Chicago Reader print issue for December 26, 2024 (Vol. 54, No. 13) by Chicago Reader

THIS WEEK

Reader Rewind

FRONT

04 Reader Letters

05 Rewind An introductory note from the editor in chief

06 Rewind 2013 Bean pie, my brother?

08 Reader Bites Sicilian hot chocolate at Sfera Sicilian Street Food

& POLITICS

10 Rewind 1993 A west-side business story

& CULTURE

16 Rewind 2014 When Chicago gave Richard Hunt his ﬂowers

18 Rewind 1988 Two art exhibitions, 20 years apart, inspired by Richard J. Daley

THEATER

20 Rewind 2011 The original Pink Ladies: Grease’s girl gang had a real-life model on the northwest side.

FILM

22 Rewind 1987 Hollywood Shuﬄe: How Robert Townsend got a good part

24 Moviegoer Kat Sach’s best in 2024 moviegoing

24 Movies of Note The Fire Inside is a dynamic story of real-life boxing legend Claressa “T-Rex” Shields; Nosferatu sometimes struggles under the weight of its predecessors, but it’s made deep and sinister by its actors.

MUSIC & NIGHTLIFE

26 Shows of Note Previews of concerts including the Teklife showcase at the Empty Bottle, m.e.h. at Dorian’s, and Lucero’s three nights at SPACE

30 Rewind 2004 Punk is dead! Long live punk! Jessica Hopper reports on the state of teen spirit from the mobile shopping mall that is the Vans Warped Tour.

34 Gossip Wolf Gia Margaret goes viral on the shoulders of a Chill Guy, and the Violent Treatment hardcore podcast spawns a label and a 24-page zine.

CLASSIFIEDS

33 Jobs

33 Professionals & Services

33 Matches BACK

35 Savage Love I’m a lesbian, but I’m still married to a man.

CEO AND PUBLISHER SOLOMON LIEBERMAN

ASSOCIATE PUBLISHER AMBER NETTLES

CHIEF OF STAFF ELLEN KAULIG

EDITOR IN CHIEF SALEM COLLO-JULIN

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ART DIRECTOR JAMES HOSKING

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GRAPHIC DESIGNER & PHOTO RESEARCHER SHIRA

FRIEDMAN-PARKS

THEATER & DANCE EDITOR KERRY REID

MUSIC EDITOR PHILIP MONTORO

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photos

GALLAHER

right) The crowd for 3OH!3 in St. Petersburg, Florida, during Warped Tour 2009 MELANIE LEVI / FLICKR

Cover design by Reader senior graphic designer Amber Huff featuring the titles of the archival articles included in this issue.

Cover pull quote written by Micco Caporale in our Reader Rewind revisit of “The original Pink Ladies” by Cynthia Gallaher, p. 20.

IMAGINE THIS

A NOTE FROM OUR EDITOR IN CHIEF

Imagine a teenager in a study carrel at a Chicago Public Library branch. It’s the late end of the 1980s, and a stack of newspapers is on a table nearby. Standing up to stretch after an hour of pretending to cram for a test, our teen’s eyes fall on the ﬁrst paper on the stack: the Chicago Reader

The paper’s classiﬁeds section is visible and they spot Life in Hell in the corner of a page, a one-panel comic starring a rabbit-like creature with one big ear. (The comic was created by a pre-Simpsons Matt Groening.) The teen grabs the paper to study that weird cartoon instead. A library clerk looks up and says, “Hey, you can take that with you if you like. The Reader is free.”

The biggest privilege in my life has been being born in Chicago at exactly the right time. I’m only slightly younger than the Reader, so I remember stacks of newspapers cluttering my kitchen table growing up. My family believed in conversation, in educating ourselves and being aware, and in having fun and seeking out new experiences, like going to concerts and museums. If you didn’t have anything to say around the table, my grandparents would ask us, how could you possibly have anything to o er away from the table?

Another privilege in my life has been working for the Chicago Reader. We’re a community newspaper for a big city. We o er a weekly look at the things that

—Salem Collo-Julin, editor in chief m scollojulin@chicagoreader.com

matter to Chicagoans and give them a chance to learn about something new. Every week I’m reminded that there’s a younger person out there who, like myself (yes, that was me in the library), is discovering our pages or website for the first time. And every week there’s something great, new, challenging, or maybe even joyful that I’d like them to know about.

The Reader is in a strange and wonderful place. We’re a media outlet that can count itself as a legacy organization but at the same time, we’re a very new nonprofit organization. We have many loyal and longtime readers and at the same time, we seek to grow and diversify our reach. And we, like all news organizations, await the future with the trepidation of not knowing what challenges might come our way as democracy continues to be challenged and independent news organizations continue to be underrepresented and underfunded.

That’s why we need your support now more than ever. We cover Chicago and the world from a Chicago lens. Please join us: donate your dollars and help us spread the word about the Reader so we can continue to foster our legacy of innovative storytelling and be a source of something new for all Chicagoans.

If we don’t have independent newspapers in Chicago, how can we possibly have anything to o er the world?

POETRY CORNER

don’t it always seem to go?

after Kaveh Akbar & Chen Chen

Late last week, a nightmare chirped: Blood blooms copper blossoms inside my mother’s skull.

By Adrienne Novy

As one pupil dilates larger than the other, a plump rising serviceberry, my father gives consent to operate.

The hallways get longer the later it gets at night; doctors shave her curls.

Somewhere in Newport, Joni Mitchell stamps her cane with delight, her rst live performance since her stroke. I imagine her, too, previously intubated.

A stroke is what the opposite of a song is. Please, please. Bees and Mi Shebeirach.

Slowly, so slowly, my mother steps one grippy-socked foot in front of the other to Big Yellow Taxi. Her walker steps forward and the nurse with a gait follows.

Through my mask, I press a kiss on the top of her fuzzy head, a frankensteined apple. Please, please. Bees and Mi Shebeirach.

Reader Letters m

Re: “Reader Bites: Gyro cheeseburger with fries at Baba’s Famous Steak & Lemonade,” written by Tyra Nicole Triche and published in our December 12 issue (volume 54, number 11)

Delicacy? More like soul trash (excellent Toro y Moi tape). I say that with love as someone who orders there.

—@letsbuildgarden, via X

Re: “Reader Bites: Pot roast sandwich at Punky’s Pizza & Pasta,” written by Salem Collo-Julin and published in our December 5 issue (volume 54, number ten)

I had it for the ﬁrst time a few weeks ago and I thought it was pretty dry. Needs to have some brown gravy on the sandwich to help it go down a little easier. I do highly recommend their chicken parmesan with spaghetti though.

—Crizz Wilkuz, via Threads

Novy is an artist from the suburbs of Chicago (Potawatomi Land). A 2020 graduate from Hamline University’s Creative Writing program, Adrienne’s work has been nominated for Bettering American Poetry, the Pushcart Prize, and Best of the Net. She is the author of two poetry collections: Crowd Surﬁng With God (Half Mystic Press, 2018/2023) and Erev Gildene: The Pop-Rock Survival Guide for the Modern Jewish Millennial (Game Over Books, 2022). Adrienne lives on social media at @adriennenovy

Poem curated by Demetrius Amparan. Demetrius is a music artist and poet from the south side of Chicago. He is a nonproﬁt leader and father to daughters Ella and Addison. His latest work, Hold Me Down, released August 2024.

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

Fall Hours

Wednesday, Friday, Saturday: 11:00 AM–5:00 PM

Thursday: 11:00 AM–6:00 PM

More Light! Exhibition

Chicago design duo Luftwerk’s immersive interpretation of Aram Saroyan’s poem “lighght” transforms the Poetry Foundation gallery into a dynamic lightbox.

Open through February 15, 2025

Learn more at PoetryFoundation.org

Re: announcement regarding our recent grant from the MacArthur Foundation to support our cultural and political coverage

The Reader has consistently been covering issues important to musicians’ survival in a changing industry. Glad to see this news!

—Future of Music Coalition, via X

Find us on socials: facebook.com/chicagoreader twitter.com/Chicago_Reader instagram.com/chicago_reader threads.net/@chicago_reader linkedin.com search chicago-reader

The Chicago Reader accepts comments and letters to the editor of less than 400 words for publication consideration.

m letters@chicagoreader.com

Reader Rewind

EDITOR’S NOTE

The people are still the news

Notes on this issue; a look back at stories we love

By SALEM COLLO-JULIN

Every day of work at the Reader brings new discoveries and challenges but we don’t do this work alone. We have the joy of our readership: those of you who seek out our paper, send friends to our website, and talk online about our stories. We’re also doing this work while trying to keep our balance as we’re perched upon the Reader’s legacy. Many of us feel the presence of all the people who worked here in decades past as we write, edit, design, and talk about the Reader, and some of those people still pop up in our pages on a regular basis.

Living with a legacy of community-based journalism is an intimidating but lovely thing. If you ever ﬁnd yourself at the Reader headquarters, you’ll see that the presence of our full print archive quietly looms in the southwest corner of the office. This means we’re only a bookshelf away from diving into more than 50 years of history at any moment.

So for our ﬁnal issue of 2024, we’ve decided to share some of our favorite gems from those cherished archives. Some of the writers responsible for this work are still active in journalism and check in with us from time to time, some have moved on and are using their talents in other trades, and one, unfortunately, has passed on.

Writer Grant Pick died suddenly in 2005 of a heart attack. By that time, Pick had written for

the paper for more than 20 years. As former Reader editor and columnist Michael Miner wrote in a tribute a few years later, “In many ways, Grant was the writer who best deﬁned this paper. As he liked telling journalism students who read his pieces and asked where the news pegs were, ‘There is no news peg. The people are the news.’”

The Grant Pick–penned article from 1993 that our current news editor Shawn Mulcahy chose to reprint for this issue (Speed Wash, see page ten) embodies that sentiment. It’s a longform look at a laundromat on Roosevelt Road, and the subheading tells you everything and nothing at once: “A west-side business story.” Pick used the business as a home base for the reader, a place to center ourselves as we travel alongside his words in a journey through the changing of the tide in that west-side neighborhood. We hear voices of residents, laughter, and life’s challenges. The people are the news. Their words are now our windows into what this time and place was like.

One of the Rewind articles you’ll ﬁnd in this issue was written by one of our longest-serving sta members, senior writer Mike Sula. Though “Bean pie, my brother?” (originally published in 2013 and on page six for this issue) is categorized in our Food & Drink section, it’s also (like so much of Sula’s work for the Reader) a capsule of cultural understanding.

For the piece, Sula traveled through the south side and brought our readers to the origins of the singular and delicious bean pie, to the Nation of Islam and its Chicago presence, and to Chicagoan Imani Muhammad. Muhammad’s business, Imani’s Originals, is still active and, as we found when reaching out to her to get new photos, she still sells the original bean pies as Sula describes in his story. She’s also added Groovy Granola to her offerings, but, then again, many things have changed since 2013.

If you dive into the Rewind stories this week, you might ﬁnd some light updates. Mainly, our standards of language have changed slightly over the years (as has that of many Chicagoans). Some examples: we default to using the abbreviation LGBTQ+ when writing about the community as a whole; we capitalize the words Black, Brown, and Indigenous when referring to people. We integrated standards like this into our style guide at the Reader because we center people’s experiences. We are scribes for the city of Chicago, and hope to faithfully continue to capture the unique stories of our fellow residents in coming years so that someone 50 years from now can read and say, “This is what it must have been like to be a Chicagoan in 2024.” v

m scollojulin@chicagoreader.com

Reader Rewind

“Bean pie, my brother?” was originally published in the issue of November 18, 2013. Since I rst went in search of the sweet, custardy navy bean pie, made in accordance with the dietary regimen prescribed by the late Elijah Muhammad, it hasn’t quite gone mainstream, but it might be easier to eat one. Plenty of online recipe churners can show you a method, as well as more august outlets like Saveur and Southern Living . Imani Muhammad is still making them and shipping them nationwide—and also hosting her own podcast, Conversations

Bean pie, my brother?

The Nation of Islam’s iconic dessert is still around, if you know where to look.

