Shhh, go to bed. Nothing to see here.

     It's midnight, I know. But tomorrow I'm posting a surprise, one-time return of the Saturday fun activity, which as you might recall traditionally posts at 7 a.m., in order that non-night owls might get a chance to solve one.
      So go to bed. Nothing to see here for seven hours. And if you simply must think about something, look at the above picture, and wonder why I posted that image and not another. It's fairly plain. G'night. 

Trump isn't the problem; it's that people support him

     So I go to the corner to buy a racing form. On my way home, a neighbor runs up, shouting: "Your house is on fire!" I smile and tell him that no, it can't be on fire. He is just trying to alarm me, reflecting his lingering malice because my tea roses placed higher than his in the All-Cook County Tea Rose Competition last summer.
     "No!" he cries. "Look at the smoke!" And sure enough, big billows of black smoke are rising from the direction of my house, a couple blocks away.
     "That's not smoke," I chuckle. "That's just dark clouds. Or if it's smoke, how do I know it's not the house behind mine that's burning? Eh? Besides, what's so bad about a little fire? Happens all the time."
     Welcome to America, 2017. As satire does not always scan in a daily newspaper, I hasten to observe that I do not buy the daily racing form, nor cultivate tea roses, and my house did not burn.
     It's our nation that is burning. Try to find an area that isn't on fire. Congress pours gasoline on health care for millions of the neediest Americans and keeps striking matches, hoping for a bonfire that'll warm rich people. Our recent presidential election was manipulated by our staunchest enemy. Our nation is grilled by global ridicule, our institutions smeared with soot. The president set in power by that corrupted electoral process is a liar, bully and fraud — and since readers sometimes object at that trio of terms, let me point out that they are not insults, nor even disrespect for the office of president, but dry journalistic description, supported by facts. By "liar," I mean a man who continually tells untruths. By "bully," I mean someone who continually abuses those too weak to defend themselves. And by "fraud," someone who represents himself, again and again, now and in the past, as something he is not, profiting from the gullible, selling empty promises that he cannot fulfill.
     If you don't like that description, well, I'm sorry. I don't like it either. But what I like, and what is actually going on in life are two very different things, and it is possible to perceive situations at odds with what you wish were true.
     For instance: I wish I could get excited about the revelations regarding Russian conspiracy. The media, which can be fairly thick, has been intent on the drip-drip-drip of new developments, of Trump’s son Donald meeting with Russian officials promising dirt on Hillary Clinton.
     That is what we do — dig up pertinent facts and confront those involved. But as reporters go through the elaborate kabuki ritual of uncovering scandal, I can’t help but suspect it is a colorful pageant put on for an audience so sharply divided they aren’t seeing the same show. Those who are stunned by the news were stunned already; those who have torched their morality and conscience and patriotism enough to support Donald Trump in the first place aren’t going to renew it now in order to feel outrage.
     “I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn't lose voters, ” Trump said on Jan. 23, 2016.
     It was true then,, even truer now. Give the man credit — he is as he has always been. Trump is a problem, but he’s not the problem. He is a symptom. The problem is that 53 million Americans voted for him, and support him still, no matter what. They have created a closed system where contrary information can be shrugged off as “fake news.” Science is a lie. Courts are dubious if they rule against you.
     Getting rid of Trump will solve a problem, but not the problem. The problem is people support him and will continue to do so, no matter the cost.
     We began with a metaphor, let’s end with one.
     Your doctor says, “I have bad news. Look at this X-ray. This blotch is a cancerous tumor on your lung.”
     You jerk the x-ray away, crumple it into a ball and drop it in the trash.
     “Problem solved,” you say. “The tumor’s gone.”

