Wilmette Notes: From Chaos to Peace

    I haven't been inside a movie theater in over two years. I was just musing that, after two vaccines and two boosters, I'd maybe possibly go sometime in the indeterminate future, if the right film came along. Wilmette Bureau Chief Caren Jeskey has once again beaten me to the punch. Her Saturday report:

By Caren Jeskey

     "Everything Everywhere All at Once" at the Davis Theater had me stifling sobs, just as the play "Spring Awakening" at Porchlight did last week. The first hour of the film was chaotic and jarring, absurd, bizarre and sometimes violent. It brought to light the disjointed, incomplete existence many of us are feeling.
     I was tempted to walk out. I had reserved seats in the middle of the theater away from everyone else in a row all its own, and was double masked for my third movie of COVID. I was with a friend who did not seem to want to run out of the theater screaming, like I did. So I stuck it out.

     My favorite bodies of work often start slow or uncomfortable. They take a commitment to get through, and the rewards are worth it. "Schitt’s Creek" is one of them. It started off with annoying and unrelatable characters. I just didn’t care about them, and I wanted to stop after the first few episodes. The comedic brilliance of Catherine Anne O'Hara kept me around, and I was also intrigued that three of the characters three of the characters are related in real life. "Schitt’s Creek" became an all time favorite.
     The show turned out to be a gift to all who made it through the beginning to be rewarded with convulsing belly laughs. It was also poignant, and showed how family ties can be the strongest bond of all, despite the difficulties of maintaining a sense of oneself amongst those who know you best.
     The first hour of chaos in "Everything Everywhere..." sets the stage for one of the sweetest emotional releases I’ve been led to via cinema. It gave light to the fractured parts of ourselves; the good, the bad, and the ugly. The movie is a vessel for connection. It had me feeling less alone when the characters erred and then found their ways back to themselves. It provided a visceral experience of battling with oneself and one’s family of origin with all of the ambivalence and cognitive dissonance that entails. It ultimately reminded us that we are all in this human existence together at this precarious time. The movie shows that vulnerability with those we love can provide a window into salvation.
     When I say salvation, I mean the dictionary definition: “Preservation or deliverance from harm, ruin, or loss.” Being human intrinsically comes with the inevitably of being affected by each of these three things. We are harmed multiple times in our lifetimes, either physically, psychologically, or emotionally. Perhaps all three, just the perils of being human.
     When the roller coaster experience ended, we stumbled out of the movie, with me wiping tears into my sleeve. We decided to have dinner at a local establishment. A young woman who was sitting at the bar paid me a compliment. “You’re so skinny.” Well, that got my attention, seeing as I concur with a 20 year old client who said to me this week, "I feel old and decrepit."I quickly realized why she approached me. She was suffering. Her two year old child had just been removed by DCFS. She told me her story, and there was nothing I could say. I hugged her, and she cried.
     The next day I reached out and found three references for attorneys who specialize in such cases, and sent them to her.
     In a Zoom staff meeting a few days later everything went wrong. The internet was intermittently failing for part of the time, someone was recovering from an uncomfortable medical procedure, and a colleague didn’t realize that she was making quite the ruckus into our speakers with her movings about.
     It was a mess. It reminded me of the first hour of the movie. Things were falling apart, but the ultimate goal was achieved. After things settled down, in the last ten minutes we looked into each others’ faces with warm, reassuring smiles. These days the best we can do is find those moments where we can pretend everything is OK.

Time to embrace ‘Our Lori’

     What if we’re stuck with Lori Lightfoot?
     Not just for another year, but for another term. Would it really be so bad?
     Let’s think this through.
     Like you, I was hoping one of the usual suspects — Paul Vallas, Mike Quigley — would come charging into the mayor’s race, someone significant we could get excited about. And no, Willie Wilson tossing away fistfuls of cash doesn’t count.
     But each potential savior took a long look at our churning municipal disaster, then fled.
     Another kick to prostrate Chicago: a city so broken nobody even wants to run it.
     Except Lightfoot, though yes, she goes about the task with the determined cringe of a cat owner squeegeeing up a particularly voluminous pool from a hardwood floor.
     Can you blame her? Why would anybody want to be mayor of Chicago? It’s an impossible job.
     Do you remember a successful, popular mayor? Me neither.
     Do those two traits even go together? Effectiveness and popularity seem inverse qualities. Jane Byrne was a hot mess with no idea what she was doing. Yet Chicagoans were fond of her ... why? Personal style. Panache.
     That’s what makes a mayor beloved. People embraced Harold Washington whether he got anything done or not. Richard J. Daley was so hated we forget how loved he was by the bungalow belt, who kept pictures of him in their living rooms, like he was the pope. All they ask is that the mayor reflect their own person. Then they can extend the blanket approval they give themselves.
     Do Chicagoans have to like their mayor? Not really. Rahm Emanuel was an abrasive jerk. But he created the Riverwalk, a cool addition to downtown. Many folks didn’t particularly like Richie Daley, an entitled princeling brought up behind the high walls of his Bridgeport purdah. He hurt Chicago, giving away the parking meters, the Skyway and bus stops in ludicrously bad deals.
     But the Bean! And Millennium Park! All is forgiven.
     That’s what Lightfoot needs. I reached out to her office to inquire what kind of glittering bauble the mayor plans to bestow upon the city in gratitude for her second term. The answer filtered back — it isn’t like she’d talk to me — to the effect that she looks with pride at the progress she’s made in each of Chicago’s 77 distinct communities.
     See? That’s so Lori, I glanced over my shoulder, expecting a laugh track, the canned “Oh Lori!” groan.

