Police parade goes on and on while we watch

     The earliest movies were glimpses of real life. Workers leaving a factory, a train arriving, a blacksmith hammering. Shot in 1895, these first short films — each less than a minute — were called actualités by their creators, French brothers Auguste and Louis Lumière. Nobody thought to make up a story on film until “The Great Train Robbery” in 1903. Just seeing pictures move was thrill enough.
     The next year, Lumière cameraman Alexandre Promio came to Chicago and, of all the scenes that could have represented the city, the stockyards or riverfront or the Ferris wheel left over from the World’s Columbian Exposition, Promio chose police officers solemnly marching down Michigan Avenue, four abreast, in their Keystone cop helmets, nightsticks at the ready. “Chicago Police Parade,” filmed in September 1896, is considered the first moving image shot in Chicago. You can watch it on YouTube.
     Was that reality? The parade was staged for the filmmaker, the police showing off their order and discipline. Not exactly in step with their reputation. “Weak discipline was probably most evident in the inability of police administration to control excessive violence,” the Encyclopedia of Chicago notes of police at that time. The more things change...
     Film technology evolved, Chicago police violence worsened, and eventually the two collided, further back in history than you might imagine. In 1937, striking workers marched on the Republic Steel plant at 117th and Burley, intending to set up a picket line. They found 200 policemen waiting. Ten marchers were killed. Police claimed they were attacked by an armed mob, whipped up by outside communist agitators, and the press believed them. “RIOT BLAMED ON RED CHIEFS” blared the Tribune headline.
     But Paramount had set up a newsreel camera at the Republic plant gates. It shows the strikers carrying flags and signs. You see the waiting police, tapping their batons. The cops attack, the strikers flee. Police shoot 40, most in the back. The city responded by banning the newsreel. That became Chicago’s go-to move for documentary evidence of police brutality. If you don’t see it, it’s not there.

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Green frog

 

     Regular reader Tony Galati shared this photo, taken in the eerie half light of the 2017 eclipse.
     "I think the frog was confused into sleep-mode by the dusky sky. It let me put my phone right in its face," he said, inviting me to use the picture on the blog.
     I think I will, thank you Tony, simply because it is a lovely green frog—if I'm not mistaken, that's not only its description, but also the creature's proper name, "green frog," or Lithobates clamitans. The large round circle just behind its eye is its timpanum, and while some sources equate that with "ear," it's really more an ear cover—a membrane keeping water out of its actual ear, located securely beneath it. 

     A frog's lungs are connected to its ears, by the way—betcha didn't know that—which make sense if you consider how tremendously loud frogs can be. Loud to humans, far away. Imagine how much louder their croaking would be to the frog's themselves. To keep those bellowing blasts from hurting their own ears, the lungs equalize the pressure on either side of their eardrums—a kind of amphibian noise cancelling headphone.
     I probably should end this here: enough fascination for one day. But I couldn't pass up an excuse to pull down the Oxford English Dictionary, guessing as I did so that "frog" is probably a thousand years old and Teutonic. Check and check. "Frogga," with all sorts of various subforms and complications, cropping up around 1000 A.D. Though hardly changed in the next half millennium, when Shakespeare penned his famous "eye of newt and toe of frogge" in "Macbeth."
      Then there are the various formations of "frog" such as "froghood" and "frogland" and one that will come to mind when I finally lose my place of employment, "frog march," which I somehow associate with a prisoner being forced forward in a kind of rolling squat, though the OED says is also the state of being held by his arms and legs by four men.

    Not to forget "frog-eater," defined as "a term contemptuously applied to Frenchmen" due to their supposed love dining upon of the amphibians. 

     Speaking of which; a story comes to mind. When my older boy was about 12, he went through a phase of wanting to eat exotic foodstuffs. Brain tacos and caviar and oysters and such.  He probably felt that doing so elevated him among the fancy set. He would put in his request during his frequent trips to my office to spend the day. One day he asked for frog's legs. The only place I could think might have them was Hugo's Frog Bar, naturally enough. But that was closed for lunch. I knew it shared a kitchen with Gibson's, and fortune favors the bold. So I called the owner, Hugo Ralli. "Could you do me a favor?" I said. "I have a little boy whose heart is set on frog's legs." He told us to come on by.