By MIKE SULA

The young man who met us at the front doors of Muhammad University of Islam wouldn’t let us in. He was polite yet ﬁrm when he told us they weren’t making bean pies that day. But my friends Peter Engler (eminent investigator of south-side culinary oddities) and Rob Lopata (occasional Reader contributor) had just toured the Nation of Islam’s neighboring Mosque Maryam a few days earlier, as part of the Chicago Architecture Foundation’s [now the Chicago Architecture Center’s] Open House Chicago. When they had asked about bean pies, their guide told them to come back during the week, when the university’s bakery would be in production.

(God) has prescribed for us,” he wrote in How to Eat to Live, a two-volume dietary guide for followers of the Nation, whose main points are repeated with the circularity of an industrialsized mixer: “Even take little things such as beans. Allah (God) says that the little navy bean will make you live, just eat them. He said to me that even milk and bread would make us live. Just eat bread and milk—it is the best food. He said that a diet of navy beans would give us a life span of one hundred and forty years. Yet we cannot live ½ that length of time eating everything that the Christian table has set for us.”

Over Pie . The Nation’s Supreme Bean Pie, relatively revitalized, is still baking at Mosque Maryam in South Shore and distributing whole pies at a handful of south-side locations. You can get one shipped, order one on Uber Eats, or just pick one up in Bronzeville or Olympia Fields at Shawn Michelle’s Homemade Ice Cream, which still makes its original chunky bean pie avor, as well as a newer, smoother variant made with the pie custard recipe.

—Mike Sula, senior staff writer

We stood in the vestibule ﬂummoxed, and it wasn’t until the same guy who had conducted the tour passed by and spotted us that we were let in. Sure, we could buy a pie, he told us—but not before some security measures. We took turns standing behind a screen while the guard patted us down, and then grabbed a seat in a row of chairs by the door while a perfect formation of white-shirted young boys filed past. Eventually, a blue-bedecked woman who introduced herself as Sister Medea came out with two official Nation of Islam Supreme Bean Pies. We forked over $18, and before we could ask too many questions, we were gently sent on our way. The university parking lot’s automatic metal gate— wide open when we turned o Stony Island—closed behind us when we pulled out.

Made from cooked, mashed, small navy beans, the bean pie is the iconic food of Black Muslims everywhere.

Made from cooked, mashed, small navy beans, the bean pie is the iconic food of Black Muslims everywhere, but locating one in Chicago in recent years has been a hit-or-miss proposition. That’s surprising given the zeal Elijah Muhammad, the Nation’s leader for 41 years, had for navy beans. “Eat food that Allah

In some ways Muhammad’s Nation of Islam diet was ahead of its time. He advocated eating unprocessed foods and mostly vegetables (definitely not pork) in moderation. On the other hand, it’s an extreme form of moderation. He advised eating just one meal per day, or every other day if you were strong, or—for those who could work up to it—once every 72 hours. “The European white race,” he wrote, “blessed with the privilege of eating the best food the earth provides, has taught us to eat the worst (divinely prohibited) foods. We eat all the time, three and four times a day. This is enough to wear out the intestines of a brass monkey.”

Though in How to Eat to Live he never precisely says why, Muhammad lists most legumes—lima beans, field peas, black-eyed peas, speckled peas, red peas, and brown peas—as among the divinely prohibited. The navy bean was the sole exception. These rules, he wrote, came directly from the mouth of Wallace Fard Muhammad, who the protege asserted came to Detroit from Mecca to found the Nation of Islam (and then mysteriously disappeared en route to Chicago in 1934). And with him came the recipe for

Imani Muhammad MARTINE SEVERIN FOR CHICAGO READER

bean pie, according to Lance Shabazz, an archivist and historian of the Nation who says that the theory of the bean pie emerging as a substitute for sweet potato pie might have some validity. Elijah Muhammad doesn’t mention bean pie, but he’s pretty clear about sweet potatoes: “Sweet potatoes were never good for any human to eat. They are good for hogs, but not for you.” (That might have been a tough sell for African Americans new to the Nation. Sweet potato pie, which originated in the south, was likely the mingling of the cooking of enslaved Africans, who knew yams, and their European enslavers, who knew pie crust. It is enshrined in the soul food canon.)

In any case, Lance Shabazz says Fard Muhammad bestowed the first recipe for bean pie upon Elijah Muhammad and his wife, Clara, in the 30s in Detroit, though none of this is precisely stated in How to Eat to Live either.

But bean pie is in fact a convincing substitute for sweet potato pie. Built on a wholewheat crust, with a filling of strained and mashed beans, butter, raw sugar, evaporated milk, eggs, cinnamon, and other baking spices, it develops a mildly sweet, dense, custardy understory, with a browned layer on top that one bean pie maker told me is the result of the butter rising and browning in the heat of the oven. If nobody tipped you o to the fact that you were eating pie made from mashed navy beans, you could be forgiven for thinking it was sweet potato or pumpkin pie.

Bean pie wasn’t the only Nation of Islam dish made with the miraculous navy bean— there was bean soup and bean bread—but it was certainly the most iconic, not just in Chicago but in any other city with a Nation of Islam presence.

In Chicago it used to be that you could reliably pick up a bean pie on the street—along with the latest issue of the Final Call —from a fastidiously dressed male member of the Nation of Islam, who might proffer, “Bean pie, my brother?” Lance Shabazz bemoans this sales tactic. “One of my pet peeves is that when Elijah Muhammad was present, we had bakeries all across this country. They baked the bean pie on the premises. We didn’t go on the street, on the corner selling pies, stopping traffic. I find it embarrassing because if you want a pie you should go to the bakery and get it. I’m talking about in

New York City, where on major streets you may see brothers stopping cars at the light trying to sell a pie. We had the tractor trailers bringing pies and bringing newspapers up and down the east coast. It seemed to be more professional.”

The late Lana Shabazz, operator of a renowned bakery in New York City, was probably the Nation’s most famous bean pie maker. She cooked for Elijah Muhammad and Muhammad Ali—and in 1979 she authored the cookbook Cooking for the Champ. In Chicago there were at least three Nation of Islam bakeries on the south side at one time, most notably the Shabazz Bakery on 71st near Saint Lawrence. Khalilah Camacho Ali worked in all three before she married Muhammad Ali, becoming his second wife. Camacho Ali is emphatic when she says that, counter to most popular accounts, she wasn’t in any of those bakeries on the day she ﬁrst met the Champ, but that’s where she was working at the time. And he was a customer.

Camacho Ali, who grew up in the Nation of Islam, says she learned to make pies from Elijah Muhammad himself. “That came about because I grew up in his house with his grandchildren,” she says. “When my mother was working or my dad was working, I was with him and his family. They had us all working in the house, working in the kitchen. We served. We were taught proper ways of cleaning and cooking our food, and this was part of our lifestyle. That’s when we learned how to make the bean soup and the bean pie.”

The bakeries where she worked are gone

now, but independent bean pie makers still come and go. “Things change really fast in the bean pie world, it seems,” says Peter Engler, who has made a study of bean pies over the years. When he first came across one in the early 70s it was at the Hyde Park Co-op. “I saw these stacks of pies. I’m pretty sure these were the Shabazz pies. I bought one and I think I was surprised that it was sweet. It was just like a pumpkin pie. I’d buy one every now and then.” Later, in the 90s, Engler bought pies from the now-defunct Original Bean Pie Bakery for his coworkers in the molecular immunology lab at the University of Chicago. “Almost everybody in the lab liked them, especially the Chinese guys,” he says, which he chalks up to the Chinese appreciation for sweet bean desserts. Such observations give credence to the idea that the bean pie deserves a fan base larger than just members of the Nation of Islam. And perhaps it once had one. There’s a recipe for bean pie in Imogene Wolcott’s 1939 The Yankee Cookbook, submitted by Mrs. Mae Bangs of Oak Blu s, Massachusetts, and it could pass for any of the Muslim recipes I’ve seen—if she only called for raw sugar.

In 2008, as Engler was preparing to give a talk about the bean pie at a Greater Midwest Foodways Alliance symposium, he realized how hard it had become to ﬁnd one. A number of independent bakeries had gone out of business, and Muhammad University’s Supreme Bean Pie had just gone back into production after a mysterious absence. With some difficulty he managed to get a half dozen pies delivered to the conference through a semi-

o cial bean pie courier.

It still isn’t easy to ﬁnd them. Last month I spotted a stack of business cards at the register of the Nation’s [now closed] Respect for Life Bookstore, across 79th Street from the headquarters of the Final Call . It advertised a distributor of the Nation’s Supreme Bean Pies. The bookstore has a refrigerator case that used to stock pies, but it was empty at the time, and repeated messages left at the number on the card went unreturned. The same was the case with the many calls I placed to Muhammad University after our visit. So where does one get a bean pie these days? Of course, you can always make your own; recipes and YouTube tutorials abound on the Internet. The Nation’s Salaam Restaurant & Bakery [currently temporarily closed], across the street from the bookstore, has them on the menu—$3 a slice and $10 for a whole pie. And there are still a few independent operators around the city. You can even ﬁnd house-made “Taste of Heaven” bean pie ice cream at Flippin & Dippin Shawn Michelle’s Homemade Ice Cream on 87th Street in Burnside (it’s really good). [It’s now Shawn Michelle’s Homemade Ice Cream, with locations in Bronzeville and Olympia Fields.]

Then there’s Imani Muhammad, who may be the reigning bean pie queen of Chicago. Like many Black Muslims, she grew up eating the pies, made by the grandmother of a friend. But about eight years ago, while she was conducting a project on the navy bean for her daycare/ home-school group, Imani’s Original Bean Pies and Fine Foods was born.

Imani Muhammad at the Quarry in 2024 MARTINE SEVERIN FOR CHICAGO READER

-ACTING JELLIES WITH BENEFITS

Reader Rewind

continued from p. 7

She says that in the course of the navy bean project, “we were just experimenting with it and talking about how it got its name, and the properties of the navy bean—being a staple food with the vitamins, the protein, that type of thing.” She moved on to recipes: a bean pie, a bean salad, and a bean soup. “The soup and the pie was good. The salad, not so good.”

From there, she began to consider the merits of the bean pie as a potential moneymaker. She started production at the shared-use facility Kitchen Chicago but now operates out of a space in the Grand Boulevard neighborhood. She eventually started to diversify, making a vegan pie and a cream cheese–frosted pie appropriate for birthdays. She has also experimented with blueberry and banana bean pies—all made with natural ingredients.

DISPENSARY

Along with her husband and another baker, Muhammad puts out about 200 large pies and 350 six-inch pies per week, which are distributed to some 18 groceries and health food stores all over the south side (and one on the north side). She also ships them to customers in New York, Indiana, New Jersey, Michigan, Wisconsin, Missouri, and Pennsylvania. For about a year, when its own production was down, she made them for the Nation of Islam itself. “That was a great honor,” she says. Right now she’s in her busiest season, pulling all-nighters three nights a week. In the days leading up to Thanksgiving, it seems, everyone wants a bean pie. “We couldn’t even keep the stores stocked last year,” she says. “I had a lady tell me that not only did she tell her husband that she made it, but she told him it was sweet potato pie.” v

m msula@chicagoreader.com

Sicilian hot chocolate at Sfera Sicilian Street Food

Hot chocolate isn’t something I usually go for. While I may crave it a couple times a year, usually around the holidays, it was more in my rotation when I was younger— before I acquired a taste for coffee, matcha, or chai. But they’re doing something different at Sfera Sicilian Street Food.

Reader Bites readers might remember that Sfera was featured just last summer, highlighting the roasted chicken and red pepper relish sandwich. But listen: I can’t get this drink out of my head.

The Sicilian hot chocolate at Sfera is crafted with housemade citrus-spice syrup and topped with bouncy vanilla-citrus

marshmallows. Having a particular taste for chocolate and citrus together is not a prerequisite for enjoying this ﬂu y, soothing beverage. I got hooked when my wife brought home the cold dregs of a go-cup and begged me to taste it. That sip was enough to convince me, but it’s a thousand times better fresh and to order. Its light sweetness stuck with me. And now, here I am—craving hot chocolate, watching a Claire Saffitz video about homemade marshmallows, planning an imaginary holiday party, and calculating how many times is too many times to visit Edgewater’s magical Sicilian corner store.

