26 minute read
Quad
from Spring 2016
The campus scoop.
PLAYING PAST PREJUDICE
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Athletes explore racial identity as minorities in their sport.
BY DANIEL HERSH
Athletic development starts at a young age. Offensive lineman Ian Park was six when he started playing. Nandi Mehta started travel soccer in seventh grade. Symone Abbott first picked up a volleyball at age 10. Brandon Medina was 5 years old when he stepped onto a soccer field.
For these four Northwestern students, racial prejudice influenced their lives as athletes; however, most of the racial and cultural obstacles they faced took place in their childhood, before they arrived at college. At Northwestern, the narrative has become more nuanced. These athletes experience race uniquely as one of, or the only, member of their race on their respective team.
Protests at the University of Missouri this past fall sparked conversations about race and inclusion on college campuses across the country. When Mizzou’s football team stood in solidarity with Black students and refused to play, protests involving racial discrimination distinctly wove their way into athletics.
At Northwestern, athletics and protests mixed differently. Protesters wanting to stop the proposed reductions to the Black House interrupted the dedication of the new athletic facilities at the Henry Crown Sports Pavilion. One of the biggest issues in this year’s ASG presidential election was the experience of marginalized groups on campus. But do these same conversations on race and inclusion follow athletes onto the playing fields? stories demonstrate the stereotyping, discrimination and cultural barriers they’ve had to overcome to get to where they are today.
Symone Abbott Volleyball Communication Sophomore
Everyone wanted Symone Abbott to play basketball. From her dad to her gym teacher, everyone assumed a tall, athletic Black girl would. Not volleyball.
“[My dad] was like, ‘It’s in your culture. I played basketball, your mom played basketball, you should be playing basketball,’” Abbott says.
The pressure started early in fifth grade gym class, when students chose basketball, floor hockey, juggling and more. Abbott
chose juggling. Her teacher asked her why she did not choose to play basketball.
“He just assumed I would go over there,” Abbott says. “That just kind of let me know maybe I should start fitting into that, and then I tried it and hated it.”
As she got into volleyball in middle school and joined a club team, her coaches did not bother developing her skills after they saw her 6-foot frame.
“They just looked at ‘Okay, she’s tall, she’s Black, she can jump, we should just put her in the middle,’” Abbott says. “That kind of put me at a disadvantage when it comes to learning the all-around game, because they just threw me in the middle and didn’t worry about teaching me.”
Abbott soon realized she was not going to be tall enough to play middle in college – most players are at least 6-foot- 2 – so she asked her coaches to move her to the outside. They refused, which forced Abbott to change clubs altogether.
At the next club, Abbott refined her game and became a dominant outside hitter, propelling her to the Northwestern team, where she has been in the starting lineup since she was a freshman.
Like almost every other volleyball team she has played on, she is the only Black player out of 15.
“They think I’m like the guru when it comes to Black culture,” Abbott says. “I really don’t know that much, but I get a lot of questions.”
The questions took a much more serious tone in fall 2015, after activists protesting the proposed renovations to the Black House interrupted the dedication of the new athletic facilities at the Henry Crown Sports Pavilion.
“Of course, me and my team talked about it. They just want to know if I felt like that, and I said, ‘No, I don’t,’” Abbott
Brandon Medina
says. “Athletes really don’t feel the brunt of it if there is a lot of racial things going on out there because we are athletes.”
As two-time captain of the women’s soccer team and one of Northwestern’s representatives on the Big Ten Student- Athlete Advisory Committee, the conference’s student athlete government, Nandi Mehta has turned into one of the school’s most distinguished student athletes. The senior midfielder stands out not only for her leadership skills, but also on the field as an Indian athlete, an ethnicity that is rarely represented in soccer in the U.S.
Mehta grew up playing on predominantly white teams for both her high school and her club. When she was younger, she didn’t face the same kind of stereotyping that several other athletes
interviewed for this story experienced – Mehta says it’s because there are so few Indian athletes in general.
“Honestly, probably in the sense with [Abbott], there are stereotypical sports that Black people play, and it’s not like that for Indian people,” Mehta says.
