New York Stories #1: Caffe Reggio

     I'm working on a project for the paper this week so, in lieu of the column, I'm presenting some observations from my recent visit to New York City.

     Once I visited an old Italian barber in Sandburg Village.  This was years ago. He surprised me by serving an espresso and a biscotti while I had my hair cut. It seemed very civilized, the tiny cup and saucer, the hot liquid, the sweet biscuit, the snip of the scissors.
     I didn't think of the nexus between barbering and espresso again until last week, in New York City.
     The cab from LaGuardia dropped off us at West Third and MacDougal, in front of the law school. We had time to kill—the boy was at class. 
     "Let's wait there," I said, pointing to a bright green storefront across MacDougal, "Caffe Reggio." My wife and I rolled our suitcases in that direction.
      Inside was a small, dark, space. Metal ice cream parlor chairs, white marble tables, black marble floors. Dark oil paintings. Busts. Pleasant classical music playing. My wife ordered a latte. I ordered a double espresso and a pair of the small round cookies I had noticed in the case. They serve a glass of water with your coffee—civilized. The orange-rimmed china cups and sugar bowls are emblazoned with the name of the cafe—also civilized.
     And so it began. Five, count 'em, five mornings in a row, begun at the Caffe Reggio, founded in 1927 by Domenico Parisi, the man—it is said—who introduced cappuccino into the United States.  Originally he ran a barber shop in the space, selling espresso to customers as they waited for their haircuts. Balancing the 20 minutes of work required to give a haircut, and the one minute to prepare an espresso, both costing 10 cents, Parisi prudently let the barber shop go by the wayside. The space was elegant yet casual, compact yet spacious. It felt like we had stepped out of the stream of time, into another dimension.
     "It's worth coming to New York just to sit here," I said, on the first day.
     A small door to the left of the counter, with a hand-painted plaque above it. The profile of a man—Dante, clearly. I went over to read the words printed there: "Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch'intrate..."
     I don't speak Italian, but I recognized the phrase, and the Canto number above confirmed my suspicions. Among the most famous lines in literature: "Abandon all hope, you who enter here." The inscription above the gates of Hell. A bathroom joke.
    Our son arrived, all smiles—he had never been here before, why would he?—and we departed for his quickstep tour the campus.
     But the next day we were back. My wife had a plan—walk across the Brooklyn Bridge, sample Brooklyn bagels—but we needed caffeine to send us on our way. I opted for coffee, and it came in a huge cup. Biscotti this time. Branching out.
     "Do many customers notice the Dante joke?" I asked the waitress.
     "Every second person," she said, flatly. Ouch. Pedantry is punished.
    The third morning we had breakfast: sharing a "Crepe Reggio," filled with fluffy ricotta cheese. Delicious. The fourth day we met a friend there for breakfast and sat talking and catching up for almost two hours. Nobody rushed us. An omelet this time.
     Back in Chicago, I delved into its history. Bob Dylan was a patron.  So was Jack Kerouac. The room had cameos in movies such as "Godfather II," "Serpico" and "Shaft"—Isaac Hayes' famous soundtrack includes a song, "Cafe Regio," a reminder that musicians are not known for their proofreading skills. The place figures into Andre Aciman's "False Papers." The Egyptian author would return, sometimes several times a day, trying to master the ache caused by a girl he courted at Caffe Reggio, "Seeking to recover something I felt I lost there."
    To me, it was the opposite. I felt I found something there, a certain calm, a place of temporary belonging. Edie immediately understood. "Every day we have coffee there is a happy day," she said, on the last day, when we made a point of heading there before meeting our son for lunch and then to the airport and home.
    Four out of five days I sat in the same chair, facing the open green door. There was always a customer tucked next to the door, and I took to slyly snapping a photo of the patron. Chicago has much to recommend it, but there is no place like this, where time has stopped or, rather, is measured out in coffee spoons. Nothing remotely like it.






   


   
   

Saturday Snapshot #10

 

Photo by Tony Galati

 
     The Saturday Snapshot kinda got bigfooted by news yesterday. Originally, I had just intended to run the photo of the Lyric strikers and call it day. But a musician pal called me, and I spoke to him, and an orchestra spokeswoman called me, and I spoke to her, and before I knew it the thing had developed into something more. 
    For a few hours I left the "Saturday Snapshot" headline, thinking it wry, a more-bang-for-your-non-buck kind of thing. But then it just seemed silly, a slight on the juicy content below, and I wrote something more descriptive, not that it churned the media waters.
    Turning my attention to today, I just was experiencing a rare frisson of what-the-fuck-do-I-write-now? when faithful reader Tony Galati offered up this lovely photo of a leaf-strewn road in Oneida County, Wisconsin, which he describes as "West of Eagle River, east of Minocqua, south of St. Germain, north of just about everything else in the state."
     When I told Tony I would run it today, he replied:
     "Sometimes I lose track of what day it is when I'm up here, but I'm pretty sure tomorrow is Sunday. Sunday snapshot? Is that allowed?"
     I assured him that I had checked with the boss, and it was indeed allowed. To be honest, I kinda like the idea of the Saturday Snapshot running Sunday. Given the insanity of our times, it seems a welcome departure from norms that doesn't harm anybody, for once.
    Autumn is a great time of year, with color everywhere, reminding us that things change, continually. Sometimes even for the better. A notion to embrace.