     So now we're sitting in the dining room at Gibson's. My son, with flowing blond hair, is enjoying his lunch. A woman at the next table glances at his plate. "Frog's legs!" she exclaims, indignantly. "I didn't see frog's legs on the menu!" 

     "They're not," says my son, eyes on his plate, face set in concentration, working at the dainty morsels with his knife and fork. "It's something the owner arranged specially for me."

     It probably reveals something bad about me—a small, embarrassing hunger for status—to admit that I cherish that memory. But I do nonetheless.

      

Cop ‘didn’t see the value, the humanity’

     “I grew up in a gang-infested neighborhood. I don’t know a Latino who didn’t,” said Luis Gutierrez, the former congressman and long-ago alderman. “We all grew up together. It wasn’t like ‘West Side Story.’ We didn’t dance around each other.
     “I remember the manipulation, the cruelty, the exploitive nature of gang members. People like to think of them as the protectors of the neighborhood. I get that. I was the alderman of the 26th Ward. It’s no different than Little Village. None.”
     We were talking over the weekend about what everybody in Chicago has been talking about since Thursday, when the bodycam video of Little Village 13-year-old Adam Toledo being shot by a police officer was released.
     The footage makes for sickening viewing: the jumpy chase through an alley; the barked, ignored commands; the boy’s hands going up followed instantly by the gunshot. The red blood. Watching it once, I can’t imagine ever watching it again. Once is too much.
     I had just read the upbeat update about Gutierrez that Mark Brown wrote last week; Gutierrez has returned to Chicago to welcome his second grandchild — his daughter Jessica’s baby shower was Saturday — and to promote Puerto Rican causes.
     So I almost shook off Gutierrez’s suggestion that we speak about the shooting. My job isn’t to echo Mark. Yet why not see what Gutierrez has to say? My first question was whether he truly wants to plunge into this emotional maelstrom. Or as I put it: “Do you really want to jam your hand into this spinning fan?”
     “I understand that,” he said. “But at some point you have to stop and say something. I feel that what is happening to Adam is a second demonization process.”
     Some Latino politicians are dismissing Toledo as just another gang-banger who got what gang-bangers get.

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Flashback 2000: "Front and centerfold"

Jeff Cohen, 2000 (Photo by Rich Chapman, used with permission)

     My friend and former Sun-Times colleague, photographer Rich Chapman, sent me a photo the other day. Did I remember this? I sure did. My wife later said she had never seen a wider, happier, more genuine smile on my face than when Playboy photographer Jeff Cohen posed us with the models we were covering the day we hung around the studio.    

Photo by Jeff Cohen

     If you had told me then that I'd outlast Playboy magazine, I would not have believed you. But I'm still going, while Playboy stopped publishing a print edition ... exactly one year ago. Yeah, I didn't notice at the time either. A lot was going on in the world. 

     I've never reprinted this story before because it never got into the online archive, I think because it wasn't for the newspaper itself, but for "NEXT," a short-lived insert. But I had a hard copy in my files—score one for old technology—and it was short work to type it in. After more than 20 years, I was interested to read it again, though a little dubious, given the subject matter, how it would bear up in the MeToo era. Surprisingly well, if I'm any judge. I'm glad that. I spoke at length to Cohen's wife, Gayle, and treated the material in a direct, non-leering fashion. 

     Rich Chapman has long had his own studio, Rich Chapman Photographers. As does Jeff Cohen, who retired from Playboy in 2011, and runs Jeff Cohen Photography in a storefront in the Ravinia district of Highland Park. "I’m busy and happy and challenged creatively each day as I have been for the past eight years photographing the most charming families, impressive corporate execs and wide eyed children," Cohen reports on his web page.

     Voluptuous Vixens. Playmates in Bed. Girls of Russia. Girls of Japan. Girls of the Adriatic. Farmers' Daughters. Sexy Girls in Sports.

