Chicago Reader print issue of January 26, 2023 (Vol. 52, No. 8)

EDITOR’S NOTE

04 Our editor in chief on resolutions.

CITY LIFE

06 Shop Local Rats: the Board Game is infectious.

NEWS & POLITICS

14 Prout | Memorials Drugrelated deaths haunt the streets of Chicago, but overdose is not inevitable.

32 Profile Artist Ariella Granados

34 Burlesque Newport Theater offers camp and more.

36 Warhol Two plays look at the artist at different ages.

38 Villette Charlotte Brontë’s last novel gets the spotlight at Lookingglass.

39 Plays of Note Reviews of current shows from Porchlight, Redtwist, and more

ARTS & CULTURE

CHICAGO READER | JANUARY 26, 2023 | VOLUME 52, NUMBER 8

TO

Note Previews of concerts by the Brokedowns, Squirrel Flower, Daniel Villareal, and more, plus reviews of releases by Oddisee, Oozing Wound, and Stella Kola

EMAIL:

INITIAL)(LAST NAME)

PUBLISHER AND PRESIDENT TRACY BAIM EDITOR IN CHIEF ENRIQUE LIMÓN

MANAGING EDITOR SALEM COLLO-JULIN

PRODUCTION MANAGER KIRK WILLIAMSON

SENIOR GRAPHIC DESIGNER AMBER HUFF

STORY EDITOR SUJAY KUMAR

NEWS EDITOR JIM DALEY

THEATER AND DANCE EDITOR KERRY REID

MUSIC EDITOR PHILIP MONTORO

CULTURE EDITOR: FILM, MEDIA, FOOD & DRINK TARYN ALLEN

CULTURE EDITOR: ART, ARCHITECTURE, BOOKS, LITERARY ARTS KERRY CARDOZA

ASSOCIATE EDITOR AND BRANDED

CONTENT SPECIALIST JAMIE LUDWIG

SENIOR WRITERS LEOR GALIL, DEANNA ISAACS, BEN JORAVSKY, MIKE SULA STAFF WRITERS DEBBIE-MARIE BROWN, KATIE PROUT

FOOD & DRINK

08 Sula A new documentary on Hermosa’s Ethan Lim, and five local food books for your consideration

22 David Razowsky The veteran actor and his new book

24 Exhibitions The art of war

26 Poetry Diamond Sharp’s debut collection cuts deeply.

28 Art shows Reviews of exhibitions at Chicago Cultural Center, DePaul Art Museum, and more

FILM

40 A family affair Blue Island’s Lyric Theater

42 Filmmakers Sojourner Truth Festival of the Arts pays homage to Black women in film. 44 Movies of Note Blood, Missing, and more to watch on screens

MUSIC & NIGHTLIFE

COMMENTARY

10 Joravsky | On Politics Early days on the mayoral campaign

12 Isaacs | On Culture Marin Alsop’s issue with Tár

13 Ehlers | On Prisons A firsthand account of the torture of solitary

THEATER

30 Leadership Sheri Flanders talks to Black theater artists about community.

CORRECTIONS

In our last issue (January 12, 2023; Volume 51, Number seven), the story “Fifty Years of Struggle” incorrectly stated Frank Chapman was 82; he is 80. It also stated that Dante Servin killed Rekia Boyd in 2021; Servin killed her in 2012.

In that same issue, our Police District Council voter guide mistakenly identified Mark Hamberlin (Eighth District) as pro-police accountability with a dove icon; he is not, and is in fact supported by the Fraternal Order of Police. We also failed to identify Juan Lopez

46 Larson | Hit Girls An excerpt from the new book looks at Chicago musicians 50 Secret History Singer Johnnie Mae Dunson 52 Chicagoans of Note A Chicagoan jumps in the lake. 54 Shows and Records of

Early Warnings New and updated concert listings

Gossip Wolf Drag City more than doubles the posthumous catalog of outsider punk J.T. IV, and Golden Dagger launches a series on music and spirituality. CLASSIFIEDS

OPINION

62 Savage Love Dan Savage offers advice on disclosing STI status to potential playmates.

LISTINGS COORDINATOR MICCO CAPORALE INTERIM COPY EDITOR SKY PATTERSON

EDITORIAL INTERN EJUN KIM

VICE PRESIDENT OF OPERATIONS ANN SCHOLHAMER

DIRECTOR OF PEOPLE AND CULTURE ALIA GRAHAM

DIRECTOR OF DIGITAL ARTURO ALVAREZ

DIRECTOR OF MARKETING VIVIAN GONZALEZ MARKETING PROJECT STRATEGIST SHAWNEE DAY NEWSLETTER ASSOCIATE CHASITY COOPER SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING ASSOCIATE NIESHA DAVIS

DIRECTOR OF CHICAGO INDEPENDENT MEDIA ALLIANCE (CIMA) SAVANNAH HUGUELEY

OFFICE MANAGER AND CIRCULATION DIRECTOR SANDRA KLEIN

SENIOR VICE PRESIDENT OF GROWTH AND STRATEGY AMBER NETTLES VICE PRESIDENT OF SALES AMY MATHENY SALES TEAM VANESSA FLEMING, TIM OGDEN, WILL ROGERS DIGITAL SALES ASSOCIATE AYANA ROLLING MEDIA SALES ASSOCIATE JILLIAN MUELLER ADVERTISING

(12th District) as a former police o cer; Lopez was an Illinois state trooper until he was fired and charged with multiple felonies because he opened fire on his ex-girlfriend’s home after seeing a strange car in her driveway. Lastly, we omitted Trisha Kannon, a candidate in the 16th District. The Reader regrets the errors.

The guide is online at bit.ly/ChiVoterGuide, and we are publishing a new voter guide pullout for the February 9 print issue.

JIM DALEY, NEWS EDITOR

READER INSTITUTE FOR COMMUNITY JOURNALISM, INC. CHAIRPERSON EILEEN RHODES TREASURER REESE MARCUSSON SECRETARY KIM L. HUNT DIRECTORS ALISON CUDDY, DANIEL DEVER, MATT DOUBLEDAY, VANESSA FERNANDEZ, TORRENCE GARDNER, ROBERT REITER, CHRISTINA CRAWFORD STEED

READER (ISSN 1096-6919) IS PUBLISHED BIWEEKLY BY THE READER INSTITUTE FOR COMMUNITY JOURNALISM 2930 S. MICHIGAN, SUITE 102 CHICAGO, IL 60616 312-392-2934, CHICAGOREADER.COM

COPYRIGHT © 2023 CHICAGO READER

PERIODICAL POSTAGE PAID AT CHICAGO, IL ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. CHICAGO READER, READER, AND REVERSED R: REGISTERED TRADEMARKS ®

As January inches to a close, it’s a good time to take stock of what this year has been like thus far, and where we stand on those pesky New Year’s resolutions we promised we’d actually stick to this time around. Remember those? Well, smart indoor rowing machine, meet the storage unit; promise to drop ten pounds, meet Carnicería Maribel’s delectable torta de carnitas.

A few weeks back, during our first editorial meeting of the year, I asked editorial sta ers to come up with a personal newsroom resolution, and share it in a singular word with no context. It was an interesting experiment that produced terms like a promising “yes,” “collaboration,” “determination,” and a stoically

self-explanatory “journalism.”

Mine was “re-energize.” I chose that word because it symbolizes so much of where I’d like for the Reader to head and expand. We’re lucky enough to have a dynamic and resilient team that, with a few battle scars under its belt, remains steadfast in producing quality journalism and shining a light on wrongs that should be corrected, as well as on the people, movements and moments, and very particularly in this issue, the artists and visionaries that make our city such a unique place to call home.

My commitment to what we do was recently reenergized when I found myself during a brisk morning strolling past Clark

Street’s Bankers Building. The Burnham Brothers’ 41-story behemoth has held many distinctions since it was first opened in 1927: it’s the city’s tallest all-brick edifice, and its 19th floor once housed the FBI office tasked with taking down notorious bank robber John Dillinger. For a while, it also served as headquarters for Medill’s Central Loop newsroom.

It was there where I arrived as a wide-eyed freelancer in the summer of 2009, to be part of the journalism school’s final Academy for Alternative Journalism, a project the Reader originated in conjunction with Northwestern a decade prior.

I remember the first time I entered through the building’s revolving door, a Chicago staple that’s not as commonplace back in the homeland, and holding onto the brass handlebar as a giddy inner voice said, “That was fun—let’s do it again!”

Going past the skyscraper again, all these years later and with nary anyone else around, I reflected and paused. The structure not only was ground zero for what would be my rip-roaring career in the alt-weekly industry, but it would also double as shelter on more than one occasion. See, I’d pitched the idea that I would experience the real Chicago by crashing at strangers’ homes I’d find on the newishly launched couchsurfing.com. More than a potential story though, it was a way for me to guarantee shelter during my Windy City stint, as I’d arrived in town with something like $60 in my bank account, and the fellowship’s stipend would only go so far.

I would have been too humiliated to share this back then, but lodging plans would sometimes fall through, and money would be extra

tight, so without anyone ever knowing, I slept on the newsroom floor on more than one occasion. I developed a system: I’d lay out a couple of sofa cushions under my desk, make sure to set an alarm to go o before the morning cleaning crew arrived, make myself presentable in the newsroom bathroom, and hopefully scrounge up some food from the break room fridge’s communal shelf. Sometimes it was someone else’s leftovers; sometimes I lucked out and it was an intact Yoplait yogurt.

I have no shame in sharing this now.

Through it all, I somehow managed to never get down on myself. Are you kidding me? I got to call this incredible town home for at least a couple of months. This is where I belonged. I’d also have the opportunity to hone my skills and meet industry leaders who I still consider mentors to this day.

The winter chill nipping at my nose, I stood there for a minute, took the full circle moment in, and snapped a quick pic as a humble reminder.

Looking back, I now cherish that hardship, and hold that freelancer’s unabashed perseverance near to my heart, because it all brought me to where I am now. I resolve to honor him and his big, seemingly unattainable dreams, and to let our shared energy carry me into these next 11 months—and beyond. v

—Enrique Limón, editor in chief @EnriqueLimon

Reader EIC strikes a pose outside the Bankers Building (aka Clark Adams Building)

By ANNIE HOWARD

If you, like me, are a fan of the humble city rat, then the relationship between our fair city and New York is an instructive one. Like all things New York, the allure of America’s biggest city seems to make everything, including its relationship to the quintessential urban rodent, more grandiose. Whether it’s the high-profile search for a well-paid “rat czar” to handle the city’s “real enemy,” the countless videos of rats dragging around slices of pizza, or even the fact that “Rats in New York City” is its own Wikipedia page, you could easily convince yourself that the Big Apple is the singular American locale for ratty obsessions.

But Chicago is no slouch when it comes to a certain reverence for the oft-despised creature. The transformation of Chicago’s iconic Don’t Feed the Rats poster by artist Derek Erdman into a loving encouragement to “Put ALL garbage on the ground” is only the most obvious example. WBEZ’s Curious City also did an investigation into the proliferation of Chicago’s rat population. While New York gets all the attention, Chicago has quietly held down the title of America’s rattiest city for eight straight years. If we’re the city that works, as Nelson Algren once said, it seems that the rats also got the message.

It’s no wonder then, that the goal of Target: Rats, a new board game from the Chicago-focused retailer Transit Tees, is to grow the city’s rat population, rather than destroy it. Following on the success of the company’s Uno-inspired card game Loop, later turned into a board game, Target: Rats pits up to four rat families against one another, and even more distressingly, an exterminator figure who haunts the city streets. The goal is simple:

to spread one’s rat empire above and below ground as far and wide as possible, by building nests, spawning new rats, and fighting to become “Da Big Cheese,” or the ruler of the underground hub that sits at the center of the game board.

Like many board games, Target: Rats requires a bit of a learning curve to settle in, although once you’ve established the basic rhythms, gameplay is dynamic and rewarding. Turns are structured by a combination of movement and activity, with several possible outcomes after moving four spaces on the board: feed (if rats are at a food source), breed (if two rats are fed, they can give birth to two others), nest (creating a potential new spawning point), fight (if you happen upon another player’s rats), or scavenge, which involves taking a card from one of two decks. Players move from the surface to the underground via sewers, and placeable dumpsters can create a steady food source that allows more rats to enter gameplay.

The game balances elements of strategic thinking, luck, and interpersonal interactions but not always successfully. For one, there’s an imbalance in the two card decks: surface-level cards are skewed nearly three-to-one in favor of spawning more rats, compared to a more even split underground, which can create inadvertent imbalances in player outcomes depending on where players settle. But the biggest impediment to forward progress is the lack of dedicated food sources that remain on the game board, making it hard to even begin expanding one’s rat population. Even if you’ve played the game before and have a strategy in mind, it can take a frustratingly long time to build momentum, which in my experience

warded o some first-time players from wanting to dig deeper.

Like so many board games, house rules can make up for certain limitations in the board game’s base settings. For one, all future playthroughs in my household will include several dedicated, nondisappearing food sources, available to all rats at all times. Rebalancing the game in this way speeds up gameplay and removes some of the frustration for first-time players, better allowing players to focus on the other, more fun elements of the game that are more challenging when resources are scarcer.

Those elements are combat between rat families, and the ever-present threat of the Exterminator, a crucial X factor that can make or break a game. The player who possesses Da Big Cheese, first gained by throwing a one in the center of the board, also gains a one-die advantage in any fight, making its possession vital throughout the game. Balancing the strategic question of when and with how many rats to fight your opponents for territory, combined with the luck of a dice throw, ensures that each confrontation around the game board becomes a dynamic showdown.

The Exterminator is the other factor that can cut a player’s momentum in their tracks and prevent someone from winning just as it seems the game is in hand. The Exterminator kills rats, destroys food sources and nests, and otherwise blocks movement around the board.

It provides a challenging impediment to forward progress, while also allowing those falling behind to catch up by targeting their

opponent’s favorite dedicated nesting spot/ food source combination for extermination. Even when a player is on the brink of victory, holding possession of Da Big Cheese and with three nests around the board even after every other player has gone, a lucky throw can unexpectedly stretch the game further.

Still, at the end of the day, I found myself wondering: would it be possible to play against the Exterminator? In a game of expanding rat populations, could players work together not in a battle of survival of the fittest, but instead aim to overrun the entire map, until the Exterminator can no longer prevent the rats from taking over the entire city itself?

I have yet to give this rewrite a chance, but my vision is simple: players collaborate to build communal nests, expand food supplies, and otherwise attack the Exterminator at all turns. There’d be a limit on the number of player turns available before the game ended, and the goal would be to get every single nest and rat on the board before time ran out. The game board itself seems capacious enough to carry out this approach and honors our city’s real-life rats, who have done so well to grow their ranks with seemingly nothing to stop them.

In his book Rats: Observations on the History & Habitat of the City’s Most Unwanted Inhabitants , Robert Sullivan writes, “I think of rats as our mirror species, reversed but similar, thriving or su ering in the very cities where we do the same.” Target: Rats invites us to suspend our usual judgments, embrace our furry rodent counterparts, and spread out a bit, content to proliferate as widely as our own rats have managed. Our rats live in abundance, making us the country’s rattiest city; perhaps it’s time we start to do the same. v

My love is real It’s doesn’t ask or expect anything from you

My love is real It tells me to believe in myself

My love is real

It tells me. It tells me “I know you don’t need me!”

My love is real

You don’t need to believe me Sometimes you don’t even see me

My love is. You say it’s cold blooded but it just is. I be in motion wondering what’s next But. I don’t need you to know that I exist

My love is real

Moments we shared. I know you a never forget But I can’t dwell in the past like that

We don’t gotta make this last forever cause.. Love. Always. Is.

I seen you grow I seen you high I seen you low

Funny how sometimes You can still feel like I ain’t never seen you before

Funny how sometimes I can still feel like The love has died inside

Funny how it can feel like that, huh?

Cause my love is alive

By Dawn “Holdawn” Ali

Your love is real It’s doesn’t ask or expect anything from me

Your love is real It tells me to believe in myself

Your love is real

It tells me. It tells me “I know you don’t need me!”

Your love is real

You don’t need to believe me Sometimes you don’t even see me

Your love just is. Your love just is. And you be in motion wondering what’s next But. You don’t need me to know that you exist

Your love is real

Moments we shared. You know I a never forget But we don’t gotta dwell in the past like that

You don’t gotta make this last forever cause.. Love. Always. Is.

You seen me grow You seen me high You seen me low

Funny how sometimes I can still feel like you ain’t never seen me before

Funny how sometimes I can still feel like The love has died inside

Funny how it can feel like that, huh? Cause your love is alive

Dawn Ali is a poet & recording artist from Baltimore, Maryland based in Chicago also known as Holdawn. His message is inspired by his deep interest in health and expression of free-spiritedness.

Poem curated by Justus Pugh. Justus is a poet, writer, and technologist born and raised on the South side of Chicago. As an artist, his work is guided by the idea that our imagination is our ancestor’s wildest dreams, inherited. And this imagination comes through writing his “Afrotranscendental” poetry, writing culinary fiction with Village X Magazine, and, now and today, storytelling.

A biweekly series curated by the Chicago Reader and sponsored by the Poetry Foundation.

Latinx Poetics Anthology Launch Celebration Join

Thursday, February 2, 2023, 7:00

PREVIEW

Watch the Cambodian Bear forage Indian fruit pies this winter

A

documentary short on Hermosa’s Ethan Lim, and five local food books for your consideration

By MIKE SULA

There’s no restaurant opening in 2023 more anticipated than Carmen “Carmy” Berzatto’s transformation of his brother’s venerable but grotty River North beef joint into a fine dining destina—uhhh, wait. No.

I’m thinking of season two of The Bear, the fictionalized heart-attack-on-a-plate that might be the most harrowing depiction of life on the line ever committed to the small screen. Shooting starts next month in advance of a ten-episode return to Hulu in early summer, according to the trades.

Little noticed amid the deafening buzz is the forthcoming release of the documentary antidote to Jeremy Allen White’s dreamy kitchen dysfunction: Cambodian Futures , a 17-minute short film focused on a real-life restaurant—the beloved, ever-evolving Hermosa. Shepherded these past eight years by Ethan Lim, who took it from a neighborhood sandwich shop to one of the hottest tables in

town, the chef serves a visionary expression of Khmer food, a cuisine whose development skipped a generation due to war and genocide.

Lim, the most chill chef you’ll ever meet, soothingly narrates his own sometimes gutting journey, beginning in a Thai refugee camp and leaving off at last year’s Jean Banchet Awards (where, spoiler, he won Rising Chef of the Year). Directed by Dustin Nakao-Haider ( Shot in the Dark ), it’s one episode in the second season of Firelight Media/American Masters’ In the Making series, focusing on emerging BIPOC artists. Lim’s the only chef to be profiled. There’s no o cial release date yet, but Nakao-Haider reports it’ll likely appear on PBS sometime in March.

I can’t predict whether the Chicago food world’s onscreen profile this year will match 2022 (which included the Trotter doc, and arguably, The Menu, and season three of South Side), but that’s a good start.

There’s a clearer picture for food writers.

Inn in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. During the pandemic, Regan’s lengthy family history of mushroom hunting followed her and her wife north, along with the anxieties of a fretful father. Remoteness doesn’t mean idleness, as she recounts fraught trips over dirt roads to the truck stop for broasted chicken, baby-making efforts, and an alcoholic relapse. Regan may have left the mental hazards of restaurant life behind, but she’s found plenty to worry about in the woods.

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Indian Cuisine , edited by Colleen Taylor Sen, Sourish Bhattacharyya, and Helen Saberi (Bloomsbury Academic, February 23): I’m probably more excited for this massive 436-page ($157.50) tome than any other in recent memory. Comprehensively capturing the breadth of sub-

continental cuisine seems like an impossible Borgesian labor, but Chicago culinary historian Sen—with seven related titles already to her name—along with two co-editors and 27 writers have made a convincing go at it. You could easily spend weeks bouncing among 236 entries, from Sanskrit scholar and food chemist K.T. Achaya to the kokum fruit, and the black, sticky condiment it produces; from the slow-stewed Muslim beef dish nihari to the galaxy of yams and their infinite purposes.

Made in Chicago: Stories Behind 30 Great Hometown Bites , Monica Eng, David Hammond (3 Fields Books, March 21): Via the Tribune and WBEZ, current Axios reporter Eng has been documenting the dimmer cor-

Ethan Lim at Hermosa BEN VOGEL

Find more one-of-a-kind Chicago food and drink content at chicagoreader.com/food.

Fieldwork: A Forager’s Memoir , Iliana Regan (Agate, January 24): This is the former Elizabeth chef’s second tell-all after 2019’s Burn the Place. Since then, she left the kitchen

and earned an MFA in writing from the Art Institute while running the remote Milkweed

ners of the Chicago food scene longer than just about anyone. With Newcity’s Hammond, they’ve assembled a taxonomic guidebook to

stories behind less celebrated working-class originals like the Japanese-American rice and gravy burger plate akutagawa; sweet sticky Chinese-Korean gampongi lollipop wings; and the city’s other beef on a bun: the sweet steak sandwich.

Pulp: A Practical Guide to Cooking with Fruit , Abra Berens (Chronicle Books, April

4): If two years go by without a sprawling single-subject cookbook from former Chicago chef Berens, did they really happen? Along with 2019’s vegetable-forward Ruffage and 2021’s grain-based Grist , this fruit- and (somewhat) baking-centered book makes a nice boxed set, even if it is just concerned with varieties that can be found in the midwest. (What, no pawpaws?) Still, from her Three Oaks farm kitchen she manages to conjure up Michigan exotica like marigold syrup, ground cherry floats, and rosé-poached apricots with earl grey semifreddo.

the city’s lesser-known endemic eats. With obligatory chapters on familiar signatures like hot dogs and deep dish, its real value lies in the

Midwest Pie: Recipes that shaped a region, edited by Meredith Pangrace (Belt Publishing, May 9): On the heels of 2021’s Rust Belt Vegan Kitchen, Belt’s creative director tackles a more ubiquitous and crowd-pleasing subject, with recipes spanning “old classic” pies such as funeral and sawdust; regional originals like the Nation of Islam’s bean pie and Indiana’s sugar cream Hoosier pie; “desperation pies” that re-

lied on pantry staples when times were tough (chess, shoofly, mock apple); midwestern produce pies (persimmon chi on); and retro relics (cottage cheese, chocolate rum). v

@MikeSula

COMMENTARY

ON POLITICS

The early days

the new news about Chicago mayoral elections —nobody knows nothin’.

By BEN JORAVSKY

With roughly seven weeks to go until round one of the mayoral election, here’s what we know so far from the latest polls.

If the election were held today, the winner would be . . . Karen Lewis!

OK, I’ll get to that. But first, a word or two about a recent “poll.” It was put out by Crain’s Chicago Business and the Daily Line, who explain that, despite headlines to the contrary, it’s a “survey,” not a poll.

Not sure what the distinction is. And I’m sure there’s no truth to the rumors that it’s based on Crain’s political columnist Greg Hinz standing on the corner of State and Randolph and calling out to passersby, “Hey, who ya’ votin’ for?”

According to the survey/poll, Cook County commissioner Brandon Johnson and Congressperson Jesús “Chuy” García are tied at the top with 25 percent of the vote.

Not surprisingly, that finding is enthusiastically championed by Johnson and García and disdainfully dismissed by Mayor Lori Lightfoot, Willie Wilson, Paul Vallas, Kam Buckner, Sophia King, Ja’Mal Green, and Roderick Sawyer. AKA—the other candidates in the race.

I’m with them—I don’t believe that poll/survey, either. Don’t take it personally, Crain’s at the moment, I’m not believing any polls.

No, it’s pretty obvious that campaign strategists are using fake polls as propaganda to fire up their supporters and dispirit their opponents.

It’s dirty politics masked as scientific research, and as usual the Republicans are a step ahead of the Democrats at this game. As we saw in the midterms when a series of phony Republican polls bamboozled the New York Times into sounding a warning about a Red Tide. Which turned out to be a red trickle.

The brouhaha over the mayoral poll/survey

demonstrates the reality about mayoral elections that all candidates would agree on, so long as they’re speaking o the record.

Chicago politics is a little like making hit movies in Hollywood—no one knows nothing.

If we’ve learned anything from the last two mayoral elections, it’s all about the runoff, baby. If no one gets 50 percent or more from the first round on February 28, it comes down to a winner-takes-it-all showdown on April 4.

So this first round is basically a race to the runo .

And outside a few diehards—like the people reading this column—the vast majority of Chicago voters are not yet paying attention.

Alas, the vast majority of Chicagoans will never be paying attention, if the trend of 35 percent voter turnout continues.

Having said all that, let me say this: the idea of Johnson and García making the runo caught me o guard.

As a lifelong lefty I’ve been conditioned to believe I’m so far to the left of ordinary Chicagoans that anyone I’d even consider voting for would undoubtedly lose. For me, a mayoral election is usually about deciding between the lesser of two evils—since Harold Washington, anyway.

But at the head of this poll are two left-ofcenter candidates who owe their careers to Karen Lewis, the unabashedly radical former president of the Chicago Teachers Union. Is it possible that Chicago’s not so conservative after all?

Brandon Johnson worked for Karen Lewis— she hired him as a political organizer. And it was with CTU backing that he unseated Commissioner Richard Boykin from a west side and west suburban district in 2018. He’s backed by CTU in the mayor’s race.

I have a feeling that García would have won CTU’s backing for mayor had he not dithered so much about whether he was going to run at all.

He only decided to jump in after lefties got tired of waiting for him to make up his mind and Johnson was already running.

Over the last few years, García has become a favorite of progressives outside of Chicago,

by virtue of his ties to Senator Bernie Sanders. But let’s not forget that he owes his career to Karen Lewis. She plucked him from the scrap heap of Chicago politics and propped him up to run for mayor against Rahm Emanuel in 2015.

Lewis wanted to back Cook County Board president Toni Preckwinkle—but Preckwinkle opted not to run.

She tried to run herself. But she got sick. So she surprised everybody by selecting García as the candidate. And then pretty much carried him to the runo .

Back to the current race. It looks like Mayor Lightfoot’s internal polls show García is her biggest rival. I say that because she launched an attack ad against him. The ad rips García for taking campaign contributions from Sam Bankman-Fried—aka the Crypto Kid.

Bankman-Fried’s the 30-year-old wunderkind who convinced hundreds of fabulously wealthy people to throw millions and millions of dollars his way. He wound up allegedly spending money intended for one company, FTX, on another company, Alameda Research. Both companies went belly-up, and he’s now facing federal corruption charges that could send him to prison.

So, yes, I suppose it’s fair game for Lightfoot to attack Garcia for taking donations from the Crypto Kid. On the other hand . . .

Lightfoot has her own connections to Bankman-Fried. Back in May, she was gushing over a promise by FTX to o er money and financial literacy training to low-income Chicagoans.

Yes, she and her advisors thought it was a good idea to have a con man teach lessons of the marketplace to our citizens. Clearly, Elizabeth Holmes was unavailable for the job.

That program fell apart in the wake of FTX’s demise. If you want to know more about it, listen to the recent conversation I had with Manny Ramos on The Ben Joravsky Show.

What’s worse—taking campaign contributions from Bankman-Fried or asking him to teach financial literacy to our citizens? Eventually, dear voters, you get to decide. v

It’s

Chicago’s next Election Day is scheduled for February 28, but early voting at the downtown Supersite (191 N. Clark) starts on January 26.

EDMOND DANTÈS/PEXELS

ON CULTURE

Who’s getting tarred?

Marin Alsop’s issue with Tár By DEANNA ISAACS

No industry has been more of a closed and creaky old white boys club than classical music. Things are grudgingly changing now that the Western canon appears to be on its deathbed, but, according to research by the League of American Orchestras, “Women conductors are still rare, especially in the high-status position of music director.” So it was intriguing, if a little surprising, that we recently got not one but two new films about women who’ve made it to the top of that field.

One is about this: an American girl captivated as a child by Leonard Bernstein’s young people’s concerts, determined to be a conductor ever since then, and eventually mentored by Bernstein. She has risen to the position of chief conductor for major orchestras in the United States and Europe, and a teacher of future music directors at a top American conservatory, as well as the founder of an organization that nurtures aspiring young women conductors. She’s also a lesbian, with a longtime partner who was a musician in an orchestra she conducted, and with whom she

shares a child. She has an a nity for Mahler, especially his Fifth Symphony.

So is the other one.

The first one is The Conductor , a documentary about Marin Alsop, music director laureate of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, chief conductor of the Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra, and, closer to home, chief conductor and curator of the Ravinia Festival.

The other is Tár , a psychodrama starring Cate Blanchett (who’s also one of its executive producers), written (as a vehicle for her) and directed by Todd Field. It’s a contender in numerous Oscar categories and has already won Blanchett a Golden Globe as Best Actress.

The first is the inspiring story of a trailblazer who, in spite of negation at every turn, never gave up on her dream, is committed to making the same path easier for others, and values music and conducting as a way of connecting with people.

The other, in spite of the protagonist’s similar résumé—Bernstein, Mahler, sexual orientation, and all—is its opposite: a Kubrick-in-

fluenced horror flick about the fictional Lydia Tár, a narcissistic predator whose career is canceled when her sexual exploitation of younger musicians, specifically one named Krista, is revealed.

Alsop’s partner is Kristin. Just a coincidence, right?

I came out of a movie theater after a screening of Tár last fall wondering if there was any way Alsop could sue.

Apparently not, but recently she has commented on the film, telling Agence France-Presse that it’s “yet another misogynistic portrayal of a woman in a leadership role.”

Here’s what Alsop told the [British] Sunday Times : “I was offended as a woman, I was o ended as a conductor, I was o ended as a lesbian.”

Offended because, “it’s not really about women conductors, is it? It’s about women as leaders in our society.”

“To have an opportunity to portray a woman in that role and to make her an abuser—for

me that was heartbreaking,” Alsop said, after noting that “there are so many men—actual documented men—this film could have been based on.”

Well, yes, including a major predecessor at Ravinia—longtime (1973-1993) music director James Levine.

Also o ensive: a claim that Lydia Tár makes in an early scene in the film (during a supercilious interview with the New Yorker’s Adam Gopnik, cast as himself). Tár claims that gender bias hasn’t been a problem for her career, and wasn’t a problem for Alsop either, actually invoking her by name. The viewer eventually understands that Tár is a frequent liar, but this assertion is not refuted in the film and seems especially egregious since, in fact, Alsop has had to wage a lifelong, gender-based struggle for acceptance as a conductor, all the way up to and including her contentious start with the Baltimore Symphony.

As the documentary makes clear, from the time she was taken to a Leonard Bernstein concert as a child, Alsop wanted only to conduct, while everyone, starting with her childhood violin teacher, told her, “Girls don’t do that.” She was repeatedly rejected for the conducting program at Juilliard, and, even after proving herself under Bernstein’s tutelage, here’s the “compliment” he paid her: “When I close my eyes, I can’t tell you’re a woman.”

What’s the Field/Blanchett explanation— history notwithstanding—for making the character they gradually reveal as a monster female? Blanchett has told the BBC that the movie is “a meditation on the corrupting nature of power and that is genderless,” and that “power is a corrupting force no matter what one’s gender is.”

But “power corrupts” is a cliche and a false one. It shifts responsibility from the doer to the position. Power doesn’t, in fact, corrupt everyone. It corrupts the corruptible. Alsop is objecting to implicating women when, as a group, they’re still fighting to get even a toe in the door.

At this date, among the 25 largest-budget orchestras in America, only one is led by a woman—Nathalie Stutzmann, at the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra. The power that’s on the podium is male. v

Marin Alsop; poster for Tár PATRICK GIPSON (RAVINIA FESTIVAL); FOCUS FEATURES

ON PRISONS

Torture by any other name

Solitary confinement is brutal torture. I have experienced it firsthand.

