The long call of a spring robin woke me from a dream about Mother Jones. She was organizing my group to protest the nightmarish abolition of women’s rights, as in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale.
“I don’t march anymore. I can’t run!” I muttered in half-sleep.
I tugged to escape her visitation as I was tugging the covers to get up and contemplate the robin’s daybreak anthem. The common backyard robin is unusual along the Lake Michigan shoreline where I live. Its song is one of the few teachings I remember from my own mother.
I’d been to a Mother Jones birthday party at the Irish American Heritage Center in Chicago. Mary Harris Jones, born in County Cork in 1837, immigrated when she was ten years old. Her husband and four children all died of yellow fever in 1867. Four years later her dress-making shop was destroyed in the Great Chicago Fire. Undaunted, this fierce, five-foot-tall Irish American became an organizer for workers’ rights, particularly the United Mine Workers.
On May 1, 1886, there was a general strike for the eight-hour workday which led to the Haymarket Riot in Chicago. Mary Harris Jones declared her birth date as May 1, to honor the Haymarket Martyrs. Her exact birthday is unknown. Most records of peasants born in western and southern Ireland were lost or destroyed during the Irish Potato Famine (1845 to 1852). This is true of my own ancestry.
Mother Jones helped coordinate major strikes in the coal mines and on the railroads where my great-grandfather and great-uncles worked. Her protest marches included children who wore banners saying, “We Want to Go to School and Not to the Mines.” They could easily have been my relatives.
Women activists belittled her lack of commitment to women’s suffrage. She said “you don’t need the vote to raise hell!” Jones believed it was more important to advocate for the working class—black, white, men, women and children—than to support women’s causes alone.
Like Mother Jones’ family, my father’s forebearers were discriminated against due to their immigrant status, their Catholic faith, and their Irish heritage. The shame of the Irish hung heavy in their Kentucky and Indiana homes. But still, my father, fresh out of law school in the late 1930s, working for the United Mine Workers, wrote the first union pension legislation in the United States. And, family lore supposes his father, my grandfather, was a union organizer on the railroad.
When Mary Harris Jones turned 60, she began calling herself “Mother” Jones. She dressed in matronly black, wore old-fashioned hats and referred to the laborers she helped as “her boys.”
When I was 60, I took up offense for workers in my office. Wage inequality, discordant work assignments, and unfair discipline reeked of cruelty. In the end, I got canned, but their jobs were secured.
Like the robin wake-up call at dawn, Mother Jones calls from the graveyard and wakes me to the oppressed and wronged.
Jesus, my lifelong friend, accompanied me through chicken pox, mumps, and measles when quarantine isolated me from my sisters, parents, and friends. No, I didn’t have Mother Theresa-like visions. He was more of an imaginary friend for my waxing brain, like an animated Pooh Bear. Clergy at St. Mary’s school in Terre Haute, Indiana, taught that Jesus was born in Bethlehem and died in Jerusalem. Due to those back-to-back pre-vaccine childhood illnesses, I heard these Jesus facts my second time around in the first grade. The teaching doubled down in my malleable brain, which had grown to ninety-five percent of its total capacity, normal for a six-year-old.
There was never any question that Jesus was born of Jewish parents. Israel, presented as a holy place, not a political state, was sacred ground because that’s where Jesus lived. There was always the implication that we, as Catholics, were in Jesus’s family, that somehow we had Jewish roots. If Jews believed in Jesus, they got to go to heaven, like us Catholics. But no other religion. Such was my Roman Catholic schooling.
Our single black-and-white family television transmitted few programs into our living room in the 1950s. Roy Rogers and I Love Lucy were allowed, but my parents insisted we watch the nightly news. My sisters and I didn’t dare whine for fear of verbal reprisals like, “Shut up and listen—maybe you’ll learn something.”
They’d let us watch “This is Your Life,” a forerunner to PBS’ “Finding Your Roots’. In 1953, This is Your Life broadcasted the story of 32-year-old Hanna Bloch-Kohner, a Holocaust survivor. I wasn’t much interested in the not-so-famous Hanna, but I did wonder about the Holocaust.
When I was ten years old, as my brain power peaked, local TV stations advertised the opening of Old Orchard Shopping Center in Skokie, Illinois. We lived in Wilmette, on the border of Skokie.
“Where’s Skokie?” I asked my mother.
“That’s where all the Jews live.” She answered.
All my thoughts screeched to a halt. I’d never seen a Jew. I assumed that whatever Jews were leftover from the time of Jesus surely had died in that mysterious “Holocaust,” a word adults uttered in a hush. Of course, I couldn’t ask my mother what Jews were doing in Skokie. She expected me to know what she knew, no matter the subject. She would have ridiculed me with a sarcastic, “You’re kidding me. Don’t you watch the news?”