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Flashback 1998: ROE V. WADE; The debate no court can settle

     Someday we're going to look back on abortion as one of those issues that captivated our nation's attention when we should have been focused on actual problems. 

     I've certainly been writing about it for a long time. Two dozen years ago, for the 25th anniversary of the Roe v. Wade ruling, I found two women on opposite sides of the fence, and dug up some background on the ruling itself. Alas, this could run in the paper tomorrow with very little alteration. 

Metropolitan Museum of Art

     Both women wept at the news.
     When the historic Roe vs. Wade decision on abortion was announced 25 years ago this week, both Mary Anne Hackett, at home with her five children, and Sue Purrington, at her job, were overcome with emotion. Both vowed to change their lives but, in keeping with one of the most controversial Supreme Court rulings of the century, those vows were at cross-purposes.
     "I cried because I was very happy," said Purrington, who went on to work for abortion-rights groups. "I made a pledge in my life that what I was going to do was make sure Roe would stay legal."
     "I remember reading it and crying," said Hackett, president of Illinois Right to Life. "I couldn't believe the land of the free and the home of the brave would allow mothers to kill their children. I became very actively involved on that day."
     Roe vs. Wade, which upheld a woman's right to have an abortion, at least in the first two trimesters, was a landmark, and 30 million legal abortions have taken place since then.
     All because of a case that started with a 22-year-old Texas street person named Norma McCorvey, who had two children and, pregnant again, wanted an abortion, which was illegal in Texas in 1970. Calling a lawyer she thought would find her an abortionist, she was drawn into a group of activist lawyers searching for a pregnant woman to use in a lawsuit to overturn the state ban.
     McCorvey was first called "Jane Doe," but that reminded her of the tag put on a woman who had died giving herself an abortion; it was changed to "Jane Roe." Few realize that McCorvey, unable to get an abortion, had the child.

     She later changed her position, and now she is strongly anti-abortion.
     The "Wade" was Henry Wade, the Dallas district attorney, who lost the case and appealed it all the way to the Supreme Court.
     Abortion was not entirely banned in the United States before Roe. Instead, each state decided individually the circumstances under which women could have an abortion.
     A few states permitted abortion; others banned abortion altogether or, as in Illinois, permitted it only when the life of the mother was at stake. About 500,000 legal abortions were performed nationwide in 1972.
     The number of illegal abortions is harder to determine. Women with money went to Mexico or to states with open abortion laws.
     Poor women were in a tougher situation. Desperate for abortions, they went to great and sometimes fatal lengths to end their pregnancies. They douched with bleach or peroxide. They used paint brushes and cocktail stirrers and pencils and knitting needles. And yes, they used wire hangers.
     "Of course they did," said Dr. Quentin Young, who worked at Cook County Hospital in the 1970s, when as many as 90 women at a time were in the hospital's septic abortion ward, suffering from their own attempts or from the bungling of back alley butchers. "They hurt themselves, perforated their uteruses, they came in bleeding, with difficult-to-treat infections."
     Anti-abortion activists contend that whatever barbarities were inflicted on women in those pre-Roe times have been dwarfed by the plight of the unborn caused by easy access to abortion.
     "Abortion has destroyed America," Hackett said, adding that women who have abortions universally regret it, leading sad and lonely lives spent missing their dead children. "It has destroyed respect for human life and had a brutalizing and sad effect on women, pretending that they can kill their children and just walk away as if nothing happened. Millions of women are suffering from it."
     Purrington, who had an illegal abortion as a teenager in 1960, still recalls the fear and humiliation she suffered.
     "The result of Roe is it institutionalized the right of a woman to feel safe and was a significant step in women having control over their own lives," Purrington said. "Roe meant that most women did not have to die in back alleys, or fear for their lives."
     Robert Bennett, a law professor at Northwestern University, finds two surprises from a perspective of 25 years:
     "First, how little closure, societally, the court was able to bring to the abortion issue by rendering the decision. And then, how much staying power the decision has had. It didn't seem to end conflict out there in society. But it has held."
                —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Jan. 20, 1998

What did you expect?

