Ravenswood notes: Radio, radio

     Many folks who drive a lot learn to love the companionship of radio, and Ravenswood bureau chief Caren Jeskey is no exception. Her Saturday report: 

     MIT educated and rough around the edges, Tom and Ray Magliozzi are better known as Click and Clack, The Tappet Brothers. For many years until they retired in 2012, I religiously tuned into WBEZ radio on Saturday mornings and counted the minutes until their radio show Car Talk began. I can hear their thick East Cambridge accents now, snorting and laughing and razzing each other in between giving astute advice to their callers. Click and Clack were trustworthy, warm, and the kind of guys who make you feel as though all the world’s a fun puzzle to solve.
      The best calls were those from people who lived in far out places and had special cars that I knew nothing about, but Tom and Ray would light up like kids on Christmas with the opportunity to talk about the models. They doled out marital advice when callers mentioned that their partners or spouses disagreed with their choice of a car, or the root of a problem. If a young woman called in, afraid of what she’d done to the family car, Click and Clack would somehow reassure her. 
     For over a decade I tuned into Car Talk. Did I mention that I did not even own a car? It didn’t matter. I wanted to hear them ease the minds of folks with rattles and clangs and rodent infestations under their hoods. Their presence was comforting.
     I miss them as a pair. Sadly, Tom died in 2014 after complications with Alzheimer’s disease. Ray still has an advice column, and you can find the old shows on their website.
     Over the years I’ve found other favorite shows on 91.5 WBEZ Chicago and 90.5 KUT Austin. At the top are This American Life, The Moth Radio Hour, and Re:sound, with Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me, the NPR current events quiz show as number one. I don’t love everything about it, but I’m able to look past the sometimes (but rarely) insensitive humor and enjoy the wittiness of it all. The show has survived since 1998, which is really saying something.
     Callers play the quiz show while a panel of comedians delivers the questions in clever and hilarious ways. It doesn’t hurt that the caramel voice of Bill Kurtis has played a key role as the MC since his predecessor Carl Kasell retired in 2014.
     One of the strangest things about COVID was hearing host Peter Sagal start each show with the statement that they were taping in front of an “audience of no one.” Ouch. Lucky for us they resumed live tapings in August, with their first stop in Philadelphia. When I heard they were coming to the Harris Theatre I flew across the room to my laptop and snapped up prime seats.
     The show was this past Thursday. A friend who lives right across the street from Harris joined me and was as excited as I was. Folks in line were exuberant. Vaccines or negative COVID tests were required, as was masking throughout the whole event. Still, it was a bit disquieting to be out there. It’s impossible to ignore the risk involved. Yesterday I learned of two people in their 50s like me, both vaccinated, both now dead from the virus. I have decided to hope and trust the precautions kept us safe.
     The applause was thunderous (at appropriate times) throughout the whole two hour taping. Chance the Rapper was the guest and charmed us with his calm demeanor and wise words. He has created a program called SocialWorks to help young Chicagoans thrive creatively. He is on a mission to help bring light to the fact that Illinois is one of only 16 states in the country that does not offer parole. He told us stories about incarcerated people who have achieved medical, law, and other degrees while being incarcerated since their teen years. Despite the fact that they can now become valuable contributing members of society after decades of rehabilitation, they have no chance of release. As you can imagine they live in situations so deplorable that Chance teared up as he described what he has seen in places like Stateville.
     The panelists included Bobcat Goldthwait, Negin Farsad and Brian Babylon aka The Prince of Bronzeville. They bounced their brilliance and wit around. We laughed until our faces hurt, and slapped our thighs. We needed this.
     When it was over I walked my friend home, got my car out of her garage, and headed north down Michigan Avenue. I was saddened but not surprised by a cavalry of police SUVs peppering the Magnificent Mile. One or more were stationed on each block, right in the middle of the road, blindingly bright blue lights flashing and blinking. The officers were there to try to protect the stores full of thousand dollar purses and other haute couture. I felt sick. I realized that the cops may or may not even have the power or the will to prevent looters, from what we have seen.
     I found myself wondering if a car might bump me from behind and then take my own little blue Civic away from me. I have already taken valuables and my vaccination card out of my glove compartment in case it does happen. Which meant I was in a real sense expecting it. I don’t want to live in fear, but I also don't want to ignore the real perils of the city where some move along on their path of destruction without any care for who is hurt along the way. Thank goodness I have the panacea of radio humor.

Cops shoot selves in foot over shot

CPD cadets asked to describe themselves 
versus others in a training exercise. 

