Planters’ fake tragedy runs into real thing

     Would any sane person connect the deaths of Kobe Bryant, his 13-year-old daughter, and seven others in a helicopter crash Sunday — an all-too-real tragedy — with the PR stunt cooked up by Planters Peanuts: the notional death of its fictional mascot, Mr. Peanut, announced last week and set to be solemnized during the Super Bowl?
     Yes, the internet is fueled by outrage. People online are incredibly touchy. But are they that incredibly touchy? The idea seems — pardon the pun — a little nuts.
     But Planters — owned by Kraft Heinz, somehow co-headquartered in Chicago and Pittsburgh — obviously worried the connection would be made. So it suspended the online publicity blitz, while still planning to run a 30-second Super Bowl commercial Sunday featuring Mr. Peanut’s funeral. So toning down the publicity, out of one corner of its mouth, while blasting it to the world out of the other.
     The whole campaign was a mistake. The smart, strategic route would have been to just quietly put Mr. Peanut out to pasture, the way Campbell’s Soup exiled its tomato-cheeked Kids. Ready to return when needed.
     Given the genuine general public grief about this tragedy — Kobe Bryant, not Mr. Peanut — affecting not only basketball fans, but anyone saddened to see a father of four cut down in the act of being a good parent, it seems Planter’s should have shown some spine, trusted consumers, and ignored any online trolls lunging to cast Mr. Peanut’s death as an insult to Bryant’s memory.
     Ironic. Mr. Peanut was designed to address public scorn, not inflate it. Since everything that could be said about Bryant is being said, I wanted to highlight something the media missed in the first days after Mr. Peanut’s demise: how Planters got an anthropomorphic peanut as a mascot in the first place. Top hat, monocle, and white gloves — kind of upscale for a comestible that at the time was considered food for swine and the poor.

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Flashback 2004: Fat and happy Big Boy always stands tall

  

     Grant me this, I am consistent. I was in Nexis, trying to find out what happened to the Campbell's Soup Kids—there's no evidence of them on the Campbell's web site—and I stumbled upon my own story, from 16 years ago, mentioning the chubby siblings. 

     My first thought, reading this below was, "They printed that?" Because it seems so exceedingly trivial, even for me. And those four dashes in the opening sentence; I would never do that today, and it's all I can do not to repair it. But if I start trying to clean up old columns, well, that's all I'd ever do. 

Reader Dave Connell shared this photo taken at the
Classical Gas Museum, Embudo New Mexico.

