It's not my usual fare. (In fact, I also caught the excellent documentary Street Fight on Friday night at Facets.) But it was really freakin' hot outside and a couple hours of mindless entertainment in a very cool, dark room had an irresistable appeal.
Funny thing was, it wasn't completely mindless. It was actually kind of cool. And I've been thinking about the questions it raises ever since: When does being "different" become a disease? Who gets to decide?
In the movie, a big (and presumably evil, since, in movies, they always are) pharmaceutical company comes up with a cure for the mutant X gene that gives the X-Men their weird powers (psychic abilities, being able to control the weather, giant wings, retractable blades for fingers, whatever, the usual). But they have to ask themselves if they really want to be "cured."
Of course, there's also the usual action movie stuff, with girl-on-girl fights featuring Halle Berry and lots of explosions. But there's also some interesting stuff to think about.
R. and I have just gotten the blood test results back that tell us, as close to conclusively as almost anything can, that we're going to have a healthy baby. The technology is amazing. And it's easy to see it developing, in just a few years, into something scarier, something that could tell us if our kid was going to be short, or uncoordinated, or bad at math. (All characteristics that happen to come from me, incidentally.) And then what would we have to decide? Would there be "cures" for those traits? Would we want them?
A book tour, says writer Gay Talese, is a "caravan of coarseness."
The sound bites and self-promotion wear on his nerves. And, though he is entirely too classy to say this, there is probably something slightly demeaning about being one of the greatest writers of your generation, but still having to sit down to answer inane question after inane question from young reporters who cannot even be bothered to finish all 430 pages of your latest book.
The book, A Writer's Life (Knopf, $26), is not, Talese says, a memoir.
"If you're a president, you can write a memoir," he tells me, after ordering a Reuben-sandwich-and-a-Heineken lunch. "Otherwise, you'd better go out and report on something."
The clothes make the man
So Talese, at an age when many would retire and live the good life, has assembled a collection of observation, reportage and memory that, when put together in just the right way, offers a statement of philosophy and a distillation of his lifelong interests. He has always written about America and about that most American of virtues, perseverance. So his book revisits several stories Talese pursued, but was never able to fully finish writing, as a journalist. He has taken his incomplete work and turned it into something with meaning.
We're sharing a booth in South Water Kitchen, the bustling restaurant in the lobby of the Hotel Monaco, where Talese has been staying for the Chicago duration of his tour. My small digital recorder sits on the table between us, and my notebook sits, mostly untouched, off to the side. Talese is a hero of mine -- among many other talents, he is spectacularly good at interviewing people -- and I've studied his work enough to know that he does not believe in making tapes or taking extensive notes. I've always imagined that this is because he has a brilliant, steel-trap mind.
"I could never carry that," he says, nodding at the recorder. "It wouldn't fit in my pocket. Not without ruining the line."
As always, Talese is elegantly dressed -- his father was a tailor and his mother ran a high-end dress shop -- and he is not entirely kidding about his concern for the line of his jacket. His clothes reflect a near-obsessive attention to detail. Striking coral-colored cuff links clasp the French cuffs of his white-striped-with-red shirt and a silk pocket square sets off his gray suit. His black shoes, trimmed in maroon suede, were custom made for him by a bootmaker who, Talese says, he is pretty much single-handedly keeping in business. And Talese's signature hat is never out of reach.
Talese has no patience for the slovenliness of modern menswear. He has spent a fortune, over the years, buying custom-made suits for his two grown daughters' boyfriends, just so they could be appropriately wardrobed for the time they might spend with him. He's recently told one daughter -- a never-married serial monogamist -- that he refuses to meet any more of her boyfriends. It's too much of an investment.
But this is not the sort of thing he means to be talking about while on book tour.
At 74 -- "Now I'm 25 years older than the 'old man' [a post-retirement Joe DiMaggio, whom Talese famously profiled in Esquire magazine] I wrote about," he says, sounding as if he might have just realized it now -- Talese knows he is expected to offer some sort of insight on The State of The Culture.
'Stadiums are filled with savages'
I ask him what he'd be working on right now, were he not on the road doing this. He says he has been thinking a lot about Barry Bonds.
"If I were 40 years younger," he says, "I'd be writing about the anger [at Barry Bonds] in the stadiums. There's a lot of anger expressed in stadiums . . . all the anger in America."
The idea is almost visibly turning over in his mind. He muses out loud, "The fans are savage -- many of the fans are savages -- the stadiums are filled with savages."
He's thinking hard about it now, how maybe there's something of racism in it, and how there are so few places left where people are really free to express themselves.
