Mailbag

     You never know, in this business, what is going to open the floodgates of reader mail, and boy did Friday's column on not going to the theater uncap a geyser.

     Chicago's reputation must really be in the shitter, because I got many of versions of this first letter:

     I just finished reading your column today about being the guy on the sofa and I am there also but for a different reason. I never attended plays but I took my daughter and other family members to many of the Broadway in Chicago shows over the years. I also enjoyed dining at Mart Antonis, Francescas, and the Rosebud on Taylor. I no longer look to do this because I can't put my family in danger in the city. I am so upset that the people in charge have allowed this city to become what it has, a cesspool of carjackings, robberies and shootings. I feel wronged that I am unable to enjoy myself with my family and also contribute to the continuation of culture in Chicago. Your reasons for being on the couch are different from mine but we both are guilty of not supporting theatre. 

          Richard P. 

     I might be inert, but the idea of being afraid to go into the city never crossed my mind. I tried to answer compassionately:

Dear Richard:
     I sympathize, I really do. And I got many letters such as yours. Working as a newspaper reporter, I've been all over the city all the time. In every housing project, when they had them. At night. So I'm mystified that a slight uptick in crime, and a shift in where a few crimes occur, should so terrify so many. I assume it has to be fear-mongering on Fox. I don't mean to minimize it — people fear what they fear, and I don't think there is anything that I could say that would make you think you could risk going to Rosebud on Taylor. But you could, and you'd see that you'd be fine. Ditto for the Cadillac Theater. My son and I handed out sandwiches for the Night Ministry in Englewood, and we were fine. Crime is one threat. Exaggerated, race-based fear is another. Thanks for writing.

     Some were easier to react sharply to:

     Neil, the REAL REASON no one goes downtown for a play or a nice dinner or even to shop is the CRIME! Who wants to get robbed, beat up, car jacked, shot, killed, by a bunch of thugs. Oh sorry — disenfranchised children. Tell it like it really is. Mary L.

     Mary:  I was downtown yesterday. Walked from Union Station to Navy Pier. No crime that I saw. I'm sorry you live in terror in — what, Florida? Homer Glen? Maybe the problem is that a lot of racists focus on crime, thinking that doing so hides their sin. It doesn't. Thanks for writing.     

Hey Neil,

     I read your column this morning. You're going to disagree with me and might call me a bigot.
     It's ok if you do. Others won't call me a bigot.
     The reason I don't go to see plays anymore in Chicago is unless it's African- American or Latino theatre, it's inauthentic. African-American and Latino theatre should be authentic. But they shouldn't have black people or Indian-Pakistanis play Victorians, for example. This is just one bad example. This wasn't the case 18 years ago when I saw lots of literary theatre in Chicago. It's woke diversity and inclusion nonsense today which has ruined the Chicago theatre scene. These post-modernist politics which is what you and your newspaper are about has not only sullied your newspaper but Chicago theater.
     Go ahead, call me a bigot. I'll keep supporting your paper.
     Have a nice weekend,
     Michael

Michael—
     I won’t call you a bigot — how could I? I don’t even know you. I will say your “ inauthentic” theory is highly dubious. Alexander Hamilton wasn’t Puerto Rican, true, but “Hamilton” is still worth seeing.  Thanks for writing.

     NS

    He surprised me by replying:    

     But that's the point of Hamilton. It's the novelty of it. But they do it to everything.
     Nothing in the mainstream is authentic anymore. That's why I don't go to literary theatre anymore. It's nonsense.
     Thanks for responding.

    I wouldn't call the "point" of Hamilton the multicultural cast, which promped my final word: 
       "Never mistake a private ail for an infected atmosphere." —Thoreau

      Not everyone is exercised about the spectre of crime: 

      I’m surprised you didn’t mention an obvious and primary reason for people staying away from the theater — record inflation. Any extra money people may have had is being used to pay for the huge increases in gas, food, and energy costs. It coincided with Joe Biden taking office. Does it make me a MAGA extremist to point that out?     Tom 

     No, so long as you don't actually support Donald Trump. Gas costs a lot, but not so much that I'll betray my country and everything it represents. I might not have considered the cost because I don't pay for my tickets.

     NS

     There's more, but you get the idea. Thanks for reading. Have a good weekend.