BY ANTHONY EHLERS

Solitary confinement has long been the punishment of choice for prisoners who draw the ire of prison officials. Its roots are at Cherry Hill, the world’s first penitentiary, built in Pennsylvania in 1829. It was founded by Quakers who believed that locking a prisoner away for months or years would reform them. Solitary confinement is the seminal philosophy of the criminal justice system in America.

After touring American prisons in 1831, Alexis de Tocqueville wrote that solitary “devours the victim incessantly and unmercifully; it does not reform, it kills.”

In 1890, the Supreme Court found in the case In re Medley that many prisoners “fell, after even a short confinement, into a semi-fatuous condition, from which it was next to impossible to arouse them, and others became violently insane.” More than a century later, Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote, “Years on end of near-total isolation exact a terrible price . . . common side e ects of solitary confinement include anxiety, panic, withdrawal, hallucinations, self-mutilation, and suicidal thoughts and actions.” Justice Sonia Sotomayor noted in 2018 that between 80,000 to 100,000 prisoners were held in some form of solitary confinement, the terms of which can range from a few days to decades.

In 2011, the United Nations declared solitary confinement to be torture. In 2014, the Committee Against Torture (which the U.S. is a member of) expressed concerns about America’s use of solitary confinement and recommended the U.S. limit the use of solitary confinement to “a measure of last resort and for as short a time as possible.” Other organizations followed suit, including the World Health Organization, the Association of Correctional Administrators, the American Bar Association, and the American Civil Liberties Union.

But in practice, solitary is not a measure of last resort, nor is it solely used in response to violent or predatory actions by prisoners. Jailhouse lawyers and politically active or vocal prisoners are frequently targeted by staff. The retaliation often manifests in fabricated disciplinary charges and months or years of solitary confinement.

Prison policymakers claim not to use solitary confinement anymore, disguising it behind a plethora of euphemistic terms: administrative detention, close management unit, control unit, disciplinary segregation unit, intensive management unit, involuntary protective custody, punitive segregation, restricted housing unit, security housing unit, special management unit, and supermax.

In Illinois, the preferred euphemisms are restricted housing, administrative detention, and indeterminate segregation.

I spent more than five and a half years in isolation, and I know what it can do. They threw me in a steel-fronted cell that had a box on the door and a small window. When it was time to eat, they unlocked the box, put my tray inside, closed the box, then opened the slide so I could grab my tray. They always covered the window so I had no human contact at all. These cells were reserved for those they especially wanted to hurt.

In solitary, you don’t notice it, but pretty quickly you begin to unravel. You pace the small cell, back and forth, back and forth. When I was a kid, I went to the zoo a few times. I used to see the tiger, who was always pacing back and forth. I used to wonder why he did that. Now I know. I felt like that animal, pacing back and forth. It almost became a compulsion.

You also begin to count. You count everything: the holes in the door, the bricks in the wall, the cracks, your steps, everything. This becomes compulsive. Your brain doesn’t stop; it’s looking for stimulation where there is none. Counting gives your mind something to do. When there is nothing, your brain invents things. It’s sensory deprivation taken to the extreme.

I became severely depressed and very paranoid. I convinced myself that the prison administration was trying to poison me. I didn’t eat for 25 days. Finally, I was told if I didn’t eat, I would be taken to court and force-fed. I said I would eat only if a nurse brought me my tray. I didn’t trust anyone else.

I realized I had to get ahold of myself or I wouldn’t be able to come back. Isolation is full of severely mentally ill people. IDOC does not have the sta or the patience to deal with such prisoners. They usually get written disciplinary reports and are buried in isolation. Unable to understand what’s going on or why, they end up spending years or decades there. I’ve seen friends who were sane lose their minds in isolation.

I talked to myself a lot. There was no one to talk to, so I had to become both sides of the conversation. I became my own best friend. I had nobody else. I was the only one there for myself.

I was able to get hold of the paranoia but not the depression. I thought about killing myself more often than I care to admit. The loneliness

was unbearable. I felt like I didn’t matter. I began to question if I was even real. Was I a figment of my own imagination? Did I even exist?

I began to cut myself, reasoning that if I bled, then I must exist. I bear those scars to this day. They remind me of when I was tortured and of just how little holds our minds together.

I came out of isolation a much di erent person. I didn’t talk; I was afraid of social situations. The paranoia I fought so hard to control came back. I was afraid people were going to hurt me. I didn’t know how to interact with people, and I didn’t understand social cues.

It’s been many years since I got out of isolation. Over time, and with a lot of difficult work, I was able to lose the paranoia. I know that I am real. I’m still socially awkward, and I get anxious around a lot of people. I’m quiet. When I get upset or stressed out, I start counting. When I catch myself doing it, I force myself to stop. All these years later, counting is still a coping mechanism. I may have left isolation, but isolation has never left me.

The toxic combination of social isolation, sensory deprivation, and enforced idleness results in many psychiatric symptoms, including anxiety, depression, anger, impaired impulse control, paranoia, visual and auditory hallucinations, cognitive disturbances, obsessive thoughts, post-traumatic stress disorder, psychosis, self-harm, and suicide. Solitary confinement causes these things—imagine how much it exacerbates pre-existing mental illness!

Humans are naturally social beings, and the social pain that isolation inflicts can be the most torturous and damaging, affecting the brain in the same regions and manner as physical pain. This social pain can actually cause longer-term su ering than physical pain, due to the ability of humans to relive social pain months or even years later.

Multiple studies suggest that solitary confinement can fundamentally alter the brain’s structure in profound and permanent ways. The harm caused by solitary confinement can culminate in a complete breakdown of one’s identity. Even after a brief period of time, a prisoner is likely to descend into a mental fog in which alertness, attention, and concentration are all impaired.

This is a lasting trauma. This is torture. This is what is done in your name. We torture people and call it justice. v

Anthony Ehlers is a writer incarcerated at Stateville Correctional Center.

MICHAEL

MEMORIALS

was somebody to us’

By KATIE PROUT

In 2022, six people I know from Lower Wacker and the Loop died. The first passed the day after Valentine’s Day, the last on December 2, when I was midway through my fi rst draft of this story and had to adjust my word count to fit in a sixth death when I thought I was mourning five. I won’t pretend that I knew each of the dead well. Some of them I met once or twice, while others I knew for two years. Ralph was shy and had a sweet smile. Polo was hard, but his interior was soft as caramel. Rose could fi ght you or hug you. Brittany loved the uncharted life she lived and chose it to the end. But each time someone died last year, I remade my altar.

The essential components stay the same: two candles and something sweet-smelling to burn. A thumb-sized statue of the Virgin Mary from my mom. Coins, because metal, like us, comes from the earth, and because these hustlers loved money and deserve to go into the afterlife with full pockets. Then, I add something that reminds me of that person. For Ron, called “Raving Ronnie” in high school because of his goofy outfits and Day-

Glo bracelets, I fi lled a shot glass of rum, the liquor that reminds me most of party boys. For Hope, ever the lady, a shot of vodka and a bottle of purple nail polish I thought she might like.

Each one of these deaths was preventable, including the two accidental drug overdoses. (One cause of death remains undetermined.) Culturally, most of us shrug off overdose deaths as inevitable tragedies—the result of ravenous addiction, if we’re being bighearted, or the result of moral failing, if we’re not. What I need you to understand is that these deaths are policy choices; they are preventable, and we all are accountable for them.

According to the Cook County Medical Examiner’s O ce, 1,599 people died from opioid overdose in 2022. A backlog on autopsies means that number is expected to rise by an additional 400-500, bringing the death total over 2,000 and breaking the record of 1,936 set in 2021. There is evidence that suggests these numbers are an undercount. If you don’t understand the scope of a story, you can’t change how it ends.

“Believe half of what you see and a quarter of what you hear,” photojournalist Lloyd DeGrane reminds me, and himself, whenever a particularly incendiary rumor winds its way through downtown.

Many other deaths—blood infections, kidney failures, etc.—are directly related to addiction but are not counted among drug deaths. Even more directly, these deaths are related to us—the people who are housed and not addicted, who have access to health care and alderpeople, who take pictures of the visibly mentally ill or impoverished asleep on the Red Line and post them in online discussions about “crime” on the CTA—and the policy choices we support.

No one can stop someone else from doing what they want to do, but we can make the circumstances in which they do it less deadly. In fact, in every neighborhood in the city, some family member, drug user, or harm reduction worker is doing just that. The Chicago Recovery Alliance, The Night Ministry, and the West Side Heroin / Opioid Task Force are mobile throughout the city. All provide free syringes, free fentanyl testing kits, free

Narcan (the opioid overdose reversal nasal spray anyone can get and learn how to administer here: anypositivechange.org/overdose-training), and more. But they can only reach so many people so often. Imagine, for example, if someone who required new needles could walk into Walgreens and get them for free, thereby avoiding the countless risks that come with reusing or sharing. Instead, they have to pay approximately fi ve dollars per box of ten syringes (limit two boxes) and, for some reason, show a state-issued ID. Out of the 20 or so folks I know downtown, approximately two have their IDs. Without a birth certificate, Social Security card, or permanent address, it can take months to obtain one.

If you ask people what kind of housing they need, they’ll tell you. If housed, people can use drugs safely and hygienically, instead of in tents with poor lighting, no running water, and prone to frequent invasions by rats, no matter how clean they live. In 2022, Mayor Lightfoot and her City Council allies could have supported Bring Chicago Home, a proposal that would increase the Real Estate

“What I need you to understand is that these deaths are policy choices; they are preventable, and we all are accountable for them.”

LLOYD DEGRANE FOR CHICAGO READER

‘She

Drug-related deaths haunt the streets of Chicago, but overdose is not inevitable.

Transfer Tax (a one-time tax paid when a property is sold) by 1.9 percent on properties over $1 million, creating a dedicated revenue stream of approximately $164 million annually for permanent, supportive housing for people experiencing homelessness. But on November 14, 2022, Lightfoot and 25 alderpeople blocked this proposal from even being discussed in City Council. The next day, my friend Ron died, sick and unhoused, in a stairwell in the Loop. He was 37 years old. Even the deaths caused by drug overdose carry more nuance than we give them. For example, the dope I’ve seen test results for in the last three years is an everything-butthe-kitchen-sink mix: always some amount of fentanyl or another analog, plus benzos, animal tranquilizers (like xylazine, whose side effects appear on limbs as rotting wounds that can require amputation), or Benadryl as fi llers that mimic the drowsiness of an opioid while further slowing down breathing. The presence of true heroin is vanishingly rare. It’s why more than one researcher argues for calling the so-called “opioid epidemic” the “mass poisoning epidemic” instead: without a regulated, decriminalized, safer supply of drugs guaranteeing the integrity of the ingested substances, people will continue to be at higher risk for overdose and death. With collective willpower, bravery, and a willingness to try something new, we could ensure that people know exactly what is in their drugs, reducing overdose and overdose death.

Everyone who died, I met while they lived on Lower Wacker or in the Loop during my weekly walks with photojournalist Lloyd DeGrane, our backpacks full of sterile syringes, snorting kits, condoms, and other lifesaving supplies people who use drugs need but often have little access to. Other people have been doing harm reduction work, legally or illegally, for longer than I’ve been alive. All of the suggestions I’ve listed come from my conversations with them, or others in their community, or the public health workers, caseworkers, and harm reduction allies who fight every day for the right for people to live safely and with dignity. I’m no expert, I’ve never been addicted or unhoused, and my grief and rage are not the biggest in this city, but still, six people I know died last year. I think you should know them too. Here are their stories, via the people who knew and loved them, with some names and identifying details changed for their protection.

Rafael “Ralph” Fernandez Jr. March 20, 1980–February 15, 2022

Iknew what Ralph looked like before I met him, at least from the mask up. In March 2021, he was standing outside of the Ewing Annex Hotel and agreed to let Lloyd snap his photo: it ended up running with my story on the Ewing, the last men’s-only, single-room occupancy hotel in Chicago. Light-brown skin, dark-brown eyes, and a head that was perpetually crooked down, forcing him to look up at the world through the frame of his brows. A couple months later, I met Ralph for real a few blocks away from the hotel, walking with his best friend Dan to go buy drugs. “Hey, it’s me!” he said, smiling now. “I’m the one on page 14!”

Ralph died the day after Valentine’s Day in 2022. One frigid December afternoon ten months later, I met with Dan at the hustle spot he and Ralph used to share. For years, Ralph flew his sign on one side of tra c, Dan on the other. Now Dan, a sun-weathered white man in his late 30s, works alone. We put his sign and my backpack on the frozen ground and sat on them. Against a brilliant sunset, Dan smoked a cigarillo, careful to wave the smoke away from my direction while he talked.

Ralph was born in the mainland U.S. and raised in Puerto Rico. When he was about ten, an uncle in Indiana died, and the fl ight his mother took to get to the mainland was so turbulent that she refused to ever board a plane again. Ralph, his dad, and his brother moved to her, but Indiana was not a welcoming new home. Spanish was Ralph’s fi rst language, which made him a target for white bullies at his new middle school. According to Dan, adulthood is where Ralph really did well. “Most like everybody’s story at one time, he had decent cars, his own apartment, girlfriends,” Dan said. But at some point, he started smoking crack and became addicted, losing his apartment and his job. Ralph told Dan that once he started stealing from his family, they had no choice but to turn him out.

According to Dan, Ralph came to Chicago looking for housing and for work sometime around 2016. There were some leads, but ultimately, Ralph lived unhoused until he died. Once in the city, his substance use intensified: “Once you come out here in Chicago, dope can be an easy trap to fall into, especially on the street,” Dan explained. Ralph fi rst knew Dan’s wife, Rhonda. After she died of a blood infection, Dan began sleeping at a spot in the

Loop where dope was easy to access. Soon, he and Ralph lived there together. “Within a short amount of time, we were always together. You seen one of us, the other one wasn’t too far away.”

They worked their hustle spot together, they went out to the west side to buy drugs together when the Loop was dry. Whatever they did, wherever they were, they had each other’s backs. In one story Dan told me, Ralph’s Spanish came in very useful “when we were at McDonald’s and workers were talking crap about us, making fun because we were homeless.” After a minute or two of pretending not to listen, Ralph would interject in Spanish, embarrassing the workers with his triumphant reveal. “You two are worse than a married couple,” others would tell them, listening to the friends comfortably bicker.

Dan loved his friend, but their relationship wasn’t uncomplicated: Ralph wasn’t a gifted panhandler, and on the days his money was particularly low, he’d spiral with fear of becoming dopesick. He did things Dan knows he wasn’t proud of. Dan told me twice that Ralph had a very good heart and good intentions. Nine months after Ralph died, Dan remains furious about his death. I saw it in his squint, heard it in the forceful way his words shot out of his mouth. After our interview, he texted me: the dead can’t speak its up to us the people who new them the people that they left behind the ones that cared about them to tell there story.

At some point during the winter of 2022, Ralph told Dan he had a blood infection. At the time, Ralph was working security for a person, also unhoused and addicted, who sold drugs to support their habit. “Ralph was working so hard, he didn’t have no downtime,” said Dan. For reasons of his own, he told few people he was sick, but I heard from one or two others who bought drugs from his employer that, in the weeks or months lead-

ing up to his death, Ralph spent at least some time at a hospital.

Dan’s wife Rhonda died of a blood infection precisely because she was terrified to go to the hospital. During our interview and in ensuing phone calls and texts, he remained convinced his best friend died the same way. “These people got blood clots and blood infections. They’re conscious of this for days or weeks, and they’re getting worse and weak,” he told me. “Their bodies are hurting everywhere. They’re throwing up bile and burning up with a fever. They do some dope, and it masks it for a little bit. But once that infection gets in your blood, it’s not gonna go away by itself.” People know they need to go to the hospital, know they need IV antibiotics at the least. But as Dan said, unhoused people with substance disorders also know that if they go to the hospital, they risk being treated “like dirty junkies.”

The Cook County Medical Examiner’s O ce ruled Ralph’s death an accidental polydrug overdose (meaning that more than one substance contributed to his death). Fentanyl, cocaine, diphenhydramine (Benadryl), a fentanyl analogue called despropionyl fentanyl, and possible “trace amounts of heroin” were all found in his system. There’s no secondary cause of death listed, no mention of infection in Ralph’s record. When I shared this news with Dan, he was frustrated. He and Ralph did the same dope. How could Ralph die and Dan live? And Ralph had been dealing with some kind of infection—didn’t that count for anything?

“Tell Ralph’s story, but even more than that, tell that the hospital system needs to be changed,” he told me. “If people knew they could go to the hospital and get properly medicated for their withdrawal symptoms, they would go. Everybody out here knows somebody who died of an infection. They would’ve gone to the hospital, but they feared being dopesick.”

“Ralph was working so hard, he didn’t have no downtime,” said his friend Dan. LLOYD

NEWS & POLITICS

Demarco “Polo” Hawes

February 13, 1993-March 12, 2022

Polo worked on the same street. I’d long heard about Polo before I met him: Polo and Reavis, Polo and Reavis. Two Latino brothers who had lived in bus stops and tents in the Loop for years, wherever one was, the other was surely nearby. Polo was younger by four years, yet it was easy to mistake him for the elder: tough and cool as he hustled, giving me a nod when I said hey, fast and steady when pushing Reavis’s wheelchair down Randolph in the snow.

Two deaths, one street, one month apart, and both of the dead were seasoned users who knew to go slow, knew not to use alone. Before the medical examiner’s report came back, the rumors flew, fast as bullets. Was Polo, like Ralph, quietly ill with something other than dope sickness? Was the dope both men used deliberately poisoned? As with Ralph, the medical examiner ruled Polo’s death an accidental polydrug overdose: in his case, despropionyl fentanyl, Benadryl, fentanyl, and heroin.

Polo and Reavis were born in Chicago. Polo lived on and o the streets since he was 13 years old. In childhood, “we got taken by DCFS,” Reavis said. For a little while, the brothers were able to stay together. An aunt took them in, but “things didn’t really go well” between Polo and her, and soon, she sent him back to DCFS.

Once in their teens, the two brothers gave up on housing and the system that was supposedly trying to protect them. “We decided to try our best to make it,” Reavis said. They began to live in the Loop, panhandling and stealing to survive. The brothers developed relationships with a few regulars who would buy them meals.

I interviewed Reavis where he lives now, in a stretch of tents near railroad tracks downtown. That’s when I finally learned his name isn’t Reavis, or Rebus, as I’ve so often heard, but Arreavis—three syllables, ah-RREE-vis, like a bird’s call. The roar and clang of incoming trains punctuated our conversation and made it hard to hear. Arreavis is disabled, and his left hand is swollen with infection. Amputation has been recommended, but he’s so far refused for a number of reasons, including fi nancial. “My money hand,” he says: when they see it while he’s panhandling downtown, people tend to give. Throughout our interview, he

remained seated inside his tent in the dark with his hand tucked inside his shirt, the soft accumulation of clothing and other living supplies strewn over the tent fl oor like moss. I squatted at the entrance, my microphone outstretched.

“It hurts sometimes because I know no matter what, we’re not gonna see each other again, we’re not gonna talk to each other. You can talk, but you’re not gonna get a response,” Arreavis said quietly. He mumbled something else, but the squeal of Metra brakes blotted it out.

“That kinda helps me get through the days.”

What does? I asked.

“Talking to God.”

Arreavis’s best memories of Polo are simple: “Me and him together, looking out for each other, making sure each other ate. Chilling together.” They were each other’s fi rst and best friends. There was nothing they couldn’t discuss.

“Even though I was the older brother, I know one thing. We was close, real close. We would’ve killed for each other,” Arreavis said. Polo did much of the visible, physical caretaking for them both, but Arreavis supported his brother in ways that went unseen. At some point, Polo spent some time in jail. When he came out, Arreavis made sure he had a place to stay. “He didn’t have no job, but I made things happen in ways that some people look down on,” Arreavis explained. “I had to do what I had to do.”

I asked Arreavis what he wanted to make sure people knew about Polo. His reply was the longest answer he’d given all day. “He was a survivor, but he was strong,” he said. “He had two kids and lost his baby mama. He tried his best, but I feel like things was a little too much. But I’ll always love him, and he’ll always be in my heart. I know he’d want me to get through this, and I know he’d want me to make it up out this struggle. And that’s what I’m gonna do.”

Valerie “Val” Clark

December 18, 1986–May 9, 2022

One icy day, Lloyd and I were out searching for the Pigeon Lady when we met Val instead. Lloyd had known her for six years, but it was my first time meeting the woman I’d heard much about. I’d heard she was pretty and knew how to fight, knew how to do what she had to do to stay alive. Val had a pale face and long, dark hair that swept in front of it while she dozed on the sidewalk outside of a Dunkin’ Donuts on Lake Street. When Lloyd woke her up, she smiled. We had donuts and co ee, and I interviewed her for an hour. She was funny and smart. I can’t find the tape, but after she died, Lloyd wrote a remembrance that he’s agreed to share here.

Sometimes you do such crazy things with someone that you never forget the moment you did it. Two years ago, I went looking for the body of a person that I knew had been dead for five days. My guide was a woman named Valerie, Val. She was tough as nails and peppered sentences with “fuck this and fuck that,” and “motherfuckin’ bitch ass” when she was really pissed. But this time, it was different. We were on a mission to find the body of someone’s brother, someone’s son, a beloved family member of a family neither one of us had ever known. Valerie led me to a field on the west side of Chicago.

“Don’t get me shot out here Val,” I told her.

“I kind of know where his body might be,” she assured me.

No one else wanted to be involved, just Valerie.

From that field, across a busy street, we could see people walking in and out of the drug house where he, the dead person, had bought the dime bag of dope that killed him. Rumors swirled that the body of this street person, a sweet soul, known to both of us, had been abandoned in that field, left to decompose without dignity. We searched. It was hot. The grass was high. The brush was dense. The people at the drug house looked at us across the field.

We smelled the corpse before we could see it. We saw a leg, then an arm, then the body, stiff and swollen. Valerie turned away, crying. I called 911. I hadn’t expected her to cry. She had seen death before, many times. She lived on the streets. Demons tore at her soul. But inside, there was compassion and hard love.

The fire department came. They called a

“You know I don’t wear this fuckin’ mask for no COVID shit,” Polo told the

photographer.

LLOYD DEGRANE FOR CHICAGO READER

hazardous waste team. I looked across the avenue, drug business as usual, shoppers shopping, servers serving.

Valerie was inconsolable. She knew the dead man better than I did. “He didn’t deserve to die like this,” she said.

Val was my friend. She was tough. Valerie slept on the streets and roamed dark, dangerous alleys. She was always ready to battle. Her boyfriend called her Rocky. She had been in many fi ghts. She, too, was someone’s daughter, someone’s sister. But today was her last fight. “Ain’t that a bitch,” Valerie might say.

“She loved her fur babies and hoped to have babies of her own one day,” her aunt Cathy Clark-Schramer wrote to me. “Now she is with Jesus, my parents, and my sister. She is with those who love her very much. I like to think of it as they were right by her side and she felt their love, so she went with them.”

Brittany Burke

January 21, 1990–October 30, 2022

As a baby, the moment Brittany could crawl, “she was on the go,” her mom Terrie told me. “She was fiercely independent.” We talked one night, shortly before Christmas, while Terrie drove home after her 11-hour workday as a shipping clerk. She now lives in Tennessee, but she raised Brittany and her younger brother in the Chicago area. Everyone downtown mentions Brittany’s cackle and teasing humor when they remember her. (“Jesus, she was such a wonderful person, I can’t say it enough,” her ex-boyfriend Mike Ferguson told me. “She had a really funny laugh . . . it was this little snicker.”) Terrie’s voice on the other end of the line is quiet, tired, but wry. I can hear the resemblance.

“She was fearless,” said Terrie simply, when I asked what she admired most about her daughter. “She loved the city, loved the hustle and bustle. She didn’t have to live that way”—unhoused and roving, camping outside—“but she chose to.” Terrie chuckled a little. “I could never do it.”

“I’d always told her she could come home, but she had to go get treatment. She needed more than I could do.” Brittany tried multiple rehabs. For a year as a teen, she tried living with her dad out in the North Carolina woods. But the care she needed was complex. Brittany had depression and bipolar disorder and

a heart murmur. In her 20s, she contracted endocarditis after an infection from a reused needle settled into her heart valves. She also had Hepatitis C, which—like endocarditis—is a preventable condition if, for example, you have unencumbered access to sterile needles. This summer, Brittany’s kidneys started failing. Then, Terrie said, in July, Brittany tried to check herself into Rush and vomited for 17 hours in the emergency waiting room before she gave up and left. Two days later,

she tried UIC instead. The doctors she saw realized she’d had a brain aneurysm and admitted her.

Brittany had brain surgery; a few days later, the bleeding slowed but not stopped, her brain was cauterized. She began dialysis shortly after. And yet, “she survived all that,” said Terrie, marveling a little. Despite her grueling work schedule, throughout July and August, she repeatedly drove from Tennessee and Chicago to be with her daughter. In Sep-

tember, Brittany came home.

“It was good. It was too short,” Terrie said of their time together. When Brittany went in for her fi rst brain surgery, she weighed only 98 pounds. It’s a point of pride for Terrie that, once back with her mom, Brittany’s weight went up to 112 pounds. Terrie and Brittany’s brother, who also lived with them, teased that her drug of choice was now cereal: specifically, Golden Grahams and Lucky Charms.

They had a month. “One Sunday morning,” Terrie said, “she woke me up. She said she was having trouble breathing.” Terrie called 911. In the emergency room, Brittany repeatedly said she couldn’t breathe. Terrie screamed for help. According to Terrie, the nurse who came over suggested Brittany was having an anxiety attack. Terrie recalled saying, “Lady, her lips are turning blue.” Brittany stopped breathing and died.

Brittany’s cause of death is listed as cardiopulmonary arrest (CPA), which is when breathing and heart functions suddenly stop. CPA is not a heart attack, though it can be caused by one. Terrie still doesn’t understand why, exactly, her daughter is dead.

“I tried so hard to be there for her and not enable her, to let her know that I loved her and was always going to love her,” Terrie said.

Brittany knew she was loved: that knowledge brings Terrie some peace. “While addiction wreaked havoc in her life, it didn’t a ect that. She was somebody to us.”

Val poses for a portrait at the camp she called home before the city cleared it to build the Riverwalk. LLOYD DEGRANE FOR CHICAGO READER

“She was fearless,” said Brittany’s mom Terrie. LLOYD DEGRANE FOR CHICAGO READER

NEWS & POLITICS

continued from p. 17

Ron Jeschke

January 17, 1985–November 15, 2022

“Are you from Tennessee?” Ron asked me the first time I met him at the tent he shared with his girlfriend Kim on Lower Wacker. “Nope,” I replied. Ron grinned and stretched, lanky as cars roared by. “Well, you’re the only ten I see,” he said. I rolled my eyes, but Kim, who was folding clothes, laughed. Then, I was annoyed that he’d make such a cheesy pass in front of his girlfriend. Now, when I recount this memory on the phone with Kim, I see it as a moment of Ron feeling happy and good, feeling himself enough to goof o .

Ron and Kim knew each other as teenagers. After years of back-and-forth crushes and bad timing, they started dating in 2016. “One thing I loved about him was his confidence,” Kim told me. “I mean, this man could wear white shorts with blue and red stripes, Jordans that are black, purple, and orange, a New Kids On the Block shirt, a flower pashmina, and an old baseball cap, and make it look good.”

Ron came up with funny words and singsong phrases. “He was a fun and caring uncle to my daughter,” his sister Randi wrote to me. Before he was on Lower Wacker, Ron worked for years as a waiter and made friends with the seniors who came in for their Sunday brunch. In good times, Ron and his mother would go on Dunkin’ Donuts runs together. When they first came out to the Loop, Ron had been unhoused before, but Kim had never

stayed outside, and she was terrified. Ron made her feel safe. At night, they cuddled, and he held her hand.

The Ron I knew was also difficult. Despair could make him harsh and bitter. He could be honest to the point of rudeness, Kim said, but it wasn’t his intention. “You wanted to be so mad at him for stuff he’d done in the past, but you can’t stay mad at him.” He was tall, with brown eyes and reddish-brown hair. He was skinny when I met him, and got skinnier. One day this summer on a visit to the camp, I couldn’t get him to wake up. He and Kim had broken up, and she was staying elsewhere. I

checked his breathing (regular), his color (pale but warm, no blue), and his position (crumpled on his side). I sat for a minute on an overturned milk crate, and then left rigs (sterile needles), more Narcan, and candy just outside the lip of his tent.

“Was he sick?” Ron’s dad Randy asked me on the phone after he died. I wasn’t sure, though I’d heard something on the street about a blood infection. “Still using?” He was. “I guess they did a toxicology screen, but it doesn’t really matter to us what the cause of death was. We’d like to know, but the bottom line is Ron’s gone.”

Randy was clear to tell me that his family

was devastated, and Ron’s mother in particular was su ering in her grief, but they had been waiting for the call telling them Ron was dead for a long time. When he died at age 37, Ron had been addicted to opioids for 15 years. “I’ve got a lot of anger myself about it,” he said. “I listened to Ron repeat the 12 steps forwards and backwards. He held meetings. When he was on methadone, he spoke very openly about his trials and tribulations.”

Addiction regularly shatters families, but there was a period where Ron lived with his sister and his niece and worked with his dad. Ron told Randy about his former hustles,

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“[I]t doesn’t really matter to us what the cause of death was . . . the bottom line is Ron’s gone,” said Randy Jeschke.

how he survived at the train station, how he taught others new to sleeping outside the necessary scams to survive. And then there was another relapse. “One day, he was standing in front of me, and I’m looking at him like, ‘What’s going on with you?’ And he just said, ‘It’s time for me to go.’ The look on his face—I think he looked embarrassed.”

Randy looked for him at Union Station. He looked for him at the Bean, where Ron hustled key chains he lifted from Walgreens. He looked for him in Garfield Park, one of the spots where Ron bought his drugs. Eventually, he and Ron reconnected, and Randy would come downtown once a month to meet Kim

NEWS & POLITICS

and Ron for lunch.

“People ask me questions, and I don’t hesitate to tell them he was a heroin addict,” said Randy. “He’s been fi ghting that battle for a long time. We should be factual, say it the way it is.”

It takes courage to be honest about the circumstances in which a loved one lived and died, especially when the circumstances are as stigmatized as drug use, homelessness, and addiction. Courage, and probably not a little resignation, born from years of trying to save a life and solve a public health problem largely alone. As of this printing, Ron’s cause of death is still unknown.

ElevatedChicagocatalyzesequitabledevelopmentaround thecity’stransitstationss

Southside, Chicago, Illinois, 1941. Russell Lee. Farm Security Administration/O ce of War Information Photograph Collection, Prints & Photographs Division, Library of Congress, LC - DIG - ppmsc - 00256.

e Negro Motorist Green Book is an exhibition that highlights the history of “ e Green Book” - the annual guide created in 1936 by Harlem postman Victor Green that provided African American travelers with information on restaurants, gas stations, department stores, and other businesses that welcomed Black travelers during the Jim Crow era.

Open January 29

e Negro Motorist Green Book was created by the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service in collaboration with Candacy Taylor and made possible through the generous support of Exxon Mobil Corporation.

PaidSponsoredContent

Formuchofitshistory,Chicagowasapublictransit-friendlytown.Thefirsthorse-drawn streetcarsappearedonStateStreetin1859,andbytheturnofthecenturythecityhad developedcomplexnetworksoftrainsandcablecars.Butthingschangedwiththerapid suburbanexpansionandthepopularizationofprivatelyownedvehiclesinthemid-20th century,andmoreresourcesbecameallocatedtowardcreatinginfrastructureforcars.