But there was familial pressure for her to not play soccer at all. Mehta’s grandfather, who was born in a small town in the state of Gujarat, India, was opposed to her playing soccer as anything more than a hobby.
“The idea of anybody playing a sport that seriously, that didn’t exist in India at that time, especially not for girls. That’s unheard of,” Mehta says.
Despite her grandfather’s wishes, Mehta’s parents encouraged their children to play sports. They saw how happy she and her younger sister were in athletics and let them pursue their passions as intensely as they wanted.
The two eventually became collegiate athletes: one soccer player and one equestrian. In both sports, the Mehta sisters were always the only Indians on the field. That changed for Mehta this fall when she got an Indian teammate, freshman Simmrin Dhaliwal.
“I was really excited when I found out that Simmrin was coming,” Mehta says.
Mehta’s presence helped put Dhaliwal’s parents at ease when their daughter transitioned from high school to Northwestern. Because both sets of parents grew up in India and lacked first-hand knowledge of the American college experience, they struggled to fully understand the importance placed on collegiate athletics.
“Having me on this team and having gone through it gave [Dhaliwal’s parents] a sense of comfort,” Mehta says. “They knew that somebody has gone through it, and it’s going to be okay.”
In order to see more Indian athletes and more diversity in general on playing fields around the country, Mehta says that the integration needs to start at a younger age.
“It has to be like an Indian family getting their kid into sports, Black people playing volleyball and ice hockey and things like that,” she says. “I think the more that happens, the more you bridge cultures.”
Brandon Medina was born in Mexico City and moved to Chicago when he was 5 years old. He is one of only two Latino players on the Northwestern soccer team; Cuban goalkeeper and Weinberg sophomore Francisco Tomasino is the other. The pair is two of a small number of Latino Northwestern athletes in general.
“For soccer, it’s kind of weird, especially for a team in Chicago—there’s obviously a strong Latino population, and we do recruit a lot in California and Texas—to not have more Latino presence [on our team],” Medina says.
While not yet an American citizen (he is currently a permanent resident and plans on getting his official citizenship in the next year or so), Medina considers himself both Mexican and American.
“Sometimes I actually yell [on the field] in Spanish,” he says. “The Northwestern guys look at me like ‘What the hell are you saying?’ I struggled with it a couple of times. For example, ‘man on,’ (te llegan) I say it in Spanish, or ‘turn’ (vuelta) or ‘pass me the ball’ (pásala). It’s really weird. Sometimes I’m trying to say it, but it doesn’t come out in English, and it doesn’t come out in Spanish, and it’s just gibberish.”
For the Latino soccer players who come to Northwestern, volunteer assistant coach Ovidio Felcaro can smooth the language dichotomy. He is a native of Argentina, who has been with the soccer team for 14 of Head Coach Tim Lenahan’s 15 seasons as coach.
“[Felcaro] speaks Spanish,” Lenahan says. “He’s been in constant contact over the years with Brandon’s father, and also can pull Brandon aside to talk in Spanish to provide that comfort.”
But Medina did not escape racist incidents growing up. With his club team in high school, he traveled down to a tournament in Georgia and played a team that consisted of mostly white players.
“They were saying ‘Go back to Mexico, go over the wall,’ kind of that thing. It’s kind of difficult because it’s the middle of the game and there’s always a lot of trash talking going on, but that was a bit out of it. You don’t usually hear racial stuff in the middle of a game.”
In college, he says the trash talk he hears during the game is directed more at the whole team and is along the lines of, “Northwestern, you guys don’t even know how to party.”
But at Northwestern, he found the lack of Latino athletes strange, especially in soccer, a sport with a typically larger Hispanic presence, a concern he raised to his head coach. Lenahan says in his experience, he has seen fewer Latino athletes at elite tournaments.
Another factor out of the team’s control is when recruited Latino athletes decide to commit to another school.
“I do remember there’s been a couple of times where we have tried to actively recruit Latinos on the team who would do a great job,” Medina says. “But for one reason or another, they decided to commit somewhere else.”
