The drink no restaurant dares serve

     Chicago Restaurant Week begins Friday. As a guy who really, really likes to tuck into a plate of excellent chow at one of Chicago’s quality eating establishments, I’m going to depart from my habit of nimbly flitting from one topic to another. Instead, I’d like to pull a thread left dangling after Wednesday’s column on Go Brewing and the rise of nonalcoholic beer to ask a question that has long puzzled me:
     What’s with NA wine? You can order nonalcoholic beer at almost any bar or restaurant. But I’ve never seen NA wine on a menu. Not once. Why?
     ”From a wine perspective, we’re a little behind,” said Serafin Alvarado, master sommelier and Illinois wine education director for Southern Glazer’s Wine and Spirits, the largest distributor in the United States. “In all these beverage trends, wine is the last to join the party. It’s very traditional, very hesitant, not only from producers’, but from the consumers’ point of view.”
     Restaurateurs agree.“We don’t currently have any nonalcoholic wine,” said Grant DePorter, CEO of Harry Caray’s Restaurant Group. ”There’s no market for it.”
     A pity. My go-to NA vino at home is Sutter Home’s Fre. (An ugly name that looks like a typo. They’d have been better off calling it “Home Free”). To me, Fre is soft and round and red, quite winelike and a nice complement to cheese. Connoisseurs disagree. In 2021, the New Yorker’s John Seabrook slagged the NA wine segment in general and Fre in particular.
     ”Nonalcoholic wines make dreadful placebos,” he wrote. “No wine drinker ... would confuse the nonalcoholic Cabernets made by Fre and Ariel, two widely distributed U.S. brands, for the nectar of the gods. ... A vineyard can’t add a lot of other flavors to make up for the absence of alcohol. You’re left with twenty-dollar grape juice that tastes like a kids’ drink.”

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"A safe nonalcoholic space"

   

Dall-E.

  If I want to be on page two in the paper, there's only room for about 750 words, so tangents often must get shorn away.
     For instance.

     My column Wednesday on Go Brewing, the non-alcoholic brewery in Naperville, lost a digression where I marvel at the tone of the sober movement, citing a line from 2019.  

   "Cindy’s at the Chicago Athletic Association Hotel, has created a safe nonalcoholic space by replacing the word 'mocktail' on the bar’s menus," noted Vox, calling Chicago "a hub of sober curiosity." 

    Where to begin with that sentence? Is "mocktail" pejorative? A kind of NA shaming? Or "sober curiosity," a term that makes not drinking sound almost like a variety of fetish.
     And don't get me started with "safe nonalcoholic space." Wouldn't that be most places? Your car? Your kid's school? Just about anywhere?

     Not that I want to wax snide. I know what they mean. When people are new in sobriety, it can seem the world is one vast bar, their acquaintances, a hallelujah chorus for relapse. I was fortunate in that I immediately understood that nobody can stay sober by pretending they don't know where the booze is. Staying out of squishy places might be necessary in the initial turmoil of rehab. But very quickly you need to be able to not drink even when people all around you are.

     Eventually you realize that nobody cares what you drink. Mostly. I seem to remember that young people, more susceptible to peer pressure, do care. For a while. They like to go out and party and reinforce each other by going after the stragglers. For those who resist joining in on the fun, not drinking can result in real ostracization. Or even for the not so young. I remember being in my early 40s, trying to cut back, ordering non-alcoholic drinks when out with certain boozehound newspaper friends and getting ridiculed. 

     Now people urging me to drink merely draw a sense of amused wonder. "What? Really? You mean you don't know?" For my literary guide to recovery, "Out of the Wreck I Rise," I had to raise a good amount of money to cover legal permissions, the fees to pay poets for the rights to use their work. This I did by hitting up rich folk to donate to the University of Chicago Press, a 501(c)3 charity, which created a special fund for that purpose.