     Give Jeff Cohen credit. He has never gotten bored with locating the most beautiful women in the world and photographing them with their clothes off for Playboy.
     He is a trim man with a neatly cropped beard and half-glasses that give him a professorial air. he is a perfectionist—"obsessed" is a word used by someone who knows him well. He is 55, weighs 150 pounds and has for the past 25 years. He golfs twice a week, rain or shine, despite troublesome arthritis.
     His office at Playboy is small and practical, maybe 12 feet square, decorated with photos of Cohen hanging around with Cindy Crawford and Michael Jordan as well as a couch hewn from the trunk of a 1957 Chevy, which Cohen takes pride in. An assistant—he has seven assistants, all women—walks in with big strips of jumbo 120mm film.
     "I just want you to know we have film," she says. Cohen, who has been taking photos and supervising the taking of photos at Playboy for 30 years, focuses his attention on the image of a pretty young woman who will appear on a calendar—one of the myriad ways Playboy photographs are repackaged to squeeze out every last drop of revenue.

     Posed on a couch. Straddling a chair. A wall. A fence. Lounging on a bed. under a table. On the floor. Wrapped in silk. Lace. Gauze.

     Upstairs, half a dozen women in black lingerie and high heels are posing for the cover of the January lingerie special issue. They've been there all day. Cohen ambles upstairs to supervise the action.
     The photo shoot has been going on since 7 in the morning. The winner of a playboy.com contest, Mark O'Neill, of Austin, Texas, is there, but his face reflects the hard truth known by everyone who has spent time around a photo shoot or movie set: The magic is in the result, not in the doing.
     "I'm getting bored," says O'Neill, glumly, rushing up to visitors on the set, desperate for distraction. "It's kind of boring."
     Cohen extracts himself from the lucky winner and goes to stand directly behind photographer George Georgiou, peering over his shoulder, murmuring suggestion.
      "He has definite ideas of what he wants to see," says Georgiou, a 10-year veteran of Playboy. "He's an easy guy to work with. We communicate really well together."
      The studio where the six women are being photographed is enormous, white, cluttered with lighting equipment and makeup tables and little bottles of spring water. Three stylists rush in to primp and preen the model's while film is being changed.
     The six models — Laurie Wallace, Sung Hi Lee, Joy Behrman, Katalina Verdin, Alley Baggett and Sydney Moon — are all Playboy veterans, and have worked with Cohen before.
     "He's always a cool guy to be around. he always makes me feel equal," says Verdin, 25. "He's a businessman. he's really, really, really professional."
     The women, despite their perfect skin and black lingerie, floating in all that white, are also all business. Standing, kneeling, flashing a pout of darting a tongue, on command.
     "Very nice ladies, very sexy. Good eyes," Cohen says. He praises the women, generally aware of the competitiveness between them. "You have to be careful what you say," he says. "If I compliment one, I have to compliment them all."
     Cohen needn't worry. if he has one quality colleagues comment upon, it is a way of handling women, of setting them at ease."
     "He is masterful," says Joanie Bayhack, a vice president at WTTW who worked as a publicist for Playboy out of college in the early 1980s. "His sense. of humor and sincerity — a wonderful, amused look in his eyes. He doesn't take this all that seriously. And his creativity never ends. He's always looking for a pictorial idea."  

      Women of Mensa. Woman of the Ivy League. Women in the Military. Women of Wall Street. Women of the Top 10 Party Schools. Girls of the PAC-10 Conference. Women of Women's Colleges.

     It was Cohen who, when Playboy's availability in 7-11 became a hot political issue, thought up: "The Women of 7-11." he also turned the tables on Playboy's female staff with "Women of Playboy." The staff needed the same special handling that any first-time model requires.
     "Ninety-nine percent of the women we photograph have never been shot nude before," Cohen says. "They're nervous. Insecure. They have to be told what to do with their hands. What to do with their body. They have all the anxieties you can imagine. There are calls from boyfriends. Calls from parents."
     Given the difficulties then, why do the women do it?
     "So many of them are getting back at somebody—a jilted boyfriend maybe," he says. "The attitude is: I can hardly wait until he sees it.' Being in Playboy is a stamp of approval."
     In fact, one of the hardest parts of Cohen's job is breaking the news to women whose photos aren't running in Playboy.
     "Being in Playboy is such a badge, such a sense of recognition," he says. "Playboy defines them. That to not run the pictures... that is tough. I hate to do it."
      It was exactly that badge, the pride of being in the flagship Playboy magazine that gave Cohen pause before he took his latest assignment. Six years ago, he was offered the position as executive editor and publisher of Playboy's special editions—those themed issues put out in addition to the magazine. At the time, they published one a month. There are no news-making interviews, no literary fiction, very little text at all. Just as the burlesque marquees used to shout, Girls Girls Girls.
     "It is what it is," Cohen says. "Each edition is 96 pages of pretty pictures of pretty women. It cuts to the chase; no bones, no apology. If you are looking for articles, for tips, buy the magazine. If you're looking for pretty women, come to us."
     For Cohen, who had traveled the world shooting spreads for Playboy—the girls of Russia, the girls of Cuba—taking the new job required soul-searching.
     "I really wrestled with it," he says. "I talked to my wife."
      Yes, he has a wife. And three kids—daughter Phoebe, 16, and sons Axel, 13, and Stephen, 18. They live in Highland Park. Gayle Cohen, manager of the Materials Possessions boutiques in Winnetka, is constantly asked the same question, delivered in many sly ways, but always boiling down to: "But Gayle. All those beautiful women. your husband, traveling, alone, without you, to all these exotic countries, meeting beautiful women in luxurious settings. Evening eventually arrives. The photo shoots must end. Don't you, ah, worry?"