     If you were to walk into my house—please don't!—but say you did—no, I'm serious, I'll call the police—theoretically walk in, that is, and went to the TV room, which is what we call our repository of toys and junk, there you would find, in addition to two young boys who have been watching Spider-Man cartoons so long their eyeballs are swelling shut, there above the shrinelike TV, another shrine of sorts. A series of five standing figurines, each 10 inches tall, each pot-bellied like a Buddha, each in red- and white-checked coveralls. Two holding hamburgers aloft.
     I refer of course to Big Boy.
     Now I know that the Big Boy restaurant mascot is an object of post-modern irony to many people, who keep a Big Boy or two around as some kind of knowing wink at consumer culture.
     That is not why I have five Big Boys at home. I own them sincerely, because I love Big Boy. I always have. I know this will seem very strange to those who consider Big Boy a mere corporate shill, like Colonel Sanders or Michael Jordan or Mayor McCheese. That's why I'm writing this—not just to reveal yet another embarrassing personal detail. But to try to understand what it is about the homunculus that is so appealing.
     What is it about the Boy?
     This comes in the wake of our story Thursday, about the town fathers of Canton, Mich., attacking a 7-foot Big Boy statue in front of a local restaurant, citing zoning against multiple signs.
     The owner, Tony Matar, defended his Boy—it isn't a sign, he said. "It's an icon."
     He sure is. More than an icon. Big Boy is a god (not the God, capital "G"—put down your pens, please—but a god, sort of a fast-food deity. The Spirit of American Burger Plenty).
     Big Boy is often depicted as running, frozen in mid-stride, lofting his enormous namesake burger high above his head. He is our Hermes, our Mercury, the god of travel and double cheeseburgers.
     There are so many reasons to love Big Boy I don't know where to begin. First, he's so happy—beaming like he's ready to explode with joy, eyes goggling, apple cheeks about to pop. Second, that Reaganesque pompadour. So strange and wonderful. And third, he's fat. How many food brand mascots are fat? Campbell's Soup sent their chunky twins to Jenny Craig years ago, Aunt Jemima lost 40 pounds along with her scarf.
     Fourth, the Boy carries a whiff of 1950s California drive-in culture, with its boomerang architecture and leering mascots, like the Pep Boys, Manny, Moe and Jack. Or Big Boy who, now that I think of it, does have a certain malign look about him, like he should have eight arms: Big Rav Boy, the Destroyer. And that appeals, too.
     The power of Big Boy is such that I am drawn to his chain, despite the fact that I've had some of the worst dining experiences in my life at Big Boy restaurants.
     I should stress that I haven't been to every Big Boy in the country—they are different companies regionally, Bob's Big Boy and Elias' Big Boy and Frisch's Big Boy—and I imagine there must be some that aren't lousy. But I've had not one, but several legendary disasters. Once the food never came at all, and we had to eventually get up and leave, the boys weeping with hunger. Another, with a family we vacation with in Ohio, was such a terrible experience that to this day—years later—all we have to do is raise the question of where to eat lunch, and lips begin to curl into mocking smiles, and eyes dart in my direction as I slump and hide my face with my hands, scoured by the memory that it was I, Big Boy's acolyte, who insisted we go there.
     Strangely, these nightmare visits have not soured me on the Boy himself. Even at that Ohio Big Boy, waiting endlessly for our cold food, I had only good feelings for him.
     "If only Big Boy knew," I said, echoing the kind of faith that abused Russians had in their czar 100 years ago, conjuring the image of Big Boy arriving just in time to save our lunch, rushing into the kitchen, a blur of activity, shouting orders, firing people.
     All hail the true burger king!
     To understand the power of the Boy, look at all those other mid-level restaurant chains— Denny's and Hardee's and such. Sure, their food might be better. But what are they in the hearts of America without a Big Boy? Nothing.
     Ronald McDonald is frightening in that way that only clowns can be. I never see him without expecting him to be holding a bloody ax. Wendy's mascots were worse—first that freckled, pigtailed Wendy creature, who looked like the vile Pippi Longstocking, and then Dave, the CEO, who tried to be lovable but you just knew, when the cameras weren't rolling, was screaming at cringing underlings, white spittle flying off his lips.
     That's it. That's the answer. Big Boy is comfort. He is cheeseburgers and malted milk and smiles and rest and safety. But, like so many minor deities, he is only the promise of these things, the promise of paradise. The graven image of delight without the substance.
         —Originally published in the Sun-Times, April 16, 2004

Illinois can do better on pre-K education

     If Dad brings home a pony on Monday, I’d say when the boys were small, and another pony on Tuesday, by Wednesday his kids will meet him at the door shouting “Where’s the pony?”
     That was meant to illustrate how expectations of children ramp up to meet whatever is done for them, my sympathies automatically siding with fellow beleaguered parents.
     But there’s a harder truth behind that: Children want so much because they need so much. Maybe not ponies, though some reader will no doubt argue that one. But they definitely need food and clothing and shelter and attention and love and vaccinations and storybooks and bedtime kisses and early morning activities and drinks of water in between.
     They’ll take as much as they can get, then put it to good use. They’re sponges, soaking up whatever is poured over them, squirreling it away to fuel their astounding metamorphosis, the magic trick of transforming from squealing, pooping, nonverbal, immobile, lumps of flesh slightly bigger than a meatloaf into fully formed, functioning, aware and decent adults.
     If all goes right. But what if it doesn’t? What if young children don’t get all the stuff they need? We see the results every day. Bad childhoods lead to bad adults, often, which help create the bad situations we must cope with on personal, family, neighborhood, city, county, state, national and world levels.
     Gov. J.B. Pritzker knows this and is expected to push early childhood education in his State of the State address Wednesday.