Real life drama comes to the opera: union musicians on strike

Cellist Sonia Mantell, left, and bassist Greg Sarchet picket Thursday in front of the Lyric Opera.

     I have friends among the musicians of the Lyric Opera of Chicago Orchestra, and also know people in its management, so would hate to take sides between the hard-working artists who create the magic and the haughty taskmasters who control it.  Both sides merit equal consideration, and besides, my opinion is probably colored by the way I am often treated by the Lyric back office as I try to write about their productions—indulged when I'm singing the party line, given the backhand if I write something that displeases them. I've taken 100 readers to the opera every year for the past decade but decided, this year, that it's just too much bother, and let the practice drop, not that anybody at the Lyric seemed to notice or care.
    And now, as it turns out, there might not be a season anyway, due to the strike that started Tuesday, so no loss to the paper's readership, except as part of the greater loss to the city's cultural life. which is considerable.
    It was in this spirit of utter neutrality that I stopped by the musicians' picket line Thursday afternoon to assess the situation. It was not as dreary as most picket lines, because of the high spirits and continual music which the Chicago Federation of Musicians strikers offered to passersby for free, an arrangement that their overseers would no doubt like to continue. I posted a brief video of a brass quartet of strikers performing Le Jeune's "Autant En Le Vent."
     The issues are complicated, and are set out at the orchestra union's web site here. Chris Jones also wrote a typically-excellent analysis of the situation in the Tribune here.
     I did my part by speaking with Amy Hess, spokesperson for the Lyric orchestra.
     "We are on strike because we truly believe a world class opera company like the Lyric needs a world class orchestra," she said. "Management has been demanding cuts that would forever diminish the quality of the orchestra and the quality of opera the company can produce."
    The nub of the issue is reducing both the size of the standing orchestra and the frequency of performances—a decade ago it was 90 a year, this season, 56. The radio broadcasts are also being scrapped.
     "We the musicians feel the slash and burn agenda management seems to have is going to destroy the company," said Hess.
     The Lyric opera management of course feels differently.

     "Lyric’s proposed terms would preserve musicians’ jobs that are among the highest paid and best working conditions in the region," the management said, in a statement. "Stated simply, the contract changes we seek are necessary for the financial future of Lyric. We urge the CFM and its members – our musician colleagues in this great artistic endeavor at Lyric – to accept our offer before further financial losses force a different outcome. It is the only path forward."
     You can read the full statement here.
     I don't want to be too flip about this situation. I'm assuming it'll be resolved sooner than later, that ill feelings will be put aside and joyful collaboration will return. But anyone who has seen his or her share of Verdi and Puccini knows that the potential for tragedy is always lurking around the corner with opera, and this situation feels a bit more fraught than usual.  
     The Lyric Opera is a tremendous asset to the city—when Boeing decided to locate its headquarters there, its executives picked Chicago over other candidates such as Denver or Dallas because, they said, they liked our opera. The greatest talents of the past 90 years have sung—and played—their hearts out on stage and from the pit at the Civic Opera House. It's a shame to see the magnificent facility fall silent when it should be alive with music and make-believe heartbreak. I'm hoping my union brothers and sisters who work hard to stay at the pinnacle of their profession, and the Hunger Games Herods setting the rules, can come to an understanding soon.

From left to right, musicians Mark Fry, Mark Fisher, Bill Denton and Matt Comerford, striking members of the Lyric Opera Orchestra, perform Le Jeune's "Autant en le Vent" at their picket line in front of the Civic Opera House, Oct. 11, 2018.

Big company welcomes kids — but not everyone would

GenderCool Project participants Chazzie (from left), Daniel, Landon, Gia, Nicole and Stella gathered at the Cliff Dwellers Club after their appearance at Conagra Brands. The group encourages acceptance of transgender youth.

