Texas notes: Keep your distance

  

"Night in Bologne," by Pat Cadmus (Smithsonian)

     This is the third installment of a series of weekly reports that reader Caren Jeskey has been sending from Austin, Texas. You can find last week's installment here and the first post here. Her title is "Keep your distance," and I stuck "Texas Notes" before it because I thought, by always including "Texas" in the title, it'll signal the change in voice to readers. And besides, when she wants to gather them together, say after some big New York publisher wants to publish them in a book, having "Texas" in all the headlines will make that easier.

     On a sunny seventy degree day in early Spring of 2002 my coworker Kim and I decided to take a walk along the lakefront during our lunch break from our South Loop office building. 

     As we approached a grassy knoll we noticed a circle of bike cops surrounding two young men on the sidewalk nearby. Two sturdy bicycles were propped up on their kickstands in the grass, bags and boxes strewn around, and cops were apparently searching the contents. 

      One of the cops surrounding the men on the sidewalk was a red faced stocky woman with ruddy cheeks that were bright crimson and sweaty, reflecting the intensity of the moment. The first words that popped into my head were racial profiling. People had been suspicious of each other since the 9/11 attacks and it was clear that we were watching a reaction to that suspicion as it was unfolding. 

      My next thought was that the men looked like spiritual pilgrims. One was tall with dark black hair that hadn’t had a cut in ages, and a bushy unkempt beard. He was wearing loose fitting cotton Dickies style pants rolled up mid-calf, a wrinkled white button up shirt and simple gym shoes. He face was drawn and he looked tired and resigned. The other pilgrim was fair skinned with a touch of sunburn, long unkempt ginger colored hair and a full unruly beard. He also had long sideburns framing his worried, flushed, pinched face.
     As we passed I wanted to stop to see what was happening and my impulse was to try to help if I could. Kim sharply said “keep walking. Let’s go.” This snapped me out of my samaritan spirit and back into the reality that these were very tense and potentially dangerous times. A circle of angry faced bike cops searching two hapless young men was a scene best avoided. We kept walking, and processed our sadness about the state of the world as well as our helplessness to prevent harassment of innocent people.
     We walked up the paved sloping path towards the Shedd Aquarium and circled it, peering into the huge blue green windows of the Oceanarium filled with dolphins and whales. We looped our way back to the sidewalk moving north along the lakefront. As we made our way back towards the knoll the cops were gone. The ginger cyclist was sitting on the concrete curb, chin resting heavily in his hands, face heavy and sad. The dark haired young man was calmly placing his bags and boxes back onto the racks of his bicycle that was still propped up in the grass. I said to Ginger “are you ok?” He looked at me blankly for a moment, and then snapped “what?” in a loud and defensive tone. I said “I just wanted to know if you are ok. We saw the cops searching you.” He seemed to snap back to reality and said “oh, wow. Thanks. Yeah, that was really scary but we are ok.” I said “good,” and Kim and I continued our walk back towards the office.
     We were several hundred yards away when Ginger biked up to us calling “hey!” 

      I felt a little worried since we had to get back to work and I didn’t want to get overly involved with this disheveled young man and what looked like a complicated situation. Kim and I stopped and he quickly pressed out the words “I just wanted to say thank you so much for asking me how I was doing. We haven’t done anything wrong and got stopped and searched for no reason. It was really scary.” 

      I said “I am so glad we stopped and that you are ok. We have to get back to work now.” Kim was already walking away and I turned to join her. 

      “Wait!” he said. “Caren, I know you.” 

