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Booked for the Evening – Newberry Library – Feb. 7, 2025

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If only I had brought my checkbook with me, I might have been able to purchase John Bringhurst and Rosina Matern’s Quaker marriage certificate from June 2, 1682 for a mere $5000. But I didn’t, so I limited myself to browsing, and chatting with some of the staff who had been released from their research nooks to be available to wax poetically about the esoteric materials on display.

One table exhibited a collection of early to mid-20th-century house plans, down to things like plumbing fixtures, in case I wanted to build the retro abode of my dreams, like Brendon Frasier did for his parents in Blast from the Past.

Another, which actually held some interest for me, presented the sheet music for twelve Tunisian dances, composed by Ali Ben Salomone, from the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition, made more interesting by the fact that at least some of those dances were notoriously performed by Fatima Djemille, the belly dancer famously known as Little Egypt.

Lastly, I would be remiss in not mentioning the Dutes Miller and Stan Shellabarger Coffee Book display, which might go well with Cosmo Kramer’s coffee table book of coffee tables that turns into a coffee table.

The married couple used a different piece of paper as a coaster for their cups every day from January 25 through August 30, 2020, and apparently forgot to throw them out, so that today I could appreciate the coffee stains and rings they had left.

I would have expected to see something like that at the Museum of Contemporary Art, especially since, it turns out, perhaps not surprisingly, that there is something known as coffee art, though that at least requires some creative value-added over and above putting out a new piece of paper every day.

On Second Thought

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In 1965 the Doomsday Clock (not to be confused with the Doomsday Machine from Dr. Strangelove) was set at 12 minutes to midnight by The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, which seemed precarious when you considered that the universe is approximately 13.7 billion years old, give or take a few million years – something to do with the Lambda CDM (not a music storage device) and the Hubble constant, a measure of cosmic expansion.

That same year Hedgehoppers Anonymous released a song entitled It’s Good News Week, which, of course, it wasn’t, though everything’s relative, a theory that eventually led to the Hubble constant.

Today, the Doomsday Clock was set at 89 seconds (less time than it takes for me to whip up some instant oatmeal) to midnight — the closest to that hour it has ever been. We should be so proud.

According to a Bulletin spokesman: “We set the clock closer to midnight [only by one second from where it was] because we do not see sufficient, positive progress on the global challenges we face, including nuclear risk, climate change, biological threats and advances in disruptive technologies.” This is much the same as they said last year, when they did not move the clock. I wonder what changed.

Since there are 31,556,952,000,000,000 (that’s 31.55 quadrillion for those of you wondering) seconds in a billion years, that one second seems rather infinitesimal, particularly when you compare it to the five hundred twenty-five thousand, six hundred minutes that helped Rent win the Tony for best original score in 1996.

Take a second and think about it.

Michelle Cann – The Women of Chicago’s Black Renaissance – Logan Center – January 24, 2025

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This was the second time I’ve seen pianist Michelle Cann perform. She was fabulous in the summer of 2023 when I saw her play Rhapsody in Blue at the Grant Park Music Festival (actually at an afternoon rehearsal I fortunately attended as I correctly anticipated weather issues for the evening performance). Even at a bit of a distance, her energy and enthusiasm, atop her skills, were evident.

From a closer vantage point for this concert, it was even better. And, since it was just her, we also got to hear her passion through background introductions about the composers before each piece. She has a magnetic, contagious personalty, further confirmed by her interaction with attendees after the performance. And she sure can play the piano.

She brought to life the music and stories of Nora Holt, Betty Jackson King, Florence Price, Irene Britton Smith and Margaret Bonds.  I was previously unfamiliar with the music, but Instantly attracted to it.

Michelle is coming back to town later this year, with a whole different playlist, but I think I’ll keep the details to myself until I get a ticket, so I won’t miss out.

Writers on Writing – The Newberry – January 23, 2025

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Hernan Diaz is a Pulitzer Prize-winning and best-selling author, despite the fact that he says  he has met with universal and enthusiastic rejection about his writing for most of his life.

Diaz was in conversation with Ananda Lima, herself an award-winning author of poetry, who also has had real writing published.

Lima was excellent at eliciting interesting conversation, including her perspectives, but Diaz was the star of the program with his unique, entertaining articulations.

