Pope Francis has left the building

     The pope has gone home, flying out of Philadelphia about 7 p.m. Sunday night.
     An apt moment to ask what, if anything, the visit meant, and what its lingering effects might be.
     Pope Francis certainly got a warm reception, adoring crowds, incessant, respectful media, an unprecedented address to a joint session of Congress.
     "There is another temptation which we must especially guard against, the simplistic reductionism which sees only good or evil," the pope told one of the most bitterly divided legislative bodies in history. "Or, if you will, the righteous and sinners. The contemporary world, with its open wounds which affect so many of our brothers and sisters, demands that we confront every form of polarization which would divide it into these two camps."
     If life were a movie, then Speaker John Boehner would have leapt up and resigned on the spot, the way that the corrupt senator played by Claude Rains in "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington" bolted from the Senate chambers, tried to shoot himself, then returned to publicly confess his guilt.
     Life is not a movie, alas, and Boehner waited until the next day, quitting, not so much in opposition to the right wing schismatics who have destroyed his party as in submission to them. While the resulting disarray might temporarily thwart their efforts to bring the United States government to a standstill, the long term is thought to be an even more bitterly divided government, assuming such a thing is possible.
     Our leadership certainly seemed unmoved by the pope's heartfelt appeals, keeping with the central tenet of extremism: you don't change in light of facts or rhetoric, but merely cherry-pick the facts and arguments you believe help your case. For instance, when the pope issued an unequivocal call for an end to capital punishment, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz's reply was a masterstroke of convolution.
     “I believe the death penalty is a recognition of the preciousness of human life," he said.
     Pope Francis handed out plenty of manna to feed the entire political spectrum — something for everyone! — and you could argue he is just putting the same old my-way-or-the-highway theology in a shiny new box.
     Was the pope's visit a feel-good waste then? My gut, or at least my hope, tells me it was not. Anyone living in a generation where the civil rights of gay people took such a dramatic turn has to believe in the cumulative effect of time and argument. Change happens the way Mike Campbell went bankrupt in "The Sun Also Rises": "Gradually and then suddenly."
     So those who habitually deny science and boost big business can argue against climate change. But climate change is still real. The evidence of it manifests itself day by day, and having the head of the Catholic Church start focusing on the fate of the planet instead of what goes on in its bedrooms can't be a bad thing. Maybe not this week. But over time. I'm old enough to remember when recycling seemed a concern that granola-gobbling oddballs cared about. Now it's almost kind of a secular religion.
     Of course, I'm only doing what everyone has been doing: spinning the pope my way. Consider this, said by the pope in Philadelphia's Independence Park:
     “In a world where various forms of modern tyranny seek to suppress religious freedom, or try to reduce it to a subculture without right to a voice in the public square, or to use religion as a pretext for hatred and brutality, it is imperative that the followers of the various religions join their voices in calling for peace, tolerance and respect for the dignity and rights of others.”
     The first part seems a big thumbs up to the Kim Davises of the world, who twist being demanded to respect the civil rights of others into an infringement of their own religious liberty. But the second part seems to be telling the Kentucky clerk to issue the marriage licenses.
     As much as religion is used by those trying to argue they have no choice, religion, as Pope Francis reminds us, is a vast treasury where you choose what to emphasize, finding whatever it is you seek. Davis chose to stand in the doorway barring gays, citing Scripture. But she could have just as easily cited her Christian faith as requiring her to sing "Ave Maria" at those gay weddings, despite her personal objections. The choice, as Pope Francis points out, except when he doesn't, is yours.

Wrigley Field isn't ruined

     Entropy demands that systems run down, that clocks stop, empires crumble, and the glittering good generally decays into the shabby bad. It is the columnist's job, frequently, to bemoan this fact, clutching at the ashes of the past and letting out a wail before the rain washes them away and into the sewer.
     So I was interested Friday, when I had the chance to visit Wrigley Field for the first time since the Ricketts clan put in a pair of jumbo TV screen scoreboards, how these perversions of Wrigley's bucolic tradition would go down. Just how horrible would it be? Just how much of a thumb in the eye of all that is holy would it be?
     I found ... to my vast surprise ... they were ... fine. As in okay. Not a problem. Even ... dare I say it... an ...improvement.
     The Toyota plug tucked under the iconic Wrigley sign at the corner of Clark and Addison? Fine. The name "Wrigley Field" is itself a plug — gum, remember? — and to be honest, other names of other sponsors have been tucked there before. The sign itself is unchanged.