      This got our attention and Kim and I both turned back to him. My heart started racing, it felt so uncanny. “It’s me, Tim, from Second Street!” This was one of those moments of synchronicity that Carl Jung describes as “an ever present reality for those who have eyes to see.” This was Tim, the best friend of the bartender at the bar I worked at in Santa Monica about six years earlier. Back then I felt that I was much older than Tim and the bartender Anthony—after all I was 25 and they were only 21 or so. When Tim would invite me to join them on their camping trips to the desert or the ocean I’d laugh and say “thank you,” but never did take him up on these invitations. I always thought Tim was super sweet but way too young for me to consider hanging out with. In retrospect he would have been a lot more fun to hang out with than the bar’s karaoke-night MC I fell for, not knowing he was married and cheating on his wife with me.
     Tim, Anthony and their friends were fun and full of life. They were adventurous and warm. This adventurous spirit had led Tim to the Chicago lakefront on this day. He explained that he and his friend had biked to Chicago from California and were making their way to the Atlantic Ocean, a coast to coast bike trip. This trip had brought him to the lakefront spot at the same time Kim and I passed the same spot, and something inside prompted me to reach out to what seemed like a distressed person in need of solace and that person just happened to be Tim, several years and thousands of miles later. It made me feel a deep connection to life itself. We chatted a little bit more and said goodbye. The moment was rich enough itself that we did not feel the need to turn it into something else.
     In this coronavirus social distancing Spring of 2020 we once again feel a fear of the people around us. This time the danger seems even more imminent and real. Back in 2002, I had the distinct sense that I did not have to fear every dark haired stranger, and I did not have to fear men with beards even though many of my fellow Americans did. I knew that the bad guys were few and far between and did not think to avoid or run from people I passed on the street. Today is different. When the man biked past me sneezing and coughing tonight as I took an evening walk I wanted to run to the sidewalk and away from the potentially virus-ridden droplets heading in my direction. When a neighbor and I took a safely distanced walk I felt that there was an invisible 6’ yard stick between us and we negotiated this necessary distance as though we were magnets bouncing off of each other, as if we’d been doing this dance forever. When a man jogged right past me and nearly brushed my shoulder with his on the sidewalk the other day I ran into the front lawn of a house, and the man turned around and yelled “oh my God!” as though I had done something wrong by creating responsible space between us.
     I’d be mad at him if I didn’t also feel that this whole thing is incredibly sad, difficult and confusing at times. Even sadder is the knowledge that we have no idea how much longer we will have to beeline away from each other with this very real and not imagined threat to ourselves and those we love as this virus runs its course. It’s not beards and fezes, hijabs and such that we fear anymore, it’s everyone. In 1955 Carl Jung wrote this: I am no preacher of “splendid isolation” and have the greatest difficulty in shielding myself from the crushing demands of people and human relationships. This time in history calls for us to keep up with the demands of human relationships in the truest and deepest way possible, in fact to save each others’ lives.

Day 19,432 of the lockdown: Kidding, it only feels that way

Boulder, Colorado

     My mother and I talk on the phone every day. It seems the least I can do. Boulder, Colorado, which offered so much when my parents retired there, geez, more than 30 years ago, isn’t quite the jubilee it once was. Now in their mid-80s, they aren’t charging up the trail to Wonderland Lake anymore.
     It can be a frustrating conversation. Particularly when my mother is planning to go to the store. “Ma!” I’ll say. “Don’t risk your life for coconut shrimp!” Or, when that doesn’t work, “Ma! You’re going to die alone, surrounded by strangers in masks.”
     My father is sometimes watching television when I phone — CNN, thank God, not Fox — and my mother will mention something on the screen, the latest aftershock from our president’s daily twirl in the limelight, like some demented ballerina on the music box in an insecure girl’s nightmare.
     “Don’t watch TV news, Mom,” I’ll say. “I never do.”
     That’s true. Primarily because I read four newspapers and follow events online, so anything on TV is repetitive. Even big breaking stories — the last time I fled to TV news was when Notre Dame burned. After 10 minutes of time-filling and tap-dancing, watching the same static shot, I bailed. What’s the point? As for the president’s daily 5 p.m. nervous breakdown, “Fortunate the person,” Soren Kierkegaard writes in his journal, “who did not need to travel to hell in order to see what the devil looks like.”
     People who do make that journey, the daily descent, feel obligated to react. This has gone on years, and I’m sorry, but by now those doing so seem merely slow on the uptake. “What? You’re saying that the president is lying?!? Oh, my gosh, that’s awful! When did he start doing that?”
     And yet. Sometimes, you must join in. State the obvious. For The Record. Yes, there is something OCD about keeping track of the president’s lies. Maybe it’s like baseball; to ignore even one wild pitch is to lose the fabric of the game. To abandon history. I understand that. Was that a strike or a ball? Hard to determine the next day. You have to pay attention now. Though I bet journalists wish they had decided to keep track of his true statements — a much shorter list.
     To the matter at hand.
     On Monday, he — no need to speak the name, we all know who I'm talking about — tweeted this:
     “In light of the attack from the Invisible Enemy, as well as the need to protect the jobs of our GREAT American Citizens. I will be signing an Executive Order to temporarily suspend immigration into the United States!”