AccordingtoElevatedChicagoexecutivedirectorRobertoRequejo,transitisultimatelya questionofequity.Widespreaddependencyoncarsandlackofaccessiblepublictransithave broadimplicationsforcommunitiesintermsofaccesstojobs,education,andotherresources; environmentalconcerns(morecarsandsurfaceparkingleadtomoreflooding,higher temperatures,andlowerairquality);andoverallqualityoflife.“Studyafterstudyshowsthat peoplewitheasyaccesstomultipletransportationchoices—peoplewhoareabletowalkor roll,bike,andtaketrainsandbuses—havebetterhealthindicators,notonlyphysicallybut mentally,”hesays.

Thoseinequitiesareespeciallyapparentamongcommunitiesofcolor.“Whenyoulookatthestatistics,you seethattheownershiplevelsofcars,forinstance,arethreetimeslowerinBlackhouseholdsthantheyare inwhitehouseholds.Andasaresult,you'llseethatmorethan60percentoftheusersofpublic transportationacrosstheUnitedStatesarepeopleofcolor,”Requejosays.“Soyou’dthinkthat incentivizingdevelopmentneartransitwouldimprovethequalityoflifeforpeopleofcolor,butthat’snot necessarilytrue.”

Readtherestofthisstoryonlineatchicagoreader.com/transportationseries

CoveragefundedbyTheDarrellR.WindleCharitableFundandPoloInn

“If you don’t understand the scope of a story, you can’t change how it ends.”

NEWS & POLITICS

Sheila Hope Hecks

June 29, 1971– December 2, 2022

Lloyd called her The Wanderer. A young veteran I first met when he was reading Chairman Mao For Kids on a crate outside of Ron’s tent knew her as Sheila. “Have you seen Carlos?” asked a nurse practitioner from the back of The Night Ministry’s street medicine van, his good-natured face slightly crinkled with concern. “We have like six months of his mail.”

“Hope,” said Hope, when I asked her, once again, to confi rm her name.

Hope kept herself to herself; everyone knew one thing about her, but no one knew the whole. Alternately, she introduced herself to me as a bisexual man who goes by he or she, a gay man who uses she/her pronouns, a trans woman, and a self-described former “female impersonator” who used to take hormones until they made her sick.

Each time Hope told me who she was, that’s who I knew her to be. Like Lower Wacker, Hope was adaptable, mercurial, and sometimes lonely in the dark. She liked purple eyeshadow and nail polish; she followed rumors around the love life of Mayor Lori Lightfoot with interest. Hope detested the illicit drag racers who crashed into the concrete buttress by her head on Saturday nights just as much as she detested Jeff Bezos. As many questions as I had for her, Hope had for me. “How much you spend on cat food? Do your cat eat a lot? What color is he? Is he very friendly? You got cable? You never watch My Cat From Hell ? Y’all don’t watch too much TV. How do you like your husband? Ooo, he’s not your husband yet? Well, when will he be? Y’all thinking about getting a big house pretty soon? You have a good job? Can you a ord your rent? Is there a lot of crime over there? Mixed neighborhood? Lotta Black folks over there? Puerto Ricans? Lotta good restaurants? Walmarts? Walgreens? You know how to get out of a lockhold? It’s good to know self-defense. Are you safe down here?”

“Are YOU safe down here?” I ask her. Hope says yeah, she’s safe. She shows me her pepper spray, and a long, fl at board tucked into her cart. No one has come after her because she hasn’t given them the chance. “I always be looking behind me!”

She liked a spot for everything and lived tidily. Before Hope headed out for the day, she covered her bed—a mattress on some blankets on concrete softened over the years

by exhaust dust, pigeon feces, and the detritus that drifts down when the hotels above the camp open their vents for cleaning on Sundays—with a tarp, carefully tucking its corners under her mattress so no rodent could worry its way into her sheets. Once, she was bitten by a rat and had to get five shots in the soft part of her arm. She lived at the same camp Ron did. It was Hope who lived here fi rst, ten years ago, when she lived alone on this bank of concrete, intended for use as a loading dock and shaped like a broken kite.

Hope didn’t like drugs, but she did like light beer, white wine, and cute cocktails if she could get them. She loved romance novels. Like most of the others, she spent years on and off various housing lists. She was born in Jamaica and moved to Chicago from New York City. Sometimes, if she was feeling social, Hope would push her cart and visit with a couple trans women she knew who stayed further down Lower Wacker, or drink beers with Stephen, a white man who sleeps on a mattress under Lower Wacker but only a few yards away from the Riverwalk and its bustling monetary flow. I wish I knew what

they talked about: Hope, who spoke fast and low and ended all of her sentences with “you know?” and Stephen, who is almost entirely deaf, although sometimes he tells me he hears my voice, very clearly, calling his name. I tried tracking down Hope’s next of kin but was unsuccessful. She told me that she had a wife who died of breast cancer and an ex-husband. With her wife, she parented five kids, or four, depending on the day I asked. In Hope’s understanding of her life, time bent and looped. At di erent times in her life, she worked as a makeup artist, for a phone company, and at Walmart. At one point, her son Brian lived with her on Lower Wacker. “He was my baby son,” she told me. Alternately, she said he died from an air bubble in a needle, he froze to death, and he died because someone “gave him some bad drugs.” However it happened, when it happened, Hope, the Wanderer, was out wandering. It was around New Year’s Eve. For some time, the rest of the camp rustling and hustling around him, Brian lay unmoving underneath his covers. The others thought he’d just nodded o and needed some time to rest. When Hope came back, she slapped his covers, called his name.

“I don’t blame [the others at the camp] anymore,” Hope told me. Hope watched while someone from the city arrived and put him in a body bag.

“He was my best friend,” Hope said. “We actually got along very good. We stuck together.” It was his belongings she pushed in her cart as she walked.

After years of homelessness, Hope had her apartment for almost exactly a year. That’s where she died, the morning I sat down to start writing these obituaries. The cause of death was hypertensive heart disease and diabetes, two diseases that, with access to real care in a functioning country, do not have to be terminal. I never did get over to see her, but I’ve no doubt she kept that place cute. Even though she had her apartment, I still saw Hope downtown from time to time, pushing her cart. “I got to get my mind right,” she’d tell us. “I’m walking to clear my mind.” The last time Lloyd and I saw her was in November, walking down Lower Wacker. She told us she liked her place. We told her we’d try to visit soon. v

“Hope kept herself to herself; everyone knew one thing about her, but no one knew the whole.” LLOYD DEGRANE FOR CHICAGO READER

BLUES@

LOGAN CENTER

RETURNING TO THE SOURCE: YOU SO COUNTRY!

THU, FEB 23 / 6PM / VIRTUAL EVENT / FREE

This investigation of Blues and Black rural identity, and the rich musical and visual cultures that stem from both, will challenge the invisibility of Black bodies in rural spaces. Our expert panel of scholars and artists curates an evening of Black rural culture through the intersecting lenses of Country Blues, Black Country Music and Visual Arts, and a trip into the heart of Black Appalachia.

BLUES GEOGRAPHIES

SAT, APR 1 / 7:30PM / PERFORMANCE HALL

Blues Geographies with Corey Harris and James Leva, moderated by Matthew Skoller, will be an evening of performance, conversation, and delicious local BBQ. Tickets on sale February 15.

logancenter. uchicago.edu

Logan Center for the Arts 915 E 60th St • Chicago loganUChicago

SOJOURNER TRUTH FESTIVAL OF THE ARTS

LOGAN CENTER FOR THE ARTS, MARCH 2-4

A symposium on Black women’s lmmaking inspired by the 1976 Sojourner Truth Festival of the Arts, featuring roundtable conversations with some of the original festival participants and contemporary lmmakers. This event is free and will also be livestreamed. voices.uchicago.edu/sojourner

Logan Center for the Arts 915 E 60th St • Chicago

The Logan Center’s Blues programming is made possible with the generous support of The Jonathan Logan Family Foundation with additional support provided by the Chill Family Fund for the Logan Center for the Arts. Gaye Adegbalola. Photo: Marc Norberg.

David Razowsky wants to set “yes, and” on fire

In a new book, the veteran actor lays out a new vision for improv.

By SHERI FLANDERS

Improvisers from around the globe flock to Chicago to learn the “right” way to improvise, yet veteran actor (actor, not improviser) David Razowsky’s new book throws “yes, and” in the trash, sets it on fire, composts it, and plants a tree with it. He’s earned the right, after ten years on Second City Chicago’s mainstage with Stephen Colbert, Steve Carell, Amy Sedaris, Rachel Dratch, and others; serving as artistic director of Second City Hollywood; and now working as a traveling instructor who has taught in prisons, and even delivered a TedTalk. He’s philosophical, funny, and says “fuck” frequently. Here, Razowsky talks about his methodology, the good ol’ days of improv, and Bacon-Flavored Bacon Bacon.

Sheri Flanders: So how was writing a book?

David Razowsky: It’s sort of like waking up one morning and you’re pregnant. And you don’t know what creature got you pregnant, so you don’t know how long the gestation period is, and what you do know is it’s too late to abort it. The most important thing is to keep it alive so that it doesn’t kill you. Then when you’re like, “I think I’m gonna give birth,” you go to the Internet and google names for the book, like baby names. Then, if you’re

self-publishing it, it’s like there’s no doula, there’s no midwife.

Most improv instruction is structured around the eight-week class. As a teacher I was always like, “OK, I can see half of you have not gotten it yet, and now I have to move on to next week’s lesson,” and felt super frustrated. What are we missing by being stuck in this format?

In the book, I talk about how I reached a point at Second City where I didn’t want to deal with a rigid structure anymore. That allowed me to do whatever the fuck I need to do. I don’t do eight-week classes anymore. I feel like one of the problems is—what’s the word that everybody’s using nowadays? Pedagogy. My advice to improv teachers is to not worry about what you have to finish teaching and be with the students every step of the way. You’re modeling what kind of an improviser to be by modeling what kind of a teacher you are. Once in a while somebody says, “Wow, you really spent a lot of time with Alice.” And I’m like, “Alice needs a lot of time right now, and when you need time, I’m going to spend time with you.” Did you ever study with Del [Close]?

No. That was before I moved to Chicago.

Del had a class at iO. It wasn’t a class in improvisation, it wasn’t a class in Harold, it was a class on what was on Del’s mind. I loved it. He would say, “I went to the Art Institute and I saw some Hopper. I think we’re gonna do some Hopper scenes.” And I’m like, what? But when you have the confidence of the students, knowing that they’re along for the ride, they’re gonna do whatever the fuck you want to do.

In the book you talk about how most improvisers don’t identify as actors. Why is that?

When I started at iO in 1985 or ’86, there were maybe four improv schools in the country? Wow, I could be totally wrong! [starts counting] Dudley Riggs? I don’t know if the Committee was around when I was in San Francisco, Keith Johnstone, of course, Second City, Players Workshop which was connected to Second City at that time, and iO. So six. So the people I took classes from weren’t improvisers, because there wasn’t such a thing. They were actors, directors, and writers. They were imparting skill sets that are vital in good scene work: blocking, viewpoints, tempo, repetition, typography, architecture. I think the reason people don’t teach it now is they didn’t learn it.

I love the way your book throws out all of the traditional improv rules like “yes, and,” and that there’s a section geared toward advanced improvisers.

Say NO! There is no play that doesn’t have the word “no” in it. And there is no play that doesn’t have a question in it! There is no play where they’re not talking about somebody who isn’t there! All of that. Why is it that improvisers aren’t fucking allowed to do that? Fuck o !

I don’t teach “yes, and,” so it’s already advanced. I’m teaching, “look at your partner right now, what are they thinking?” And keep going with that. So what ends up happening is we start opening our hearts more, and we start going, “I trust you, you trust me.”

There’s a show called Naked Lunch, a podcast by that guy, Phil, Rosenberg? Rosenthal? One of my fellow Jews, whatever. He interviewed Elaine May for her first podcast. She talked about when she first really sat down

with Mike Nichols, just to fuck around on a park bench or something, she realized, “He’s got my sense of humor!”

The need for “yes, and” doesn’t apply to them! Because they’re living in their own world!

In your book you recall your father telling you to get a real job, and having a meandering career like many artists—myself included. As artists, there’s always the doubt of “Is this what I should be doing?” How did you navigate that?

There’s something that happens to us called compulsion. I’m compelled to do this, I have to do this, I must do this. As much as I feel like I don’t want to do this, I have to do this.

Like somebody says, “Come out, we’re gonna eat dinner together,” you’re going to go, even though you just ate. And you’re reading a menu, and you see Bacon-Flavored Bacon Bacon! Anything below that, you’re not paying attention to, because you cannot get that Bacon-Flavored Bacon Bacon out of what it is that you’re doing. As much as you try to do something else, it’s not going to work, because that’s not what you want to do! There’s always this thing in the back of your head that’s going, “Yeah, like, I’m making the money, and yeah, I got a parking space, and yeah, I got bennies. But you know what?—”

I could be having Bacon-Flavored Bacon Bacon.

Exactly. After a while, the universe gives you signs. It was just a matter of me being at the right place at the right time, which really helped push me. Then to be cast with Mick Napier and Splatter Theatre—which changed the face of theater I think in Chicago, arguably the Annoyance changed the face of improvisation and sketch writing—I was part of that. I was also in a theater company with Carell and Colbert and Amy Sedaris; that was the universe saying, you’re in the right place. I couldn’t fucking get enough of it because I was given the opportunity—and that is a huge thing right there—I feel I’m coming from a place of privilege. I never take that for granted. v

A SUBVERSIVE’S GUIDE TO IMPROVISATION: MOVING BEYOND “YES, AND” by David Razowsky, Boyd Parker Press, paperback and ebook, 496 pp., $9.99, amazon.com

VISUAL ART

The art of war

These exhibitions attempt to document the psychological toll of endless militarism.

By HANNAH EDGAR

When he met Tereska Adwentowska in 1948, David “Chim” Seymour was photographing ghosts.

Born Dawid Szymin in what would become Warsaw’s Jewish ghetto, the 36-year-old cofounder of the legendary Magnum Photos collective returned to find the streets of his youth reduced to rubble. His parents were gone, too, executed by the Nazis in a wooded suburb of Warsaw where they once spent blissful summers.

But closure, or something like it, wasn’t what brought Chim back to Warsaw. After his powerfully received postwar coverage for This Week magazine, UNESCO commissioned Chim for Children of Europe , a photojournalism series raising awareness about the continent’s

estimated 13 million war orphans.

That’s how Chim met Adwentowska, a student at a school for “backward and psychologically upset children,” per his caption. Her home had been flattened during a German air raid, her brain permanently damaged by shrapnel. In Chim’s photo, Adwentowska responds to an art class prompt: “This is home.” She scrawls a violent tangle of lines on the blackboard, her eyes wide and bewildered.

Chim, on the other side of the lens, likely knew the feeling.

“Tereska,” as the 1948 photograph is often called, casts its thousand-yard stare over “Chim: Between Devastation and Resurrection,” a

retrospective excerpted from an International Center of Photography exhibition and showing at the Illinois Holocaust Museum until February 4, 2024. But for the next several weeks, the pangs “Tereska” elicits from viewers echo in galleries far beyond the Holocaust Museum’s. Until February 12, the Ukrainian Institute of Modern Art shows “Children of War,” a collection of 144 paintings spirited out of Lviv by mother–daughter art teachers Nataliia and Yustyna Pavliuk. Later this winter, the Chicago Cultural Center, Newberry Library, and Hyde Park Art Center host exhibitions a liated with the second Veteran Art Triennial and Summit, entitled “Surviving the Long Wars.”

The three exhibitions are more or less dovetailing by chance. The first triennial happened in 2019, with this iteration delayed because of COVID, as was “Chim.” And, of course, few could have predicted the need for “Children of War.” But the resonance of that coincidence is hard to ignore.

“Every time I see these images now, I see Ukraine,” Ben Shneiderman, Chim’s nephew and a pioneering computer scientist, told me as we passed a line of Chim’s Warsaw photos. “Chim,” by design, privileges one perspective (Chim’s) and one medium (photography, here enlarged digital inkjet reproductions).

On the other hand, “Surviving the Long Wars” will feature everything from textiles to performance works to 19th-century ledger art created during the American Indian Wars, which began the moment European settlers set foot in North America and never o cially ended. (The U.S. government stopped recognizing Native tribes as sovereign nations in 1871, making it impossible to broker official treaties.) In an expansion of the first triennial, this year broadens the focus from veteran artists to all individuals a ected by the U.S.’s longest wars: the American Indian Wars and the Global War on Terror.

“We’re coming at this as community members grappling with something that we all know is beyond our ability to fully grapple with,” says “Surviving the Long Wars” co-organizer Aaron Hughes. “Because of that, it’s really fraught; we’re bringing a lot of di erent communities together. And often, veterans overwhelmingly come from the same communities impacted by our foreign and domestic policies. What does it mean to unpack those

contradictions?”

Hughes and co-organizer Joseph Lefthand have been doing just that—grappling, unpacking—for years now. Hughes, who cocurated last year’s “Remaking the Exceptional: Tea, Torture, & Reparations” at the DePaul Art Museum, foregrounds his dual identities as an Iraq war veteran and anti-war activist in his artistic practice; Lefthand delves into his experiences as both a subject and agent of state violence. (Lefthand is of Cheyenne-Arapaho, Taos, and Zuni descent; like Hughes, he participated in the 2003 invasion of Iraq.)

When both spoke to me about “Surviving the Long Wars” over Zoom, words often gave way to pregnant pauses. “I would love to enrich the conversation around war and violence in a way that de-emphasizes the violence,” Lefthand says. “As a performance artist, what are the tools, methods, and relationships that I can use in order to create work around these experiences, so as not to center the violence and subject others to it?”

At the first triennial, Lefthand presented a performance piece, Things Are Certainly Beautiful to Behold, but to Be Them Is Something Quite Different. Donning a gas mask, he used symbolic objects which “repurposed, recontextualized, and questioned” the latent violence of everyday life: the emergence of the “nuclear family” and middle-class prosperity from World War II. An audience member—a Marine vet—approached him afterward. “He told me he was moved by my performance. It made him reflect on his children and how our youth are pulled into this machine of creating violence,” Lefthand recalls.

Later, Lefthand looked the vet up. Years before, he’d been put on trial for war crimes, though he was ultimately found not guilty. “Someone who believed so deeply in the culture of the Marine Corps and that culture of violence was able to watch me perform, and it caused him to then question, even just a little bit, this system that he had been a part of,” Lefthand says.

What had done it? Was it the setting—a veteran art show in the Chicago Cultural Center’s Grand Army of the Republic Rotunda? Was it Lefthand himself, also a former Marine? Was the man haunted by what he had done?

Lefthand doesn’t know. He’ll likely never know.

Tereska standing by her drawing of “home” in a home for emotionally disturbed children, Warsaw, Poland, 1948 COURTESY THE ILLINOIS HOLOCAUST MUSEUM

EXHIBITIONS

R CHILDREN OF WAR

Through 2/ 12 : Wed-Sun noon- 4 PM, Ukrainian Institute of Modern Art, 2320 W. Chicago, uima-chicago.org, admission donation-based

R CHIM: BETWEEN DEVASTATION AND RESURRECTION

Through 2/4/24: Wed-Mon 10 AM- 5 PM, Illinois Holocaust Museum & Education Center, 9603 Woods Dr., Skokie, ilholocaustmuseum.org, general admission $6 -$18

R RESIDUES AND REBELLIONS

Through 5/27: Tue-Thu 10 AM-7 PM, Fri-Sat 10 AM- 5 PM, Newberry Library, 60 W. Walton, newberry.org, free

R UNLIKELY ENTANGLEMENTS

Through 7/9: Tue-Thu 10 AM-7 PM, Fri 10 AM- 4: 30 PM, Sat 10 AM- 4 PM, Sun 10 AM-1: 30 PM, Hyde Park Art Center, 5020 S. Cornell, hydeparkart.org, free

R RECKON AND REIMAGINE

Through 6/4: open daily 10 AM- 5 PM, Chicago Cultural Center, 78 E. Washington, chicago.gov, free

Where the works in “Surviving the Long Wars” are, by necessity, hyper-individualized, the works in “Children of War”—all paper-based, rendered in acrylic, pastel, or watercolor—make for more diffuse interpretations. UIMA exhibits the art sans placards, leaving artist names, titles, dates, and provenance a mystery.

In the disparate and often overwhelming display, some themes nonetheless coalesce. Many children lean into patriotic symbolism, squaring off the Ukrainian blue-and-yellow against the Russian white, blue, and red. (One work, in a bit of sophisticated geopolitical commentary, shows blue-and-yellow silhouettes shielding themselves from missile fire with an umbrella decorated with the Swedish, Polish, and American flags; whether the umbrella symbolizes solidarity or futility is left to the viewer.) In others, anthropomorphic animals stand in as surrogates for the conflict—a terrier in a police vest, a cat curled next to a rifle and a helmet.

Step into the one-room gallery, and you’ll also be confronted by a sea of sunflowers, Ukraine’s national symbol, many Van Goghlike in their staccato elegance. The most devastating shows a line of sunflowers standing charred and skeletal before an ashen landscape. Like most of the works, it only bears the first name of its painter: “Катерина,” Katerina.

Yustyna Pavliuk knows these artworks and the young artists behind them by heart. Since the outbreak of the war, Pavliuk and her mother, a professor at Lviv Polytechnic National University, have taught art at hospitals, orphanages, and distribution centers to more than a thousand displaced children, most between the ages of four and 14. Nataliia Pavliuk started the classes just days after the Russian invasion; Yustyna, herself a student at the Polytechnic, joined her once or twice a week between her own studies.

Likewise, when she and Nataliia return to Lviv at the end of the month, they will rest for just one day before resuming classes.

“The first day, you are shocked. You don’t know what to do. The second day, you try to deal with your plans. And then, you say, ‘I can’t sit in one place. I need to do something,’” Yustyna says.

Yustyna called me from New York City, where she and Nataliia were sightseeing

before returning to Chicago; Nataliia, who understands English better than she speaks it, listened and chimed in occasionally from out of frame. Yustyna said their students usually shared their backstories gradually. Sometimes, color palettes o ered their own tell.

“Kids who are the most a ected by war, the most traumatized, they use the brightest colors. They don’t use black at all,” she says.

One such drawing depicts two children, one holding a balloon, standing in front of a house. The work is a self-portrait of the ten-yearold artist, Veronika, and one of her friends, Danylo. The colors seem to leap from the page; Veronika’s hair is long and flowing.

In reality, at the time she created the work, Veronika’s hair was cropped short, the result of extensive surgeries after her house in Vuhledar, a coal mining city in Donetsk, was leveled by a Russian tank. Her entire family was killed. So was Danylo, in a separate attack, and many of her friends.

Unlike Tereska, Veronika could imagine “home”: the building in the work’s background. Yustyna says Veronika told her it was a house “where all of her friends who died could be in one place.” But, like Tereska’s “home,” that place does not—cannot—exist.

“It’s a very, very deep work,” Yustyna says. “It’s the hope of meeting her friends again, and also knowing it will never be the same, like it was.”

The most powerful photographs in “Chim” come from his Children of Europe series. The precocity and pain Chim captured still staggers. Two pocket-sized buskers swaggering like troubadours on the streets of Naples. Young boys working in a printing press in Hungary, the composition and light evoking Vermeer. A boy without arms, probably no older than 12, reading a book in Braille with his lips. In one of my favorites, a half-dozen Polish kids ham it up for Chim on a rickety-looking wooden jungle gym. Behind them looms the blown-out skeleton of the Warsaw ghetto; the playground was built to deter kids from exploring the rubble. If not vying to impress him, clearly Chim’s young subjects at least trusted him.

That doesn’t surprise Shneiderman. “In terms of why he focused on children, it always seemed obvious to me. He was a very empathic

person,” Shneiderman said, during his January 19 talk at the Illinois Holocaust Museum. Chim wasn’t drawn to combat images. Instead he favored psychological portraits which, like Lefthand’s work, never let you forget the violence looming just out of frame. The exhibition concludes with the last five years of Chim’s career, spent in the Middle East, much of it in the nascent state of Israel. In one, an Italian settler named Eliezer Trito holds his newborn daughter aloft, beaming. The placard describes her as the first child born in the Alma settlement in Northern Galilee.

What it doesn’t mention is that three short years before, there had been another Alma— an Arab village razed by the Israeli Defense Force, despite being denoted by the Israeli Minority Affairs Committee as a peacefully “surrendered” village. The ruins of the old Alma rest just half a kilometer west of the Jewish settlement.

In another photo, taken in an unspecified region of Israel, a young couple marries under a chuppah held aloft by guns and pitchforks. The subject and composition were so stark that one contemporary accused Chim of staging it. Life, yet again, springs from bloodshed, and the living are left to reckon with the emotional rubble.

“There’s nothing more Zionist than that,” Holocaust Museum curator Arielle Weininger mused, staring at the wedding tableau.

In 1956, Chim was shot by Egyptian troops while covering the Suez Crisis. His family found out on the morning news when Shneiderman was nine.

Today, Shneiderman oversees Chim’s estate, mostly handling licensing and research queries. As he settles into retirement from the University of Maryland, he devotes increasingly more time to managing his uncle’s legacy.

“Robert Capa is known for the phrase, ‘If your photos aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough,’” Shneiderman says. “A couple of the exhibits about Chim are called ‘Close Enough,’ because Chim got close enough emotionally. That’s just the spirit of who he was.”

It’s all any of these exhibitions can be, grasping at terrors we all cower beneath yet never get an iota nearer to understanding: close enough. v

Super Sad Black Girl plumbs the highs and lows of life

Diamond Sharp’s debut poetry collection cuts as deeply as it heals.

By ATAVIA REED

Under a south-side el station, in a space small enough to blink and miss, there’s a door to a world where Black girls can live the fullness of an impossible, earthly bliss. Suppose you listen close enough, past the sound of the ghost train speeding by. You might hear Black girls laughing, crunching down on chips dripping in hot sauce between sips of bubbly Moscato and drags of Black & Mild cigars, as they reminisce about a past that was never just and the possibilities of a future.

Literary greats like Lorraine Hansberry and Margaret Walker are there, cutting up in Washington Park. You might see Gwendolyn Brooks, too, shooting pool with The Seven.

It’s a purgatory beyond heaven and hell. Unlike author Diamond Sharp, you’d have to believe in one or the other to deny it. And it’s one of the critical settings of Super Sad Black Girl, Sharp’s debut text that cuts as deeply as it heals.

In verse spanning 52 pages, Sharp explores the limitations and heartache of being born with mental health conditions and what it means to accept a sadness that permeates

every part of your being.

Death is a prominent theme—Sharp was dealing with suicidal ideations when she began writing the poems in 2013—but so is acceptance of self, freedom, and the exploration of a world where you can have both.

Sharp beautifully captures an ache of sorrow that often feels isolating and makes it relatable, palatable. The poems flow like diary entries.

“In the early writings of these poems, I was thinking a lot about death, particularly about what it means to die young and what it was like to talk to the people who are no longer on this plane,” Sharp said. “Where else in the universe can you go when talking to people who aren’t on this plane? I imagined purgatory as a liminal space. I chose to imagine it as a joyful place.”

Storytelling is deeply rooted in Sharp’s heritage.

Sharp’s grandmother, a retired nurse, was a born storyteller. Tales about life in Mississippi in the early 20th century and Chicago’s west side in the 1930s were frequent

as Sharp grew up in Oak Park.

Sharp had a speech impediment and was quiet. It was “di cult to enunciate and speak articulately,” she said. Instead, she filled her days with film, television, and books—she was an early, voracious reader.

“I feel like every writer said when they were a kid, they wrote their own little books and stu ,” Sharp said. “But I learned how to speak after I learned how to read. That’s how my brain works.”

The cliche is true for Sharp, too. In the fifth grade, she wrote a poetry book. At Oak Park and River Forest High School, she joined the spoken word club, led then by the celebrated poet Peter Kahn. As a junior, she took Saturday classes at Young Chicago Authors.

Sharp’s later texts are more mature, exploring what it means to live with several mental health diagnoses as a Black woman. Now, fully equipped with the language to describe how she’s feeling as someone living with bipolar II disorder, she can see the impact of her mental health on her earlier writing.

“If mental health has been undiagnosed in your family—which is not unusual—getting information later on allows you to reflect and say, ‘OK, what I was seeing was depression and anxiety,’” Sharp said. “So now, as an adult, I can look back and be like, ‘Oh, I’ve been anxious my entire life.’ These depressive moments have been part of me for as long as I can remember. I just didn’t understand it as such.”

Writing and publishing Super Sad Black Girl over the past ten years was lonely, scary, and freeing.

She’s been hospitalized three times, a “health insurance sponsored vacation,” she said. She’s dealt with suicidal ideations, evident in poems like “Poppies,” “Runaway,” and “Room,” where Sharp explains that leaving an unkempt room behind in the wake of her death would be an inconvenience to those living.

It wasn’t until she turned 25, nine years ago, that everything “clicked.” Beyond the suicidal ideations, there was an urge to “fight back” and explore what life would be like when you’re interested in living.

You can be sad, and you can be Black, and

you can be lost, lonely, or frightened. But you can want to live, too. And there’s power in all of those qualities.

It’s a blessing to lay oneself bare and celebrate the mess.

—“I Can Be Sad In Public”

“I started to realize that people are going to think I’m crazy anyways,” Sharp said. “People talk about me behind my back. I might as well just say, ‘Yeah, you’re correct. That is true.’ I’m not going to let these aimless notions about mental illness control my life and how I see myself.”

Now that Super Sad Black Girl is out for the world to consume, the poems are no longer hers, Sharp said.

She places a barrier between herself and her work, allowing readers to respond how they choose. Sharp does have two hopes, though. “I’m hoping that people enter the world, and I hope that it sparks more interest in Lorraine, Gwendolyn, and Margaret’s work,” Sharp said.

“If you are a young Black child in the Chicago area and you’re interested in writing, I feel like it’s impossible not to be introduced to Lorraine and Gwendolyn Brooks. In some ways, they’re just kind of in the water.”

Sharp spent years running from her mental health issues. A conversation with a friend’s mother encouraged her to nip it in the bud and “do what I need to move forward in the best way for my health,” Sharp said.

Sharp hopes that for people dealing with mental illness, trying to understand it, or still running from it, her book adds context and color to what can be a desolate world.

“It’s been good to revisit these poems,” Sharp said. “It’s good to see them out in the world. One person wrote to me and said they felt like it was a book that would allow people to heal. It’s an honor to me that people feel that way. All I can do is write it and hope that it impacts people positively.” v

R SUPER SAD BLACK GIRL by Diamond Sharp, Haymarket Books, paperback, 72 pp., $11 90, haymarketbooks.com

The Glass Menagerie .

Photo By Kiran West ©

ARTS & CULTURE

REVIEWS

R Ways of seeing

Lu werk challenges our understanding of color in “Exact Dutch Yellow”

Stepping into “Exact Dutch Yellow” is like finding a cool spot of shade on a scorching hot day. The light in the darkened fourth-floor galleries mainly comes from the work itself, LED- and neon-lit installations that seem to play tricks before our eyes.

The exhibition plumbs the history of color classification, a subject that seems tailor-made for Lu werk, the Chicago-based artistic duo of Petra Bachmaier and Sean Gallero. Lu werk, which references the immateriality of light and air and the materiality of artwork, have staged similar architectural interventions across the world, from the Chicago Botanical Garden and the Farnsworth House, to sites in Barcelona and Zimbabwe. The show’s title refers to a shade renamed by Charles Darwin, perhaps one of history’s best-known classifiers, on his infamous trip through South America.

