Category: Writers

The Condo Board: A Play

The Condo Board: A Play

Alex Lubischer, a playwriting teacher at Chicago’s Goodman Theater, taught my beginning playwriting class that every play has its own interior logic that doesn’t have to be bound to reality. I’ve seen plenty of those, good and bad. He prompted us to write a short “bad” play that included a fire escape, a talking animal, a fur coat and a Venmo payment. I can’t guarantee my bad play, The Condo Board, has any interior logic, but it is definitely not bound to reality. The characters and their dialogs are fictional. However, you may see a similarity or two if you’ve ever been to a condo board meeting.

The Condo Board

SET: COURTYARD—48 UNIT FOUR-STORY BRICK BUILDING-EVENING

WE OPEN in a three-sided courtyard. It’s the end of summer. Onlookers sit in their open windows around the courtyard, on the lumpy grass, or lean against the building, waiting for the condo board meeting to start. In a 4th-floor window, a well-dressed, emaciated man with a straw fedora is stretched out on the windowsill. He’s drinking from a whiskey bottle and smoking.

Board members sit in a circle of mismatched folding chairs. Fire escapes are fixed to all three walls. Potted red geraniums fill the 3rd-floor landing of one. A bicycle is locked to the 2nd-floor railing of another. An old rag rug lays over the 4th-floor railing of another. In the center of the building, a cement sidewalk leads from the back door to the grassy courtyard’s edge. 

(PAUL, 49, the Condo Board President, balances a spiral notebook and some loose papers on his lap. The sleeves of his white dress shirt are rolled up. He’s wearing khakis and fancy sneakers and holding a pen.)

PAUL. The meeting will come to order. Do we have a quorum?

(BIANCA, 35, building manager, sits next to PAULwith a clipboard stuffed with papers. She’s slight and perky, long dark ponytail, wearing an ill-fitting grey suit.)

BIANCA. No.

(NORA, 50, board member, sitting next to BIANCA. Blonde bob, 1950s flowered fitted dress, pearls, shiny barrette, round wire-rim eyeglasses, white socks, classic white Keds.)

NORA. I talked to Barry an hour ago. He said he’s coming. He agrees to paint the meeting room aqua.

(BARRY, 45, board member, paraclimbs down the fire escape from the 4th floor like a chimpanzee, stopping to do chin-ups on the metal bars. Fit, athletic, Margaritaville T-shirt, shorts, black sneakers.)

BARRY. I’m coming! I’m coming! 

PAUL. (Strains his neck to see BARRY.) 

What are you doing on the fire escape? 

BARRY. (Lands on the ground and walks to a chair next to NORA. NORA perks up.)

Since we’re meeting in the courtyard, I thought I’d get a workout on my way down. It’s faster than that rickety old elevator.

NORA. (Shouts at no one in particular.) 

When will the meeting room be finished? It’s gonna be too cold out here next month. Can we paint it aqua?

PAUL. (Looks at BIANCA.)

Do we have a quorum?

BIANCA. Yes.

PAUL. Did everyone read the minutes from the last meeting?

(The emaciated man, hugging his bottle, falls out of his 4th-floor window into the bushes below. His hat flies off in the direction of the meeting. No one notices.)

BARRY. My name is spelled wrong.

(SUSAN, 55, board member, next to BARRY, bleach blonde straightened long hair, fake diamond ring, tight white t-shirt, blue jean jacket, tie-dyed tights, ankle bracelet, oversized pink sneakers.)

SUSAN. I didn’t get the minutes.

BIANCA. Minutes are in everyone’s board pack.

SUSAN. Not mine.

PAUL. Do we have a motion to approve the minutes with the correction of BARRY’s name?

(CARMEN, 45, board member, next to PAUL, black unruly hair, thick eye makeup, red lips, hoop earrings, head scarf, bangle bracelets, ruffle blouse, stuffed into blue jeans.) 

CARMEN. (Signals a silent thumbs-up motion)

PAUL. All in favor?

SUSAN. Don’t we need a second?

PAUL. What?

SUSAN. A second, someone to second the motion.

PAUL. How about you?

SUSAN. (Shaking her head) 

Oh no, I’m not gonna have my name in no minutes.

(MARCO, 33, board member next to Carmen, tall, black slicked back hair, goatee, sleeveless t-shirt, tattoos, tight jeans, pointed tie shoes, aviator sunglasses.)

MARCO. I second.

PAUL. All in favor?

NORA. When will the meeting room be finished? Does everyone like aqua?

PAUL. Can we have the Treasurer’s report?

BIANCA. The Treasurer isn’t here. 

PAUL. That’s Mark. Did he sell his unit?

(Pause. No one answers.)

BIANCA. Tsk. I’ll do the Treasurer’s Report. We have 239,241 dollars in operating.

PAUL. Motion to approve the Treasurer’s Report?

BARRY. I move to approve the Treasurer’s Report.

PAUL. (Gives Susan the evil eye.) 

All in favor? 

ALL. Ay

MARCO. I’ll volunteer to take over the Treasurer spot.

PAUL. Ok. Let’s table that ’til next meeting.

NORA. Wait. Hear that? Someone’s playing rap music. I hate rap music. When will the aqua board room be painted?

CARMEN. I’ll be right back. 

(she stands and walks off, shouting over her shoulder). 