—TARYN MCFADDEN SFERA SICILIAN STREET FOOD 5759 N. Broadway, $4.25–$6, 773-739-9128, sferachicago.com v

Reader Bites celebrates dishes, drinks, and atmospheres from the Chicagoland food scene. Have you had a recent food or drink experience that you can’t stop thinking about? Share it with us at fooddrink@ chicagoreader.com.

Reader Rewind

SMALL BUSINESS

Speed Wash

A west-side business story

By GRANT PICK

Grant Pick had a knack for the unusual. During his time as a Reader contributor, he documented residents of a north-side hotel as they fought against displacement, interviewed a local hypnotist who once loaned his services to Saddam Hussein’s eldest son, and pro led a stranger clad with dozens of keys (“the keys to my broken heart”) who stopped to x his collar.

I rst read Pick’s work in The People Are The News , a collection of his writings compiled and published posthumously by his son. A fellow journalist suggested the book to me a few months into my tenure with the Reader. I scribbled down the title, checked it out from the library, and quickly understood why.

Pick had a way of capturing the city through the eyes of the people he wrote about. His subjects were authentic and un ltered (and not always in a pleasant way). He documented all the mess and excitement of life in a Chicago that in some ways has long since died—and in some ways is still very much alive. Revisiting this piece three decades after it rst ran on June 10, 1993, I’m reminded how lucky I am to work at a newspaper willing to publish 6,500 words about a laundromat. I’m also reminded why these stories must continue to be told.

—Shawn Mulcahy, news editor

Content note: This story discusses sexual and domestic abuse.

The ﬁrst arrivals push through the door of the Davis Speed Wash on Roosevelt Road just past five o’clock on a frigid February morning. They walk to the rear counter, where owner Hughzell Davis is dispensing cups of thin co ee for 50 cents. They settle comfortably into what seem to be their regular spots. Some sit on a row of colored plastic chairs, a couple slide onto folding tables, and others stand. They peer at the street through the windows’ black metal

grille, talking quietly as the sky lightens.

“There’s a depression goin’ on,” says George Gray, a middle-aged man in a threadbare coat. “People think the new president has some kind of magic wand over the economy, but he doesn’t. The Congress does. That’s my thinking.”

Gray has come out of the cold after walking the streets all night. He complains that his welfare has been cut to the bone. Gray had surgery recently, and while recuperating in a nursing home, he was arrested for theft. “Supposedly I stole my roommate’s wallet, but they really planted it in my drawer,” Gray tells Glenn Dupree, the muscular fellow standing next to him.

“Lousy co ee,” remarks Dupree, as he sips Hughzell Davis’s brew. Dupree dropped his wife off at work and now he’s at the Speed Wash. There’s a $5 bill tucked into his hatband in case he needs it. “I’m a hustler,” he explains. If he’s lucky, he says, a friend will pick him up soon to do some jobs. “If the guy stands me up, I’ll go home to my son. He’s eight, and his teeth should get brushed before he leaves for school.”

Gray begins a rambling account of playing basketball in high school.

“All that basketball was a waste ’cause you never got no piece of paper,” Dupree says. “A diploma counts for a lot. You need one to make money, and I’m about getting my GED and making money. All I need is a little luck.”

“There ain’t much of that around here,” says Gray.

There isn’t much in the way of a co ee shop either, which is why these men gather at the Speed Wash. This stretch of Roosevelt Road, between Kedzie and the city limits in Lawndale, was once the commercial heartbeat of Jewish Chicago. But the road has been down on its luck for decades. The strip is now distinguished by fast-food joints, liquor stores, churches, vacant lots, and laundromats. There is no shopping in the grander sense, only small operations ﬁshing o the bottom.

The Davis Speed Wash is a small oasis, not only a laundromat but a notions store,

coffeehouse, community center, and economic success. The residents of Lawndale ﬁnd friendship, safe haven, and a measure of respect while drinking Speed Wash co ee and watching their dirty clothes hit the spin cycle.

Every day but Wednesday, John Franklin “Monk” Tucker, the morning clerk, opens up the Speed Wash. More importantly, he puts up a full-bodied co ee that the regulars much prefer to Hughzell Davis’s. “They come from everywhere for my coffee, from Maywood and the south side,” boasts Tucker. “They’re crazy about the stu .”

Besides the coffee, the Speed Wash offers four varieties of plastic-wrapped Danish, which the clientele can heat up in the microwave. A television, positioned high in a back corner, broadcasts the morning news shows, which will give way to diversions like Joan Rivers and the soaps; in the afternoon there’s Jeopardy

The morning conversations go off in the usual directions—politics, sports, women. Many of the regulars have known each other for years without establishing some of the basics. “I don’t know names,” says Frank Ware, who rolls out of bed each morning and over to the Speed Wash. “That guy over there is Rabbit. That fucker’s Doc. Willie over there I’ve known for a long time. Don’t know his last name, and whether Willie’s his first name I couldn’t say.”

As the men talk, nibble pastry, and drink co ee, Tucker stands watch. “You got to keep your eyes open,” he says. “I know who is who and what is what. I don’t take no shit from nobody.” The smallest infraction riles him. He will reprimand someone for sitting on the folding tables. Wash your hands in the sink in the back that’s only for washing and drying clothes and you’re likely to be confronted by Tucker, talking tough and brandishing a small billy club.

Tucker acts from experience. “It’s rough around here,” he says. “I’ve seen 12 or 13 people killed, most shot but some stabbed. Drugs are on all the streets—on Grenshaw, Fillmore, Independence, and Roosevelt. If it’s midnight and you don’t have a gun, you better not be out walking.”

By the time Hughzell Davis arrives at 8:30 the men are drifting outside. Some walk east, past a shuttered store and onto a vacant lot where they will loiter away the day. Others buy a bottle of wine and a paper at Sunshine Food and Liquor, the Arab-owned grocery across the street. Shortly George’s Music Room, a

full-service record store and local bright spot, will open. Owner George Daniels puts speakers outside and blasts gospel music. “Gospel sets the morning mood on the block,” says Daniels. “In the afternoon, anything goes.”

The area’s women enter the Speed Wash as soon as their kids leave for school. “They all have their schedules,” says Davis. “We have Monday washers, Tuesday washers, and Sunday washers. Wednesday is usually slow for some reason. When the mailman brings the welfare checks the business just ﬂows in.”

Most women are carting dirty clothes and sheets, though a few who have washers in their buildings show up with articles dripping wet. “Folks also sometimes do their clothes in the bathtub,” says Davis. No one has dryers, at least renters don’t, since to run one requires an extra gas line or a 220-volt electrical line strung into a building, a cost Lawndale landlords won’t bear.

The Speed Wash has 22 washers and 18 dryers. “Bedspreads, blankets, comforters come cleaner here,” claims a sign. Over the folding tables in front is a ﬁsh-eye security mirror. Davis, a sweet-faced man of 52, invariably wears the camouflage cap that came to him from a son who was in the army. His principal venue is the back counter, where he sells laundry soap, pantyhose, barrettes, candy, pork rinds, aspirin, laundry bags, and pop, not to mention co ee. There is a bottle of hot sauce on the counter for those who like it on their potato chips.

Doing their wash, the women scu e across the worn tile ﬂoor, heft wet clothes into carts, and make chitchat with one another and with Tucker and his attendants. These are Delores Ru n, Joe Greer, a self-styled “goodwill ambassador” who helps out voluntarily, and the laundromat’s tart-tongued ﬁxture, Rose Coffee. “Honey, I been here 22 years,” says Co ee. “I know everyone and everyone knows me. They can tease me and I don’t get upset, and if they want help I give it to ’em.”

The camaraderie is one of the reasons many of the women are here. “This place is nice and homey,” says Carolyn Jones, a young mother of two on welfare. “I always get to jabbering with the other people.” Patrice Henry, a young mother, processes five loads of wash every Saturday. “When you come up in here, you be having fun,” says Henry, “getting together to do laundry, talk, and laugh. You catch up on what your girlfriends are doing.”

Other customers use the Speed Wash more reluctantly. Robin Johnson, an o ce manager who has lived two blocks away since she was

Reader Rewind

Illustrations based on photographs for the original 1993 story by

a girl, comes on Saturday to do wash for her husband, O-Jay, their five-year-old son, and her niece. “I’m always praying the place is empty,” says Johnson. “I put my stuff in the washer and come back later to put it all in the dryer. There are all these guys I don’t like hanging out around. O-Jay used to tell me not to go, but Davis’s place is so close to home. Besides, Monk is on the lookout, Rose has

known me practically my whole life, and the coffee’s good.” Adrienne Smith, an assistant gas station manager, would rather patronize “the biggest, cleanest place I can find, but sometimes it’s hard to get a ride. I use this [the Speed Wash] as a last ditch.”

Davis tries to make his establishment comfortable. He addresses each customer as “mister” or “young lady,” and as a rule they call him

sugar. “If they can’t get drugs they need sweet stu ,” says Davis. “It pacifies them.” Increasingly, unfortunates hawking one product or another—screwdrivers or hand cream—come inside to find buyers. The homeless slip inside to rest, and though Davis normally doesn’t allow them to sit for long, or sleep, “if it’s cold or raining I relax my ways,” he says. He is most permissive early in the morning, with the men. But it aggravates Davis to see someone arrive with food. “They leave their wrappings, or they want free napkins from me,” he says. “Why should I have to clean up after them? I’m making no profit o them.” When someone slams a washer in anger or is seen swilling a bottle of beer, Davis has a quiet word. “I never swear or holler,” he says, “but I make clear that sort of behavior is out of line. I’ve had some fights, but whenever I see something I tell the people to settle their dispute outside.”

Outside, Davis often finds drug dealers standing around. “They use my doorstep as a lookout point for police or for actual sales,” he says. He politely shoos them away, and doesn’t call the police. The dealers don’t go far. A lookout is normally posted across the street, at the entrance of Sunshine Food and Liquor. The proprietors of Sunshine are more tolerant than Davis and refuse to trouble the lookouts. “You don’t stick your nose in anything,” says a Sunshine clerk. Actual sales occur behind the grocery.

The Speed Wash weathers its share of crime, such as the May break-in when an intruder stole the color television. But there have been no holdups or major brawls. “I’ve been fortunate,” Davis reflects. “I haven’t a clue about why, except that if I’d been a real snob or a bastard who knows what would have happened. I treat people as I’d like to be treated.”

“Mr. Davis.” He’s a softie about making change to catch the bus. “I also take messages for people,” says Davis. “Someone will have a mother living down south and the mother’ll call here and I’ll pass on the message. We’ve got several customers in their 80s who we pick up and bring over.”

Young drug traffickers frequently spill in from the street, to buy candy and co ee with

In the afternoon schoolkids come in with their mothers, and there’s a particular feeling of community. One day this winter a girl from Marshall High was showing o her grades, ﬁrst to Rose Coffee and then to Davis. There was one D on the report card, in math; Co ee and Davis praised the girl for her good marks yet encouraged her to pick up the D. A four-yearold girl who had graduated from preschool came in with her mother one afternoon in May and accepted congratulations all around. Davis stocks penny candy for younger children. “You’d be surprised how many kids come in here with a dollar’s worth of change in their pockets,” says Davis. For teenagers he lays out fruit drinks and chips.

By 6:30 the last loads go into the washers, and an hour and a half later the Speed Wash

Robert Drea KAITLIN KOSTUS FOR CHICAGO READER

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closes for the day. “If people aren’t done, I don’t put them out,” says Davis. By eight o’clock, when Davis ﬁnally padlocks the door for the night, the Speed Wash will have brewed some 175 cups of co ee.

Millard and Deeker, a real estate firm, gave Lawndale its name in 1870 and began developing the area, which reaches west through mid-Chicago roughly from Western to the city limits. Lawndale first drew Dutch, Irish, and German families, then Bohemians. In the early 1900s came the Jews, most of Russian and Eastern European origin, who occupied the two-flats that were erected in profusion during the period.