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What happens in Vegas: little good;

Excalibur, Las Vegas

     Carolyn Goodman, the mayor of Las Vegas, in a display of imbecility staggering even by that city's minimal standards of intelligence, announced on TV that she is prepared to open her city up as a test case in a kind of experiment to see how many people die if social distancing measures are ignored under crowded conditions. "I offered to be a control group," she told CNN's Anderson Cooper. Then again, I am biased against Las Vegas, as my most recent visit there, 11 years ago, is a reminder. 

     LAS VEGAS — When Dante passes through the grim portal advising all who enter to abandon hope, and descends into the upper suburbs of Hell, he is immediately surprised at the sheer number of damned souls he finds.
     "I would not have thought that death had undone so many," he observes, a line that came to mind when we arrived here from Los Angeles.
     You can't enter this most improbable of cities without being awed, first by the enormous fantasy casino buildings —15 of the 20 largest hotels in the world are in Las Vegas — and then by the mass of humanity crawling through them.
     We were bound for the Excalibur. I would have preferred something fancier — the Bellagio  — but in consideration of the boys, we settled on this 4,000-room mega-hotel with a medieval theme. The valet drop-off is as wide as a six-lane highway, but can barely handle the army of ever-arriving gamblers. Some 37.5 million people visited Las Vegas last year, according to the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority.
     Having been here once before, a brief visit 15 years ago, I of course planned to skip Vegas entirely on this trip — once is plenty. We would return home through Arizona. But my older son wanted to see Hoover Dam, in nearby Boulder City. Hence Vegas.
     We had no sooner given our car to the valet and stumbled into the Excalibur lobby, on our way to the 16, count 'em, 16 check-in stations, when we were greeted warmly by a man in a suit and steered to a kiosk offering show tickets. Another man shook my hand. This unexpected personal touch confused me.
     "Las Vegas must really be on hard times, if they're glad-handing everyone who walks into the Excalibur," I thought. The second guy launched into a spiel about bargain tickets. We were interested in taking the boys to the hotel's swordplay extravaganza, so listened politely about how a dinner package would normally cost $300, but he could let us in for $50 —"that's $12.50 a person," he added, doing the math for us, perhaps under the fair assumption that anybody who could do simple arithmetic wouldn't go to Vegas.
     That seemed awfully low for a dinner show, but there is a recession on — tourism in Vegas was down 4.4 percent last year — so who knows? We were about to sign up when he explained that, of course, at such a low price we'd need to first learn about the joys of time-share condo ownership, a two-hour orientation which . . .
     We bolted like rabbits.
     I'll admit, I was irked and offended, and got more irked and offended every time I walked into the lobby and had to dodge the time-share shills, avert my eyes and run away.
     As minimal as the standards of taste and hospitality are in Vegas, subjecting your guests to real estate hustles every time they walk through your Brobdingnagian lobby seems beyond the pale. But then I suppose the time-share condo scam pales compared with the thinly veiled robbery of gambling itself, one of the rare vices that merely puzzles rather than entices me. 