When Talese wants to make note of something, he writes it down on a small, thin piece of cardboard -- from the boards that come packed in boxed shirts -- that he has cut down to the size of large tongue depressors so that they fit, perfectly invisibly, in the breast pocket of his jacket.
Who's watching the CEOs?
Talese has a real empathy, an admiration, really, for athletes -- he thinks of them "like gladiators in the coliseum" -- and has little patience for the view of them as lazy and overpaid. With professional sports figures, he says, "Everything they do, there's a record. But when these CEOs are making millions and their companies are losing money, there's nowhere near the same level of accountability."
It's clear that Talese has hit on an idea that interests him. And if I were writing a brilliant, insightful profile of him, I would make it my business to follow him around as he develops this idea and turns it into something. I'd sneak a peek at those cardboard notecards.
But, after lunch and his next book tour stop, in the studios of WGN radio, I have to head back to the office. I leave him, shaking his hand and promising that I will actually finish reading his book.
Friday's column: It's not the crime, it's the cover-up
There are certain things that everyone should know by now. First, there's no such thing as a hit man. If one makes himself available to you, don't take him up on his offer, no matter how tempting, to "off" your hated boss or cheating spouse. He is an undercover cop.
Second, and on a similar note, there are no preteen girls trolling the Internet looking for creepy older married guys to date. They, too, are undercover cops.
Third, and most important: it's not the crime, people. It's the cover-up. Seriously. How many times do you have to be told?
Former Enron executives Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling didn't get convicted for creating the byzantine financial structures that generated spectacular "profits" for a company that was not, actually, doing all that well. They got convicted for lying about it.
The Enron case might be unique for its complexity -- pretty much no one can clearly explain what the company was doing, or claiming to be doing, to make its money -- but it's actually got a lot in common with all the other corruption cases you hear about every day.
The script goes like this: Tipster alerts the authorities to some sort of misconduct. Investigation begins. Crooks do all sorts of pathetic, desperate stuff -- hide money in the freezer, create fake paper trails, etc. -- to dodge investigation. Prosecutors find out about pathetic, desperate stuff. Crooks get indicted.
The original crimes, like embezzlement and bribery, are often subtle and hard to prove. But the cover-ups, conducted in mid-panic, tend to be painfully obvious.
The Lundegaard Principle
Jurors' and journalists' eyes glaze over at long explanations of technical violations of accounting standards and reporting requirements. The line between bribe and gift, for example, is not always clearly drawn. But, when you lie about it on your tax forms, that maybe-almost-innocent-sort-of-a-legal-gray-area "gift" starts to look a lot more like a bribe. From there, it's a slippery slope to mail fraud, obstructing justice, conspiracy, making false statements to banks and all the other charges that white-collar criminals -- and your more sophisticated gangsters -- typically end up facing.
You can think of it as the Lundegaard Principle. Jerry Lundegaard, the hapless car salesman played by William H. Macy in the movie "Fargo," begins his descent into crime by embezzling from the car dealership where he works. He thinks of himself as simply borrowing the money to fund some business deals and plans to pay it back before anyone notices it's gone. But, when the business deals fall through, he gets desperate. In trying to cover his tracks, he hatches a plan to have his wife kidnapped so her wealthy father will pay a big ransom. After several disastrous twists and turns, the cover-up ends, naturally enough, with a dead body in a wood chipper. The cover-up always gets away from you.
That's how these things go. Except for the wood chipper part. That only happens in Minnesota.
'Shut up.' That'll be $50,000
If I ever really want to make some money, I'm going to open a "media consulting" firm with an imperious-sounding name and very posh offices. We'll be the people that public figures go to when trouble strikes. And we'll have one piece of advice: Don't comment.
(Yes, I know it looks like I've just given away my big strategy for free, but I'm not worried. No one ever takes advice like that unless they pay big money to get it.)
My firm -- which will be called something like the Pickett Group, only pronounced with a slight French accent -- would have told Jeff Skilling to keep his big mouth shut after Enron's collapse. No testimony before Congress. No appearance on Larry King. And, most of all, no long attempt at explaining everything to the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Because it was, quite predictably, Skilling's desire to cover things up, smooth them over and explain them away that, ultimately, did him in.
Like George Ryan lying to the Operation Safe Road investigators and Martha Stewart concocting a story about a "standing agreement" with her broker, Skilling made his own situation infinitely worse by publicly defending himself against charges that he knew Enron was failing and tried to cut his own losses before word got out. He insisted that he'd sold half a million shares of Enron stock on Sept. 17, 2001, because he figured they'd lose value in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks. Then, when investigators uncovered his original attempt to sell some of the shares -- on Sept. 6 -- he was stuck.
