Hay as happiness, beauty and freedom at Joffrey's 'Midsummer Night's Dream'

Photo by Carolyn McCabe for the Joffrey Ballet

     Noon one day last week found 45 of the fittest young people on the planet — dancers with the Joffrey Ballet — lying on their backs in the company's Loop rehearsal space, on a floor covered with what looks like hay.
     Swedish contemporary music plays. Suddenly they leap up and scatter, running in all directions, flinging the hay at each other, while a big hay wheel is rolled in. Two dancers leap atop it and perform a kind of courtship gavot.
     Welcome to the dress rehearsal of "Midsummer Night's Dream," opening next week at the Lyric Opera House. Despite its name, the ballet has nothing to do with either the Shakespeare play or George Balanchine's 1962 ballet. Rather, this is Alexander Ekman's joyful solstice frolic.
     A glance at the prop list gives an idea of the production's whimsy. Along with 45 flower crowns, 40 umbrellas, 40 wooden chairs, 40 wine glasses, two bicycles and a hand-held fish — not to be confused with the wooden herring; this is a Scandinavian entertainment, after all — at the very end, in bold-face so as not to be missed, is:
     "Hay: 1100 pounds total."
     "It's actually raffia," said stage manager Mandy Heuermann. "Haylike, but much less allergenic. It's flame-treated, to make sure it's safe, since we basically cover the whole stage floor with it."
     Real hay might also impale the dancers, who are barefoot and are experienced at performing in clouds of various types.
     "The dancers are pretty accustomed to dealing with atmosphere," said principal stage manager Katherine Selig. "We use fog, we use smoke, we use haze. They're used to it; it's just part of the job."

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The comfy chair!

     Sunday was a beautiful day to be in Chicago, walking down Halsted Street from Montrose to Belmont. Clear blue skies, temperature in the 70s. It seemed all of Boystown was out, and the bars had their windows flung open and people could be seen in the dimness within, gathered in groups, eating and drinking.
     The entire experience was a reminder that, sometimes, if you do something kind for someone, it rebounds well. I hadn't begun the day planning to spend an hour strolling city streets — the plan was to help our future daughter-in-law pack to move into a new condo. Well, my wife's plan — she has the glassware packing skills, from her years at Mindscape Gallery in Evanston. I was there to drive, provide moral support, do what packing I could, and lift heavy things. I felt a little bad, to be spending the glorious day indoors. But duty is duty.
    Noon came and went, but by 2:30 p.m. lunch was suggested and I did not argue. I was good with wherever anybody wanted to go, and that turned out to be the Momo Factory, a Nepalese dumpling place at Broadway and Belmont. It's a mile and a quarter away, my soon-to-be-relative explains. Were we good for that? We were.

     So packing morphed into a leisurely stroll through a city full of young people. We passed spots we used to know, and chatted on the changes — this spot is now that. Yoshi's Cafe is closed, recently enough there is a note on the door, re-directing mail. We had a nice dinner there once.
     I of course thought about all those Floridian cops cringing and damning Chicago as some kind of hellscape, when — on Sunday at least, through these neighborhoods — it was about as inviting and happy as a place can be. We cut down Melrose, the block where my wife used to live, and I pointed out the balcony from her place.
     At one point we saw the chair above, and I noticed that rather than give it away, someone had put a QR code, asking for $15, which is not bad for a second-hand office chair. (And a "Comfy chair!" at that — could that be a sly Monty Python reference? Or did those stop decades ago?) 

     Like a farmer setting out eggs at a wooden stand on a countryside road, my future daughter-in-law observed. With a slotted box for a few dollars. Only we weren't in the trusting heartland, I thought, but on the mean streets of Chicago. Maybe not so mean after all.

      What charmed me was the owner's hope that whoever wanted the chair would take the time to convey the money, as opposed to just take the chair. Plus the modern Venmo twist. That expectation of decency, of honor. Not to be pollyannaish about it. But one person in Chicago thought there was some slight chance that a random person in need of a second-hand chair would both take it and throw some money their way. There was something sweet about that. Or maybe I was just in a hopeful mood.