He’s all about words, saying that a book is only as good as its worst sentence. He calls his books syntactical events, He likes to write longhand, describing his typing as reminiscent of a praying mantis, and preferring not to be constrained by layout designs dictated by Bill Gates.

Trust, his second book, is four novels in one, each written from a different perspective, based on four style guides he fashioned in advance, creating what he called a stratified, polyphonic structure.

His mention of that led him to tell us that his procrastination time is spent looking at the Chicago Manual of Style, where he loves taking their quizzes. I bet he’s fun at parties.

What he doesn’t do, is research. He says that term should be limited to the sciences, where emotion isn’t allowed. He prefers to say he reads.

He describes genre as writing’s built-in device to help form a meeting of the minds between the author and the reader and a reason why he doesn’t worry about whether readers will “get it”, as he also assumes the readers are smarter than he is, which is a cause of his constant state of writing terror, the state of mind, not the genre.

Fun Home – Porchlight Music Theatre – January 16 – March 2, 2025

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My best personal dress rehearsal story (for anther time) is a perfect example of that which was best described in Shakespeare in Love as follows:

“Allow me to explain about the theatre business. The natural condition is one of insurmountable obstacles on the road to imminent disaster.
So what do we do?
Nothing. Strangely enough, it all turns out well.
How?
I don’t know. It’s a mystery.”

Porchlight’s Fun Home dress/tech rehearsal actually went quite well. A drawer of pencils spilled on the stage (perhaps appropriately since the play is set in Pennsylvania), promptly cleaned up by one of the actors ,who of course knew better than to let them sit there for everyone to stare at and/or trip over.

I was also engaged by watching a photographer work his way around in front of the stage (as best viewed from the balcony where we sat) snapping away for promotional purposes, while the actors, professionals that they are, totally ignored him, which reminded me of the way the actors in the immersive plays I’ve been to have worked around the audience members in their midst as if they were mere apparitions.

Back a mere four days later, for the final preview, it was obvious that the cast hadn’t just been lazing around the house eating popcorn and watching football, like someone I know. The production was even sharper and my enjoyment even higher.

Fun Home is complicated. It doesn’t sugar-coat life, but it also doesn’t forget about the good things – the ending is, surprisingly, not downbeat. Despite the play’s serious themes, it uncovers plenty of humor, with the aid of some wonderful songs. Listen to the children singing Come to the Fun Home and you’ll want to.

Making an Impression: Immigrant Printing in Chicago – The Newberry – Dec. 12, 2024 – March 29, 2015

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Printing is so yesterday. Now it’s all about videos, DMs and deep fake photos, although the U.S. Supreme Court has installed a speed bump in the social media highway for about 170 million people.

Hickory Dickory Dock,
China is on the clock
The Court voted nine to none
That their U.S. time was done
For providing us their Tik and their Tok.

So let’s discuss printing. Chicago in the late 19th, early 20th century, produced newspapers for over 20 different foreign language communities.

The current Newberry exhibit made an impression on me, but not totally in a good way. I understand why documents are protectively placed behind glass, but could the library at least put them close enough to the viewer so that they can be read. That said, I press on.

The highlight, for me, was the section dealing with the company of Curt Teich, a- German immigrant who arrived here in 1895 at the age of 18. The company secretly printed 3 million maps for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in World War II that were used for invasions and as decoy maps. A couple were on display, but, again, were hard to view in person, so I went online afterward, but couldn’t find them. Apparently still a secret.

The company was also known for its postcards, printing up to 250 million a year depicting places around the country. Among those on display were a few featuring a Chicago Chinese restaurant, which left me wanting more.

Shucked – CIBC Theatre – January 11, 2025

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Shucked takes place in Cob County, which may or may not be in Kansas (Cobb County is in Georgia), and very well may be taking place in August, the beginning of harvest season.

The show has cornered the market on corn and corny jokes, a veritable cornucopia, a word that originally referred to the horn of a goat, an animal that fittingly was the butt of a couple jokes in the show, as are butts and most everything else you can imagine.

I would love to see the pages of one-liners that didn’t get picked because they didn’t ripen properly. The authors should write a script, about writing a script, around the discards and call it Chucked.