From that moment on, I looked for Jews in supermarkets, at the beach, in the record store, and even at school. It’s possible I looked for men who resembled Jesus. In high school, I met a Jewish brother and sister. I stared them into my spiritual family. I wondered how they got to New Jersey from Bethlehem or Jerusalem or Israel, those holy places whose ancient remnants had settled in my bones, with Jesus.
My brain, now waning, has reformed itself through evidence, facts, and logic into knowing and loving the Jewish story. There may be evidence, and there may be facts, but there’s no logic to knowing Jesus.
Alex Lubischer, a playwriting teacher at Chicago’s Goodman Theater, taught my beginning playwriting class that every play has its own interior logic that doesn’t have to be bound to reality. I’ve seen plenty of those, good and bad. He prompted us to write a short “bad” play that included a fire escape, a talking animal, a fur coat and a Venmo payment. I can’t guarantee my bad play, The Condo Board, has any interior logic, but it is definitely not bound to reality. The characters and their dialogs are fictional. However, you may see a similarity or two if you’ve ever been to a condo board meeting.
The Condo Board
SET: COURTYARD—48 UNIT FOUR-STORY BRICK BUILDING-EVENING
WE OPEN in a three-sided courtyard. It’s the end of summer. Onlookers sit in their open windows around the courtyard, on the lumpy grass, or lean against the building, waiting for the condo board meeting to start. In a 4th-floor window, a well-dressed, emaciated man with a straw fedora is stretched out on the windowsill. He’s drinking from a whiskey bottle and smoking.
Board members sit in a circle of mismatched folding chairs. Fire escapes are fixed to all three walls. Potted red geraniums fill the 3rd-floor landing of one. A bicycle is locked to the 2nd-floor railing of another. An old rag rug lays over the 4th-floor railing of another. In the center of the building, a cement sidewalk leads from the back door to the grassy courtyard’s edge.
(PAUL, 49, the Condo Board President, balances a spiral notebook and some loose papers on his lap. The sleeves of his white dress shirt are rolled up. He’s wearing khakis and fancy sneakers and holding a pen.)
PAUL. The meeting will come to order. Do we have a quorum?
(BIANCA, 35, building manager, sits next to PAULwith a clipboard stuffed with papers. She’s slight and perky, long dark ponytail, wearing an ill-fitting grey suit.)
BIANCA. No.
(NORA, 50, board member, sitting next to BIANCA. Blonde bob, 1950s flowered fitted dress, pearls, shiny barrette, round wire-rim eyeglasses, white socks, classic white Keds.)
NORA. I talked to Barry an hour ago. He said he’s coming. He agrees to paint the meeting room aqua.
(BARRY, 45, board member, paraclimbs down the fire escape from the 4th floor like a chimpanzee, stopping to do chin-ups on the metal bars. Fit, athletic, Margaritaville T-shirt, shorts, black sneakers.)
BARRY. I’m coming! I’m coming!
PAUL. (Strains his neck to see BARRY.)
What are you doing on the fire escape?
BARRY. (Lands on the ground and walks to a chair next to NORA. NORA perks up.)
Since we’re meeting in the courtyard, I thought I’d get a workout on my way down. It’s faster than that rickety old elevator.
NORA. (Shouts at no one in particular.)
When will the meeting room be finished? It’s gonna be too cold out here next month. Can we paint it aqua?
PAUL. (Looks at BIANCA.)
Do we have a quorum?
BIANCA. Yes.
PAUL. Did everyone read the minutes from the last meeting?
(The emaciated man, hugging his bottle, falls out of his 4th-floor window into the bushes below. His hat flies off in the direction of the meeting. No one notices.)
BARRY. My name is spelled wrong.
(SUSAN, 55, board member, next to BARRY, bleach blonde straightened long hair, fake diamond ring, tight white t-shirt, blue jean jacket, tie-dyed tights, ankle bracelet, oversized pink sneakers.)
SUSAN. I didn’t get the minutes.
BIANCA. Minutes are in everyone’s board pack.
SUSAN. Not mine.
PAUL. Do we have a motion to approve the minutes with the correction of BARRY’s name?
(CARMEN, 45, board member, next to PAUL, black unruly hair, thick eye makeup, red lips, hoop earrings, head scarf, bangle bracelets, ruffle blouse, stuffed into blue jeans.)
CARMEN. (Signals a silent thumbs-up motion)
PAUL. All in favor?
SUSAN. Don’t we need a second?
PAUL. What?
SUSAN. A second, someone to second the motion.
PAUL. How about you?
SUSAN. (Shaking her head)
Oh no, I’m not gonna have my name in no minutes.
