting rights could and did get you killed.
     One of the dozen Charlie Hebdo staffers killed was Stephane Charbonnier, editor and cartoonist. The magazine had been threatened and firebombed before, and in 2012 he said something worth repeating:
     "Muhammad isn't sacred to me. I don't blame Muslims for not laughing at our drawings. I live under French law. I don't live under Quranic law."
     Charbonnier said something else: "I'd rather die standing than live on my knees."
     This is a moment of truth, where we decide whether to cower in fear or stand up. I admire Zorn for standing up and boldly insulting Islamic terrorists everywhere, almost daring them to come after him. I only wish I had his courage.