     After the book came out, I went to lunch with one particularly generous soul, head of a Chicago financial firm, at Chicago Cut Steakhouse. I brought him a copy of the book he had helped fund, as a thank-you present. Before lunch, he encouraged me to order a glass of wine, several times. I looked at him, dumbfounded, and was tempted to say, "You have no idea what this book is about, do you?" I managed to hold that back: the man did contribute a hefty sum to my permissions kitty. What I did say was: "No thanks — wine makes me sleepy." That worked.

Dry January, not Beerless January

Joe Chura, right, draws an NA beer at Go Brewing in Naperville.

     Joe Chura is more than halfway through a dry January. Or make that Dry January, capital D, now that it is an official cultural phenomenon.
     One in five U.S. adults told pollsters they planned to go the whole first month of 2023 without alcohol. It’s the same in the United Kingdom.
     Why swear off booze for a whole month?
     “One, I needed to, personally, I wanted to take a month off completely from drinking,” said Chura, a 45-year-old father of three. “But secondly, I wanted to create a challenge for a group of people that wanted to try for the first time or do it again. And I couldn’t have it without myself doing it. This is a very unique experience that someone can come here.”
     “Here” is Go Brewing, the craft brewery that Chura started in Naperville last October that brews only no- and low-alcohol beers — the first in Illinois.
     Regular readers might be aware that every January is Dry January for me — and February, and March, and on through the year. For the past 17 years, which means I remember when you were lucky to find O’Douls at a bar. Now you can buy Bud Zero at Wrigley Field and there are shelves of exotic NA IPAs at Binny’s.
     Four hundred people signed up to do Dry January with Chura, and Go Brewing offers regular activities like CrossFit-style workouts and live-band karaoke nights. (The pub does offer several full alcohol guest beers for those who just won’t be denied.)
     When Chura opened his doors, he expected his average customer to be a “40-year-old who is gaining weight and wants to be healthy.”
     ”The brand was built around that,” said Chura, who was surprised by who walked in.
     “Week one, 50% or more of the people who came in here were in recovery or couldn’t drink for health reasons. I looked at them and thought, ‘Holy shit, I got this wrong.’”

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Flashback 2011: One quarter of the country has gone crazy

Generated by Dall-E.

     The good news is that the vise grip that Donald Trump has on the Republican Party seems to be slacking. The bad news is that they don't need him to continue the carnival of crazy. As I've been saying for years about Trump: he didn't create the environment he thrived in. Not a cause, but a symptom. In case this isn't clear, I offer as evidence this column from 2011 that tills the loamy soil that Trumpism, and other fact-free totalitarian causes, bloom in. Trump cut his political teeth as a proponent of birtherism, but didn't even merit mention here.