This originally appeared in "NEXT," a
short-lived weekly publication.

     "I get asked that question at least once a month," she says. "How can you stand it? You must be the most secure woman on the face of the earth. The fact is, I'm not. I just know we have a really good marriage. We have a wonderful family. If he met somebody there who would make him want to reconsider what he had, and to ruin that, then he's not the person I fell in love with, then he's somebody different. It's really very simple. I trust him absolutely, completely. It never, never even crosses my mind. It did when we were first together, when I was a lot more insecure. Now I just know that what we have is really solid, the best marriage I know of."
     Gayle Cohen's impression is confirmed by the modes who know him.
     "He talks about his family. He's a very, very family person," says Verdin. "He mentions it to everybody."
     Under his guidance, special editions went to two a month, or 24 a year. Put another way, Cohen is responsible for some 2,300 pages of erotic photographs a year.
     "The challenge is finding new and creative ways of marketing the same product months after month," says Cohen, who grew up in Wilmette, graduated from New Trier, then went to Syracuse University, where he majored in economics and journalism.
     He graduated in 1967, at the beginning of the Summer of Love, and almost disappeared into a life in the advertising business.
     "I graduated on a Saturday and was set to start work on a Monday," he remembers. "Then I said, 'What? I've been going to school all my life and I get one day off?"
     Instead he hopped into a buddy's 1967 Camaro and they headed — where else? — to San Francisco. When he got back, the copywriting job was gone. Instead, he heard Playboy was hiring people, and he ended up a photographer's assistant, loading cameras for $25 a day.
     "That summer I fell in love with photography," he says. "I completely forgot about economics, thank you very much."
     Asked to describe the trademarks of a Jeff Cohen photograph, Cohen instead praises the work of other photographers, and it was that kind of self-effacing quality that nudged him toward supervision.
     "They liked my ideas more than my photos," says Cohen. "they made me a photo editor."
     Over the years he has filled many roles—for a while he was editor of Oui, Playboy's short-lived entry into more risque fare. He has seen the proliferation of silicon implants as well as tattoos, which hardly ever look good in a photo spread and, besides, can give you away if you flip the negative for layout effect and are not careful.

     Women underwater: in bathtubs, swimming pools, showers, waterfalls, ponds, oceans, rivers. Women in red: red cars, red underwear, red lipstick, red shoes.