Radio Flyer turns 100

    Once I pulled a little red wagon down the center of Sheridan Road.
    OK, there was more to it than that. It was the WOOGMS Parade, an eccentric East Lakeview neighborhood event marking Memorial Day and the beginning of summer. Sheridan Road was closed; my boys were perched within the wagon. I'm sure I have an unwatched video of it, somewhere.
    The wagon was a Radio Flyer, a gift, mirabile dictu, of the newspaper, which once upon a time distributed catalogues to employees so they could select presents to mark their various work anniversaries. On my fifth I chose the proverbial set of steak knives. For my 10th, the wagon. For the past decade or so, your gift is you keep your job.
    The wagon proved very useful in carting boys. Not the metal wagon of my youth, but the less aesthetic plastic. Still, it had a certain fat, pleasing roundness, and a compartment inside for storing things. I did not mind it. 
    Radio Flyer is marking its centennial this year. The venerable Chicago company doesn't construct its little red wagons here anymore—production moved to China in 2004— but at least it still makes them, which is cause for celebration. If you are reading this Thursday, July 13, you can join the fun from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. at Pioneer Court, the plaza just south of Tribune Tower. Radio Flyer will have their World's Largest Wagon, somehow fitting outside what once imagined itself the World's Greatest Newspaper. 
      Strolling out to the garage to snap the above, I reflected how sentimental it is to keep the wagon. The boys certainly aren't going to ride in it again, and by the time grandchildren arrive, if they ever do, they'll have wagons that hover, and no doubt the tykes will demand them, as tykes do.
    This is probably enough for one day but, in case you are interested in the history of Radio Flyer -- such as why a wagon company has a form of communication in its name — I explain that in this late 1990s Christmas story on toys that originated in Chicago. I've left the other toys in, though the entirety, like old toys themselves, tends toward woodenness. 

      Furby may be hot now, but just wait. Odds are he won't stand the test of time. Someday, the babbling little furball may be as desirable a Christmas present as a Hula Hoop; or a Pet Rock is today.
     But certain toys keep their appeal. While they may never have created the intense -- and passing -- mania that the Tickle Me Elmos of the world once inspired, they've done something that is perhaps more incredible: They've survived (though some just barely) and become classics, delighting generation after generation of children who found them under their Christmas trees.
    Here is a roundup of some cherished toys which originated in the Chicago area.

     The Radio Flyer: The definitive "little red wagon" is manufactured on the West Side of Chicago, and has been for more than 80 years.
     In 1917, an Italian immigrant cabinet maker named Antonio Pasin founded The Liberty Coaster Wagon Co., named for the Statue of Liberty. Originally the wagons were wood, but when metal stamping became popular for cars in the 1920s, he borrowed the technology for wagons, rolling the edges so they wouldn't cut little fingers.
     In the 1920s, the company took to naming its wagons after popular figures and phenomena. There was the Lindy Flyer, in honor of Charles Lindbergh, and the Radio Flyer, named for the hot new communications medium. That wagon was particularly popular, and in 1930 the company renamed itself the Radio Steel & Manufacturing Co. (It officially adopted the name "Radio Flyer" in 1987).
     The wagons are still made in Chicago, of wood, steel and plastic, and the company is still owned and operated by the Pasin family. And they still name their products after the latest wave of pop culture: Recent wagons have mimicked burly all-terrain vehicles and been given brawny, sports-utility-vehicle-like names such as "Voyager" and "Navigator."
     Lionel trains: For decades, no Christmas tree was complete without a Lionel train circling the base. The trains were the brainchild of Joshua Lionel Cowen, who, in one of those amazing quirks of history, also invented the flashlight.
     He put a small electric motor in a model train, and began selling them by catalog in 1903. The company had some close calls over the years. It nearly went bankrupt during the Great Depression, then came up with an offering that hit the public fancy: a handcar pumped by a Mickey Mouse character. The handcar was the top toy in the nation in 1934, and it saved the company. Today a large part of Lionel's business is the adult hobby market -- a basic set runs a hefty $ 150 or so -- but nostalgic adults still buy their kids Lionel trains at Christmas, whether the children want them or not.
     Raggedy Ann: Like the first teddy bear, the first Raggedy Ann doll was promoting something else. Johnny Gruelle, a political cartoonist in Downstate Arcola, had created the Raggedy Ann character (named for James Whitcomb Riley's poems "The Raggedy Man" and "Little Orphan Annie") to amuse his daughter, Marcella.
     But he also had the foresight to patent the Raggedy Ann image in 1915. His book on the red-yarn-haired beauty, Raggedy Ann Stories, was published in 1918.
     Marshall Field's created the first Raggedy Ann doll to place in its window to promote the book, but customers wanted both the book and the doll. Raggedy Andy showed up two years later, when a friend of Gruelle's mother handmade a brother.
     Ironically, after 80 years, Field's once again isn't selling Raggedy Ann. It has stopped carrying the dolls.
     Tinkertoys; : An Evanston stonecutter named Charles Pajeau was disillusioned with the gravestone trade. Fishing around for a new line of work, he noticed how children played, for hours, with pencils and wooden spools from thread. A classic toy was born.
     He formed the Toy Tinkers Co. in Evanston and introduced the product at the New York Toy Fair in 1913 (the same year another classic, now faded, was introduced: A.C. Gilbert's Erector Set). Tinkertoys were an instant hit -- selling nearly a million sets in 1915, the first year it went national.
     Tinkertoys sold millions of sets, with almost no advertising. And not only kids played with them. Illinois Bell used Tinkertoys to test skills of job candidates; Harvard University bought the sets, in bulk, to study executive decision-making.
     Tinkertoy has been buffeted, in recent years, by construction sets with more flash and sizzle. But it still carries on, its wooden dowels and hubs replaced with plastic, manufactured by Hasbro.
—Originally published in the Chicago Sun-Times, Dec. 24, 1998