   

Hoover Dam

  "How does Richard do it?" I wondered aloud, of a friend who spends time in such places.
     Then again, nothing is more inexplicable than another man's pleasures — a fact I was reminded of after my last column, about California pot prescriptions, drew emails from fervent potheads, complaining that I was denigrating their source of innocent relaxation.
     There is something to that. It is too easy to scoff at, oh, the guy who spends 10 years of his spare time constructing a matchstick model of the Eiffel Tower in his basement. You need to force yourself to remember, "Well, it must have been worthwhile to HIM — he did it, voluntarily."
     Obviously, this gambling stuff must have allures. These people come here of their own volition to pour their money down this rat hole. And indeed, I felt obligated to go to a blackjack table and lose the small parcel of cash I had allotted for that purpose. A task, which, at $10 a chip, took all of five minutes.
     Hoover Dam, by the way, was thrilling. If walking through the low ceilinged, stale-cigarette-reeking casino floor made me doubt the value of humanity — "If a meteor were going to destroy earth, I'd hurry here, so the loss wouldn't seem so bad," I told my wife — Hoover Dam, this massive yet elegant curve of concrete offered a certain redemption. We made this. There was the added bonus of the Hoover Dam bypass bridge, a delicate span being constructed across the Colorado River nearby.
     We all agreed that Vegas has been the low point of the trip. We even preferred Reno, which we hit driving west to the coast. Yes, Reno was small, and forlorn, but the buffet at our hotel — the Eldorado — was much better than that at the Excalibur, the staff was far friendlier, with no insulting timeshare pitches, and you could play blackjack for $5 a hand, which doubled my playing time.
     We checked out of the Excalibur and drove to a lodge on the North Rim of the Grand Canyon. It hardly seems possible that both places — Vegas and the Grand Canyon — could coexist simultaneously on the same planet, never mind bookend a single day. But they do and they did.

      —Published in the Sun-Times, Aug. 3, 2009

Muslims prepare for a Ramadan like no other

     The holiest month of the Islamic calendar begins with the sighting of the new moon — probably this Friday. And just as earlier this month, when Jews faced the challenge of the Zoom Seder and Christians coped with Easter Mass celebrated in empty cathedrals, now Muslims prepare to enter a new world of social-distance Ramadan. 

     “It’s going to be very interesting,” said Nabeela Rasheed, a lawyer. 
     “Muslims around the world are bracing for a Ramadan of the likes they’ve never seen or imagined before,” said Salman Azam, a board member at the Downtown Islamic Center. “We watched our interfaith partners having Seders and Easter dinners virtually and it helped us get ideas for the breaking of the fast.”
     The Ramadan dawn-to-darkness fast from eating and drinking is one of the five essential “pillars of Islam,” along with prayer, charity, pilgrimage, and declaration of faith. The fast is usually broken with a nighttime meal, called an “iftar,” a much-anticipated home-cooked feast eaten with friends and relations.
     “Ramadan is a time when communities and families gather in large numbers,” said Ahmed Rehab, executive director of the Chicago office of the Council on American-Islamic Relations. “That obviously is not going to happen this Ramadan.”
     So what is going to happen? The Downtown Islamic Center is trying to shift Ramadan festivities online.
     “This year at DIC, we are emphasizing that social distancing is not social isolation,” said Azam. For congregants breaking the fast alone, “we have set up a virtual room where we will be offering online recipes of popular fast-breaking food items and allow them to showcase their skills and exchange daily reflections, goals and lessons as they break their fast together.”

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Look at me, it'll make you feel better...