     Six young people, ages 12 through 17, sitting on a pair of leather sofas at the Cliff Dwellers Club on Michigan Avenue, talking about their day: Chazzie, Daniel, Gia, Stella, Nicole and Landon.
     Regular kids, in most regards — maybe a little more poised than typical middle- and high-schoolers. Each shakes hands firmly, making eye contact. They come from across the country, Massachusetts to Texas, and had just visited one of the largest corporations in Illinois.
     "We met the CEO," said Stella. "That was pretty cool."
     "It was really fun," said Chazzie. "Because they gave a lot of food."
     They'd better; they sure have enough. The company was Conagra Brands, the $8 billion packaged food giant headquartered in Chicago, and the kids are part of the GenderCool Project, a non-profit group working to show transgender youth for what they are most of the time: not victims of bullying, not suicides, not individuals whose bathroom habits are fair game for public critique, but unique individuals filled with enthusiasm and creativity.
     The effort was begun early this year by two Chicago-area women, Jen Grosshandler and Gearah Goldstein, in reaction to the Trump administration decision to trash school guidelines for transgender students.
     "If we don't tell their stories, then people will think that anyone who identifies as transgender is not right," said Grosshandler. "It's not true."
     Their appearance Thursday coincided with National Coming Out Day.
     "I came out to my parents at 7," said Daniel. "I always knew that I was trans and I was meant to be a boy. I was just in a girl's body."
     "I transitioned when I was 13, in seventh grade," said Nicole. "I don't think there was a defining moment. Whenever people ask me, 'When did you know?' I ask them, "When did you know, that you were a boy or a girl?' My body didn't match to who I know I am."
     Two details in Nicole's life are worth mentioning: first, her father rejected her after she came out. "I haven't seen him in four years," she said. A reminder that while these children have loving parents and live in accepting communities, not everyone does.
     "It is and can be difficult for a lot of us," said Landon. "But having the support of those in our lives allows us to thrive and succeed just as much as anyone else can."
     And second, the world is changing with extraordinary rapidity regarding transgender youth. Nicole's father rejected her, but the Boston Bruins hockey team embraced her, allowing the budding entertainer to sing the National Anthem at their Hockey is for Everyone Night in February.
     They were a hit at Conagra, too.
     "I was extremely impressed by them," said Khalilah Lyons, the company's manager of diversity and inclusion. "They were beautiful, bright, bold, courageous and very open individuals."
     Lyons makes an important point. Inclusion isn't just ethical; it's also good business.
     "We're creating an inclusive culture, making sure people feel like they belong and they can bring their authentic selves to work," she said. "It needs to be part of everything we do here at Conagra. It's definitely good for business, and provides a competitive advantage when we're creating a space for our talent to be fully engaged."
      Everyone drags a burden of preconceptions around with them, and the visit caused me to re-evaluate my unexamined notions about both transgender people and giant companies. I had expected smears of mascara, sequins, feather boas—something far more arch and theatrical than the understated GenderCool kids, who I wouldn't give a second glance if they passed me at the mall. And Conagra I somehow associated with combines, coveralls and burlap bags of hybrid seed.
     "We are purely a packaged food company, completely focused on brands," said Daniel Hare, a communications specialist at Conagra, noting they're wrangling brands such as Healthy Choice, Hunt's, Slim Jim, Reddi-wip, Frontera, Bertolli and P.F. Chang's.
     Despite their polish, there was only so much quizzing about their lives that they could take. After about half an hour I recognized a certain shift remembered from my own two boys—attention had waned, impatience set in. Time to free them. The six sprang up to admire the view from the Cliff Dweller's Club, consult their phones, and head to the bathrooms, which were put to use without rattling the foundations of the 101-year-old club.
     "Look at them," said Grosshandler. "They're just kids."

Forbes Week #3: The Power of Large Numbers

    The Internet was a very different place a decade ago, as this piece illustrates. The public was still wrapping its head around the concept that you could produce something enjoyed by hundreds of millions of people and not get anything for it. While services like YouTube have gotten better about sharing the bounty, we are still seeing the big social media services hoover up profits that used to go to creative individuals.
    Speaking of which, this was the last piece I wrote for Forbes, unless I'm missing one. When I tried to track down the editors I had worked with, they had all been fired. That sort of thing used to happen a lot.

    This originally was posted Sept. 24, 2008.

     Judson Laipply's act has been seen by nearly 100 million people. Matt Drudge boasts a daily audience of 25 million. Sen. Dick Durbin's mail from constituents in Illinois shot up 700%.
     Those huge audience numbers impress us. There is strength in numbers because they exude a power, implying fame, wealth and significance. Nothing testifies more to the popularity of an entertainer, the success of a Web site or the significance of a cause than counting the millions of people who are paying attention.
     But how much should they impress us? What do those big figures mean in a digital age, and do we tend to give them more importance than they actually deserve?
     Take Judson Laipply. His name probably means nothing to you, but odds are you've seen his "The Evolution of Dance," a six-minute clip of the trim, balding Clevelander gyrating to 30 snippets of songs that long topped the YouTube chart of most-watched videos of all time--viewed a staggering 99,451,300 times and counting.
     If those were record sales, it would be equivalent to the splash the Beatles made in 1964.
     But 100 million YouTube views are not record sales or movie tickets or a network TV audience. Laipply makes no money from his online success, at least not directly.
     Someone does profit from all those eyeballs--YouTube runs ads for Revlon and Circuit City and other top companies. But its split with content providers such as Laipply remains 100/0, so the only benefit the motivational speaker received was indirect.