(MARCO, 33, board member next to Carmen, tall, black slicked back hair, goatee, sleeveless t-shirt, tattoos, tight jeans, pointed tie shoes, aviator sunglasses.)
MARCO. I second.
PAUL. All in favor?
NORA. When will the meeting room be finished? Does everyone like aqua?
PAUL. Can we have the Treasurer’s report?
BIANCA. The Treasurer isn’t here.
PAUL. That’s Mark. Did he sell his unit?
(Pause. No one answers.)
BIANCA. Tsk. I’ll do the Treasurer’s Report. We have 239,241 dollars in operating.
PAUL. Motion to approve the Treasurer’s Report?
BARRY. I move to approve the Treasurer’s Report.
PAUL. (Gives Susan the evil eye.)
All in favor?
ALL. Ay
MARCO. I’ll volunteer to take over the Treasurer spot.
PAUL. Ok. Let’s table that ’til next meeting.
NORA. Wait. Hear that? Someone’s playing rap music. I hate rap music. When will the aqua board room be painted?
CARMEN. I’ll be right back.
(she stands and walks off, shouting over her shoulder).
I have to get my fur coat. It’s too cold out here. (voice fades)
(BOARD members talk all at the same time about nothing in particular)
PAUL. Order, please. BIANCA, let’s have the Manager’s Report.
NORA. (curled over, swinging her legs, muttering toward the audience)
Finally. The meeting room.
(GREG 35, board member, next to MARCO, sandy hair, Rolling Stones t-shirt, blue jeans, Converse sneakers, skateboard at his feet)
GREG. Carmen! Carmen! Your parrot got out!
BARRY. I’ll get him.
(BARRY paraclimbs up and around the fire escapes, trying to capture the PARROT.)
(PARROT, played by a child, green & red feathered costume, yellow beaked mask, hooked up to circus wires from the ceiling, flies up and perches on a fire escape railing.)
PARROT. Squawk! Squawk! Squawk!
BARRY. (mutters toward PARROT.)
Yeah, we’re writing you out of the building, Buddy.
(Various Board members and onlookers simultaneously try to catch the PARROT and shoo him back into CARMEN’s open window. The PARROT flies around squawking and settles on CARMEN’s window ledge.)
PAUL. Order! Leave the PARROT. BIANCA! Please. The Manager’s Report? Order everyone!
(BARRY swings back down from the fire escape and returns to his seat.)
BIANCA. First up, Owners are complaining about the PARROT squawking.
CARMEN. (arriving back in the courtyard with her fake fur coat) Aw, C’mon. He’s not that loud.
(She blows a kiss up at the PARROT.)
Are you sweet boy?
PARROT. (PARROT bounces onto the fire escape.)
Squawk! Squawk! Squawk!
SUSAN. I move we prohibit parrots from living in the building.
(PARROT flies around squawking and dive-bombing members of the board.)
PAUL. Is there a second?
SUSAN. Now you ask for a second?
PAUL. Do I hear a second?
CARMEN. My PARROT is an Emotional Support Animal protected by the government.
(To the PARROT)
C’mere baby.
(PARROT sits on Carmen’s shoulder.)
GREG. Carmen, you must recuse yourself from this discussion as a board member.
CARMEN. Ok, but my PARROT is an Emotional Support Animal.
(BARRY rolls his eyes. Greg and Marco stare at their phones.)
NORA. Can we talk about the meeting room? Painting it aqua? How about teal?
PAUL. (Ignores NORA.)
There’s a motion on the table.
MARCO. What motion?
GREG. (elbows MARCO)
The motion to kick the parrot out of the building.
(Whispers to MARCO)
Did you get the 50k? I Venmoed to you just before the meeting.
NORA. (Crosses her arms and legs, turns away, looks toward the audience)
I thought the motion was to paint the meeting room turquoise. Or was it aqua?
MARCO. (whispers to GREG)
Thanks, man. That new casino already wiped me out.
PAUL. (Looking around at the board members).
Is there a second to the motion about the PARROT?
(No response. Everyone looks around but not at PAUL or each other, then look at their phones)
PAUL. Hearing none, the motion fails.
PARROT. Squawk! Squawk! Squawk!
SUSAN. (Jumps up)
Wait a minute, we didn’t even discuss it!
BARRY. The motion failed. End of. Let’s move on.
(Winks to CARMEN. Talks loud so the whole building can hear.)
This is not going away, sister. We all hate that thing.
CARMEN. That’s not true.
(Looking around the building)
Who hates the PARROT?
ALL. (muttering) Not Me. Not Me.
BARRY. Let’s move on.
PAUL. Next item on the Agenda is recycling. BIANCA?