By 1930 the overwhelming majority of the population was Jewish and Lawndale was known as “Chicago Jerusalem.” It supported 60 synagogues and other quasi-religious institutions, notably the Jewish People’s Institute, a large community center. Novelist Meyer Levin, who grew up in Lawndale, set his novel The Old Bunch (1937) there. Lawyer Elmer Gertz was reared in a Lawndale orphanage. As a young woman, Golda Meir, the future prime minister of Israel, was a local librarian. The 24th Ward Democratic machine became a legendary force in city a airs; in time Cook County party chairman Jacob Arvey, a former alderperson, would launch the national political careers of Adlai Stevenson II and Paul Douglas.

Roosevelt Road was the shopping mecca. “A dense shopping area, the street was lined with every kind of store imaginable,” native Beatrice Michaels Shapiro would recall in a monograph. “You name it, they had it. You wanted a sign painter, there was Primack; you wanted ﬂoor covering, there was Kramer; you wanted wine, there was Wexler’s; you wanted high-fashion women’s clothes, Milton Sacks and B. Nathan ﬁlled the bill. You could have a party or a wedding at Cafe Royale or the Blue Inn or a number of other places. There were ice cream parlors and eateries, jewelry, furniture, and men’s furnishings stores galore, and on and on.”

Lawndale supported three banks and six movie theaters, which featured current ﬁlms plus the top stage performers of the day— Sophie Tucker, Benny Goodman, the Marx Brothers. The great delicatessens included Silverstein’s at Saint Louis and Roosevelt, a locale favored for wedding showers. “A shower always attracted passers-by, who could observe the doings from a window on the

Saint Louis Avenue side of the building,” wrote Shapiro. “As kids, we’d peer through the window and watch wide-eyed as the bride-to-be would open her beautifully wrapped gifts, and voila!, from one of the boxes would sometimes emerge a pair of nylon stockings—a precious gift indeed during the war years.”

As a Jewish commercial strip, Roosevelt Road had no equal. “Oh, there was Lawrence Avenue in Albany Park,” says Irving Cutler, a retired geography professor and Lawndale historian, “and there were nice Jewish shopping strips in Humboldt Park and in South Shore. But there was nothing like Roosevelt Road.” Many businesses that still grace Chicago—from Fluky’s hot dogs to the Piser Weinstein and Weinstein Brothers mortuaries—have their roots on the street.

By 1950 Black Chicagoans had started to move in and the Jewish residents out, to the north side and the suburbs. In 1960 Lawndale was 91 percent Black. Roosevelt Road went into decline, though a number of white merchants hung on into the 60s. Then came the Martin Luther King riots in 1968. “The stores were torn up bad,” remembers Monk Tucker. “There wasn’t too much left afterwards.” Few merchants returned.

also John’s restaurant, where you could linger over a full meal or a cup of coffee. Another restaurant, known for its peach cobbler and banana pudding, stood where Sunshine Food and Liquor is today.

But o Roosevelt Road, the housing was in decay. Every winter ﬁres set by space heaters would gut a few more apartment buildings. “If the Blacks owned the buildings, they couldn’t afford to rebuild,” says Moore. “If other nationalities owned them, they didn’t want to.”

From 1960 to 1990, Lawndale would lose 48 percent of its housing units, according to the city’s housing department; its population shrank from 125,000 to less than 50,000.

Worse yet, the area’s large employers— General Foods, Coca-Cola, Western Electric, Sunbeam, Aldens—gradually took their leave.

The largest employer was Sears, Roebuck and Company, whose national headquarters, bank, and retail store stood on a 55-acre site at Homan and Arthington; but even Sears began to pull out in 1973.

The Davis Speed Wash is a small oasis, not only a laundromat but a notions store, coffeehouse, community center, and economic success.

“Either their businesses were destroyed and they got out, or else they were afraid and saw no future and got out,” says Irving Cutler.

But Black businessmen, ironically, now had access to Roosevelt Road. “The riots opened things up for us,” says Ralph Moore, who at the time owned a laundromat on 13th Street.

“SBA [Small Business Administration] loans were readily available, and the old owners were moving out from fear and intimidation.”

A man named Leo Golsher had operated a laundromat at 3860 W. Roosevelt since 1951. But in 1969, after the riots, he sold out to Ralph Moore, who wanted to move to a main drag. For a time Moore ran both the laundromat and a dry cleaners across the road, but eventually he combined these operations in the laundromat.

Moore says the vicinity still supported many businesses. A tavern, a beauty shop, a furniture repair shop, a hardware store, and a ﬁve-and-dime were within easy reach, and

In 1984 the First Chicago Corporation acquired American National and a new supervisor ﬁred Davis. “It was tough and I was disappointed,” he says, “but they made the right move. I was burned out by the rat race and the politics that you have to play. I was tired of going to school to keep up.” A friend interested him in buying a laundromat, and even though he knew nothing about the business (“I could turn on the machine, is all”), he made Ralph Moore an o er. They settled on a price of $49,000 for the building and the business; Davis put $10,000 down and has been paying Moore o since.

By 1987 the Sears site offered “some warehousing and very, very little else,” according to a Sears spokesman.

Moore says many Black shop owners on Roosevelt Road had a hard time of it.

“They really didn’t know how to manage a business. Many had trouble buying wholesale and setting prices. Others would make money fine, but then they’d blow it on cars or at the racetrack.”

But Moore’s laundromat on Roosevelt Road thrived. So did two new laundromats Moore opened across the Eisenhower Expressway on Madison Street, and “it all become kind of taxing for me. Then my wife, who used to help me out, got arthritis.” In 1984 he put his place on Roosevelt Road up for sale, and Hughzell Davis o ered to buy it.

Davis had grown up in the Mississippi Delta, the fourth of a farmer’s ten children. After high school he brieﬂy worked in a factory that made backing for carpets, then migrated north to Chicago. For ﬁve years he was a warehouse clerk at the Spiegel catalog house. “It was a job, but it didn’t pay well enough,” Davis says. He trained in computer accounting at a Loop trade school and soon began an 18-year stint in computer operations at the American National Bank, where he rose to shift manager.

“When I first came over here I was concerned a lot,” Davis says, “but I had kept all Moore’s employees, and they knew people.” Moore’s washers and dryers were shot, so Davis installed new equipment. He put up new paneling and redid the ceiling. In went video games (which were discontinued after burglars stole the money out of them). Davis passed out key rings and calendars and for a couple of years, revenues were respectable. But in 1986 Mark Holstein opened a spanking new place at Roosevelt and Keeler. “My idea was to revitalize the neighborhood,” says Holstein, a former paint salesman whose half-million-dollar facility, called the Clean Scene, o ered double the Speed Wash’s washers and dryers. (The Clean Scene is still the largest noninstitutional construction project in the 24th Ward since the riots.)

“When I found out about Holstein opening down the street, my heart almost popped,” says Davis. Yet Davis was determined not to be hostile. “He wasn’t the enemy, and why should he be?” Davis says. He made it a point to have a sandwich with Holstein. “He and I sat down and shot the shit and got along fine,” says Holstein.

Nonetheless, Davis found his sales dipping 20 percent, and he began to o er co ee, hair accessories, candy, and other items as a sideline. There had always been a Pepsi machine in the front of the store, but now Davis laid in ﬁve more kinds of pop in a back-o ce cooler. Customers are encouraged to carry discount cards. Twenty visits to the Speed Wash and you have the option of taking a $5 premium or continuing to log benefits; two punched-out cards win you a laundry cart. “It keeps ’em coming back,” says Davis. Not everything succeeds. During the past year Davis entered into a deal to sell beepers for a wholesaler, “but the guy went sour on me,” says Davis, and he’s abandoned the idea.

Sales have rebounded some. Today [in

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1993] the Speed Wash grosses $160,000 a year. The average laundromat in the U.S. takes in $96,000 annually, says Richard Torp, spokesman for the Chicagoland Coin Laundry Association. Torp says about Davis, “He’s doing good business for a small store. It’s commendable. Evidently he’s pleasing his customers.”

Glenn Dupree happens by the Speed Wash for coffee at about six o’clock almost every morning. Afterward, he’s usually at his leisure. He used to assist his friend Ike, who specializes in hauling and gutting, “but Ike’s a cheap motherfucker and that’s why I stopped working for him,” says Dupree. He says he runs a crew of his own, but mostly on weekends.

Dupree didn’t ﬁnish his senior year at Crane High School. “This woman got pregnant with me,” he says, “and, shit, I dropped out.” Since 1979 he has lived on Fillmore two blocks from the Speed Wash, in a three-bedroom house owned ﬁrst by his mother and since her death by himself. Early on he held a series of jobs, including six years as a short-order cook. “Wherever there was money to be made, there was Glenn,” he says. But he wound up on general assistance (GA). Because GA is designed for single, employable adults and he was married, he was, he admits, not entitled to it.

Last July new budget cuts eliminated Dupree and thousands of others from general assistance. Now all he receives is $111 a month in food stamps. Dupree passed up the new EarnFare Program, which offers a welfare check in return for part-time employment. “I have a heart murmur, and my right leg is crippled,” he explains. “I get sick. It takes me a half-hour to get out of bed in the morning.” At the moment he is angling for Social Security disability benefits. Meanwhile, his wife has taken a factory job, packing cologne into boxes.

Dupree passes the days alongside an oil drum behind a three-flat near the laundromat. The surroundings are sparse—no grass, two dead trees, a shopping cart, and several cars being worked on by Frank Ware, Dupree’s friend from the Speed Wash and the street. Ware was ticketed once by the city for keeping a fire going in the oil drum, but the ticket failed to douse the flames. During the winter people come to warm their hands over the fire, and in every season the drum serves Dupree as an outdoor stove.

“People’ll be out here working on their cars, and they can’t wait to ﬁnish so they can eat my

food,” he says one spring morning that finds him resplendent in a black Bulls hat, deep purple sweatshirt, and bright blue jeans. There’s a diamond stud in one ear. “I make pork or ribs, ﬁsh, and wieners.”

Wieners and pork in a can are today’s specialties. The oil drum, stuffed with burning timbers, has been turned on its side, and Dupree is preparing to be the chef. He slices some onion and sprinkles the bits on a half dozen hot dogs positioned on tinfoil. Opening a can of processed pork, he sprinkles the contents with onion, pepper, and seasoned salt. “Don’t forget to put in some Spanish fly,” yells Ware from underneath the car he’s tuning up. Dupree laughs. He places the pork can on the piping hot surface of the oil drum; the wieners also go atop the drum on a rusty grill.

“I’m Mr. Rogers,” shouts Dupree to his audience, which includes Ware, a woman named Gayle, and several other men with time on their hands. “Soon you all are gonna have some real good food.”

“Hey, Glenn, you got your pimp clothes on today,” jokes Gayle. Humorously, Dupree do s his Bulls hat in Gayle’s direction, revealing a scalp he has shaved clean. “Bald I don’t have to worry about no brush or no comb,” he says. One of the men announces he’s o to Maywood to look for work. “I’m going to buy a lottery ticket,” says another fellow, an announcement overwhelmed by the wail of a souped-up car driving by. Dupree knows the driver. “Hey, motherfucker, can you smell prime nigga cooking?” he yells.

When the food seems done, Dupree unwraps a loaf of Wonder bread. He deposits a hot dog on each piece of bread, then slops on some pork. Everyone grabs a sandwich and eats heartily, washing down lunch with beer. Ware, the exception, is drinking vodka and water. It’s 10:45.

Soon Ware slips away. “He knows he’s drunk, so he’s going into his house,” remarks Dupree. Ware, 48, is the father of four children by various women. One daughter was raped and murdered at the age of 14, according to Ware, and he says he hasn’t been the same since.

He carries the marks of a hard life. “I been shot ﬁve or six times,” he says. “I take the bullets out myself or do nothin’, so there you go.” To prove his point, he displays a maimed part

of his left hand where a knuckle used to be, and shows o a scar near his left eye. “Some guy shot at me,” he explains, “but I didn’t go to the doctor because I couldn’t ﬁnd my medical card.” Cross Ware at your peril. In May he concluded a girlfriend had stolen a saw and $60 in cash from him. “I plugged her up the side of the head with some of my tools,” he says. He was charged with battery and hauled o to jail. Ware lost his driver’s license after a series of drunk-driving arrests, though he continues to drive a 1974 Oldsmobile. He’s held “so many jobs I can’t recall them all.” He receives $155 a month in Illinois assistance that comes to persons presumed eligible—but not yet approved—for Social Security disability payments. He gets food stamps and makes some money repairing cars.