     The U.S. Supreme Court being poised to eliminate American women’s legal right to have an abortion was not on my totalitarian bingo card for this week.
     It shouldn’t be a surprise, because we’ve been headed in that direction for decades. Such a development, if true, would be in perfect harmony with our repressive times, along with Russian President Vladimir Putin invading Ukraine abroad, while at home free elections are curtailed, teachers muzzled and books banned.
     What’s the common thread? Authoritarianism strikes at weakness. That’s why it imposes such a topsy-turvy kind of morality: attacking gays but not adulterers, undocumented immigrants but not those who cheat on their taxes. The bully doesn’t pick on someone stronger.
     Hence women. It might be news to you that women occupy a degraded, second-tier position, still, in 2022 America. But they do, obviously, and overturning Roe would be ample proof. Here, honey, we’ll decide that for you ...
     Otherwise, this push would be off-brand for libertarians. The same people who collapsed writhing and crying over the intrusion, the oppression, the tyranny of the state demanding they wear a cotton mask during a deadly pandemic manage to jump up, revivified, and rush into your gynecologist’s office, plop themselves onto a low rolling stool, and invite you into the stirrups.
     That the news leaked, a draft Supreme Court judgment shared by Politico Monday night, is significant. While Washington beltway types, of course, bemoan the departure from standard legal practice, it is a reminder that when zealots are allowed to steer law away from the will of the people — 59% of Americans think abortion should be legal — the first casualty is the law.

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The judge or the horse.

Judge Isadore Himes, far right, at Harrison Street court in 1911 (Chicago History Museum).

     When is something interesting, and when is it merely trivia?
     I suppose it depends on who you are.
     Right now, I'm a guy methodically picking through the galley of his upcoming book, in the last weeks before it is pried out of his hands forever, checking every proper noun, if I can, bumping into more mistakes along the way than I'd like to be finding at this point. Though generally confirming facts and fleshing out the occasional vagueness. 
     For instance, for an entry about an arrest in 1912, a defendant appears before Judge Himes at Maxwell Street court. At the time, judges were often referred to in the newspaper by only their last names, and one task is to fill in the full name, if possible. Plus double check "Himes"—an odd name. Could it be a typo for "Hines?"
     A quick plug into Google turned up an interesting mix of hits: some about Judge Himes, the Chicago jurist, a former prosecutor. And others about Judge Himes, the thoroughbred horse that won the Kentucky Derby in 1903.
     My immediate, fleeting thought is that it was some nom de plume, a forgotten journalistic trick—maybe they called all criminal judges in newspaper stories after that horse, a kind of disguise, the way the Tribune's movie reviewer in the 1950s was called Mae Tinee.  

Judge Himes, after winning the Kentucky Derby

    

     But I found the full name of the human judge, Isadore H. Himes, quickly enough, and the American Classic Pedigrees web site cleared up the mystery of the connection, explaining that the judge was a friend of owner Charles R. Ellison, who named the horse after him.
    Which led to another question. What did the judge make of the horse? I checked the Tribune and the Daily News for 1903, and while there was plenty reportage about the horse, no one seems to have circled back to sound out the judge, even after his namesake won at Churchill Downs. Given the aggression of reporters at the time, you'd think someone would. Or was the dignity of judges such that nobody would bring up that topic for a story?
     Then there's the question of how the horse came to be named for the judge. Here I found a 2012 edition of Chicago Jewish History, a publication of the Chicago Jewish Historical Society that, citing a descendant of Himes saying the horse owner found himself in front of the judge, was pleased with the ruling, and named the horse after him in gratitude, which does make sense.
    Mere trivia? Well, the Kentucky Derby is running this weekend, so that makes it relevant, sort of. I suppose I could dig deeper, and try to flesh the story out more. But honestly, I have a book to proofread, and given the number of flubs I'm fixing, I'd better get back to it.

Why does peanut butter taste so good?