On view are LED-lit canvases which slowly shi in tone based on the changing lights, like living color field paintings. Two wall-hung sculptures vacillate between light and dark, in an LED illusion reminiscent of Anish Kapoor’s work. Yet it is the final gallery that steals the show. The wall-sized The Sky at the Time Was Berlin Blue recreates a 1789 tool called a cyanometer, used for measuring the blueness of the sky. Opposite is a neon piece that spells out “Dusky,” a word repeatedly used to describe colors by an American taxonomist in the early 20th century. Standing between the two is like watching night fall; they function as a sort of sunrise alarm antithesis, serving to calm instead of awaken. —KERRY CARDOZA ”EXACT DUTCH YELLOW” Through 1/29: open daily 10 AM-5 PM, Chicago Cultural Center, 78 E. Washington, chicago.gov, free

R Boundary pushing

At DePaul Art Museum, surrealism complicates the boundaries between the real and the fake.

“A Natural Turn,” curated by Ionit Behar and up at DePaul Art Museum, centers the impossibility of articulating the boundaries between the real and the artificial. With work by artists María Berrío (Colombian), Joiri Minaya (Dominican-United Statesian), Rosana Paulino (Brazilian), and Kelly Sinnapah Mary (Indo-Guadeloupean), the show tackles the elusiveness of the self for women of color within the mirrored world of colonialism, racism, and late capitalism. While there is no single idea of “woman” or “Latinidad” that the show champions, at the center of the exhibition lies an incisive critique of the myths of individuality.

Behar’s “Turn” forces viewers to question who has the privilege to access the mantle of personhood under the eyes of the collective. In lieu of definitive statements or overarching theses, the exhibition offers something much more interesting: ambivalence and complexity, a refusal of easy answers. For instance, in artist Joiri Minaya’s 2017 video documentation of a performance entitled Containers (the title of the work taken from the wearable pieces Minaya performs in), she states, “I am not a flower,” while partially emerged in the “container” that covers her body in a tropical floral print. A flower here is never just a flower—nor is a snake plant, a motherland, a piece of cake, a mother, or the person you see

when you look in the mirror.

With emotional and artistic depth, “A Natural Turn” makes space for refusal, rebellion, and play by making a home in the in-between spaces. Wholeness here is a myth, but in the fissures and cracks, liberation grows.

—ANNETTE LEPIQUE “A NATURAL TURN: MARÍA BERRÍO, JOIRI MINAYA, ROSANA PAULINO, AND KELLY SINNAPAH MARY” Through 2/19: Wed-Thu 11 AM-7 PM, Fri-Sun 11 AM-5 PM, DePaul Art Museum, 935 W. Fullerton, resources.depaul.edu/art-museum

RThe spirit of Lawrence Steger

A group exhibition examines the late performance artist’s legacy.

“What could be worse than not finding the right story?”

Lawrence Steger, a Chicago performance artist, stated those words to audiences in his final performance work, Dra (1998). The same sentiment infuses the lively spirit of Gallery 400’s “Reckless Rolodex,” the first comprehensive retrospective of Steger’s massive body of work. Where else could one find a fruit cake, the death of Elizabeth Taylor, and mattresses bent and broken by storms of flesh? Steger’s artistic legacy not only tells these stories but explains how truth tends to live in the corners of life that closely resemble fiction.

The show’s title is both inspired by one of Steger’s performances and a descriptor of the exhibition’s structure; the show features a muscular lineup of artists responding to Steger’s work and impact on late 20th-century art history. The exhibition includes work by Devin T. Mays, John Neff, Betsy Odom, Derrick Woods-Morrow, Cherrie Yu, and a performance series.

Curated by Matthew Goulish, Lin Hixson, and Caroline Picard, “Rolodex” does something extraordinary in its examination of Steger’s brief life, one taken by complications from the AIDS virus. The exhibition imparts urgency and impresses intimacy upon Steger’s legacy and honors the artistic communities that continued in his absence. There is a type of magic that occurs when one is dislocated in time and place. It is in these moments that one can join something bigger than the self. This magic is what “Rolodex” offers viewers.

ANNETTE LEPIQUE “RECKLESS ROLODEX” Through 3/18: Tue-Fri 10 AM-5 PM, Sat noon-5 PM, Gallery 400, 400 S. Peoria, gallery400.uic.edu, free

R Perspective from a man in the crowd

For 50 years, artist and veteran Franklin McMahon championed righteous causes in his work.

Margot McMahon says her father called himself an innocent bystander, but if this exhibition of graphite and watercolor pictures is any guide, I’d call him an engaged, active witness. Comprising some 40 pieces that portray protests, court scenes, political gatherings, as well as portraits and cityscapes with historic significance, the work dates from the 1940s to the early 2000s. If there’s a through line, it is a palpable sense of being there.

Franklin McMahon was a POW in the waning months of World War II, and his daughter believes that experience shaped his worldview. The earliest pieces show the gates of Auschwitz, the Berlin Wall under construction, and a decimated building in Hiroshima. Subsequent pictures depict the Emmett Till trial, Martin Luther King Jr. on Madison Street in Chicago, Shirley Chisholm giving

a campaign speech, protestors against Nixon, and street demonstrations against the Iraq War. These subjects and dozens of others are always from the perspective of the man in the crowd rather than the hero on stage. McMahon would park himself on the sidewalk and draw what he saw before his eyes as it happened. Then he would take the large sheets of paper home to his studio and add watercolor. Some pieces still bear his handwritten notes on what color to use and where Scarred by war, McMahon devoted his entire working life—he passed away in 2012—to championing righteous causes with his pencils and brushes. Talking about the country’s recent history, Margot laments that the lessons her father worked so hard to impart through his art weren’t heeded. He reminds us that an artist’s greatest responsibility is to bear witness. —DMITRY SAMAROV “RESIST!: A VISUAL HISTORY OF PROTEST” Through 2/12: Wed-Sun noon-4 PM, Ukrainian Institute of Modern Art, 2320 W. Chicago, uima-chicago.org, admission donation-based

R Reckoning with life

This survey of African art falls short of the curators’ aims to decolonize Western perspectives.

I rarely read wall labels in art exhibitions as I find the verbiage gets in the way of my experience. My goal is to have a one-on-one reckoning with what I’m looking at without someone else’s words confusing or directing my reaction.

The curators of this survey of some 250 sculptures, masks, and ornaments from all over the African continent have made my modus operandi difficult. Signage and wall texts throughout allude to their aim of reframing how this non-Western work is seen in as Eurocentric a venue as can be imagined: an encyclopedic art museum. They want the viewer to see these pieces of wood, bone, leather, dirt, hair—most made for devotional and communal rituals—the way their makers intended. They propose that we consider various metrics of beauty and ugliness as we stroll through.

This is a fool’s errand. There’s no way to recreate the original context so many years a er these o en sacred objects were taken from their places of origin, shipped halfway across the world, and displayed as decorations in some rich American’s or European’s home. Even the wall texts admit to not knowing what tribe every piece came from or the dates it was fashioned. All I hope a er breaking my rule and reading is that whoever sold the work got a good price.

I’ve spent hours at a time in this show and had many powerful encounters with these figures and faces. I

don’t for a second presume to know the intent of the sculptors who cut down a tree trunk, fashioned it into human form, then pierced it with nails, knives, and sharp shards of glass. I look at what they made and recognize a base-level reckoning with what it is to be alive. It’s all anyone can ask for from a work of art. Beauty has nothing to do with it.

—DMITRY SAMAROV “THE LANGUAGE OF BEAUTY IN AFRICAN ART” Through 2/27: Thu 11 AM-8 PM, Fri-Mon 11 AM-5 PM, Art Institute of Chicago, 111 S. Michigan, 312-443-3600, artic.edu, general admission $14-$35 (see website for free days, discounts, and a breakdown of admission fees)

This 19th-century female fi gure, on view at the Art Institute of Chicago, comes from Côte d’Ivoire. COURTESY ART INSTITUTE

Barbara Kasten’s digital Chromogenic Print Crown Hall 2 is on view at Gallery 400. COURTESY BORTOLAMI GALLERY

OF CHICAGO

The strength of community

Black theater artists and leaders find their “field of familiars.”

By SHERI FLANDERS

At the end of September 2020, I wrote a piece for the Reader titled “Black artistic leaders take charge at several Chicago theaters,” which framed the influx of new (and preexisting) Black leadership in Chicago theater against the backdrop of a historic disruption in the industry. That disruption was powered in part by COVID-19 leading to budget cuts and mass layo s, and in part by intense public criticism of the shortcomings of many predominantly white theater institutions, with a call to action for faster and more concrete gains in racial equity in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement’s impact on the arts sector.

Many, including myself, tentatively hoped that the tsunami of these external forces would lead to a watershed moment ushering in a golden era of transformative changes that would completely redefine the industry as we

know it.

The cynic in me, however, had doubts.

The reality has landed somewhere in the middle. While ticket sales might not yet be back to pre-pandemic levels, theater is back in full swing for just about everyone except for the immunocompromised, who are left with the agonizing choice of participating at their own risk or not at all, as COVID precautions such as masking have become less frequent to nonexistent. On the other hand, some of the temporary accommodations for accessibility have led to completely reimagining what theater can look like, with those early humble Zoom performances opening the floodgates toward permanently blurring the line between screen and stage. The heartbreaking number of theaters that have closed temporarily or permanently due to insolvency or mismanagement has also energized discussions about the

long-term e cacy of board leadership.

On the racial equity front, the final tally has yet to be counted. And frankly, if success isn’t obvious, based on historical track records and the continued excellent reporting of my colleagues, I think it’s quite fair to make assumptions.

My first instinct was to approach this recap through the lens of how many artists have been retained in their positions and how many have moved on, to capture a snapshot of the health of artistic institutions.

And doubly frankly: it doesn’t matter.

For me, the endless spin cycle of hand-wringing about whether or not fundamentally inequitable organizations can or will change after yet another misstep, scandal, or blindingly white season is beginning to feel like a lens best left in the trash bin like a used KN95.

“The function, the very serious function of racism is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being. Somebody says you have no language and you spend 20 years proving that you do. Somebody says your head isn’t shaped properly so you have scientists working on the fact that it is. Somebody says you have no art, so you dredge that up. Somebody says you have no kingdoms, so you dredge that up. None of this is necessary. There will always be one more thing.” —Toni Morrison

So much precious energy from so many talented artists has been wasted on so many recalcitrant and bullheaded organizations. So much ink has been spilled verbally prodding these stubborn oxen uphill. We know in our hearts that many simply will never budge. And that even the one obstinate step they are shamed into taking is just simply not worth the e ort. At times, I as a writer have felt low, seemingly writing the same article over and over and over again, calling for a change that never seems to arrive.

I workshopped a few much more graceful ways to say this, but this feels the most authentic: People are fucking tired. I’m fucking tired. We need rest.

“Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.” —Audre Lorde

When Jerrod Carmichael hosted the Golden Globes recently, his opening monologue was quiet, contemplative, and light on the jokes—a drastic tonal shift from the typical biting zingers of award shows past, leaving quite a few people puzzled. To me, his monologue of fact—simply stating “I’m here because I’m Black”—acknowledged the sham, the repetition, the predictability. He was exhausted.

During the pandemic the organization ArtEquity held a series called BIPOC Surviving Predominantly White Institutions geared toward supporting artists who found themselves exhausted from the neverending struggle for respect. This movement toward healing is not new. It’s been a plank of Black liberation for

Le : Charlique Rolle of Congo Square Theatre; Myesha-Tiara of Perceptions Theatre JOHN BOEHM; KHALIQ VISUALS FIELD REPORT

eternity, from spirituals to recent movements such as #BlackGirlMagic #BlackBoyJoy, Toi Derricotte’s poem “The Telly Cycle” (opening with the line “Joy is an act of resistance”), and Congo Square’s recent work of community healing, What to Send Up When It Goes Down.

The pandemic forced us to rest. Now it is mandatory that we embrace rest and pull together to heal and care for one another.

In my opinion, the best metric of success for Black artists—and all artists, frankly—is that they continue to find joy, renewal, and creative satisfaction in whatever role they choose, whether that choice is to stay in their position or move on to a new position. My wish for every artist is to find roles that o er them a better-than-living wage, benefits, schedule flexibility, the space to use their authentic voices, collegial support, and careers that allow them to grow or that happily help to launch them toward bigger and brighter futures.

My wish is that we all luxuriate in the strength of community. Real, nourishing, supportive community.

My original piece highlighted seven leaders: Sana Selemon, the executive director of BoHo Theatre; Kamille Dawkins, the interim artistic director of Strawdog Theatre; Regina Victor, the artistic director of Sideshow Theatre; Donterrio Johnson, the artistic director of PrideArts; Mikael Burke, associate artistic director at About Face Theatre; Anthony LeBlanc, the interim executive producer of The Second City; and Charlique C. Rolle, the executive director of Congo Square Theatre. In an addendum to the article after press, the article also added Arlicia McLain, the artistic director at Halcyon Theatre, and MyeshaTiara, cofounder and artistic director of Perceptions Theatre.

Recently, I was fortunate enough to gather some updates of joy from a few of this talented cohort of leaders. I want to celebrate their successes with you.

One exciting update comes from LeBlanc, former artistic director of The Second City, who is thriving in his new role. LeBlanc shares, “I am working for Nickelodeon doing talent development and on-set acting coaching. It is a joy to help be a small part of fostering a new generation of comedians. But it does not miss me that every time I come back to Chicago or talk with a BIPOC comedy director that still reaches out for advice . . . that there is still so much work to do to keep improving the community . . . My constant advice is to do what you can to help to leave the community better

than you found it. And if we all keep doing that, it will be harder and harder to turn back time.”

Perceptions, which started producing during the pandemic shutdown, is still going strong and rapidly breaking new ground. I checked in with Myesha-Tiara, and she had quite a bit of great news to share.

Myesha-Tiara reports: “Perceptions Theatre is in its fourth year as a theater company based on the south side of Chicago. This is their second year in person, as their first two years were completely virtual. They have been working hard to live up to their mission to strengthen the accessibility of theater to the African-American/Black communities of South Shore and to be an economic and artistic resource for BIPOC artists and succeeding in doing so.”

Myesha-Tiara notes that the company has received over $40,000 in grants, which enabled them to employ “over 30 actors, 15 directors, and 12 playwrights.”

In 2023 they plan to do even more. This spring they are coproducing with Prop Thtr to bring the rolling world premiere of the play Panther Women: An Army for the Liberation by India Nicole Burton, which focuses on the Black women in the Black Panther Party and will be directed by Myesha-Tiara, to the south side. Panther Women is part of the rolling world premiere program through the National New Play Network; other partner theaters are Cleveland Public Theatre in Ohio and Phoenix Theatre in Indianapolis. This summer they will continue with their third annual BIPOC Play Fest that showcases playwrights of color, and will end the season with a workshopped staged reading of a piece yet to be announced that will go up in spring 2024.

Myesha-Tiara shared a thoughtful and profound meditation for the future, saying, “This year I hope to live more in the present and enjoy each moment with my community instead of only focusing on what the future will bring.”

Over at the consistently excellent Congo Square Theatre, Rolle continues to shine as one of the hardest-working artists in the city. She shared a few impressive highlights of her work since we last spoke, which include being named in Newcity ’s Players 2022: The Fifty People Who Really Perform for Chicago (along with Congo Square artistic director Ericka Ratcli ); being elected as the newest (and second in its 25-year history) board president of the African American Arts Alliance of Chicago, a role that has been previously occupied

by Black Ensemble Theater’s founder Jackie Taylor; and being selected for the Chicago Urban League’s IMPACT Fellow Class of 2023. Currently Rolle serves as executive producer for Congo’s digital content, with the sketch series Hit ‘Em on the Blackside in season three and the audio series The Clinic in its second season.

When asked what she might like to share with our readers, Rolle said, “I have been able to stabilize the organization to be in the best financial position it has seen in its entire existence. If there’s anything that I’ve learned, or rather that has been reinforced, amidst COVID, is that community is one of the greatest forms of currency that we have. I can say that I’ve done a lot and accomplished much on my own, but that wouldn’t be completely accurate. It’s the community that strengthens my bones and ignites my passion to continue to push boundaries, fight for equity, and ensure that our collective voices are heard.”

Some of the other artists featured, including Victor, Johnson, and Burke, have moved on from their positions toward new futures. Some, including Dawkins (now the permanent

artistic director at Strawdog) and Selemon, remain. Regardless of how long or short their tenures were or will be, all of them remain threads in the tapestry that is Chicago theater and that should not mark the measure of anything more than the passage of time.

Burke’s words from two years ago on the limitations of longevity still ring true: “I don’t think there is one human being at the head of a cultural organization who can be as in touch with his community ten years later as he was when he first started.”

Longevity of tenure is a crude and outdated measurement of success of an artistic organization, or for the artists themselves. After all, theater isn’t an institution. Theater is people. And even if every single institution crumbles, theater will still exist. Community will still exist.

I extend my sincerest thanks to everyone in the theater community for sharing their art with me over the years.

May every artist wander until they find the field of familiars where they can bloom. v

@SheriFlanders

‘Utopia is a place that accommodates every body’

Ariella Granados builds community for artists with disabilities.

By IRENE HSIAO

Last October, the Mayor’s O ce for People with Disabilities [MOPD] and Chicago DCASE appointed multidisciplinary artist Ariella Granados as its first Central West Center artist in residence. Supported by the MOPD, the National Endowment for the Arts, and DCASE, the residency o ers studio space and funding for Granados to develop her artistic practice, host open studios and meetups for artists with disabilities, and present a series of public programs between January and July. January programming launched with an open studio with Granados and a sound workshop by blind media artist Andy Slater. On January 27, Granados screens Experimental Graphic Score Performance, their first work completed during the residency, alongside an hour-long DJ set. Programs in upcoming

months include a DJ workshop, an improv/ comedy workshop with Jesse Swanson of iO, a set design workshop, and a makeup/character workshop—all designed to cultivate a community of artists with disabilities.

“What I love most is . . . Ari’s playfulness in their work,” says Zhen Heinemann, DCASE director of visitor experience and public engagement, who has been working with MOPD on the residency. “The projects . . . seemed a fun entry point for folks . . . with wigs, makeup, set construction, improv. That kind of work supports a social environment to celebrate in community. Because Ari is a performance-based artist and a makeup artist, it’s a theatrical world. People who come from the performance world come from a place of collaboration and community. It’s a program

that’s about opening arms and gathering people in, in a fun, playful, joyful way.”

Blending humor, drama, and improvisational play, Granados’s work spans creative direction, makeup, performance art, video, and music—frequently casting herself in alternate worlds and even altered bodies to experience, process, and reimagine personal history, family dynamics, and existence as a first-generation Mexican and Indian artist with a disability. In 2021, Granados created a series of videos using green screens to transport them to spaces such as the surface of a resident card (No Documents), a meat processing plant, a gas station convenience store, and the set of a telenovela (I Used To Have Cable Before He Left, parts 1-3), using makeup and costuming to transform themself into characters that inhabit these spaces, including imagined renditions of their parents.

In 2022, during a residency at the Hyde Park Art Center, Granados began to transform the background into the foreground by reinventing herself as a green character. “The color green is used to render things in postproduction, so I’m thinking of [the] color green and blue as ways of rendering my body,” says Granados. “I use the color green as a metaphor. When you’re standing in front of a green screen, you have to render the image you want into the green screen for you to be where you want to be. I started using green screen to put myself in different places, to recreate memories and imagine memories. [Now] I use the color green as a way of rendering my body.”

At the Central West Center, which houses the MOPD and the Chicago Department of Family and Support Services at 2102 West Ogden, Granados has been developing an album called /’pôlzē/. “It’s spelled the way it’s pronounced, palsy: to be paralyzed,” says Granados. “It’s me thinking about my experience being paralyzed and how I can convey that through sound, and thinking about experiences I’ve found paralyzing in my upbringing.” Coproduced with drummer Eddie Burns, the album also features musicians Josh Jessen (keys/synth), Alec Trickett (percussion), William Corduroy (bass/guitar), and Kenneth Leftridge Jr. (saxophone/flute)—a “community of people coming together,” says Granados. Three songs from the album will be presented on January 27, with videos created in collaboration with sound engineers at VSOP Studios, production assistant Erika Grey, and

directors of photography Alex Halstead and Pouya Shahbazi.

“I grew up in the church and grew up singing,” says Granados, who was born in Texas and came to Chicago to study art at UIC. “When I left Christianity, I left singing. But when I built a friendship with Eddie and began to participate in the music community, it happened out of nowhere—going to the studio, making songs—before I knew it, I had eight or nine songs.”

“This is what it feels like to be in my body, a paralyzing experience,” says Granados. “I have Erb’s palsy, paralysis on my right arm. It was medical mistreatment—the doctor’s fault when they were delivering me—then I was not properly treated. My mom had just immigrated to the U.S. I can only imagine how di cult it must have been to navigate the medical system.”

“I didn’t really come into my disability identity until three years ago. I grew up hiding my arm—for 23 years. I was not in my body. I was very much just in survival mode,” says Granados. “Like many of us, I had a lot of time to sit with myself through the pandemic, and that was it for me. I was forced to come to terms with my feelings around my disability. I was tired of hiding. I think the moments that gave me confidence in coming into myself were through self-expression with my makeup and clothing. I was naturally drawn to bright colors and patterns as a way to distract myself from my disability.”

“Coming into my identity as a person living with a disability has helped me understand myself and step into my body. For so long I have been so deeply dissociated, living with chronic pain, what comes with having a disability. I’d premeditate how I would get up and move across the room and make sure I would do it in a way that people wouldn’t notice my arm.” Now performance has become “a way to reclaim my body,” says Granados.

Community has been key to Granados’s progress. “Finding the Chicago Artists with Disabilities Facebook page was life-changing to me. I had felt alone for so long. Being in a body is hard, especially with the upbringing I had. I grew up radically Christian, being at church conferences with 150 people praying for me, like God was going to heal my arm. It was because of those experiences that I hid. I broke with that when I moved to Chicago. I

PERFORMANCE AND ACTIVISM

Ariella Granados DANIEL DELGADO

was 17. [I thought] I shouldn’t be living with this much guilt and shame in my life for being myself, for wanting to express myself and be a human. Now I’ve been here for nine years. Community—that’s what’s kept me here, because the winters are brutal. There’s such a rich community here of artists and musicians. Now I’m slowly beginning to build a disability community. I’ve wanted this space for so long.”

The culminating project of Granados’s residency is designed to build and acknowledge this community of disabled artists—a video in which they intend to engage other artists with disabilities in visions of utopia: “What does utopia mean to you? What does it mean to be in your body? What makes you feel the most at home?”

For themselves, Granados says, “I don’t care for perfect. Utopia to me is an imagined place of rest and pleasure, where humans who look like me and di erent kinds of ways are cele-

brated and honored. Utopia is a place where I can exist freely and safely in my body. It’s a place that is digitally rendered, green, with an influx of images of big arms and hands. Utopia is a place that accommodates every body. It’s a place that prioritizes access and needs across the board.”

“I’m not a victim of pain; I am in relationship with pain and that complicates things because it’s one of the things you just have to come to terms with, and sometimes it’s really di cult to accept. I spend time in my room doing my affirmations—‘I am enough, yes’—but goddammit I’m also in a lot of pain. What do I do with that? Make art.”

For more information about the programs and to register and request accessibility needs, visit www.eventbrite.com/e/public-programs-central-west-center-artist-in-residence-ariella-granados-tickets-477485651437 v

@IreneCHsiao

PERFORMANCE

Not your average camp

Newport Theater offers a haven for burlesque and a whole lot more.

By JT NEWMAN

It’s July 1990, and I am summoned to the corner of Newport and She eld over and over again by the lure of my friend Franz’s rooftop parties. But little do I know that just half a block away, Lower Links is beginning a summer of programming that solidifies that corner as a mini-epicenter of performance art in the city.

Performance luminaries such as Lydia Lunch, Paula Killen, and Brigid Murphy (Milly’s Orchid Show) found a regular home in its friendly confines. At the same time, a tradition began to ferment upstairs at Link’s Hall of

supporting small dance companies and indie choreographers that continues today in their space on Western Avenue.

Originally serving as a space for social dances and Daughters of the American Revolution meetings, the building on the corner of Newport and She eld housed the Chicago Women’s Health Center (CHWC) and the original Links Hall in the 1970s (the presenting organization dropped the apostrophe at some point). Once Links moved out, Under the Gun Theater took over the space for their original comedy shows. Building out the spare space as

a small proscenium stage theater with cabaret seating, some bleacher seats, and a bar, the newly formed spot became host to a bevy of burlesque, belly dance, and variety shows in early 2019 after the Uptown Underground was abruptly shuttered.

Enter Eva la Feva. “‘I’m a belly dancer and a burlesque performer. Many of us performed regularly at the Uptown Underground, which was a former burlesque drag variety space that’s now become the Baton Lounge.”

La Feva also runs a popular regular burlesque and variety show at the California

Clipper, the Clipper Cabaret. So, when Tight Five Productions looked for someone to take over programming and rebrand the space, la Feva felt like a natural fit. She was a trusted burlesque and cabaret community member and knew how to pull in an audience and promote. She opened the space to her community to bring in their own productions, and started coordinating fringe programming. After the COVID shutdown, she started the Newport Peek-Easy, a weekly burlesque/drag/ variety show, to provide regular work to fringe performers.

“We focus on what I call the fringe arts because currently, our programming has pole dancing, clowning, belly dance, burlesque, and Bollywood dance—things that might have a harder time finding a home within a traditional theater environment because they aren’t continuous runs of productions,” la Feva explains. “[We o er] more one-o or pop-up, cabaret-style productions versus the same single production for a number of weeks.”

She also stresses the importance of the space being very inclusive and open to a variety of productions and di erent performance communities. “We’ve been really fortunate to partner with Shimmy LaRoux from The Professional Adult on DEIJ issues,” la Feva says. “She was really helpful in helping us to develop our values statement and our commitment to inclusion. We provide discounted space for BIPOC and LGBTQIA+ artists who are struggling with affording rent or need help with a first-time project. We try to make sure that we’re bringing in a variety of di erent voices and perspectives in terms of the productions. We ask our producers to abide by our safety and inclusion policies that we adapted from Burlesque Community Against Unsafe Spaces (BCAUS) and through the help from Shimmy. And we’ve just been reached out to by Chicago Therapy Collective to commit to their Hire Trans Now initiative.”

In addition to featuring a variety of voices,

NEWPORT THEATER 956 W. Newport, 773 -270 -3440

Newport Theater Camp resumes 1/29 with eight-week classes running Wed-Sat. For information on classes and registration, or for performance schedules and reservations, visit newporttheater. com. Performers from Newport Theater Camp MC NEWMAN

FRINGE

la Feva is committed to creating a more cooperative fringe arts scene and cross-pollinating disciplines and communities through her work at the Newport. All of this grew out of programming that began during the early lockdown period of 2020. “We actually built a virtual venue during the pandemic with this group called QueerCoded,” says la Feva. “Through use of an avatar, you can navigate a digital environment to video chat with other patrons and watch digital performances.”

The Newport then invited performers in to create virtual content by launching Newport Studio, a multi-camera live-editing video recording service. La Feva says, “I’d be like, ‘OK, if you need to record, just come here and do it.’

And the thing that was so weird is that when people would come in, they would be like, ‘I forgot my shoes, how could I forget my shoes?’

And I would say, ‘You’re out of practice packing a gig bag and remembering those little things you don’t realize you need.’”

This also helped build the Newport Theater Camp. When la Feva went looking for someone to collaborate with to help build out the fringearts curriculum for the camp, she turned again

to her community and found multi-awardwinning burlesque performer Bazuka Joe, who had a similar experience during the lockdown.

“It was so hard for everybody. And I can say without any exaggeration, every single performer got depressed, got inspired, uninspired, felt disconnected,” Joe says, adding, “I remember the first day that live performances were happening again, performers were crying because they were so emotional about getting back into the space and seeing their friends performing live and having that energy of an audience back again.”

He continues, “And there were still precautions—where we’re still wearing masks and the dressing areas were setups six feet apart and the air was thick with Lysol. But it was emotional coming back. One, because I think we didn’t realize how much we had missed it until we had it again. And in a reverse way, we didn’t realize how good we had things until we didn’t have it anymore. And I think that really hit home for a lot of people.”

And that was the origin story of the Newport Theater Camp. Says Joe, “We were really feeling that we were disconnected from our

“Riveting”

– BERKSHIRE ONSTAGE

community. We had the time and the space to do something, but what that something was, we weren’t sure. And then we thought, ‘Hey, remember three years ago? When we were talking about this camp thing? Yeah, let’s do that!’

“So we thought, let’s bring our best friends who are also performers in, and who we know are good instructors, to do a few classes just to get back in the swing of things. It was as much for the participants as it was for us because we needed to feel connected again.”

But even then, la Feva and Joe knew that they didn’t want it to be just burlesque—so they added clowning first. And then belly dancing. And it grew from there. Today, the Newport Theater Camp offers year-round, eight-week courses and workshops on a variety of fringe disciplines such as sketch comedy, clowning, pole dance, and burlesque.

“The response has been overwhelming—we have sold out almost every class,” Joe notes. “Beyond just the business success, the responses that we had have been like, ‘Thank you SO MUCH for doing this.’”

Once people started taking basic and then

“Scintillating”

intermediate classes, there was a demand for a stage performance series too. “We had a lot of people asking if we were even doing a solo act development series and we were like, ‘Oh, we have some time in between the winter and the spring sessions, so let’s do it,’” la Feva explains.

“So we have two solo act classes running concurrently now. Eva has one group, and I have another, and our showcase will be on February 5,” Joe says.

The pair continue to foster community in the fringe arts oeuvre. When they don’t o er something, they refer to other instructors and schools. Joe says, “We are all leaning into that collaboration and support.

“One silver lining from the pandemic is that it did level the playing field, like by having no playing field. I think because it was so long, people came back with a ‘live together or die alone’ attitude, like, if we can’t live together, we’re all gonna die alone. So everyone came back with this truly collaborative spirit of being like, ‘Let’s make this happen!’”  v

“Whip-smart”

BY BRENT ASKARI DIRECTED BY BJ JONES

– NIP PERTOWN – iN THE SPOTLIGHT

Hamid Dehghani and Rob Lindley | Je Kurysz Photography

@Chicago_Reader

Warholian diptych

Two plays show the artist at very different points in his life.

By JACK HELBIG

Andy Warhol was an enigma wrapped in a mystery, a voyeur who wanted to be a superstar. Thirty-six years after his death we are still trying to suss him out. Which may be why this year we have not one but two plays about Andy Warhol being produced— one at the Bu alo Theatre Ensemble, the other at Northlight in Skokie. (And in New York,

Andy Warhol’s Tomato tells the story of a young Andrew Warhola, before Manhattan and before he dropped the final “a” in his last name to sound less ethnic. Andy Warhol in

Iran features Andy in the 70s—the laconic, white-wigged Studio 54 Warhol, the Andy who survived the 60s, the Andy who shook things up with his Campbell’s Soup cans and Marilyn Monroe portraits. The Warhol who was left after the Factory and the superstars and Valerie Solanas’s assassination attempt.

For all their di erences, the two plays share

some striking similarities. Both are two-person plays, and both feature an encounter between Warhol and someone who is very di erent from Warhol.

Andy Warhol’s Tomato embellishes an apocryphal story about Warhol from his art student days at Carnegie Tech. Playwright Vince Melocchi, who grew up in Warhol’s hometown of Pittsburgh, explains, “There’s a bar up the street from where I grew up, originally called Bunovich’s, when Old Man Bunovich owned it. There was a story that went around that a young Andy Warhol used to draw on napkins for Cokes for Old Man Bunovich because he got a kick out of them. Now, this is just a story, right? But it stuck with me.”