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p. 12

“Here’s home,” says Ware as he welcomes a visitor to the basement apartment he occupies in the three-ﬂat; he lives for free in exchange for watching over the building, which was bought recently by someone in Maywood. The top three ﬂoors are empty and being renovated. “I go upstairs and check on things,” Ware says. “I listen. I’ve run a few people out, and I hit one guy with an iron pipe.”

Ware’s apartment consists of four rooms, but only one is usable. He cooks fried chicken and pinto beans and ham hocks on a hot plate, sleeps on a box spring mattress, and sits in a reclining chair afternoons and evenings watching Gunsmoke , Bonanza , and karate movies on a small television. There is no phone or water in the building. To use the toilet, Ware must fetch water from a nearby ﬁre hydrant. When he wants to take a shower, he goes to his brother’s house across the street.

From the oil drum Dupree can eye the drug dealers hanging at the corner of Grenshaw and Springfield. “Those little rodents,” he remarks. “They’re pathetic, out on the corner selling rock [crack cocaine] or blow [heroin]. They come out after the kids go to school, and they’re out again in the afternoon once the kids get back. They’ll walk through a crowd of kids giving out fucking candy.” (The dealers on Grenshaw do more than that, says a neighbor: they throw a kids’ block party during the summer and give away hams at Christmas.)

A cop car glides east along Roosevelt Road past Springﬁeld. “Ready on the road,” yells a lookout at Sunshine Food and Liquor, meaning the cops are driving by. Once the police car is out of sight, the lookout gives a second signal—“He’s straight.” A dozen persons suddenly materialize in a line behind the Sunshine grocery building, and a dealer makes his sales at high noon.

“Look at that shit,” says Dupree disapprovingly. “I don’t have anything to do with that shit.”

Glenn Dupree doesn’t drink co ee at the Speed Wash because he needs to. “I can make co ee my own damn self,” he says. “The thing is, I like to have co ee and a roll and shoot the shit with the other fuckers who are hanging around. Plus, it’s best to leave some money circulating in the neighborhood, and not with the drug dealers.”

The neighborhood can use the help. Only a few employers remain. One of them is the Roscoe Company, an industrial laundry that’s been a Lawndale ﬁxture since 1927 and intends to stay. “People that work for us live in and

around this area,” says president Jim Buik. “We have a ready supply of labor.” Not every employer feels so comfortable. “We had a sign on the building but we had to take it o because we don’t want anyone to know we’re here,” says one small manufacturer. “It’s not safe.”

The mean annual household income in Lawndale is $18,336, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, about half the city average. About 40 percent of the neighborhood gets public assistance. A 1991 study for Chicago’s Department of Economic Development reported 121 businesses along Roosevelt Road, but “there is a combined total of 49 vacant storefronts and vacant lots along the commercial strip, and pedestrian tra c is extremely shallow and widely dispersed. Apart from food and liquor establishments, there appears to be very little support for other businesses.”

Most Speed Wash regulars leave the community for major purchases. Glenn Dupree goes to an Aldi for his canned and frozen goods, to Moo & Oink on the south side for meat, “or wherever there’s a sale.” He buys rice at a church. “On Sunday we go to [the Maxwell Street shopping district], where we buy jumbo eggs with double yolks plus fruit,” he says. North Riverside mall is his destination for most clothing, though he purchases neckties and jeans from a Goodwill store and other thrift shops.

Frank Ware drives his Oldsmobile beyond Lawndale for nearly all his needs. He favors a ﬂea market at 26th and Pulaski for clothes. “’Cepting suits,” he remarks. “A woman I just dropped bought me some suits in Detroit. Nice ones. Basically, though, I don’t need ’em, because I don’t go to church and it’s best to avoid funerals.”

Robin Johnson, who lives a block from Dupree, shops for groceries at the Omni or the Aldi in Cicero, or at the Super Giant supermarket at Pulaski and Harrison. For clothes she heads to the Brickyard or North Riverside malls. Johnson frequents a Lawndale dry cleaner and Sunshine Food and Liquor, “to play the lottery and for two-liter pop.”

“There’s nothing to buy around here, except for gas, a clothes wash, and a can of pop,” says Hughzell Davis. Davis acquires supplies for the Speed Wash from wholesalers and discount houses. He says he’d like to open an account at the Community Bank of Lawndale, owned by the neighborhood-based Pyramidwest Development Corporation, but he’s heard negative comments about the small institution so he banks on the south side.

Laundry turns out to be a major contributor to the economic health of Lawndale. Johnson’s biggest local outlay is the $10 to $15 she spends each Saturday at the Speed Wash. Ware takes his wash once or twice a week to the Speed Wash, jamming it all in one washer to limit his expenses. Dupree and his wife own a washer and dryer, but he sometimes does his laundry at the Speed Wash anyway “just to get out of the house.”

The 1991 study for the Department of Economic Development found that the average Lawndale resident spends $54 a year along Roosevelt Road on clothing, $29 to dine out, $2.67 on furniture, and $2 on auto care. The largest outlay is for groceries—$698. The study didn’t give a dollar ﬁgure, but it reported that after groceries residents spent more of their money on laundry than on anything else.

In recent years Lawndale has been the subject of several attempts to spur retailing. In 1988, 24th Ward alderperson William Henry helped start a chamber of commerce, which limped along for several years and finally died. Henry also tried to godfather a pact between Arab merchants and Black community members, which came to naught after Henry was indicted on charges of extortion and mail fraud and was defeated for reelection. He died in May of ’92.

Plans by Wallace E. “Mickey” Johnson, a former Chicago Bull, to build a shopping center near Roosevelt and Homan have gone nowhere. And though Lawndale did participate in the Commercial Area Revitalization Effort (or CARE), a city program meant to spur retail development in declining neighborhoods, the principal benefits have been trash receptacles and street banners along Roosevelt.

A CARE banner ﬂies from a pole outside the Speed Wash, and a trash receptacle is nearby. Recently the city installed a bicycle rack in front of Sunshine Food and Liquor, but no one can recall seeing a bike locked up there.

“You talk about all these programs that are supposed to revitalize this area, and nothing really works,” says Hughzell Davis, who joined the Chamber of Commerce and participated in CARE. “What I see out here depresses me. All I see are Black folks going no place. They’re just in a rut. All my waking hours I spend in an environment where it’s easy to get bad feelings, to think that what I see around here is life.”

Davis has the most sympathy for his female customers on welfare. “The ladies are in a bad

situation because, sure, they should work, but they have the responsibility for their kids.

“The men, though, they’re looking for a handout. Nobody’s going to give them anything to get them up the ladder, but that’s what they expect. Each situation is di erent, I know that, but why don’t they go home and ﬁgure out what to do, instead of just standing around on the street? They think if they stand out there long enough something’s going to happen.

“They have only themselves to blame. I could be in the same place they are but I’m not. Even if they don’t use drugs, they are addicted to standing on the corner with their buddies. They refuse to give up 24 hours a day of doing nothing, afraid that if they get a job they won’t be able to stand out there anymore, that they’ll miss something.

“Clinton gets blamed over the economy, like he could change things in Lawndale in the city of Chicago. Clinton’s only going to do what Congress allows him to do, and Congress seems to be ﬁghting him. If the whole economy improves maybe then things will change, but not before.

“My best advice to the men would be to move away. Go clean, with new friends and a new neighborhood. That’s the only way to break the cycle.”

Davis is seldom approached for advice, although he is free with it. A few do consider him a role model. “I talked to him several times about getting into my own business, and he encouraged me,” recalls Ann Marie Parker, a laboratory assistant at Malcolm X who’s a Speed Wash customer and wants to run her own pharmacy one day. “To find a Black businessman like him around here is a rarity.”

The idea of being considered an example perplexes Davis. “I can’t say what I am,” he says. “You’d have to ask somebody else.” He continues to draw satisfaction from the Speed Wash. Last year Davis and his brotherin-law opened a laundromat on Clybourn on the north side, but Davis is content to let his brother-in-law handle the other place. “I never say to myself that I don’t want to go to work,” he says. “I come every day and look forward to coming here because it’s mine. The boss is me. I don’t go on vacation really, three or four days at most but nothing more. I’m not ready to get out yet. Maybe in ten or 12 years, but if my health holds up and I don’t burn out I’ll probably stay around.” v

m letters@chicagoreader.com

Reader Rewind

EXHIBITIONS

Richard Hunt gets two concurrent exhibits

As Hunt nears 80, the Museum of Contemporary Art and the Cultural Center mine nearly 60 years of the artist’s work.

By AIMEE LEVITT

Last December, the Chicago-born sculptor Richard Hunt died at the age of 88. The prolific artist was born in Woodlawn, blocks from the home of Emmett Till, whose brutal murder helped shape the course of Hunt’s career.

As a young man, Hunt took art classes at the South Side Community Art Center and later earned a degree at the School of the Art Institute. Early in his career, he chose to focus on welding metal—garnering the attention of curators and politicians alike. He was just 35 when MOMA staged a retrospective of his work, which Hunt’s studio notes was “the rst retrospective for an African American sculptor at the museum.”

Though Hunt lived outside the city for periods throughout his life—including a stint in the army—he was a Chicagoan through and through. In 2023, Hunt was still making his signature, stately works

out of his Lincoln Park studio. As the New York Times reported, one of Hunt’s nal pieces, Hero Ascending, will be installed outside the Emmett Till and Mamie Till-Mobley House.

In this 2014 article, originally titled “Chicago sculptor Richard Hunt’s sixdecade career gets two concurrent exhibits,” Aimee Levitt highlights solo shows Hunt had that year—two Chicago institutions giving the artist his owers while he was here to appreciate them.

—Kerry Cardoza, culture editor

When the sculptor Richard Hunt was still a student at the School of the Art Institute, he sold a piece to the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York. That was back in 1957; Hunt was 22. When he was 35, in 1971, MOMA mounted the first retrospective of his work. Hunt is nearing 80 now, but he continues to work in his Lincoln

Park studio, welding industrial metal into art. Several pieces from his personal collection, covering the full range of his nearly 60-yearlong career, from his student days through work currently in progress, is on display at the Chicago Cultural Center through March. The Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) salutes Hunt with a retrospective, opening this week, featuring pieces (mostly) drawn from its own collection.

“It’s rare to see an artist active for so long,” says Naomi Beckwith, the MCA curator who put the exhibit together. “You can see how things have shifted from his early work, the shift in scale, the shift in form. The early work is more ﬁgurative, but the later work pushes toward real abstraction.”

That’s certainly not to say Hunt is inaccessible—his sculptures have appeared everywhere, from the o ces of Playboy Enterprises to Midway airport.

Although Hunt wasn’t the first artist to

work with industrial materials—he was strongly influenced by the Spanish sculptor Julio González, whose work was shown in Chicago in the 50s—he stands out, Beckwith says, because of the expressiveness of his forms. Unlike his contemporary Tony Smith, who embraced minimalism, Hunt, in his sculpture, sought to re-create the ﬂuid lines of drawing. Along the way, he also became a master welder. While in his earlier output it’s possible to see the seams, his later sculptures look like, as Beckwith puts it, “one solid piece of metal extending into space.”

“The material doesn’t look like it should be able to do the things it does,” she says. “There’s a sense of vivacity—of aliveness and energy. There’s metal all around us, in buildings and in our cars, but it’s a magical moment to watch metal transform from something mundane and utilitarian into something poetic.” v

m letters@chicagoreader.com

Reader Rewind

EXHIBITIONS

On Exhibit: a roomful of Daleys

By HOLLY GREENHAGEN

In the lead-up to this year’s Democratic National Convention in Chicago, media abounded with reflections on and comparisons to its storied 1968 predecessor. And while the city was once again the site of multiple protests against another horri c war, the level of violence and the number of arrests were relatively low compared to what ’68 saw—the year then mayor Richard J. Daley infamously encouraged CPD to “shoot to kill” arsonists and “shoot to maim” looters.