BIANCA. Okay, everyone wants recycling. We pay a recycling company $12,000 a year to come every Tuesday to pick up, and the blue bin is always empty. I propose we end the contract.
SUSAN. NO! I recycle all the time.
ALL. So do I! So do I!
BIANCA. Well, if everyone is recycling, why is the bin always empty?
BARRY. It’s that homeless guy who lives in the alley. He takes them plastic bottles and sells ‘em.
NORA. (Looking at Barry.) Are we going to paint the meeting room turquoise or what?
(BARRY puts his arm around NORA and whispers in her ear. NORA blushes and looks at her phone.)
PAUL. Is there a motion to end the recycling contract?
GREG. I move to end the contract.
(GREG nudges MARCO)
MARCO. I second.
PAUL. All in favor?
ALL. Ay.
PARROT. Squawk! Squawk! Squawk!
CARMEN. I move we adjourn.
BARRY. (Standing in front of his chair, stretching, and doing squats.)
What did we just vote on?
PAUL. We still have items on the agenda — the cable company upgrade, fixing the front sidewalk, and security cameras.
CARMEN. I still move to adjourn.
BARRY. I second.
(Winks at Carmen)
Let’s go to your place and watch the game.
NORA. (Smiling, Looks up from her phone.)
Did we vote to paint the meeting room yet?
PAUL. All in favor to adjourn?
ALL. Ay. Ay. Ay.
PARROT (On CARMEN’s shoulder as she walks off with BARRY)
Squawk
(NORA walks off, smiling, staring at a fire escape.)
GREG. (Huddles with PAUL and MARCO, looks at PAUL) Let’s go to yours and decide on the rest of these contracts. My brother-in-law has a security company we can use for those cameras.
MARCO. My girlfriend is the bookkeeper at a cement company. I know the boss. They do sidewalks.
BIANCA. (Overhears and walks over)
My dad can get us a deal from Comcast.
PAUL. Ok. Ok. Might as well. We’ll never get anywhere otherwise. (All four walk off together, chattering.)
(Onlookers in the courtyard amble off. Others linger in their windows, some smoking and looking at the sky. Someone waters a geranium and then stares at the sky. The man who fell into the bushes scrambles out of the branches and wobbles over to one of the chairs, hugging his bottle).
(NORA appears in the courtyard wearing a painter’s shirt with a bucket of aqua paint. She picks up the man’s hat and puts it on his head. He nods and takes a swig. She begins painting a fire escape as she hums “Blue Skies.” Onlookers look down at her and blissfully return to staring into the dark blue sky, humming along.)
Fresh off a Zoom webinar titled Midwest Reparations, I rushed to my local coffee shop for a takeaway to sip during my upcoming current events group.
“12-ounce coffee in a 16-ounce cup?” The White barista asked. That’s my usual, with room for cream.
“Yes, please. What are all these new pastries? Chocolate cake? Key lime pie?”
“Yep, they’re new. All from different bakeries” said the barista.
“I’ll be back later with friends. They. Will. Love. These.” I said.
The Blackroots Alliance webinar that morning enlightened me on reparations projects in the Midwest. These are nascent activities reviving the 159-year-old “40 Acres and a Mule” policy for emancipated slaves that was promised and then revoked during Reconstruction. The initial focus of current reparations projects is research to uncover the descendants of enslaved people and how they’ve been impacted. Non-Black allies join at the end of the process when it’s time to distribute funds. Research is conducted by the harmed community, Black Americans, particularly African descendants, who look through the eyes of the tortured generations of chattel slavery. Non-Black Americans cannot be trusted to do this research since they see through a different lens: the eyes of the colonizers, the enslavers, the guardians of the dominant culture.
With this new information, I was wondering how I, an old White woman, could fit into the reparations movement as I filled my coffee with half and half and rushed over to my current events group.
The group discussed the news of familiar territory: TFG, the former guy, and his latest legal shenanigans, immigration, climate change, gun control, and the ever-evolving White Christian Nationalism. Afterward, a small group sauntered over to the coffee shop where I’d spotted the new pastries. Six of us pulled up around a small table, coats draped over our chairs, rising one by one to fetch our drinks.
I was the last one to the counter.
“I’m sorry, we can’t serve you.” said the barista.
“What?”
“We can’t serve you. The manager wants to talk to you.” I joined my friends and announced what happened. The manager appeared and asked to speak to me privately.
“We can’t serve you because there’s been a report of you using a racial slur this morning.”
“What? What racial slur?
“The “N” word.”
“Well, there’s a mistake. I’ve never used that word in my life.’
“You understand we have to investigate when something like this is reported?”
“Wait. Are you accusing me of this?
“We have to investigate. Meanwhile, we cannot serve you.”
“For how long?”
“For the unforeseeable future.”