I’m that guy on the sofa

Jaeda LaVonne plays Viola in Chicago Shakespeare Theater’s production of “Twelfth Night,” reimagined in the Caribbean isles. Performances begin Oct. 25. (Photo by Jeff Sciortino)

     Chicago Shakespeare Theater is presenting “Twelfth Night,” opening Oct. 25. Of course I was invited. I’ve been going to CST for decades, from before it moved to Navy Pier. I used to say it is a joy just to sit in the polished-wood tribute to Shakespeare’s Globe theater and soak in the surroundings. The fact they also put on a play is a bonus.
     I clicked on the email, and suddenly the hassle to get there rose up before my eyes like a cloud of gnats. The train downtown. The cab to Navy Pier. The long walk past the carnival of crap dangled in front of tourists. The tourists themselves. Sitting in the aforementioned theater, glancing around at my fellow theatergoers.
     “I used to recognize people,” I’ll complain to my wife. “Now I don’t recognize anybody.”
     I didn’t RSVP. The matter would have been forgotten had the Sun-Times on Tuesday not run a story (front-page headline: “CULTURE SHOCK”) about dwindling theatrical audiences.
     Honestly, I felt both indicted — I’m exactly the theatergoing demographic who has gone AWOL — and the strange disorientation when a newspaper story describes your exact condition, when you grab your paper, collapse on the couch and read: “Boomers, exhausted and bitter, sprawl on sofas, passively absorbing information using moribund technologies ...”
     Attendance in Chicago theaters is down 60% from pre-pandemic levels, according to a Department of Cultural Affairs study.
     “During the pandemic, people learned new habits — getting more of their entertainment online,” is how my colleague Stefano Esposito put it in the story. He’s got that right. Why trek downtown when I can tip back in my cool blue leather electric recliner — it’s like something from “WALL-E” — shovel popcorn in my maw and rewatch “The Crown”?
     Online theater was just sad. When COVID-19 struck, in the spirit of being supportive, I watched a play online. If you put a gun to my head and demanded that I recall one aspect of the performance — the title, the actors, anything, — I’d be a dead man. Every detail is lost. Meanwhile, the definition of good theater, to me, is something that sticks with you. The online play never registered, but I can still see William L. Petersen slam his head against that filing cabinet in “In the Belly of the Beast.” Maybe the material was just better.

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What just happened?

     At 1:18 p.m. Wednesday, I heard my wife's phone sound downstairs then, a moment later, mine buzzed.
     The national alert we had been told about. I'd noticed online reports about nutbag conspiracy theories — that the alert will somehow activate "nanoparticles" in people's bloodstream, injected along with the COVID vaccine, causing Marburg virus to manifest itself. Crazy stuff; hard for me to believe anybody believes that. But apparently some do, unless it's somebody's plea for attention.

     For me, the alert evoked memories of that  horrendous grating noise they used to play periodically over the radio as a test of the Emergency Broadcast System.

     I always wondered why the tone had to sound so awful, like Satan clearing his throat. Why couldn't it be something neutral, a gong, say, or even soothing. A harp glissando. With a disaster potentially bearing down on us; isn't comfort in order?

     I read the message, took a screenshot, and wondered two things:
     First, what conceivable emergency would require the entire nation to be notified at once? The United States is almost 2,900 miles across at its widest point. No weather, no natural disaster affects more than a part of it. Any attack would be localized. So what are we practicing for? 
     Reading up, I quickly realized that though the test is nationwide, the alerts are typically used in one region or another, to alert an area to an advancing hurricane or raging wildfire. There are practical applications to this, not merely improbable doomsday scenarios.

     You have to wonder what the practical result of ringings tens of millions of phones — I wonder how many car accidents resulted, for instance.
     Leading to my second question: how do they alert everyone at once? By what process? Turns out to be quite complicated. The Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, has a system it calls Integrated Public Alert & Warning System, or IPAWS. 
   They explain it this way:

     IPAWS allows Alerting Authorities to write their own message using commercially available software that is Common Alerting Protocol (CAP) compliant. The message is then delivered to the Integrated Public Alert and Warning System, Open Platform for Emergency Networks (IPAWS OPEN), where it is authenticated and then delivered simultaneously through multiple communication pathways. Through IPAWS, one message is created to reach as many people as possible to save lives and protect property.

