Boys will be cats

Gizmo, surveying his domain. 

   
   When former colleague Kara Spak mentioned a column where the boys were allowed to eat like cats, I drew an utter blank. I almost didn't believe her. But that SOUNDED like us. Fortunately, the Nexis machine is a tireless birddog, and dredged this up. It's from 14 years ago—I'm encouraged to think that anything I wrote would stick in the mind that long—back when the column was a thousand words and filled a page, and I'm keeping the first two non-cat items, for the heck of it. You can, if you like, jump straight to the cat part. Though I still maintain the appeal of performing Merchant of Venice as the comedy it was intended to be by Shakespeare. Oddly, just Monday, at the Goodman dinner, I sat with Bob Falls and Canadian actor Colm Feore, and I mentioned the idea to the latter—Bob's probably sick of me urging him to do that. It would catch people's attention. 


Opening shot

     Like you, I was glad to see President Bush finally put to rest the idiotic debate over whether New Orleans would be rebuilt. If we can rebuild Iraq, we can -- we must -- rebuild New Orleans.
     So the will is there. And so is the money, apparently -- from whatever magic source federal money now pours.
     But what I don't understand is the logistics; where are the carpenters going to come from? How is it going to be done? I don't know if you've ever tried to get someone to come by your house and rebuild a shaky fence. But you can be in Northbrook on a dry day, waving a fistful of cash over your head, and nobody will agree to do it.
     Now imagine thousands upon thousands of destroyed homes in an enormous blighted area covering several states. If they started building today, it would still take years, and by the time they were done, a big chunk of the displaced residents would have decided to stay where they were.
     The devil is in the details, and so far the federal plan reminds me of the classic 1941 New Yorker cartoon where the catcher advises the pitcher: "Strike him out."

The quality of mercy

     Shakespeare can be thick going for modern audiences. Thus, there is the temptation to spice up productions by yanking plays out of their tights-and-feathers context and dropping them somewhere unexpected. It can be merely gimmicky—Kabuki Othello, or the gay Richard III in "The Goodbye Girl" —or it can take overly familiar material and make it new again.
     I was lucky enough to have seen Robert Falls' groundbreaking "Hamlet" in 1984; I think of it as "Reagan Hamlet," since Claudius' speech is shown on a TelePrompTer, and Gertrude, in a red tailored suit, gazes with that same fixed Nancy Reagan smile at her husband.
     I remember exactly the thought that popped into my mind when Ophelia shows up on stage, late in the play, makeup scrawled on her face, hiking up her dress.
     "She's crazy," I thought, horrified, before smiling at myself because, of course, Ophelia is one of the more famously insane characters in literature, and it is a sign of Falls' genius that he could make it fresh again.
     "The Merchant of Venice" poses a similar problem: what to do when the central character is not only one of the most familiar parts in literature, but also one of the most offensive stereotypes: the money-grubbing, bloodthirsty Jew?
     Barbara Gaines solves the problem with mastery in the "Merchant" just opened at the Chicago Shakespeare Theater on Navy Pier. She places the play in the present. Her Venetians are jaded Eurotrash, swilling scotch and spitting lustily on Shylock, the moneylender.
     And she gives it an earthiness. The spit isn't polite stage spit, but real hocking spit that makes the audience cringe.
     As someone who constantly deals with people unhappy to see their own group maligned, I was glad to be able to enjoy Shylock, who despite Gaines' humanizing touches is no hero.
     It was only later, musing on the play—always a sign of a job well done—that reservations arose. Nobody dies in "Merchant of Venice," which seemed unique for a tragedy, until I remembered that it was not a tragedy, originally, but a comedy. Shylock is supposed to be funny.
     Perhaps the only way to stage the play nowadays is how Gaines did, to include all sorts of humanizing touches to explain why Shylock is the way he is. But it strikes me that we are ready for the play as written -- to be hit with the full grotesqueness of Shylock. Give it to us straight. Perhaps the most radical revision of all would be to present the play in all its original harshness, and force audiences to grasp the depth of the ancient hate on their own, while laughing.