Ian Park
Football Communication Redshirt Junior
In the days leading up to one of his biggest games of the year against rival Bethel Park High School, then-high school senior offensive lineman Ian Park’s mind wasn’t on his half-white, half-Korean heritage — he was simply preparing for the matchup.
But one of his upcoming opponents, a trash-talking wide receiver, was thinking about Park’s race and posted about it on
his Facebook wall. Yeah, we’re gonna smack you guys. You’re a stupid chink. “That was basically it,” Park says. “Just that word. I remember that word.”
Park mentioned it to one of his friends, his friend told the principal and that player was suspended from the game.
“It’s just an insult based on where you come from and what you look like, it kind of gets to you,” Park says. “I try not to think about that and just play football.”
Racially charged trash-talk is not something new for Park: He has dealt with it on just about every stage of his career.
“As a whole, Asians don’t really have a big presence in football or many American sports,” he says. “They think all Asians are the same, a lot of stereotypes—being smart, all this kind of stuff, not being athletic.”
Park’s two brothers also have football experience at the collegiate level. His older brother, Alex, played quarterback at Dartmouth College from 2011-2014. “It was especially tough for my older brother, being quarterback. Especially anyone with some Asian ethnicity at QB, I feel like people weren’t sure what to think of him,” Park says. His other brother is an offensive lineman at Amherst College. While Park says his family never had any explicit talks about overcoming racism, his parents were always there for him whenever he was down or had a bad day.
“My brothers and I, we’ve always just tried to let our play do the talking,” Park says. “If you’re a good football player and people see that, they’ll put all biases aside, sometimes.”
Park says that most of the time at the college level, race has not come into play despite being one of the only Asians on the Northwestern football team.
“If I ever meet somebody that is Korean or Asian and they’re trying to play football, I immediately try to make a bond because there aren’t many of us out there,” he says.
TECHNICALDIFFICULTIES
BY ROSALIE CHAN
Growing interest in computer science strains department resources.
As a freshman, McCormick senior Nikhil Pai took the introductory Electronic Engineering and Computer Science programming course (EECS 111) with fewer than 120 other students. Now, the course has tripled in size – and, as an undergraduate, he is a teaching assistant for the class.
Computer science has exploded across all sectors of the economy, from Silicon Valley’s titans of tech to Wall Street and New York’s new media companies. Job-hungry students are streaming into Northwestern’s program faster than McCormick can manage.
“Over my years, I’ve had to fight to get into classes,” Pai says. “You have to talk to the professor and department people and convince them you need to be in the class. There’s a lot of stress getting into classes.”
In the 2007-08 school year, there were 61 computer science majors. Now, introductory classes alone have more than 100 students, and last year the number of majors swelled to 345. That’s just for those who want a full degree. Enrollment in all classes has grown from 710 students in 2007-08 to 3,790 students in 2014-15.
Northwestern is not unique in its growing program. According to the Computing Research Association, the number of new undergraduate majors in U.S. computer science departments rose about 18 percent in 2014.
“Computer science used to be seen as too nerdy of a topic,” says computer science professor Fabian Bustamánte. “I think some of that has gone away. The impact of computer science across the fields has become very noticed.”
High demand for classes and a low supply of resources, often shuts out undergraduate students from basic classes required for their major. Part of the problem has been the limited amount of faculty and enrollment slots, as well as graduate students’ higher registration priority.
To snag a spot, students say they often have to email professors and staff in the EECS department and explain that they need to take the class to graduate. McCormick sophomore Jimmy Song says that he was shut out from two introductory courses in Fall Quarter 2015 because they were full.
“I kind of regret doing computer science here,” Song says. “One of the big reasons is the school doesn’t have a lot of faculty.” However, he does plan on continuing the major.
To accommodate overflowing classes, Northwestern turned to undergraduate TAs – formally called peer mentors – in a rare but not unheard of practice across different schools at NU. Last quarter Pai was one of 18 peer mentors for EECS 111.