     That's heavy sledding — as best I can figure it is, the government sends service providers a signal, and then every cell tower in their network scattershots out a pre-ordained message to every phone on the system. There is a chart that may or may not help.

    It's sort of an amazing thing, even if you only hazily understand the process — count me among you. Even for those of us muddy on the system, I think it's important to always ask, to make an effort to understand how a particular thing happens. Otherwise, we get into the habit of not bothering to even try to wrap our heads around a system, and risk shrugging off our technology as unknowable magic.

Banned any good books lately?

 

   It’s Banned Books Week, again? Well, Happy Banned Books Week! Wait, do you say that? Or is that like “Happy Yom Kippur”?
     I shouldn’t joke — Banned Books Week is important, bringing attention to the plight of schools and libraries being forced to yank books off their shelves, perhaps pressured by glittery-eyed religious zealots and prudish church ladies (Look, the mice are nekkid!”).
     Not that we need reminding. With thousands of efforts across the country, it seems every week is Banned Books Week. Banning efforts are on the rise. Pen America records 3,362 attempts to ban books across the country, a third more than the year before. Librarians who defend their collections are harassed.
     At least nobody is piling the books in the Operalplatz and burning them. Yet.
     We in Illinois of course can be proud to be the only state that passed a law against book banning — starting next year, any library that pulls books for “partisanal or doctrinal” reasons can become ineligible for state funds.
     I’m sure some folks consider that oppression. What about their religion and their right to impose it on everybody else? Book banning is attractive because it doesn’t seem, at first glance, to be the same as, oh, demanding everybody in class be baptized. But that’s exactly what it is. Puff away all the underlined prurient passages and imaginary harm that book banners focus on, and what they’re doing is insisting everybody view the world through their keyhole.
     What I want to know is, where are the victims of these dangerous books? The children plunged into emotional turmoil after reading a Judy Blume book? If only parents wildly indignant about edgy books could manage to get equally worked up about real problems that result in actual damage — school shootings come to mind. How come the same parents who shrug off the very real prospect of their kids being murdered at school line up at board meetings to scream about “Gender Queer”? It’s a puzzlement.

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"More beer and bosoms"

 

     Attention is addictive, as addictive as any drug. As the years go by, and I see what a bit of notoriety does to people who receive even the slightest taste, I've come to view obscurity — so dreaded in my younger years — as my lance and shield. Or at least that's what I keep telling myself. The lauded destroy themselves, or become parody of themselves, or grow regal. Their fame lights up the sky for a moment, then dulls. I look up from tending my potatoes in my lonely midwestern field, note the flash, then return to tapping my hoe on the loamy soil. 
     That said, I do smile when something I've written years ago actually resonates with someone, despite having been written by me. Reader Lee Goodman, who I've mentioned here from time to time, wrote to me a few days back:

           Neil,

I hope you didn't miss that you were quoted in the recent Smithsonian
article on Renaissance Fairs:

"Writing in 2007, Chicago Sun-Times columnist Neil Steinberg perhaps
summarized Renaissance festivals’ appeal best: “If theme parks, with
their pasteboard main streets, reek of a bland, safe, homogenized,
white-bread America, the Renaissance fair is at the other end of the
social spectrum, a whiff of the occult, a flash of danger and a hint of
the erotic. Here, they let you throw axes. Here are more beer and bosoms
than you’ll find in all of Disney World.”

     And he provides a link to the story, here.
     I did miss it; between The New Yorker and The Economist and Consumer Reports, plus writing this stuff, I never get to the Smithsonian. I could be on the cover and I wouldn't know it unless somebody told me.
     Thanks Lee. Good line. You can read the original piece here. I haven't been to the Bristol Ren Faire in years — a pal who participates in it tells me it's gone downhill, so I don't feel as if I'm missing much.