I have to get my fur coat. It’s too cold out here. (voice fades)

(BOARD members talk all at the same time about nothing in particular)

PAUL. Order, please. BIANCA, let’s have the Manager’s Report.

NORA. (curled over, swinging her legs, muttering toward the audience) 

Finally. The meeting room.

(GREG 35, board member, next to MARCO, sandy hair, Rolling Stones t-shirt, blue jeans, Converse sneakers, skateboard at his feet)

GREG. Carmen! Carmen! Your parrot got out!

BARRY. I’ll get him. 

(BARRY paraclimbs up and around the fire escapes, trying to capture the PARROT.)

(PARROT, played by a child, green & red feathered costume, yellow beaked mask, hooked up to circus wires from the ceiling, flies up and perches on a fire escape railing.)

PARROT. Squawk! Squawk! Squawk!

BARRY. (mutters toward PARROT.) 

Yeah, we’re writing you out of the building, Buddy.

(Various Board members and onlookers simultaneously try to catch the PARROT and shoo him back into CARMEN’s open window. The PARROT flies around squawking and settles on CARMEN’s window ledge.)

PAUL. Order! Leave the PARROT. BIANCA! Please. The Manager’s Report? Order everyone!

(BARRY swings back down from the fire escape and returns to his seat.)

BIANCA. First up, Owners are complaining about the PARROT squawking.

CARMEN. (arriving back in the courtyard with her fake fur coat) Aw, C’mon. He’s not that loud. 

(She blows a kiss up at the PARROT.) 

Are you sweet boy?

PARROT. (PARROT bounces onto the fire escape.) 

Squawk! Squawk! Squawk!

SUSAN. I move we prohibit parrots from living in the building.

(PARROT flies around squawking and dive-bombing members of the board.)

PAUL. Is there a second?

SUSAN. Now you ask for a second? 

PAUL. Do I hear a second?

CARMEN. My PARROT is an Emotional Support Animal protected by the government. 

(To the PARROT) 

C’mere baby. 

(PARROT sits on Carmen’s shoulder.)

GREG. Carmen, you must recuse yourself from this discussion as a board member.

CARMEN. Ok, but my PARROT is an Emotional Support Animal.

(BARRY rolls his eyes. Greg and Marco stare at their phones.) 

NORA. Can we talk about the meeting room? Painting it aqua? How about teal?

PAUL. (Ignores NORA.) 

There’s a motion on the table. 

MARCO. What motion?

GREG. (elbows MARCO)  

The motion to kick the parrot out of the building. 

(Whispers to MARCO) 

Did you get the 50k? I Venmoed to you just before the meeting.

NORA. (Crosses her arms and legs, turns away, looks toward the audience) 

I thought the motion was to paint the meeting room turquoise. Or was it aqua?

MARCO. (whispers to GREG) 

Thanks, man. That new casino already wiped me out.

PAUL. (Looking around at the board members). 

Is there a second to the motion about the PARROT?

(No response. Everyone looks around but not at PAUL or each other, then look at their phones)

PAUL. Hearing none, the motion fails.

PARROT. Squawk! Squawk! Squawk!

SUSAN. (Jumps up)

Wait a minute, we didn’t even discuss it!

BARRY. The motion failed. End of. Let’s move on.

(Winks to CARMEN. Talks loud so the whole building can hear.) 

This is not going away, sister. We all hate that thing.

CARMEN. That’s not true. 

(Looking around the building) 

Who hates the PARROT? 

ALL. (muttering) Not Me. Not Me. 

BARRY. Let’s move on.

PAUL. Next item on the Agenda is recycling. BIANCA?

BIANCA. Okay, everyone wants recycling. We pay a recycling company $12,000 a year to come every Tuesday to pick up, and the blue bin is always empty. I propose we end the contract.

SUSAN. NO! I recycle all the time.

ALL. So do I! So do I!

BIANCA. Well, if everyone is recycling, why is the bin always empty?

BARRY. It’s that homeless guy who lives in the alley. He takes them plastic bottles and sells ‘em.

NORA. (Looking at Barry.) Are we going to paint the meeting room turquoise or what?

(BARRY puts his arm around NORA and whispers in her ear. NORA blushes and looks at her phone.)

PAUL. Is there a motion to end the recycling contract?

GREG. I move to end the contract. 

(GREG nudges MARCO)

MARCO. I second.

PAUL. All in favor?

ALL. Ay.

PARROT. Squawk! Squawk! Squawk!

CARMEN. I move we adjourn.

BARRY. (Standing in front of his chair, stretching, and doing squats.) 

What did we just vote on?

PAUL. We still have items on the agenda — the cable company upgrade, fixing the front sidewalk, and security cameras.

CARMEN. I still move to adjourn. 

BARRY. I second. 

(Winks at Carmen) 

Let’s go to your place and watch the game.

NORA. (Smiling, Looks up from her phone.) 

Did we vote to paint the meeting room yet?

PAUL. All in favor to adjourn?

ALL. Ay. Ay. Ay.

PARROT (On CARMEN’s shoulder as she walks off with BARRY) 

Squawk

(NORA walks off, smiling, staring at a fire escape.)

GREG. (Huddles with PAUL and MARCO, looks at PAUL) Let’s go to yours and decide on the rest of these contracts. My brother-in-law has a security company we can use for those cameras.