     On Sunday mornings, for more years than I care to contemplate, I wake before dawn and write a column for the Monday paper. Which is odd, from a contractual point of view, since I do not officially work on Sundays. My actual schedule ... checking ... says I am on the clock Monday through Friday, 9 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.
     So should I decide, some sleepy Sunday morning, that I just don’t feel like writing a column, I would be within my contractual rights simply not to. When my editor inevitably sends a puzzled where-the-heck-is-it? message, I could explain that this is a union scheduling issue.
     Except I would never do that. First, because it would make me a jerk and a bad employee. Second, it would burden my colleagues and undercut the institution that I love. Third, I would be shirking my life’s work, something I still enjoy doing. And fourth, my boss could just say, “So why didn’t you write it Friday? You were working then, in theory ...”
     Truth is, given that much of my job involves noticing things and thinking about stuff, plus fretting over what I’ve just written and cooking up something to write next, I don’t know how you could possibly divide between time spent working and time off. “Sooner or later,” as Bruce Springsteen sings, “it just becomes your life.”
     Which is why I’m so unsympathetic to the Fraternal Order of Police and its endless battle against vaccine mandates. In strictly union terms, just as I could sit on my hands next Sunday morning, FOP President John Catanzara is also technically correct: The city is asking police officers to do something that isn’t in their formal union contract. Requiring a vaccine is definitely a change in work conditions.
     You know what else isn’t in any contract? A requirement that community residents talk to police after they witness a crime. Indeed, it is in their immediate best interests not to step onto their front stoop and finger the gangbanger down the street. Yet there are the police, knocking on doors, asking for the public’s help, without compensation beyond serving justice and living in a better community. Values the police seem to shrug off easily.

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A word from Scut Farkus and friends

Scott Farkus

     Wednesday's column, "The past plays out in Virginia," was written Tuesday morning, before results of the election were known, long before Trump stalking horse Glenn Youngkin was elected governor. Once his victory became official, late in the day, I jiggered a sentence to reflect that. But the column had already been online for hours.
     The outcome wasn't a surprise mind you, and the general grim tone of the column was written in anticipation of what would probably happen. We're at the top of a roller coaster hill, preparing for an even deeper plunge into Trumpism than before. Strap in. Keep your hands in the car.
     The column was met by the expected crowds of gleeful residents of Fox Nation ululating their victory. No big surprise there either. As Trump demonstrates, being a bigot is, at rock bottom, about having an ego so small you must alternate between flights of grandiosity and abuse of anybody you can find to ridicule in your frantic efforts to pump yourself up by putting them down. It hardly matters who: immigrants, Muslims, Blacks, libs, the media, whomever. The win gave Trumpers the all-important permission to trumpet their scorn, oblivious to the idea that an adult considers the source of any particular opinion, or tries to. Thus being held in contempt by dupes half a decade into their swooning thrall to a liar, bully, fraud and traitor well, let's just say the sting of their disapproval is not what they seem to imagine it will be. 

     Some were so over-the-top, I truly had to admire the result.
     "Awww, lefty’s didn’t get their way," writes Kevin Kibler, stumbling over his grammar, but perfectly capturing the bullying tone of the Scut Farkus character from "A Christmas Story." "Go back home and cry Neil."

     Conjuring up liberal tears, and then laughing at the imaginary tableau, is a go-to move for Trumpies. Why bother with reality? Why look up and see the pitying gaze of solid, grounded, fact-based, patriotic Americans contemplating their fellow citizens, souls lost in malice and folly? Far easier to cackle like Bond villains, and work themselves into faux hysterics at the confounding of their enemies.

      "LMAO, like I said before you leftwing liberal socialist communists have no ideas or solutions just lies, thievery and whining when you don’t get your way," Ed Perchess writes, as if a $1 trillion infrastructure bill weren't stalled in the Senate without a single Republican vote. "What, no mention of your bromance Trump, LMAO! No morals, no brains, go get a refund for your education."

      Oh that I could. 

      Some, like the above, rambled on. A number of readers were quite pithy, which I appreciated.

    "Keep fanning the flames of racism," was all Ed Case has to say.

    Though brief, that sounds a common theme that will no doubt be a major Trump World talking point, assuming it isn't already: racism in America is a fiction invented and sustained by liberals and disgruntled Black Lives Matter activists. Otherwise, it would be only a fading memory.