"Meow," my son said

     We have rules in the house. No computer games in the morning. Homework gets done first thing after school, before the television goes on.
     The rules are especially plentiful around suppertime—if you can't preserve decorum at dinner, when can you? Thus I insist, for instance, that the boys wear clothes. I would not have cooked up this rule myself, understand, but, let's say, it became necessary. They also need to use napkins instead of shirts, and silverware—that's what it's there for. If they emit that saliva-gargle of food lust sound that Homer Simpson makes, I send them to their rooms.
     Still, we try not to be tyrants. Which is why my wife, in her wisdom, hatched the idea of an "anything goes" break from all the rules. One dinner a week, the rules are suspended. They can slurp and slobber their food all they like.
    Thus, I was not too surprised, at a recent chicken dinner, when one son said he wanted it to be an "anything goes" dinner. I figured he wanted to eat the chicken with his hands.
     "Sure," I said.
     Without a word he leaped up, went to the cupboard, found a bowl, returned to his seat, and poured his glass of milk into the bowl.
     "I want to drink my milk like a cat," he explained.
     Our younger son, recognizing fun when he saw it, followed, and got his own bowl.
     My wife began to protest—there are limits. I, intrigued, raised a palm to quiet her. This, I wanted to see.
     A few moments of silence, except for the sound of gentle lapping, both boys bent over their bowls, their tongues darting.
     My wife and I gazed into each other's eyes. I mouthed the words, "We're in trouble."

Closing shot

     God knows I have my problems with the president. But never so much that I'd take the time to Photoshop mocking pictures of him. But other people do. A lot. Bush, happily playing guitar for weeping Katrina victims. Bush, golf clubs tucked under arm, among a band of New Orleans looters. Bush and his father fishing in the devastated flood region.
     They're funny, sort of. But they also puzzle me. Isn't the truth insane enough? Why imagine new craziness to lay at his feet?
     Similarly, a caller phoned and began babbling about Bush's facial twitches. As soon as he paused for breath, I said something like, "Isn't this beside the point? It's like criticizing Hitler for bad posture."
     But he didn't understand.
     What's the point of being against zealotry if it makes you a zealot?

                          —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Sept. 18, 2005

More wonders than space in the newspaper

Sgt. Tony Valentn, left, and son Anthony.

     If there is one comment my readers make most frequently — well, after some variant of “you suck” — it is that they are fans of the print newspaper, the log of dried tree pulp tossed at their homes every morning and spread with a sigh of pleasure over the breakfast table.
     I like that too. But at the risk of apostasy, I have to confess that, as a writer, I prefer the online edition, for two reasons.
     First, errors can be easily corrected. If, say for instance, a careless writer’s right index finger falls short of the “Y” and hits the “U” instead, converting the J. Tyke Nollman Field into the J. Tuke Nollman Field, it’s a moment’s work to set it right, not counting responding contritely to all those print readers solemnly pointing out the gaffe.
     Second, you can find older stories without pawing through filing cabinets and manila folders. Searching is a breeze.
     Print, however, has one big advantage over online. It’s finite. With print, you have to cut, and cutting is good, because while the internet is boundless, attention spans are not. In print, my column should run 719 words, which means if want to go much longer, like Monday’s introduction to the joy that is rugby, I have to get approval ahead of time.
     Even then, I lost marvels worth sharing. For instance, in rugby, referees are called “the Sir” — even women (though some female refs prefer “Ma’am”). Regular players may not speak to the Sir — that’s a penalty. Only team captains can. Here’s a line from the Nashville Grizzlies online “Rugby Primer”: ”If the Sir speaks to [a] player directly, it means the player did something bad. The ONLY correct response by this player to the Sir is ‘yes Sir.’”
     Kinda makes you wish life were a rugby game.
     Then there was Tony Valentin. I was standing on the sidelines Saturday, watching players tussle over the ball, and struck up a conversation. Turns out he is a sergeant, 20 years with the Chicago Police Department, assigned to the boat unit.

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A box full of darkness

     "If you don't care about your writing," I tell aspiring writers, who, now that I think of it, I don't encounter much anymore, "then nobody does."
     What I mean by that is, you can't dog it, can't phone it in, can't half-ass your way to any kind of success. At least not in most cases. For every 6-year-old who finds internet fame and a book contract by posting their finger paint poetry online for a month, there are 100,000 other writers who must grind forward with all their might and not give up.
     That said, on rare occasions, a writer, if he or she is lucky, will encounter somebody else, a person not themselves, who also cares about their stuff. Best-selling authors are accustomed to this, no doubt, and come to expect lionization as a daily event, the general public tapping at their windows from dawn to dusk. Must be nice.
     But we mid-list authors, who sweat mightily just to find somebody to print our writing, have to catch at whatever passing shred of significance we may, cling to it, admire it, then use it to feed the guttering fire of our self-regard. Like recently spying my 2012 memoir, "You Were Never in Chicago," and in abundance, at the Chicago Architectural Association bookstore on East Wacker Drive. Still in the game...
      I considered revealing myself to the clerk, maybe offering to sign the copies. Increase their value! But the clerks seemed pretty busy, ringing up books that customers actually wanted to buy, and there are so many ways an offer like that can go wrong. ("Oh no, you can't sign them, because that might complicate things when we return the books to the publisher to be ground into mulch...") I figured better to savor the situation and not muddle things.
      So timidity is a stumbling block, but professionalism can also get in the way of cheesy self-promotion. I really wanted to tuck a plug for tonight's talk, "A box full of darkness" at 7 p.m. at Northbrook Public Library, at the end of a column in the Sun-Times, where 50 times the amount of people might read it compared to here. But the moment never presented itself. Doing so would mean trimming the column by a few lines, and I could never bring myself to undercut whatever point I was trying to make merely to ballyhoo an appearance discussing my most recent book, "Out of the Wreck I Rise: A Literary Companion to Recovery," written with Sara Bader. Should be proud or disappointed at that? I suppose a little of both.     