     The six women in the photo shoot are not blushing amateurs, but seasoned Playboy models. They are a far cry from your farm girl with a dream. Alley Baggett has her own comic book and action figure. Sung Hi Lee just starred in "Nurse Betty."
     The women pose fetchingly, but not obscenely. Given the heat Playboy has received, it is actually one of the tamer men's magazines, if not the tamest. You will rarely, for instance, see a man in a Playboy photograph. "A male in the picture intrudes into the fantasy for our readers," says Cohen. "They say 'Wait a minute. I want to fantasize about her and think maybe she's fantasizing about me. If there's a guy in the picture, he's clouding it. Very rarely do we put a guy, or even a guy's hand or the semblance of a guy. All the other men's sophisticate magazines, far too many to mention, that's the new thing: couples, twosomes, threesomes, all the various machinations. Our readers are very clear about the sexual temperature we like — we like it right where it is. We're not embarrassed when we buy it. It's Playboy: good, healthy sex. We can leave it out on the coffee table."
      Except of course at his house, where Gayle Cohen tries to keep her husband's work back in his office, at least when her kids' friends are around.
     "Frankly, I don't like them laying out on the coffee table," says Cohen's wife of 22 years. "We do live in the suburbs, and I do have kids. [I tell their friends] 'I don't want to get in trouble with any of your parents.' If they call me and say it's OK to look at Playboy magazine, then all right."
     And has any parent ever called and given permission?
     "No," she says.
     That said, Gayle Cohen who met her husband while she was working at the magazine, fiercely defends both the women's right to pose naked, and her husband's right to market the result.
     "I thought being a feminist was allowing a woman to choose to do whatever she wants to do," she says. "having worked there for 10 years helps. I met these girls, lived with them, traveled with them. They're just like anybody else. They come from small towns, want to get out, don't know what their future holds. But they have a beautiful face and a wonderful body and have youth, and somebody makes them an offer they can't refuse. They are treated like queens for however long their ride is, are paid a lot of money, and for the most part they really do enjoy the experience and walk away with something."
     Jeff Cohen is no stranger to the controversy around Playboy. He has taken flack — public flack, on TV, on the old "Phil Donahue Show."
     "I was duped," he says. "I went on, and they had this feminist who had gotten her Ph.D. on Playboy. She accused me of every wrong since Eve. I dragged myself off the stage, called the PR department, and said, 'Don't ever do that to me again.' It was brutal."

     Overbite beauties. Women of Walmart. Women with Phony Smiles.—No, those aren't real pictorials, but from a Mad Magazine parody—"Playboy Newsstand Specialties"—proudly framed on the wall of Cohen's office. You know you've made a mark in the culture when Mad Magazine takes a poke at you.
      But it does reflect the central professional challenge of Cohen's life. Thinking up new layout ideas, which even the most seasoned Playboy veterans are in awe of.
     "I'm one of the biggest admirers of Jeff Cohen," says Pompeo Posar, the legendary 40-year veteran of Playboy, for whom a young Jeff Cohen first worked. "I respect how he does everything. He's incredible. He knows what he wants, always comes up with this new magazine, two a month. It's not easy, to have a new idea, something new to do. It's incredible."
     Cohen has no particular explanation for his stamina.
     "One year ago I started to get burned out," Cohen says. "But that was about the time I started to get involved with the Internet."
     Now he makes sure that those who log onto playboy.com have something to look at. And something to buy.
     "This is our first foray into the calendar business," he says, showing off "College Girls 2001." "Sales are unbelievable."
     Into his fourth decade at working for Playboy, Cohen is still in top form.
     "He is the happiest man I know," says Gayle Cohen. "I once had somebody who was very impressed with Jeff say to me, 'It's really such a shame because he could have done so much more with his life.' I said, 'Excuse me, what more could you ask for out of life?' He gets out of bed, every morning, and has a family that he loves, smiling wonderful children, all happy and healthy and well-adjusted. He makes them breakfast, then goes happily to work every day, and never complains about it."

     Maybe the secret is that Cohen never takes himself too seriously.
     "It's fun, exciting, but my buddies get a bigger kick out of it than I do," Jeff Cohen says. "We're not working on the cure for cancer here. We're taking pretty pictures of pretty women."
                               —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Dec. 17, 2000.

Texas notes: Flowing locks

     One of Austin bureau chief Caren Jeskey's last dispatches from the Lone Star State before she returns to the welcoming embrace of the Midwest.

     How many things in your life have you fervently wanted? How many of them did you get? What drives you? Is it desire? Is it purpose? Is it control? Do you even know? Or maybe are you like me—sometimes you know very clearly, and you can see the path forward. Other times you find yourself looking through a fogged up window on a chilly damp day. Glimpses of clarity emerge as you wipe the shammy across the windshield. Ahhh. I can see again. What a relief. But just as soon as you exhale there’s that darned condensation again. You wonder: If I turn the air on will it clear? Should I really be driving right now? Do I need to pull over? Is there anywhere to even pull over? Maybe I’ll just keep on driving, do my best, and I will probably be just fine. Praying is not an option for me in those moments.