MARCO. My girlfriend is the bookkeeper at a cement company. I know the boss. They do sidewalks.

BIANCA. (Overhears and walks over) 

My dad can get us a deal from Comcast.

PAUL. Ok. Ok. Might as well. We’ll never get anywhere otherwise. (All four walk off together, chattering.)

(Onlookers in the courtyard amble off. Others linger in their windows, some smoking and looking at the sky. Someone waters a geranium and then stares at the sky. The man who fell into the bushes scrambles out of the branches and wobbles over to one of the chairs, hugging his bottle).

(NORA appears in the courtyard wearing a painter’s shirt with a bucket of aqua paint. She picks up the man’s hat and puts it on his head. He nods and takes a swig. She begins painting a fire escape as she hums “Blue Skies.” Onlookers look down at her and blissfully return to staring into the dark blue sky, humming along.)

END of Play

Body, Mind & Soul Music

Body, Mind & Soul Music

Candles, Israel-Gaza, and a World We Don’t Have Yet

Jonathan and Sandy Miller founded “Sounds Good” choirs for older Chicago adults in 2016. Two years later, they added “Good Memories” choirs for those with dementia and early-stage Alzheimer’s. Having no background in singing and an inability to carry a tune or read music, I hesitated to volunteer to help people with following their sheet music. But Sandy and Jonathan said a fuller group would give people a better choir experience. So I joined.

I’d been worried that I had slid into a period of ever-increasing cognitive decline myself. In researching what was happening to me, I’d read that singing, particularly choir singing, could help stitch together busted nerve endings in the brain. It has. Learning to match the notes to the words, concentrating on reading the music, and trying to vocalize it seems to replenish bits of lost grey matter. Choir singing enlarges my world by healing the brain.

Sandy & Jonathan Miller, Founders of Sounds Good/Good Memories Choirs

Little did I know that the world of Jonathan and Sandy Miller is a body, mind, and soul experience. The following essay was posted on the Sounds Good website. Jonathan Miller doesn’t “preach’” as our choirmaster. But he and Sandy exemplify every good quality expressed here.

Come hear the fruits of these labors at our concert in Chicago on Dec. 21, 2:00 pm, 4th Presbyterian Church, 880 N. Michigan Ave.

 

Candles, Israel-Gaza, and a World We Don’t Have Yet

by Jonathan Miller

We have been rehearsing “Light One Candle” in all of the Sounds Good Choirs for many weeks. When Linda Powell and I picked the song for this fall’s concerts, we had no idea how timely it would seem now—almost prophetic. It suddenly feels deeply relevant, especially when seen in the context of events unfolding in Israel and Gaza. What is happening there horrifies me as a Jew and breaks my heart as a human being. My heart cries out at the suffering that has taken place and is bracing for yet more suffering to come. 

Look anywhere in your news feed for thirty seconds, and you’ll see it: we have not learned how to live together. A song, therefore, that acknowledges pain and suffering is a good thing right now. A song about “the terrible sacrifice justice and freedom demand” is a wise and timely song.

Light one candle for the Maccabee children
With thanks that their light didn’t die
Light one candle for the pain they endured
When their right to exist was denied

Peter Yarrow wrote “Light One Candle” in 1982 when war broke out between Lebanon and Israel; he said that he hoped the song would take hold in people’s hearts like “Blowin’ in the Wind” had captured American hearts during the Vietnam War. The song holds up the example of the “Maccabee children”—those Jews who stood up for themselves when the Romans took over the Temple in Jerusalem around 165 BCE—as a source of inspiration, resistance, and courage.

History gives us many such role models of courage. Sandy and I recently went to a fundraiser for the nonprofit “Facing History and Ourselves.” Facing History equips middle- and high-school teachers and administrators to embrace a thoughtful, rigorous approach to history to promote civic engagement, a sense of empowerment, and the investigative rigor to understand how injustice happens—so we don’t have to repeat past mistakes. Their training and curriculum resources encourage deep inquiry. They show students how to ask the tough questions. They foster in an entire school (not just a social studies classroom, which is super cool) an orientation toward challenging entrenched attitudes about race, bullying, homophobia, and other volatile topics. A young woman spoke at the fundraiser; she had studied with Facing History in high school and had just graduated from college. Her words were an inspiring lesson in honesty and bravery. She said her college “worked hard to get Latinx students there, but they didn’t make us feel welcome when we arrived.” She spoke of fighting to raise awareness of the issue, to help create safe spaces for Latinx students at her college, and of her vision to shape a career that combines her passion for reproductive rights with her concern for immigrant women.  

Light one candle for the strength that we need
To never become our own foe
And light one candle for those who are suffering
Pain we learned so long ago

The event concluded with a conversation between Jonathan Eig, whose recent biography of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. has met with critical acclaim, and Adam Green of the University of Chicago, whose scholarly work includes post-emancipation African-American history, cultural studies, and urban studies. The conversation was about Dr. King’s legacy for us in our time; it was fascinating, and I felt stretched in a wonderful way afterward. The conversation took a deep dive into, among other things, our tendency to put leaders on pedestals; the seminal influences on King’s life and thinking, including Coretta Scott King and Rosa Parks; and King’s own way of stretching himself to take on bigger and bigger problems, even when it was very difficult, and of continuing to find and engage with people whose views differed widely from his own, including Stokely Carmichael and the toughest Vice Lords gang leaders in Chicago.