Rugby ‘makes football look for little babies’

The Chicago Lions women's rugby team, in black, playing the Minnesota Valkyries. 

     The Rugby World Cup is being played right now in Japan. You are forgiven if you didn’t know; rugby occupies one of the lower rungs of American sports consciousness, somewhere below soccer but above cricket.
     Rugby is also being played right now in Chicago, including a day-long celebration on the West Side last Saturday, as the Chicago Lions Charitable Association — the Lions have played rugby in Chicago since 1964 — unveiled its new J. Tyke Nollman Field at Chicago Hope Academy.
     The action began shortly after 8 a.m., with younger players — organized rugby starts at age 4 — gathering to practice on the special shock-absorbing artificial turf.
     Among them, Keandre Bates, 14, from West Garfield Park, who has played rugby for four years.
     “It’s a challenge at most times. Rugby is really tough,” said Bates. “It just makes football look for little babies. You have to pass backward.”
     “It’s the greatest game out there,” agreed Mike Inman, of North Center, who brought his son Sullivan, 10. “For somebody likes Sullivan, loves to be active, to be out there, tackle, and run, and do it all, this is a great sport for him. At this level they’re just kids running around being kids.”

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A rugby scrum is actually a carefully-structured event. 

When summer's end is nighing

       School begins before summer ends. So we typically sigh for the end of summer during the last days of August, when we are urged to stock up on rulers and pencils and back-to-school clothing. As if summer only exists for children, which in a sense it does, though adults appreciate the warmth and life and sense of possibility. My wife and I are members of the Chicago Botanic Garden, and while we do visit in February as well as July, let me assure you: July is better. 

A. E. Housman

       But summer ends for adults too, at 2:50 a.m. Central Time on Monday, Sept. 23. And for grown-ups, the opening gong of winter can bear an extra element of regret. There is a lovely poem by A.E. Housman, "When summer's end is nighing"—an unfortunate word, "nigh," redolent of the preciousness that poets have rightly banished, replaced by bodily fluids. 
     But to be expected. Housman was late 19th century Oxford don, seemingly a "dried up husk of a man," in Alan Bennett's words, huffing on the dying spark of a youthful, unreciprocated flame. A prig and something of a fraud—he lionized the dead in war but complained when Cambridge took in wounded soldiers. When the philosopher Wittegenstein, feeling the indisputable call of nature, rapped on Housman's door and asked to use the loo, the poet replied "Certainly not." 
     Still, he could be bracingly direct. "The faintest of all human passions," he wrote, "is love of truth." Practically ripped from the headlines, as is his observation that men "think in fits and starts."
      The poem is out of copyright, so I can print the whole thing without guilt, which is more than I can say about reading it:

      When summer's end is nighing
         And skies are evening cloud,
      I must on changes and fortune
         And all the feats I vowed
         When I was young and proud.

      The weathercock at sunset
          Would lose the slanted ray,
       And I would climb the beacon
          That looked to Wales away
          And saw the last of day.

      From hill and cloud and heaven
         The hues of evening died.
      Night welled through lane and hollow
         And hushed the countryside.
         But I had youth and pride.

      And I with earth and nightfall
           In converse high would stand,
       Late, till the west was ashen
           And darkness hard at hand
           And the eye lost the land.

        The year might age, and cloudy
            The lessening day might close.
        But air of other summers
             Breathed from beyond the snows.
             and I had hope of those.

        They came and were and are not
           And come no more anew;
         And all the years and seasons
            That ever can ensue
            Must now be worse and few.

          So here's an end of roaming
             On eves when autumn nights:
          The ear too fondly listens
              For summer's parting sights,
              And then the heart replies.

     A bit treacly perhaps, but to the point.
     Speaking of which, I'm giving a talk entitled "Box Full of Darkness," a line filched from Mary Oliver, at the Northbrook Public Library, 1201 Cedar Lane, this Tuesday.  It begins at 7 p.m., lasts about an hour and admission is free. The subject is poetry and recovery from addiction, and I'll sign copies of "Out of the Wreck I Rise," the book on the subject I wrote with Sara Bader. 
     Though if you plan to go—and I hope you do, I'd feel stupid standing there alone, talking to myself—the library asks that you pre-register here.

