On law, facts and yelling about gay marriage

  

     “When the facts are against you,” the first part of the old legal saying goes, “argue the law.”
     That means, when evidence undercuts your case, the way it does for those who oppose gay marriage on religious grounds, then try to win by finding a loophole in the law, such as the notion that states have the right to control marriage within their own borders. Hang your case on that.
     Which is necessary, because there are no facts to suggest gays shouldn’t get married. They don’t make worse spouses, or worse parents. If society wants people to form families, in order to raise children and create a stable world, then the only reason gays shouldn’t participate in marriage is religious intolerance, or simple fear that causes one to invent reasons against it.
     Not to underestimate bigotry. It was enough, for years and years, to keep gays from marrying. But the truth will out — another old saying — and over the past few years we’ve seen extraordinary progress in the United States, as old biases melt away.
     On Friday the United States Supreme Court agreed to consolidate four gay marriage ban cases from four states — Michigan, Ohio, Kentucky and Tennessee — and then decide once and for all whether gay marriage, already legal in 36 states, should be the law of the land.
     You could argue that this is the Big One, which will resolve the issue definitively, from a legal point of view. Although, for the shrinking minority against it, a legal decision will only cause them to rail about unelected judges, as they do whenever a ruling goes against them.    
     You could also argue that any Supreme Court decision is moot, that the issue is already resolved, since 70 percent of Americans live in a place where gay marriage is legal, and given the practice’s ample benefits, improving the lives of previously marginalized people, and their children, and complete lack of drawbacks, other than ruffling the moral sensibilities of zealots, we’re never going back, no matter what the Supreme Court decides.
     "When the law is against you,” the second part of the saying goes, “argue the facts.”
     Those facts are that 14 states still do not have gay marriage. Most of them in the Bible Belt — Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, Tennessee, Texas. The same states that clung to racial segregation until the Supreme Court pried it away from them, to the degree that it has. They won’t give up this fight easily either. Which leads to the third part of the saying:
     “When both the facts and the law are against you, yell like hell.”
     That is a certainty. Oral arguments will begin in April, and a ruling is scheduled for June. Until then, expect a lot of bluster, a lot of false statements loudly made, and empty claims that gay marriage somehow undermines traditional marriage in a way clear to those who want it stopped, but not readily apparent to the increasing number of Americans who see the dignity, certainty and security that legalized gay marriage brings to their parents, their children, their brothers and sisters. Justice Antonin Scalia will no doubt issue a blistering dissent — assuming he isn’t in the majority. But either way, the change has been made, and the high court will either seal it, or delay that inevitability for another day. 

Puppetry Week: #5: "A puppet mocks being human"

 Puppetry Week lurches to a conclusion today — there there, take comfort, it'll be back in two years, perhaps, when the festival returns—with this interview with Blair Thomas, who created the Chicago International Puppet Theater Festival. 

     Were I to live my life again, I'd be a puppeteer.

     My puppet theater would be called Punch & Judy's. It would be semi-legendary in Wicker Park, a modest hall, wide-slat wood floors, elaborate gilded stage with a red velvet curtain. The line would stretch out the door, the long tables, groaning with ale and spiced meat pies. Once an hour, a bell rings, the curtain flies up, and for 10 minutes Mr. Punch, with his pointed chin and jester's hat is once again locked in eternal battle with wife Judy, the shrieks and whistles and rude jokes, the baby ejected from the stage as if shot from a cannon, the crowd, red-faced and roaring while I sit on a stool in my admiral's hat, counting the gate, greedily fingering the thick rolls of wet bills.
     Alas, I'm stuck doing this.
     But I can admire those who do devote their lives to puppetry, that eternally low-rent art form whose rare splashes of success — the Muppets, Avenue Q, "Being John Malkovich" — only mock  the shabby desuetude of of the art form in general.
     Not to be a downer at the advent of the first International Chicago Puppet Theater Festival, which began Wednesday and runs until Jan. 25. If it weren't so obscure, I wouldn't care about it. Video games do far, far better than puppetry, but don't expect a lot of updates on them here.
     The festival is the hard-earned brainchild of Chicago puppeteer Blair Thomas.    
     "It's true, it's been a lot of work, a lot of great things happening," he said. "There is not a major international puppet theater festival."
     Well, there is now, or could be, if this catches on. What does he hope to accomplish with his festival?

