Are you a real person?

     Stephanie Scott is a forensic psychiatrist, football lover, journalist and educator. Elli Mcguirk is also a forensic psychiatrist, as well as a dancer backpack ninja, web talent and "good friend." Raina Tipps is also a backpack ninja.
     Forty-seven people followed me on Twitter Monday. Much more than the usual handful I expect in a day. I couldn't help but look closely at my new flock. Perky young women, mostly, with odd, strangely capitalized names, sharing a suspicious confluence of interests. Romaine Mcpeters, Tanya Preusser and Margot Lopez are each a self-proclaimed "beer drinking coffee junky," as opposed to Marta Sumter and Laura Salzman who are just coffee ninjas, and Melba Mcclary, a mere coffee "enthusiast."
     It dawned on me — quite quickly, considering all the years I thought the Kinks song "Lola" was about a girl — that these were not the Twitter identities of actual people who had fallen under the spell of my high quality journalism, but faux identities generated by computers.

     The idea is, you are followed by a robot, glance and see a pretty face who also likes coffee, and you follow them back, then suddenly are getting their curious blend of non-sequitur factlets—"Apart from the burial of Unas, only the Pyramid of Teti displays the Cannibal Hymn"—intermixed with come-ons for holistic web sites: "5 Natural #Herbs To Detox Damaged Lungs."

     If you are unfamiliar with Twitter—and geez, get with the program, at this point it's like being unfamiliar with shampoo—it's a an online communication network where you blast messages at your band of followers while in turn being blasted by messages of the people you follow. Somehow in all this, communication occurs, or did, before all this random commercial garbage began to gum it up.

      Fake Twitter accounts are not news, except to me. The fake accounts story has been rattling around for a few years. Back in the 2012 election, it was pointed out that a significant percentage of Barack Obama's and Mitt Romney's fan base were fake accounts. The way it works is you go to certain sites where you basically buy followers, for a penny apiece. These drive up your Twitter numbers, and people are more impressed with you.

Julia Khorramchahi,

      I wondered where they got the photos, so plugged a few into Google's image search. Ammie Arthurs, a Halle Berry type, was swiped from "The Hottest Short Hairstyles & Haircuts for 2015."   Elli Mcguirk? The photo was actually Elena Mazur, a communications consultant in Toronto. Maryjo Kratz was Julia Khorramchahi, a "Brazilian/Iranian human being" and "digital marketer" also from Toronto. The "human being" made me suspicious — could these Canadian flaks be using their own photos to generate fake accounts? I sent a few queries and Khorramchahi responded.
      "Defnitely NOT my doing!" she tweeted to me. "Thanks for pointing it out; will report that account right away."

     Okay then. I was left with the moral quandary. A person on twitter is judged, in part, by the size of the following herd.  As it happened, Monday's busload of mannequins pushed me over the 5,000 follower mark, a milestone I had been anticipating for a while, though grimly aware how small beans that is on the online world.
     So some of my followers on Twitter are not a cargo cult of actual living people, scanning the skies for my next essay. Who cares?  We already tolerate people in our lives who really aren't there.  The woman guiding you through giving your information when you call a credit card company is not really talking to you. Miss October, smiling alluringly from her centerfold, is not really here.
     If you believe the view of the future in movies such as "Her" and "Ex Machina," then we will happily have relationships with electronic intelligences and robot inamoratas.

Not a real person either

     Why not? Raggedy Andy was not really my pal, though I thought so at the time. Why not accept company where you find it? Perhaps as people become more robotic and absent, shuffling around, gazing at their phones, the phones will become more human and present. Talk about irony.
     On second thought, no. I decided to purge my robot harem, on general principles. Boosting your numbers with fake followers is like wearing elevator shoes—the solution is worse than the problem.
     So goodbye Frida Byham ("skiing fan"). Goodbye Jessica Phillips ("Total bacon specialist.") Goodbye Noelle Shyes ("Javadicted.")  I have enough fake friends as it is without tolerating more.

Frightened bureaucrats throttle our American freedoms

  

Bill McCaffrey, chief of CPS communications, in theory.