     I was raised Catholic and never believed in god. I loved the pomp (“ostentations boastfulness or vanity”, says Google) of church. From my tiny school girl stature I stared up at porcelain sculptures of Mary and exquisite stained glass. The glass told intricate stories of sad looking women and men with downcast eyes, looking like they were in big trouble. Some were gazing upwards praying to a God I could not see or feel. I’d go through all the motions—genuflect, kneel, stand up, sit down, (fight fight fight) and make the sign of the cross on my body murmuring “the father, the son, and the holy spirit.” To this day I am not sure who all of these guys are.
     Earlier this week a quote by Dr. Jane Nelsen, proponent of Positive Discipline, floated around on the internet. “Where did we ever get the crazy idea that in order to make children do better, first we have to make them feel worse? Think of the last time you felt humiliated or treated unfairly. Did you feel like cooperating or doing better?” What did those stained glass disciples feel? Why did porcelain Mary have to stand alone in the corner looking so miserable?
     There was also the priest who had me in his car that one time I can remember—wait, why was I in his car? Did my parents know? I felt uncomfortable and didn’t like the way he was overly familiar. The memory is vague but it’s real. That’s not why I am not religious. I just honestly never felt that there was a being out there, or a creator. To me science is real.
     I often meditate, clear my head, practice humility, and grow the love in my heart for others and myself. I have found over the years that I can pray (“ask earnestly” says Google) to Good. Good, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change. I even like the Lord’s Prayer. When we say “Thy Kingdom Come, Thy Will Be Done,” I think “may Good’s will be done."  May this world be a kinder, gentler place. May I heal as I grow and become the best version of myself, which will help me be a good cog in the wheel of life.
     When I started this piece I thought it was going to be about something else, a man I met who is a part of The Fervent Church here in Austin. Today I got lunch at a cafe (to go) and found myself telling the cashier “let me get his meal too,” gesturing to the man in scrubs who clearly worked at the hospital next door. We chatted a bit. Turns out he moved here from Tucson recently with his wife and a few other couples, and their children, to start a church. It was their “calling.” Well, good for them. Nice young man.
     Living in the South for seven years has taught me to be much more tolerant of those who are super religious. Otherwise I’d have shut myself off to many lovely friendships and acquaintances. I finally put down any need to talk anyone into or out of anything, really. The only time I’ll step into other’s lives these days (unless I’ve slipped up and started giving unsolicited advice, or if they directly ask for advice) is if they are harming another living being—like that one time the guy at the DMV kicked the little pooch he had in a bag under his chair. The dog whined from time to time, which elicited a kick, a louder whine, and then a sickening silence. Everyone but me acted like nothing was happening, or maybe they had their heads buried in their all important phones, oblivious to the outside world. When I got up and reported it, a muscly guard told me to stop causing trouble. “I handle what happens here,” he bellowed down at me as I stared at his barrel chest.

     It’s clearly time in our country for us to try to have civilized discourse. A friend told me about a course that teaches how to do this: https://betterarguments.org/our-approach/. I plan to enroll. If Jesus Christ was allowed to have flowing locks even though dirty hippies were brutalized by Southern gentlemen just because their hair was long. We must continue addressing the hypocrisy head-on. It’s time for us to wake each other up to the fact that we are all just human, and each of us as equal as the next.

     “If I can’t dance it’s not my revolution.” Emma Goldman

Silently facing ‘an ungodly, unmanly thing’

     “It’s been like living like a monster in a cage, a caged animal, for the past 50 years of my life,” said Bill. “It’s affected every aspect of my life, from childhood to adulthood.”
     “It was making me miserable,” said Richard. “I can’t enjoy the things I want to.”
     “It destroyed the relationship I had with my father; it destroyed the relationship I had with friends,” said Russell. “It destroyed my ability to go out and participate in athletics.”
     The unnamed “it” is paruresis, and in an era when it seems every possible human condition is regularly discussed in public, most readers are no doubt unfamiliar with the term. Also known as “bladder shyness,” paruresis is the inability to urinate in public bathrooms, or even in a private bathroom while others may be somewhere nearby.
     “Hardly anybody who doesn’t have it knows about it,” said David Carbonell, a clinical psychologist in Chicago specializing in anxiety disorders. “This is one of those conditions people have an inordinate amount of shame about.”
     The subject is so sensitive, all patients I spoke with asked for anonymity, so I use a pseudonym for anyone I identify solely by a first name.
     This shame causes sufferers to lose relationships and jobs because they refuse to go into situations — dates, business trips — where they aren’t certain of having access to an utterly private bathroom.
     Paruresis is obsessive, vastly magnifying the significance of the bathroom process. You might think that an airplane toilet is private, for instance. But a person with paruresis fixates on the walk down the airplane aisle to the bathroom, passing other passengers who might judge them.