Mr. Punch

     "One thing I'm interested in, as a puppeteer, is to advance the form," he said. "One of best way to do that is to get the audiences to see what is going on in the contemporary puppetry movement. Once they see that, they will be astounded."
     I told him that the "Theater" in his festival name struck me as a stab distancing itself from the grim 4th birthday party machinations that come to mind for many at mention of "puppetry," and a grab at Steppenwolf-ish respect.
     "We are in a way attempting to align ourselves with that, rather than a lesser form of puppet theater," he said. "My goal is to redefine what puppet theater is for Chicago audiences."
     For me, puppet theater is the thing I never go to. I admire puppets as lovely, often strange objects, and puppetry as a concept, perhaps because it's the rare profession even more ill-favored than my own. But the last puppet show I attended was while herding a pair of toddlers. What advantages, I asked Thomas, does puppetry bring to a dramatic effort?
     "I think of puppetry as being a form of performance using sculpture and performance together in a unique way," he said. "You're watching material objects. It looks like a human but it's not, and ends up being able to do things a human being can't. A human being can't come apart, but a puppet can literally come apart in front of you. Fantastical things like that. In puppetry, the fantastical is normal."
     I told him there was a bit of synergy, his festival arriving right after the Charlie Hebdo tragedy in France.
     "[Puppetry is] extremely good at mocking authority, because authority is the humans, in terms of shows in the festival actually doing that...we don't have anyone doing that directly."
     Pity.
     I told Thomas I didn't think that puppetry could ever be popular again, assuming it once was. That puppets are like hats; their renaissance is constantly being announced without ever actually arriving.
     "You can open up a puppetry journal from 1930, and they're like, 'Puppetry is having a renaissance!' " Thomas said. "The reality is puppetry always exists on periphery of dominant culture. It's an amalgam form, not a pure form like poetry or playing the piano. This position on the periphery allows it to comment. That's why puppetry lends it self to satire. It can mock. A puppet itself mocks being human, appears to be alive, but can't be alive. We're the people who're alive. That's really a disturbing thing, when it's really well done, it's shocking, that uncanny thing ... taps into our reptilian brain, and we think this is a real thing. That's actually a thrilling place to be, sweeping us away with its wonder and otherworldliness. This is what I think contemporary puppetry is. Hardly anyone know this."
     The secret's out now. I've got tickets to a production Friday night — you kind of have to. I'm hoping that it's wonderful.
     "'The Table' is a great introduction," he said. "Really funny and good theater too."
     You can learn about the festival at chicagopuppetfest.org.
     By the way, in that alternate world, after the crowd at "Punch & Judy's" drains their beers and staggers out the door, after the lights are turned up, showing horribly the swill and God-knows-what-else soaked sawdust on the floor, I stand, let out a long sigh, set my admiral's hat on the stool, put on my jacket, look at the empty puppet palace and think, "I devoted my life to this? I could have been a newspaper columnist ..."

Puppetry Week: #4 Sometimes it's just a puppet

     You can, of course, think about this stuff too much.
     I was reading Kenneth Gross' artful critique Puppet (University of Chicago Press: 2011) and as much as I admired his turns of phrase, the "fundamental strangeness" of puppets, their air of "something very old and very early," as I neared the end of the book, I felt he had sort of missed the point.  A writer, of course, is entitled to define his subject, and if you want to wax poetic about puppets by giving far more attention to Russian puppeteer Sergei Obraztsov than you do the Muppets, so be it. 
     But just as, at some point in your exegesis on chocolate cake, even the most scrupulous scholar should admit it simply tastes good, so one shouldn't unspool a puppetry week—or a book about puppets—without a nod to their essential goofiness, their inherent sweetness, so that even under glass, with no animating hand, like my pal Kukla above, with his dark tomato nose, cherry cheeks and matching gown, well, he's funny. You shouldn't speak of the "wild, monomaniacal appetite of the Cookie Monster," as Gross does, without at least whispering that he was a riot to watch. Otherwise, it seems a willful obfuscation. No matter how sophisticated your analysis of the social-mechanical dynamics of schoolyard play, it's still hopscotch.
     Puppets are also commercial. As sweet as Kukla and Ollie were (Fran, being human, we'll leave out, for now) as manipulated by Burr Tillstrom, they were also designed to get kids to pester their parents to buy television sets, and they worked very well. 
     While puppetry can be accomplished with enormous skill, as those attending the Chicago International Puppet Theater Festival will no doubt discover, puppets can also push product, do the heavy lifting and cover for a lack of talent on the part of the puppeteer. I'm thinking of the Puppet Bike, a crude moveable stage spied around town where basically threadbare hand puppets bop to recorded music. That's it. Their central skill is dancing with each other and encouraging children to get money from their parents and stick it in a slot. My buddy Mark Konkol caught up with the Puppet Bike's inventor a few years back, describing the project as "a way to help an out-of-work friend make a few bucks."
     No shame there. Not everyone can be artists, and more puppets are adjuncts to beggary than cultural touchstones. Somehow, I thought perhaps local puppet acts would be buffing their shoe button eyes, practicing their best stuff and attempting to shine in the festival, looking for their big break, puppetwise.That is the romantic in me. The truth is, it's a hard world out there, and if putting a sock on your hand makes the passerby stop and maybe fish for a stray buck, well, that's what you do.  