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Vatican Museum, 2016

Leaning tower of snow

     Yesterday was busy with so many things that weren't this blog, I don't know where to begin and, frankly, don't want to.
     I did walk the dog, leading to the photo above, which seemed to update the snow tower rhapsodized in yesterday's post. Saturday morning's alarming list to starboard, from my perspective, seemed almost a physical impossibility. Pliant stuff, snow. Plastic and malleable.
     I was right. By the afternoon, the top two spheres had toppled, but there was some good news. My wife took Kitty out (one benefit of the hip surgery has been to diffuse dog-walking duties, which used to be my exclusive responsibility. I'm not sure how long that will last, and I don't really mind dog walking—it's both exercise and a bracing blast of normality—but I do like this whole sometimes-somebody-else-does-it business).
     Anyway, my wife encountered the home owner, shoveling his walk and, having read yesterday's post, inquired about the snow spire. He responded, "That's what happens when your nephews visit from Texas."
     He didn't elaborate, and she left the matter there, lacking the journalistic imperative to grill people. So we have to speculate whether the snow pylon represents Lone Star State ignorance of the conventions of snowman construction, or outsized Texan ambitions, or what. Perhaps just as well.
   

Snow menhir

     Well it isn't a snow man, that's for sure, this tower of five snow spheres that I passed on my way to the train Friday morning. Not the familiar three ball, feet/torso/head configuration. No coal eyes, no carrot nose, not battered top hat. Can't call it a man, or I suppose, nowadays, a snow person. Mustn't traffic in gender stereotyping.
     So what is he ... whoops, it. I mean "they." A snow...what? Monolith? Cenotaph? A snow pylon perhaps.
     I could knock on the door and ask. I saw three men building it the day before and have to assume they belong to the house. I mean, who builds a snow whatever in the front yard of a stranger? That would be even weirder. Of course, if I had to write the chapter title for the past few years, I couldn't go wrong with "Under Weirdness More Weirdness."
      Can't knock on the door. That transaction is beyond imagination. Almost. Ding-dong. "Excuse me. I was wondering; your snow edifice, exactly what is it? Representationally speaking."
     Better a mystery. One, I admit, I did not ponder too much. A pleasant day, got work done at the office, a promising lunch at the Little Goat Diner with an editor. Then, returning home, there it was. Only a little reduced. Layering another mystery. How did it stay up? In the rain no less. Is it impaled? Upon a broomstick, say?
      And not built in the center of the yard either. Right by the sidewalk. Is that trust?  Or a challenge? Or oblivious? You'd think some malicious person would have knocked it over at some point during the day. Would have succumbed to the overwhelming desire to knock it over.  The thought crossed my mind, but I squelched it. As did everyone else. A very quiet street.
     On the second visit I finally reflected on the tyranny of snow men. They have a lock on the market of snow creatures. Very seldom anything else. The occasional cave or fort.  That's it. No snow bears. No snow trees. In the realm of amateur efforts I mean. I'm not talking about giant snow dragons at some festival in Finland. Though, to my credit, I do recall building an enormous snow bust of George Washington, years ago, with my brother and our kids. A compelling likeness, if I recall. I used a dollar bill as a model. Though if you want to be critical—and who doesn't nowadays?—you could point out that a snow bust of George Washington is, still, a snow man.
     The house, I should point out, is one of those places that changes residents nearly every year. Backs up against the train tracks. And they all must come and go out the back. I swear, I've had a chance to converse with the occupants no more than three or four times in 20 years, and it's always someone different. So it's not like I can casually inquire about the snow obelisk during our next conversation.
     Thin gruel, I know, even for a Saturday. But it was a long week, my first week back after medical leave, and frankly, it's the snow cairn or nothing. I hope I made the right choice.

It’s Restaurant Week — grab your wallets!

Chef Sangtae Park at Omakase Yume

     Chicago Restaurant Week 2020 begins Friday.
     OK, it’s not a week — it’s 17 days, which perfectly reflects the inflation that creeps into fine dining. Seven can easily become 17 by the time drinks and tax and 20% tip and 3% staff health insurance fee — it’s a thing — are factored in.
     For instance. During winter break, I lured my boys home from law school by promising they could each pick a swank eatery and dad would pay. It worked. Both chose places offering a prix fixe meal which, in my naïveté, I thought meant in return for a set amount of money, we’d get dinner.
     Ah, hahaha. Dewy innocence.
     The older boy chose Omakase Yume. It’s hard not to be charmed just walking into perhaps the smallest restaurant in Chicago: eight seats around a tiny wooden sushi bar.
     “It’s very Japanese,” I said, somewhat idiotically, thinking of Suntory Jigger Bars in Tokyo. It was quiet: light classical music, the octet of customers sitting in rapt expectation, watching Chef Sangtae Park create eight perfect pieces of raw fish—amberjack, yellowjack, three kinds of tuna — on oblongs of rice, then solemnly set down a piece before each guest.
     The highlight was salmon, which Park smoked in a rectangular cedar box. A lovely bit of restaurant theater, the woodsmoke delightful, the sushi exquisite.
     The fish was several derivations of freshness beyond standard sushi, it almost seemed a different substance. We mused over the economics of preparing dinner for eight customers and wondered how this place gets fish so much fresher than anywhere else.
     “It must be a separate supply chain,” I speculated, imagining some hardy Japanese fisherman hooking slabs of bluefin tuna off a pier in Yaezu, packing them in ice and jumping on a plane to Chicago, sitting stolidly in his green rubber boots and orange slicker, his insulated treasure perched on his lap.