      Stories fill the paper, discussing certain issues, visiting various places, introducing particular people. Readers read them, never pausing to wonder how those stories got there. 
      Some are pitched by eager publicists, but more often a reporter had to press, make phone calls, send emails, cut through layers of bureaucracy, wheedling quotes and permission from hesitant administrators.
      I'm not complaining, it's part of the job. 
     Sometimes it works, and the story gets in the paper. Sometimes it doesn't. I've been doing this long enough to take disappointment along with success. But this one particular experience, well, let me tell you.     
     Several years ago, I thought about a story I did in 1986 at the Chicago public high school in the basement of the Cook County Jail. It was one of my favorite stories, because of the surprise, not just to find classes being held—teenage prisoners still must go to school—but because the teachers were so positive and enthusiastic, not at all what I expected. 
     Merely reposting the story here seemed lazy. Most of the teachers I quote are probably dead. I wanted to go back, to re-report it, see what had changed in three decades. I started with Tom Dart. He likes to show off the jail, but on his own terms, and the school didn't fit into his PR program. But gentle pressure, and the passage of a couple years, finally won permission.
     There was still a hitch. Though the school is in the jail, it's run by the Chicago Public Schools. You can't just walk in. So I started on the CPS last June, beginning with Judy Pardonnet in their communications office. I figured that gave me plenty of time to get it in the paper when school started.
     We eventually had a pleasant conversation on the phone, around July, and permission seemed forthcoming. Then nothing. She wouldn't return my emails or calls, and I tried for weeks. Finally, irked, I began what I call the "demon dialer" --- call her and call her and call her, every hour sometimes. Eventually she picked up. 
     She was apologetic, and passed the blame up to Bill McCaffrey, the chief of CPS public relations, pictured above. He won't allow it, she said, for reasons mysterious. 
     So I started trying to contact him.  July melted into August which morphed into September. He never responded. He never returned a call or an email. Earlier this month, Forrest Claypool, the head of CPS, came into the newspaper to talk to the editorial board about all the problems in the school system. I sat through 45 minutes of his spin, then approached him as he left and laid out what I wanted to do with the high school in the basement of the Cook County Jail..
      He said sure, talk to Bill McCaffrey. 
      At that point McCaffrey did phone me back, made some positive noises, then promptly disappeared again. I know the schools are in crisis, and there's lots to do. But he didn't have to write the story; all he had to do was give me permission. 
     For some reason I would not give up. I begged Kelley Quinn at the mayor's office to pressure Claypool—he and Rahm are supposed to be great pals, brother control freaks trying to herd the cats of civic government. I asked the publisher to intervene directly, and he did. 
       Nothing. Not even a reply. The CPS reaction to my simple, reasonable request for a mundane feature story is perhaps the most unprofessional performance I've encountered in 30 years of Chicago journalism, They lacked the consideration to even say "No" so I could stop asking. Just silence. Weeks and weeks. The September back-to-school moment has come and gone. 
     I give up, and am posting the story I liked so much from 29 years ago. It was an inoffensive thing, a nod to the hard work that teachers do, day in and day out, in the Cook County Jail. The teachers there now might want to ask their bosses why their efforts could not be showcased in the newspaper.
     I shudder to think why it was possible for a young freelancer to write it in 1986, but that months of steady pressure could not replicate it in 2015. We are a nation with freedom of the press, in theory, but that freedom is curtailed and hobbled by fearful government bureaucrats who lack faith in themselves, in their organizations and in their employees, and so gag them, not realizing that the gag is a worse indictment than anything they might say. Those terrified of bad publicity use that fear to bat away good publicity, then wonder why all the news about them is bad.
     Bottom line: our American freedom erodes, undermined, not by foreign enemies, but by domestic cogs.  
     Enough.  I tried my best. When Forrest Claypool moves on to his next posting, building his resume for his mayoral run in 2018—Rahm's definitely done after this term—I will try again with the next head of CPS. It's was an interesting story, then, and I bet it would be interesting now.
     Until that happy day: This ran in the Sun-Times on August 5, 1986 under the headline, "Headline:Enthusiastic students flock to jail's classrooms behind bars." It's quite long, but that's how we did it once upon a time. 

