Speakers

Gallery Conversation: George Gershwin and the Color of Jazz – Art Institute Chicago – Feb. 27, 2026

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Loren Wright, assistant director in Interpretation (who knew there was such thing?) at the Art Institute, led the event. Per the museum’s website, Interpretation in this context, is the “highly collaborative,” way of making “sure the galleries are accessible and relatable to visitors.”

Wright did just that as we first stood in front of Marc Chagall’s America Windows, which, appropriately, are not only are blue, but also feature panels suggesting urban life and music, for her presentation about Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, complete with a few moments of listening pleasure.

The thought of too much audience participation is always a little off-putting in these situations, but the attendees proved to be knowledgable, appropriately inquisitive and considerate of time constraints while reacting to Wright’s prodding questions about the art, the music and their interrelationship.

We moved en masse to Archibald Motley”s painting Blues, depicting a Paris nightclub, for a discussion that, not surprisingly, included Gershwin’s An American in Paris.

Finally, we literally turned around to see Thomas Hart Benton’s The Cotton Pickers and accompanied that with conversation about Gershwin’s controversial Porgy and Bess and his song Summertime, along with quick excerpts of Louis Armstrong/Ella Fitzgerald and Audra McDonald versions of it.

No one left the program feeling blue.

Front Row: An Insider Series – Steppenwolf Theatre – October 27, 2025

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The next best thing to seeing a Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award-winning play is to go to a program featuring the director and some of the actors discussing the evolution of the work.

Phylicia Rashad (director), Harry Lennix, Alana Arenas and Glenn Davis came together, in a program moderated by Director of New Play Development Jonathan L. Green, to celebrate A Homecoming for the Artists of Purpose at the theater where the work had its world premiere before heading to Broadway.

That I have not seen the play didn’t affect my interest in hearing about the drama behind the drama, highlighted by a discussion of the final hours before the show took wing. Apparently, quite a bit of the script remained uncompleted until late the day before opening night, when Green rushed into the rehearsal on stage from the room where he had been with the author, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, pages in hand, like a scene out of some other play, announcing the script was done, to the relief of all, but forcing the actors (except for Lennix, who amazed even his colleagues by his quick study) to appear on stage the next night with lines in hand.

The participants used the word canon a lot, describing the play’s status in the theater world and in Steppenwolf’s collection of works, and also spent time articulating their steadfast attitude in bringing the “Steppenwolf way” to Broadway.

All that, and the cookies at the reception were really good.

Nicholas Meyer – American Writers Museum – September 18, 2025

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Nicholas Meyer came to discuss his new book, Sherlock Holmes and the Real Thing, his seventh based upon the remembrances of John H. Watson, M.D., the first having been the highly successful The Seven-Per-Cent Solution, which also led to Meyer’s Academy Award-nominated screenplay of the same name.

Meyer is equally, if not better, known for his involvement in three Star Trek movies – The Wrath of Khan, The Voyage Home and The Undiscovered Country. Coincidence? I think not, as the following exchange from the BBC show Sherlock might suggest –

Mycroft Holmes: “Oh, Sherlock. What do we say about coincidence?”
Sherlock Holmes: “The universe is rarely so lazy.”

To confirm, in season 3, episode 4 of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, Mr. Spock says “Well, as my ancestor, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, would write, ‘The game is afoot.’”

Based on his work, it was no surprise that Meyer came across as an extremely well-read, engaging and amusing speaker. Here come a few quick highlights.

The new book throws Holmes into the world of art forgery. Meyer’s discussion of copying versus forging versus plagiarizing was thought-provoking.

It led to a mention of the aggressive copyright action Doyle’s descendants have taken against various authors. Meyer suggested that his payments to the estate regarding his first three Holmes books (and none others thanks to the 2014 case of Klinger v. Conan Doyle Estate, Ltd.), exceeded a seven-per-cent solution.

His recap of Edgar Allen Poe’s case study of The Raven in The Philosophy of Composition was a terrific presentation that added another layer to Poe’s intriguing, alleged methodology of writing.