In response to overcrowding, the computer science department started to play catch-up. This quarter marks the first time that computer science majors are able to pre-register for classes, allowing them to grab spots before graduate students. Both Horswill and Bustamánte also say that the EECS department will hire more professors in the near future. Kyle Delaney, executive director of Strategic Initiatives and Marketing, confirmed that McCormick will announce some new initiatives for computer science in May, but could not comment further.
Many undergraduates are concerned that changes won’t come in time to help them.
“It might be great if they hire 20 professors in four years, but I’ll have graduated by then,” Weinberg junior Haley De Boom says.
Part of the problem is a lack of doctoral candidates, Bustamánte says. Earning a Ph.D. in computer science takes four to six years, and the number of Ph.D.s hasn’t caught up to the recent boom.
Students hope Northwestern will be able to build a program fast enough to accommodate growing interest, including Alaina Kafkes, a Weinberg junior studying computer science.
“We want to create an infrastructure to hold more students not deter them from staying in the department.”
Beyond the ballot box
International students follow the election cycle.
BY SOPHIE STEIN
“Those [who live] outside of America want to believe in the freedom that America promises. It’s freedom, or the idea of it, that makes America great … not the ideas Trump promotes,” says Neha Rashid, Medill sophomore of NU-Q, in an email. It’s this freedom that Rashid, who grew up in Qatar, fears she might lose if Donald Trump wins the presidential election in November.
Rashid is one of many Northwestern students who, though they aren’t U.S. citizens, have begun to pay an increasing amount of attention to the 2016 election cycle.
“I always joke that we should be able to vote, because we pay the price for the U.S. electing the wrong president as much as, if not more than, U.S. citizens do,” says Michal Massoud, a Lebanese graduate student in Bienen. He adds that the U.S. election makes him concerned for his family members, who still live in Lebanon.
“It’s been really hard there, even though Obama’s been trying to clean up the acts of the people who came before him,” he says. “It takes one U.S. president, and the next thing you know you have a war [in Iraq]
that lasts almost 20 years, and hundreds and thousands of people [are] dead.”
NU-Q Medill junior Faizan Shakir follows politics for a similar reason: After living in the U.S. for a scant three months, he’s realized the vast extent of the United States’ political impact overseas.
“[My] newfound enthusiasm for American politics was the realization that we live in a global landscape where America is deeply entrenched in most political decisions,” Shakir says in an email. “As an overseas Pakistani, I feel that my life will probably be affected more by the type of regime in America than Pakistan.”
Other students, however, don’t feel as closely connected to America’s current election cycle. Some students from Europe and Canada only follow American politics to the extent that it’s become a major focus of foreign media.
“In Canada, we pay close attention to American politics … in a pop-culture sense,” says Bienen junior Chris Fenje. Trump gets more airtime than Trudeau … It’s entertaining.”
Others feel alienated by U.S. political ideology, claiming U.S. policies operate on a conservative value system and that the electoral process seems flawed by design.
“For me, it feels like the whole spectrum of American politics is lifted up and shifted further over to the right,” says Christopher Bennett, an Australian graduate student in Bienen. “Your left wing is significantly more right than ours.”
Another reason for Bennett’s lack of interest in the election cycle is that he’s only lived in Evanston for a year, and he doesn’t intend to live or work in the U.S. after he finishes his degree.
“I came here for an education; I came here so that I could further myself,” Bennett says. “Really, it’s a bit selfish, but I kind of don’t care.”
Shakir, on the other hand, argues that regardless of his personal ineligibility to vote, he feels obliged to follow U.S. politics because the impact of the country’s policies reach far beyond its borders.
“An American president is powerful not just because of their executive powers,” he says, “but because of their ability to set the agenda for the world to discuss.”
A league of their own
Former Northwestern athletes fill first women’s semi-professional lacrosse league.
BY WILL FISCHER
When Alyssa Leonard graduated from Northwestern, she wasn’t sure if she would ever play lacrosse again. Without a professional league for women, people always told her that she would have to find another job after college. While Leonard (SESP ‘14) was one of the lucky 36 players named to the U.S. national team in 2015, everyone else had to hang up their cleats after college graduation – until now.