Left field scoreboard: not a problem. 

     The big ass TV screen erected in left field? Unoffensive, and I enjoyed the chance to see the plays I'd missed because some idiot was standing up to grab his beers from the beer vendor, or someone was entering or leaving a seat, or the little girl two rows up was raising her glove in such a way that it blocked my view (and no, I wasn't constitutionally able to shout, "Hey tot, put your flippin' glove down!"  I considered it, several times, but decided I didn't want to be that person, and besides, her twig of an arm would have to get  tired, eventually, and it did, about the sixth inning). 
     They also kept the crowd occupied by showing videos of plays more exciting than anything we were seeing on the field, where the Cubs limped along before losing 3-2 to the Pirates, though they made a good show in the 9th inning and stranded the tying run on third. 

    I didn't mind the scoreboard in right field either, admiring the way they used a Wrigley

Right field scoreboard: does not suck.

green, and retro graphics to make the thing seem to fit in. I keep score, and on plays where I wasn't sure if it was a 4-3 or a 6-3 they'd flash the numbers up, so I could look and cheat.
     This isn't a blanket endorsement of the Ricketts, who are still charmless, right wingers who think Scott Walker should be president.  It's hard enough to pay $4.50 for a bag of peanuts without also underwriting the Republican destruction of the American government. The skeleton of whatever godawful hotel they're building just to the north of Wrigley loomed, and we'll have to see how that turns out. But the little ballpark still has its beauty, the concessions still suck—$3.75 for a cup of coffee that might have been hot at one point, but at best held the memory of warmth when handed to me from the concession stand. There is advanced urn technology that will keep coffee hot until the moment it is sold. Maybe that's coming in a future remodeling of the place. 

Saturday fun activity: Where IS this?

     WBBM has its wonderfully-named "Smart Quiz" in the mornings, asking listeners to answer a trivia question, and when they get it wrong, as they often do, I think, "If they were so smart they'd look the answer up on Google while they were on hold."
     Even my humble Saturday fun activity needs to take that into consideration. I had one photo that was basically a yellow mug in a generic coffee shop, and an enterprising reader -- King Dale, where have you gone? -- ripped through the photos in Yelp reviews of Chicago coffee shops until he spied a matching yellow cup. 
     I suppose I could install rules forbidding readers from consulting Google, but that would display a level of naive trust that I'm just not capable of expressing. Besides, I should be able to find images that defy Google. It's a challenge to me as well as you.
    I thought I had a winner with the above. But had the presence of mind to plug, "Decaying Ram mural Chicago" into Google, and up it popped, 400 N. Peoria, in West Fulton Market. 
    Not much of a puzzle.
    Okay, what about this:

     I thought a had a viable option, since "Running man sculpture Chicago" or "Jogging man sculpture Chicago" did not serve up the answer. That seemed too good to be true and, pressing onward, I plugged "Metal running man sculpture Chicago" and Google served up an article on its installation at O'Hare International Airport. 

     This is going to take a bit more ingenuity. 
     How about this carefully-cropped photo?

     Not readily Googlable. Orange triangle just won't do it. But still solvable, I believe—probably too solvable, to be honest. But I like the trio of triangles, black, red, white (not counting the white space, which could be a fourth). Plus I have a soft heart. Place you guesses below. The correct answer will receive one of my super-collective 2015 official Every goddamn day blog posters, signed and numbered, itself a kind of public art now that I'm wheat pasting them around town. Good luck. Have fun. Enjoy your Saturday. 