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Из России с любовью

    I was friended by a Russian immigrant living in Chicago Wednesday, and thought to share this look at the Russian community, which I assumed I must have posted at some point since it was written in 2007. 

    But I hadn't. So correcting that error, as well as the headline, which I had originally wanted to be in Russian, but the copy desk refused, under the very practical notion that newspaper headlines should be in English (translated, it means "From Russia with love." The original subtitle was: "The Chicago area's Russian population may not be the most vocal, but in terms of sheer numbers, they are a powerful ingredient in our melting pot.")

     I also am including a correction, which ran two days later, and reflects the, umm, vigorous insistence of the Russians who felt overlooked. One of whom shortly thereafter took me to a not-at-all pleasant lunch at the Zhivago Restaurant in Skokie, where I definitely remember playing with my fork, listening to him complain, and musing, "I wonder if he's going to kill me after this...."

OPENING SHOT . . .

     "Are there any Russian-speaking passengers on the train?" the conductor asks over a loudspeaker on a 6:19 Metra Milwaukee North Line.
     I hesitate. My last Russian class was in 1980. A few words linger, a few sentences echo around the old brain. But fluent? Not even close.
     Still, what if it's an emergency? Someone in distress? In seven years of taking the train, I've never heard an appeal for help over the PA system. I stand, shuffling down the aisle, imagining a lovely dark-haired lady, in a violet velvet dress, sobbing hard into a lace handkerchief.
     The conductor, patting her shoulder sympathetically, looks up at me.
     "Something about a Count Vronsky," he implores.
     The actual conductor isn't in the next car, or the car after that. By then I decide the distressed party must be a frumpy, maroon-haired matron with a ticket problem. I groped at dusty words. Gdyeh—"where." Hochoo—"you want."
     Just as I am puzzling over "to go," I reach the conductor, who is alone. He tells me that it was indeed a ticket problem—a woman wanted to get off at a stop that isn't on this run, so needed to be told she had to transfer at a certain station. Another passenger took care of it.
     As I turn to go, a question comes to mind: "Out of curiosity," I ask the conductor, "how many Russian-speaking passengers volunteered to help?"
     "Including you?" the conductor says. "Thirteen."

                                                        - - -

     Chicago is an ethnic city. Yet when the usual suspects of our global melting pot are rounded up—the Irish and the Poles, the Italians and the Chinese—you have to go way down the list, past the Swedes, past even the Cambodians, until you get to Russians.
     I'm not sure why. Russians were flocking here by the 1880s, according to the Chicago Encyclopedia. Most Chicagoans remember or at least know about the old Maxwell Street market. But who realizes it was an attempt by the city's Russian Jews—in 1930, 80 percent of Chicago Jews were Russian—to reproduce the jam-packed shtetls of their homeland? I didn't.  

Holy Trinity Orthodox Cathedral

     There were Russian Christians as well—Holy Trinity Orthodox Cathedral was built in 1903, in part, thanks to a donation from Czar Nicholas II. A fund-raiser was held by Buffalo Bill Cody, whose Wild West show included Cossack riders.
     "We still have a liturgy in Slavonic," said Father John Leavitt, dean of the cathedral. "And traditional Russian foods are blessed at Easter."