“You’re kidding. Look at me. I really don’t have an unforeseeable future.”
My friends were incredulous. ‘You? Boy, have they got the wrong person.’ They were ready to mount a protest in front of the building, signs and all.
In the following days, I connected with the company’s Chief Operating Officer. She apologized and emailed me a store voucher for $150. That’s a lot of coffee.
The coffee reparations, however, failed to dispel the lingering notion that I’m not a credible witness to my own story, that I’m not sufficiently worthy to be believed. How can we expect descendants of enslaved Africans to automatically manifest self-worth after enduring generations of false accusations, lynchings, and pressed-down powerlessness?
From my window, I can see Lake Shore Drive’s curve at Oak Street, an “S” curve fraught with danger. Some days, as many as five separate car crashes occur from unsuspecting or inexperienced drivers speeding toward the curve and sliding off the road. Heavy gauge ribbed steel barriers prevent errant vehicles from jumping the curb, flying off across a small park, and crashing into the Drake Hotel and vintage apartment buildings on East Lake Shore Drive.
On eclipse day, April 8, 2024, an East Lake Shore Drive building was an arrival point for President Joe Biden’s visit to Chicago. To augment the threat of car bombs speeding down Lake Shore Drive and intentionally barreling off into the building, city salt trucks lined up bumper to bumper on a half-mile stretch of the S curve that hugs the small park on one side and Lake Michigan on the other.
At 2:07 pm, the moon blocked the sun by 94% as I waited in the park with my dog Elsa. A few other dogs tethered to humans stood nearby.
“Is the eclipse happening soon?” I called out to one.
“Yes, right now,” a neighbor announced.
“Here!” He rushed over and handed me his solar glasses so I could see the shadow of the moon crossing the sun.
“Oh, there it is,” I whispered, “I thought the sky would be dark.”
At 94% sunshine, the sky doesn’t turn dark. Even a tiny sliver of the sun is so bright it can light up the sky. I hadn’t been paying much attention to the details of the solar cycle or lunar eclipses. I knew light from that 6% sunshine is so intense it can fry your eyeballs, but I didn’t know that 6% sunshine gives off an intense, vibrant light capable of eliminating shadows.
As I handed the solar glasses back to my neighbor, I looked down at Elsa, standing in the projection of overhead tree limbs. April brought out buds, but still no shady foliage. The images of the boughs, branches, and twigs on the ground were as clear as they were on the trees, like a photo. A perfect mirror image of the deep brown arbor architecture above. Nothing in my memory compared to this. I sensed, though, a deep knowing, as if ancient benevolent familiars had brought me the seeing of a thousand ancestors.
Elsa in the eclipse
“The sun is about a million times brighter than the full moon,” explains Angela Speck, an astronomer at the University of Texas at San Antonio, “So if 99.9% of the sun is obscured,” she says, “there will still be a thousand times more light than the full moon.
I read that in the days before the eclipse, but it held no meaning and slipped my memory. I still had a preconceived notion that the sky would turn black. Experiencing the solar light on the ground, mine and Elsa’s ground, in the valley between the salt trucks and the highrises, revved up my consciousness.
At the Goodman Theater Chicago’s Storytelling class, teaching artist Julie Ganey prompted us to write a “story of changed perspective” based on Goodman’s production of Margaret Atwood’s Penelopiad.
I had a story in the can, Lunch Money, about a changed perspective, and decided to revise it for the storytelling assignment before I saw the Penelopiad performance. When I finally saw Peneliopiad, I couldn’t see the change in perspective theme—still can’t. Did Penelope change her perspective? Did Odysseus? Who? What?
Had I seen Peneiopiad first (one of the best productions I’ve ever seen in any theater anywhere), I would have written about an experience in honest storytelling.I have lots of those. But, alas, it’s best I don’t sermonize on truthtelling. The following is my change-in-perspective story, which I’ll soon be reciting in person at the Goodman Theater’s “Lobby Stories.” If you’re a regular blog reader, thank you; you’ll understand why retelling this story is important.
Lunch Money Reparations
Reparations are a program of acknowledgment, redress, and closure for a grievous injustice.— From Here to Equality, Reparations for Black Americans in the 21st Century, by William A. Darity, Jr. and A. Kirsten Mullen
When I started working as a part-time receptionist in downtown Chicago, I lived with my nine-year-old son in a high-rise apartment and periodically spent more money than I had. Glitzy earrings or a new red lipstick often called to me as I passed through Marshall Field and Company on State Street. I once had my entire purse stolen off the counter as I adjusted my scarf in the mirror.