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Forbes Week #2: Dude, Where's My Videophone?

     Often freelance jobs are one-shot deals. The list of publications I've written one article and no more for stretches from Sports Illustrated to Brides to the New York Times Sunday Magazine. But Forbes liked my piece on Dante and failure, and asked me to follow up with the stumbling history of video telephones, which STILL haven't taken off and, I would suggest never will.  This was originally posted on Forbes online Oct. 15, 2007. 

     Today, the future is cloudy. But we all know what it used to look like: sleek people in Spandex catsuits talking to each other on wall-sized video telephones.
     That's how they chatted on Star Trek. And on The Jetsons. And 2001: A Space Odyssey. And a thousand other science fiction films, books and TV shows.
     Yet video telephones never took off in real life, even though they have been pushed on the public for more than 40 years, since the first "PicturePhone" was demonstrated at the New York World's Fair in 1964 with a hook-up between the Bell Pavilion and Disneyland in California.
     When the PicturePhone was rolled out as an actual service, later that year, people were expected to line up to use the wonder, having first made reservations at a PicturePhone center in New York, Chicago or Washington, D.C., where they could ogle someone in a distant city as they talked, at the rate of $27 for a three-minute call between Chicago and New York, or about a day's pay for an experienced high school teacher at the time. The company stressed the usefulness of the phones in allowing proud grandparents to see new grandbabies and deaf teens to chat in sign language.
     Cost and inconvenience kept the service from taking off, but AT&T—which ended up spending more than a billion dollars developing video telephones—persisted, ignoring futurists who quickly put their finger on a central problem holding back the devices.
     "Will you be able to see as well as hear the person at the other end [of the phone line]?" wondered Arnold B. Barach in his 1962 book, 1975 and the Changes to Come, which accurately saw the rise of cable TV and call-waiting. "Such a service could be arranged now, but until there is a popular demand for 'phone seeing' to go with telephone calling, it is not likely to come to pass. Prospects of that demand developing in the next 15 years are not considered especially promising."

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Forbes Week #1: Looking Failure in the Face

Statue of Dante, Florence, Italy

       Anyone who writes a book wants it to echo. And while my books are certainly not reverberating around the world and over the decades, they do vibrate quietly at certain times in certain places. A dozen years after it was published, "Complete and Utter Failure" stuck in the mind of an editor at Forbes, enough that he would ask me to write something on the topic, which was enjoying one of its periodic revivals in interest. I think that the opening sentence was inspired by the novelty of writing for a business magazine—this was posted  in the online edition March 2, 2007, and later ran in the print magazine itself, which pleased me greatly, since in that far off era it meant they paid me a second time.
  
    Dante Alighieri had a very bad fiscal 1302. His mission to Pope Boniface VIII ended in a betrayal, political rivals burned down his home in Florence and he was forced to flee into exile and condemned to die if he returned, accused of the rather ordinary and unpoetic crime of skimming money off municipal road repairs in his capacity as superintendent of widening and straightening roads, one of the many mundane duties the poet performed for his beloved native city.
     But Dante made the best of it. While scrounging his living, he began writing Inferno, the first part of his Divine Comedy, inventing a fiery Hell and meticulously placing his enemies--including Boniface--one by one into it. The public embraced his creation. Dante was celebrated, both in his lifetime and without pause for the next 700 years, lauded as one of most important writers of the modern world, a titan alongside Shakespeare and Cervantes.
     All in all, a fair recovery.
     We all fall down in our lives at one point or another. Some stay down; others get back up. Failure is such a common human experience that it is difficult to find a general observation about it that doesn't sound trite, like something off a high-school locker room wall. "Winners never quit, and quitters never win." "If at first you don't succeed, try, try again." And on and on.
     Despite all the truisms about failure, and despite it being universal, we still tend to ignore failure. We leave the disappointments off our resumes, and we overlook them in the lives of others.
     How many people, watching Steve Jobs announce the iPhone, the latest hot product from computer giant Apple , paused to remember that he was once a notorious has-been? That in 1985 Jobs was forced out of the company he co-founded before blowing $100 million on NeXT, a start-up computer company that arrived stillborn?
     Not many. Because success eclipses failure. We think of George Lucas as the creator of Star Wars, not the guy who produced Howard the Duck. When we see Dustin Hoffman chatting with David Letterman, he is the star of The Graduate and Tootsie, not the star of Ishtar, one of the biggest bombs ever made.

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