     The expression "my jaw dropped," is usually metaphorical, the writer reaching for some oomph beyond "I was really surprised."
     But reading the New York Times/CBS poll released last week that 25 percent of all Americans — and 45 percent of Republicans — believe President Obama was born outside the United States, I could feel the muscles in my jaw go slack and my chin dip.
     Why is this so amazing?
     Well, first, let’s review the evidence that Obama was born someplace other than Kapi’olani hospital in Honolulu, Hawaii, on Aug. 4, 1961:
     There isn’t any.
     None, nada, nothing. A slop bucket of rumors and lies. As opposed to the overwhelming hard proof that Obama was born exactly where he said he was born — a state birth certificate, not to mention two local newspapers printing birth announcements.
     So why does a considerable and growing chunk of the country — one in four, the same percentage of Americans who are men over the age of 37 — embrace this fallacy?
     The short answer is they believe it because they want to believe it. Belief and fact have almost no relationship to each other — we should know that by now. There is no situation so clear-cut that it cannot be twisted into a hall of mirrors. The 9/11 attacks were the most documented crime ever. Did that stop the conspiracy theories? No way.
     That said, why do 25 percent of us want to believe Obama was born in foreign soil?
     It’s obvious when you ask yourself what happened in November 2008. The nation elected its first African-American president, a Democrat. Of course that would inspire some to say, "Whoa, wait a second, this isn’t happening. This guy can’t be president!"
     He can’t? Why not? Well, umm, because he wasn’t born here. Yeah, that’s the ticket!
     Conspiracy theories flourish among those who find the truth too uncomfortable to tolerate. America being the victim of terrorist attacks made the nation sympathetic — better, in some minds, to view the United States as the perpetrator. The same dynamic inspires Holocaust denial. People don’t deny the Holocaust because of lack of evidence — those Germans, sticklers for bookkeeping. Rather, the Holocaust is uncomfortable, inconvenient to those wishing for the next one, and thus nutjobs like Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad find it easier to just grin and insist it never happened.
     Obama being president of the United States is uncomfortable, inconvenient, for a lot of people, and rather than acknowledge that a majority of Americans elected him to an office he is entitled to hold, it’s easier to declare the whole thing a sham.
     Just as Holocaust denial is, on its face, anti-Semitism, so the birther movement is clearly racism. I’m reluctant to say that because racism has become such a frayed charge in recent years, thanks to professional wolf criers like the Rev. Jesse Jackson or Carol Moseley Braun. But just because some overplay the race card doesn’t mean that racism ceases to exist. Electing a black president might have been a milestone, but it did not make the bigots automatically wink out of existence, unfortunately. Where did they all go?
     To me, the sort of people who in 1961 would say, "Obama can’t be president because he’s a n-----," now, 50 years later, are saying "Obama can’t be president because he’s not an American." Progress!
     Although I refuse to believe that haters constitute a full quarter of the country. My hunch — or perhaps just hope — is that the birther mania is fueled by a hard core, say 2.5 percent, the full-time bigots, psychos and partisan operatives who come up with these lunatic theories and weave loose threads into this elaborate tapestry of delusion. Then the other 22.5 percent look at the "issue," feel it resonate in their guts, let out a few moos to tell a pollster that it all makes sense to them, then drop their muzzles back into the silage.
     You know what? I’m going to start a movement right now, insisting that Obama can’t be president because he isn’t 35, as the constitution requires. Barack Obama is only 32 — he was born in 1979. There, you read it in a newspaper. That this claim is false, contradicted by all evidence and common sense might be seen as a stumbling block, but not judging from the success of the birthers. People will believe anything that scratches their itch, and would much rather change the facts of the world than alter their opinions.
      Twenty-five percent. The jaw drops, the eyes pop, the mind reels, the heart breaks.
        —Originally published in the Sun-Times, April 24, 2011

On MLK Day, don’t shortchange the message

Carol M. Highsmith Archive, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

     Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was not a tall man. Five-foot-7 at most, and prone to pudginess. His grandeur was not physical, but moral, verbal, philosophical and spiritual. When he opened his mouth, he donned wings and would soar, taking his audience along with him.
     Except, of course, for those left earthbound, who remained unmoved by his vision of an America where people are not judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.
     Maybe that’s why I never cared for the King Memorial in Washington, D.C. First, the statue doesn’t look enough like him, in my estimation. Second, the entity honoring King is the same federal government that allowed the FBI to hound him, bugging his hotel rooms and tapping his phones, peddling his darkest secrets as punishment for the crime of trying to make the country a better place.
     Even setting that aside, the government rendering the man into granite 30 feet tall is still a two-edged honor. Official approval helped and hurt him. One of the many challenges King faced was being co-opted. King was a man squeezed — haters to the right, radicals like Malcolm X to his left, impatient young people pushing up from below, inert officials clucking concern from above.
     For the past few weeks, I’ve been immersed in King’s brief life and turbulent times because I’ve been lucky enough to get my hands on an advance copy of “King: A Life.” The first major biography of King in decades is written by Jonathan Eig, the Chicago author of “Ali: A Life,” the truly excellent, bestselling biography of Muhammad Ali (and the truly excellent, bestselling biography of Al Capone and the truly excellent, bestselling ... well, you get the idea).
     “King: A Life” is such a nuanced, detailed biography, it’s like having Martin Luther King sitting in your living room, reading a newspaper. Every day, I get to join him, to hurry downstairs, pour myself a cup of coffee and get to know the man better. You’ll have to wait until May when it’s published, but don’t worry, I’ll be sure to remind you.