Commissioned by the LA-based Pacific Resident Theatre to turn this bit of lore into a play, Melocchi’s script catches Warhol at an interesting moment in his life. It’s Andy before he moves to New York, but already in his short life he has endured a couple of traumatic, life-changing events—the death of his father when he was 13 as well as the illness in the 3rd grade, Sydenham’s chorea (also called St. Vitus’ dance), that kept him confined in bed, listening to the radio and reading movie magazines.

“This is a fable that conjectures what Warhol was like before he went to New York,” director Steve Scott elaborates. “It is kind of nice to get to know Andy as a kid when he was kind of just a person, a very distinctive person, but just a guy. This is Andy before the persona. But you can see from this play how the persona kind of formulated. There’s a whole scene at the end where Bones is looking at Andy’s sketchbook, and then we see the pictures that [Warhol has been] sketching and see how they became the works that we know later on: Mickey Mouse and the Campbell’s Soup cans.”

The Bu alo Theatre Ensemble production is part of an ongoing celebration of Andy Warhol at the McAninch Arts Center at the College of DuPage that culminates in a major exhibit of Warhol’s work at the Art Center: “Andy Warhol Portfolios: A Life in Pop” (June 3 to September 10).

The actor who plays young Andy in Andy Warhol’s Tomato , Alexander Wisnieski, is also making appearances at other McAninch Arts Center events as a Warhol impersonator. Wisnieski shares many of Warhol’s features— his Slavic bone structure, his extremely pale

Rob Lindley in Andy Warhol in Iran at Northlight Theatre JEFF KURYSZ

Anthony McCarten’s play, The Collaboration, about Warhol’s relationship with fellow artist Jean-Michel Basquiat, runs through February 11 at Manhattan Theatre Club.)

Andy Warhol’s Tomato rehearsal at Buffalo Theatre Ensemble REX HOWARD PHOTOGRAPHY

skin. In a silver wig he is a dead ringer. Wisnieski bubbles over when he talks about playing Andy. “I played Warhol [at COD] for his birthday party. And then there was a donor event. I did a ticket sale event before actually auditioning for the play. I’ll also be in the exhibit in a kids’ room video, which is really exciting. And then I will be there for four days after the exhibit opens.” Wisnieski will also appear as Warhol at a gala benefit on February 18 entitled “A Night at Studio 54: For the Love of Warhol.”

“I didn’t know all that when I cast him,” Scott laughs. “But he did an enormous amount of research to prepare for [his Warhol] gigs. He came in [to the audition] as prepared as I’ve ever seen an actor to play this character.”

When researching Andy Warhol it is hard not to do too much research. There is so much out there. Rob Lindley, who plays Warhol in Northlight’s show, admits to falling into the Warhol hole when preparing for the role.

“I am a research nerd,” Lindley tells me. “I do [a lot of] research for every project I do. I drove myself to Pittsburgh this summer so I could go to the Warhol Museum. Each day I was there I visited his grave site.”

Lindley admits he was motivated to do lots of research because he felt a “bit of pressure” playing Warhol: “There is certainly a challenge playing someone that was so well known. I feel like I’ve always played [fictional] characters. Well, [Warhol’s] a real character, that’s for sure. Whether he was a real person or not, it still remains to be seen. Andy himself said that his greatest work of art was himself and that he was his greatest creation. So there’s a challenge to that.”

The Andy in Andy Warhol in Iran is a very different Warhol than the callow fellow in Andy Warhol’s Tomato . This is the Warhol who once quipped, “Making money is art, and working is art, and good business is the best art.” At this time he raked in the cash doing silkscreen portraits of the very wealthy.

One of his clients was the Shah of Iran. Andy Warhol in Iran was inspired by Warhol’s trip to Tehran in 1976 to take Polaroids of the Shah’s third wife, Farah, for a commissioned portrait. But the tale playwright Brent Askari tells is wholly fictional.

“In [Askari’s] play, this young kidnapper tries to kidnap Andy Warhol to bring the world’s attention to what’s going on in Iran

and to turn them against the Shah,” director BJ Jones explains.

For Askari, the story is very personal: “My dad is from Iran, he’s Shiite Muslim. And my mom was an Episcopalian New England WASP. So growing up was with those two very distinct cultures, and I didn’t quite fit into either camp.

“I got a commission from a theater in Western Massachusetts called Barrington Stage Company. They were interested in something historical about Iran. I originally was thinking like, we’re going to do something with the Shah.”

But when Askari remembered Warhol’s trip to Iran, his plans changed.

“So the original idea was that it was going to be a two-person play with Andy Warhol and the Empress. But that only lasted about a day because I sort of realized as a dramatist that there was no conflict. And so that’s when I had the idea, like, oh, maybe I need somebody that has a completely di erent point of view, right?”

“In the play we have these two revolutionaries clashing,” Jones tells me. “One an artistic revolutionary and one social justice.”

“So my character is Farhad,” Hamid Dehghani, who plays Warhol’s would-be kidnapper, tells me. “He’s a young educated man who has been to America, who realizes the cruelty of the Shah’s regime. And so he decides to sacrifice and take immediate actions to make changes for his people and his country.”

The irony is the person Farhad decides to kidnap was about as disaffected, apolitical, and emotionally disconnected an American artist as you could find in 1976.

After he was shot in 1968 Warhol famously said, “Before I was shot, I always thought that I was more half-there than all-there—I always suspected that I was watching TV instead of living life.” But in a way Warhol continued living like he was watching TV for the rest of his life.

“Writing this play, I felt a mixture of pity and sympathy for Andy Warhol,” Askari reflects. “He lived this life of fame and fortune and success. But with all that he achieved, it seemed like he ended his life fairly unhappy.”

Yet he still fascinates. And that’s why his 15 minutes of fame will never run out. v

ensemble member RAJIV JOSEPH

VICTORIAN ROMANCE

Beyond Jane Eyre

Brontë’s last novel gets the spotlight at Lookingglass.

By EMILY MCCLANATHAN

Although Charlotte Brontë’s Villette has long been overshadowed by Jane Eyre—its “more popular younger sister,” in Sara Gmitter’s words—the 1853 novel takes the spotlight at Lookingglass Theatre next month in a world premiere adaptation written by Gmitter and directed by Tracy Walsh.

Based on a period of bereavement, homesickness, and unrequited love in Brontë’s own life, Villette traces the journey of English protagonist Lucy Snowe to a fictional, French-speaking city where she builds a new life as a teacher at a girls’ boarding school.

“It’s her last novel, and I think it’s her best one,” said Gmitter, an artistic associate at Lookingglass, in a joint interview with Walsh, one of the theater’s ensemble members.

According to Gmitter, the book is more psychologically complex and mature than Jane Eyre. “Villette is so much more realistic, and so much more grounded in real, lived human experiences that we can all relate to—that poignant feeling of unrequited love that Lucy feels and that sense of wanting to make a place for herself.”

Walsh added that this novel is special because Lucy finds happiness, not through a “Hollywood-style” makeover, but rather through the personal connections she finds as she works to achieve a successful career

and a home of her own. “She’s made a whole life for herself,” Walsh said. “It’s not a story where love saves her—where she suddenly has a physical transformation and becomes physically desirable to everybody.”

With most editions of the book clocking in at 500 pages or more, adapting it for the stage is an exercise in selectivity. Gmitter took Lucy’s first-person narration as a starting point for the play, which is also told from her perspective.

“What would Lucy do if it’s a play? She’s only going to show us the characters that we absolutely need and the scenes that we absolutely need,” Gmitter said. “What does this audience, this night, need in order to go on the emotional journey that she wants them to have?”

One of Gmitter’s priorities for the adaptation was conveying Lucy’s sense of humor, which surprised her when she first read the novel. “Lucy is so funny sometimes—the observations that she makes, the way that she calls nonsense nonsense, and the way that she’s so honest but in this wry way that is also so clever.”

Her complex inner life was another key quality to get across in the play. “Just because Lucy doesn’t have all the experiences that a typical romantic heroine might have, she still has all these feelings, and she still has so many

thoughts,” Gmitter noted.

“The language that she has in the book is so beautiful,” she added. “We can’t have all of the beautiful words [in the play]. Fortunately, we have an amazing actor [Mi Kang] who can show us the beautiful words with her face and with the way that she holds herself.”

Kang leads a cast of six, most of whom are new to working with this playwright and director. “We had the best time assembling this cast,” said Walsh. “Sara and I agreed that we would know the people when we saw them because they would be the people who were these characters.”

“They’re an incredibly talented group, and they understand the play really well,” she continued. “You can tell when somebody gets the play, and this group of people just knocked it out of the park in their auditions.”

Gmitter added that it was important to find actors who could create a character that audiences would love to watch “even when they’re being awful.” She explained: “Some of them do some things that are not so kind, but you still love these characters because they’re so rich and they’re so deep.”

When it came to designing the production, Walsh and Gmitter were grateful to have plenty of time to meet with their designers—who are usually booked on multiple shows simultaneously—and work through the play together.

“The design concept is that, rather than being a literal representation of a 19th-century world, it’s more of a psychological representation,” Walsh explained. “[It’s] warm, beautiful, compelling, psychological, and constantly transforming itself.”

Similarly, the costumes (designed by Mara Blumenfeld) are inspired by “a 19th-century silhouette,” but without the signature bell skirts of the era. One reason for this change is practical; there are four women characters in the play, and the space on stage is limited. “If everybody’s got the giant skirt on, there’s no way everybody’s going to fit,” Walsh said.

“Because we made the decision to not make them specifically period-correct, we could play around with pulling in different kinds of looks, so the costumes look fantastic,” she added. “They look from another time, but they don’t look from any time in particular.”

In another departure from interpreting this period drama literally, Walsh and Gmitter

VILLETTE

2/8-4/23 : previews 2/8-2/ 17 Wed-Sat 7: 30 PM, Sun 2 PM; opens Sat 2/ 18 6: 30 PM, then Tue-Wed 7 PM, Thu 1: 30 and 7 PM, Fri 7 PM, Sat 2 and 7 PM, Sun 2 PM; Sun 2/ 19 6: 30 PM only; Lookingglass Theatre, 821 N. Michigan, 312-337- 0665, lookingglasstheatre. org, $ 50 -$75

decided the actors should speak in their own accents even though all the characters are British or from a fictionalized Belgium. The only exceptions are lines that the Francophone characters deliver in their native language; the actors have worked with a dialect coach on these.

All the actors auditioned with and without foreign accents, and “everyone we saw was fantastic,” said Walsh. “But when we had them drop their accents and just be themselves, suddenly we were able to get this really honest window into who they were as actors. Then we just knew—this person is Monsieur Paul [Lucy’s love interest] or Madame Beck [headmistress of the school where Lucy works].”

“Unless the accent is necessary as part of the storytelling—especially since we’re telling a story that’s not set in the present day—it’s one more little excuse for the audience to think, ‘Oh, this is not now; this is not here. This is an adaptation of an old novel,’” added Gmitter. “If it’s [the actors’] own accents, it’s that much closer to what’s real and what’s present for the audience.”

Ultimately, Gmitter and Walsh want audience members to feel a personal connection with the resilient heroine of Villette and to be inspired by her remarkable story. “My hope, honestly, is that there are people who come out of the theater feeling the way I felt the very first time I read the book, when I was blown away by how much this, at the time, 150-year-old book was speaking so directly to me in a way that other books hadn’t,” Gmitter said.

“For me, the message of resilience is so important,” added Walsh. “Lucy loses so many people; she struggles. She has to start her life over in a new place, with every obstacle in her way and nothing to help her.”

“It’s such a great reminder that, at the end, she’s content,” Walsh concluded. “To take stock of what you have and to say, ‘This is a good life; it’s the life I have, and I’m going to find joy in it’—for me, that’s a really powerful message that Lucy shares, and I hope that resonates with the audience.” v

The cast of Villette at Lookingglass Theatre SANDRO

Charlotte

OPENING

RDon’t miss this Birthday Party City Lit’s Pinter revival hits every note.

If you were concerned that Chicago’s storefront theaters lost their mojo during the pandemic, get thee to Terry McCabe’s gripping production of The Birthday Party by Harold Pinter. It’s a meta-accomplishment: not a false note in this version of a play that’s entirely about false notes. Pinter’s breakthrough piece (albeit a flop at the time), encompasses all the themes for which he later became known: the mindlessness and dishonesty of most of what passes for communication; the universal capacity, and appetite, for savagery; how no one is innocent but anyone might be a victim; how most efforts at heroism—or even simple humanity—end with a whimper.

McCabe has cast the show flawlessly, anchored by perfect-pitch Elaine Carlson as Meg, whose comic cluelessness devolves into hideously willful blindness, and by James Sparling as Goldberg, who looks and sounds exactly like Patrick Stewart at his most posh while simultaneously nailing every stereotype of the East End London Jew getting what he wants at others’ expense. The entire six-person ensemble is strong, and there’s a particular pleasure in watching 6-foot-6-inch Will Casey as the henchman McCann looming over David Fink, a foot shorter, as the titular guest of honor and designated victim Stanley.

I’ve o en felt that I don’t understand what Pinter is on about: menace, sure, and the comedy of cruelty, but to what end? I can offer this production no higher praise than to say, now I get it. Highly recommended, as in Do. Not. Miss.

—KELLY KLEIMAN THE BIRTHDAY PARTY Through 2/26: Fri-Sat 7:30 PM, Sun 3 PM; also Mon 2/13 and 2/20 7:30 PM; City Lit Theater, 1020 W. Bryn Mawr, 773-293-3682, citylit.org, $34 ($29 seniors, $12 students and military)

RAn emotional willkommen

Porchlight’s Cabaret is exuberant—until it isn’t.

Like many of the American musical theater greats, Cabaret is one of those shows that can suffer from stylecreep, wherein an unwritten but generally agreed-upon aesthetic tradition grows into self-parody. For John Kander and Fred Ebb’s legendary pre-WWII Berlin-set romantic drama (based on the 1951 play I Am a Camera by John Van Druten and the 1939 novel Goodbye to Berlin by Christopher Isherwood), that usually translates to a Kit Kat Club that’s more of a strung-out haunted house than a cheeky flesh fair anyone would actually want to rain deutsche marks on. Not so in Porchlight’s nachtclub, a sparkling, inviting, exuberant pansexual party (led by Emcee Josh Walker) that puts a hearty emphasis on the “willkommen.”

Establishing that contrast is essential in order for any of the second-act gut punches to land, and in that respect, director Michael Weber, associate director/ choreographer Brenda Didier, and music director Linda Madonia leave bruises and draw blood. I found my eyes welling up with spectacle tears long before the first emotional blow, and I suspect that has to do with just how masterfully pieced together these musical theater elements are, from the crystalline vocals to the bombastic ensemble-wide numbers to the intimate conversations between (ahem) “roommates.”

Gilbert Domally, who brings a radical so ness to the

character inspired by Isherwood, makes for a heart-melting partner with Sally (Erica Stephan, giving a performance for the ages). Even Angela Weber Miller’s and Patrick Chan’s Anhalter Bahnhof-inspired set and lighting design has a sense of gravity and impermanence to it, as if to ask: if brick, studded steel, and heavy cathedral wooden buttresses won’t survive the looming tsunami of inhumanity, what chance do we have? —DAN JAKES CABARET Through 2/12: Thu 7:30 PM, Fri 8 PM, Sat 3:30 and 8 PM, Sun 2 PM; also Thu 2/2 1:30 PM; open caption Sat 1/28 and Sat 2/4 3:30 PM; Ruth Page Center for the Arts, 1016 N. Dearborn, 773-777-9884, porchlightmusictheatre.org, $45-$77

RThe great con

Redtwist’s latest examines how racism and sexism affects Black teens.

Redtwist’s rolling world premiere of The Great Khan with the National New Play Network couldn’t be better timed. When Florida’s Department of Education had just rejected an Advanced Placement course in African American studies. When Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders just signed an executive order banning critical theory in public schools, making Arkansas the 18th state to limit how racism and sexism are taught. And when Missouri lawmakers just proposed three similar bills, which will also allow parents to monitor school curricula.

A rebellious production about the effects of racism and sexism on Black teens, written by Michael Gene Sullivan and directed by Jamal Howard, this intimate play calls on viewers to confront “history” through the eyes of high schoolers, who aren’t afraid to ask the tough questions.

A er fighting off a group of boys who were assaulting his friend Ant (Monique Marshaun), Jayden (Simon Gebremedhin), and his protective mother, Crystal (LaTorious Givens), move to a new neighborhood. At his predominantly white school, Jayden strikes a deal with his history teacher, Mr. Adams (Bryan Breau): he’ll do his Genghis Khan report if Mr. Adams can name 20 Black Americans who aren’t athletes or entertainers. Traumatized by the world, Jayden grows fascinated with the Mongolian emperor’s vengeful spirit. But when Khan (Steffen Diem Garcia) visits Jayden, he reveals the story written about him is only part of the truth.

It’s a multiplex piece that demands adults grow up. With Jayden’s class partner Gao Ming (Josie Mi) as our narrator, we start to question how we enable these whitewashed tales and are inspired to find our own answers. If anything, you’ll realize that history is a great con. —BOUTAYNA CHOKRANE THE GREAT KHAN Through 2/26: Thu-Sat 7:30 PM, Sun 3:30 PM, Redtwist Theatre, 1044 W. Bryn Mawr, 773-728-7529, redtwisttheatre.org, $40

R Waves of memory

Christina Anderson’s newest play traces one Black family’s struggles with desegregation.

Christina Anderson’s luminous and wise the ripple, the wave that carried me home (now at the Goodman in a coproduction with Berkeley Rep, where it played in fall 2022) unfolds in mesmerizing capillary waves of memory, selective and otherwise. (“This country is built on selective memory,” one character observes while watching the Rodney King trial in 1992, and it’s impossible to argue with that, given the escalated police violence 30 years later.)

Janice (Christiana Clark) is a native of fictional

Beacon, Kansas, where her late father Edwin, a civil rights activist who focused on desegregating the town’s public pools, is about to have a pool named in his honor. Janice has several reasons for not wanting to travel from Ohio to Kansas for the ceremony, no matter how much Brianna Buckley’s Young Chipper Ambitious Black Woman, a volunteer with a Black community group in Beacon, implores her. Those reasons spool out as Anderson’s play takes us through nearly 40 years of history. It begins when Janice’s mother Helen (Aneisa Hicks), from the “thinking class” Black people of Beacon, and Edwin (Ronald L. Conner), a “necessity” Black man, (as in “working for the bare necessities”) meet and begin courting in the mid-50s; moves through Janice’s own adolescence as a budding swimmer; and concludes in the midst of the King riots.

Edwin and Helen’s joint activism kicks into high gear with the “Beacon Three”—a group of white and Black boys who, unable to find a pool where they can swim together, drown in a garbage-filled lake. Yet that activism hits differently for Helen than it does for Edwin in sometimes horrifying ways, which has repercussions for their daughter.

Directed by Jackson Gay, Anderson’s play lets us see the characters and their causes with complexity (intraracial class differences, as well as gendered abuse, come into focus), along with sorrow and horror at the repeating cycles of white abuse. A recurring line, “Is this your first time in America? Let me show you around,” hits with both humor and heartache at the unwillingness of white Americans to confront racism. Yet by the end, there is also a hard-won pride and hope washing over the women in the story. —KERRY REID THE RIPPLE, THE WAVE THAT CARRIED ME HOME Through 2/12: Wed-Thu 7:30 PM, Fri 8 PM, Sat 2 and 8 PM, Sun 2 PM; also Tue 1/31 7:30 PM, Sun 2/5 7:30 PM, and Thu 2/9 2 PM; touch tour and audio description Sat 2/5 2 PM (touch tour 12:30 PM), ASL interpretation Sat 2/11 2 PM, Spanish subtitles Sat 2/11 8 PM, open

captions Sun 2/12 2 PM; Goodman Theatre, 170 N. Dearborn, 312-443-3800, goodmantheatre.org, $15-$40

Viking rock

The Plagiarists turn Cirkut Mob’s concept album Valhalla into a musical.

In a world . . . where Norse mythology meets prog rock on a set seemingly built by precocious middle-schoolers, brothers Jorik and Jarl battle one another and several deities (best known to modern audiences via the Marvel Universe) to wear the crown of their kingdom. Songs are sung, seas traversed, swords crossed, and evil vanquished; the people rejoice and peace rules the land.

If this calls to mind a game of Dungeons & Dragons soundtracked by Yes or Magma, you’re on the right track. Adapted by Bryan Haney and Kate Nawrocki from a concept album by Haney’s band, Cirkut Mob, and directed by Nawrocki, the overall effect is spirited cosplay meets high school musical. Lacking the budget for the million-dollar effects the production aspires to, designer Nina D’Angier-Castillo’s shadow puppets evoke a child’s world of make-believe where a toy Viking ship can crash convincingly in a pretend sea that is just a long piece of cloth waved to and fro by a playground friend. The spell breaks when grown-ups belt tunes with on-the-nose lyrics about good and evil and the like. The live band, led by Elizabeth Bagby, backs these groaners skillfully, but not unlike the 70s dinosaur rock they are an obvious and loving tribute to, it’s best to ignore the lyric sheet.

I kept imagining how much more affecting this would all be if it were performed by actual children rather than adults pretending but there’s no faulting the effort or desire of anyone involved, no matter their age. —DMITRY SAMAROV VALHALLA Through 2/5: Thu-Sat 8 PM, Sun 2 PM, The Edge Off Broadway, 1133 W. Catalpa, theplagiarists.org, pay what you can (suggested donation $15) v

The Birthday Party STEVE GRAUE

The Lyric Theater is a family affair

There’s a bright future ahead for the Blue Island theater, where the roots of a family tree sprouted from its ticket booth.

By YOLANDA PERDOMO

For most high schoolers, a part-time job is a way to make a little money, get out of the house, and meet people you otherwise wouldn’t connect with outside of family or school. When Janet Fisher was a Chicago teen, she never expected that she’d have the rare privilege of being able to point to the exact spot where a seed from her family tree was planted. Its fruits would take the shape of a popular, local pizza chain and the reopening of a Blue Island landmark, the place where she fell in love at a ticket booth.

Blue Island’s Lyric Theater opened in 1917, but it has been shuttered on and off for decades. Closed since 1989, the Lyric Theater was reopened last summer by the Garetto family, preserving the space where their matriarch was taking tickets in the 1940s.

“I was 16 and 17 as a cashier in a little booth outside. It was, at that time, right in the mid-

dle of the theater near the sidewalk,” Fisher says. “I met a lot of people, and they seemed to like me, so it wasn’t like a job. It was really fun. I used to have an angora sweater. Mr. Atkins was the manager [stepping in the box to count the money], and he would say, ‘You’re getting it over my coat! Everyone’s going to start talking.’ He was just teasing.”

She lived on 118th and Longwood, blocks from the Blue Island-Chicago border.

“I got to see everyone in town. They all got to see me,” Fisher remembers, adding that she met a number of guys back then, but only one really stood out.

Angelo Garetto and his brother Larry, the Garetto Twins, ran a successful Blue Island music shop, giving lessons and performing around town. Angelo played the saxophone, Larry the accordion. Angelo was seven years older than Fisher, and he had to ask permis-

sion from her family to take her out.

“They weren’t too happy at first. But they got used to it. And he was very good to my grandma, my dad’s mother. He took her down food because she was alone. So they grew to love him,” she says. “I started dating him and before I knew it, we were engaged and married with children.”

Together, they had six kids. Two of them, Larry and Peter Garetto, would open Beggars Pizza in 1976, with a little help from dad Angelo, but all the siblings worked hard to get it o the ground.

“He opened it for me and my brother because we didn’t do so well in college,” says Larry Garetto, with a laugh.

Today Beggars boasts 27 locations in Chicago, the suburbs, and northwest Indiana. Peter Garetto died ten years ago, but Larry still owns it. When his daughter Amanda Melvin,

who has marketing and operational duties at Beggars, was looking for another pizza shop location, she stumbled upon the shuttered Lyric Theater.

Melvin already knew the story of how her grandparents met and was curious about the building, so she asked her realtor about its status.

“I said, ‘What’s going on with that Lyric Theater?’ He was like, ‘Well, let me find out,’” remembers Melvin, who says at the time, the owner wasn’t ready to sell. A week later, though, the Lyric was put on the market “at a more reasonable price.”

After talking about it with her father Larry and her uncle Ray Cantelo, they decided to go for it.

“We didn’t really know exactly what we’re going to do, but we just knew it meant a lot to my dad and my grandma,” says Melvin.

The Lyric Theater in Blue Island around the 1920s

A marquee from 1982 BLUE ISLAND HISTORICAL SOCIETY / GARETTO FAMILY

This was 2019, and Blue Island’s MetroSouth Medical Center had just closed, leaving the local economy without a hospital and without workers, many of whom either lived in or near Blue Island and regularly patronized many local businesses.

“It just seemed like everyone was starting to abandon Blue Island. And my dad was heartbroken. So this was a way for him to do his part to really, not necessarily revitalize, but stop that downward slope that he felt was happening,” Melvin says.

The Lyric Theater has had several owners since it opened more than a hundred years ago. A fire engulfed the building in 1960, but everyone inside got out safely. The theater was at the center of a bustling business district, which included venues like the Blue Island Opera House, stores like JCPenney and Kline’s, and many restaurants that kept Blue Island’s Uptown area thriving.

Melvin didn’t know what to expect when they got the keys.

“We saw a blank shell. It was not in good shape,” remembers Melvin. But the theater, which at one time was a space for dance and theater events, still had good bones.

“They had torn out all the movie theater seats. So it was a concrete floor, black walls. Upstairs was nothing. And when we looked at it, we just saw possibilities.”

What she didn’t see was a global pandemic on the horizon that would stop everything, including work on the Lyric, in early 2020.

“Beggars being my full-time job, I had to say, ‘This [theater] needs to go on the back burner.’ Because we need to survive. We need to survive this pandemic,” says Melvin. Supply chain issues also affected how they’d find a path forward.

“We saw basically the cost of every single thing that we were going to do triple,” she says. “We’re going to open a theater, which literally brings people together, when you cannot come together.”

Larry Garetto convinced his daughter to proceed, even if they couldn’t open right away. Ray Cantelo and his wife Janet are also part owners. They paid $90,000 for the building and spent another $100,000 to fix the sprinkler system, but remodeling costs, which included a new marquee, came in at around $3 million.

“They said we have to do it right. We can’t just do it half-assed,” Garetto says. “It was my commitment to invest in Blue Island.”

While still working at Beggars and the Lyric, Garetto bought the business next door, the popular Iversen’s Bakery, as Garetto says

its owner was ready to close it for good after more than 60 years.

“I’m 68. I’m doing more than I want to do, but that’s OK. I’m having fun doing it,” says Garetto, who credits Amanda and her husband Pat Melvin with the vision and ideas to make the space come alive. She admits that without a designer, “every single finish, every single color, every single tile, every single door” was selected by her and her husband.

One thing that was not going to be part of the Lyric’s future was that it would be exclusively a movie theater. Viewing habits had been shifting for years, and as the 1980s brought in multiplexes and as streaming options became more popular, the former onescreen theater space had to be reimagined.

“If we turned it into just a movie theater, we were likely to fail,” says Melvin, who gave the interior a 1940s supper club feel, with a large, sleek bar area and seating for more than 300 people, with private suites in a balcony area.

John Goldrick is thrilled the Lyric is back. He owns Big ’n Little Shoes on 111th and Kedzie and fondly remembers growing up on 118th and Hale, when he’d walk to the Lyric with his mother. Goldrick likes the new Lyric and says its presence will only attract other businesses.

“I think it’s a great idea. I would have never thought of it, but absolutely,” Goldrick says. “Life is a roller coaster. It [has] peaks and valleys. I think Blue Island right now is heading for one of those peaks, becoming vibrant again.”

Born-and-raised Blue Islander Pat Disabato also has great memories of the Lyric. The former sports columnist for the Daily Southtown says, back in the day, the 900+-seat theater made an impression.

“Growing up, I saw Rocky there. I saw Star Wars there as a kid. It was a big thing.”

After leaving the Southtown, Disabato says he wanted something different. He found it as the Lyric’s live events manager, handling everything from drag brunches to comedy shows, as well as live blues and rock concerts.

“If this was any other town, I would not have done it. But it was Blue Island, and I know what this means to the town,” says Disabato.

“I love the Garetto family and the Cantelo family, so I’m like, ‘You know what, I got to see this through. I want to be a part of this.’”

Melvin says they’re looking at “immersive” movie experiences. Over the summer, for a screening of Grease , the staff dressed up as Grease characters with a “Frosty Palace” diner pop-up inside and a classic car show outside the theater.

And in December, for a screening of It’s a Wonderful Life, each seat had a little bell and a small bag of rose petals, a nod to what Jimmy Stewart’s character finds in his pocket. The flowers came from a local florist.

“To hear the bells ring at the end of the movie, I mean, that might have been my favorite moment,” remembers Disabato.

A favorite moment for Melvin came from her five-year-old daughter Madelyn, who watches her do just about everything at the Lyric. It happened after seeing The Polar Express at a friend’s party.

“She goes, ‘Mom, give me a broom and a dustpan. There’s popcorn I gotta sweep up,’” says Melvin. “And she actually asked me, ‘Mom, when I grow up, can I work with you at the Lyric Theater?’ and I was like, of course you can!”

The Lyric’s mix of events includes music (a blues brunch with singer Stacy Brooks on February 4), comedy (the Vito Zatto Variety Show, a throwback to lounge shows, on February 24), drag extravaganzas (coming February 17, Lindsey Devereaux and friends with “Crazy, Sexy, Cool”), rock showcases featuring original acts (Eric Lindell on March 11), groups with retro sounds (Jonny Lyons on February 18), and, of course, more movies.

Disabato says that like the variety of events, their audience comes from the suburbs but also from Chicago neighborhoods near and far.

“Vernon Hills, Plainfield, Aurora. They are

just finding out about us, still. So it’s been kind of organic,” Disabato says, on meeting people coming from di erent places. “South Loop. We had a big family here the other day from Lincoln Park and Lakeview. So it’s kind of crazy.”

He adds that the remodeled interior, with its midcentury modern accents and supper club, sets the tone for comfort and entertainment for people who say, “‘I want a good night, to be entertained. And have a nice evening with some nice cocktails and, you know, watch a good show,’” Disabato says, noting that the Lyric is the only venue that does what it does south of downtown Chicago.

“I mean, up north, you got the Genesee [Theatre in Waukegan], you got the Arcada [Theatre in St. Charles], and Des Plaines Theatre. So there’s some places up north, and they all have their niche, but down here, particularly, there’s nothing,” says Disabato, adding that the Lyric hopes to change that.

Now in her 90s, Janet Fisher Garetto is living a full-circle moment; her home is near the bright Lyric Theater marquee, not far from where her family tree began to grow, and some relatives still call Blue Island home.

“It makes me happy that it’s open and alive again,” says Garetto. “Yeah, I think it’s beautiful. And it livens up the town. It’s good for everyone.” v

The Cantelo-Garetto family GEORGE POULOUS

Paying homage to Black women in film

The Sojourner Truth Festival of the Arts returns with an open-to-thepublic celebration and film series.

By ARIONNE NETTLES

The first ever Black women’s film festival in 1976 was a celebration of culture and art with live performances and lectures on change. It showed new work by Black women filmmakers while also showcasing essential discussions about the art’s future.

The group of Black women artists and activists was composed of filmmaker Monica Freeman, poet Patricia Spears Jones, writer Margo Jefferson, artist Faith Ringgold, and Ringgold’s daughter, author Michele Wallace.