The first ever professional women’s lacrosse league, the United Women’s Lacrosse League (UWLX), will debut this summer, giving dozens more women the chance to continue playing the sport they love whileopening new professional pathways for a generation of female athletes.
For Leonard, the league serves as validation after everyone told her she couldn’t play professionally, words that motivated rather than discouraged her.
“I think that’s something that’s inspired me to stay in coaching and play for the U.S. team and now the professional league,” Leonard says. “It’s kind of funny to turn around and [show] all those people who said there’s no such thing as sports for girls after college, that here we are.”
The UWLX comes 15 years after Major League Lacrosse, the major men’s professional league – an example of the ongoing battle for equality in athletics. Previously, the only option for female athletes hoping to stay involved after college was coaching or joining the U.S. national team. So when UWLX commissioner Michelle DeJulius called Caitlin Jackson (Comm ‘09), who won four national championships in her time at Northwestern, and asked her to be a general manager in the new league, Jackson knew she had to take the job.
Force, Long Island Sound, Boston Storm and Baltimore Ride, will compete from May 28 to July 30. Featuring the sport’s top talent and new rules designed to make play quicker and more exciting such as a shot clock and the two-point shot from beyond the arc, the league will showcase a more dynamic brand of women’s lacrosse.
Teams will play at many of the major college lacrosse recruiting tournaments this summer, including the opening games at Lehigh University, where 70 high school teams from across the nation will also be participating in the the U.S. Lacrosse Women’s National Tournament. Jackson says the proximitywill help bridge the gap between the youth, collegiate and professional levels, encouraging girls to strive for a career in women’s lacrosse.
“If a 14-year-old girl can show up to a large recruiting tournament and see her biggest role model in lacrosse up front, close and personal, that’s huge for the growth of the sport,” Jackson says. “[You’re] able to really see your future within the game.”
The league will not be able to offer players salaries in its first year, Jackson says, but through ticket sales and sponsorship revenue, players should have paychecks by year two. But for most, it’s not about the money – they just want to play the sport they love again, a thought that gives Communication senior Kaleigh Craig hope.
“The thought of not playing anymore is really hard,” Craig says. “I just love competing and love playing, so if you get a chance to, it’s hard to pass it up.”
Players and coaches hope the creation of a professional league where women pursue their athletic dreams will resonate beyond the sport of lacrosse.
“There really aren’t a whole ton of venues for women who want to go into athletics as a career,” Jackson says. “To be able to create jobs that allow someone coming out of college who can then move forward in their career, that’s really big. That’s bigger than just lacrosse.”
UNITED WOMEN’S LACROSSE LEAGUE ROSTER OF WILDCATS
CAITLIN JACKSON (‘09)
General Manager of Philadelphia Force Four-time national champion defender
SHANNON SMITH (‘12)
Head coach of Long Island Sound Three-time national champion attacker NU’s all-time leading goal scorer (254)
ALEX FRANK (‘12)
Assistant coach of Long Island Sound Three-time national champion midfielder
ALYSSA LEONARD (‘14)
Assistant coach of Long Island Sound Three-time national champion midfielder
BROOKE MATTHEWS (‘11)
Sixth overall pick to Long Island Sound Two-time national champion attacker Graduated as NCAA all-time leader in draw controls (469)
KARA MUPO (‘15)
11th overall draft pick to Philadelphia Force Two-time national champion attacker
BRIDGET BIANCO (‘15)
15th overall draft pick to Philadelphia Force One-time national champion goalie
KATRINA DOWD (‘10)
30th overall draft pick Long Island Sound Three-time national champion attacker
COLLEEN MAGARITY (‘11)
Selected by Boston Storm with the 40th overall draft pick Three-time national champion defender
HIGH NOTES
HIGH HOPES
Wildcats take on the Lyric Opera of Chicago.
BY MADELINE COE
Last spring, two Northwestern theater students shared a stage in downtown Chicago with Steven Pasquale, one of Broadway’s biggest stars. They owe this experience to Northwestern’s long-standing relationship with the Lyric Opera of Chicago.
