Culture
Waiting for Michelangelo
I’m sitting here surrounded by 120 CD’s of the music that once defined my life. There’s Dylan and Springsteen, The Beatles, The Stones, The Eagles, The Byrds––you can see where this is going, it’s a nostalgia-heavy collection––and there’s no greater proof than the fact this collection has been sitting in my office closet for at least 10 years, maybe more, in sealed boxes.
Next to the CD’s is a box of old newspaper clippings, cartoons, phone lists and rejection letters from publishers; beside it, a second box of what can only be described as trinkets––snow globes, bobble-head dolls, a sumo wrestler fan, a statue of Albert Einstein and a singing frog my son bought me on a vacation in Puerto Rico.
All this collects around my desk chair because, after 13 years, I am waiting for Michelangelo to come paint my office. MORE...
New York For The Fun of It
I went to New York last weekend for no other reason than to see what’s happening on the fringes of America. When you have Donald Trump treating Sarah Palin to dinner at a pizza franchise, well . . . it just doesn’t get any fringier than that. But of course, I was looking for something a bit more substantial in places where limousines are banned and tour buses like Sarah Palin’s are little more than canvas for graffiti artists. MORE...
Rained Out
We'll be back again next week. MORE...
The Pewaukee Sentrys
One of the many ways I misspent my youth in Wisconsin was playing baseball for a summer league team called The Pewaukee Sentrys. We played for the most part in Tea Party country where rival teams were often called The Minutemen or The Patriots. Our team had no such noble origins. We were named after the grocery store that sponsored our uniforms and, not coincidentally, was owned by the coach’s father. MORE...
Gone Fishing
What a perfect time to sample around the site and hit the MORE button when you see something you like. MORE...
Choosing St. Patrick’s Queen
On a cold Sunday in February, I went off in search of some respite from the politics of the day and found myself sitting in the warm glow of the Plumbers Local 130 union hall on West Washington Street choosing the next queen for the St. Chicago Patrick’s Day Parade. . . . The criterion for winning is pretty simple. The queen must be a young woman of Irish ancestry, between the ages of 17 and 27, never married, and, in the opinion of the judges, the fairest lass in the land. Determining this last pesky detail is the main purpose of the contest. But––this being Chicago––there are a number of other factors that weigh into the decision. MORE...
You Know When The Men Are Gone
For the longest time (literally), the United States has been fighting two wars against ill-defined enemies in places very few of us have visited. As we know from Homer long ago, war is not just about Odysseus and his heroic Trojan battles, but also about his long voyage back home…and all the Penelope’s waiting anxiously for his return with loyalty, domesticity, bravery, and agile wits. MORE...
The Santa Tapes (For Real)
In 1975, Art Baldwin was nearing the end of a quarter century of service playing Santa for the Marshall Field store in Chicago. Scott Jacobs caught up with him one day as he talked about the life, the lessons, the joys and sorrows of being the only one true Santa Claus on State Street. CLICK TWICE ON THE PICTURE TO PLAY THE VIDEO. Merry Christmas. MORE...
‘Tis the Season . . . To Bag a Buck
In Wisconsin the 2010 deer season is now over. More than 600,000 licensed hunters (11,000 of them "child soldiers" aged 10 & 11) walked the fallow fields and dense forests for nine days killing over 200,000 deer, although that still left a herd estimated to be around 1,000,000. This year's deer kill was 11% higher than last year's (but not high enough to bring the herd down to the 800,000 target set by the state's Department of Natural Resources.) And the most remarkable thing about this season is that––for only the second time in 150 years––there were no hunting fatalities. MORE...
A Golden Russet Moment
Late every autumn, my wife and I take her wheelchair-bound father, Rob, up to an apple orchard near South Haven, Michigan, to “pick” apples. Actually, “picking” may be the wrong word. Selecting is more like it. We walk around the farm amid large wooden bins full of fresh-picked apples set out on a hillside rising above the Overhiser family’s orchards and make our selections. MORE...
RR: Are you playing Monopoly on the iPad?
CF: Yep and I’m playing the Italian way. Making all my money in jail.
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