Now that festival, the Sojourner Truth Festival of the Arts, is back as a film series and symposium that pays tribute to the original event. The programming is in conjunction with a University of Chicago course titled “Creating a Di erent Image: Black Women’s Filmmaking of the 1970s-90s,” taught by professor Allyson Nadia Field, and is part of the department of cinema and media studies “Open Classroom”

initiative.

“In the past, classes that are ‘open classroom’ courses have one or two screenings that we invite the public into, and the students are involved in that,” Field says. “It just means that they’re on the public program . . . and it’s a way of kind of inviting the audience into our classes.”

But this time, Field’s classroom is even more open. All nine screenings, which occur through March 2, are free to the public, allowing the festival to pay homage to Black women in film while extending the colearning experience outside of the boundaries of a traditional classroom.

“This is unprecedented; this is the first time we’re doing the entire course as public engagement,” Field says. “And what’s neat about that is a lot of the material on the program is rarely screened. Some of it we had to make

access copies for, [or] it was sourced from various archives, and so it’s an opportunity for the public to see material that’s not widely screened.”

One of those rarely-screened films is Pearl Bowser’s The Guest

“It’s part of the Pearl Bowser collection at the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture,” Field says. “And Pearl Bowser is best known as a film curator, collector, and archivist. She also made documentary films, and she’s a historian, so she’s partly responsible for the first wave of scholarship on Oscar Micheaux and early Black filmmaking.”

Unlike Bowser’s historical works, The Guest is a five-minute fiction horror that screened during the series’s first week, showing the breadth of her ability.

“What we wanted to emphasize with the programming is the real range of work and the impact and power of what these women were trying to do in telling Black women’s stories,” Field says.

In addition to Field, the 2023 festival is co-organized by Monica Freeman, who co-organized the 1976 festival; Yvonne Welbon, CEO of the nonprofit Sisters in Cinema; Michael W. Phillips Jr., founder and director of South Side Projections; and University of Iowa professor Hayley O’Malley.

O’Malley, who was researching the original

festival, found a program from 1976 in special collections at Northwestern University. As she started to look for organizers and participants from that time, she connected with other co-organizers, and together they created the idea for a way to honor that festival with new programming.

“The process of putting together a 2023 festival has been a highly collective and collaborative endeavor,” she says.

Along with weekly film screenings, the festival culminates with a two-day symposium on March 3-4, where Michele Wallace—another co-organizer of the original festival—will give the keynote address. O’Malley says she hopes attendees can see just how expansive the history of Black feminist media really is.

“There’s a much longer history of Black feminist media,” she says. “And so hopefully, by bringing together filmmakers, writers, curators, programmers for this gathering, for the symposium in 2023, we can celebrate that history and also start thinking not only about what Black women’s filmmaking was in the past and what it is now but what it can be in the future.”

All events are held on the University of Chicago campus, and the university has also created additional community events surround-

R THE SOJOURNER TRUTH FESTIVAL OF THE ARTS 2023 AND “CREATING A DIFFERENT IMAGE: BLACK WOMEN’S FILMMAKING OF THE 1970S-90S” Through 3/4, free, voices.uchicago. edu/sojourner

Alma’s

ing the film screenings. On February 9 and 16, for example, the university’s Arts + Public Life and Logan Center Community Engagement teams will host happy hours with drinks and appetizers before the film screenings. Sabrina Craig, assistant director of external engagement at UChicago Arts, says these events are meant to encourage people outside of the university to participate. Attendees are then shuttled to screenings.

“Our goal was to create a friendly, low-key ‘field trip’ experience for people who don’t regularly attend university events but who might enjoy going with a group,” she explains.

Each week, the screenings have a theme, such as “A Sense of Place,” “Adaptation and Beyond,” “Family Stories,” and “Interior Lives”—themes that resonate with the human experience.

“I think that this just is really about sharing this work and making it clear to audiences that there’s something here for everyone to appreciate and to understand,” Field says.

Co-organizer Yvonne Welbon explains how special the opportunity is to pay homage to

women like filmmaker Madeline Anderson, who was the recipient of a Woman of the Year Award at the original festival in 1976. She believes people will be inspired by what they see.

“She was definitely one of the early folks out there making films in the 50s,” she says. “She really decided, instead of writing a book, to make a film about her life. That’s inspiring. It’s never too late. You can always, always, always work. So we’re going to be seeing a lot of older women who are [still working in film]. I don’t think many people would think about a 95-year-old Black woman making the movie, but that she is.”

And as a filmmaker herself, Welbon knows that inspiration can be for creatives in film, too.

“I know we showed my film [on January 12], The Cinematic Jazz with Julie Dash, and I realized I hadn’t seen it in decades because it’s from the 90s,” she says. “Some of us haven’t even seen our own work in a long time. . . . It’s inspiring for us, not just for audiences but for the filmmakers, too.” v

@ArionneNettles

FILM

Find new film reviews every week at chicagoreader.com/movies

NOW PLAYING

Blood

What do you call a vampire movie with no teeth? Blood Just kidding—sort of. Director Brad Anderson adds another film that should be better to his resume (see also: The Machinist, Session 9), this time dragging along Michelle Monaghan as Jess, a mother and nurse going through a bitter divorce.

Jess, her children Tyler (Skylar Morgan Jones) and Owen (Finlay Wojtak-Hissong), along with family dog Pippin, move into Jess’s childhood home, a creepy place that needs a coat of paint and an exorcism. Here, it gets the Anderson treatment: a litany of half-baked and underexplored ideas that walk to the edge of effectiveness until the movie lurches toward other half-baked and underexplored ideas.

The setup is decent. Pippin chases an unseen evil into the woods. Upon returning home, he attacks Owen, biting at his jugular and seriously wounding him until Jess dispatches the dog with several blows to the head. As Owen recovers at the hospital where Jess conveniently works, he and Jess discover he can’t handle food; Owen has a new and insatiable thirst for blood. (It never occurred to Anderson that there are bad-hospital-food jokes to be made here, I guess.) As luck, coincidence, and contrivance would have it, Jess the RN has access to the hospital’s blood bags. She’s also friendly with a terminally ill cancer patient (June B. Wilde) no one would miss.

See where it’s all going? Even Blood’s bad double-entendre marketing campaign gives it away: “How far would you go to save your child?” (Get it?) By the time Owen goes full Vlad, Monaghan’s natural charisma and a bottle of Geritol can’t save Blood from its own anemic silliness, right down to the absurd explanation for Owen’s condition. Skip it and stream Let the Right One In —DAVID REIDEL 108 min. Wide release in theaters

Missing

If it hasn’t been made clear by projects like Bodies Bodies Bodies, Euphoria, and even Eighth Grade, then Missing is here to drive the point home: kids these days love to use the Internet. In this new thriller, a SoCal teenager (Storm Reid) is forced to turn to the ’net when

her mom (Nia Long) takes off on a trip to Colombia with her boyfriend and never comes back.

Bored, broke, and understandably worried, young June starts scouring the Web for clues, using what she knows to break into her mom’s phone, investigate the fishy boyfriend’s random online accounts, and even hire a cheap (but sympathetic!), Colombian Taskrabbit to investigate her mom’s whereabouts. As viewers, we know all this because, like Unfriended and Searching before it, Missing is stylized to look like we’re seeing everything from the other side of June’s laptop screen.

That means you get to watch as Google searches and video calls play out in real time, and when June has to step away from her laptop to actually get in on the action, you’re asked to peer through phone cameras, surveillance footage, and even a conveniently-discovered smartwatch. It can feel a hair gimmicky at times, especially if you’re the kind of person who just wants June to actually call the FBI and stop running her own investigation on Twitter, but it’s fun enough to watch. As with any good thriller, there are copious twists and turns along the way as bits of evidence trickle in, and when the big, not-so-shocking reveal does come near the end of the film, it brings along an appropriate amount of spine-tingling dread.

Overall, Missing is just about as fun as a couple of hours flicking through Instagram or knocking out levels in Candy Crush. Unfortunately, it’s also just about as ephemeral, leaving little impression beyond mild enjoyment. —MARAH EAKIN PG-13, 111 min. Wide release in theaters

R No Bears

Jafar Panahi is compelled to document the world around him. Despite a 20-year filmmaking ban imposed by the Iranian government, the director continued to release complex, daringly reflective films that investigate Iranian society, government oppression, and himself. Panahi managed to release five feature films, including Taxi Tehran (2015) and 3 Faces (2018), gaining international recognition at the Cannes and Berlin film festivals. However, this July, Iranian officials detained Panahi, condemning him to a six-year prison sentence for anti-government propaganda, but not before he secretly directed an incisive commentary that implicates both filmmaking and the filmmaker.

Plane KENNETH REXACH / LIONSGATE

No Bears introduces us to two Iranian exiles, Bakhtiar (Bakhtiyar Panjeei) and Zara (Mina Kavani), as they discuss their plans to find asylum in Europe. Anxiety intensifies as the couple faces separation when Bakhtiar encourages Zara to flee Turkey first with her stolen passport. But almost immediately, the film folds on itself, panning out to reveal that Panahi, playing a version of himself, is directing a film documenting the couple’s real experience. Panahi loses Internet, propelling us into the director’s immediate setting: a remote town near the Iran-Turkey border. Despite the generosity of his host Ghanbar (Vahid Mobasheri) and his remote setting, Panahi becomes embroiled in controversy incited by a photograph of a young couple, played by Darya Alei and Amir Davari, that locals believe he captured. He denies the accusation, but a boiling tension is fueled by a romantic rival that intends to marry the girl. Panahi is entangled by two complex love stories that escalate into devastating conflict due to the director’s compulsive documentation. And this is No Bears’s most heart-stirring retrospective.

Panahi’s latest film interrogates the limits of art, placing cinema and documentation under a critical eye. The director recognizes cinema as a source of possibility but dares to weigh the severe, occasionally ruinous consequences of creating. No Bears reveals the creases and shortcomings of cinema that hide behind a compulsive endeavor to create, positioning Panahi himself at the core of these dilemmas. This bold decision makes No Bears Panahi’s most honest film, among an impressive filmography. —MAXWELL RABB 106 min. Gene Siskel Film Center

Plane

Plane is officially billed as a thriller, but given the gleefully swaggering machismo parade of action-hero/ buddy-movie cliches it traffics in, it almost feels like a satire. You can practically hear the pitch meeting: “Die Hard meets Captain Phillips meets Rambo but with a plane.” That’s pretty much what you get in director JeanFrançois Richet’s production for Lionsgate, screenplay by Charles Cumming and J.P. Davis, story by Davis. Lack of originality isn’t a dealbreaker. I was thoroughly entertained, watching pilot Brodie Torrance (a literally gritty Gerard Butler) morph from well-coiffed, buttoned-up family man to grimy dude in a ripped, bloody muscle shirt unleashing his inner Iron John with guns of both flesh and steel. Furthermore, local hero Joey Slotnik is extremely hilarious and equally despiseable as the kind of passenger who, were you to encounter him in real life, would force you to weigh your own capacity for inciting violence in small spaces. Also: Tony Goldwyn plays a shadowy, impeccably dressed, high-level government operative-type named Scarsdale, and who doesn’t want to see that? Finally, the supporting leads here—Yoson An as copilot Samuel Dele and Mike Colter as Gaspare, a convicted criminal with a mysterious past and unguess-

able motives—make stock roles memorable. Gaspare is all still water running deep; Dele wears his heart on his sleeve. You’ll be rooting for them both.

What ultimately ruins the movie is the lazy one-dimensionality of its villains. We know three things about the hyper-violent “pirates” (I don’t have a copy of the script, but I could swear I heard the word “separatist” used) led by Datu Junmar (Evan Dane Taylor) in attacking the passengers: First, they speak English with some form of accent. Second, they are quick to terrorize and kill people. Third, we are in some undisclosed “war-torn” nation, to quote the press materials. Stereotype and cliche remain alive and well on the big screen. —CATEY SULLIVAN R, 107 min. Wide release in theaters

The Seven Faces of Jane

Exquisite Corpseis a surrealist game in which multiple artists contribute to a work without seeing what any of the others are doing, creating poetry or visual art collages. The exercise is supposed to create work that challenges the usual notions of unity and identity by emphasizing disjunction, unexpected leaps, and odd connections.

The Seven Faces of Jane applies this technique to film, with mixed results. The very loose frame is that Jane (Gillian Jacobs) has dropped her daughter Molly off at camp. She drives away, and her journey of indeterminate length takes her through a range of vignettes. She sees the ghost of a friend who has just died (“Guardian” by Ryan Heffington). She picks up a free-living hippie hitchhiker (“The Lonesome Road” by Xan Cassavetes). Etc.

Some of these vignettes pay lip service to the idea of multiple selves, as in Julian Acosta’s “Rose,” where Jane muses “everyone struggles to find a version of themselves that they like.” The problem is that most of the segments are too tied to a bland realism and narrative cliche to create the collective sense of unease and/ or delightful disorientation that the surrealists prize. “Rose” itself is a familiar story about two strangers who make an unexpected connection and Learn Life Lessons. Then there are not one, but two predictable short films about ambivalent encounters with old flames: Boma Iluma’s “Tayo” and Ken Jeong’s “The One Who Got Away.”

There are a couple of exceptions. In Gia Coppola’s “Jane 2,” Jane stumbles into the life of Jane, a coffee-shop waitress who looks just like her. By the end, even the viewer isn’t sure which Jane is which. And in Alex Takács’s very Lynchian “The Audition,” Jane auditions for a part as someone very like Jane, losing her car and maybe herself in the process.

These segments at least try to engage with Exquisite Corpse’s surreal roots. For the most part, though, despite its adventurous structure, The Seven Faces of Jane shows us features we’ve seen before. —NOAH BERLATSKY 93 min. Wide release on VOD v

Jen B. Larson exalts our punk mothers

in the new book

Hit Girls

By LEOR GALIL

Ifirst heard about Jen B. Larson when she played in Swimsuit Addition, whose scrappy, pulse-quickening punk combined doo-wop vocals and surf-rock scuzz. They released music through local DIY labels—Midwest Action, Tall Pat, Impossible Colors—or just put it out themselves. In short, Swimsuit Addition were exactly the kind of band the Reader ’s music writers like to talk about, and we did.

Swimsuit Addition got plenty of exposure elsewhere too, though they weren’t always entirely happy about it. In the introduction to her new book, Hit Girls: Women of Punk in the USA | 1975-1983 , Larson points out that Swimsuit Addition often attracted frustrating comparisons to bands with whom they had little in common—writers seemed to make connections for no other reason than both lineups included women. Perhaps most egregiously, when the Sun-Times ran a Jan Terri profile in 2012 to preview a show Terri was playing with Swimsuit Addition at Reggies Rock Club, it apparently mixed up Larson’s band with another all-woman Chicago group, Summer

Girlfriends—the paper identified them as “Summer Addition.”

Larson has long sought refuge in music, but she’s had to work hard to learn about women making the kind of punk rock she wants to hear. It’s not that those musicians don’t exist, of course, but most versions of the punk-rock canon—especially the versions available when she was getting into punk in the early 2000s—barely include any women, except maybe Patti Smith and Cramps guitarist Poison Ivy. Making matters worse, when Larson started high school, “punk” tended to mean skinny white boys yelping about crushes they didn’t know on a Warped Tour stage at 2:30 PM.

Larson’s love of punk women set her on a path to her 2019 book deal with Feral House, which published Hit Girls this month. In 2017 she began documenting her research into lesser-known or overlooked punk bands anchored by women with a Tumblr she called Punkette Respect. In September 2020, punk website Please Kill Me published Larson’s story about forgotten Seattle proto-grunge band Bam Bam and their Black front woman,

Tina Bell, which prompted a tidal wave of interest in both and a reframing of grunge history. (In February 2022, I wrote about the saga of Bam Bam and the effort to preserve their legacy.) As Larson put the finishing touches on Hit Girls last year, she published her first Reader story, a deep dive on bygone local garage rockers Barbie Army.

“We must identify and define the truth about punk history,” Larson writes in the introduction to Hit Girls. “We must preserve it. We must exalt our punk mothers. We must tell their stories, make documentaries, spread the word of their deeds.” Hit Girls profiles 90 lesser- known American acts, organized by region. The book begins in the midwest, and among the Chicago artists it covers are hard-rock band Bitch and bassist and singer Kate Fagan, who made new wave, postpunk, and ska, most famously with Heavy Manners. Their sections are excerpted below. Next month, Brooklyn indie label Captured Tracks will reissue Fagan’s 1980 single “I Don’t Wanna Be Too Cool,” expanded to album length with the addition of previously unreleased tracks.

—LEOR GALIL

Jen B. Larson ERICA HERNANDEZ

The Reader shares Larson’s chapters about Chicago acts Bitch and Kate Fagan.

From Hit Girls: Women of Punk in the USA | 1975-1983 by Jen

B. Larson

Bitch

Chicago, Illinois » Formed in 1978

MEMBERS

Original Lineup

Lorrie Kountz { guitars, vocals

Debbie Cielen { guitars, vocals

Donna Kirkendall { bass, vocals

Donna Fraser { drums, vocals

Second Generation Lineup

Lorrie Kountz { guitar, vocals

Gere Eddinger { guitar, vocals

Nancy Davis { vocals

Patti Prendergast { bass, vocals

Leslie Kaye { drums

During the late ’70s and early ’80s, a coven of all-girl bands whipped through the Windy City like a pack of wild wraiths. Bitch, Tough Love, The Girls, Surrender Dorothy, Illicit, and Rash, to name a few. The tempest’s catalyst was none other than songwriter and super-shredder guitarist Lorrie Kountz.

Lorrie began playing guitar at eight when her parents, unable to bear the everyday clamor of a yet-to-be-proficient percussionist, returned the drums they originally bought her and replaced them with a guitar and a promise of lessons. Lorrie studied classical guitar for several years, and at 14, began giving lessons. Once she heard Aerosmith and the Runaways, Lorrie abandoned nylon strings for a Strat and Marshall amp.

At 15, she saved up money from teaching guitar and bought a motocross motorcycle. On the bike, she cruised to school and went o -roading with friends. By 17, she traded in the motorcycle for a car to lug gear around for her first band, Bitch. Lorrie passed up a fouryear college opportunity and put ads in the Illinois Entertainer. Through that and word of mouth, she summoned the first lineup of Bitch. “My parents weren’t pleased,” she said. She started writing songs and remembers, “It was good emotionally. It was a way to speak. Socially I felt better writing it down, writing music, and getting my point across, whatever my point was at that age. I felt I was better at writing music to describe my feelings.”

Lorrie approached songwriting by beginning with guitar riffs or bass riffs and building from there. Her first songs reflected teen angst. Titles like “Committed,” “Drag Her Under,” “You Come Too Fast,” and “I’m 18” (not the Alice Cooper song!) became Bitch originals. They also threw in covers like “These Boots Were Made for Walking” and “Heartbreaker.”

“I was highly inspired by the Runaways,” Lorrie recounts. The all-girl group put the idea in her head that an all-chick band would be cool.

In their three years together, Bitch underwent a lineup overhaul (adding a lead singer), put out two albums, Love is Just a Crime (on Orfeón Records) and America’s Sweethearts. Bitch were often listed on marquees or billed in newspapers as “B” or “BIT**” by venues and media outlets; sometimes their entire name was blacked out. Despite this, they packed houses at local venues, performed at city events like Loopfest and Chicagofest, and zealously toured North America. They followed a six-weeks-on, two-weeks-o tour schedule during their prime and made it to 30 states. On tours of the States, they played alongside many legendary acts who were not yet household names.

“We toured with U2, the Cramps, and the Ramones,” Lorrie recalls casually. Bitch opened for U2’s first tour (5,000-seat venues) throughout the Midwest, played with the Cramps in the north (Wisconsin, Michigan, into the Dakotas), and the Ramones on the East Coast (New York City, Massachusetts, and the Carolinas). “That was a hoot, [the Ramones] were so nice.” They also played with Ronnie Spector, the Kinks, and even the Scorpions.

Lorrie recalls touring endlessly, playing regularly in Texas, having a solid fan base in Guam and Mexico (where their label Orfeón was located), and once touring 28 straight days on the way to Los Angeles.

“It was much easier than now. There were actual booking agencies, and you actually made money,” Lorrie says. “You had a lot of support from the crowds, too. The clubs would be packed five or six days a week, no matter who would be playing, so they had their own draw. They were very supportive of the original music back then.”

In the city, women supported one another’s bands fiercely as well. “There was a lot of camaraderie back then. All the females in music were supporting each other. When we were in town and not playing, we would go check out

other female musicians and support them!” she says. “There was this band Barbie Army we used to go see.”

“It’s much different than now,” she adds. “It wasn’t competitive back then. When I play with a band now, and there are females in the band, there is not as much camaraderie, not a lot of love going around. Is it generational? I don’t know why it changed,” she says.

“He was a very crude man,” Lorrie says unapologetically. “And I basically said, ‘you know, I don’t think so,’ and he got a big attitude. He would even call me when I was back in Chicago, and finally, I had to tell him to knock it o .”

Even though the Runaways were one of Lorrie’s biggest influences, both on her guitar playing and her vision for Bitch, she didn’t budge. “I just didn’t like him. I didn’t care that he made the Runaways or some of those other bands. It was his attitude that I couldn’t stand.

Bitch ran this ad in the Illinois Entertainer in May 1979, promoting the 15 shows they were playing in the next month.

COURTESY OF FERAL HOUSE AND THE ILLINOIS ENTERTAINER

Bitch sometimes egged on their male audiences, dedicating songs to “the boys in the room” and naming them “the ones who haven’t become men yet,” before launching into a ri -heavy song like “Come Too Fast.”

The girls didn’t let men push them around, especially the musicians they played with. “I think they were actually a little intimidated by us because we were a little bit edgier. Back then, long hair was in, like big poofy hair was in style, and we wore less makeup than they did. They’d be kind of hogging the mirrors and stu , putting on their hairspray. So, we would come in there and be like, ‘OK, clear the room’ because it was our turn. They weren’t really used to that. They were used to just kind of hanging out in the dressing room the whole time.”

In 1980, Bitch headlined the Troubadour in West Hollywood to play for potential labels. Kim Fowley happened to be there and approached Bitch founder and lead guitarist Lorrie Kountz, interested in working with her and the band.

He was too chauvinistic. We wouldn’t go for that. I didn’t want to go there.”

Lorrie’s patent integrity has always guided her decisions, even when it came to moving on from bands and beginning new ones. In 1981, Bitch changed their name to Tough Love to avoid censorship issues and make it easier to advertise. Tough Love added synths and tried to soften up their sound. With three second-generation Bitch members at the helm, Tough Love put out a few singles and got radio airplay. When Lorrie felt the band wasn’t going in a direction she enjoyed, she left and tried out new outfits. She played in bands The Girls, Surrender Dorothy, Illicit, and Rash before doing solo work and starting her current band Whatismu.

Lorrie says she remembers the time in Bitch fondly. “We had a good time; we were good friends.”

MUSIC

Kate Fagan

Chicago, Illinois » 1980

After Rupert Murdoch bought New York Magazine and fired 80 sta ers in the late ’70s, Kate Fagan was out of a job. “He sat on my desk, and he fired all these people,” she said. But a friend of hers living in Chicago sang the city’s praises. So Kate visited the Windy City, where she picked up shifts as a waitress at the Little Corporal restaurant and stayed to make her mark. She loved Chicago for its creative energy and began bartending at the Jazz Bulls and Kingston Mines, where she saw all the blues greats perform. She also enjoyed folk music and lived with writers and actors, who inspired her. She lived above the liquor store across from the Biograph Theater and says, “Lincoln Avenue was vibrant!”

Kate had relocated a lot during childhood, moving from the outskirts of D.C. and going to college in Wisconsin, then lived in London and New York City. She never wanted to fit in, but to find herself. She said, “Moving around so much, you recognized how people created and identified with di erent kinds of groups. Everyone was searching for who they were and a way to express their feelings.”

After living in London and New York, the art scene in Chicago seemed a little more down-to-earth at first. “In Chicago, there isn’t as much phony-baloney—people are more straightforward.”

Musically, she said, “Chicago fostered a lot of good punk music because of that. It’s just that the framework isn’t there for people to become nationally and internationally successful.”

“[In Chicago], everyone wasn’t standing around peering at each other from behind their shades,” she says. Then, she started to see a particular type of conformity snake in. She approached BB Spin at La Mere Vipere. She writes,

“I took over the lead singing role in BB Spin. The original vocalist was a male, and I sang in the original keys. When we opened for the Ramones, Joey asked our manager, ‘Where’d you find a girl that sings like a guy?’ I took that as encouragement to be a ‘front man,’ like I was successful in a traditional man’s role.”

Then, she picked up a bass and wrote a bouncy five-note ri , adorned with her anti-

cool culture critique “I Don’t Wanna Be Too Cool.” She calls out divisive hipster exclusivity in it—the idea of velvet ropes and the “who can get in and who couldn’t get in” atmosphere invading creative spaces. She howls and sings:

I won’t wait at Neo Can’t afford Park West

I don’t really care I’m just not impressed.

I don’t know no rock stars I don’t snort the good stuff I don’t really care I’m just not impressed

In the chorus, she sings:

I know your cool is chemical

The local scene loved being chastised. The anti-hipster anthem became a favorite of club DJs, radio stations, and Wax Trax. She had recorded the song at Chicago’s Acme Studios and met the fellow artists with whom she’d formed the Disturbing Records label. This group staged warehouse parties and became a platform for many punk, new wave, and garage bands. Disturbing released the “I Don’t Wanna Be Too Cool” single, as well as early singles by her later, legendary ska band Heavy Manners,

for which she is most well-known.

After the original singles sold out in 1980, Kate Fagan did a second run of 1,000 copies out of her own pocket, but the records perished in a house fire where she lost everything she owned.

Another song she wrote and recorded, “Waiting for the Crisis,” critiques U.S. international relations and the Reagan-era military-industrial complex. Over its singular plunky, eerie piano note, in the verses she sings:

We sell guns to all our third world friends

We sell guns if they will sell us oil

We’ll sell nukes if you will be our friend

With paranoia-inducing chanting choruses, she sings:

Oh oh

We’re waiting for your crisis

We sell hate to offset our deficit

Kate says she found herself writing protest music at a young age. She grew up outside of D.C. in a highly politicized environment during the Vietnam era when her father was a civil

rights lawyer. “I’d run to get the newspaper in the morning to read the editorials on women’s rights, Black power, and the sins of Richard Nixon,” she told Flaunt in 2016. In high school, she wrote for her school paper; later, she earned a journalism degree from Indiana University’s Ernie Pyle School. She states that she “found comrades among the editorial sta .” In Chicago, she became involved with Rock Against Racism as a political movement and taught art education at Chicago Academy for the Arts. She also fronted the ska band Heavy Manners, who shared bills with the likes of the Ramones, Grace Jones, the Clash, and Black Uhuru.

Kate hasn’t stopped performing, as making music and entertaining is integral to who she is. Describing her experiences performing live, she says, “You’re finding a little burning coal inside you—an essence, you’re finding and expressing it. That’s what punk was. You didn’t just sit in the stands and watch people; you jumped down on the dance floor. That feeling is so contagious and punk really hit it right for a lot of people. They could open themselves up.” v

Used with permission from Feral House, Inc., © 2023

Kate Fagan appears on the cover of the original 1980 release of her best-remembered single.

COURTESY OF FERAL HOUSE

MUSIC

Remembering the Big Boss Lady

Drummer and singer Johnnie Mae Dunson built her career in the kind of powerful gutbucket blues almost entirely dominated by men.

By STEVE KRAKOW

Since 2004 Plastic Crimewave (aka Steve Krakow) has used the Secret History of Chicago Music to shine a light on worthy artists with Chicago ties who’ve been forgotten, underrated, or never noticed in the first place.

“I’m the mother and the grandmother of the blues,” Johnnie Mae Dunson declared in a 2005 interview with the Chicago Tribune, and I won’t argue. “When I first started playing in Chicago, in the ’40s, people said ugly things about a woman who plays the blues,” she recalled. “They said, ‘She must not be a woman if she plays the drums.’ They’d call me names. If they hit on me and I wouldn’t respond, they said I must be a lesbian.”

There’s nobody else in music history quite like Dunson, a no-nonsense drummer and singer who also wrote hundreds upon hundreds of songs. Women aren’t just rare as blues drummers; they often get short shrift in the genre across the board. Chicago blues scholar Dick Shurman called Dunson “one of the few ‘gutbucket’ blues women,” and pianist Jon Weber, who’s played with her, described her as “a walking history book, a real important person who, unfortunately, has been somewhat neglected.”

Dunson was a vivid, unvarnished talent, raw and prolific and utterly uncompromising. She deserves to be more widely remembered,

and that’s what the Secret History of Chicago Music is all about.

Dunson was born Johnnie Mae Hudson near Bessemer, Alabama, in 1921. At age two she contracted rheumatic fever, which weakened her heart. “I was a miracle child,” she told Neal Pollack for a 1998 Reader story. “I been living on death row all my life.”

“When I was 10 years old, I heard the doctors tell my mama, ‘She won’t live to be 14 years old.’ So my mama got a group of people to come to our house and they prayed for me,” Dunson explained to the Tribune . “And I believe at that time God gifted me with the music I have because He knew I wouldn’t be able to do any other kind of work.”

Dunson left school at age ten due to her heart condition. She’d been singing gospel as long as she could remember, but she also soaked up the blues of Bessie Smith, Memphis Minnie, and Ma Rainey, which her mother liked to play on the Victrola. As she grew stronger in her teens, her singing style evolved into something rougher and grimier.

Dunson’s mother liked fresh spring water, and when Dunson and her sister went to fetch it, Dunson would thump on the washtub they were carrying. She’d give her sister half her lunch to let her do it. “In that way,” Dunson told Pollack, “I am a self-taught drummer.”

In 1943, encouraged by visiting churchwomen from the Windy City who’d heard her

sing, Dunson moved to Chicago. Back in Alabama, she’d taught herself how to treat hair, and to make money she pressed her west-side kitchen into service as a salon. Within a year she was also hanging out at the famed market on Maxwell Street, performing however she could. She remembers taking over the drum kit of veteran bluesman Eddie “Porkchop” Hines. “He had this little set down there, and he looked so tired,” she told Pollack. “He said, ‘Girl, you gonna mess up my drums.’ Then I played, and he told me to never stop.”

Dunson started a hard-gigging trio named after Globetrotters Lounge on the west side, which often performed at clubs along Madison Street. For nearly 30 years, she played steadily

THE SECRET HISTORY OF CHICAGO MUSIC

STEVE KRAKOW

on the south and west sides, in any combo she could. She played in the band of guitarist and harmonica player Jimmy Reed, and they became friends—she wrote songs for him and even managed him for a spell. Her rough, powerful voice and fierce drumming made a big impression everywhere she went.

“She could hold her own with anybody—nobody gave Johnnie Mae a hard time,” harmonica ace Charlie Musselwhite told the Tribune. He crossed paths frequently with Dunson when he lived in Chicago in the 60s. “People just looked at her, and they would think, ‘This is somebody I’m not going to mess with.’”

Dunson was no less formidable as a songwriter. She was known for carrying around a massive notebook of her compositions, and in her late 70s she claimed she could still write 25 songs in a day if left alone to do it. She said she’d written “Evil” for Muddy Waters (no relation to the even more famous Howlin’ Wolf song), and though BMI lists Waters as its author, the blues business famously su ers from more than its share of attribution issues. The many songs she wrote for Reed over the years include “I Wanna Be Loved,” “I’m Going Upside Your Head,” and “Life Won’t Last Me Long.”