"A feast of joy, love, harmony and grace"

Barbara Gaines

     "Ready?" says Barbara Gaines, to the singers, technicians and assistants scattered around the otherwise empty Civic Opera House theater one morning last week. "Let's do it."
     "Here we go," adds stage manager John Coleman. "Act 4. Quiet please."
South African soprano Hlengiwe Mkhwanazi climbs the stairs at stage right, glancing tentatively around at her feet, looking for something, lifting the curtain and peering underneath.
     "L'ho perduta, me meschina!" she sings, in Italian. "I've lost it; unhappy me!"
     A handful of notes of Mozart sung in her strong, achingly clear voice is enough to jolt me out of the up-to-that-moment ordinary day. It's like someone popping open my skull and laying cool wet cloths on my brain. Ahhh.
     But only for a moment.
     "Stop please," says Gaines, leaping up. "Okay, great. We're going to change something."
     It's the third day of stage rehearsals for "The Marriage of Figaro," the first production of the Lyric's 61st season, which opens Saturday night. Gaines, on of Chicago's top directors, who founded Chicago Shakespeare Theater and has directed some 30 plays there, is back at the Lyric, part of a savvy strategy to expand its reach beyond the circle of people who, like myself, just love opera, to lure those who might be drawn in by a star director.
     Gaines' job is to sweat the smallest detail, like when Mkhwanazi's character, Barbarina, lifts the curtain, looking for a lost pin.
     "I realized we revealed the set way too early," said Gaines, explaining why she wants to delay the moment. "It works better with the music."
     Gaines reflexively reassures as she instructs.
     "Barbarina, you were perfect, " she says to Mkhwanazi, who sang a show-stopping "Summertime" in "Porgy and Bess" last year.
     Gaines made her Lyric debut in 2010 with Verdi's far grimmer "Macbeth" and is excited to have been asked to take a crack at something lighter.
     "So much more fun, a lot more laughter," she says, during a break. "The joy of it. It's all about love, and passion. It's all of us, all of our stories. It's not about those dark productions where the count is a miserable bastard. He's a human being with empty spaces in his heart and tries to fill them, like all of us do."
     Gaines promises, if not quite Robert Falls-Grade shock, then plenty of surprises.
     "Some of the things on this stage has never been done before," she says.
     Such as?
     "At the very end of the overture—the best overture ever written," she says. "We have two singers and an actress doing a little improvisation that tells you the entire story. It's great fun.  What it says to the audience at the very beginning: 'You can laugh, you can enjoy yourself, this is going to be fun up to the end,' which is hilarious, but totally a surprise. I don't think it's been done in the history of 'Figaro.'''
     And she wasn't referring to the entire second act being performed in an enormous bed, 25 feet across.
     Directing the cast, Gaines is constantly in motion, watching the action from various perspectives.
     "I'll just stay here," she fibs, tucking herself into a seat for, perhaps five seconds, before she is up again, leaning over the pit, on her toes, then on stage, stopping action again, Daniel Ellis, her assistant director, following her like a pull toy duck.
     "When they do things, it gives you ideas, and you have to institute those ideas before you forget them," she explains.
      Gaines has said you can't hear the 4th act and not feel that you are in heaven, "a feast of joy, love, harmony and grace."
     Readers ask—and complain—more about my occasional opera column than any other topic. Gaines, talking about the differences between theater and opera, nails it so well, we'll give her the final word on the subject.
     "You know what it is?" she says. "I am not a religious person. I don't like people telling me what to do. But when they start singing, when the count asks the countess for pardon—perdono—there's this whole song about forgiving. Please forgive me. I think ... there must be a God, because the music is so beautiful. I think it is some of the most beautiful music that has ever been written, the finale of this opera. It goes from this beautiful moment of grace and forgiveness to let's celebrate, get drunk and have fun and live."

"You mealymouthed paper mache-headed wussweasel..."