Light one candle for the terrible sacrifice
Justice and freedom demand

Toward the end of the conversation, Adam Green reminded the audience about Howard Thurman’s 1948 book, “Jesus and the Disinherited,” one of my favorite books. A mentor to Dr. King, Howard Thurman was dean of the chapel at Boston University and one of the most influential theologians of the 20th century. In this book, Thurman speaks to the downtrodden of the time: Americans of African descent, against whom Jim Crow relentlessly hurled insult upon humiliation upon pain upon injustice. However, rather than encouraging African Americans to succumb to rage, violence, hate, or disconnection, Thurman exhorted just the opposite: moral courage, a conviction that their own basic goodness, in concert with others, could turn the tide, and a sense, using Christian language, of “committing myself to the redemption of everyone.”

Echoing Gandhi, who said, “Nonviolence requires more courage than violence,” Dr. King said, “We will meet suffering with soul force.” When we do not follow the crowd by succumbing to fear or fearmongering, we can look our situation squarely in the eye and begin to tell the truth of the situation. Following this example, we must insist on goodness and truth-telling from ourselves first, holding ourselves to a higher standard rooted in compassion, what Abraham Joshua Heschel calls “moral grandeur and spiritual audacity.” This, in turn, creates a virtuous cycle of people committed to making the entire situation work for all concerned. I especially like how Buddhist nun Pema Chödrön describes King’s mindset: “For me to be healed, everyone has to be healed.” If my life gets better, but you are left in the dust, does that really work in the long run?

Light one candle for all we believe in
That anger not tear us apart
And light one candle to find us together
With peace as the song in our hearts

A worldview where we all mattered… what would our planet look like if that’s what we all strove for? How would we have to enlarge our sense of who “we” are if we wanted that sort of society? Can we challenge ourselves, individually and collectively, to do that? I’d like to find out. I’m not sure we can survive as a species if we don’t.

What all these wise people are pointing to is not conventional thinking, and I don’t claim to be good at it. If it were easy to create a bigger box that could hold us all, what King called “a revolution of values,” we would have done it by now. But I want that world: an America, for example, where I don’t have to choose between health insurance and food or between living in my car and paying rent and where I don’t have to endure ridicule for wanting that. I want a world where my character and skills matter more than my skin color. I want a world where caring for my children or parents doesn’t mean I have to quit my job. I want to be able to love whom I choose, make choices about my own body, and live with dignity in a place that I can afford. And of course, I want a world where the gifts and experiences of older adults are celebrated. It may take us still more centuries to “light one candle to find us together with peace as the song in our hearts,” but it’s the right direction. Let’s go there.

Don’t let the light go out!
It’s lasted for so many years!
Don’t let the light go out!
Let it shine through our hope and our tears.

“Light One Candle,” written by Peter Yarrow. Lyrics ©Warner Chappell Music, Inc.

©Jonathan Miller

 

Joys and Sorrows of a Colonoscopy

Joys and Sorrows of a Colonoscopy

The morning after my last colonoscopy, I stood in line at Starbucks to satisfy a sudden obsession for a flat white, not my usual coffee drink. A familiar tune came through the surround sound subwoofers. My toes began tapping involuntarily until the song’s words remembered my voice from long, long ago and softly fell freely from my lips.

Thunder only happens when it’s raining

Players only love you when they’re playing.

Dreams. Stevie Nicks. I imagined myself wiggling my hips and flailing my arms—an unwise move for a not-so-sure-footed roly-poly 77-year-old.

Feldenkrais teacher Deborah Darr says, “Imagine you’re doing the movements you can’t physically do.” She taught me that imagination can so deeply engage the mind that the body feels like it’s moving when it’s not. So, on my way home from Starbucks, I imagined myself line-dancing down the street humming Dreams.

By the time I got home, I was physically exhausted. I clicked into a meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous on Zoom. I’ve been attending AA meetings for over 50 years and often ho-hum to myself, “I’ve heard this story already…nothing new,” even if I’ve never seen the speaker before in my life. On this day, I zeroed in on the story so wholly that I felt every cheap drink, every disgusting hangover, every regrettable hook-up, and every sickening word of his drunken story. When he talked about getting sober, my stomach balled up, remembering the agony of those early days of sobriety with uncontrollable sweaty shakes and tears. The love he felt from fellow sober alcoholics and for his family sticking with him filled me, too. Love and gratitude seeped into my every pore. 

The growing ball in my stomach erupted at the emotional and physical powerlessness, and I ran to the bathroom and puked. 

(AP Photo/Dor Kedmi)ASSOCIATED PRESS

Seeking distraction, I turned on the TV. Hamas terrorists had tunneled under the Gaza-Israel border a few days before and riddled Jewish babies with bullets. News outlets had taken a few days to get the images to us. I wept watching the photos and videos, hearing children crying out for their mothers, watching helpless fathers, and reporters describing families on the move. Displaced. Terrified. Confused. Grieving.

I reached in my purse for the forgotten mound of papers handed to me as I left  the “colonoscopy suite.” Was I supposed to read them sooner? I don’t know. But I saw why I was so giddy, twirly, and happy in the morning and so emotionally flattened later. Fentanyl. The doctor shot fentanyl in my arm before snipping a bit of chitterling from my innards. Fentanyl is so powerful that I forgot biopsy results were coming my way.