    Ironic that social media, which relies on people talking to everyone all the time about everything, should over time provide a running lesson on the value of silence.
     But it does.
     The meme not responded to. The twitter troll blocked. The invitation to list your 10 favorite albums ignored. These little acts of resistance build up, become precious. Lately on the rare times I react to some piece of stupidity someone has posted, I immediately circle back and delete it. Because really, why ride that rocking horse? Especially when there are so many others doing it. The horizon thick with them, the Hobby Horse Cavalry of the Damned.
     Even my commenting here about it—well, it reminds me about what I used to write to readers who asked why I wasn't reacting to the the latest stupidity from Fox News: "If I start responding idiotic things someone says on Fox News, it would be all I'd ever do."
     However. One practice did sweep Facebook in the past few weeks that deserves noting, simply because it speaks to a large deficiency of us older people—who are, remember, the backbone of Facebook, our little meringue of significance we whip up to spoon feed ourselves and each other. With spring settling in, and high schools worldwide adjourned for the season, the senescent on Facebook began posting their own high school pictures, from deep into the 20th century, in "support" of all these unfortunate actual high school students whose proms and bonfires and conga lines and whatever are never to be, thanks to COVID-19. To somehow comfort them. Out of the goodness of our hearts.
     Forgetting that no high school student worth his salt or her pepper gets within a mile of Facebook. Forgetting that, if they did, the process whereby they are buoyed up by seeing some awkward Kodachrome photo of their parents or grandparents is entirely notional. An act of faith in the curative power of our own precious selves. A trust drop into our own image, oblivious that, if anything, the supposed beneficiaries of this charity would be further mocked, had they seen it, which they won't.
    Up to this point, I think I could still let the matter pass as insignificant. I have my pride, God knows, it just has a self-awareness feedback loop. But if you pull this situation apart, it touches upon something I try to remind myself, suddenly living with two men in their early 20s as I do now. Musing on what was happening with these posted class photos—old people indulging their own vanity under the pretense of helping young people—it struck me that this happens a lot, outside of Facebook.
     There is the matter of advice—useless entreaties the ancient offer that reflect their own anxieties and failures, or act as a kind of lame hand-washing insurance from the potential for ill results—
"Drive carefully!"—far more than any chance that this is useful information, that it might impart any kind of practical information to anyone. I try hard, and often fail, but I do try, to neither offer unsolicited advice, nor glibly explain how to solve problems that people find themselves in. Neither are effective, or welcome.
     I thought that was worth mentioning.

Ship in distress

 
 
     The Fireman Joe column posted here Friday did not run in the paper Friday, which ran my column on Brian Dennehy instead (I assumed they were running both, which sometimes happens). It's running in print Monday. So rather than leave you high and dry, I thought I would share this tale, which I've been meaning to tell. 

      For the past few weeks, I've been highlighting posts from my visit to South America a year ago. They seem particularly timely, given how housebound we all are—I was supposed to be crawling around volcanoes in Taiwan in a couple weeks. But of course, now that isn't happening. Nothing much is happening, but a global disaster that is, in a strange sense, everywhere and nowhere.
    Not that I'm complaining, given the general suffering. The lucky should keep quiet.
     Yet, as I shared these stories—of Buenos Aires, the tango, birds, glaciers—a little voice was whispering, "But what about the encounter with the Venezuelan navy? The shots fired? The sinking ship? The vessel seized in port? When do you tell about that?"
     To be clear, I wasn't aboard the RMS Resolute when these things happened. But a person does form a bond with a ship—I do, anyway. I crossed the Atlantic more than 20 years ago on the New York Maritime College's Empire State, and still feel a kinship with her. For years, I kept a plastic card the captain gave me, with the ship's specs, its displacement and such, in my wallet, as a token. I might be the most mundane of desk bound keyboard jockeys, now. But I did once go to sea....
     So it was with more than causal interest that I read of the events of March 30.
     First, a bit of background. I sailed aboard the Resolute for a two-week cruise from Ushuaia, on the Southernmost tip of Argentina, up the Patagonian coast of Chile, to Santiago, asked aboard by my friend and former boss, Michael Cooke, who among his numerous accomplishments and distinctions is also a fellow of the Royal Canadian Geographic Society. The RCGS lent their luster to a tour company called One Ocean Expeditions, an environmentally woke cruise line that ran voyages to Antarctica, to the Northwest Passage. They invited him and he invited me.
     Everything was smooth and professional. Mostly. There was a bit of foreshadowing. Before the trip, One Ocean Expeditions were slow to cough up our airplane tickets, and I remember a few terse "So where are they?" conversations as the departure date neared. But the tickets arrived, we were whisked down to South America, the trip proceeded as planned.
     The boat was well-provisioned and properly staffed with chatty naturalists, eager program directors, acerbic bird experts. There were two photographers, a resident artist. Nobody grumbled about not being paid. But they weren't.
      "OOE basically led us along for months and months, always claiming that payment was just another week or three away and thanks for our patience, we can trust that we WILL get paid," one wrote to me, asking not to be identified. "So none of us took any action..."