'Messy, imperfect, awkward, beautiful, these people'

"Marsha," 2023, watercolor and charcoal on paper, 45x36, by Lisa Edelstein.

   
     My parents are on the move again. After two years at an assisted living facility in Buffalo Grove, it's down to Addison to a smaller place that better suits their needs. Moving means packing, and once more my wife and I boxed up their dwindling possessions — far fewer than when they left Boulder in 2022 — weeding out what can't make the transition from three rooms to one.
     "How about this?" my wife said, holding up a round metal 1950s cookie tin. "Photos."
     "Throw it away," replied my mother. She never even looked inside.
     The past burdens and buoys us, holding us back and driving us forward, like stunned survivors wandering across a minefield. The moment I clapped eyes on Lisa Edelstein's paintings, my first thought was "Jewish unease." The awkwardness of one's own relatives, frozen in the garish 1970s. The lucky few who somehow made it from Lodz to Levittown. They call to us, in their thin, wavering voices, from beyond the grave, or its lip. A hard tin to throw away, and Edelstein has taken her family Kodachromes and transformed them into evocative paintings.
     "I love finding the in-between shots, the poorly posed, the awkward, the strange angles, even damaged photos or film stills," said Edelstein, an actor you might know as Dr. Cuddy in "House." "Taking these unvalued shots and blowing the images up into carefully rendered paintings, celebrating them that way — there’s so much life and story and discomfort that gets exposed."
     Edelstein's work has to be viewed through the fog of anti-Semitism, always a haze in society but billowing up even more after six months of the war in Gaza. Not the easiest moment to be Jewish, never mind examine the out-of-placeness of our tribe.
     "Yes, this is a wildly fraught time to be Jewish, which is absolutely part of why I am making these paintings," said Edelstein, whose husband, Robert Russell, is also an artist. "Robert and I have gone to countless art shows over the 14 years we’ve been together, and we’ve seen a lot of identity-based work. All of the various identities were demanding representation within the larger human story. And not just representation — celebration. But not Jews. Where are the Jews?"

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Gail Wise bought the first Ford Mustang sold in the United States; 60 years later, she still owns it

 

     In the spring of 1964, Gail Wise taught third grade at Sunnyside Elementary School in Berkeley, Illinois, a small suburb just east of Elmhurst. She was still Gail Brown then, loved her job, but it was a dozen miles south from where she lived with her parents in Park Ridge.
     "Back then you lived at home until you got married," she remembered. 

     At 22 years old, she couldn't expect to drive her parents' car forever. She needed her own.
     So on Wednesday, April 15, 1964, she and her father went to Johnson Ford on Cicero Avenue in Chicago — her family always drove Fords. Her father had driven a '57 Fairlane 500, then a '63 Thunderbird.
     "My parents always drove a convertible," she said. "I just knew I wanted a convertible."
     But there were no convertibles on the showroom floor. When the salesman saw Brown's disappointment, he took pity on her, and said they had something special in back. They weren't supposed to sell it yet, but she could take a look. He pulled a tarp off a Mustang convertible in "Skylight Blue." No Mustangs would officially go on sale for two days, until after it was unveiled at the New York World's Fair on April 17. If she wanted this one, she'd have to buy it without a test drive. She did want it. 

     "I just fell in love. It was sporty. It had the bucket seats, the transmission on the floor," she said. "He started it up. It went zoom zoom and made that nice, loud noise. I was just so excited to buy it. I was in heaven. I told the salesman it was for me."
     Some aspects of the car might surprise today — the Mustang had seat belts in the front seats but not the back. The passenger seat could not be adjusted. Back-up lights were optional.
     The price was $3,447.50. Her salary was $5,000 a year. Her father loaned her the money.
     Making Gail Wise the first person in the United States to buy a Ford Mustang — 60 years ago on Monday.
     "When I drove out of the showroom, nobody had seen this car yet," she recalled. "Everybody was waving at me, asking me to slow down, so they could see this car. I felt like a movie star. I was very happy. I drove it to school the next day. All those boys, the seventh and eighth graders, were hovering over it."
     She drove that Mustang for 15 years. She married Tom Wise, an electronics technician who worked on the guidance system on a nuclear submarine in the Navy, in 1966. The couple moved to Charleston, South Carolina. Their four kids arrived, and she gave up teaching.
     "When you were married, you started a family and stayed home with the children," she said.