     "I was disappointed in the tone of your 11/2 column, bringing up the tired old trope of racism," writes Howard Tanzman, as if I had invoked some fusty old fixation, like Free Silver. 
     "I think the American people are wising up to the hate from CRT and BLM etc." someone calling himself Jerry Jobe writes. "I will continue to pray. We are all equal. And now, we need to get on with educating or Black and Brown youth."
     I wish he had elaborated on that last thought: maybe the problem, in his mind, is that nobody has told Black people that racism is no longer an issue. Except to libs, of course.
     "What is it with your (and those of like-minded Liberals) obsession with race?" Dennis Bracco writes. "News flash: it's NOT 1959 now, and we've come a long way."
     As proof of the long way we have come, Bracco and many others served up the new lieutenant governor, Winsome Sears, who is Black, a twist on the some-of-my-best-friends gambit. It's like arguing that Trump can't be stoking anti-Semitism, since Stephen Miller is Jewish. I wanted to write back, "One swallow does not a summer make." But that would be quoting Aristotle, and imagine how they'd howl at that.
     There can't be racism in Virginia. Because they elected a Black lieutenant governor. This pairing of inequivalent  situations is continuous. The Jan. 6 insurrection is cancelled out by the post George Floyd protests. 

     "The Jan 6th insurrection was a toga party as much as the riots/burning/looting for a year were 'mostly peaceful" protests,' Dave Bohec writes. "People are seeing what it means to be 'woke' and are voting accordingly."

     It isn't the racism, which doesn't exist, but it's the reaction to the non-existent racism that's the problem.

     Racism, in their view, is a historical relic, and if we go back in the past, it was a sin of the Democrats, which means that Democrats today, who believe diametrically opposite things and have for decades, are thoroughly undercut. 
     "When you discussed bigotry from the 50's, keep in mind the southern states at that time were governed and managed by Democrats," Terrence Hagen writes. "Ever hear of the "DixieCrats"? Maybe your history didn't teach that the Dem party has its own history of bigotry. Ever hear of Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia, the Grand Wizard of the Klan? He was at one time the Senate Majority leader. Don't attribute bigotry to Republicans alone."   
     Don't miss the slip of that final "alone." We may be bigots, but so are you. Everybody is bigoted. And there is truth there, in that we all harbor prejudice, to a degree. Though for some it is a problem to be recognized and fought, and others don't even see it, either because they won't or they can't, the way fish supposedly don't perceive the water they are swimming in.  It would almost be funny—it is funny, a little—if it weren't also so sad. 

 

The past plays out in Virginia

     In 1959, Virginia’s Prince Edward County shut down its entire public school system, instead using tax money to support all-white private “academies,” an attempt to thwart the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision ruling that segregation in public schools is illegal.
     Prince Edward County made no provision for the education of Black students, and their parents were forced to scramble, setting up classrooms in church basements and storefronts.
     The closure was the latest strategy in a statewide campaign dubbed “Massive Resistance.” Earlier in the year, the Virginia legislature repealed the law requiring children to go to school.
     “The only places on Earth known not to provide free public education are Communist China, North Vietnam, Sarawak, Singapore, British Honduras — and Prince Edward County, Virginia,” said Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, trying to shame Prince Edward County into reopening its schools. That took five years.
     It’s an important story to know. Bigotry is primal, and those afflicted hurt not only others, but also themselves: limiting their own experience, discarding their own values, shutting their own schools.
     The massive resistance continues. Tuesday’s key gubernatorial race in Virginia pivoted on race, with former Democratic governor Terry McAuliffe, who left office in 2018, losing to private equity manager Glenn Youngkin, a Republican who campaigned on the promise to keep critical race theory from being taught in Virginia schools.
     Critical race theory isn’t taught in Virginia public schools. It’s a graduate-school level approach to history arguing that race intrudes upon just about everything in public life. Which of course it does, as evidenced by the Republican Party seizing the phrase as their latest code for keeping Black people down, their reductio ad absurdum argument being that if you teach an accurate history of race in America, well, it spoils everything.

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The 20 percent

 

     I've been eating at Chicago restaurants hand over fist since 1975, since I slid my considerable teenage keister into a booth at the Blackhawk and watched them spin their famous—supposedly, at the time, if you could trust their word—spinning salad.
     Having eaten at thousands of restaurants since, little throws me. Yes, my wife and I were taken aback with the trend of tiny pieces of food lost on enormous plates in the 1990s—I remember going straight from dinner at Cafe Spiaggia on Michigan Avenue to Dunkin' Donuts on Rush Street to eat something. I never approved of the show-off-slabs-of-raw-meat tradition at steakhouses like Gibson's. Kinda gross. And some of those intentionally wise-cracking waitress places could set my teeth on edge. I remember trying to get through a meal at Ed Debevic's without saying, "Why don't you shut up and bring our food?" But I'm not the intended customer, my kids were, and they liked it plenty.