      Some people took action. Stiffed contractors put a maritime lien on the ship in Halifax—the Guardian lays out the saga here, if you want details.  A trip to Antartica had to turn back because they couldn't pay to fuel the ship. Sobbing passengers who paid $20,000 for the trip of a lifetime were put ashore, out of luck.    
     Then last month, it got truly weird. Another lien held the ship in Buenos Aires. Those creditors were paid off, then the ship headed north, only to be accosted in international waters by a Venezuelan cruiser, the ANBV Naiguatá. It hailed the Resolute, and ordered her to heave to and be boarded. But the ship kept going, even when the Naiguatá put a few warning shots across her bow. Given the troubles facing that star-crossed country, I can't say I blame those sailing the Resolute.
     The Venezuelan craft rammed the Resolute, unwisely, not realizing she has a steel reinforced hull designed to ply polar waters. Funny, right? The Naiguatá was stove in and subsequently sank. What happened next is also under dispute. The Venezuelans says the Resolute steamed off, leaving the sailors in the water, in contravention of every tradition of the sea and naval warfare. The Resolute people say they lingered, to see the crew would be rescued by another Venezuelan vessel. You can find the entire controversy laid out here. There's also a jumpy, blurry video of the shots and the collision, released by the Venezuelan navy.
     And the moral of the story is? I'm tempted to say that Canadians with money can be no less vile than anybody else with money. But I knew that already, learned years ago from observing David Radler and Lord Conrad Black in action. 
     Maybe the lesson is, as I've said before, that it's better to be lucky than good. Michael and I sort of blinked at each other, via email, marveling at the thing. I can't speak for him, but the cautious suburbanite within me was glad we got our odyssey in before the hammer came down; glad we weren't left on the dock in Ushuaia having to make the long journey home with nary a glacier ogled. Though whatever shred of Jack London adventurer is hidden in my marrow felt a pang that we missed the action with the Venezuelan navy, which no doubt would have been quite the story to tell. 
     But only a passing pang. The reason we tell the stories of hardships is trying to redeem them somehow. It's still better not to experience them at all, if you can help it. Or if you are lucky. Anyway, for what it's worth, should any of this find its way to the crew we met on the ship: I'm sorry for your difficulties. You deserved better. 

  


     
   

Brian Dennehy on Eugene O'Neill

    

     I only spoke with Brian Dennehy once—if you don't count my drunkenly accosting him while he was trying to eat at Petterino's to tell him how great he was. The other time was this interview that ran eight years ago, under the headline, "O'Neill's 'Palace of Pipe Dreams;' Brian Dennehy helps Chicago brace for Goodman's 'The Iceman Cometh.'" I remember being inordinately proud of my script format. I always thought there was an element of penance to his O'Neill work at the Goodman, paying for all those Hollywood potboilers with five hours of "The Iceman Cometh," which I saw both times Dennehy did it here, in 1990 and 2012.  He no doubt lured many Chicago theatergoers to O'Neill though, for me, it was the opposite: O'Neill drew me to him.