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Flashback 1995: "Ito unlikely to leave, experts say."

A courtroom scene, by José Guadalupe Posada (Metropolitan Museum of Art)

     O.J. Simpson's body had scarcely begun to singe in hell before readers wondered when I'd be weighing in on the subject. Never, I hope. I hated the case while it was going on, the omnipresence, the sensationalism. Plus I wasn't yet a columnist, so only wrote about it as an assignment, covering some local reaction to a trial development. I wouldn't share this except for Northwestern professor Dan Polsby's sharp closing quote, which is worthy of remembrance. Polsby left NU in 1999 and joined Antonin Scalia Law School at George Mason University, retiring in 2020.

     Chicago legal experts regard the possibility of Judge Lance Ito stepping down from the O.J. Simpson trial as just the latest bit of empty theater in a trial that seems to grow stranger and stranger. Few think he will declare a mistrial.
     "Given the investment that everybody has in the trial, I seriously doubt he will" recuse himself, said Dan Polsby, a professor of law at Northwestern University Law School.
     Questions of a judge's possible conflict of interest are rare, and usually are settled without the judge stepping down. Ito did disqualify himself Tuesday from ruling on the tapes of Mark Fuhrman insulting Ito's wife.
     "Contrary to popular opinion, this is not the first trial in history," said Tom Scorza, a former assistant U.S. attorney. "Many times problems develop between a judge and a given witness, particularly a police witness."
     Typically, in matters of bias the judge is concerned with how an appeals court will view a situation, Scorza said. But a Simpson appeal based on bias is unlikely because the judge's possible bias is against a prosecution witness. If Simpson is found guilty, to argue the judge was biased against a witness whose testimony helped convict him doesn't make sense. And if he is found not guilty, there is no need to appeal.
     Area lawyers tend to be critical of Ito, who they say should never have let Fuhrman's racial beliefs become part of the trial.
     "Let's assume he is a racist: So what?" said Patricia Bobb, a trial lawyer and former prosecutor. "Does that establish the fact he planted evidence? The law of evidence is you can't impeach people on collateral matters. Ito is facing a problem he created."
     Bobb said perhaps having Ito step down might not be such a bad thing.
     Northwestern's Dan Polsby seems to agree.
     "This trial is a scale model of eternity," he said. "The O.J. Simpson case looks like it's going to go on until the heat death of the universe."