Over the years, I’ve faced down quite a few street scams and purse snatchings. The worst was the time three teenage boys trapped me in a revolving door at the old Carson, Pirie Scott building. One had yanked on my purse as I entered, but I grabbed the shoulder straps while the accomplice pushed the door in the section in front of me. The accomplice stopped abruptly and held his hands on both glass doors. This left each of us stuck in a different section of the revolving door, awkwardly staring at each other through the glass. They all ran off when a security guard came to my rescue.
I added this grievance story to others like it. Joining the ranks of privileged pseudo-traumatized victims, I loudly condemned an exaggerated version of the bands of criminals marauding downtown Chicago.
As a pensioner, I’ve inoculated myself against criminal assault by carrying nothing but my iPhone and a pocket-size purse where my bus pass, credit cards, and a small amount of cash are stored. Costume jewelry and cosmetics are no longer a retail draw. But I cannot resist accepting Dutch treat lunch invitations from friends, paying no attention to my budget or bank balance.
One day, I sat waiting for a fellow retiree, Peter McLennon, in the lobby of a busy hotel where we’d planned to have lunch. I delved into my ever-present iPhone with heightened curiosity to see if anything big had happened between the time I had gotten off the bus, walked the two blocks to the hotel lobby, and plopped down in the overstuffed chair.
I was so engrossed in the breaking news of a car accident on a distant highway that my senses were dulled to a body stirring in the chair next to me. When the body started in on her story, I momentarily jolted to attention.
“My husband beat me for the last time. I been hidin’ in a women’s shelter but he found me, and now I need to move.”
“What?” I said as much to her as to myself since I was not quite tuned into her voice, my mind drifting in and out of her story while half-wondering what happened to the people in the car crash that was reporting out of my phone behind the now blank screen.
“My social worker found a place in Cincinnati. They gonna hold a room 24 hours. I need $19 for the bus. Can you lend it to me?”
“What?” I looked around to see if Peter was nearby to rescue me.
She repeated her story, adding some details about injuries inflicted by the husband.
“As soon as I get situated in Cincinnati with a place to stay and a job, I’ll pay you back.”
I tested her by asking if she was taking the mega-bus since $19 didn’t seem like enough money for a bus to Cincinnati. That stumped her, but she recovered nicely by describing where the bus station was.
And for one shimmering split second, we caught each other’s eyes and I sensed she knew I was on to her. But she kept up the hustle. I admired that. She was working hard for her money.
I unzipped my little red purse and happily handed her my $20 lunch money. Before I zipped up, she was gone. The scam worked. Relief washed over me as I exhaled the stress of her desperation. Even if I doubted her, she deserved all the money I had for all the years I’d spent harboring both silent and noisy racial bias.
When Peter arrived, he commented on how serene I looked. As we walked toward the restaurant, I asked if he could pick up the tab for lunch.
WBEZ Chicago is celebrating 40 years of one of the greatest concert films of all time, Stop Making Sense, at the Studebaker Theater in downtown Chicago’s Fine Arts Building.
I love this movie. Every Sunday when my son was a toddler, he’d nap as his father studied, and I’d go to the movies. When he was old enough, we went to the movies together, especially on Christmas Day after the divorces, and it was just the two of us. At seventeen, he convinced me to see the Talking Heads’ 1984 concert film Stop Making Sense at the same Studebaker Theater.
“I don’t like punk rock,” I said.
“It’s not punk. It’s different. You’ll like it,” he convinced me.
He had his own band at the time and knew his music, so I trusted him. He was right. I blasted the Stop Making Sense cassette on my car radio until the tape wore out.
The film documents the legendary rock band Talking Heads performing at Hollywood’s Pantages Theater in December 1983. David Byrne, Tina Weymouth, Chris Frantz, and Jerry Harrison perform alongside an ecstatic ensemble of supporting musicians.
When my movie buddy Marca Bristo was alive, we went to the movies nearly every Saturday. We’d mull the pros and cons of what we had just seen in the quiet theater afterward before going off to a coffee shop to talk about politics. Marca died in September 2019. The releases that year included Little Women, 1917, and It’s a Beautiful Day in theNeighborhood. Part of mourning Marca meant slacking off on movie-going. I saw only one movie for the rest of the year, Just Mercy, which tells the true story of defense attorney Bryan Stevenson and his client, a black man falsely accused of murder. It was my quiet tribute to Marca, a powerful advocate for disability rights.
These days, I’m wary of catching Covid and all manner of infectious diseases so I’ve been in only one movie theater since March 2020 to see Caste.
But I may have to venture into the old Studebaker theater with its high ceiling and wide aisles to see this old film with old friends who love the old Talking Heads. There’s just nothing like being in a room full of people who love what you love.