     At first glance, the rooms could be any classrooms anywhere.
     They have all the right equipment - desks, chalkboards, globes, handmade mobiles and construction paper silhouettes of Lincoln and Washington stapled to bulletin boards. Above the chalkboards are green strips with large alphabets of cursive writing.
     If it weren't for the Sheriff Richard J. Elrod calendars hanging in each room, you might expect a group of laughing fifth-graders to return from recess at any moment.
     When the students do arrive, they are all wearing the lone school color - beige. They wear the same beige T-shirts and beige cotton pants. Stenciled on the back of the shirts and the pants are "D.O.C." - Department of Corrections. This is the basement of the Cook County Jail, where the Board of Education runs a high school 12 months a year.
     The students are between 17 and 20 years old - the youngest group in the jail. They attend classes from four to five hours a day in a broad range of subjects, taught by 50 full-time teachers.
     If the cheery, standard classrooms come as a surprise, the teachers are even more so. Rather than being a burnt-out group of gritty survivors, filled with tales of the frustration of trying to teach hardened street toughs, they are enthusiastic to the point of zeal, and say they prefer teaching in the jail environment to teaching in the regular public school system.
     "My students are the nicest group in the world," said Daniel Fitzgerald, who teaches during the year at the Nettelhorst School and spends his summers teaching at the jail.
     "If I had this kind of demeanor in the school year, my teaching would be a breeze. I've been coming here for the past four summers, and it's a real pleasure. I had a student today thank me about four times for helping him with a new math problem. All the way to the door - thanks again, thanks again, thanks again. I would never get that at my school."
     According to Phillip T. Hardiman, executive director of the jail, teaching positions at the school are in great demand from other teachers in the school district. Many of the teachers in the jail have been there for more than 20 years, and few leave prematurely.
     "In order (for a new teacher) to get into the jail school, one of our teachers has to die or retire," said Hardiman.
     "Most people have a misconception of what it is like in jail - they think of bars, inmates with tin cups," said Robert Glotz, director of security at the jail. "The funny part is (teachers) are far safer here than in a grammar school or high school."
     "We have very, very few discipline problems, if any, here in the jail," said Andrew Miller, who began teaching in the jail in 1956. "As a matter of fact, my role as assistant principal is primarily involved with having each student placed in the appropriate classroom setting. There is very little disciplining needed."
     But because the teachers enjoy what they do does not mean their job is an easy one. The majority of teens who come into the jail are dropouts with emotional and developmental problems and reading levels that average around the fifth grade. They are frequently hostile toward the idea of school and are lacking in self-esteem. On top of everything, there is no way to control how long they will be in the school. Stays in jail range from a few days to two years, with the average stay being around a month, so the teachers face classes that are constantly changing.
     "You have to be a special individual to work in that setting," said John Gibson, who was principal at the school for 5 1/2 years and is now principal at John Marshall High School. "They're working with a clientele that puts great demands on the teachers. A lot is taken out of a person.
     "The high turnover is one of the major problems. You may begin to see attitudinal changes, and then the student is gone. Teachers, like anyone else, like to see results - it's hard to work with a young person for three weeks or three months and suddenly that student is gone. It takes a special kind of person to deal with it."
     Gibson said the teachers in the jail have to be sincere, committed and dynamic because that's the only way to reach the students in jail.
     "Otherwise the students would simply come in and put their heads on the desk and that would be the end of it," he said, adding that the enthusiasm among jail teachers tends to be "contagious," passing from older to younger teachers.
     Despite the disappointments often found in a jail environment, the teachers all have their tales of success, such as the one about the student who earned his high school equivalency degree in the jail and went on to graduate magna cum laude from Northern Illinois University.
     And there's the man who approached Andrew Miller in San Francisco, stuck out his hand, smiled, and said, "You're Mr. Miller. You said something to me in the basement of the Cook County Jail that changed my life. . . ."
     Even if a student is not reached by the teachers at Cook County Jail, they hope that perhaps some good still can result from their efforts.
     "Even if we are unable to have the kind of success we expect with youngsters, we believe that attitudes are being changed about schools," said Gibson. "When they begin to experience success in the classroom, that spills over to younger siblings - or children. Many of them have children of their own. We know some of this is taking place. It pays dividends to larger society for years to come." 

     As far as the classes themselves, they tend to stress practical information and life skills. Thus, the science class will focus on public health or drugs, while in history the class learns about such basic Chicago information as the name of the mayor and the tallest buildings.
     Despite their veneer of street sophistication, the teens in the jail need this rudimentary information.
     "Those great big semi-adults with beards and muscles - they are fathers, they've committed all kinds of crimes and have all kinds of venereal diseases," said Miller. "These great big grown men have not learned the first thing about how to take care of themselves. They can't put a stamp on an envelope - to put a stamp on a letter you have to write letters, and they don't write. So they put the stamp on the wrong corner."
     In a recent class, Anthony Picciola had his students answer a series of multiple choice questions about their feelings - how they react when in a group, when happy, sad, angry. The class had several purposes - to get the students to read aloud, to think about themselves, to learn to discuss their emotions and participate in a group.
     Jesse Lee, the jail social worker, stopped by on his rounds and gave the group a pep talk.
     "You gotta be prepared," he said. "You gotta have a plan."
     He walked over to the desk of a student named Bob - a young man with a thin mustache and tossled hair - and asked him what kind of sports he played. Bob, in jail on charges of residential burglary stemming from his $100-a-day cocaine habit, stared at his desk while he answered - his feet constantly tapping, his fingers drumming on the table.
     He played tight end in football, he said, left field in baseball. Lee, seizing on the sports connection, made an analogy between having a realistic game plan and winning the game, trying to get the students to see the need for foresight and planning in their own lives.
     "I don't think you're gonna get a person in here saying, `We're looking for coke abusers - all the coke abusers line up, we've got jobs for you.' " Lee said.
     "This is what makes the school go, the staff," said Miller. "We have a fantastic staff. Our social worker staff are just crackerjacks. Our staff is especially trained to handle the difficult boy. Most of the youngsters are dropouts who happen to get in trouble with the law. They come here and, maybe for the first time in his life, someone listens. For the first time, he has structure and discipline. This is something he badly needs and, believe it or not, these boys welcome that."

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.