            —Originally published in the Sun-Times Aug. 16, 1995

Bumped to Sunday

DALL-E AI program

      No column in the paper today. I asked if the column could run a little long — okay, almost twice as long — in order to unspool a sweet story I thought needed  room to stretch its legs, and my editors bumped it to Sunday, where there's more real estate to fill. 
     A very 20th century, black-ink-on-dead trees concern. Although if I've learned anything in writing, it's that your hindrances are also benefits, and as vexing as it can be to cram your thoughts into a set space, doing so does encourage concision. I write my column in Blogger, which through some odd quirk has no word count function — maybe because online you have no limits. Online you can ramble on for as long as you like. Online, the idea that few are following you to the end because you're such a prolix bastard might never cross your mind.  Online, you can just say the same thing, over and over and...
     Sorry. Where was I? When I finish drafting my column in Blogger, and go to put it in BrightSpot, the latest platform the paper dredged up somewhere to compose our work upon, I'm always happy to see it's 850 or 900 or 1,000 words. That means I can then tighten the thing up to 750, 760 tops, the word count to park myself on page two. Without any loss whatsoever. Just the opposite: it's an improvement. Shorter is better. Back when I used to speak to students, I always told them, if they want to ace any assignment, just write it twice as long as the assigned length, then cut it in half. They reward me with boggled, yeah-that's-never-happening expressions.
    In honor of the above, I just cut out the next 10 lines of exposition. Trust me, you'll never miss it.
    When BrightSpot was rolled out, the biggest change was that I could no longer correct errors and simply post the new version. I had to find an editor to do it for me. Which was an earthquake, to me, because I'm always finding mistakes in past columns. I called the editor and begged her — truly beseeched, voice quavering — to let me post corrections. It was pathetic, and she said no. Basically, a control thing, and the kindergarten teacher view of staff — if we let Johnny do it, then we have to let everybody do it. Because we're all the same. When in fact, I always took the night shift employee's proprietary view of the place. At 1 a.m. the office is often empty, and you can go nap on the sofa in the editor-in-chief's office.
     For all its flaws, BrightSpot does work. Last week Facebook served up my Neenah foundry story from two years ago, and I reread it and noticed that I talk about "slats" in manhole covers when I meant "slits." Four times. Quite a lot really. The mistake flew past me, while carefully writing it, and all the editors carefully reading it, and every reader over the past two years — or none who wrote in pointing out the flub. So I created a new draft, replacing "slats" with "slits," called up a night editor and had him post it for me. Then checked to make sure it had actually happened, because with BrightSpot, you never know. Correcting errors that nobody else noticed in a story two years old. That's a good thing, I think. Unless it isn't. Anyway, fun column coming Sunday. 

Mailbag

    Assessing reality is my stock-in-trade. I can't afford to let illusions and ego guide me. Thus it's natural for me to acknowledge just what a small pile of pebbles I've managed to accumulate in my life. Humility comes easy; it's not only true, but useful. I'm proud that, in Friday's column about hot honey pizza, I could disgorge a paragraph like this one:

It's so obvious, now — you splash hot sauce on chicken; you pour honey. But it never occurred to me to combine the two. That's why some men run growing $40 million companies — Mike's Hot Honey is on the menu in 3,000 restaurants and sold in 30,000 retail establishments nationwide — and some are wage slaves jammed onto the No. 36 bus going up State Street, excited at the prospect of free pizza.

   If I asked you, what about that paragraph would prompt you to write in, aggrieved, I bet you would be hard-pressed to find the flaw to criticize. No so Chris S., who wrote:

Noticed in your writing you like to boast about yourself whether it’s how you used to get included at Gene & Georgetti’s political luncheon and now free pizza for this.

You should try some manual labor (ya know a real job where you actually produce something) and not just a bunch of hot air about a bunch of smorgasbord bullshit funded by a non for profit organization backed by JB Pritzker.

You’re one of the great hack writers of your era with little to no insight in Chicago newspapers. You’re legacy amounts to an article your colleagues will write that will be forgotten in tomorrows paper when the new headlines roll out.

    Usually I'd shrug that kind of thing off without reply. But I felt extra generous. He was obviously a reader — the Gene & Georgetti reference was from a column on Jay Doherty that ran three months ago. Plus he was criticizing me over something for which I am actually proud. It was so vituperative, plus grammatically spotty ("you're legacy," "tomorrows paper") that getting angry didn't seem an option — he was mad enough for the both of us. So I read his remarks again, thought carefully, and replied this way:

        Chris:

         No argument here. Thanks for writing.

         NS

     Most people are actually pretty nice. Even hateful trolls — that sounds odd, but I find that if you meet the nastiest remark with a dollop of kindness, the person in question dissolves in a puddle of gratitude. Hurt people hurt people, but they coo at a touch. I realized long ago that the psycho who writes me a dozen hateful emails a day also, in his topsy-turvy world, really likes me, and wants my attention, like a schoolboy pulling a girl's pigtails.

    He replied:

    lol no problem. I’m just jealous

    I did pause at the lol — "laughing out loud." Right wing haters are always laughing — trying to show their indifference and superiority, in a kind of "look at them Siegfrid, they're just ants" fashion. Anything that confuses them is deemed funny. It's a cover.  I could have left it there, but I was on a roll, and replied to his reply:

     No worries. I have a great life. A little jealousy is understandable.

     Not something I ever actually come out and say much. But true, nevertheless.