(written for Skyline Village Chicago March-April 2024 newsletter)
Robert Kramer, 74, talking to students at the University of Southern California: “You have far more at stake in changing how we approach aging than I do. You are far more likely, statistically, to live past 100 than I am. If you don’t change society’s attitudes about aging, you will be condemned to lead the last third of your life in social, economic, and cultural irrelevance.”
A KFF News article, Do We Simply Not Care About Old People? lays out the blatant disregard for our citizen elders, citing covid-19 statistics.
Around 900,000 older adults have died of covid-19 to date, accounting for 3 of every 4 Americans who have perished in the pandemic. In the last week of 2023 and the first two weeks of 2024 alone, 4,810 people 65 and older lost their lives to covid — a group that would fill more than 10 large airliners.
Yet, where is the outrage? Experts in the field of aging from around the country all agree ageism has always existed, but the pandemic elevated an intense, hostile prejudice against us.
“The implied message to older adults is: ‘Your time has passed, give up your seat at the table, stop consuming resources, fall in line,’” said Anne Montgomery, 65, of the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare. She says that baby boomers can “rewrite and flip that script if we want to, and if we work to change systems that embody the values of a deeply ageist society.”
In the years I’ve tried to advocate against ageism, I’ve heard everything from “I’m 80 years old, and I’ve never experienced ageism” to “Ageism? What’s that — not admitting how old you are?”
Gay rights leader Harvey Milk famously said in the 1970s, “Come out to your parents.” He knew, and he was right, that if people got to know gay people (can I say “queer” now?), their bias toward them would diminish.
Anti-ageism advocates say, “integrate, don’t separate.” The best way to overcome the ageist stigma is for the people who are stigmatizing you to get to know you. Don’t put “old” in the closet. Go out. Speak out. Be old.
Chicago has separated the old from the rest of the population — in housing, in social groups, in churches, and in health care. “They” don’t see us. ‘They” look through us. We defend ourselves by saying: I wrote a book! I walked the Camino! I volunteer! I have wisdom! I babysit! Walk dogs! Ride my bike!
Reminding people that we are still here, part of the human experience, walking through life like everyone else at any other age, is the best way to flip that script, not by bragging about our credentials but by our visible presence. And when we can’t hear or when our brain energy gets depleted at 3:00 in the afternoon, we ask people to speak up, and we excuse ourselves to take a nap.
A pamphlet in the back of the church had all the details. The Catholic Marriage Manual. The title revealed nothing to me about the contents. But the sixth-grade boys knew. At recess, the girls followed them into the church from the playground. I was new and needed to fit in. One of the girls grabbed the booklet, and we all ran out to sit under the shady elm at the edge of the parking lot. She read from the booklet, “the man places his penis inside the woman’s vagina” to make a baby. “Eww!” The girls squealed. And those boys, standing by the corner of the church, pointed at us and laughed.
To look cool, I desperately wanted to act like I already knew that. But I was so shocked I couldn’t control my facial expressions, and my shaking knees gave way. I could hardly stand up.
I act the same way when I come to some new awareness these days. I blurt out, “What? How come I didn’t know that?”
A boy I wanted to impress once told me Paul McCartney recorded a very high whistle sound in the song “A Day in the Life” so that his pet dog could hear it.
“I knew that,” I said, hoping he was telling the truth and not testing me. Inside my head, I heard, “What? I didn’t know that!”
Being cool was so important that I spent the first half of life pretending I knew more than I did. Over time, in an effort to be authentic, I slowly emerged from that deceptive veil. The lingering consequence of being truthful about myself was that I could no longer swallow my emotions and hide my expressions.
Recently, a friend and I were rehearsing for a talk that we would present to a White audience on microaggressions. “I don’t see color” is a prevalent White microaggression since it’s a refusal to acknowledge the race-based struggles people endure and the discrimination they face. We discussed the outline, who would address what issue, and how to fill the time if no one asked questions. Then he showed me a video he wanted to use of an Asian woman giving a TED talk on microaggressions.
“Are there videos by Black people instead?” I asked.
“There are, but White people often hear this material better if it’s from a light-skinned person.”
“Oh, of course,” I said, as if I knew that.
Suddenly, my breathing sped up. I started sweating and swaying in my chair.
“I have to take a break,” I said.
The awareness that I don’t listen as deeply to Black people as I do to White people filled me with such shame that I almost fainted.
Life was much easier when I learned where babies come from, jumped up, ran around, and tagged the boys in a game of Steal the Bacon. On the playground, we were free to be ourselves, boys and girls, Black, Brown, and mostly White kids whooping it up in a simpler world where there were no microaggressions and we didn’t see color.
On February 15, 1976, I drove my red Toyota ten miles west from my Toms River, New Jersey, home to a small church meeting in Whiting. I’d not had a drink for twenty-four hours. My head was pounding. I shook and shivered and sweated. I sat down but had one foot out the door.