     

Defeating ISIS one mom at a time

Zarine Khan/AP photo

     The mother of the accused can be safely ignored.
     Usually.
     All those outraged “Not my baby!” protests.
     The inevitable “I know he’s innocent” oaths, dripping with ginned-up indignation.
     They must seem powerful when the mothers of boys gone wrong are saying them, with tears and nods.
     And the media passes it along as if it means something.
     But there is always an unspoken dismissive “uh-huh,” a tongue click: Maybe mom, we think, if you were paying more attention, then Junior wouldn’t be duck-walked through 26th and California in shackles, and you wouldn’t have to tell the indifferent world what a good kid he is and how he couldn’t have done what all the evidence points toward him doing.
     With most moms of the accused, this is true.
     Now Zarine Khan is a different case.
     Mother of Mohammed Hamzah Khan, the Bolingbrook teen who in the fall managed to retire the 2014 prize for Top Suburban Youthful Screwup, leaping over being caught with a joint or wrecking the car or missing his curfew, and landing straight into the realm of treason as he was arrested at O’Hare on his way to join the Islamic State group.

       If you don't recall, in October, Khan, 19, his 17-year-old sister and 16-year-old brother were blocked from boarding a plane to Vienna, on their way to Istanbul, then to Syria to help with the beheadings and civilian massacres that the Islamic State is committing in the name of Islam.
     "An Islamic State has been established and it is thus obligatory upon every able-bodied male and female to migrate there," Khan wrote in the note he left behind. "Muslims have been crushed under foot for too long. ... This nation is openly against Islam and Muslims. ... I do not want my progeny to be raised in a filthy environment like this."
     He was charged with providing material support to a foreign terrorist organization. On Tuesday, Khan pleaded not guilty.
     Expected. But the really interesting statement was made by his mother, in the lobby of the Dirksen Federal Building:
     "As parents we feel compelled to speak out about the recent events in Paris, where we saw unspeakable acts of horror perpetrated by the recruiters for jihadist groups in the name of Islam," she said. "The venom spewed by these groups and the violence committed by them find no support in the Quran and are completely at odds with our Islamic faith.
     "We condemn this violence in the strongest possible terms. We condemn the brutal tactics of ISIS and groups like it. And we condemn the brainwashing and the recruiting of children through the use of social media and Internet."
     Normally, I consider demands for Islamic condemnation of terror an insult to the world's 1.6 billion Muslims. Chicagoans weren't called upon to denounce John Wayne Gacy, to prove they weren't in sympathy. Yet whenever there's an Islamic radical attack, those who fear Muslims anyway demand some sort of collective denouncement from them, as a body, a situation best summed up by Ahmed Rehab, executive director of the Council on American Islamic Relations in Chicago.
     "We are held account for the choices of the worst among us," he said, pointing out that one of the attackers of the kosher market in Paris and a bystander who tried to help were both African Muslims.
     "Should the guy who saved lives have to apologize for the guy shooting?" Rehab asked.
     But the situation with mothers, and fathers, is different.
     It is possible to discount what Zarine Kahn said. She is, after all, the mother of a teen facing years in prison. And I would never suggest she is heroic for saying that.
     But that process - speaking out against this - is important for the parents of other teens, who certainly might harbor feelings such as those that sent Mohammed Khan packing. A million French in the street is one piece of the puzzle getting us toward the world that most of us want to inhabit. And mothers against the romantic lure of jihad, both in public and in private, is another.
     Zarine Kahn is not the only one; her desperate situation made her brazen. But many parents are in a similar desperate situation and might not even know it. They, too, need to speak to their children. As a parent of a 17- and a 19-year-old myself, I know that they don't always seem to be listening. In fact, sometimes it seems they're never listening.
     But some part of them is listening. And the message sinks in.

Puppetry Week #3: The persistence of puppet opera

 

Photos from "Faust," above, and "Lakme," atop blog, courtesy of Opera in Focus.