                                  - - -

     But that is the past. In the present, the Russian population is swelling. The 2007 Chicagoland's Russian Yellow Pages is 598 pages—twice as big as when it began in 2000— with nearly four dozen pages in full color, for lawyers, banks, real estate agents. Chicago has two Russian newspapers, a daily, the Novy Svet, or New Light, and a weekly, Sybota Ploos, or Saturday Plus.
     "There are about 550,000 Russian speakers in the Chicago area," says Alex Etman, who along with his wife, Emily, publishes the phone book and the newspapers. "Russian Jews, Ukrainians, Lithuanians and people from some former republics, Uzbekistan, Estonia, Latvia, Belarus . . ."
     Etman says immigrants who once went to the city now go directly to the suburbs.
     "We went to Rogers Park, then Northbrook, Highland Park, Glencoe. Now it's Buffalo Grove, Wheeling, Mundelein."
     The population of Buffalo Grove, Etman says, is 18 percent Russian-speaking. That strikes me as a very high figure. But village officials don't think so.
     "That may be about right," says Buffalo Grove Village Manager William Brimm. "That may be a legitimate number."

                                                                 - - -

     Russians are very low key, despite their growing numbers. No big parades, no driving around, waving flags out the window. If I didn't see them in droves on the train, I wouldn't know they are here. Why is that?
     "Very good question," says Etman. "The best kept secret about Russians is, Russians always think that they are late. Most of us came at age 30, 45, 50. We didn't have time to celebrate, to make festivals. Russians are a very hardworking segment of the population."
     Some are, some aren't. Some Russian immigrants are burdened with the legacy of 70 years of the ineptly paternal Soviet state, which has left a lingering hands-in-the-lap, when-is-someone-going-to-tell-me-what-to-do complacency.
     "There are two groups," says Svetlana Fastovskaya, Russian service specialist at Omni Youth Services in Buffalo Grove. "One group is very passive and think they're entitled to everything and the government will serve them. The other group is very high achievers, pushing their children. A 'B' is not acceptable."

                                                               - - -

     Another reason the Russian-speaking population is so understated is that it constitutes such a broad range of nationalities—from proud former Soviet commissars to Kremlin-loathing Lithuanians. Unlike most ethnicities, speaking the language does not necessarily make one a fan of the culture.
     "Some will say, 'I'm not from Russia; I'm from Belarus," said Fastovskaya. "In my experience, there are again two groups: one assimilating and don't want to have anything to do with Russian culture, and other very, very connected with Russian culture."

                                                               - - -

     Myself, I like to celebrate Russian culture over at Russian Tea Time, on Adams. The carrot salad. The squash piroshki. The special tea. I'm not sure how this influx of immigrants is going to affect Chicago, but while we're fixating on Hispanic immigration, it's worth pausing to remember that they are just the largest element of a constant infusion of new blood, making the city the changing, dynamic, diverse place it was, is and always will be.

CHICAGO'S TOP 10 RUSSIAN-SPEAKING SUBURBS:
City                        Pct.
Buffalo Grove      18.7
Highland Park     18.2
Deerfield               16.1
Glencoe                 14.4
Northbrook          14.3
Skokie                    11.6
Vernon Hills .        9.1
Northfield              9.0
Wheeling                8.9
Wilmette                7.2
Source: Russian Yellow Pages

TODAY'S CHUCKLE . . .

     Bob Hope supposedly once went to the Soviet Union to escape the pressure of celebrity, but quickly came home when he realized nobody there knew who he was.
      That experience -- if true -- might have inspired this quip:
     In Russia they treated me like a czar -- and you know how they treated the czar.

                                           —Originally published in the Sun-Times, May 2, 2007


     Clarification:

     Lots of response to my item about Russians in Chicago -- my favorite was a simple "Who knew?"     There were cries of alarm, however, that my list of Russian periodicals was incomplete, ignoring the weekly "Reklama" -- Russian for "advertisement" but denoting a newspaper, the way an American paper might be "The Commercial Appeal."
     "The community is so big and so wealthy and so powerful, yet not a lot of people talk about it," said Igor Golubchik, vice president of the company publishing the Reklama.
     He scoffed at the idea—stated by the publisher of a rival Russian newspaper—that there are 550,000 Russian speakers in the Chicago area.
     "There are no legitimate statistics or data," he said, only willing to estimate that there are "more than 300,000."
     "We know there are a lot of Russians, but any precise numbers they get by sitting around, making them up," Golubchik said.
     There are also Reklamas published in Detroit, Miami and Milwaukee, as well as a Polish version.
     "It's a brand," he said.
      Anyway, the Sun-Times regrets the omission, and notes that there are other Slavic publications out there as well, so they won't feel overlooked and complain, too.