In addition to the numerous performance opportunities available to vocalists on campus, Northwestern’s proximity to Chicago provides extra options for undergraduate musicians. For years, singers in both the Bienen School of Music and the School of Communication have taken on professional opera jobs while simultaneously performing in Evanston and maintaining a full course load. These students often find their first jobs at the Lyric.
As Bienen senior Caitlin Finnie finishes up her degree in vocal performance, she’s also singing in the Lyric’s production of The King and I. The show opened April 29 and ran until May 22. While Finnie says balancing performance at the Lyric with her schoolwork is immensely difficult, the job has helped reaffirm her conviction that she has chosen the right career path.
“I’ve always been the type of person who likes to sing to herself,” Finnie says. “I just can’t imagine doing anything else.”
Finnie’s experience at the National High School Institute, a Northwestern summer program she attended at age 15, solidified her passion for performance. Now 21, Finnie has been involved in countless student productions on campus, including Little Women and Ruddigore. Frequent trips to the Lyric with studentpriced tickets introduced Finnie to the
professional opera community in Chicago and encouraged her to audition for The King and I.
After an initial audition and a successful callback, Finnie accepted a role in the ensemble. She entered the professional world of opera, where she found a different sort of performance experience than Northwestern offers.
“The house is incredible and the costumes are so lavish,” Finnie says. “Just being on that stage is a dream.”
Finnie isn’t the only Northwestern student who has pursued professional opportunities downtown. Alyssa Sarnoff, Communication senior, has performed in two Lyric Opera shows, CAROUSEL and The Merry Widow, during her NU career. While there are many student theater performances on campus, a desire for deeper involvement draws students downtown.
While Sarnoff has valued all of her theater experiences on campus, she notes that at the professional level, “there is a different caliber of respect between cast and crew,” she says. “At the Lyric, everything runs seamlessly. There are so many more resources.”
After attending a discussion with CAROUSEL Director Rob Ashford, Sarnoff decided to audition for a role in the show. This began a series of negotiations with NU professors in the hopes of balancing her chaotic schedule.
While she says many of her theater professors acknowledged the difficulty of her situation, given their firm belief that “experience is excused,” economics professors proved to be less understanding.
It took some rearranging and deliberating, but Sarnoff was able to create a schedule that could keep her enrolled as a full-time student while she worked professional hours.
Closer to the show, rehearsals can go as long as nine hours, six days a week, putting extreme physical strain on performers’ bodies. Sarnoff says she basically could not attend class for the two weeks prior to opening night because of the long hours and the need to prioritize sleep for her health’s sake.
Finnie ran into similar scheduling conflicts with The King and I, for which four hours of rehearsal was considered a “light day.”
“You know your role, you know how much you can take,” Finnie says. “We are encouraged to mark often, continually hydrate and get as much sleep as we can … as difficult as that is.”
Communication junior Rosie Jo Neddy, who performed in CAROUSEL as an ensemble member, also had to tackle the difficulties of creating a flexible schedule.
“It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done,” Neddy says. “Spring break [rehearsal] week was thrilling. My only job was to take care of myself so I could be at my best for the hours when I was at work. I fell in love with the lifestyle. Then classes started.”
Apart from the time crunch, all three women agreed that working at the Lyric was one of the most fulfilling experiences they’ve had.
“I learned more in three weeks of CAROUSEL than I have in any class,” Sarnoff says. “It snaps you into this professional reality.”
Rosie Jo Neddy (opposite) sings in this year's Waa-Mu show, Another Way West. Neddy has also appeared on stage at the Lyric Opera of Chicago.
A cinematic shift
Student film crew explores untold Katrina narrative in New Orleans.
BY MALLOY MOSELEY
Moving continents is a gargantuan feat, an incremental process that takes millennia. Abstracting this process, Communication senior Olivia Peace wrote and directed the film Pangaea, exploring a young girl’s attempt to rationalize Hurricane Katrina.
The film, shot in a style of documentary filmmaking called “cinéma vérité,” is set days after the 2005 natural disaster. The 6-year-old protagonist, unnamed in the film, uses her brother’s explanation of how the continents formed from the landmass Pangaea to understand the force of nature that has unfolded in front of her.