     Usually, it was nothing that couldn't be solved by never going back. When the Berghoff pretended to close in 2006, so it could fire its union waitstaff, then promptly re-opened as a sort of imitation of itself, I grieved for all the thuringer and rye that would never be eaten there, then moved on with my life. It was as if the place burned down, and for me it had, emotionally. In these cases, at least there was clarity. But I was just confused at Big Jones, 5347 N. Clark, Saturday. My wife and I were meeting a young judicial clerk of our acquaintance and his girlfriend for brunch. All was happiness; I've never been more primed to enjoy a meal. And I did, beginning to almost end. Okay, the coffee was a bit metallic. But it came in these gorgeous English cups. The beignets were thick with powdered sugar, the biscuits satisfactory. I avoided the heavier, sauce-laden fare and went for an omelet with a butter lettuce salad, which almost felt like austerity. The wait person was attentive and didn't rush us.
     Then the bill came. I grabbed it, as my role demands. About $70. Plus the 10 percent tax. Plus another 20 percent "Service charge." Which was what I would have left anyway. I'd never seen that before.
     "This is unusual," I commented to the table as I reached for my wallet. "Usually they add the gratuity only if it's a party of six or more...."
     At that moment the waitress swept in with well-practiced timing and explained that this was COVID related. The 20 percent was to cover the various plague-related challenges, and the blank tip space—which I had already drawn a line through—was for her. There was a note of entreaty in her voice. My wife suggested that perhaps they'd want to fold the COVID costs into the menu prices, and she said something about management change. So I broke a twenty—I've recently returned to the arcane practice of carrying cash—and left $15 for her.
     Walking out I felt ... well, ripped off. Slightly. Like I had been forced to leave $30 in tips on a $70 tab. More than 42 percent. I'm all for supporting restaurants, but the psychology of this is way off.
     Doing subsequent research, I see this that added COVID charges in restaurants has been an issue for well over a year. The surcharges range from 3 percent to a whopping 26 percent, which one restaurant promptly retracted when diners howled. At the very least, they should put a placard on the table, or a big red label on the menu, something to prep the diner for what is coming. I'm all for supporting restaurants during this time of crisis, but at least let us know what's coming.
     And clean your coffee pots.

    Editor's note: through a mutual friend, big jones owner  Paul Fehribach observes that the charge is also noted on the menu and web site. That is true, I later discovered after searching for it. But the menu also says the charge is "in lieu of tip," which makes me feel worse, not better. 

Remember COVID toll on Day of the Dead

Photo by Caren Jeskey 

 
     On Día de los Muertos, the Day of the Dead, the barrier between the world of the living and the world of those who have left it is thought to be thinner than usual. On the holiday, which begins Monday, we who still savor the frequent joys of life, for the moment, can reach across the chasm to embrace our deceased loved ones, at least in memory.      
     Originated in Mexico, a blend of Spanish and Aztec cultures, at first in the United States it was glimpsed as a kind of exotic after-echo of Halloween, the way we vaguely notice that Boxing Day follows Christmas in England, without worrying about details.
     But as the influence of Hispanic culture in the United States grows, despite furious attempts to thwart it, the holiday is being more generally felt. This year the city set up an ofrenda, an altar to the dead, in the middle of the lobby at City Hall, complete with food offerings, photos of the departed and friendly calaveras, or skulls, that represent the holiday the way decorated eggs embody Easter.
     If Halloween is a ritualistic thumbing of society’s nose at death, transforming morbidity into a happy occasion for children to dress as monsters and collect candy, the Day of the Dead is a more family-oriented plunge into all that is good in life — food, drink, music, flowers, color, companionship — and the warm presence of those we loved, undiluted by the unfortunate detail that they are no longer here. Families visit graves, create shrines, throw parties.
     Two reasons why this is a bigger deal this year. First, the ever growing Hispanic presence — in the 2020 Census, Chicago’s growing Latino population nosed ahead of its shrinking Black population for the first time. Chicago is now 31.4% white, 29.9% Latino, 28.7% Black and 6.9% Asian, according to the latest census.
     Not that political power has followed. Chicago still has 18 black majority wards and only 13 Latino wards. Though that is about to change, after the requisite political free-for-all.
     The second reason Day of the Dead is more important this year: the million plus people, 743,000 in the United States and 288,000 in Mexico, who died of COVID-19 over the past 22 months.