I n the days surrounding 2024’s DNC, artists and organizations around the city again put together programming that took aim at our so-called democracy, highlighted protest art, or offered counterprogramming to mainstream narratives about the city. Most of these art activations weren’t as bold as the city boycott that (non-Chicago) artists announced after the ’68 DNC violence or the famed post-DNC exhibition “Richard J. Daley” quickly put together at Feigen Gallery that fall. Artists from Claes Oldenburg to Donald Judd to Christo contributed work and the show garnered strong reactions—one night, the gallery was trashed. In 1988, Feigen revisited the exhibition, written up here by Holly Greenhagen. Is the art world too cautious now, or was the Daley show not as risqué as it seems? You decide.

Kerry Cardoza, culture editor

Richard Feigen remembers the 1968 Democratic convention well. Feigen, a Chicago-trained artist who now works in New York but owns a gallery here, recalls the surprise that swept the city—first at the demonstrations, then at the bloodshed. Feigen, though, was not surprised. “Everyone was astonished by what happened,” he says, “except for the art community.” He and his fellow artists decided to stage a kind of demonstration of their own. Headed by Feigen, who then ran a gallery on Ontario, they put together an exhibition of art about Daley and the city he ran.

The show, titled simply “Richard J. Daley,” got a lot of attention from everybody—the critics, the public, and other artists. Some loved it: the press (treated so badly by the police during the riots) praised the message, although it gave the art mixed reviews. Others hated it: one group (“obviously Daley sympathizers,” says Feigen) trashed part of the gallery one night. But the artists made their point: the Daley administration was corrupt, the police were in the wrong, and political upheaval was inevitable.

Now a second show, consisting mostly of works from the original exhibit, is on display at Feigen’s current gallery. “Richard J. Daley— The 20th Anniversary,” a commemoration of artists’ reactions to the ’68 convention, opened on election day.

Chicago in 1968 was not a rewarding place for artists, Feigen says. “If you were gonna make it, you had to go to New York”—and many Chicago-trained artists did. After the convention, some of the emigres wanted to express their scorn at the way Chicago police treated the rioters and announced a boycott: none of them, they agreed, would show their work in Chicago for ten years.

Relations between the artists who left Chicago and those who stayed were also strained. The convention riots had given Feigen the idea for a protest show, but the threatened boycott spurred him on. When New Yorker Claes Oldenburg canceled the career retrospective he’d scheduled at Feigen’s gallery for early October, Feigen was moved to action. Oldenburg hadn’t canceled because of the boycott—he wanted time to put together a more timely exhibit. But Feigen and his cronies worried that Oldenburg’s cancellation would set an example for other artists and really set the boycott in motion.

The Chicago artists worked fast: the Democratic convention ended August 29, the Oldenburg letter arrived September 5, and the exhibit—which included some work made especially for it—opened October 23.

The artists interpreted the city’s political chaos in a variety of ways. Some, like Kenneth Noland, who called his series of colored hori-

zontal lines Shadow Line, chose an abstract route. Others were more overt: Chuck Thomas put Daley’s head in the middle of his Dartboard, and Oldenburg made a crayon drawing called Mayor Daley’s Head on a Platter. Feigen has three particular favorites: Barnett Newman’s Mayor Daley’s lace curtain, a life-size barbed-wire fence splattered with “blood”; James Rosenquist’s Mylar Daley Portrait, cut into strips so viewers could punch it; and Oldenburg’s Fire Plugs, 50 seemingly innocuous bright red foot-high replicas.

When Feigen asked his daughter, Philippa, to put together the anniversary exhibit, it took her about the same amount of time the original exhibit had required—six weeks. She started by sorting through piles of old records her father had kept—fan mail, hate mail, reviews, and even the telegram Oldenburg sent telling Feigen he was canceling. “I’m sure it was incomplete, but we had a whole lot of information,” she says. She and her father made a list of the pieces they wanted to ﬁnd. “We didn’t try to reconstruct the exhibition because it was too much trouble,” Feigen says. A lot of the artists were

dead, and not all of the contributions now seemed relevant to him.

Philippa searched ﬁrst through her father’s own art collection; there she found the Mylar Daley portrait and one ﬁreplug. Then she called galleries, artists, and sometimes relatives. A few of the artists still living couldn’t help, some, like Christo, were out of the country, and others, like Roy Lichtenstein, were busy with other projects. Nevertheless she managed to round up 13 of the original works.

“We got the most germane things,” Philippa says—the Mylar portrait, the “lace curtain,” and six of the 50 ﬁreplugs, which had been sold separately. She and Feigen also included a few newer pieces—including a portrait of a big, ugly Dan Quayle titled Young, Rich and Stupid

This exhibition is “more about politics than aesthetics, artists than art,” Feigen says in the program. Last time, he tried to rally the artistic community. This time, he hopes the exhibit will just remind people of the events—artistic and political—of 1968. v

m letters@chicagoreader.com

Reader Rewind

GIRLS TO THE FRONT

The original Pink Ladies

Grease’s girl gang had a real-life model on the northwest side.

By CYNTHIA GALLAHER

Grease is a movie that’s grown with me as I’ve aged. The rst time I saw it was during a winter break from elementary school in Ohio. My excitement for the movie’s dirty denim, black leather, and glittering kitsch could’ve melted the snow outside, and it’s an aesthetic preoccupation that’s come to de ne much of my adulthood. As I got older, I saw parts of myself in different characters at different points, even buying a pair of black American Apparel disco pants in my 20s to channel Slutty Sandy, only to realize in my 30s that I’m more of a gay Danny Zuko (the pants work for both). At different times, I saw elements of myself in each Pink Lady but never quite saw myself as a Pink Lady (reading The Outsiders over a dozen times at ten was probably a good indicator I was more of a T-Bird). Nonetheless, I love—love—retro girl gangs as symbols of sisterhood and feminine aggression, and I was fascinated with the Pink Ladies as a group archetype for rock ’n’ roll bad girls.

When I nally learned that Grease was loosely inspired by Chicago teen gangs of the 50s the way The Outsiders had been inspired by Tulsa teen gangs of a similar era, certain details made more sense, like the Polish names and the face-offs with Catholic school baddies. I love this 2011 story for all the layers it adds to a piece of pop culture so dear to me. It’s a classic tale about art imitating life and how lowbrow culture slowly oats upstream only to be warped by the tide. But this history lesson centers women and the tiny details that animated their lives—from their go-to cocktails to the semiotics of their pink satin jackets. How can anyone resist a deeply Chicago story that screams, “Girls to the front!”?

—Micco Caporale, staff writer

In 1971, friends dragged me to see Grease, a musical that was getting its premiere run at Kingston Mines Theatre, on what was then the new O -Loop theater strip along Lincoln Avenue near Fullerton. The story of a bunch of hoody teens from a school the authors called “Rydell High,” the show featured Chicago-specific references to Foster Beach and Melrose Park. Also a girl gang, the Pink Ladies.

“There were Pink Ladies at Taft High when my sister went there,” I whispered to my friend Sue.

“This is ﬁction, silly,” she replied. “There are no Pink Ladies.”

She was so wrong.

I was a preschooler in 1957 when my sister Sharon came home from Taft, in Norwood

Park, bearing tales about the scary group of girls known as the Pink Ladies. She said they hung out in front of the school and stood tough as they puffed cigarettes, wearing stern-faced wha’-chu-lookin’-at expressions. Their black ﬂats, nylons, and pencil-slim skirts were topped with varsity jackets emblazoned with a champagne glass bubbling over in pink embroidery. Their eyes were smoky with makeup and their billowy hair was haloed in scarves tied taut at the chin, like the strap on a combat helmet.

Jim Jacobs, who wrote Grease with Warren Casey, graduated from Taft the same year my sister did. He based the show on his experiences there, which included bleacher observations of the Pink Ladies. Casey, who died in 1988, drew on memories of teaching high school in New York state.

“The Pink Ladies were the toughest broads I’ve ever seen, before or since,” says Jacobs, now 68. He remembers them stowing razor blades in their teased hair, in case girls from another gang attacked them, and carrying church-key can openers, not just to pop a Hamm’s but to use for protection.

The original Grease was appropriately raw. In his rave review for the Chicago Tribune , William Leonard called the characters “a bunch of foul-mouthed, lazy, brawling, useless, cheating, disrespectful no-goods” and warned the show was “for those who don’t mind dirty four-letter words and lots of them.” But when it left Chicago for Broadway, Jacobs says, he and Casey were pressured to clean up the racy lyrics and write new ones for general audiences. In the car-sex anthem “Greased Lightning,” for example, a lyric that originally read “the chicks will cream” became “the chicks will scream,” and the line “You really are a clown if you think that I’ll go down in greased lightning” got cut altogether. Jacobs and Casey dumped the Chicago references, too. By the time the sunsoaked California ﬁlm version came along in 1978, Grease was squeaky clean enough for Olivia Newton-John to star.

In a 2009 blog post addressed to “Mr. and Ms. Chicago Producers,” curTribune critic Chris Jones pleaded for a revival of the nasty old Grease . American Theater Company artistic director PJ Paparelli liked the idea and called Jacobs. They decided to restore some old material from the Kingston Mines days and add new DJ patter. The results can be seen now in an ATC production that began previews April 21 and opened a planned eight-week run on May 2. “It isn’t a museum piece or a gloss production,” says Paparelli. “It’s not the Grease we know. We’re taking what we’ve learned from the iconic of the past 40 years and crafting it to an edgy level to really allow Chicago to see itself in the characters.” Even the good-girl lead character, Sandy, is slated to sing a suggestive number that didn’t make it into the Broadway version. Called “Kiss It,” the song’s got her crooning, “Kiss it right where I’m tender.”

The Pink Ladies got started somewhere between 1953 and 1955, depending on whom you ask, and lasted into the early 60s, with anywhere from a handful to nearly 50 members at any given time. Many of them were the children of inner-city Roman Catholics who’d come to Norwood Park looking for a ﬁrst home after World War II.

The club’s name resulted from a stunt some friends pulled on Sunday afternoons after

“The Pink Ladies were the toughest broads I’ve ever seen.”

ZIPPER COURTESY CYNTHIA GALLAHER

Reader Rewind

church when they were 16 years old. Dressing up in sophisticated hats, heels, and gloves, they hit the downtown clubs, anxious to dance.

“Before long,” recalls Zipper, a member who didn’t want her real name used, “we were sitting pretty and sipping pink ladies”—a frothy gin-and-grenadine cocktail that, according to another club member, Rose Marie Doladee Marinelli, was served to them without the alcohol.

“There was no Rizzo or Frenchy,” says Pink Lady Sandra Pavlik Brigante, referring to a pair of Grease creations—the former a hardshelled bad girl, the latter an airhead who dreams of being a beautician. Brigante paints a picture at odds with Jacobs’s vision of razor-toting JDs.

“We liked to play volleyball, plan which parties and dances we wanted to attend, then hung out at Canale’s Pizza on Higgins,” she says.

they also rumbled down by the rocks at Montrose Beach.

“We didn’t use guns, but some guys from Steinmetz High School came around one night, stuck a shotgun out a car window, and ﬁred,” recalls Goomba Leo Golda. “They put a hole in one guy’s car radiator, but that was the extent of it.”

“You had to act tough in a public high school dominated by people who never went to a Catholic elementary school.”

“We kept it official. Paid club dues and raised money for children’s charities.” And they were chartered as a social athletic club. Otherwise, the Pink Ladies might’ve been considered a gang and harassed by the cops. The main thing, says Zipper, was the dancing.

But Marinelli remembers things di erently. Grease ’s depiction is “true to us,” she says. “You had to act tough in a public high school dominated by people who never went to a Catholic elementary school, as we had. You needed friends. It was survival.”

To qualify for membership in a parallel all-male club known as the Goombas—one of several with a claim to being the model for Grease ’s Burger Palace Boys—a kid had to win a ﬁstﬁght with someone from a di erent neighborhood. The Goombas would drag race and occasionally scu e with a rival gang from Park Ridge called the Vanguards. Zipper says

Marinelli and Brigante each claim to have originated the Pink Lady varsity jacket, which came with a detachable hood. Marinelli says she did it as a way to assert herself at a school where she had no boyfriend and felt like an outsider. “We said, ‘We don’t need boys to give us jackets. We’ve got our own.’” Brigante asserts that it was she who had the inspiration and got the jackets made, adding that when she picked them up she was surprised to ﬁnd that the champagne-glass insignias had been embellished with bright red cherries. “I told the shop owner that Pink Ladies don’t have cherries,” she says—although they generally do—then laughs. “Well, we were all virgins anyhow.”