Henry David Thoreau: More to the man than a shack by a pond

Walden Pond (Photo by Tony Galati)

     As much as I enjoyed researching and writing this, I enjoyed even more reading Pond Scum, a 2015 New Yorker article on Thoreau by Kathryn Schulz that longtime friend Bob Goebel shared with me Wednesday morning. I don't know how I missed it, but I did, and if you are interested in the perspectives I touch upon here you should consider reading her piece. It's excellent.

     Henry David Thoreau's father owned a pencil factory.
     In between failing as a teacher and a writer, Thoreau worked in that factory. From the day in 1845 he moved to Walden Pond, where his fans will flock Wednesday to mark the bicentennial of his birth on July 12, 1817, to the day he left, J. Thoreau and Co. churned out high quality pencils.

      There is an irony here. Thoreau is remembered best as an early bard of appreciating nature. On Sunday, the New York Times described a line he uttered in a speech—"In wilderness is the preservation of the world"—as "eight words that in coming decades helped save that Maine woods, Cape Cod, Yosemite and other treasured American landscapes."
     They ignored the pencils that underwrote his work. I know why. It spoils the cherished image, to have Thoreau calling for preservation of trees out of one corner of his mouth and promoting the transformation of trees into pencils out of the other.
     Or does it?
     Do the two values, conservation and business, have to contradict? Our government certainly thinks so. The Trump administration began with a wholesale slaughter of environmental regulations. Dropping out of the Paris climate change accords is only the most visible. Clean water rules—that keep mining and metal companies from pouring waste into streams—are being relaxed Ditto for clean air regulations. And we don't have to worry about alarming increases in pollution statistics, since the EPA, now headed by one of its fiercest critics, is going to stop collecting certain air quality data.
     Thoreau describes the type perfectly—"He knows nature but as a robber."
     Thoreau had a gift for piercing concision. That is why I like him, despite his frequent descent into piety. He used his own experience. You need to be in line to inherit a pencil factory to write a sentence like: "I see young men, my townsmen, whose misfortune it is to have inherited farms, houses, barns, cattle, and farming tools; for these are more easily acquired than got rid of."

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Photo by Tony Galati

Blue lawsuit

     The innovative Cirque du Soleil bought Blue Man Group last week. As a fan of both ensembles, it seems a natural pairing, and sent me back over times I've written about Blue Man Group — in this one I presciently mention their eventual purchaser, in describing a particularly daft lawsuit.  It was a time when the column filled a page, and I've left in the subheadings. Afterward I'll let you know what happened with the case.

OPENING SHOT . . .

     Silly me. Over the years, I have endured countless horrors at the Lyric Opera of Chicago — been menaced by several dragons; seen doomed lovers sealed within a tomb; witnessed the lips of a harmless bird catcher sealed with a padlock, and even watched, aghast, as Satan himself emerged, singing, from the fiery pits of hell.
     And I never sued them. Not once.
     Dumb.
     Meanwhile James Srodon of California attends just one performance of the Blue Man Group at the Briar Street Theatre and files a lawsuit in Cook County Circuit Court claiming that their "Esophagus Cam" was shoved down his throat, knocking out fillings, damaging his windpipe and of course causing psychological distress.
     Now I've attended several Blue Man Group performances and have my own issues with their show, mainly that it ain't drama. People act like it's a play because it takes place in a theater, but it's not. It's entertainment, part Cirque du Soleil, part concert, part magic show. So long as that's clear, Blue Man Group is energetic, loud, clever fun. Duping the audience is part of the thrill.
     One highlight was a version of the Esophagus Cam: A member of the audience was invited onstage and then zipped into a canvas body bag while one Blue Man recorded the proceeding with a video camera. The sack was then dragged backstage — we follow the action on screen —where it was loaded onto a truck, driven away and, eventually, hurled off a cliff.
     By then, it dawned on the audience that they were not watching a man actually being murdered in real time, but a prank involving an unseen cutaway to a pre-filmed segment. The kidnapped audience member actually slipped back into his seat.
     At least one hopes they realized it. If anyone called the cops — "Oh my gosh, I just came from Blue Man Group, and they killed somebody!" — I'm not aware of it.
     Srodon was singled out for a similar bit. The Blue Men gathered around him and pretended  — emphasize pretended — to shove a camera down his throat.
     Now I wasn't there, so perhaps they slipped up, in a frenzy brought on by toxic blue-paint poisoning, and really did pry open Srodon's jaws and, as he claims, shoved a paint-and-food-befouled camera down his throat.
     Perhaps he truly is a victim of assault who needs our cherished legal system to deliver redress for his suffering.
     Or maybe — and frankly, I'm putting all my chips down on this — the Blue Men have done this bit 50,000 times over the last two decades, and were they in the practice of actually shoving cameras down patrons' throats, well, we'd have heard about it by now. Maybe it is a well-done illusion and Srodon, 65, a sensitive soul, was overwhelmed. A judge will decide, sadly.