The doctor sent me a note within a few days. “All clear,” he wrote.

Just one veinful of fentanyl laid down a new neuro path in my brain, allowing the deepest of joys and sorrows. Since then, if I’m tuned in, boundless joy arises from the hope of alcoholic stories—and bottomless sorrow from images of bloodied children being carried to unsafe safety.

Click: Stevie Nicks sings Dreams

Mikado Pintado

Mikado Pintado

At the Convent of the Sacred Heart in 1958, Mother Cleary announced at the weekly school assembly the name of the annual school play. She was uncharacteristically gleeful.

“Gilbert & Sullivan’s The Mikado will be this year’s play. We’ll start auditions next week. The entire school will take part. It will be a real pageant!”

The “convent” was a community of nuns and a Catholic girls’ school for grades five through twelve in a pastoral Chicago suburb. The nun’s surnames Riley, Doyle, O’Brien, and McCarthy would lead outsiders to think the order of the Religious of the Sacred Heart of Mary has its roots in Ireland. Not so. The order originated in France. Wealthy Irish families paid to have their well-educated daughters live and teach as “Madams” of the Sacred Heart, as they were known colloquially. 

On hearing the news of The Mikado, we in the lower grades looked at each other with a shrugged Huh? The high schoolers cheered. Full of musicians, music lovers, budding drama queens, or future dramatists, the upper grades knew their Gilbert & Sullivan.

Gilbert & Sullivan wrote their 1885 comic opera as a satire on Victorian mores, culture, and government. The plot of The Mikado is the operatic old stand-by of an adolescent boy and girl trapped in forbidden love. The forbidden in this opera is a law against flirting. Some like to think Gilbert & Sullivan used the ridiculous plot to mock England’s law against homosexuality.

The late 1880s British society, the Victorian era, is known for its sexual prudishness. As an eighth-grader in the 1950s, I doubt I knew the word “Victorian” was synonymous with hypocritical sexual repression. Do you suppose those crafty Sacred Heart nuns were trying to get some subliminal point across to their mostly virginal students?

Those in the know at school aroused curious excitement about the play, the music, the staging, and the costumes. Oh, the costumes. The Mikado is a fake Japanese story, and the buzz about the songs, the kimonos, the make-up, and those hairdos filled my dreams with whirling color.  

In Catholic schools, everyone sings in the choir throughout the year’s many feast days. When it came to my turn to audition, I had high hopes of landing a dramatic singing part. I had no idea I couldn’t carry a tune. My seventh-grade sister and I were called together to audition with Mother Cleary. 

“Oh, girls, we have the perfect parts for you! You will be dressed as mackerels and stand as sentries on either side of the stage for the entire play! Isn’t that exciting? You’ll be visible the whole time!”

“Mackerels? You mean fish?” I asked.

“Yes, yes, yes! Don’t worry; you aren’t required to attend all the rehearsals—just the last few. Mother O’Brien will contact you about your costumes.”

“I won’t be singing?”

“Oh no, dear. That isn’t a part for you.”

“Thank you, Mother.” No matter how dispirited I felt, I knew manners were required. Pretending to be grateful was more virtuous than expressing true feelings.

Our costumes were colorful green felt tunics with blue and grey scales stitched in rows around the entire body. A fin and fishtail were sewn to the back, not that it mattered since only the front was visible on stage. I loved my costume. Mother O’Brien fitted it just right. But the fish head? It was a gigantic papier-mâché exaggeration of a mackerel head with slits for us to look out. We had to wiggle into our heads in the wings and be led to our spots at each edge of the stage. The smell of fresh white paste never dissipated inside the mackerel head. 

We held silver staffs fastened to oversized cardboard hatchets. The mackerels were also executioners.

As executioner mackerels, we stood sentry throughout the play —  a constant reminder to the audience that The Mikado is about death. Self-decapitation, being buried alive, and boiling in oil are all described in The Mikado as humorous ways to die if caught flirting. Death is funny. 

I suppose for nuns cloistered in their habits, satire about death allowed them a fun escape from the reality of staring at a bleeding dead man on the cross at daily matins. My thoughts have turned to death every day before and since The Mikado because of that same bleeding dead man on the cross. But the play permitted me to laugh at death, and myself, for that matter.

As for Gilbert & Sullivan, I feel nauseous whenever I hear The Mikado’s “Pretty Little Maidens.” I suffer from a subconscious sixty-five-year-old humiliation that I buried while standing on that stage for hours, holding a weapon meant to decapitate. 

Funny or not.

The Gift of Wisdom

The Gift of Wisdom

When my dog died of liver cancer, I thought it was my fault. Why, you ask? Because I didn’t keep him from eating sidewalk nasties. What the hell? Did I think I was that God I no longer believe in? You know, the God who causes pain and suffering?

Victim-blaming runs deep with me. I’m good at it. Whether I blame myself for dead dogs, misfortune, and health problems or I blame others for theirs, the first thought upon hearing bad news is, what did I do wrong? What did they do wrong? When a friend told me she was hospitalized for an irregular heartbeat, my reaction was, “How does that happen?” Implying she did something to cause it.