      Puppetry Week hit a speed bump today. I had a thoughtful conversation with Blair Thomas, founder of the Chicago International Puppet Theater Festival, all set to go, when my boss asked me Tuesday afternoon to weigh in on the latest developments of this Bolingbrook teen who tried to fly to Turkey and join ISIS.
     I considered replying, “But my puppetry opus is ready!” But that didn’t seem the path of the hardened journalist, and since the paper hasn’t run the puppet story yet—I’m shooting for Friday—it wouldn’t be right to post it here first and scoop my own paper.
     So, to keep the week going, I’ve disinterred this 2010 visit to one of the oddest landmarks of Chicago puppetry, Opera in Focus, a rod puppet operation improbably located in Rolling Meadows. No pictures, alas. I’ll post the kid-in-trouble column at 6 a.m. If you want to learn more about Opera in Focus, you can click here. Its season begins Feb. 4 with, fittingly, a program that includes "Aida."
     Whew.

     Opera is a grand art form, and Verdi's "Aida" is the grandest opera 
of all, a tale of forbidden love amongst the pyramids. Its 
Triumphal March is opera's famed flourish, a pageant that sometimes 
includes chariots, horsemen and live elephants.
     So when I heard that not only is opera performed by puppets in 
Rolling Meadows, but in May the show on the 4-foot-wide stage was 
"Aida," I had to be there.
     Chicagoans of a certain age will remember the Kungsholm Miniature 
Grand Opera, performed at a Swedish restaurant at Rush and Ontario. 
That closed in 1971, but puppeteer Bill Fosser, who began working 
at Kungsholm at 14 in 1943, continued the tradition. He kept his 
Opera in Focus going at various storefronts, and even in a Magic 
Pan restaurant, until his puppets found a permanent home in the 
basement of the Rolling Meadows Park District headquarters in 1993.
     This "Aida" was abbreviated, but still over two hours long, with 
four intermissions, plenty of time to wonder: a) exactly how did 
Rolling Meadows become the permanent host to puppet opera? And b) 
how did this blending of puppetry and song -- unique in the world, 
apparently -- find new enthusiasts after Fosser's death in 2006?
     In the early 1990s, Rolling Meadows was looking for ways to spur 
cultural interest -- courting a children's museum, a youth theater, 
waging a "battle" with Park Ridge over the puppet opera.
     "I had just been assigned by city of Rolling Meadows to work on 
economic development, and we had nothing in the form of 
entertainment," said Linda Liles Ballantine, executive director of 
the chamber of commerce, who had read about the puppets. "I 
happened to say to the city manager, 'Oh shoot, this would be 
something unique.' "
     Unique it is. As tempted as I am to assume a straight face, hold up 
the puppet "Aida" to the Lyric's and find it wanting ("The artistic 
decision to present a recorded 'Aida' using only four puppets 
underscores the Lyric's wisdom in using a full orchestra and 100 
live singers . . ."), the truth is, it is beyond critique, a visual 
and musical gem in a separate realm of sweetness that you either 
appreciate or you don't.
     My wife loved it. "This is such a little treasure," she said. I'm a 
harder case, so did recall Samuel Johnson's line about women 
preachers and dancing dogs -- the issue isn't whether it's done 
well, "but you are surprised to find it done at all." That said, I 
was charmed by the effort.
     The puppets are not marionettes, but rod puppets, operated from 
below, 16 inches tall and finely crafted, with lush costumes.
     Wisely, every half hour there is an intermission, with a spread of 
food—hors d'oeuvres, cookies, candy and pop—in the small lobby. 
My boys appreciated that.
     Afterward, the puppeteers invite the audience backstage, so you can 
see how they maneuver the puppets, while sitting on low rolling 
chairs, and view their work room, with sets and costumes and 
puppets from other operas at the ready.
     You also meet the puppeteers -- brothers Justin and Shayne Snyder, 
Barry Southerland and Leilani Narcisco. All in their 20s, it is 
remarkable to find a quartet of young people devoting themselves to 
this obscure realm of low-tech entertainment. Why?
     "To keep the tradition alive," said Narcisco.
     "We do what we do because we love it!" said Justin Snyder, who was 
an apprentice under Fosser and got the others involved. "It's a 
labor of love. We're the last remnant of a beautiful art form that 
is unique to Chicago."
     That they are. Unlike the Lyric, which, like an exhausted bear, 
hibernates half the year, Opera in Focus performs year-round, if 
sometimes sporadically and not usually single operas, but 
highlights. Call to make reservations -- (847) 818-3220, ext. 186. 
Adult tickets are $12, a buck less for seniors, children are $7.
        —Originally published in the Sun-Times, May 31, 2010

"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.