LEVITATION, ESP, BIGFOOT, UFOS . . .

     There are two important lessons in this lawsuit against the Blue Man Group for a stage trick.
     First, as much as I admire lawyers generally — my wife is a lawyer — this is the sort of lawsuit that exposes the profession to shame and undermines the idea of law as a desirable part of society. This type of lawsuit just hands ammunition to big insurance company hirelings working to further restrict the ability of the truly harmed to receive compensation.
     Second, this sort of thing also ruins life for the rest of us. It is a big reason we live in the padded, homogenized, vacuum-sealed, fenced-off, gelded, oversafe, professional-driver-closed-course, do-not-try-this-at-home world we live in.
     You can't ride a merry-go-round anymore without being herded past a legal disclaimer as long as the Magna Carta, informing you that this is a ride that revolves and goes up and down, that you will be exposed to equine wooden figures but that no actual horses were harmed in their creation, and pregnant women, the fantastically obese, the motion sensitive, equinophobes and those allergic to calliope music should not participate.
     I'm surprised we have any entertainments at all. Most of the animals have already been exiled from circuses by fanatics, and I'm sure clowns are next. "Mr. Binky did knowingly aim and discharge a seltzer bottle in the direction of plaintiff Henry Prudock, exposing him to a stream of cold carbonated water, which wettened him, and drew the mocking laughter of his fellow audience members . . ."
     Second, consider Srodon's belief that the camera was actually jammed down his throat. I am sure he is sincere, and this genuine conviction should remind us just how suggestible people really are.
     It must be important to some part of the collective human ego that we ignore this obvious reality—to flatter ourselves, I suppose. So important that we prefer to embrace the existence of nosy visiting motherships from distant galaxies rather than entertain the possibility that our planetmates are a bunch of gullible dopes, dithering and pliable, soft-minded and open to all sorts of delusions, mirages, misapprehensions, panics and fantasies.
     That is, when they're not outright lying . . .
     Yes, humanity's ability to fall for anything has value — we wouldn't have magic shows, time-share condos or religion otherwise. But the downside is that we automatically assume that the witnesses really saw the criminal, that the testimony is not the product of brain cramp, that the lady was really sawn in half and replaced by a tiger.
     I hate to involve myself in legal proceedings, but if the Blue Man Group is looking for an expert witness, I offer myself. I will testify, under oath and on penalty of perjury, that people are, in the main, morons, and that James Srodon is definitely a person. The jury can draw their own conclusions.

               —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Jan. 27, 2008

    While the filing of the lawsuit was reported everywhere, the result was reported nowhere, as far as I could tell — a common lapse in journalism. In 2013, when another patron sued Blue Man Group after he was hit by a foam ball, the San Jose Mercury News caught up with Sroden's former lawyer.
     ‘The matter was settled for nominal dollars,’ Antonio Romanucci said. “I eventually withdrew from the case.”

You can look here soon for the water that used to be in your basement

     When I visited the new McCook Reservoir, I wasn’t exactly happy to be welcomed by rain pelting down in big summertime drops. I had brought my steel-toed boots but no jacket and no umbrella.
     But the rain was appropriate, considering that rain is what this is all about: the 109 miles of deep tunnel, the 10-billion-gallon reservoir this hole in the rock will someday become part of; all so the water that falls from the sky can find its way into a treatment plant without first detouring through your basement, a task that is getting harder for two reasons: the soot we put into the sky and the pavement we slap over the ground.
     “Forty percent of Cook County is nonpermeable surface, which means water can’t absorb where it falls,” said Mariyana T. Spyropoulos, president of the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District of Greater Chicago, who accompanied me on a tour of the site tucked between the Stevenson Expressway and the Sanitary and Ship Canal in Bedford Park.
     Here I interrupted her, incredulous. I’ve heard a lot of stark statistics about Cook County. But 40 percent? How can that be?
     “We have concrete,” she said. “We have asphalt. Rainwater cannot absorb into it. Yes, 40 percent. Combine that with the fact that we have climate change, we have more intense rainstorms. In the last 10 years we’ve had three hundred-year rainstorms.