Before the pandemic, in my downtown Chicago neighborhood, thugs drove around casing out pedestrians, jumping out of cars, knocking vulnerable people to the ground, and stealing their belongings. My neighbor reported getting mugged in broad daylight while walking her dog. My reaction? 

“Why weren’t you wearing that whistle I gave you?” As if she could have done anything to stop three teenage boys from shoving her up against a brick wall and ripping into her clothes to find her iPhone. 

At community meetings, police officers gave primers on how to protect yourself. Among the suggestions was to attach a colorful whistle to your coat, not necessarily to use, but as a deterrent. I had a few bright red whistles from RAINN.org, the national anti-sexual assault advocacy group, so I called and asked for more. 

“We don’t have those anymore. Our survivors thought they were a sign of victim-blaming.”

Whoa, I didn’t see that coming. I get it, though. Victims of sexual assault are hyper-aware of all the ways society, either by word or by thought, says, “That’s what you get for wearing those clothes or walking on that street at 3:00 a.m. or not wearing a whistle visible to your attacker.“

Over twenty-five years ago, I became a victim of fibromyalgia, a mysterious inflammation of the tissues connecting the muscles to the bones. That’s not the exact definition. I use that description because it’s easy for me to visualize. Contrary to all medical knowledge, I have a notion that if I can visualize it, I can heal it. I get relief with meditation, movement, and writing, but there’s no cure, no healing. I think I can fix it because I blame myself for causing it.

Deep down, or really just below the surface, I cannot accept the randomness of bad things happening to good people. I want reasons and meanings—some way to help me control the fear that I’m next. This psychology is my Screwtape, the Tempter leading me into madness. Dr. Google tells me it’s a natural phenomenon. I’m committed to seeking a way forward through virtuous self-care. But that, too, is Screwtape tempting me into believing I alone can fix it.

Living untethered to reasons and meanings is like George Clooney detaching himself in the movie “Gravity” to save Sandra Bullock. It requires courage received only through grace.

County Fair

County Fair

Boosters say the Taste of Chicago is the world’s largest food festival. The world’s largest!

It’s usually held around the Fourth of July. This year, with the newly-scheduled NASCAR race taking up the festival space over Independence Day weekend, the city moved the Taste of Chicago to less touristy September 9-10.

The quaint idea of having Chicago restaurants give people a “taste” of their signature dishes appealed to the legacy-obsessed Mayor Jane Byrne in 1980. She predicted there’d be about 100,000 people showing up on the two blocks of closed-off Michigan Avenue during the three-day festival.

On the first day of the first “Taste,” my thirteen-year-old son and I waded into the sidewalk crowd at the Ohio Street entrance, heading toward the Michigan Avenue bridge. Our nostrils itched with anticipation as each aroma swirled around us until the crowd thickened to an immovable throng. Signs for hamburgers, Chinese dumplings, deep-dish pizza, and sushi were in sight, but the food was out of reach. We all moved in a slow flow of claustrophobic, sweaty goo, trying to break loose.

“Thanks, Jane,” shouted my son.

And a roaring chant rose from the street like the fumes of the smoldering barbeque ribs: Thanks, Jane! Thanks, Jane! Thanks, Jane!

Chanting turned to laughter by the time we disentangled ourselves over the bridge at Wacker Drive. And really, it was hilarious. A crowd of 250,000 showed up. Jane had blocked off streets for the Taste next to downtown office buildings with only two openings in and out.

The following year, the Taste spread out at the edge of Grant Park. My son and I stuffed ourselves with various restaurant pizzas but avoided Greek, Chinese, and Thai food. Neither of us had elevated taste buds at that point in our lives.

Chicago moved the Taste farther into spacious Grant Park in 2023. The ornate 1927 Buckingham Fountain backdropped every photo. Food tasting required an adventurous spirit and a healthy gut. I ran into Lorraine, staring at the sign over the stand selling deep-fried Oreos, crab rangoon, and fried rice. We strolled past little and big hands clutching funnel cakes, rib tips, and Seoul tacos in dinky paper bowls—a hot Cheeto burger sold for sixteen dollars. The longest lines queued up at Harold’s Chicken and Badou Senegalese Cuisine. We sniffed out Chicago Doghouse to chow down on our favorite hot dog, but my throat clogged with the invisible flying grease of deep-fried Twinkies. I couldn’t do it.

“Try a “Beyond Meat” burger,” Lorraine said.

Nope.

“The More I paint the more I like everything” Artist unknown. Grant Park Rose Garden, Taste of Chicago 2023

Blow-up slides, band stages, and a karaoke contest all spread out among the well-gardened rose bushes and the native hibiscus. Lorraine joined hundreds of line dancers under the “Summer Dance” tent. This was indeed Chicago’s very own county fair.

My son has developed far more sophisticated eating habits in the forty-three years since the first Taste of Chicago. This year, he would have coaxed me into tasting unfamiliar foods or, at the very least, eating a hot dog. As it was, I walked home hungry.

I wish we’d gone together.

Jobs I Could Never Do

Jobs I Could Never Do

Every spring at Walsingham Academy, Sister Walter Mary selected a few students to prepare Catholic children for their First Holy Communion. The children were patients at the local mental institution, Eastern State Hospital in Williamsburg, Virginia. I have no idea why there were young children locked up in an insane asylum. We were trained to teach these pre-Ritalin six-, seven-, and eight-year-olds to memorize answers to preposterous questions such as “Why did God make me?” from the Baltimore Catechism. 