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Not quite so many bullets

Shooting arcade in Kissimmee, Florida (photo by Carol Highsmith; Library of Congress)

     First the good news.
     Someday soon — this month, maybe, this year, certainly — someone in Illinois is going to be mad about something. Doesn't matter what: girls won't date him, a coworker cracked a joke, just learned that Biden faked the moon landing. Whatever, this unnamed person is doing to want to kill a bunch of people, He'll — and it's always a guy — head to the local gun shop. These shops always seem to be on bleak expanses of industrial nowhere. And he'll want to buy an assault rifle with which to spray their school or store or whatever.
     And they won't be able to. Because of the new law signed in Illinois last week.
     Not that we should have the big Problem Solved Party quite yet. There's less good news. Unless they're stopped because of the law beefing up the ability of the state to keep guns away from known crazies, they'll still be able to buy a gun. (After the mandatory 72 hour waiting period in Illinois, to allow for a background check and perhaps let a person intent on murder cool off). Just not one holding as many rounds. Ten will have to do, instead of 30. Which isn't the vast improvement it seems if you get one of those first 10 bullets. But if someone cold-cocks him while he's swapping out magazines, then, heck yeah, the law works!
     How much of a victory is that? Well, it's a start. Ten rounds is still a lot. Just the bill becoming law — it also bans "switches" that can permit guns to fire in full automatic mode, and makes extends the ability of courts to keep guns out of the hands of dangerous persons — is a reminder that we are still a nation of laws, despite the tough talk of would-be frontiersmen. We aren't all shooting out our differences. Yet.

     Bottom line: it's realistic to hope that there will be some group of persons who are only alive because this new law saved them, even though they'll never know.
     That's the good part. And honestly, my first impulse is to celebrate that progress — passing laws about guns! Who would imagine? But then the candid moderate in me has to observe that we're really taking aim — ooh, wrong metaphor, it really is embedded in the culture — we're really addressing only a tiny fraction of the problem.
     In 2020, the most recent year full stats are available, 45,222 Americans were killed by guns, more than ever before, according to the Centers for Disease Control.
     Of those, most — 24,292, or 54 percent — were suicides. Another 19,384, or 43 percent were murders, and of those murders, mass shootings accounted for ... 38 people, using the FBI definition of a mass shooting. If you use the looser Gun Violence Archive definition, 513 people, or a little more than 1 percent of the fatalities.
     So while, yes, bans on assault rifles, whatever they are, and high capacity magazines are fine, and if I could press a button and have every state follow suit, I would , it's also the low hanging fruit.
     A tougher nut is to make people understand that the guns they buy to indulge in some Clint Eastwood, get-the-drop-on-the-bad-guy fantasy is actually the gun they're going to stick in their own mouth at some dark night of the soul, or that their 6-year-old is going to take to school one day to shoot his teacher. (A bad, example, because so rare). That his teenager is going to use to kill himself with — guns are the leading cause of death in children in the United States, 4,357 in 2020. No other developed country comes close.
     But then, there's a direct relationship between gun ownership and gun death. Not of bad guys coming in the windows. Of the owners. For all the sneering and shade throwing our fellow citizens in the backwater areas of the country, the gun death rate in Illinois are less than half what they are in Wyoming or Mississippi. If liberals were bad people, like conservatives, we'd push for more guns, because red states are predominantly the people killing themselves and each other. But we're not. So we cheer for even the most limited progress. Like the Illinois law signed by Gov. J.B. Pritzker last week.

Northshore Notes: IRL

      Not quite grumbling, I padded up to my office Friday night, thinking, " Well, I hope Caren has something FUN to share with us." She does. Again we are in synch — this week I noticed that the more time I deliberately spend away from social media, the happier I am.