Toms River shoulders the Atlantic Ocean. Most of life there happens near the ocean, its inlets, and brackish rivers. Whiting, known for the now-closed Nature’s Rest Nudist Colony, sits on unceded Leni Lenape land at the northern edge of New Jersey’s Pine Barrens. It’s a defunct railroad town surrounded by scrub pines, that dreary little tree that never grows more than eighteen feet because of the sandy soil. No one goes there.
I drove to Whiting to a meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous because I wanted to be anonymous and not run into anyone I knew. I had an overwhelming urge to announce out loud to strangers that I was going to kill myself with vodka.
An active adult community, Crestwood Village, had risen up near Whiting. The eight men and women at the AA meeting were over fifty years old, which was a turn-off for me at twenty-nine. But I was banging on the bottom and had nothing to lose. I thought I’d spill the beans there and bug out for the liquor store on my way home.
The group of eight centered the AA meeting around me and how I could stay sober. They figured out a schedule of who could follow me home that night and stay with me for the next few days. Each day, a different soul appeared on my doorstep to feed me, talk to me, answer the dreaded phone, and connect me to an AA group in my neighborhood. Their messages were the same: you’re sick, we were sick, too. Drink water. Eat chocolate. Go to AA. They trusted me with shocking truths about their lives before sobriety.
They traveled well beyond their small community in the Pine Barrens and re-arranged their comfortable lives to help a suffering alcoholic. The obsession to relieve my misery with booze lifted after about seven days. Each of them called every day for a month.
I never drank again. After a few months, I sold my house, gave away the dog, left an estranged husband, packed up my son and houseplants, and drove to Chicago.
I was a dead soul before I met that group of kind and loving saints in New Jersey’s outback. Every minute of every day, I thought only of drinking and not drinking.
In the forty-eight years since, I’ve met many people who have asked for help. I share the same love that was offered to me that first week. In very few cases, people have stayed sober themselves. Most have disappeared, died, or gotten pissed off and moved on.
One summer in the early 1960s, my mother walked the beach near our Sea Girt, New Jersey home. A shark came into the calm shallow of the Atlantic and chomped off the leg of a man wading right in front of her.
Another that week. And another. Grisly accounts and sightings of man-eating “great whites” all along the central Jersey coast appeared daily in the Asbury Park Press. Lifeguards stood high on their stands and whistled us out of the surf repeatedly at any sign of a dorsal fin. The summer was terrifying.
When Peter Benchley’s 1974 novel, Jaws, appeared on the paperback rack, my mother snatched it up, read it, and passed it on. She and everyone else at the Jersey Shore convinced themselves that Benchley, who lived in New Jersey, based the book on our summer shark attacks.
What a book. After eyeing that famous book cover, my seven-year-old son, Joe, became interested in and eventually obsessed with sharks. Having read in Dr. Spock that I shouldn’t tell my child frightening stories, like the crucifixion of Jesus, I kept the Jaws story from him.
The movie Jaws was released the following year. I refused to watch it, much less expose it to my eight-year-old. His sleep was already interrupted by nightmares after getting hit with a pitched baseball at Little League.
At age nine,Joe announced that Jaws was at the neighborhood theater on Dollar Day and begged me to take him. The near-empty theater was spooky. I held both hands over my eyes for most of the show .
“You can open your eyes now,” Joe said.
I did, just as the shark was ripping apart a girl on her raft.
“Oh my god! I’m going to puke! I thought you said it was ok!”
We laughed so hard we could hardly hear the movie. Thus began those funny years when boys learn there’s a big payoff in pranking their parents.
When Raiders of the Lost Ark came out in 1981, we lived in Chicago.
“Is it about Noah’s Ark?” I asked Joe.
“No. The Ark of the Covenant. You know, where the Ten Commandments are.”
Dragging him to Sunday school all those years had paid off.
We ran to the 1,400-seat Esquire Theater on Oak Street. The only tickets left were upfront. Right there, on the front row, the entire wall before me slithered and hissed as Harrison Ford was lowered into a hypnotic pit of 10,000 snakes.
I shut my eyes.
“OK to look now,” Joe whispered.
And again, I got fooled into watching the creepiest part of the movie, where Indiana Jones is staring down a hooded cobra.
Raiders is set in 1936 and follows Indiana Jones vying with Nazi Germans to recover the invaluable long-lost Ark of the Covenant. Some have interpreted it as Steven Spielberg’s creation to slam the Nazis for the Holocaust. But to me, it’s a hilarious, breathless adventure, made memorably funnier by the prank of my fourteen-year-old movie companion.
And a memorable relief from how I view Nazis today.
Regan Burke 