When asked about Holmes depictions in the movies and on TV, Meyer allowed that he hated the Basil Rathbone movies; liked the visual presentation style used in the Robert Downey, Jr. movies, but didn’t think much of the stories therein; and very much liked the aforementioned Benedict Cumberbatch BBC series, which employed an actor who has crossed over into the Star Trek universe, portraying a character (Khan) that first appeared on the big screen in a movie directed by Meyer. Coincidence?

Printers Row Lit Fest – September 6, 2025

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I originally intended to go to the Lit Fest program featuring Pulitzer Prize-winning author Maureen Dowd speaking about her most recent book – Notorious: Portraits of Stars from Hollywood, Culture, Fashion, and Tech – but decided that the subject wasn’t serious enough and the title wasn’t long enough, so, instead I went to the stage featuring sports historian Don Zminda talking about his book – Justice Batted Last: Ernie Banks, Minnie Miñoso and the Unheralded Players Who Integrated Chicago’s Major League Teams.

If nothing else, I learned that, as of August 2023, there is a Chicago Public School named after Miñoso, a childhood favorite of mine, even though he once turned down my request for an autograph, thereby traumatizing me to the extent that I never again asked for one from an athlete.

Zminda also, as promised by the publication’s title, spoke about some unheralded players, but I’ve already forgotten their names, so they have maintained their status with me.

The blocks-long fest was jammed with a crowd that seemed larger than I can remember from past years, apparently undeterred by any possible threat of National Guard troops taking any prisoners or burning any of the thousands of books on display.

Author Talk: “The Invisible Spy” by Thomas Maier – American Writers Museum – July 29, 2025

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Having enjoyed listening to Thomas Maier at the 2024 Printers Row Lit Fest, I looked forward to hearing about his new book. He did eventually get around to discussing it, but first I had to sit through 20 minutes of the same things I heard about last year.

The Invisible Spy is the moniker he gave to Ernest Cuneo, who played 2 years in the NFL before becoming a lawyer, a congressman and a liaison officer between the OSS, British Security Coordination, FBI, the U.S. State Department and President Franklin Roosevelt.

One of his close connections was with Ian Fleming, who credited Cuneo with the basic plot for Thunderball, which he dedicated to Cuneo as his muse.

Maier discussed the work of Fleming and other Englishmen in the U.S. in 1940 and Cuneo’s interactions with them and Walter Winchell and Drew Person, both of whom he fed stories to.

What wasn’t clear to me was why, other than for marketing reasons, Maier refers to Cuneo as a spy. As far as I could tell, none of the presumably confidential information he leaked was inherently damaging to the U.S. Nonetheless, Maier made it clear that Cuneo led a very interesting life before, during and after the war.

Get Lit!: Game Changers – American Writers Museum – July 8, 2025

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A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, I was a trivia star.

I have written about trivia contests in a few different contexts over the last several years – at bars, at New Faces Sing Broadway performances, at the Chicago History Museum and, of course, at my computer as part of my decades-long quest to qualify for Jeopardy (I took the online test again recently), which, if I did, I would, following in the declared footsteps of William Tecumseh Sherman, not accept, in my case for fear that I would totally embarrass myself and possibly become the worst contestant since Cliff Clavin.

In a less pressure-filled atmosphere, I went to the American Writers Museum’s Get Lit!; Game Changers event last week, where sports was the topic. My teammate and I correctly answered 11 out of 15 questions, unfortunately only good enough for third place (perhaps tied) out of six teams, all of which were comprised of at least four people (sour grapes).

I think my responses were ill-served by the three sips of a foul-tasting non-alcoholic beer that I took prior to the contest. Next time I’ll go with the night’s specialty cocktail (this time it was the MVP, described as “a sporty-twist on a ranch water cocktail.”)

Easing the pain of defeat was the evening’s speaker, who discussed three sports-related books related to game changers, one being Kathrine Switzer’s memoir about being the first woman to run the Boston Marathon.

August’s program – Get Lit!: Drawn to Life – is set to “celebrate the colorful world of animated movies and TV” with another “night of trivia, art-making, and nostalgia-packed fun.” I don’t know what the signature drink will be that night, perhaps the Flaming Moe from the Simpson’s or Blue Milk from a galaxy far, far away.

Dave Barry: Class Clown – American Writers Museum – Chicago Hope Academy – May 15, 2025

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This program attempted to answer the age-old question – should you really trust a person with two first names?