That’s another point on which people di er.

“There was a good portion of sex going on,” says Golda. “In automobiles, in garages, at the drive-in movies.”

“Our motto was ‘be tough, act tough, be a lover boy,’” notes Goomba Rich Bollman, who dropped out of high school to marry his 15-year-old Pink Lady girlfriend.

“Among the girls,” says Pink Lady Phyllis Stratton, “I think I was the only virgin.” v

EDITOR’S NOTE: PJ Paparelli, the artistic director of American Theater Company, died in a traffic accident in Scotland in 2015. The company closed its doors in 2018.

m letters@chicagoreader.com

BY JAMES IJAMES DIRECTED BY TYRONE PHILLIPS

A CO - PRODUCTION WITH

A boisterous Southern cookout sets the scene for a Black, queer discovery of self and resilience in this Pulitzer Prize-winning, five-time Tony nominated “uproarious reimagining of Hamlet” (The New Yorker).

“This is what I was raised in: pig guts and bad choices.”

As Juicy grapples with his identity and his family at a backyard barbecue, his father’s ghost shows up asking for revenge—on Juicy’s uncle, who has married his widowed mom—bringing his quest for joy and liberation to a screeching halt. James Ijames has reinvented Shakespeare’s masterpiece, creating what the New York Times hails as “a hilarious yet profound tragedy, smothered in comedy,” where the only death is the patriarchy. Tyrone Phillips, Founding Artistic Director of Chicago’s famed Definition Theatre, directs.

JANUARY 11 - FEBRUARY 23

Reader Rewind

Spending an hour with Robert Townsend—producer-director-writerstar of the anarchic shoestring extravaganza Hollywood Shuffle —is like watching a television commandeered by a hyperactive ten-year-old kid with a remote control unit.

Hollywood Shuf e

How Robert Townsend got a good part

By PETER KEOUGH

Putting aside the joy and chaos of “Hollywood Shuf e” reading like an absolute fever dream of impressions and quotations, this piece from April 2, 1987, is a fascinating time capsule. Not only does it accomplish the classic Reader feat of spotlighting a now-famous Chicagoan at the onset of their career, but it also provides a glimpse of the film industry in the late 80s, notably describing how

it felt to be a Black creative trying to nd work. Townsend might not have ended up quite as mainstream Hollywood famous as Eddie Murphy, like some envisioned, but he’s still working. And considering one of his most recent credits is playing the father of Sydney (Ayo Edebiri) on FX’s The Bear, I’m guessing Townsend is still a Chicago guy through and through.

—Taryn McFadden, culture editor

“I was a weird kid,” he begins in answer to a question about his upbringing on Chicago’s west side. “My mother used to keep us in the house because there were so many gangs. I would watch TV all the time. I was like a chameleon. I would watch a movie and walk around the house saying [switch to Bogart in Casablanca ], ‘Here’s looking at you, kid.’ When kids in the neighborhood started talking about each other’s mothers [switch to Willy, kid in the neighborhood], ‘Yo’ mama is so fat.’ I would do dialects—‘Hey, Willy, I saw your father, he looked like an African!’ [Click to Garrett Morris as a Somalian exchange student in an early Saturday Night Live] ‘Wheellay! Bringa yoo butt hom, Wheel-lay!’ When I played on the basketball team I spent a lot of time on the bench and I’d do impressions for the other players: [snap to Walter Brennan in The Guns of Will Sonnett] ‘Dagnabit! I’m . . . I’m GOOD! The coach better put me; I’d . . . I’d slam DUNK it! No brag, just fact.’ But it was in ﬁfthgrade English class that I discovered I really had something. We were doing a play called Oedipus and the teacher gave us different roles. Now this is a typical inner-city school. Willy Jenkins does the sibyl: [switch back to Willy, the schoolkid] ‘Oed-o-piss. You . . . will

marry . . . yo’ mothuh

and

kill

. yo’ fathuh.’ Then I’d be Tiresias the prophet [cut to the Royal Shakespeare Theatre on Great Performances] ‘OEDipus! Jocasta loves not YOU but yourSELF! It is your destiny!’ ‘Where did you learn that?’ that teacher asked. ‘PBS,’ I told her.”

Sophocles is switched off and we are, for the moment, tuned into Robert Townsend, a slim young man in a hotel room wearing a navy blazer and a T-shirt printed with stylized ducks. Touted as the latest addition in the Richard Pryor and Eddie Murphy line of blockbuster Black movie talent, he is surprisingly self-e acing. He has some of Murphy’s taut good looks—the skull-tight hair and the insouciant mustache—but not yet much of the superstar’s swagger or ﬂinty aplomb. To a certain extent, Townsend remains that precocious ﬁfth-grade kid amazed at his ability to speak in voices and to command an audience and make them laugh.

Though there are great hopes for Hollywood Shu e, Townsend’s career so far has not been exactly meteoric. Some years after his fifthgrade debut in Oedipus , Townsend worked with Chicago’s X-BAG (Experimental Black Actors Guild) and with Second City. In 1974 he got his ﬁrst movie role—two lines of dialogue as playground punk in Cooley High—followed nine years later by a more substantial part in Walter Hill’s Streets of Fire . Immediately afterward came the role of the wisecracking jeep driver in Soldier’s Story, and suddenly the

Robert Townsend with Hollywood Shuﬄ e costar Stephanie Williams NATE BELLAMY/CONQUERING UNICORN, INC.

Jimmy Woodard and Robert Townsend COURTESY THE SAMUEL GOLDWYN COMPANY

years of shu ing in New York and Hollywood, of bit parts and TV commercials, looked like they were about to pay o .

“I had all this money in the bank from Streets of Fire and Soldier’s Story,” recalls Townsend. “My friends were asking, ‘What are you gonna do? Get a Porsche, a townhouse?’ But I was happy where I was living and my Mustang was still running. What I really wanted to do was act. My agent told me there were no roles, nothing was happening. So, I said, ‘Why don’t we create something? All these people bitching and moaning about no work, why don’t we make our own movie?’ Everybody said it was a big mistake: ‘You’ve never made a movie, you didn’t go to ﬁlm school, you’re going to waste your money.’ But it was my money. I told them I’d get more joy out of watching out-of-focus dailies than driving around all day in a BMW doing nothing.”

“So in the fall of ’84 I withdrew some money and shot the first scenes of the movie—the ‘Sam Ace’ private eye spoof in black-andwhite. I liked the way it looked so I took out some more money. At the time the TV critics had just blasted a film I liked and I was thinking, we need our own critics, brothers that will tell us what these movies really are about. So that’s when my partner, Keenen Wayans, and I wrote ‘Sneaking Into the Movies.’ About this time too I had gotten a string of auditions for some really bad movies. My agent would call and say, ‘Hey, Robert, there’s a slave role on North and South, a pimp on Hill Street Blues, a mugger on Cagney and Lacey.’ I figured they should have a school for this kind of stu , so that’s when we came up with the idea for ‘Black Actor’s School.’” Townsend’s ideas soon exceeded his bank account. Cash from a few more film parts helped out—in American Flyers, Odd Jobs, and Ratboy—as did the short ends of film stock he was able to mooch from the moviemakers. Then one day a hideous temptation arrived in the mail—a preapproved application for a preferred Visa account.

but come on down to the Shell station and I’ll put gas in your car.’ ‘See those 20 cars?’ I’d tell the attendant. ‘Fill them up. Visa.’”

“It was crazy. But a lot of fun. We shot over a period of two years, but we rehearsed so much that I knew every second where everything was going to be when the cameras started rolling. A lot of times we had to steal locations, and you can go to jail for that in California. People say, ‘Why didn’t you hold that shot?

Why didn’t you zoom for another close-up?’ But they don’t know that the police were coming! I could be in jail! And I look at the movie now and say, ‘Ah, I should have! Oh, I would have!’ But it was my ﬁrst time out.

I hear Woody Allen reshoots

“I was going to toss them out,” says Townsend. “Then I said, ‘Wait a minute. I can finish the film on credit cards!’ I got on the phone to the Bank of Boston, Citicorp in New York. By the time I was ﬁnished, I had $40,000 in credit cards. What can’t you charge in this country? I racked up wardrobe, catering, ﬁlm stock. I would tell my cast, ‘I can’t pay you now

Reader Rewind

wigged, prancing gangbanger. Taylor’s plight is a framework for Townsend’s wild satirical imagination. As Taylor mopes in audition lines his daydreams of dread and grandeur spin off into sketches such as “Sam Ace,” “Black Actor’s School,” and “Chicago Jones.” The comedy is crude, outrageous, and often wickedly accurate, and only rarely does the manic energy of Townsend and his troupe fail to compensate for low production values and

the same movies,” he begins, ﬂashing through a rapid montage of Errol Flynn, James Cagney, and E.G. Robinson. “When I got to Hollywood I said, ‘Yeah! I’m gonna play those parts!’ But then they tell me, ‘Townsend, the butler on page five.’ The butler? Cagney never played the butler!

“Then I saw the movies with new eyes. I’d see Bogie come out—‘That’s right, sweetheart, I’m the tough guy in this movie.’ But then the Black guy would come in and say, ‘Yo wan’ me t’ git th’ luggage? An’thin else yo be needin’, suh?’ And I gotta play that part? Oh, man! Well I’ll do that part a couple of times, but I want to play the Bogart role, too.”

Things are bad in Hollywood, one has to admit, but haven’t they improved somewhat since Bogart’s time? Townsend shakes his head. “I’d like to say so,” he replies. “But Bill Cosby is only a half hour on Thursday night. Richard Pryor and Eddie Murphy do movies, but how come you never see them with any Black friends or family? Except for Soldier’s Story, The Color Purple , and Native Son , what else is there? Muggers, rapists, and pimps. The image hasn’t changed.”

50 percent of his movies. I couldn’t; my credit cards were overcharged.”

For a ﬁlm ﬁnanced with plastic, Hollywood Shuffle is pretty impressive—sufficiently so at any rate to convince its distributor, Sam Goldwyn, to pay Townsend’s Visa bill. Loosely autobiographical, it is the story of struggling Black actor Bobby Taylor, who longs to play Lear and Superman and ‘Rambro’ but gets stuck trying out for roles as a fright-

bad taste. One such lapse is Townsend’s characterization of gays as ﬂamboyant hairdressers and bodybuilders in tutus, an indiscretion that seems particularly out of place in a ﬁlm attacking stereotypes.

Townsend is a bit deﬂated by this subject. “With comedy,” he says carefully, “you have to take chances. I just do what I think is funny. I don’t mean to o end people but if I worried about all the people I might o end I’d never make anybody laugh. I like comedy because I’m a comedian. But that’s not what the movie is all about. I made the movie to show Hollywood’s insensitivity and the pain of an actor’s responsibility. It’s based on our lives as actors. We’d go to auditions and read each other the lines from the script: ‘I ain’t be got no weapons.’ We would just laugh. ‘Yo’ mama! wha’s happeninnn, bro?’ Who talks like that? We don’t talk like that!”

He is warming up again. A button is pushed and Townsend is on. “We’ve all grown up with

“Even a movie like Platoon,” continues Townsend, his mask of seriousness breaking into the grin of the kid with a ﬁnger on the remote control. “I mean, it was a good movie, but those Black guys, I’m sorry, they’re stereotypes. I call it the ‘Father Knows Best as a pimp’ type. You got Charlie Sheen, he’s so straight [switch to Sheen’s excruciatingly Caucasian earnestness] ‘Why . . . why do they . . . treat people like that? Why are things . . . like that?’ And the brother is always like [cut to older and wiser Black grunt cooing between tokes on a hash pipe] ‘Heeyyyy, bebbee . . . this is NAAAMMM, joon-yuh! This what it be like. . . . Let me educate you, junior . . .’” The show goes on, from Ward Cleaver on drugs to sly informers warning Spenser to watch his coattails, as Townsend gleefully exposes one crass Hollywood cliche after another. The laughter is liberating and suggests that maybe by playing with stereotypes, we can slip from their bonds. v

m letters@chicagoreader.com

Top: Townsend and friends during the Hollywood Shuﬄ e years; Bottom: Robert Townsend with costar Helen Martin and friend NATE BELLAMY/CONQUERING UNICORN, INC.