And another thing ...

Destin, Florida anti-circumcision protestor. (Photo by Robert Angone)

     I had a lot of fun putting Wheaton College over my knee yesterday. But when I was done, after finishing the first draft, the column was 1100 words long. One important point got cut out reducing it to the print-friendly 719. I lost professor Larycia Hawkins, the political science professor forced out of Wheaton College in 2015 for wearing a headscarf in solidarity with Muslims threatened by the rise in poisonous rhetoric. In retrospect, I wish I had kept her and cut Wheaton scuttling health insurance for its students, lest one girl use it to buy contraception, since the Hawkins case spoke to the school's trademark stifling of free speech and religious immorality even more than health care did. 
    Ah well, not every choice is the best one.
    And I also lost the thread on how The Bean will be cluttered if we let one in religious fanatic, we let in them all.  Plus freedom of speech never means freedom of speech everywhere at any time. I wrote, then cut:

     The sidewalks of the city are not enough. Chicago doesn't have enough corners, apparently. With 99.99 percent of the metropolis at their feet, of course they'd must come here, where so many lambs aggregate. The question is, how many flock there in order to be endure a religious lecture, and the answer is: none of them.
     The ability to control when and where rights are expressed is inherent to running a city. You may not preach the gospel in the Gehry bandshell—also public space—during a CSO concert, you may not read the Constitution in the middle of Michigan Avenue during rush hour.

    Abandoned as too much of a digression was a passage where I pointed out that just as people pushing for school prayer can only conceive their prayer being allowed, and forget that opening the door also welcomes in a confusion of prayer mats, beads, rituals, prayer times, sacrifices so that nobody learns long addition. 
      Thank goodness Eric Zorn had my back, and expressed it perfectly in his take, the same day on the same subject:

     “Irritation or annoyance of some opinionated minority is unavoidable in public spaces and is never enough to prohibit someone from exercising their First Amendment rights both to express and to hear ideas wonderful and ridiculous,” said a letter to the city from John Mauck, an attorney for the students.
     “Visitors at The Bean who want to enjoy the reflection of Chicago’s skyline will not miss it because they turn their heads for a few seconds,” Mauck wrote.
     No, but their enjoyment of their visit to The Bean stands to be dramatically impaired if the immediately surrounding area becomes a boisterous daily forum for competing religious, political and social activists ululating for attention.      And that’s what a total victory for the students here might do.

     Well said. Protest used to be about information and entreaty—you were telling the public about a situation and urging them to act. Now a lot of public action, like our political realm, is about manifesting power, showing what you can do—you carry your gun into the store because you can, or think you can. You bully and harangue strangers because, well, that's what you do. Of course they don't like when the afflicted push back. Nobody cries like a bully.

Chicago prays: Let us not be Bible-thumped

     The line snaking through the deafening, dripping bowels of Union Station, waiting to squeeze up the stairs to Madison Street, can take an eternity. When you finally break the surface, into light and air, one more hurdle awaits: the permanent pair of Jehovah’s Witnesses hoping to break you on their rack of literature.
     No biggie. Sidestep them and be on your way. But they are also the opening salvo in the constant barrage of admonition and entreaty that is the price of walking downtown.
     On Madison Street you’ll likely encounter a mendicant or two on cardboard, blessing you for whatever funds you contribute to their meth addiction. And if you’re really unlucky, Joe Scheidler and the entire Pro-Life Action League will be waiting across the bridge, human easels for their five-foot-tall color posters of the diced up fetuses of women they wouldn’t bother to spit on in person.
     That’s life in the big city. Window shopping on Michigan Avenue? Dare make eye contact with a well-scrubbed millennial holding a clipboard and they will bound over, flash you a Colgate smile, asking some inane question — “Do you like animals?” — while snaking a hand into your pockets, metaphorically.
      Finished? I’ve barely begun. State Street is the home of gaunt, Elmer-Gantry-style preachers screaming into blown-out loudspeakers about the fiery pit that awaits cigarette smokers and sodomites. All December much of Daley Plaza becomes a jostling religious anti-science fair, with little Lord Jesus asleep in the hay close by Muslims brandishing their star and crescent and the brutalist steel menorah of the Chabadniks, a decoration Albert Speer might have used at the Nuremberg rallies had the Nazis, you know, been into that kind of thing. Worst of all, the flimsy, anemic glowing red “A” of atheism, a physical manifestation of their feebleness relative to the Biblical passion of the Godstruck. 

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