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Just drumming is not enough to make you Blue

     Blue Man Group, the popular and increasingly-pervasive trio of mute drummers putting on a surreal show, were purchased last week by Cirque du Soleil, a marriage of like minds if ever there were.  I saw Blue Man Group when it opened on Broadway, and again a time or two over the years. In 2011, I stopped by to watch them audition future Blue Men.

     By 9 a.m., 10 men are standing in a steady drizzle outside the Briar Street Theatre on Halsted Street, waiting for their chance.
     "Cold, rainy, windy and damp enough to annoy you," says a 20-year-old with the Hollywood-ready name of Nathaniel Hawkins, first in line, having driven in from Cedar Falls, Iowa, the night before and been here since 7:30 a.m. "I always wanted to give this a shot if the chance came up."
     "The chance"—the first in Chicago since June—refers to the open auditions last Tuesday for Blue Man Group, the wildly popular mix of music, vaudeville and social commentary.
     If you think of Blue Man Group as three bald guys painted blue stuffing Cap'n Crunch in their mouths, you're behind the times. That was 20 years ago, when Chris Wink, Philip Stanton and Matt Goldman created the show "to celebrate the human spirit through music, science, art and theater."
     Now Blue Man Productions has some 600 employees worldwide with about 60 full-time Blue Men performing in seven cities: Boston, Orlando, Las Vegas, Berlin, Tokyo, New York, where it has played for 20 years, and at Briar Street, where it has run continually for 15. Not quite the Disney Co., but a long way from busking in Central Park.
     The Briar Street lobby is crowded with men, and a few women. (Two females have become Blue Men). They have driven from as far away as Nebraska. An acting professor at Notre Dame canceled classes to be here.
     Those waiting to be called sit on the floor, filling out forms, many drumming with drumsticks they brought with them, or with the flats of their hands on their chests.
     "I love music," said John Curulewski, 24, of Plainfield. "I want to play drums." Being a Blue Man would be "pretty sweet, it seems like a good job: be kinda crazy and drum."
     Were it that easy. Playing drumheads splashing brightly colored liquids is only part of the job, and the five-level audition process begins with neither craziness nor drumming, but an earnest two-minute interview, sitting in salon chairs facing casting coordinator Tascha Van Auken, who glances at each resume, makes small talk - "So how far is Plainfield?" - then asks about acting experience. Those with none find themselves quickly, but with notable gentleness, thanked for coming and sent on their way.
     "If you went out and got some acting work, we would totally be into it," she tells one. "It doesn't make sense to put you through the process now."
     Those who make it past Van Auken—and most do—are put, five at a time, through a pair of tough non-verbal acting exercises.
     Someone in the room has "a deep sadness" within them, explains Tim Aumiller, director of casting. "You have an opportunity right now to look at us once, just once, and you have to determine who in this room has this deep sadness.
     This weeds out those whose talents are limited to drumming, and the irony is, that test is next. The two skills just don't compare.
     "Almost anyone can learn to be the kind of drummer we need them to be," says Aumiller. "But it can take years to teach someone to be an actor."
     Those who make it this far stand, one at a time, at a drum pad on the Briar Street stage, facing Jeff Quay, the music director.
     "Track my dynamics," he tells one hopeful. "I get softer, you get softer." They mirror each other. "Excellent. Let's keep it going - you track my tempo changes."
     In the audience are current Blue Men Matt Ramsey and Nick Rush, 23, the one actor picked out of 150 auditioning last June.
     "Once I got to training, one of the directors said 90 percent why you get the job is the moment you walk in the door," says Rush. "You can just tell: He's a Blue Man."
     Of the 164 would-be Blue Men who tried last Tuesday, 18 were called back for more intensive exercises and auditions, leading to final trials, in makeup, in the weeks to come. All to get . . . how many new Blue Men?
     "One would be good," says Aumiller, noting that some city auditions yield none.
     A final thought, from hours watching this success funnel, with 164 earnest aspirants pushing themselves into the wide end and one, maybe, emerging from the spout:
     The American dream is that if you have ambition, if you truly believe in yourself and try, really hard, you will succeed, with a bit of luck. And that is sometimes true. But not if you're only a drummer, and what they're really looking for are actors who can drum.

—Originally published in the Sun-Times, April 25, 2011