While Peace says her film explores childhood more than it does Blackness, the story unfolds in Treme, a predominantly Black neighborhood in New Orleans.
“From the beginning,” Peace says, “I knew I wanted people of color in the forefront.”
Initially, Peace was unsure what this might look like, so she began to investigate the stories she didn’t remember seeing in the news when the hurricane hit. She thought of the children who Katrina impacted, and the fact that many of them would be around her age now.
As her vision for the movie expanded, Peace scratched her original idea of shooting on a roof in Evanston and instead set her sights on New Orleans. Most Northwestern-funded student films shoot in northern Illinois or nearby Wisconsin, but few have attempted to film nearly 1,000 miles away.
Peace approached Ethan Senser, the Communication senior who went on to produce the film, with an early idea at the beginning of this past fall. The two spent much of Fall Quarter reading about individuals impacted by the traumas of Hurricane Katrina. Peace was initially struck by how few mainstream narratives of Katrina concentrated on people’s experiences in the poorer wards in New Orleans, so she and Senser looked to
the work of journalists, survivors and psychologists to create a picture of the tragedy through a child’s eyes.
“It seemed like there was a lot of media distortion,” Peace says, adding that listening to podcasts during the research process was a liberating experience. “There’s so much more than just people crying. For the first time, it felt like I was hearing a lot of personal stories.”
Once they completed their research, it became a matter of Peace and Senser working out the logistics. Moving the equipment was one of the biggest obstacles, Senser says, but he made sure the ninestudent crew and the Northwestern RTVF equipment traveled safely to New Orleans. This was the first time undergraduate students had taken Northwestern’s film equipment so far away.
Although the hurricane happened more than 10 years ago, the impact on the neighborhood was still palpable when they arrived. Peace and her crew could even see water lines left on rooftops around one of the neighborhoods where they shot.
For Peace, communicating the youthful perspective was an important part of making this movie. The vitality of her lead child actress, Raeghan Keys, captured it. To further convey the lens children use when viewing the world, she includes animated scenes in the film, a vision she shares with Senser.
“You see the politics, the environment, the news – what you don’t see is what that might be like for a kid living through it, that was something we wanted to address and achieve through the film,” Senser says.
Pangaea will screen on Northwestern’s campus through Studio 22 on June 4 and Inspire Media at the end of the quarter. Peace then plans to take it on the festival circuit.
“I hope the audience can feel the love and care when we’re done,” Peace says.
FROM LEFT TO RIGHT: Crew members Ashley Mills, Jeremy Le, Ethan Senser and Olivia Peace, on the set of Pangaea.
BY CAROLYN TWERSKY
Al’s Deli has a palpable French flare: Pictures of Parisian landmarks line its walls, and smells of freshly baked baguettes waft from its kitchen out to a long line of customers. Sandwiched between the Coffee Lab and Tomate Fresh Kitchen, Al’s deli has been a Noyes street staple for over 65 years.
Owners and brothers Bob and John Pottinger wear their mutual love of Paris on the sleeves of their matching white aprons.
“We’re both terrible Francophiles, so as soon as we started running the business we started doing all sorts of French things here,” says Bob, co-owner of Al’s. “It’s a niche that we fill and we’re also doing what’s in our heart.”
Bob and John’s father, Al, was a chef in the Navy during World War II. After coming home to Evanston, he worked in a nearby grocery store until the empty space on Noyes Street opened. In 1949, he decided he wanted to run a grocery store of his own and opened up Al’s Deli.
“It was supposed to be temporary, but you know how temporary things go in family businesses,” Bob says of his job at Al’s. “So I’ve been here for 45 years.”
In the beginning, Al’s was a gourmet grocery market, and the deli did not have a very imaginative menu.
When Bob joined the team after graduating from college, he decided to add his own personal touch to the menu. “When my brother John and I came on board, the main sandwich that we sold here was roast beef on white bread with lettuce, tomato and mayonnaise,” Bob says.
A French deli seemed like the obvious solution for the Pottinger brothers, who both discovered a passion for Paris at a young age. Bob fell in love with the city after watching a short film called The Red Balloon.