Dunson’s own recordings from this era are much thinner on the ground, unfortunately. She put out a single on Checker Records in 1965, “You’re Going Out That Door,” which is now next to impossible to find. In 1972 she and Reed released a couple 45s as a duo for the short-lived Magic label. Within a year or so, though, Dunson had all but vanished from the scene, and by the time Reed died in 1976 she’d withdrawn from performance completely.

The music business had never provided Dunson with much of a living anyhow—she usually didn’t control her copyrights, and she didn’t get much in the way of royalties when other artists recorded her songs. In the 60s and 70s she made money buying buildings to fix up, sometimes working demolition jobs— she could take down an interior wall by herself with a sledgehammer. At some point after that she ran a Madison Street diner, but I can’t find any details.

In 1992 bluesman Jimmie Lee Robinson, who’d retired from his job as a security guard, tracked Dunson down. By then Dunson’s home was in dire condition, and her

health had declined steeply. She’d been in a wheelchair since ’88, and she relied on other people to bring her groceries. At first she was distrustful of him—she was holding a grudge because she’d heard he’d insulted Jimmy Reed, and he had to persuade her she’d been misinformed. But eventually they became friends and began playing music together in her backyard.

“Robinson would call Dunson in the evening, and she would talk on the phone to him until three in the morning, often falling asleep in mid-conversation,” Pollack wrote for the Reader in 1998. “Last December she started to walk again on her own. ‘She used to get mad at me and call me a devil,’ Robinson says. ‘But now she don’t call me a devil no more.’”

Robinson was a member of the Maxwell Street Historic Preservation Coalition, and Dunson wanted to contribute to the cause. In August 1998 she sang at a benefit for the coalition, part of a series of blues jams it had been holding in a vacant lot on one of the last patches of the old Maxwell Street to survive.

Dunson’s ride canceled on her, and she got there so late (having finally charmed a cabbie into driving her for free) that no one expected her to show. She arrived in black slacks and a black wig, carrying a gold sequined cane—but she hadn’t been able to get out to buy new shoes, so she was wearing house slippers. “As soon as she started singing, a lot of older black women started coming up to her and sticking dollar bills into her hand,” photographer and filmmaker James Fraher told Pollack for his Reader story. Fraher, also a member of the Maxwell Street coalition, had been making a documentary about Robinson. “She just knocked people out. It turned into a party on the street.”

Dunson later mentioned that the benefit jam was the first time she’d left her property in ten years. Her husband Andy Smith had died there in 1991, and she planned to do the same. Sadly, within weeks the city condemned her house and boarded it up with her things still inside— Pollack listed just some of them, including an antique icebox, a pump organ, two sets of drums, a Coca-Cola vending machine from the 1950s, and original copies of more than 600 of her songs.

Fortunately Dunson was supported by her late husband’s military pension, and fellow

blues vocalist Katherine Davis took her in temporarily. She’d seen Dunson at a second Maxwell Street benefit gig and started bringing her food and listening to her sing her songs, eventually offering her a room in her apartment.

At that point, in 1998, Davis had been singing blues professionally for about 16 years, but she told Pollack that she’d never heard of Dunson before that summer. “It was like, OK, Koko Taylor is of this period, and Dinah Washington . . . but who else in Chicago?” she said. “They said there was no one else, but I know the women migrated here from the south. I’ve been doing research. Who were the women singers? Why couldn’t I find her? When I heard her, I thought she was the mother of my time.”

Dunson’s fortunes improved somewhat after her “rediscovery,” and in 2000 she finally released her first and only album under her own name, Big Boss Lady. Its title track, a response to Reed’s 1960 favorite “Big Boss Man,” was her signature tune. It also includes “Evil,” “I’m a Whole Lotta Woman” (a retort to Bo Diddley’s “I’m a Man”), “I’m Going Upside Your Head,” and more recent songs such as “Blue Sky Is My Blanket” and “Trouble Just Won’t Let Me Be.” Her son, blues guitarist Jimi “Prime Time” Smith, appears on the album, and so does Robinson.

Dunson’s house wasn’t saved, and by the time of the 2005 Tribune story, she was living in a small apartment of her own on the north side. She made several appearances at the Chicago Blues Festival after the release of Big Boss Lady, but on October 4, 2007, she died at age 86 at Northwestern Memorial Hospital of complications from intestinal issues.

At her first Maxwell Street appearance in 1998, Pollack quoted her speaking from the stage. “I’m gonna holler loud,” Dunson said, delivering a boast that makes a fitting epitaph for a tough, fearless blueswoman who survived for decades in a scene made for men. “You see, I’m a she-wolf, and I prowl all night long. . . . Ain’t gonna hang my head and cry.” v

The radio version of the Secret History of Chicago Music airs on Outside the Loop on WGN Radio 720 AM, Saturdays at 5 AM with host Mike Stephen.

MUSIC

Dan O’Conor, the

Great Lake

Jumper

“There were no stages to play—I think for these artists to come down and play one or two songs, it kind of gave them a stage or venue.”

As told to JAMIE LUDWIG

Dan O’Conor is best known as the Great Lake Jumper, but he’s also a Chicago-based artist and owns T-shirt company Dtox Designs. Raised in the north suburbs, O’Conor began going to concerts in the city in the early 80s, and his passion for live music led him to a career in the music and media industry. Over the years he’s worked for Spin, Grooveshark, Chris Schuba’s long-running national ad-sales firm, and others.

During lockdown O’Conor rode his bike from Lincoln Square to Lake Michigan and jumped in. It felt so good that he came back and did it again. And again. Eventually, his morning jumps became a local phenomenon, especially as local musicians—among them Jon Langford, Mucca Pazza, and Mute Duo—joined him by the lake to play a song or two, helping raise money for O’Conor’s organization of choice, the Chicago Independent Venue League (CIVL).

Lockdown is long over, but O’Conor is still making daily treks to the lake. He likes to wear the Motörhead shorts he got at a concert years ago, and before he jumps in, he shares bits of music trivia from his enormous record collection. This summer, he’ll reach his third anniversary as the Great Lake Jumper. I caught up with O’Conor between jumps to find out more.

When I started jumping in the lake during the pandemic, it had nothing to do with music. It was just that I was hungover, and my wife wanted me out of the house. I went to the lake, jumped in, and it felt good. With the politics and protests and

the pandemic, it felt like something positive I could do to clear my mind. It just felt good.

I could go down to the lake, have a 20-minute ride down there, listen to my music with no commercials, no other static, just me and my bike.

I wasn’t videotaping the jumps at first, because I couldn’t figure out how to record while playing music, so I just chose to play the music.

I was wearing the Motörhead shorts I’d gotten at South by Southwest years before. On the SpongeBob soundtrack, there’s a Motörhead song called “You Better Swim,” so I was trying to figure out a way to soundtrack a jump, but I don’t think I’ve ever figured it out.

My friend tipped o Block Club that this guy from Lincoln Square had been jumping in the lake for 150 straight days. That’s when WGN Radio and reporters started interviewing me, and they’re like, “When are you going to stop this? You can’t possibly go through the winter.” I had no plans to go through the winter. But why not?

It was [January 2021], and my wife suggest-

ed that I have bands and artists serenade me as I jumped into the lake, which sounded like a strange idea. But I love Jon Langford, and so I asked him, and he said, “Sure.” He had this [Mekons] song from, like, 1985, called “Shanty”—a sea shanty that somehow got on TikTok and had gone viral. So he came out and sang that, and it was wonderful. I started inviting other musicians, and that’s kind of where it took off. There were no stages to play—I think for these artists to come down and play one or two songs, it kind of gave them a stage or venue.

I started having people ask me how they could donate to support me, but it wasn’t about me. The venues were the first to close and the last to reopen [during the pandemic]. So on WGN, I announced, “Hey, anyone that wants to donate, please donate to CIVL.” I think that helped the momentum. I’d invite an artist, and their friends would reach out and say, “Hey, I saw Lawrence Peters played for you. Can I play for you?” Ninety percent of that was over Instagram or Twitter DM. I had a lit-

tle pitch written out saying, “Hey, this is why I’m doing it. I’d love to have you out.”

From that January to June, I had four to five artists a week. But I was a moving target. I never knew when I was going to be there, because I was driving a bus at the time. I was driving a limo and juggling whatever stuff I had with the kids. It’s amazing that all of these artists showed up. Weekends were easier, because there were less conflicts. So that’s when I’d try to spread the word on Twitter and Instagram.

I got mostly positive feedback from the artists, and I think there was a certain amount of, “I’m a musician, and I haven’t performed.” Even if it was in front of 20 people, that’s a buzz. Also around that time, there were several music photographers who started coming out. Ministry’s photographer, Derick Smith, and I became friends during the pandemic because he started shooting me out there.

By March, I was like, “I’m over the hump. I’m going to have a party on day 365.” The night before that, they relaxed capacity restrictions.

Dan O’Conor (le ) on the lakefront with drummer Skyler Rowe and pedal steel guitarist Sam Wagster of Mute Duo DERICK SMITH

My buddy cooked 60 pounds of pulled pork, another one donated 50 pounds of sausage. We went through the pork in two hours. It just turned into something a lot bigger. I had wanted to aim high, so I asked Je Tweedy to come out, and he said, “Yeah, I’ll be there.” So that was amazing in its own right. I asked Steve Albini; the last band I had seen before the pandemic was his band Shellac. And Jon Langford came out. And that was really cool, because he was the first artist [to play the jumps] and kind of the last. By the time he got there, it was raining buckets. And there were two tenby-ten tents. He stood on a cooler in a tent and played four songs—it was really special.

I took a family vacation that July. So I was like, “OK, what can I do on the way out?” So I did two of the Great Lakes on the way out to Massachusetts—I jumped in Lake Erie in Bu alo, New York, and then I jumped in Lake Ontario in Rochester, New York. And I did a bunch of stuff in Massachusetts and Rhode Island, and then I came back.

[Jumping in the lake] just continues to feel good. I still get that cleansing feeling. It’s a great way to start the day. It did become easier when they opened the lakefront. Now I can drive my car out. I’ve needed a shovel at times to break the ice, though I really haven’t had to use the shovel much this year so far. I also started wearing water shoes, because my feet were all beat up from 800 days of jumping o the cement. My wife got me some foot balm for Christmas, and it’s amazing. I also have a flotation coat that I wear some days, when it’s rough, to keep me afloat. I know that it’s a dangerous situation, especially during the winter. You’ve got to get down there and block everything else out, and get in the water and get back to the ladder.

It’s really been a huge positive impact in my life. I was depressed during the pandemic, and when I started this I realized I could go down [to the lake] and find a little Zen and a little peace. And I love Lake Michigan. I just asked my Web guy to update my website, because I’m going to have a third annual party this summer. In October, I went up to Lake Superior and Lake Huron to complete the Great Lakes. And last summer, when we were in Massachusetts, I did the six New England states in one day—I jumped in a river, a pond, a lake, and the ocean. I’m not going out chasing artists anymore, but if someone wants to come play for me, I’m happy to host.

About a year ago, I started thinking it was getting boring for people just seeing me, the guy in the Motörhead shorts, jump in the lake.

I happened to be wearing my “A Boy Named Sue” shirt, which had something to do with Shel Silverstein—Johnny Cash made that song famous, but it was written by Shel Silverstein, who’s a Chicagoan. So I dedicated the jump to Shel Silverstein that day.

I wanted to tie in my albums—just because I think the visual of a big album is way better than a CD. Ninety percent of the time, it’s the day of or the night before, and I’m just googling what happened that day in music and trying to find something that I have some vinyl for, whether it’s my dad’s Frank Sinatra 78s or my older siblings’ Beatles or Stones records. Most of the stu is not really about me, though I’ve done a few—like I used my Johnny Cash ticket stub as a visual because I’d gotten a guitar pick at the show, and when I flipped the ticket over the guitar pick was on the back.

I try to keep it short. There were three women who jumped in with me today. They reached out through Instagram, like, “Hey, we’ve been wanting to jump in. Is tomorrow OK?” I’m always all for it. It’s a big lake—you won’t get in my way. It’s always fun to see others have that excitement of that bone-chilling cold and that endorphin rush.

I brought out a Rod Stewart record. I find it hard to believe, but he has the Guinness world record [for the biggest crowd at a free concert] for playing for 4.2 million people on Copacabana Beach in Rio in New Year’s ’94. I couldn’t spit all that out, so I just mentioned that he had 32 solo records. Which is an incredible amount of records. When you look up music trivia, there’s Beatles and Elvis stu almost every day, because those two have been documented as much as anyone, but I try to mix it up and bring something new.

[Now that venues are open,] it’s always nice to see a musician who came and played for me. I get recognized a little bit more, though it’s mostly by my joker friends, who haven’t seen me in a while. I see them at the show, and they have a new nickname for me.

Music takes you to a time and place. It’s very subjective. Someone’s favorite show might be another person’s worst show. And you can bond with someone over these amazing shows. But to bring it back [to the venues], I think it’s like, “Hey, I was there. I had an incredible time, and I wouldn’t have had that without that venue being open.” So I think people are very supportive of their favorite venues, and for live music fans, I think this is an amazing time. v

@unlistenmusic

MUSIC

PICK OF THE WEEK

Recommended and notable shows and releases with critics’ insights for the week

CONCERT PREVIEWS THURSDAY26

Squirrel Flower Dearly Somber and So and Dumb open. 9 PM, Sleeping Village, 3734 W. Belmont, $20, $18 in advance. 21+

Ella Williams, the Massachusetts-born musician who makes music as Squirrel Flower, released her first EP, Early Winter Songs From Middle America, while attending Grinnell College in 2015, and she’s been steadily touring ever since. A er graduation, she moved back to Boston to make her way in the DIY scene, and she soon turned heads with stunning back-to-back albums, 2020’s I Was Born Swimming and 2021’s Planet (i) , both released through Polyvinyl. She moved to Chicago in 2021, and since then she’s seamlessly settled into the city’s tightknit music scene, even joining tours with local bands, including Tenci, Mia Joy, and Whitney. Squirrel Flower’s latest single, “Your Love,” is a full-band reimagining of the so er, more stripped-down track “Your Love Is a Disaster” from last year’s Planet EP Here, Williams steadies herself against the sharp gut punch of new love, her voice careening over fuzzed-out guitar and a punchy drumbeat. Bursting at the seams with layers of vocal harmonies, pedal steel, and a twangy guitar solo from MJ Lenderman, “Your Love” is a nervous reckoning with the pain of love as much as it is a ringing celebration of desire. Williams’s songs often toe this line, creating a staggering balance between decay and absolute comfort. Through these extremes, she manages to unearth bright, unclouded insights about herself and her most intimate relationships. Onstage, this clarity lends Williams a certain sternness; she o en sets her face with a calm and unsmiling reserve. While she holds chaos and catastrophe close in her songs, beneath the surface there’s a taut and aching longing for connection, no matter the price. To love is to face the sharpest razor’s edge, but Williams convinces us that the risk is worth it. How far would you go to feel close to someone again?

FRIDAY27

BROKEDOWNS, CHINESE TELEPHONES, DANGEROUS CHAIRS, PERMANENT RESIDUE

Sat 1/28, 8:30 PM, Burlington, 3425 W. Fullerton, $10. 21+

CHICAGO PUNK FOUR-PIECE the Brokedowns emerged from the same Elgin underground scene that gave us Ian’s Party, a homegrown humdinger of a music festival. That wintertime event hasn’t returned since the start of the pandemic, but at least we get a new LP from the Brokedowns, Maximum Khaki (Red Scare). When it comes to scru y, funny punk songs with an emphasis on pop melody, the Brokedowns mean business. The band’s love for cheeky song titles remains as strong as ever on Maximum Khaki, whose tracks include “Man Graves (Masculine Caskets),” “Osama Van Halen,” and “Samurai Sword Decontrol.” If you don’t get those jokes, the Brokedowns might not be for you, but I still hope you’ll take a chance on their new album. They tenderize the beefy songs on Maximum Khaki with the occasional softhearted turn, and they smuggle thoughtful earnestness into brawny, barreling tunes that you wouldn’t expect to be able to communicate such depth in less than two minutes. The Brokedowns have been at it for more than two decades, and they’ve beaten the odds to age with their goofiness and their humanity intact: Maximum Khaki is loaded with shamelessly catchy rippers as sharp and tongue-in-cheek as “Ernest Becker at a Costco.” —LEOR GALIL

Alash 8 PM, Old Town School of Folk Music, Szold Hall, 4545 N. Lincoln, $25, $23 members. b

Alash are a Tuvan trio of multi-instrumentalists and singers Bady-Dorzhu Ondar, Ayan-ool Sam, and Ayan Shirizhik. Founded in 2005, the group perform khoomei, also known as Tuvan throat singing, a traditional vocal style practiced in Tuva, Mongolia, and Siberia, in which singers manipulate their mouths and throats to layer overtones over a fundamental pitch, o en combining buzzes, whistles, or low guttural sounds. Folk music built around throat-singing techniques has become popular in the West, not just for its uncanny vocal athletics but also for its wistful, evocative instrumental arrangements, which suggest the winds and landscapes of the Asian steppes and the rocking gaits of horses. Despite its ancient pastoral vibe, Tuvan throat singing pairs surprisingly well with modern forms of music, and fus-

—TASHA VIETS-VANLEAR

The Brokedowns make scruffy, silly punk that satisfies

JACK GROSSMANN

ing it with elements of much newer genres—including alt-rock (Yat-Kha), avant-garde jazz and electronica (Sainkho Namtchylak), and metal (the Hu)— has become a tradition in its own right.

The members of Alash are formally trained in the strictest traditions, which has made them adaptable; past collaborators include the Sun Ra Arkestra, Bela Fleck & the Flecktones, and numerous jam bands. They’ve performed at many U.S. folk festivals over the years, and they’ve become familiar faces in Chicago, particularly at the Old Town School of Folk Music. In 2018 and 2019 they recorded sessions with local experimental chamber-music project Fi h House Ensemble, and in 2019 Bady-Dorzhu Ondar undertook a monumental collaborative project with Baltimore beatboxer Shodekeh, singer-rapper Jasmine Pope, and many others from the Charm City hip-hop scene. The resulting album, last year’s Embodiments , is surprising, ingenious, and stunningly beautiful.

Ever mindful of their role as cultural ambassadors, Alash usually include explanations of each element of their music when they perform traditional sets, including their vocal techniques, their instruments, and the themes of their songs. They’re masters of the form, so whether you’re new to Tuvan folk music or have loved it for years, expect to be entranced.

—MONICA KENDRICK

SATURDAY28

Abortion Fund Benefit Series Featuring performances by Akenya, Bnny, Elizabeth Moen, Finom, Friko, Godly the Ruler, Grelley Duvall, Lifeguard, Post Animal (DJ Set), and V.V. Lightbody. 7 PM, Schubas, 3159 N. Southport, $30, $25 in advance. 18+

On June 24, the Supreme Court overturned the 1973 landmark decision Roe v. Wade , unceremoniously stripping away half of the population’s right to bodily autonomy and therefore full citizenship. While the ensuing backlash helped shape the outcome of the 2022 midterm elections, downgrading the “red wave” that political pundits and mainstream media had told us to expect into a “red trickle,” those victories haven’t been enough to reverse this disastrous backsliding: as of December, 14 states have made legal abortion completely unavailable, and eight others have enacted laws curbing reproductive rights. With lives at stake, Ground Control Touring’s Abortion Funds Benefit Series aims to raise awareness and engage communities with three simultaneous concerts benefiting reproductive justice organization Noise for Now, all on January 28 in New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago.

The Chicago event brings together an eclectic roster of local talent, including Akenya, a vocalist, pianist, and composer who’s working on her debut solo album, Moon in the 4th , though her CV is already several miles long. She’s collaborated and toured with Noname and Hayley Williams, recorded with Mavis Staples and Nubya Garcia, and fronted local band Resavoir. In her own music, she’s explored jazz, hip-hop, classical, and more, often incorporating themes of social justice; last year she released a recording of Fear the Lamb, her three-movement chamber-music tribute to Emmett Till. Also on the bill are Bnny (a country-tinged,

smoky indie-rock outfit fronted by Jess Viscius), hiphop and pop-punk artist Godly the Ruler, folk-rock singer-songwriter Elizabeth Moen, glammy pop singer Grelley Duvall (a project of theatrical performance artist Alex Grelle), and more. Whether you come out for the cause or for the lineup, you’re bound to leave more inspired than when you walked in. —JAMIE LUDWIG

Brokedowns See Pick of the Week, page 54. Chinese Telephones, Dangerous Chairs, and Permanent Residue open. 8:30 PM, Burlington, 3425 W. Fullerton, $10. 21+

Doghead The Tear Garden Collective, Deary, and Act of Retaliation open. 6:30 PM, Subterranean downstairs, 2011 W. North, $15. 17+

Kankakee band Doghead make clean, controlled emocore whose energy draws on a wide spectrum of heavy music, not just old hardcore—they owe more to recent artists (D.C. flower-power group Give, much of the roster of Chicago label New Morality Zine) than to the genre’s 1980s beginnings. The professional polish of their debut EP, last year’s Silver, allows them to emphasize that heaviness as expertly as they do their melodies. The EP’s burliest sections feel like a stamping press smoothly exceeding its rated power—you can feel the weight moving as the band travel through the song, with hurricane-force guitars and throaty screams barely contained by tight, steely rhythms. On “Wick Splitter,” a cyclone of riffs threatens to swallow the vocals, but when the guitars tip the balance by throttling back to expose the churning drums, the song’s emotional core—angry, repentant, hopeful—takes over from the instrumental momentum. This galvanizing moment gives Doghead a second wind, and makes it feel like they could demolish any obstacle. —LEOR GALIL

TUESDAY31

Mugen! the Human Heavy Crownz headlines, Mugen! the Human, Neph & Nigel, and Aero Austaire open. 8:30 PM, Golden Dagger, 2447 N. Halsted, $12. 21+

Chicago rapper Mugen! the Human grew up in Prince George’s County, Maryland, but on the new “Wanted” he raps with the speed and rhythmic fluency of someone who spent his youth in Chatham watching footwork dancers face off at Battlegrounds. The track kicks off his new self-released EP, For Her Consideration, with a live-wire flow that Mugen adapts to the instrumental’s odd pulse. He shi s the speed of his rapping like he’s leaping carefully through an interlocking nest of rotating fire bars in Super Mario Bros. , so that his words slide between and tie together a hiccuping vocal sample and a palpitating bass thump. Mugen, born Armand Rome, moved to Chicago in 2016 to study guitar at Columbia College, and he’s since found a community here. He’s a member of Mp3dotcom, a hiphop collective formed in late 2021 whose dozen or so members include rising MCs such as Aubry of

Ella Williams, aka Squirrel Flower TONJE THILESEN

Alash WADA FUMIKO

Mugen! the Human LATEEF BRIDGEWATER

MUSIC

Find more music listings at chicagoreader.com/musicreviews

continued from p. 55

Stranded Civilians. Mugen has a dry, husky voice and a love for the kind of sample-based underground hip-hop whose spacious instrumental architecture requires an MC with a strong personality—a love that comes through on his brief 2021 album, Ghost . The deluxe version of his bubbly new EP adds songs that emphasize Mugen’s range on the mike and adaptable ear for melody. His woebegone, syllable-smearing rap-singing on “Okay!” brings a bittersweet feel to the groaning, murmuring synths in its bass-heavy backing track—the instrumental reminds me of Lil Yachty’s viral “Poland,” but Mugen’s delivery makes the song’s dystopian melody distinctively his own.

—LEOR GALIL

THURSDAY2

Avreeayl Ra’s Dream Stuff The evening opens with a screening of TUNING Into the Moment, a 40-minute documentary about Avreeayl Ra. 8:30 PM, Elastic Arts, 3429 W. Diversey #208, $15. b

Avreeayl Ra is quite literally a driving force in Chicago jazz. He’s an enduring member of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) who’s spent decades drumming for countless local and visiting eminences, including Ernest Dawkins, Ari Brown, Fred Anderson, and Nicole Mitchell. While he can be counted upon to bring emphatic, surging energy to any setting, he can also throttle back and supply a gentle pulse when that’s all the situation requires. In recent times he’s also stepped out as a bandleader. Last February local nonprofit Homeroom, which fosters new arts production, sponsored a weekly residency at Elastic Arts for Ra’s ensemble Dream Stuff, which includes pianist and synthesist Jim Baker, bassist Jason Roebke, reedist and didgeridoo player Edward Wilkerson Jr., and guitarist, violinist, and mandolinist Peter Maunu. The group performed winding, set-

length improvisations, which were also streamed over the Internet. Mexican film collective Rhizomes Films later combined excerpts from those four performances with archival footage and voice-overs by Ra to create an impressionistic portrait of the artist titled TUNING Into the Moment. That documentary will screen tonight as a prelude to a set by Ra and Dream Stuff. —BILL MEYER

Daniel Villareal 7:30 PM, SPACE, 1245 Chicago, Evanston, $15-$22.  b

Panama-born, Chicago-based drummer Daniel Villarreal is involved with myriad musical projects. He coleads the groups Dos Santos, Valebol, the Los Sundowns, and Ida y Vuelta; he’s collaborated extensively with grab-bag marching band Mucca Pazza, sibling duo Wild Belle, and soulful psychpop singer Rudy De Anda; and he’s a familiar face on Pilsen’s DJ circuit. At the intersection of all those endeavors is his debut album, Panamá 77, released last May on International Anthem. Working with plenty of colleagues from his various projects, Villarreal cocomposed 11 lush, hypnotically motivic instrumental tracks, many of which undulate with psychedelic organs and synths.

Villarreal’s affinity for the organ runs deep: his father was an organist in a touring conjunto band, and it was the first instrument Villarreal learned as a boy. (“Patria,” the only cover tune on the album, was written by Panamanian organist Avelino Muñoz, whose family taught Villarreal’s father.) But Villarreal dedicated Panamá 77 to his late grandmother Ofelia De León, who helped raise him while his parents worked in nearby Panama City. She’s the namesake of the album’s second song, which is buoyed by surfy solos from guitarist Nathan Karagianis (a Dos Santos colleague) and an organ groove by Cole DeGenova (who’s also collaborated with a long list of artists, including Chance the Rapper, Lupe Fiasco, and Meshell Ndegeocello).

For this show, Villarreal will be joined by Danjuma Gaskin on congas and the same musicians

who recorded “Ofelia” and “Patria”: DeGenova on keys, Karagianis on guitar, and Gordon Walters on bass. As they did at the Panamá 77 release show at Thalia Hall last July, the quintet will play the record in its entirety with help from a few surprise guests. —HANNAH

EDGAR

ALBUM REVIEWS

Oddisee, to What End Outer Note outernotelabel.bandcamp.com

Oddisee is aging like a fine wine, becoming a producer- rapper’s producer-rapper. Two decades into his career, the native of Prince George’s County, Maryland, still doesn’t care about mainstream popularity—as long as he can feed his family off his music, fame isn’t important. This doesn’t mean mainstream accolades aren’t apropos; his big music is innately hip-hop, but the way he infuses it with elements of genres such as soul, R&B, and go-go makes it more expansive and widely relatable. From his early days with D.C. rap trio Diamond District through his widely heralded solo projects (such as 2011’s Rock Creek Park mixtape), and including his production work and killer live band, Oddisee has always been far above average. And in the spirit of Pharrell and the o -troubled Ye, Oddisee has the vision and skills to do whatever he wants with music, because his music is just that good. He touts fierce independence, sociopolitical commentary, and intelligent, layered introspection over bright production. Oddisee’s latest record, To What End (his second project with Outer Note), continues on that path. The album is so polished that even when some of the choruses falter, the powerful verses and dynamic instrumentation are strong enough to create balance. The orchestral opener, “The Start of Something,” floats in knowing and proud, with Oddisee declaring that you “can’t appreciate the winnings, never learning loss.” Philadelphia rap icon Freeway

provides his signature “rah-rah” to the driving bass of “Ghetto to Meadow” and surprisingly meshes with Oddisee’s mellifluous veteran’s flow. To What End shows Oddissee’s knack for bringing together incredible talent; “Choices” is a melodic bed of roses with great verses from Little Brother’s Phonte, British rapper and producer Kay Young, and singer BeMyFiasco. If Oddisee never blows up, that’s OK. His family is fed, and his music is so good it feels universal.

—CRISTALLE BOWEN

oOzing Wound, We Cater to Cowards Thrill Jockey

oozingwound.bandcamp.com/album/we-cater-tocowards

Lots of bands emerged from the lockdown era writing material with a darker tone than their prepandemic work. Local thrashers Oozing Wound take that to a new level with their brand-new LP, We Cater to Cowards (Thrill Jockey). Granted, they’ve never been purveyors of positivity—their catalog includes song titled “Everyone I Hate Should Be Killed,” “Surrounded by Fucking Idiots,” and “Everything Sucks and My Life Is a Lie”—but the vibe shi this time around is palpable. Gone are the snappy Dave Lombardo-style beats, the speedy solos, and the catchy scream-along choruses. Instead we get ten smeared, sludgy, grungy tracks of muddily rhythmic sonic misery.

The last thing I expected from Oozing Wound was a slow record, but reinvention feels good from a band more than a decade into their career. The way they throw things back to behind-the-beat In Utero and Tad worship feels completely fresh and surprising. Even the boomy, natural reverb of Electrical Audio, where they tracked the record, recalls the sound of early-90s Steve Albini-recorded noiserock classics.

By the time the epic horn arrangement barges in on “Crypto Fash,” you’ll be completely engrossed with the band’s updated bag of tricks. And despite the unexpected turns and throwbacks, Oozing

Daniel Villareal ARIANA LEBEDEV

Oddisee ASMINE VAN BUYTENE

MUSIC

continued from p. 56

Wound weave elements of their classic sound into every track: Kyle Reynolds’s unrelenting drum fury, Kevin Cribbin’s monstrous fuzz bass, and Zack Weil’s dissonant shredding and ear-piercing shrieking. On We Cater to Cowards, Oozing Wound work out the pain and confusion of a hard few years with a new approach, and we’re lucky to have it. It’s complex, dirgy, and dark, and its twists and layers will keep you coming back for repeat listens.

—LUCA CIMARUSTI

Stella Kola, Stella Kola Fountain Fight

stellakola.bandcamp.com/album/stella-kola

When I heard about this new New England psych project, I wondered if the name “Stella Kola” referred to a solo artist, a duo, or a band—or possibly alluded to a so drink. It turns out that it’s a little from column A and a little from column B. Stella Kola is the collaboration of Beverly Ketch, a poet and vocalist who’s performed in folk-psych bands such as Bunwinkies and Viewer, and guitarist Rob Thomas, a longtime member of fearless experimental ramblers Sunburned Hand of the Man. They’d been writing dark acoustic songs together for some time before deciding on a name. Ketch originally wanted to call their project “Star Soda,” but she settled on “Stella” in tribute to a friend’s grandmother, who’d recently passed away.

Once Ketch and Thomas had settled on a mutual musical direction, they compiled a wish list of local musicians they wanted to bring aboard to flesh out their fragile tunes. Miraculously, all of them were game. Guitarist, synth player, and fellow SHotM

member Jeremy Pisani joined them to form a live trio, and from there the group expanded into a larger ensemble with multi-instrumentalist Wednesday Knudson (Pigeons), bassist Jim Bliss (Wet Tuna), and violist and violinist Jen Gelineau, who’s recorded with Six Organs of Admittance. They began recording Stella Kola in 2020, inviting even more friends to provide additional instrumentation, including guitar wayfarer Willie Lane, Pat Gubler of legendary acid-folk group P.G. Six, and prolific “outsider” musician Gary War. The album isn’t as wild as you might expect, though, despite this star-studded freak-folk lineup: it’s a slice of chamber-folk bliss fueled by Ketch’s hushed but powerful vocals.