Eastern State Mental Hospital, Williamsburg, Virginia

It was pre-HIPPA 1963. We received basic training in mental illness. A hospital attendant walked us teenage tutors through the children’s wards, pointing out caged paranoid schizophrenics, psychopaths, and catatonics in their soiled grey tunics. Some children sprang at the chain-link fences, grabbing us and screaming obscenities. We didn’t teach this group. Our students lived in cozy dormitories and wore regular clothes. 

Eastern State—the oldest psychiatric facility in the country—had been founded on the forward-thinking concept that insanity was an emotional disorder, not an aberrant behavioral condition. Treatment included exercise and social activities. Catholic parents treasured the outside instruction their little ones received. I’m not sure how much my first-grader learned because all she wanted to do was sit next to me and play with my hair. I helped her into her white veil and gloves and took her to nearby St. Bede’s, where she made her First Holy Communion with the local children. I met her parents at the church. I never saw them again, never learned her diagnosis, or if she ever left the institution.

A few years later, I worked an overnight shift at the Point Pleasant Nursing Home in New Jersey.  My job was to straighten up—put games like Monopoly, bingo, and chess in their boxes and wiggle them into overstuffed cabinets. I wrote down missing pieces of each game so the next shift could look for them in patients’ hiding spots—pockets, drawers, purses.

A completed jigsaw puzzle of an Impressionist painting lay on its box cover under a window. I put the pieces back in the box and stuffed them into the cabinet with art supplies, books, and magazines. Before my shift ended, a patient wandered into the day room. She stopped at the space where the completed jigsaw had been and looked at me, panic-stricken. She grabbed my hair in a flash, shrieked I stole her art, and smacked me in the face. By the time the nurse reached us, we were both screaming. 

In dementia, my mother, Agnes, carried an ever-present small clutch purse. At that same nursing home, the nurses gave her their old lipsticks because the click-clacking sound as she rifled in her bag calmed her down. 

The day she died, I visited the nursing home and thanked the staff for giving my mother what I couldn’t: a proper confinement of love and respect to keep her from wandering around and terrifying her fellow creatures. Only then did I ache for the parents of the Eastern State girl I’d met twenty-five years earlier.

Back to school

Back to school

By the time I’d left the eighth grade, I’d attended thirteen schools. Dealing with all those changes led to the development of uncanny protean skills, including the art of answering questions before they were asked. For instance, my mother, Agnes, an ace at avoiding small talk, taught me:

“When you meet new people say, ‘My name is Regan. It’s from Shakespeare and it means queen in Gaelic’, so you won’t have to answer all their questions.”

This tactic thwarted the name questions on the first day of any new school, especially since my grade school classmates didn’t know what the heck I was talking about. 

Word Daily, coughed up “protean” the other day, a word seen once in every 16,000 pages you might read. I never use it, though I completely click with the namesake origin, Proteus. He was a Greek sea god who knew all things, past, present, and future. Recognized as a shepherd of sea creatures, he slept among the seals and otters, which, save for the smell, appeals to the phantasms leftover from my childhood mermaid dreams.

Proteus escaped those seeking his knowledge by changing his shape to avoid answering questions. In modern parlance, not a shape-shifter, but rather someone flexible and adaptable, is protean.

Proteus sleeps with the seals. Artist: N.C. Wyeth

In the lower grades, adapting to mean-girl culture, I inevitably and reluctantly had to announce, “I repeated first grade because I was sick; then I skipped second grade.” This answered the question of why I couldn’t add or subtract. If I had remained in that first-grade school, my parenthetical nickname would have been “The Repeat” all the way to the eighth grade. The Repeats were few but well-known. We bonded with knowing glances passing silently in the hallways. 

We were Catholics. My sisters and I attended parish schools, wore parish uniforms. There was never a back-to-school ritual in our house because we never went back to a school we had been to before. The beginning of each new school year was a fresh start. 

In Terre Haute we rode our bikes; in St. Louis the school bus. In downtown Indianapolis, we caught a public bus crammed with garlic-breathed commuters. In the Chicago suburbs, a school bus, my mother’s station wagon, bicycles, and walking, all brought us each year to a new building, a new neighborhood. 

I never learned how to predict the future like Proteus (though a spiritualist on LSD once told me I had the gift of prophecy). Predicting what the next parish would be was never in the cards—it was always a mystery. My ears didn’t reach high enough to hear my parents deliberating the matter. But I could easily predict we’d be in a different school for the next grade. For better or worse, we all exhibited protean traits: flexible and adaptable. 

Early on, knowing stuff came to be my raison d’être. I became and remain an insufferable know-it-all. Geographic stability has diminished the necessity for protean mental agility of late. 

But protean knowledge? It continues to inoculate me from ever being called any version of “The Repeat”. 

Lessons Learned: God

Lessons Learned: God

First Grade—Third Grade

God is a white man with a white beard and white flowing hair, sometimes holding white stone tablets, later to be revealed as the Ten Commandments. Then He has a son, Jesus, and simultaneously is Jesus. Jesus’ mother, Mary, and God aren’t married. Then God becomes a ghost, the Holy Ghost. Then He’s all three. Three persons in one God.