“It’s about a little boy in Paris who has a red balloon that follows him all around the city and he stops in a patisserie and gets a pastry,” Bob says. “It’s a wonderful little film and ever since then I’ve wanted to visit Paris.”
After years of hard work and saving, Bob now goes to Paris twice a year to explore the sights and tastes of his favorite city.
Because of Bob’s frequent visits to Paris, the Pottingers are willing to accept Euros at their store. So if you have a few extra coins lying around after studying abroad, the Pottingers will take them off your hands in exchange for a French treat.
“It’s a good deal for everybody,” Bob says. “I give a good exchange rate, and at the end of the day I just put them in my sock and when I head to Paris I have like a thousand Euros in my pocket, which is good walking around money. You can buy a lot of chocolate éclairs.”
Newsstand still standing
BY MIA ZANZUCCHI
The Chicago-Main Newsstand’s Depression-era neon sign glows in the shadow of the nearby ‘L’ stop. The store was almost a park, almost a coffeehouse, but against all odds, it’s still a fully functioning newsstand and a thriving historical landmark.
The same family owned and operated the newsstand from its opening in the 1930s until 1993, but the CTA owned the land and the City of Evanston owned the building itself. When the stand’s rent increased, the original owners closed the shop down and the building stood vacant for eight years. Current owner Joe Angelastri, who founded City Newsstand in Chicago in 1978, re-opened the stand in 2001.
Eight decades of print at Chicago-Main.
“Some of the businesses [in Evanston] knew about us,” Angelastri says. “We had a bit of areputation of being a big newsstand, and they called up and said, ‘Why don’t you come over here and see if you could open up this old newsstand and start running it again?’”
While the newsstandserves mostly Evanston residents, the occasional out-of-town shopper stops by,
both for eclectic magazines like Teddy Bear Times or Beads and Buttons, and for the novelty ofvisiting a newsstand in a digital age.
“There’s still a lot of interest in just getting away from the electronic screens, you know, holding something in your hands,” Eric Ismond, newsstandmanager, says. “It’s a different kind of experience. The feel of the paper, the kind
of reproduction of images, that kind of thing. It’s a different sensation of reading on paper versus reading on screen.”
But Chicago-Main Newsstand is still, for the most part, for the regulars. They tend to be older Evanston residents, who come in daily for daily newspapers or visit weekly or monthly to grab each issue of their favorite magazine. Commuters on the Purple Line stop by in the mornings, afternoons and early evenings on their way to and from work.
Fred Jennings is one of those loyal customers; Chicago-Main has been a part of his life since it was still under construction when he was 16 years old. He left Evanston as an adult, but when he moved back in 1989, he fell into the newsstand routine again. Now 74 years old, Jennings browses the newsstand about once a week, looking at photography magazines and whatever else catches his eye.
“It may feel different,” Jennings says. “But it’s still my favorite place to come.”
Another newsstand regular, Teresa Collins, moved to Evanston in 2012 and wandered into the stand one day. She tries to come by every other month to look around at canoeing, kayaking and gardening magazines.
“It’s a cool store,” Collins says. “I’m old, and I prefer to touch it, feel it, read it, hold it in my hands.”
Aside from obscure and niche publications like Chickens, Coin World and Veranda Magazine that regularly line the shelves, Chicago-Main stocks a few Evanston-centric books, including
Northwestern Wildcat Football, The ABCs of Evanston, and special editions of certain publications. They were also one of only a handful of American stores to sell the comeback issue of Charlie Hebdo following the January 2015 terrorist attack on the satirical newspaper. The day after President Barack Obama was elected in 2008, the stand sold hundreds of papers, with customers lined up outside the store waiting for multiple deliveries.
Ismond says that while prominent publications have gone out of business, moved online or switched to direct sales only and the amount of ads in magazines and papers has decreased, the stand is still as busy as ever.
“It’s becoming increasingly difficult with all the changes in the industry,” Angelastri says. “It’s not the heydays of ink and paper, but we think it’s still going to be here.”