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Flashback 2004: 'For us, it's saddest day of the year'

Wednesday was Memorial Day in Israel, and I thought I'd share this piece about it, from when I visited in 2004.

Soldiers at the Western Wall, 2004

     JERUSALEM— It isn't like in America. There are no picnics, no softball games, no big sales. In fact, most stores are closed, along with most restaurants and movie theaters. The nation literally comes to a halt, twice, once on Sunday night, when a siren sounds nationwide at 8 p.m. announcing the beginning of Yom Ha'Zikaron, or Memorial Day for the Fallen Soldiers of Israel, and again at 11 a.m. Monday. Israelis take the sirens seriously. They pull their cars over to the side of the road, even on the highways. They step out and stand, heads bowed. Lines of cars sit motionless at green traffic lights, their doors flung open, their drivers placing their hands over their hearts. A far cry from Memorial Day in the United States.

     "On Memorial Day, you guys have sales and go out barbecuing," said Zvi Harpaz, a tour guide. "For us, it's the saddest day of the year. Because every Israeli growing up knows he will have to serve in the military and risk his life and every Israeli has a friend who has made that sacrifice."
     More than 21,000 Israeli soldiers died in the five official wars fought against its hostile Arab neighbors, plus the pair of bloody intifadas conducted by Palestinians trying to create a nation of their own out of the territories seized by Israel in the Six-Day War in 1967.
     Israel has paid a high price for the almost constant state of war it has faced. In the War of Independence in 1948, 6,000 Jews died out of a total of 600,000 in the fighting that followed the Arab rejection of the partition of British Palestine. That's 1 percent—the equivalent of three million Americans dying in a war today.
     Memorial Day is marked across the country, in cities, towns and schools. In Israel's largest city, Tel Aviv, some 500 people sat on white plastic chairs in Gan Haboneem, the "Garden of the Sons,'' a downtown park where palm trees stand beside stark square black granite pillars, broken off at the top to symbolize lives cut short and etched with the names of the fallen.
While heavy security ringed the park, holding machine guns and eyeing the traffic, a group of teenage Israeli Scouts sang a number of Israeli pop songs that combine sentiments of loss with generic Euro-beats.
     "Somebody up there is worried about me," sang the teenagers, in their khaki uniforms and orange and turquoise ties. "We go along different roads … and will meet again after many nights and many days."
     In addition to the scouts, the audience contained a group of elderly "Volunteers"—Jews from around the world who rushed here in 1948 to help create the new Jewish state. Maurice Fajerman, a 76-year-old Frenchman, wore a gray ponytail and his decoration from the Israeli government. He lost his brother, Baruch, in the fighting, he said, but still views the night he slipped by British patrols and waded ashore into what would become Israel as "the most important moment in my life."
     Elsewhere, TV stations broadcast solemn services, apartment buildings were decorated with long blue and white streamers, and flags were placed along desolate desert highways from the Golan Heights in the north to Eliat in the south.
     Famously casual Israelis donned dark suits and somber ties. Candles burned in hotel lobbies and people gathered in public squares to sing mournful songs, a kind of national catharsis in anticipation of the joyful celebration of Independence Day.

     While the state was actually created on May 14, 1948, the anniversary falls on Tuesday this year, as the Jewish calendar, based on the phases of the moon, doesn't usually coincide with the calendar used in most of the Western world.
     Ask any Israeli why Memorial Day is such a wrenching moment of real collective grief, and expect an answer like this:
     "Because everybody in the country knows someone buried in the military cemetery -- I have more friends in military cemeteries than I have walking the streets," said Eli Peled, 68, a deeply tanned veteran wounded four times in four of Israel's five wars. "I don't know anybody who doesn't. It's as simple as that."
      —Originally published in. the Sun-Times, April 26, 2004