ACT ONE

SCENE—A columnist, fifty-one, the stamp of his profession unmistakably on him. Day, near Chicago, a room with doors.

ME—(too vehemently) Jees! The Goodman Theatre is doing "The Iceman Cometh." Again! More than four hours of bleak Eugene O'Neill misery and hopelessness....

SHADOW ME—(a trifle acidly) Of course you'll go. You always go. You have to. Because you're a sap, a sucker for O'Neill.

ME—(bleakly) Tickets go on sale Friday. The show opens in March.

SHADOW ME—Why bother? Just skip it.

ME—I can't. I'm compelled to go. I'm not even sure why. A bum fixation. What is it about Eugene O'Neill? (Dialing telephone).

I'm going to ask Brian Dennehy, the actor who's been starring at the Goodman in O'Neill plays for years. I saw his "Iceman" 20 years ago. Why should anyone see it again?

DENNEHY—(gruff, gravely-voiced) Chicago is probably the premier theater town in America. People have a real appetite for one of the great plays ever done. With Nathan Lane, the curiosity factor will help.

ME—(bitingly) Right. Nathan Lane, beloved Broadway comic actor, in the lead. But won't that fool people into seeing "Iceman"? That's like seeing "Schindler's List" because you loved Liam Neeson in "Star Wars."

DENNEHY—(patiently) Look, we live in a world where "Jersey Shore" triumphs. I wouldn't worry about that. There is a larger question: What is the future, what is the prognosis for serious classical theater, period? Shakespeare or O'Neill or Miller.

ME—Why not cut? Shakespeare gets cut.

DENNEHY—(mollifyingly) Yeah, sure you can. O'Neill is trimmed a great deal. There's so much repetition. He never came up with an idea he didn't want to repeat five times. But you have to be careful, because some phrases are historically powerful ... It still runs four and half hours. If done right, it only seems four hours and fifteen minutes.

ME—(with puzzled desolation) What's the appeal of O'Neill? Why do people love him?

DENNEHY—What's great about Chicago, about the Goodman and [director] Bob Falls: We always tried to do things that are hard to do. Hard to do, hard to watch. The audience has to bring its "A" game of serious theater-going. You don't just sit there and observe. You become part of the production . . . this is a tragedy in the deepest sense of the word. In fact, O'Neill jokes with the seriousness of it, the determination to be self-destructive, the self-importance that a self-destructive person creates around himself; "The universe is paying attention because I'm fucking myself up and what an incredible tragedy it is."

ME—( comprehension dawning) Yes! Tragedies are far better than "The Lion King" because you can fool yourself that you're doing something significant when of course—as O'Neill teaches us—all is bleakness and misery and failure. Is there no hope?

DENNEHY—The pipe dream is critical in his plays. Nobody gets through life without creating a bullshit world around them. What they do is they re-create themselves into some kind of person they have been or will be, and that's the way they live. The reality of life is too harsh. If you need booze, or if you need other people to believe that you are something you are not, all these things are drugs that allow a person to live essentially a fraudulent life. The only life any person lives with any happiness is a fraudulent life—the worst thing you can do to a human being is insist he gets rid of the fraud, accept your responsibilities and be the person you are."

ME—Thank you Brian. Goodbye. (Hangs up phone—to self). But why? Where did my O'Neill passion come from? (Dials telephone).

BIG SISTER—I remember the parents were going out. They said, "We'll see you." I told Mom I was going to watch the "Carol Burnett Show." And she said, 'You should really watch "Long Day's Journey into Night." ' Seeing Laurence Olivier—my life has never been the same. It was because of Mom.

ME—(hangs up, stung, blinking with surprise) I should have known. (Dials phone).

ME—Mom, hey hi, I was just wondering, why did you start liking Eugene O'Neill?

MOM—(with determined affection) The whole family was dysfunctional.

ME—(controlling a wild impulse to laugh) Oh! It always comes back to that, doesn't it?

CURTAIN

                           —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Jan. 30, 2012