     Once upon a time, columnists would occasionally put their feet up and run a day of reader mail, a chance of them to take a breather and let their audience to gape in wonderment at the carnival of humanity that is out there, lurking in the shadows. 
     That died with the Internet, when space in the paper became too precious to waste, and online comments sections made us all wearily familiar with just how mean and crazy people can be.  You couldn't have a two inch news story about a kid being hit by a bus without a Greek chorus of malice offering a peek under the rock.
      Mere anthropological interest isn't why I present this letter from a reader in Bensenville, written last month but delivered only Tuesday--he seems to have held onto it for a while, adding fresh thoughts as they came to him. 
     Typically I get such letters and read a bit, and toss them out. But this one struck me as having value, in that it answers the vexing question, "Just who in God's name supports Donald Trump?" far more eloquently than I ever could. He printed his name legibly on the envelope, but I'm going to let his scrawled signature protect his identity — no malice here. 
     For those reading on their iPhones, it might be a bit hard to decipher; wait for your coffee break and call it up on the computer at work; it's worth the effort, I think, because you see the sort of reasoning at work. This is why Trump is doing so well. Any further comment from me would be unnecessary. Enjoy or, I suppose, more accurately, despair.

"The moving walkway is now ending; look down."

     
     The future we were promised never came.
     No jet packs, no spandex jumpsuits, no robot maids—that little round vacuum thing just doesn't count.
     Sure, we got certain whiz-bang devices we didn't expect: the phone/camera/computer in our back pockets. But that wasn't really part of the classic Space Age Dream.
     Moving sidewalks were. Why walk, why go to the bother of using your legs when you could be whisked to your destination through the magic of our friend, technology?
     Now some of those futuristic wonders are going the way of Space Foods sticks, at least at O'Hare International Airpot, where United Airlines announced it is taking out the eight moving walkways in Concourse C.
     "Our observation shows that removing the walkways in Concourse C will enhance the experience for our customers by reducing congestion and improving flow through the concourse," said Luke Punzenberger, a spokesman for United Airlines, based in Chicago.
     They'll also move faster.
      "Moving walkways are the only form of transportation that actually slow people down," said Dr. Seth Young, of Ohio State University, one of several scientists to study the sidewalks and find that they delay pedestrians by obstructing their paths or encouraging them to stand while traveling at a slower pace than they'd walk unaided. The walkways also take up room that could be used to increase airport shopping, a trend of the world we find ourselves in, as opposed to one we once dreamed about.
     For those with a fondness for United trippy 850-foot walkway between Concourses B and C, with undulating glass walls, under what was billed as the longest neon sculpture in the world, worry not: that will remain.
     "We're only looking at Concourse C," said Punzenberger. "There are no plans to remove the connector walkways."
     People who are elderly, or have physical limitations, might be concerned about the removal of the walkways, which do offer a respite from the lengthy slog between Point A to Point B.
     "We recognize that some customers have special needs or concerns when flying, and we will continue to provide transport to customers who may require additional assistance,"  Punzenberger said.
     Like the fascination with trips to the moon, moving sidewalks appeared in Victorian times then took off in earnest the 1950s. The first debuted at the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago.  Several other fairs around the world featured them, but it was only in 1954 that they first showed up in as part of urban transportation hubs and, in 1958, jet age airports, when the first was installed at Love Field in Dallas.
     People are always worrying about our machines turning on us, and moving walkways actually did. There was at least one death: On New Year's Day, 1960, a toddler, 2-year-old Tina Marie Brandon, visited Love Field with her family to see relatives depart and was crushed to death when her coat sleeve was caught by the walkway. Before anyone could react, her clothing constricted her so much she suffocated.

     Even when they don't kill you, the walkways in C offered an unwelcome conundrum. What to do? Stride athletically through the non-moving part of the concourse, or meekly hop aboard, knowing you'll have that slightly unsettling "The moving walkway is now ending, please look down" moment when you were projected back into the pedestrian realm of foot travel?