 

A penny for your thoughts

     It costs 2 cents for the United States Mint to manufacture a Lincoln cent. In 2021, the government struck 7.1 billion of them. Two-thirds never circulate. They clutter up banks. Yet we keep minting them.
     Whenever the nation’s “greatness” is bandied about, by those who imagine greatness is a quality that can be self-assigned, a little voice says, “Yeah, we can’t even get rid of the penny.”
     Australia managed. In 1990. Canada, too — a decade ago. Also Brazil, Finland, New Zealand, Norway, Israel — quite a list. Are they “greater” than we are? Certainly pennywise.
     Enough prelude. It was a shameful weekend for the country, even though the federal government didn’t shut down, as it seemed about to. A good thing.
     But avoiding disaster should never be confused with triumph — House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., called the stopgap bill “a victory for the American people.” No, a victory for the American people would be a smoothly functioning government that can’t be hijacked by any cadre of extremists who feel so inclined.
     This is a good moment to step back and understand what is going on, big picture. The United States is a majoritarian democracy. In theory. Meaning the will of the people is expressed through elections, naming representatives who make laws and decide policies.
     People who find themselves in the minority, like the MAGA extremists who almost shut down the government, are not happy with this, because this representative world doesn’t revolve around their precious selves.
     So they try to achieve their ends — slashing Social Security and Medicaid, blocking immigration, cutting aid to Ukraine — by cheating. Procedural tricks. Refusing to fund the government. Holding their breath and throwing tantrums.

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75 years covering race in Chicago: A newspaper for a diverse city

Fletcher Martin

    Since February, I've been doing deep dives into the history of the Sun-Times to mark its 75th anniversary as a daily paper. I've written how we covered major disasters, and City Hall.  A prudent man would not have attempted to encapsulate as broad and fraught topic as our coverage of race over 75 years into one 3,000 word story. But I am not a prudent man. And yes, there was hesitation over whether I was the right person to tell this story, and I pointed out that if Jonathan Eig can write the definitive biography of Martin Luther King, then I can do this, or try to. It could easily have been three times as long and gone all sorts of other places. But this is where it went with the space I had.

     “Copy!”
     The way newspapering worked in 1951 was, when a reporter got to the end of the page he was pounding out on his Royal manual typewriter, he would zip out the copybook — a thick bundle of newsprint and carbon paper — from under the typewriter platen, remove one beige sheet and yell “Copy!” or “Boy!” Immediately, a copy boy, who by then was sometimes a girl, would run over and rush the page over to the city desk.
     Only nobody came running when Fletcher Martin called “copy” at the Chicago Sun-Times newsroom at 211 W. Wacker Dr. in 1951. He sat there, arm out, waving a page over his head. The copy boys ringing the room gazed determinedly into space.
     Martin was a former World War II correspondent who had been city editor of the Louisville Defender. He spent a year at Harvard as a Nieman Fellow — the first Black person to hold a Nieman Fellowship, then the first Black reporter at the Chicago Sun-Times.
     Hence the problem. Copy boys were the lowest form of life in a newsroom yet felt entitled to simply ignore Martin — until a white assistant city editor saw what was happening, stepped in and read the nearest copy boy the riot act.
     “Boy,” he said, according to a reminiscence published years later. “Go over, and get that copy. It’s hot copy, and his is as important as anyone else’s.”
     Or more. Martin brought a perspective that would serve the paper well in the 1950s as it tried to pivot into the civil rights era. The Sun-Times sent him to cover the NAACP convention in California in July 1956, and he wrote about two figures who were transforming America. His story began:
     “SAN FRANCISCO — Two widely dissimilar men have captured the imagination of the NAACP convention here and may emerge as the new Negro leaders. They are Thurgood Marshall, special counsel of the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People, and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., leader of the bus boycott in Montgomery, Ala.”
     Marshall would become the first Black U.S. Supreme Court Justice. And King ... well, he needs no explanation, one hopes.
     As the Sun-Times looks back during its 75th year of continual daily publication, race is a key lens through which to understand the newspaper’s history. Race is often referred to as “the third rail” of Chicago politics — in both the “provides animating power” and the “touch it and you die” senses.
     A fraught topic. But ignoring it isn’t an option. Race is too huge a subject to tackle thoroughly, too important to be sidestepped.
     The Sun-Times played a dual role regarding race. First as a news source reflecting the enormous changes — and lack of change — that have affected the city since the daily paper began in 1948, from the impact of Black vets returning home, their eyes opened to the possibilities of life, to the struggles over housing, redlining, the riots to Latino migration and the rise of the Asian community as an outspoken force. In the early 1950s, thousands of white Chicagoans would rampage in the streets if a Black family moved where they thought they didn’t belong.
     And second as an employer of Black, Latino and Asian writers, editors, photographers, columnists, executives. Martin was the first of a string of talented journalists who would distinguish the paper, such as Pulitzer Prize-winning photographers John H. White and John J. Kim.

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