By Caren Jeskey

     Last year Netflix and I broke up. An Irish goodbye seemed the best. With a click of a button the streaming service that robbed me of thousands of hours, thousands of dollars, and a whole lotta sleep — think back to "Breaking Bad" if you can stomach it — was gone.
     There are free streaming sources that air well-crafted and informative pieces without the hell of constant pop-ups, such as BBC Reels. They offer short pieces — how whispering took over the internet, leeches: the therapy used by Stalin, and the power of psychedelics. They also have LongReels (about 15 minutes). You might not want to miss a a 50 year old audio recording of a disappearing language.
     Incidentally, psychedelics is a topic I’m learning about this coming Tuesday night via Zoom, hosted by the Schaumburg Library (which also hosts book groups, Photoshop lessons, and other free virtual and IRL events).
     hoopla® is another streaming option, stocked with digitized treasure troves of libraries. I have found that watching a funny or arty movie, or watching a few short reels, is more satisfying and less numbing that the six-season binge pattern. 

     Detangling from being a slave to tech is a process. I’m personally not aiming for abstinence, just a better balance. Zuckerberg is smart as hell and makes it hard to reduce the clutter of "friends" one has on his blue platform. He makes it as hard as he can to say goodbye. I thought about deleting my Facebook account, but I use it for several satisfying professional and hobby groups. I also have photos and memories tucked away in the Facebook cloud. So, I opted to unfriend my hundreds of connections, one tedious step at a time. The Eye of Sauron does not graciously allow you to set your own boundaries with his free-ish web-based toy. (Free only if I don't value my own time while sitting on my arse and making him richer). It took a good long time, but now I am a proud facilitator of a total of six Facebook friends — Neil of course, four mentors, and a dear friend who passed away. We keep him alive in this way.
     Last Fall I also said farewell to using Amazon, and to Prime. The best part has been shopping IRL, or at small Etsy and privately owned shops where I can chat with the owners and support the folks I want to support. The kind owner of a rock hunting supply company sent friends free scoops to give them a little bit of love after losing a loved one, and their home, on Sanibel Island during Ian. I know it's not much, but I also know they will smile. Tech-culling has cleared the way for more awesome adventures. Less reasons to be tethered to the laptop. I received an iPad for my birthday last year and my tech-savvy sister removed all distractions. No messaging, no Gmail, no App Store... nothing but Insight Timer and the Safari browser that I mindfully use for light-hearted pleasure.
     This past Monday turned into a nine hour beach day. It was the first of 38 days we’d seen the gosh darned sun. I needed it. I rounded out hours of playing unselfconsciously — the child in me dancing in the sand and singing to the waves — with working from my car parked in the sun, windows down and moonroof open. At the water’s edge at the Lighthouse Beach I noticed a piece of blinding white pottery glimmering in the sunny waves 7 meters or so offshore.
     I love to collect pottery shards. This was no shard. It was whole, intact plate, face down. (I keep meaning to throw my waders in the car for moments like this). I snapped a couple of photos of this unusual find, and headed to Walker Brothers for breakfast. (I’ve been craving their apple pancake for about 25 years now. It was every bit as good as I remembered). I had posted the plate photo on a Facebook group of Great Lakes treasure hunters, and the crowd spoke. I was to immediately return to the Lighthouse, take my boots off and go get the damn plate. I obeyed. It was not nearly as hard as I’d made it in my mind. A pretty gray dog accompanied me while her person filmed the excursion.
     After I’d dried my feet and put my warm boots back on, the spry dog leapt back and forth in front of me, waiting for me to throw the frisbee she was seeing. As dogs do, she quickly forgot and went back to frolicking.
     I hopped back onto Facebook that evening. Hundreds of fellow shard addicts had followed the story of the whole plate closely. They weren’t even disappointed when I shared that I realized it was just a $15 ceramic plate made in China.
     Good times were had by all.