     Better to get rid of them, and not just for the way they can make it harder to get to a particular shop, or the energy consumed, or the expense of maintaining them—or not maintaining them, as the case may be. In 1999, an electrical fire in one of the walkways shut down flights in Terminal One for two hours.
     Four of the eight walkways are being removed now and will be gone by Thanksgiving, when there will be a pause in construction for the holiday traffic nightmare.
     "We expect to complete work by spring," Punzenberger said.
     Good riddance. Moving walkways are like food pills: a better idea than a reality. Cool concepts, perhaps, but turns out people prefer walking and eating. Walking is a joy—okay, in airports, not so much. But it's still good for you, and all things being equal, you should walk more, not less. Ditto for nutrition pills. People didn't really want them; they want artisanal bread and organic apples and lettuce grown in the backyard.
     The future never actually arrives, and considering the strange stuff we fooled ourselves into believing we wanted someday, that's a good thing.

One less GOP hopeful to laugh at

     The parade of dunces that the Republican Party has been marching through America's living rooms over the summer was just too entertaining to last. Inevitable that the lowest, most rotten fruit would drop away. Last week it was Rick Perry collapsing in a heap, after making a game but failed effort to overcome his humiliating gaffe of 2012, when he demanded the closing of three federal agencies, but just couldn't name that third one, not off the top of his head. The new glasses did not help.
    Monday was Scott Walker's turn to cease—no, no, "suspend," his campaign, a mere pause just in case the nation wants to fall to its knees and beg him to stay in the race. 
    Won't happen. The pride of Wisconsin, who most recently polled at 0.5 percent of the likely Republican voters, declared that other doomed candidates would take his lead and quit too so the party could focus on finding somebody to counter Donald Trump, who's been spanking their bottoms for months now. He seems to be forgetting that his whole problem is none of the voters care what he says or does, so the odds of his erstwhile opponents doing so are pretty slim. 
     Walker made the mistake of believing that dominating Madison made him fit to conquer the world. He actually said that if he could face down 100,000 angry union members, outraged over his keelhauling of government employee rights, he could take on ISIS too. Though my favorite shred of Walker stupidity was when he appeared on Meet the Press, and told Chuck Todd that building a wall along the 4,000 mile border with Canada was a "legitimate" idea to keep out the terrorists who might start pouring over any moment now. (Add his recent invitation to Ben Carson to drop his trousers and reveal his shameful bigotry, and Chuck Todd is becoming the go-to guy for egging on self-immolating Republicans) .
     Walker's downfall seems to be that he was out-crazied by Donald Trump. The charisma-challenged Walker lost the lunatic fringe and thus the footrace to the bottom of the American soul. 
     So a big bye-bye as Walker bites his lip and confronts a future where the harm he can do is limited to Wisconsin. 
     Now the question is: who's next? Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal would be a natural, though there is real doubt whether he possesses the self-awareness needed to quit. Lindsey Graham does, at least, have the photo receptors and ganglionic clump that Jindal lacks, which might inspire him to look around, see where he is on the evolutionary scale, and go home. He does have a sense of decency that makes him unelectable as a GOP contender -- he actually chided Carson for his vile bigotry about Muslims, which, in Republican circles, is the equivalent of joining Jane Fonda for an inspection of North Vietnamese gun emplacements. But Graham did moderately well at last week's loser consolation undercard debate, and that probably splashes enough water in the face of his swooning campaign that it can endure a few more turns of the thumbscrews. 
    No, Rick Santorum is the next baby GOP baby bird to be pushed out of the presidential campaign nest. Santorum, whose very name has morphed into a term for a gross sexual byproduct — a usage that is certain to outlive him, the way "bowdlerize" lived on long after Thomas Bowlder — couldn't even distinguish himself in the pageant of midgets, his performance drawing comments like "lackluster" and "weak." Given the blats of ridicule he receives, expect him to slink off with whatever injured dignity he can muster, I'd say by St. Crispin's Day, or Oct. 25. 
      My wife, by the way, using her generally spot-on intuition, announced at supper Monday night that Marco Rubio will get the nomination and win the presidency because he is young, handsome, and seems able to gull GOP diehards into thinking he's crazier than he actually is, then reversing course and tacking toward a generally acceptable flirtation with rationality when the general election rolls around. We could do a lot worse.