Pitched somewhere between Vashti Bunyan’s breathy, quavering delicacy and Judee Sill’s conversational but melancholy clarity, Ketch’s so sighs weave among aching strings and chiming guitars, and her gentle ruminations on the sparse space shanty “Rosa” haunt my dreams. She can also rise to the occasion of a full-band setting, as she does on the righteous folk-rock anthem “November,” and she multitracks her evocative verses on baroque laments such as “Heart in the Rain” and “Being Is a Beggar’s Blessing,” where her performances recall singersongwriter greats Margo Guryan and Susan Pillsbury. I know I’ve compared Ketch to four people just in this paragraph, but she’s unique—and she proves it amid the fluttering horns and orchestral flourishes of “First Fret,” when she gently intones “I think of my life / From the beginning to the end / And this time presses so close around / But those times are laid deep in the ground.” Stella Kola transcended their casual beginnings to create something epic with this first album, and I’m excited to see what other trails they’ll blaze. —STEVE KRAKOW v

Beverly Ketch and Rob Thomas of Stella Kola LIZ DURETTE

EARLY WARNINGS

b ALL AGES F

M83 5/2, 7:30 PM, Riviera Theatre, 18+

Madonna 8/9-8/10, 8:30 PM, United Center  b Magic Giant 4/7, 8:30 PM, Reggies Rock Club, 17+ Mames Babegenush 4/18, 8 PM, City Winery b Jared Mattson 5/31, 7 PM, Subterranean, 17+ Milk & Bone 4/4, 8 PM, Schubas, 18+ Minnesota 4/15, 10 PM, Concord Music Hall, 18+ Mint Mile, Wowza in Kalamazoo 2/11, 8 PM, Hideout

Modern Nun, Joey Nebulous, Hard Femme 2/9, 8 PM, Schubas, 18+ Mucca Pazza 5/5, 8:30 PM, Martyrs’

NEW

Alla Boara 3/4, 8:30 PM, Constellation, 18+ Altin Gün 7/15, 8:30 PM Thalia Hall, 17+ Giorgia Angiuli 3/17, 10 PM, Concord Music Hall, 18+ Anuel AA 5/18, 8 PM, Allstate Arena, Rosemont b Arctic Monkeys, Fontaines D.C. 8/27, 8 PM, United Center b Bailen 4/1, 8 PM, Maurer Hall, Old Town School of Folk Music b Anita Baker, Babyface 6/30, 7 PM, United Center b Bankrol Hayden 5/4, 7 PM, Subterranean b Nessa Barrett 3/13, 7:30 PM, Aragon Ballroom b Big Joanie 6/2, 10 PM, Empty Bottle Bongzilla, Wizard Rifle, High Priest 4/19, 8 PM, Beat Kitchen, 17+ Bouncing Souls, Swingin’ Utters 5/11, 7 PM, Metro, 18+

Choir! Choir! Choir! present Something: An Epic George Harrison Sing-Along 3/3, 7 PM, Maurer Hall, Old Town School of Folk Music b Consume the Divide, Bullet to the Heart 2/11, 7 PM, Bottom Lounge b Coyote Man 3/17, 8:30 PM, Gman Tavern Cryogeyser, Draag 4/15, 8 PM, Empty Bottle Destroyer 4/29, 7:30 PM, SPACE, Evanston b Devin Drobka Trio 8/12, 8:30 PM, Constellation, 18+

Kahil El’Zabar Quartet featuring Corey Wilkes, Justin Dillard, and Isaiah Collier 2/19, 3 PM, the Promontory b

Fenne Lily, Christian Lee Hutson 5/25, 8 PM, Thalia Hall, 17+

Fly by Midnight 4/18, 8 PM, Beat Kitchen, 17+ Friday Pilots Club 2/18, 9 PM, Lincoln Hall, 18+ Mark Fuller 2/11, 9 PM, Punch House F Garza (Rob Garza of Thievery Corporation) 3/2, 8 PM, Subterranean Girl God 3/19, 8 PM, Bottom Lounge, 17+ Glen Hansard & Markéta Irglová 8/18, 8 PM, Salt Shed, 17+ Carlie Hanson 3/9, 8 PM, Schubas, 18+ Jerry Harrison & Adrian Belew, Cool Cool Cool 2/25, 8 PM, the Vic, 18+ Haunt Me, Blood Club, Muted Color 4/13, 8 PM, Beat Kitchen, 17+ Ben Hemsley 2/26, 10 PM, Prysm Nightclub

Hippie Sabotage 5/6, 7:30 PM, Riviera Theatre b

Hirs Collective 5/4, 8 PM, Reggies Music Joint Jesca Hoop, Gracie & Rachel 2/9, 8 PM, Hideout

Horseshoes & Hand Grenades 4/21, 8 PM, Martyrs’

Griffin House 4/28, 8 PM, City Winery b

International Women’s Day Celebration featuring Patricia Ortega, La Paula Herrera, Neusa Sauer 3/8, 8 PM, Maurer Hall, Old Town School of Folk Music Fb

July Talk, Daniel Romano’s Outfit 4/27, 8 PM, Subterranean, 17+ Kevin Kaarl 5/5, 7:30 PM, the Vic b

Kaash Paige, Amari Noelle 2/10, 8 PM, Lincoln Hall b Kali Uchis 5/16, 7 PM, Aragon Ballroom Kayzo, Joyryde, Samplifire, Automhate 3/4, 10 PM, Radius Chicago, 18+ Kerala Dust 4/26, 8 PM, Lincoln Hall, 18+ Kittin & the Hacker, Panterah (live), Patrixia, Greg Corner 3/4, 10 PM, Concord Music Hall, 18+ Knock2 3/3, 10 PM, Radius Chicago, 18+ Kreator, Sepultura, Death Angel, Spiritworld 6/6, 6:30 PM, the Vic, 18+ Kyshona 4/26, 7:30 PM, SPACE, Evanston b L’sGA: Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address featuring Ja Nelle Davenport-Pleasure, A.J. McClenon, Kao Ra Zen, Willie “Prince Roc” Round, and more 3/12, 7 PM, Elastic b Lady A, David Barnes 4/20, 7:30 PM, Chicago Theatre b

Legions of Metal Fest 2023 featuring Metal Church, Witchslayer, Adamantis, Serpent Rider, Chamber Mage, Infinity Dream, and more 6/2, 5 PM; 6/3, 3 PM, Reggies Rock Club, 17+

Lurker Bias night featuring Torches Mauve, All Extinct Animals, LB Trio, and more 2/26, 8 PM, Elastic b

Never miss a show again. Sign up for the newsletter at chicagoreader. com/early

Lulu Santos 5/17, 8 PM, the Vic, 18+ Satan, Night Demon 3/30, 8 PM, Reggies Rock Club, 17+ Jeff Schaller & the Long Way Home, Blind Adam & the Federal League 2/17, 8:30 PM, Gman Tavern Stephen Schuch 2/9, 9 PM, Tack Room F

GOSSIP WOLF

A furry ear to the ground of the local music scene

Murder Capital 4/3, 7:30 PM, Lincoln Hall b The National, Soccer Mommy 5/2-5/21, 7:30 PM, Auditorium Theatre b

Stevie Nicks 6/23, 7 PM, United Center b Nocturna’s New Loves & Broken Hearts Valentine’s Ball featuring DJ Scary Lady Sarah 2/11, 11 PM, Metro, 18+ Héctor Oaks, DJ Hyperactive, La Spacer 2/17, 10 PM, Smart Bar Ocean Blue, Hang Ups 9/2, 8 PM, Lincoln Hall, 18+ Onyx, R.A. the Rugged Man 5/4, 6 PM, Martyrs’

The Other Side Showcase featuring Ricardo Villalobos, Raresh, Maher Daniel, O.bee, and more 3/4, 10 PM, Radius Chicago, 18+ Sofiane Pamart 5/3, 8:30 PM, Constellation, 18+

Paris Chansons 5/1, 8 PM, SPACE, Evanston b Pedro the Lion, Erik Walters 5/27, 8 PM, Thalia Hall, 17+

Phoneboy 4/21, 8 PM, Beat Kitchen, 17+ Pink Talking Fish 4/15, 8 PM, Park West, 18+ Dougie Poole 5/5, 10 PM, Empty Bottle Presidents’ Day Queen! featuring Derrick Carter, Michael Serafini, the Blessed Madonna, Rae Chardonnay, Blesstonio, Iambrandon 2/19, 9 PM, Metro and Smart Bar

James Reid 2/9, 7:30 PM, Lincoln Hall b Josh Ritter & the Royal City Band 5/12, 8:30 PM, Thalia Hall, 17+ RXK Nephew, Buggin, DJ Taye 2/17, 9 PM, Lincoln Hall, 18+

DJ Seinfeld, Shaun J. Wright 2/18, 10 PM, Smart Bar Skáld 4/16, 8 PM, Reggies Rock Club, 17+ Sloan 3/17, 8 PM, Bottom Lounge, 17+ Al Stewart & the Empty Pockets 5/24, 8 PM, City Winery b Sunless, Thieves, Noctambulist 4/7, 8 PM, Reggies Music Joint DJ Susan 2/25, 10 PM, Spy Bar Spencer Sutherland 4/8, 7 PM, House of Blues b Unique Sounds From the Hi Fi featuring Jill Barron, Mike Aimer, Glenn Russell, Nurse Ratched 2/19, 6 PM, Gman Tavern  F

Valentine’s Queen! featuring Cqqchifruit, Madeline, Michael Serafini 2/12, 10 PM, Smart Bar

Valley, Aidan Bissett 5/31, 7 PM, House of Blues b Waco Brothers 3/29, 9:30 PM, Hideout Wednesday, Tenci 6/26, 7 PM, Metro b Wilco, Horsegirl 3/23, 3/25-3/26, 7:30 PM, Riviera Theatre, 18+ Wilder Woods 4/25, 7:30 PM, Lincoln Hall, 18+ Worry Club 4/22, 8 PM, Subterranean, 17+ Xiu Xiu 4/25, 9 PM, Empty Bottle

Yaeji 5/10, 9 PM, the Vic, 18+

UPDATED

Jayhawks 3/11, 4:30 and 8 PM; 3/12, 7 PM, Maurer Hall, Old Town School of Folk Music, show added, 3/11 (8 PM) and 3/12 sold out b Paolo Nutini 3/13, 8 PM, Riviera Theatre, venue changed, 18+ v

HARD AS IT might be to believe, it’s been 15 years since Gossip Wolf (and the rest of the world) finally got hip to local outsider punk J.T. IV , aka John Henry Timmis IV . In the 1980s, Timmis released a handful of impossible-to-find singles and a compilation LP in near-total obscurity, and he died at age 40 in 2002. In 2008, Drag City released the J.T. IV compilation Cosmic Lightning via its Galactic Zoo Disk imprint, run by Secret History of Chicago Music creator Steve Krakow (who’d profiled Timmis for the Reader ). Accomplished with heavy li ing by Robert Manis of Moniker Records, the reissue brought the forgotten rocker to a new audience of enthusiastic weirdos. Since then the only additional Timmis material to see the light of day has been his short autobiographical book From the Inside , published in 2017 by Moniker and Featherproof Books Thankfully, more music is on the way: on Friday, March 10, Drag City releases The Future, a two-LP set that more than doubles J.T. IV’s available catalog. (The set hit streaming services last week, and it’s available digitally on Bandcamp right now.) The set’s 19 tracks are split between chilly acoustic numbers and what Timmis called “destructo rock,” and the lyrics o en lampoon the celebs and current events of the 80s: “The Ballad of Oliver North” reaches unsafe levels of sarcasm, and “My Fellow Americans” sounds like a madman president delivering a suicidal State of the Union address backed by a golden-era SST Records band.

If you’ve ever described going to a concert as a “spiritual experience,” you may be interested in Church! , a new series about music and spirituality. It debuts at Golden Dagger on Sunday, January 29, where host William Murray-Rodriguez will interview two of this wolf’s favorite Chicago musicians, Jessica Risker and Angel Marcloid (aka Fire-Toolz). Both artists will play full sets to cap the night. “Services” start at 8 PM, and tickets are $10. —J.R. NELSON AND LEOR GALIL

Got a tip? Tweet @Gossip_Wolf or email gossipwolf@chicagoreader.com.

Madonna appears August 9 and 10 at United Center. RICARDO GOMES

JOBS

Project Engineer. Evaluate construction scope, reqs & conditions. Prepare budget & bidding & discuss construction methods. Prepare construction submittals to architect for approval. Analyze construction blueprints, shop drawings, survey reports, & geo data, & confirm outcome. Prepare construction schedule of values. Inspect on-site progress. Prepare project-specific proposals. Create RFIs, submittals, potential change orders & contract mods. Prepare project closeout pkg. *Work is at Employer’s Office (44 West 60th St, Chicago, IL 60621) with travel to project site visits lasting 1-2 hrs per visit within the Chicago metro statistical area 4x per month. Min Reqs: Master’s in Civil Engineering, Construction Engineering & Mgmt, or closely rltd field +2 yrs exp in any occupational title involving the analysis of construction blueprints, shop drawings, & specs. Must possess 2 yrs exp in the following: analyzing construction blueprints, shop drawings, & specs; preparing bids & cost estimations for construction projects; conducting construction site visits to ensure conformance with construction drawings, blueprints, & specs; working with: Project Management software, such as Procore or Autodesk Build; Bid Management software such as BuildingConnected or Construction Connect; Construction Estimating Software such as Bluebeam, Autodesk Takeoff, or RSMeans; CAD software such as Auto CAD or Sketchup; & Scheduling software including Primavera P6 or Microsoft Project. Please send resume to Burling Builders, Inc. at careers@ burlingbuilders.com.

EDI BUSINESS SYSTEMS ANALYST (Lake Forest, IL). Develop/ implement EDI (Electronic Data Interchange) transactions/software upgrades; implement system changes to existing EDI integrations using EDI ANSI X12 data formats, EDI communication protocols (FTP, HTTPS, AS2); perform quality/user acceptance testing. Bachelor’s deg. (or foreign equiv. deg.) in Comp. Sci., Technology, or rel. + 5 yrs. prog. exp. in EDI, GMP, FTP, FTPS, HTTP, HTTPS, SMTP, AS2, unit testing and Sterling Integrator.

Submit resume: Akorn Operating Company LLC, 1925 West Field Court, Suite 300, Lake Forest, IL 60045.

General Engineer Commonwealth Edison seeks General Engineer in Oakbrook Terrace, IL to perform power system load flow, short circuit, and time-series analysis for Distributed Energy Resources (DER) integration; manage DER integration tools development; and contribute to DER Management Systems (DERMS) and Battery Energy Storage Systems (BESS) projects. Requires B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering or related Engineering field, U.S. or foreign, plus 5 years’ electrical engineering experience or post-bachelor’s academic research and teaching experience in building energy management systems and power system planning tools, full-time or part time. Advanced degree in Electrical Engineering or related Engineering field or professional engineering license may be substituted for one year of experience. Reply by email with resume to jobposting@exeloncorp. com.

World Food Enterprises, LLC. d/b/a Deli 4 You seeks an Advertising Sales Manager. Mail resume to 9 E Camp McDonald Road, Prospect Heights, IL.

IT Project Manager

Manage project execution to ensure adherence to budget, schedule, and scope, confer with project personnel to identify and resolve problems, monitor or track project milestones and deliverables, submit project deliverables, ensuring adherence to quality standards, assess current or future customer needs and priorities by communicating directly with customers, conducting surveys, or other methods, initiate, review, or approve modifications to project plans, schedule and facilitate meetings related to information technology projects, develop and manage annual budgets for information technology projects, establish and execute a project communication plan, develop and manage work breakdown structure of information technology projects, monitor the performance of project team members, coordinate recruitment or selection of project personnel, assign duties, responsibilities, and spans of authority to project personnel, negotiate with project stakeholders or suppliers to obtain resources or materials.

Mail résumé to Bruce Sokol, Clear Corp, 5005 Newport Dr, Suite#100, Rolling Meadows, IL 60008

Mars, Incorporated: Global DirectorPurpose Marketing – Chicago, IL. Telework permitted up to 2 days/ week. Partner w/ content & media experts, MarTech, commercial, agency, & production consultants to design pioneering approach that will step change Diversity & Inclusion (D&I) & sustainability impact in business comms & creative supply chain work. Job req’s Bach’s degree in Food Sci, Food Mktg, or rel field + 3 yrs of mktg exp in each of the following industries in a CPG environment: human food, petcare, & confectionery. Up to 20% domestic & int’l travel req for business meetings. To apply, send resume identifying Job Code 120 to MarsTA-PIC@effem.com. No calls.

Senior Software Applications Engineer (BI) Senior Software Applications Engineer (BI). Dev., design & modify software. Bach. deg. (Comp. Sci., Computer Information Systems, or related) or foreign equiv. req’d. Min. 5 yrs.’ prog. resp. post-baccalaureate exp. in IT field req’d. Prior exp. must incl. pos’n(s) a) implementing Tableau, Power BI & MSBI analytics to consolidate raw data & b) design & development of MOLAP cubes. Peerless Network, Inc., Chicago, IL. Resumes to: Recruiting, Peerless Network, Inc., 433 W. Van Buren St., Suite 410S, Chicago, IL 60607 or via email to resumes@ peerlessnetwork.com.

Live Operations Associate Producer (Wargaming (USA), Inc.; Chicago, IL): Coordinate Live Operations plans & associated detailed information with Events, Community, Customer Support, Content, Customer Relationship Management, Creative & Marketing functions to deliver positive KPIs across all functions. Mail resumes to: Attn: HR, Wargaming (USA), Inc., P.O. Box 1206, Chicago, IL 60690. An EOE.

TranSmart, LLC seeks Civil/Traffic Engineer in Chicago, IL to design traffic signals, traffic control plans, collect raw traffic data, run traffic simulations & create reports & graphs. Requires bachelor’s degree in civil engineering with emphasis in transportation & knowledge of traffic operations analysis, signal timing & Auto-CAD or similar. Travel throughout Chicagoland area, as needed. Send CV to cheineke@transmartinc. com. Use job code KA0123.

Software Developer is needed to develop and maintain Android apps. Req. Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or related fields. 1-year work experience in developing Android apps. Worksite: Chicago, Illinois. Send resume: INFI USA INC, 159 N Sangamon St. Suite 200, Chicago IL 60607.

Data Engineer - Fintech Groupon, Inc. is seeking a Data Engineer - Fintech in Chicago, IL w/ the following responsibilities: understand the complete architecture of the data pipeline including scripts, code & data warehouse. Position based out of Chicago HQ. Can telecommute up to 100% from New Jersey. Apply at www.grouponcareers. com by searching keyword R27370.

Software Engineers (SE), SE IIs, SE IIIs, & SE IVs Groupon, Inc. is seeking multiple Software Engineers (SE), SE IIs, SE IIIs, & SE IVs in Chicago, IL to: dvlp, construct & implement the next generation of company products & features for Groupon’s web & mobile applications. Send res to apply@groupon.com & ref SECH1.

Purchasing Manager

CHUANGYI METALS CORP. is seeking a Purchasing Manager to Establish purchasing agreements and ensure that all the terms and conditions are in consistent with company’s business goals and policies; Evaluate, select, and negotiate contracts with all major vendors etc. Position requires a Master’s degree in Business Administration or related, 1 year experience as a purchasing manager or related. Experience with SWOT strategy, etc. Any interested applicants can mail their resume with code CYPM23 to:

CHUANGYI METALS CORP., 3939 S. Karlov Ave, Chicago, IL 60632.

Financial Analyst Database mgmt., marketing activities, develop Zoho CRM system, create workflow rules & automations w/ Deluge. Analyze financial data, research & prepare financial reports, articles & presentations. Compile prospect lists on strategic & financial opportunities. Prepare Client Offering memos. Bachelors in Economics, Accounting or Finance, or foreign equivalent, plus 1 yr. exp. w/ financial analysis of business operations, & 1 yr. exp. w/ each: Excel, VLOOKUP, Pivot Tables, CRM & SQL. Mail resumes to: Thomas Blaige & Co., 980 N Michigan Ave, Ste. 1350, Chicago, IL 60611.

Antares Capital LP seeks a Lead Technologist, ETL Developer in Chicago, IL to develop SQL queries, SSIS packages, stored procedures, enhance and maintain data warehouse load process, and manage the gathering of requirements from a backend SQL perspective and implement the necessary and required business logic to transform the business requirements in SQL to provide the desired outcome. Will undertake any duties involved with query optimizations and performance tuning of various MS BI objects, collaborating with business analysts and business stakeholders to ensure a thorough understanding of strategic data requirements and ensuring that the data hub is following the best practices in every aspect.

Requirements: Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or a related field, and 7 years of progressively responsible experience in Database Management/Data Modeling, SQL Development, including SQL Server and Visual Studio, ETL and in designing and coding SSIS packages. 5 years of experience in SQL Server Performance Tuning and Query Optimization and experience writing complex Stored Procedures, Functions, and views using SQL. Send resumes to Antares Capital LP HR debbie. maggio@antares.com.

Senior Manager, Data Engineering Senior Manager, Data Engineering (Schaumburg, IL): Develop, solution, support & lead multiple IT initiatives and systems. Reqs.: MS +3 yrs. exp. Option for remote work available. Mail resume w/ cover letter to: Central Garden & Pet, 1340 Treat Blvd, Ste 600, Walnut Creek CA 94597 Attn: HR.

RENTALS & REAL ESTATE

Spacious 2 bedroom apartment. New hardwood floors. Dining room. Appliances. Laundry in-unit. Heat Included. Electric included. Monthly rent $1,550. 4321 w. Cortez st. Contact Mr. Henry 773 620-1241.

COMMUNITY

BIG EARS MUSIC FESTIVAL I am going to BIG EARS MUSIC FESTIVAL-Knoxville Tenn 3/30-4/2. I would like to share transport and Hotel expenses. Please respond if you are or know someone. I am in Arlington Hts. geierabc@att.net

RESEARCH

Have you had an unwanted sexual experience since age 18? Did you tell someone in your life about it who is also willing to participate? Women ages 18+ who have someone else in their life they told about their experience also willing to participate will be paid to complete a confidential online research survey for the Women’s Dyadic Support Study. Contact Dr. Sarah Ullman of the University of Illinois at Chicago, Criminology, Law, & Justice Department at ForWomen@ uic.edu, 312-996-5508. Protocol #2021-0019.

PROFESSIONALS & SERVICES

CLEANING SERVICES CHESTNUT ORGANIZING AND CLEANING SERVICES: especially for people who need an organizing service because of depression, elderly, physical or mental challenges or other causes for your home’s clutter, disorganization, dysfunction, etc. We can organize for the downsizing of your current possessions to more easily move into a smaller home. With your help, we can help to organize your move. We can organize and clean for the deceased in lieu of having the bereaved needing to do the preparation to sell or rent the deceased’s home. We are absolutely not judgmental; we’ve seen and done “worse” than your job assignment. With your help, can we please help you? Chestnut Cleaning Service: 312-332-5575. www. ChestnutCleaning.com

PERSONALS

Dominick Defanso rocks Guns N Roses, Aerosmith, Black Sabbath, Marilyn Monroe in Icons. Pop star / rock stars fun with Tracy Guns, ACDC, Lady G, T. Swift, Slash, J. Bieber, Gwen S. Watch on the Tube, Downloads, T-shirts, album coves - CDs. My favorite song - BARBIE GIRL. We love you - America. Thank you Hollywood Rose Guns N Rose Tracy Rock Rose Lia Lakely

LEGAL NOTICE

NOTICE OF PUBLIC SALE OF PERSONAL PROPERTY

Notice is hereby given that pursuant to Section 4 of the Self-Storage Facility Act, State of Illinois, Chicago Northside Storage - Lakeview /Western Ave Storage LLC will conduct sale(s) at www. storagetreasures.com by competitive bidding starting on February 8th and ending on February 15th @ 11:00 pm on the premises where the property has been stored, which are located at Chicago Northside Storage 2946 N Western Ave. Chicago, IL 60618. 773-305-4000. In the matter of the personal property of the individual listed below, Chicago Northside Storage - Lakeview. Nicolas K Spagnolo H03, Debra Strazzabosco N06, Perry Marshall N12, Kahlia Williams O14, Adam Legler T147. Purchases must be made with cash only and paid at the time of sale redemption. All goods are sold as is and must be removed at the time of purchase. The sale is subject to adjournment.

ADULT SERVICES

Danielle’s Lip Service, Erotic Phone Chat. 24/7. Must be 21+. Credit/ Debit Cards Accepted. All Fetishes and Fantasies Are Welcomed. Personal, Private and Discrete. 773-935-4995

SAVAGE LOVE

DISCLOSURE

Is lying the only option?

My partner is not comfortable disclosing his HIV status.

By DAN SAVAGE

Q : I’m a bisexual woman living in a major city. My boyfriend of about a year is HIV-positive. He’s been undetectable for more than a decade, but I’m on PrEP, just to be double backfl ip safe. I trust science and I’m comfortable with this, in part thanks to your clear and honest conversations around HIV. We have been talking about playing with other couples or singles, but I’m super nervous about contracting herpes, and he agrees he doesn’t need that in his life either. I know it’s part of the risk and I’m aware of all the stigma around having or getting herpes and other STIs. The thing is, I would like to have a very open conversation with our future hookups about testing and STI status. The problem: my partner does not disclose his status. Only a handful of people in his life know. Not even his family knows. How do we go about having a transparent conversation with potential hookups about status and risk if he’s not comfortable disclosing his HIV-positive status? We live in a state where it’s not illegal to withhold this information. Is lying the only option?—RISKAVERSE DAME

a: First, a quick refresher on the science. If someone with HIV is taking their meds and has an undetectable viral load, that person is uninfectious; meaning, that HIV-positive person can’t— cannot—infect someone with HIV. An HIV-negative person is at greater risk of contracting HIV having unprotected sex, i.e., condomless sex, with someone who thinks they are HIV-negative than they are having unprotected sex with someone who knows they’re HIV-positive and has an undetectable viral load. And while some argue it’s inaccurate to describe bareback sex with an HIV-positive person with an undetectable viral load as “unprotected,” since the meds themselves provide protection, HIV meds—including PrEP, which is a pill HIV-negative people can take to protect themselves from contracting HIV—offer no protection against gonorrhea, syphilis, chlamydia, and other STIs. So, meds or no meds, PrEP or PrEP, condomless sex still counts as unprotected sex.

A little more science: a study out of the UK found that more straight people were infected with HIV in 2020 than gay people. But

while there were more total infections among straight men and women than among gay men—slightly more than a thousand new HIV infections in 2020 among straight people (1010) and slightly fewer than a thousand among gay men (940)—gay men still remain at significantly greater risk. Only 2.9 percent of men in the UK identify as gay men, while 93.7 percent of the population identify as straight. Which means almost half of all new HIV infections were concentrated in less than 3 percent of the population, which is why health officials recommend that all gay and bi men get on PrEP.

Okay, RAD, so you and your boyfriend wanna play with other couples; you wanna have open, honest, and transparent conversations about STIs in advance of playing. Your boyfriend doesn’t want to disclose the fact that he has HIV to anyone.

Is lying the only option?

I guess so. If you want to have sex with other people and withhold this information—which means you would only be pretending to have those open, honest, and transparent conversations— then lying by omission and commission would indeed be your only option.

Now, you can make a solid case for not disclosing—your boyfriend is undetectable, he can’t infect anyone. You aren’t legally obligated to disclose where you live. You would presumably be using condoms to protect yourselves from other STIs. Or, you could have sex with couples who don’t wanna have a conversation about STIs in advance. But I’m guessing you don’t want to have sex with couples who aren’t willing to have the STI convo with you, RAD, for your own safety and peace of mind. Which means . . . you want other couples to be honest with you without having to be honest with them. That hardly seems fair, RAD, especially since you’ve made the choice to get on PrEP for your own peace of mind. Denying other people you play with the opportunity to make that same choice for their own peace of mind isn’t very fair either.

Look, I don’t always think HIV-positive people who pose no risk of spreading HIV—people with undetectable viral loads—are morally obligated to disclose their HIV status to casual and/ or anonymous sex partners, although they might be legally obligated in some states by misguided HIV-disclosure laws. But we aren’t talking about anonymous sex partners here. We’re talking about other couples that you and your boyfriend claim to want to have honest and transparent negotiations with about sexual safety.

There’s a very real chance that straight couples will refuse to play with you guys if he discloses. Straight people and opposite-sex couples are far less likely to be informed about HIV and far

more likely to reject HIV-positive partners who pose no risk to them in favor of presumed-to-be HIV-negative partners who do. Even worse, there’s a very real chance that word will spread. People talk. The only workaround here that comes close to ethical—the only ethical-adjacent workaround—is for your boyfriend to refrain from having penetrative sex with other play partners. But even then, RAD, you will be failing to disclose information that your new play partners might feel they were entitled to, e.g., that your primary sex partner is HIV-positive.

Q: I am a 64-year-old bisexual woman. I contracted HPV about ten years ago and went through a painful, expensive treatment that dragged on for three months. Since then, I have tested negative for it. My gyno said that I am HPV free. Is that possible? I thought HPV lasted forever. I have a new sex partner, my first in a few years. I have to tell him, right? Am I going to get throat cancer giving him blow jobs? Is he going to get esophageal cancer eating my pussy? Do we use condoms forever and plastic wrap on me? It makes me want to stay home and watch Grace and Frankie alone. We used condoms for the first couple of months and then agreed that since we were both disease-free to go without. But am I really diseasefree?—STRESS EATING AND TENSE

a: “For most people, once HPV is cleared, it goes into an undetectable state and cannot be transmitted to future partners,” said Dr. Ina Park, a professor at the

University of California San Francisco School of Medicine and medical consultant for the Centers for Disease Control’s Division of STD Prevention. “In rare cases, people who cleared HPV can experience a reappearance— say, if their immune system becomes compromised—but this is NOT the norm. For someone who has been HPV free for ten years, there’s no need to disclose a remote history of HPV to partners, and no need to use barriers unless both parties wish to do so. So, it’s OK to leave the plastic wrap in the kitchen!”

Worst-case scenario: let’s say you somehow wound up exposing your new boyfriend to HPV or he exposed you to a different strain. It can take 20 years and sometimes longer for an HPV infection to progress to cancer, which only a small percentage of HPV infections do. And I don’t mean to be callous, SEAT, but by then—20 years frow now—something else will have killed you already or you’ll be ready to go. And whether you’re dying of cancer or something else a few decades from now, SEAT, I doubt you’ll be laying on your deathbed thinking, “Gee, I wish I’d gotten my pussy eaten less.”

P.S. And if you’re not too old to learn a new trick—and you’re not—use that plastic wrap to mummify your boyfriend.

Dr. Ina Park is the author of Strange Bedfellows: Adventures in the Science, History, and Surprising Secrets of STDs. Follow her on Twitter @InaParkMd. v

Send your questions to mailbox@savage.love; hear podcasts at savage.love.

@fakedansavage

by Michael W. Falls

A Classic Chicago Mystery

ART IN THE CARIBBEAN DIASPORA, 1990s –TODAY

OPENING SOON: DUANE LINKLATER: mymothersside

Opening March 11, mymothersside brings together sculptures, video works, and digital prints on linen from the past decade of the artist’s practice.

CLOSING SOON: MARTINE SYMS: SHE MAD SEASON ONE

Closing February 12, don’t miss Martine Syms’s dissection of how Black experiences are mediated in TV, lm, and online.

CHICAGO RESTAURANT WEEK AT MARISOL

Complete your museum visit with an inspired, prix xe meal at Marisol during Chicago Restaurant Week, January 20 through February 5.