I’m sure I didn’t catch all the references/homages to other Broadway shows, but I sure recognized the Shucked version of Music Man’s We Got Trouble (also set in corn country), entitled Bad, complete with rapid patter and Gordy, instead of Harold Hill, standing on a platform selling his schtick to the crowd.

Independently Owned is a show stopping song and the whole cast was great, but I was particularly impressed by their ability to stay in character and not crack up at any of the rapid fire, often groan inducing or head shaking, and frequently punishing, humor, that always contained a kernel of truth.

And Now a Message from Our Sponsor

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In line with the growing trend among other social media giants, I have decided to abandon third-party fact checking for my blog in favor of, not some sort of community decision making, but rather a dart board with True and False targets, although I’m still considering adding an ask a person on the street backup for those instances when the dart falls harmlessly to the floor and for when the time comes for Tommy John surgery necessitated by too many 100 mph pointed projectiles.

In case you’re wondering, and even if you weren’t, I also considered trying to get my hands on an EMERAC, like the one used in Desk Set, but don’t have the room for it. AI was suggested to me, but I don’t know what a three-toed sloth found in the tropical rain forests of South American could possibly due for me.

Part of the problem with the community approach is that I don’t allow any comments, other than my own, to be posted, for several reasons – 1) There are a lot of crazy people out there; 2) I have no interest in taking the time to read what would undoubtedly be a surfeit of corrections; and 3) Why do I care what others think anyway? – let them start their own blogs.

All that said, rest assured that I will continue to do the kind of thorough (read boring) research I was born to do, or fell into for lack of any other skills, without regard to the dangers of clicking on unknown websites, so that I can bring a plethora of minutiae to the attention of all three of my readers.

2024 Year-end Review

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I won’t bother recapping all the things I already wrote about – please look back on your own for anything you may have missed and in order to jack up my hits in case I try to sell the blog to an off-kilter billionaire.

Things I didn’t do:

Break any bones or tear any soft tissue (to my knowledge).

Read a book that wasn’t an electronic (but a lot of those).

Play the piano for anyone other than my piano teacher (and possibly a spider on the window sill).

Go to a movie theater (except the one that has been converted into a bank, and then only to steal a pen).

Set my bedside alarm.

Open a window.

Order more than 150 items from Amazon.

Play golf outside – I love playing on a simulator indoors – it’s a short walk from home; it takes less than an hour and a half to play 18 holes; I can choose from at least one hundred different courses around the world (and I think one on a moon of Jupiter); food and beverage service is never more than fifty feet away (more like fifteen for special customers like someone I know); it’s never too hot, too cold, too windy (unless you want it to be by adjusting the program), or raining; the ground is flat (no uneven places from which to take an elderly nosedive); no searching for wayward balls, or losing them; no one hitting into your group; no slow players in front of you; and much closer to the nearest emergency room, just in case.

I can hardly wait to see what things I can avoid doing in 2025! (like using too many exclamation points).

It’s a Wonderful Life Live in Chicago – American Blues Theater – December 6, 2024

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The American Blues Theater has presented It’s a Wonderful Life as a staged radio show every year since 2002, complete with breaks for singing commercials that reminded me of my visit to the Grand Ole Opry, but this was my first time in the audience, because, well, bah humbug.

I had my reservations, both literal and figurative, but decided it was time to see what the fuss over this consistently recommended show has been about all these years.

The theater encourages you to get there early to enjoy some rowdy renditions of holiday songs by the cast to warm up the attendees coming in from the cold.

After that there’s a little too much introduction to what you’re about to witness, especially given the fact that, unlike me, a fair number of people there were annual regulars, as evidenced by some comments collected before the show and read aloud by the actors during the breaks between acts.

The play itself is true to the movie. If you’re one of those people who can’t imagine watching anyone but Jimmy Stewart as George Bailey and Lionel Barrymore as Mr. Potter, then, of course, you’ll be disappointed. But if you’re there for the material, and the enjoyment of watching a talented ensemble do their thing, with cast members instantly, audibly transforming from one character to the next, all while Michael Mahler provides background music on the piano and J.G. Smith does her thing as the resident Foley artist (which is fun not only to hear, but also to watch), the evening is a crowd pleaser.

And there were free homemade cookies in the lobby afterwards.