It was clear from his comments that Barry doesn’t expect to be trusted. He told the audience several times that his readers shouldn’t believe anything he says, that he’s a self-described silly humorist, a liar.

Thus he finds great pleasure in receiving countless letters, correcting him for “errors” in his work, from people who don’t get that he’s kidding. He writes everyone back, often extending the joke (lie) and thereby compounding the correspondent’s misconceptions and fury over the “mistakes”.

Barry says he got his sense of humor from his edgy mother, who, though she suffered from great depression and eventually committed suicide, did not foist her problems upon others.

When asked, Barry doubled down on his chosen career, saying that, although he started out as a newspaper journalist, his first calling had always been comedy, not writing.

Perhaps his best story of the evening related to the day it was announced that he had won the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary (1988), which led to a photo of his son (a later Pulitzer winner himself) giving him a big hug, which, in fact, was unrelated to the award, but rather the result of Barry having told the boy seconds earlier that Barry was buying him a Nintendo. As Shakespeare first said in 1599, timing is everything.

Season Prelude Reception and Dinner with the Maestro – Millennium Park – February 20, 2025

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The maestro, in case you have been avoiding all news, is the new Grant Park Music Festival (GPMF) artistic director and principal conductor, Giancarlo Guerrero, replacing Carlos Kalmar.

Addressing a packed stage, Guerrero had a lot to say about his background and plans, not only for this year, but also the future, in particular next year’s 250th anniversary of something or other.

He did so in a rapid-fire style that would make Aaron Sorkin proud. I was assured by GPMF staff that not everything he conducts moves at that same lightening-fast pace.

In his remarks, GPMF President and CEO Paul Winberg mentioned the organization’s successful DEI efforts, and didn’t get hit by lightning.

It never gets old sitting on the Jay Pritzker Pavilion Stage, with the glass doors closed to spare us from the frigid temperatures, and looking out onto Millennium Park from the vantage point, in this case, of a member of the violin section of the Grant Park Orchestra.

Several times I noticed the headlights from a golf cart driving east to west across the division between the seats and the lawn, which I assume was either some sort of security check or a search for the most wayward shot in history.

We were treated to two beautiful cello selections played by this year’s artist-in-residence, Inbal Segev. I wish I could tell you what they were, but I must have been too focused on the hunt for the golf ball. Segev will be playing at two consecutive Wednesday concerts in July, which I look forward to and when there will be written programs for me to crib from.

There also was a mezzo-soprano, who probably was very good, delivering a couple short songs, but, as we know, I don’t care.

Dinner in the Choral Hall was excellent (special kudos to the rolls).

Finally, I would be remiss in not mentioning my excitement when parking in the Millennium Park Garage for the first time and having the gates open automatically for me upon recognizing my license plates as entered on my prepay online form. I’m easily amused.

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.

Printers Row Lit Fest – September 7, 2024

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I started with the Sisters in Crime, represented by four women mystery writers, including Sara Paretsky. As there had been when I saw her there in 2018, a minute mystery competition was promoted. But I was so bored after listening to the first writer read from her forthcoming book, that it was no mystery that I left after 10 minutes to wander around, thereby missing the contest.

At last year’s Lit Fest I recorded a 10-second sound bite for the Get Lit Podcast, As I still haven’t received my imaginary royalties from that appearance, I decided to forego treating them to further words of wisdom this year.

I came across a tent selling t-shirts with messages like “The book was better” and “I’ll stop when I finish this page, chapter, book.” Tempting, but no sale.

For all you Wordle addicts, I came across a book of Wordle limericks, written by a retired oncologist from Fresno (please note, not a single five-letter word in that sentence, or this one).

Deciding to actually listen to a speaker, I dropped in on Thomas Maier, who thoroughly engaged the audience with stories about his career in journalism; his book and later Showtime series Masters of Sex; the recently-released Paramount+ docuseries entitled Mafia Spies: The Inside Story of the CIA, Gangsters, JFK and Castro, based on his 2019 book of the same name; and his newest book, Montauk to Manhattan: An American Novel.

I forgive him for the self-important addition of “An American Novel,” as it was undoubtedly the publisher’s idea.