Well, fellow moviegoers, it’s the last column of 2024. I’d ask how we got here, but life careens forth on the same principle as cinema: movement and light. To understand how one proceeds is to have a general understanding of the other, so, just as I understand the principle by which a nine-hour Wang Bing ﬁlm can seem to move so quickly, so too does it follow that this year has both been so long and moved so fast.

To that end (pun intended), I’ll be folding my annual year-end repertory roundup into this column. As with previous years, this list basically encapsulates my favorite moviegoing experiences of the past 12 months, sans anything new. (For those wondering, I will publish a year-end list of my favorite new releases for Cine-File early next year.)

10. King Vidor’s Stella Dallas (1937) at the Nitrate Picture Show at the George Eastman Museum in Rochester, New York, June 1

I went, I saw, I cried, I cried, I cried.

9. Julius-Amédée Laou’s French Wedding Caribbean Style (2002) at the Film Studies Center, February 16

Home video construct belies complicated familial tension.

Film editor Thelma Schoonmaker told me that as Martin Scorsese gets older, his favorite Powell and Pressburger ﬁlm has gone from being The Red Shoes to Colonel Blimp. I see the appeal of both now.

5. Mike Nichols’s The Birdcage (1996), presented by Rated Q and Ramona Slick at the Music Box Theatre, June 20

“Yes, I wear foundation. Yes, I live with a man. Yes, I’m a middle-aged fag. But I know who I am, Val. It took me 20 years to get here, and I’m not gonna let some idiot senator destroy that. Fuck the senator, I don’t give a damn what he thinks.”

4. Paul Vecchiali’s The Strangler (1970) at the Music Box Theatre, January 8 / Paul Vecchiali’s Femmes femmes (1974) at Doc Films, November 7

Neurotic fairy tales of the French underground.

8. Whit Stillman’s The Last Days of Disco (1998) at the Gene Siskel Film Center as part of MUBI Fest, August 17

“Disco will never be over. It will always live in our minds and hearts. Something like this, that was this big, and this important, and this great, will never die.”

7. Peter Weir’s Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (2003), presented by the Chicago Film Society at the Music Box Theatre, May 2

Machismo meets its match on the high seas.

6. Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s The Red Shoes (1948) and The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943) at the Gene Siskel Film Center, October

3. Experimental screenings of the works of James Benning at Doc Films, Stan Brakhage at Sweet Void Cinema, and Tom Rubnitz at the Onion City Experimental Film Festival and Music Box of Horrors

Form without plot.

2. Kinuyo Tanaka, Actress and Auteur series at Doc Films, March–May

The ﬁrsts are often the best.

1. Dangerous Business: Elaine May Matinees at the Music Box Theatre, November

“Telling the truth can be dangerous business / Honest and popular don’t go hand in hand.”

Until next year, moviegoers! —KAT SACHS v

The Moviegoer is the diary of a local ﬁlm bu , collecting the best of what Chicago’s independent and underground ﬁlm scene has to o er.

still from The Strangler (1970)

FILM

RThe Fire Inside

The Fire Inside tells the story of real-life boxing legend Claressa “T-Rex” Shields, who became the first woman to win an Olympic gold medal in boxing. Written by Barry Jenkins (2016’s Moonlight) and directed by Rachel Morrison (cinematographer on 2017’s Mudbound and 2018’s Black Panther), the story follows Shields (Ryan Destiny) and coach Jason Crutchfield (Brian Tyree Henry) from Flint, Michigan, to the Olympics and back again. Destiny shines in a dynamic role as a boxer, sister, and daughter. Henry is simply an outstanding actor, so at ease even when frustrated, and he centers the film while serving as an anchor in Shields’s life. The film follows a predictable course up to her winning the gold medal, but Jenkins’s script wisely does not end at the Olympics. It shows the a ermath, as the protagonists struggle to get endorsements for Shields from companies not ready to support women athletes—namely badass boxers—who do not fit their gender-biased expectations (gymnasts or beach volleyball players). Morrison approaches her feature directorial debut with an artistic eye, lingering on shots of life in impoverished Flint, the town a central character in itself. Some of the dialogue, however, is almost laugh-out-loud silly, and Jenkins did not take enough time to explain any intricacy of the sport or coaching. At one moment during a gold-medal Olympic fight, Shields says, “What do I do?” which undermines her ability. Shields’s lauded fight for equality for women boxers gets a one-off line and onscreen text at the end of the film. —JOSH FLANDERS PG-13, 109 min. Wide release in theaters

R Nosferatu

No one denies it: F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror is still the gold standard for Dracula onscreen. This 1922 silent German expressionist ﬁlm—an unauthorized riﬀ on Bram Stoker’s Dracula—harnessed the macabre tale of desire and despair from the 1897 novel. By turning Count Dracula into the grotesque Count Orlok and moving the story to a German town, Murnau created something entirely its own. Despite

lawsuits and near extinction, Nosferatu survived—and its shadow still looms over every vampire ﬁlm made since.

An adaptation was previously undertaken by Werner Herzog (1979’s Nosferatu the Vampyre) and with The Witch (2015), The Lighthouse (2019), and The Northman (2022) under his belt, director Robert Eggers daringly follows in these footsteps. Eggers’s Nosferatu is predictably stylized—a cryptic horror that gradually leverages its score and pallid lighting to cultivate a grand, disquieting epic. It does so with Ellen (the Mina Murray character from Stoker’s novel, played by Lily-Rose Depp) in the foreground.

“Come to me,” Ellen calls out in a sleepwalking state. Her call is answered by a brutish voice, and in a second, a communion between the melancholic girl and a demon takes place in the outside garden. This nightmare haunts Ellen to the present—1838 in the ﬁctional German port town of Wisborg. There, she’s comforted by her new husband, Thomas Hutter (Nicholas Hoult), a too-sincere property man.

This comfort is cut short. Hutter’s boss, a certain suspicious Herr Knock (Simon McBurney), sends him to the Carpathian Mountains to help secure a property for Count Orlok in Wisborg. Bill Skarsgård’s rendition of the vampire is unlike any predecessor: he’s a brute with a bushy mustache who looms just out of focus for most of the ﬁlm. A rising king of horror, Skarsgård makes sure to put his stamp on this legacy.

The narrative unfolds with all the classic Dracula checkpoints—a feverish account from Hutter to the vampire’s trip on the Demeter. It’s interspersed with tributes to the yearning vampire in Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992) and the fear of the plague featured in the original silent film. It’s fair to say Eggers is juggling a lot, and it’s these influences that pull the film apart at times; it o en clumsily balances the absurdity and horror of its predecessors.

Yet, it’s the actors who pull together Nosferatu Thanks to a career-making performance by Depp, Ellen is at the heart of this forlorn nightmare—it’s a performance that pulls its audience deeply into this sinister love aﬀair. —MAXWELL RABB R, 133 min. Wide release in theaters v

The Fire Inside AMAZON/MGM STUDIOS

Recommended and notable shows with critics’ insights for the week of December 26

b ALL AGES F

FRIDAY27

Footwork veterans Teklife gather an all-star lineup to sweat out the Empty Bottle

RP BOO, DJ SPINN, HEAVEE, THE ERA, DJ JALEN Fri 12/27, 9 PM, Empty

CHICAGO CREW TEKLIFE formed in 2011, and they’ve thrived as an electronic dance collective, fashion brand, and record label with footwork as the group’s impenetrable core. Founders DJ Rashad (aka Rashad Harden, who died in 2014) and DJ Spinn (aka Morris Harper) met as teens in the mid-90s and bonded over the DJ mixes they’d hear on the radio and at local parties and roller rinks; they quickly recruited scene veteran and party-circuit mainstay DJ Gant-Man into their budding collective. At that time, a fast, gritty form of house was evolving into ghetto house—a subgenre whose sample-based tracks used raunchy lyrics, loads of repetition, and tempos pushing north of 140 bpm—and in turn it spawned footwork and juke. As these new sounds grew in popularity, competitive dancers would gather to battle one another to the music. From early on, Teklife understood a crucial party rule: every event needs a DJ, dancers, and banging tunes. For decades now, the crew’s

members have been providing those necessary elements in a quintessentially Chicago way—many of them got their start even before Teklife. In the late 90s, I lived on the south side, where footworking was an inescapable part of growing up. My cousins and I went to the Rink on 87th Street quite a bit as teenagers, where we’d dance our hearts out and leave with our clothes drenched in sweat. Fast-forward to March 2024, when I randomly ended up at an afterparty in Missouri and to my surprise discovered that Teklife legend RP Boo was performing. Though I’m much older now, I still got out on the ﬂoor. The vibes hit as hard as ever, and I couldn’t have been prouder to be from Chicago that night.

The hometown heroes of Teklife have brought together RP Boo, DJ Spinn, Heavee, footwork dance collective the Era, and DJ Jalen at the Empty Bottle for a night that’s sure to make for a steamy, cathartic, and therapeutic way to juke away the end of 2024. —CRISTALLE

Dave East DJ Mustafa Rocks spins. 10 PM, the Promontory, 5311 S. Lake Park Ave. West, $40, $50 table seating, $100 meet and greet. 21+

New York City rapper Dave East delivers verses like a freight train—just as a train is unassuming and familiar in its bulk and speed, his performances have a powerful momentum that’s belied by his restrained persona and low-humming voice. He’s understated on the mike. Though he isn’t one to raise his voice, he can still give every syllable sharp definition, and his light rasp lends gravitas to his straightforward lyrics. East is often most effective when he’s most blunt: “Them homicides left me traumatized / Seen mamas cry / Still surprised, asked how I’m alive,” he raps as a parting thought on “Can’t Even Know.” That track appears on the May release Apt 6E , an album that pairs him with Los Angeles beat makers Mike & Keys—one of three full-length collaborations East issued in 2024. He sandwiched Apt 6E between February’s For the Love (where he worked with New York DJ and producer Scram Jones) and November’s Living Proof (a collaboration with Rhode Island–based producer AraabMuzik). The alluring, menacing nighttime glamor of Living Proof casts East’s hard-won grit in sharp relief, and the contrast makes him sound bigger and bolder—even though he hasn’t changed lanes himself.

—LEOR GALIL

Teklife See Pick of the Week at le . This showcase by Chicago crew Teklife features performances by RP Boo, DJ Spinn, Heavee, footwork collective the Era, and DJ Jalen. 9 PM, Empty Bottle, 1035 N. Western, $10. 21+

SATURDAY28

m.e.h. 9 and 11 PM, Dorian’s Through the Record Shop, 1939 W. North, $10. 21+

Chicago R&B singer Megan Hammond, better known as m.e.h., delivers searching lyrics as though she’s already figured out what to do. With her steadfast poise and voluptuous voice, she balances confidence and vulnerability, which gives her music a disarming sincerity. In August, Hammond self-released the two-song EP Coup de Grâce , where she handles stylistically slippery instrumentals as easily as the workers at the Pike Place Fish Market toss big king salmon to each other. With its lithe, buttery guitar melody and gently bustling percussion, “Thrill Is Gone” borrows nonchalant cool from hip-hop and luxurious glamour from R&B, and Hammond’s performance moves between regimented rapping and swooning singing. Her knack for genre blending has brought her into the orbits of bigger artists on similar paths: she opened for Smino at Metro in April and for TheMIND at Sleeping Village earlier this month. This isn’t Hammond’s first set at chic Wicker Park speakeasy Dorian’s, but I suspect it’ll seen get much more difficult to catch her in a space this intimate. —LEOR GALIL

BOWEN

TEKLIFE SHOWCASE:

Bottle, 1035 N. Western, $10. 21+

The Teklife crew showcase includes (from left) Heavee, RP Boo, DJ Spinn, the Era (represented here by P-Top, Steelo, Litebulb, and Chief Manny), and DJ Jalen. COURTESY THE ARTIST

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