 

    This morning I had my usual breakfast: a whole grapefruit and a Bays cinnamon and raisin English muffin with a tablespoon of Smucker’s Natural Peanut Butter.
     I really like Smucker’s peanut butter. It tastes great, far better than the natural peanut butter I remember from the 1970s, a bland beige paste found at places like the Sherwyn’s health food shop on Diversey.
     And I wondered: is this a trick of memory? Could natural peanut butter have gotten better? And if so, how? They don’t add anything. Just peanuts.
     One way to find out.
     “I love this stuff.” I wrote to Smucker’s, asking to talk to a brand manager. “We would discuss, first, why the product is so delicious.”
     That was Monday, Dec. 6.
     The response: nothing.
     I tried again the following Monday.
     “It seems to me, that if Smucker’s can’t respond to this, what is it you respond to?” I asked.
     And the next Monday.
     “It’s been two weeks now. I’m beginning to lose hope.”
     On the one month anniversary, I wrote to company CEO Mark Smucker, explaining what I had in mind.
     He put me in touch with what seemed like a crisis PR firm in New York. We had some lovely conversations, but the question remained unanswered. They were working on it.
     As January went by, I reached out to my alma mater. Why is Smucker’s so bad at this? Is this a common corporate problem, or perhaps the result of red state anti-media paranoia? The company is based in Ohio.
     “Without knowing anything about Smucker’s, that surprises me,” said Jonathan Kopulsky, a senior lecturer on business marketing strategy at Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management. “The marketers’ job is to tell the story of their brand. You’d think, this may be an opportunity. You’d think, ‘Hey, a reporter from a major daily—why wouldn’t we want to use that to tell our story?’ That surprise me. I can’t think of a possible explanation why they wouldn’t use that.”
     The best we could imagine was reflexive secretiveness.
     “In a hypercompetitive world, what you regard as mundane operational things may be viewed as tipping their hand to competitors,” suggested Kopulsky.
     I had another theory: could it be that newspapers are so diminished that we aren’t worth the time to communicate with?
     “The relevance of newspapers as an advertising medium is dramatically down,” said Gerry Chiaro, who teaches brand communications at Medill. “I can build up my social media following to hundreds of thousands, even millions. Sometimes it can go viral. I’d rather spend my time on that, if I can find influencers to speak to my community.”

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Whole Paycheck

     Whole Foods was never a good fit for Englewood. Too expensive, too pretentious, though credit to them for trying to bring Italian lemonade and bulk grains to a low income urban food desert. But Whole Foods closing down there after six year years, announced this week, was foreordained.
     I live in whatever the opposite of a food desert is—a food cornucopia, I suppose. Sunset and Jewel—several Jewels—and Mariano's and Aldi and Costco and even Fresh Farms, that great Russian emporium in Wheeling, with fantastic slavic bread and Eastern European cookies, everything immaculate and wonderful. I'm sure I'm leaving a few out. 
     The one place I never go to is Whole Foods because, well, I explained it in 2005:

SAVE THE EARTH

     Too bad there aren't more hungry, homeless people in the northwest suburbs, because they could graze themselves full on 12-grain and seed bread, cider-roasted salmon with fruit chutney and other exotic free tastes at the Whole Foods in Deerfield. When I stopped by I had just had lunch and wasn't even hungry, yet still found myself nibbling cubes of Fratelli Pinna Brigante cheese and chunks of gourmet brownies. A far cry from the sizzling slices of kielbasa that smock-wrapped, beehive-hairdoed ladies used to prepare in electric fry pans and hand out stuck on fuzzy toothpicks at the A & P.

     I couldn't read descriptions in Whole Foods of the coddled apples and happy chickens fed only natural grains without thinking of the Romans, and their candied lark's tongues. Organic food is decadent, even worse than the excesses of the past because it is disguised as virtue. The whole world is eating beans grown in the sludge of old bauxite mines and gnawing meat that has hung on hooks in the market for three days, while we're paying $10 a pound for maple mustard roasted turkey from birds raised on Mozart.
     We're not paying for the food, really, we're paying for the packaging, and its implication that our lettuce was grown by pueblos and delivered by ox cart. I stood in gaping wonder at "American Flatbread," an "all-natural pizza baked in a primitive wood-fired earthen oven." At first I focused on "earthen" as the marvel. "I tried pizza from metal ovens but it tasted so . . . technological."
     But then I came to savor "primitive." Not any old earthen oven, mind you, not one of those fancy Southwestern stucco domes with a door and everything. No, our oven is a rough mound of dirt and we shove the pizzas in a hole and they sit serenely baking amongst the burning yew wood, wood specially grown for us in renewable Brazilian forests by our own joyful peons. And we, we are not charmless suburbanites yapping on our cell phones as we roar up to Whole Foods in monstrous vehicles that burn more money in gas each month than most people in the world earn in a year. No, we are gentle, rainforest folk, crouching under the lush green canopies of our self-regard, using our fingers to eat organic groats from wide bowls, groats gently washed with spring water, a bargain at $7.99 a pound.

                  —published in the Sun-Times, Nov. 28, 2005