All people who were ever born are sinners who can never redeem themselves. But God gives Jesus to Catholics for salvation from their sins. Only Catholics have access to Jesus. They go to heaven when they die, thanks to Jesus dying on the cross for their sins. Everyone else goes to hell.

Lesson: Everyone is bad and God only likes Catholics.

Fourth Grade—Sixth Grade

God created Adam and Eve in His likeness and placed them in Paradise, a tropical garden with no predators or stinging bugs, and all the animals, flowers, and fruit in the world. God forbade them to eat apples from the Tree of Knowledge, but they wanted to be like God, to have His knowledge, so they ate the apples. He got mad and threw them out of Paradise. They had to fend for themselves—grow their food, make their clothes, and pay attention to God.

Adam and Eve had two sons, Cain and Abel. God seemed to like Abel better. Cain got jealous and killed Abel. God punished Cain by throwing him out of his hometown into the desert.

Lesson: Avoid God.

Seventh Grade—Eighth Grade

Jews and Romans alike feared Jesus for riling up the citizenry against their oppressive power structures. The Roman king of Jerusalem sentenced Jesus to a brutal crucifixion. Even though He was a Jew, the Jews didn’t come to his defense.

When Jesus’ followers went to the tomb to see His dead body, Jesus was gone. God resurrected Jesus, body, and soul to live forever. This is what happens to Catholics. They live forever. In Paradise.

“Tiger, Tiger, Burning bright, 
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry.”

Lesson: I want to be a nun.

Ninth Grade

Using my leaky Esterbrook fountain pen,  I write “How can God make evil” in the margin of my English literature textbook next to William Blake’s first stanza of “The Tiger”.  

Lesson: God is confusing.

Teenage—Twenties 

I look for the heavenly in alcohol, drugs, and men. I see God. Then I don’t. 

Lesson: There is no God.

Thirties—Sixties

There is a Higher Power. Maybe God. Maybe Jesus. Maybe the Holy Spirit. Maybe Buddha. Not a Catholic. Not even a Christian.

Lesson: Keep looking.

Seventh Decade

Casting off the lifelong mantle of sinner; I’m finally hip to the knowledge no one is born bad. God does not create evil and Jesus didn’t die to save me—God doesn’t need atonement from me or Jesus. There’s no heaven. No hell. Resurrection may be so. At the end, perhaps time and space will simply let go of me and I’ll wander an endless field of puppies, aka, Paradise.

Lesson: I’m OK. 

You Went to Woodstock?

You Went to Woodstock?

R-13471089-1563892691-9421.jpegToday, August 15 is the anniversary of the 1st day of Three Days of Peace and Love at Woodstock. There’s not been an event in my life that’s made me feel more like a hot shit than going to Woodstock.

On August 15,1969, everyone I knew in my small circle of dope-smoking friends was either headed there, planning to meet there, or trying to get there. Hundreds of miles of caravans disrupted the pastoral dairy farms of lower New York state, rolling upcountry from the Jersey Shore. Reveling in the world’s greatest rock and roll bands melded our bodies and souls into three days of peace and love.

Throughout the festival, Wavy Gravy danced to the microphone with updates on the number of cool cats sitting on the hillside of Max Yasgur’s farm. When he exclaimed half a million, whoops and whistles rose up to the spirit in the sky. All the hippies in America, maybe the world, had come together. I was right where I was supposed to be.

My friends and I told and retold Woodstock tales for a time afterward. And then it was over. Or so it seemed.

Eight years later as I stirred spaghetti sauce in my Sandburg Village kitchen in Chicago, my ten-year-old son and his friends were snickering in the doorway.

“Go ahead. Ask her.” My son elbowed his friend.

“Did you really go to Woodstock?” He asked.

“Yes, I did.”

“See, I told you.”

“Wow. What was it like?”

I brought out a small box of photos and souvenirs including my prized ticket to Woodstock to show the unbelievers. Until that point, I’d kept Woodstock quiet.  No one in my new crowd of straight and sober friends was or ever had been a hippie. Woodstock wasn’t yet a badge of honor, but rather the confession of a derelict life.

But after wowing those ten-year-old boys, I knew I was on to something.

In 1969, half a million was only .2% of the population. By 1979 we were an elite group, only 500,000 of us. In 1994 I interviewed for a twenty-fifth-anniversary story in a local Chicago paper. The Presbyterian church showed Woodstock the movie and asked me to give a talk about my experience. 

My ten-year-old grandson called one day in 2007 and asked, “Regan, my dad said you went to Woodstock. Is that true?” I assured him it was.

“We just watched the movie. It looks pretty wild.”

That box of souvenirs mysteriously disappeared after I showed it to his father’s pals at the same age. My grandson didn’t need proof to tell his friends though. Unbelievable reality turns believable with age. He asked about my favorite Woodstock band. The next Christmas he gave me a complete set of Janis Joplin.

Using “Woodstock” in the description of my upcoming book on Amazon optimizes search engine results. Even in my seventies friends introduce me as “…she went to Woodstock.” What are they implying? Drugs? Hippie? ‘60s radical? Or simply that I used to be a hot shit badass.

Read: https://www.euronews.com/culture/2023/08/15/culture-re-view-why-is-woodstock-still-so-iconic-54-years-on