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City Hall ofrenda

Flashback 1997: Reality is scarier than City Hall's decorations

City Hall, 2021

     I was hot-footing across the Loop to meet a pal for lunch Thursday and couldn't resist ducking into City Hall to check out their Halloween decorations. Most prominent was this ofrenda, or Day of the Dead shrine, complete with photographs of fallen Chicagoans and food offerings to their spirits. Nearly a quarter of a century ago, I also took note of the City Hall Halloween trappings, producing a snarky, young, rather Rex Huppke-ish column..

     When somebody told me that City Hall is decorated for Halloween, I had to stroll on over and take a look.
     It is a surprising sight, particularly if you enter from the north, through the Randolph Street door. You walk down the corridor to the central lobby and are presented with a choice.
     To the left, the unadorned elevator banks for the County Building. The only decoration: a sign touting Cook County Disability Awareness Month.
     To the right, City Hall and Halloween.
     Not only decorated, but decorated a lot. Pumpkins. Witch flags. They've built an arbor of sorts, with pots of flowers and a tiny field of cornstalks and a big grinning jack-o'-lantern.
     The reason: Mayor Daley is a big fan of Halloween.
     I noted the scarecrows and smiled, telling myself, "Of course, they'd only go so far as Halloween Lite. None of the heavy stuff; no bloody corpses, no terrifying ghouls. Not from the city. They wouldn't want to offend people."
     I was thinking how surprising it is even to see a big cardboard cut-out of Tweety Bird saying, "Twick or Tweet"—hasn't some assistant corporation counsel with a speech impediment complained by now? Then I saw them.
     The skeletons.
     Two big, life-size, scary rubber ones, sprawled on benches.
     I also noticed the ghosts—three little ghosts, with round mouths shrieking "Boo," wearing pointy black witch hats, trailing white sheets in tatters.
     Skeletons and ghosts at City Hall. Either somebody's got a wonderfully wry sense of humor or they're all dumber than even I had imagined.
     The ghosts are what really surprised me, given that ghost payrolling has been honed to an art form right on the premises.
     That federal probe into aldermanic corruption—what did they call it? Oh yes: "Operation Haunted Hall."
     Now that's an idea for next year. Why offer such a generic tribute to Halloween when we could take advantage of our city's rich heritage to put on a far scarier display?
     Next year, City Hall could present a big rubber Fred Busse, the mayor 90 years ago, clutching his famous safe deposit box full of stocks from a company that did business with the city.
     From the ceiling, flying aldermen, pinky rings aflame, fists stuffed with play money.
     And why settle for boring scarecrows when you could have a mechanical Ald. Tom Keane? He was to Richard J. Daley what Patrick Huels is to his son: close political ally and all-round big money boy. A recording could play Keane's crowing "Daley wanted power, and I wanted to make money, and we both succeeded." There's a boast that hasn't lost any currency despite the passage of decades.
     Keane was convicted on 18 counts of federal mail fraud and conspiracy, by the way. After a Sun-Times series exposed it all. Ooh. Eerie how some things never change.
     Come to think of it, why settle for sham rubber figures when we can have the real thing? Why not get Jesse Evans transferred over? Make his cell part of the Halloween display. He can lunge through the bars at passersby, maybe shouting, "Food! Food!" in honor of the ridiculous and shameful hunger strike he held to protest the workings of the criminal justice system. That would scare the kiddies plenty.
     In fact, lots of former aldermen, who are still around, could be hired at a fraction of their former city salaries to impersonate themselves in the City Hall Chamber of Past Ghosts.
     Why not set Louis Farina pacing back and forth in front of the elevator banks, dragging money boxes at the ends of chains wrapped around his body, a la Jacob Marley.
     Or Wallace Davis. The last time I saw him he was working in his catfish restaurant. He could make an appearance as a cautionary tale to all those power brokers in their Brioni suits and Hermes ties. "Be careful," he could say, "or you'll end up wearing polyester and snaps to work."
     Sure, it would shame them a bit, but didn't they shame us? Doesn't our city struggle to present itself to the world as a modern and progressive place, the home of Michael Jordan and Wrigley's Spearmint Gum? How many bad aldermen will it take before peasant children in China greet tourists visiting from Chicago by rubbing their thumb and forefinger together and saying, "Ooo, Che-ca-go! Gimme gimme gimme."
     Halloween is, if nothing else, a flexible holiday that changes to reflect the times. In past years the kids dressed as Power Rangers and ballerinas. This year maybe they'll be paparazzi and Marv Albert. Maybe next year you'll have 8-year-olds in imitation silk suits yelling "Trick or treat!" They'll make cuff links out of stray pairs of dice and put dime store rings on their pinkies.
     Going door-to-door, they'll collect their candy in shoeboxes and brown paper bags. Just like the big boys do.
        —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Oct. 26, 1997