If he'd just crossed his arms and said nothing, the burden would have been on the prosecutors to prove that he'd knowingly done something wrong. In lying, he made it easy for them.
I can only hope -- because these endless public corruption trials are getting deeply boring and seriously depressing -- that the crooked politicians of Illinois will finally take this lesson to heart. If they're not going to stop cheating and stealing, the least they could do is stop lying about it.
on the subject of sex education and AIDS prevention is a pretty mean feat. But, apparently, the First Lady of Kenya, Lucy Kibaki, has done it. Check out this summary, featured on Broadsheet, of her comments about why young Kenyans -- as many as a one-third of whom are likely to become infected, according to some estimates -- should not have access to condoms.
Because it's so much more important to be moral than healthy. Or alive.
So, um, yeah . . . I had managed to convince myself that today, May 25, was "Free Cone Day" at Ben and Jerry's. And, at lunch time, I walked over to the Metra station to partake.
How excited was I when I arrived to find that there wasn't even a line?!?
Fortunately, I refrained from shouting at the 5,000 people in the food court, "You people are missing out on free frozen deliciousness!"
Because, actually, Free Cone Day was April 25. So I quietly paid for my scoop of Chunky Monkey and walked back to the office. At least it was a nice day out.
When I headed to the Secretary of State's office to replace my stolen driver's license, I was figuring that the whole thing would be a bit of a nightmare.
As it turned out, though, an Illinois "Drivers Facility" is not a bad place to spend an afternoon, especially if you happen to be pregnant. (Or eldery or disabled, I suppose, but those conditions seem fraught with other challenges.)
I took the El right to Clark and Lake and walked into the office without even having to step outside in the rain. (I was tempted to stop off in the Food Court, but I'm kind of soured on Food Courts right at the moment.)
Right when I opened the door, I was greeted by a sign that instructed senior citizens, persons with disabilities and expectant mothers to head directly to the front of the line. The line didn't seem that long, and, I figured, I'm not really that pregnant, so I just waited my turn. (Actually, I kind of wanted to give my free pass to the woman in front of me who was trying to entertain her squirming 2-year-old, but that didn't seem like an option.)
After about a 15 minute wait, I got to the "greeter," explained what I needed and got my deli-style number.
Then I headed to the waiting area and, again, spotted one of the signs that pointed to a specially designated waiting area for those of us who might really need to sit down. At that point, I was half-expecting refreshments to be served.
At every turn, someone offered to expedite my service simply because I have the great fortune to be an "expectant mother." (Not to quibble over details or anything, but I think I prefer the slightly less euphemistic term "pregnant woman." Whenever anyone refers to me as any sort of mother, I immediately suspect that they have some sort of weird, life-begins-at-conception agenda. But maybe I'm just being paranoid.)
All in all, I was completely smitten with my driver's license experience. (Pregnant women: renew your license now!)
So, in a total abuse of my position with the paper, I called the Secretary of State's office to get the inside story on why they are so darned nice to pregnant people. Cynically, I was guessing that there'd been some sort of lawsuit or horrible woman-gives-birth-while-waiting-in-line-for-new-license-plates incident.
But, no.
Turns out, according to Beth Kaufman, a spokesperson for Sec. of State Jesse White, the guy just has a soft spot for us Gestating-Americans.
Back in the '90s, she said, when White was traveling the world with his tumbling troupe, he happened to visit a government office in Japan. In that incredibly polite culture, such special treatment is quite normal. Designated lines and waiting areas for pregnant people are everywhere. (I suspect that pregnant women there are also allowed to eat all the sushi they want, too, but that's a topic for another day.)
Anyway, White actually made a campaign promise, when he first ran for Secretary of State, to bring such courtesies to Illinois and launched the special lines and chairs in 1999.
A cursory review of other states (OK, I called a friend in New York and one in California) reveals that we are leading the nation in making bureaucracy more pregnancy-friendly. In my mind, this really does make up for an awful lot of corruption and inefficiency.
And, because of a sort of random confluence of circumstances (weather, outfit choices, recent schedule), this was the probably the first time I've been with them that it's been physically obvious that I'm pregnant.
Here's how it went:
I took off my denim jacket and Jariatu broke into a big smile when she saw my very curvy profile. "Your body is so beautiful!" she said with delight. She didn't immediately get that the belly (along with the other curves) was baby-related, but it didn't matter. Because she's been taught that a little roundness on a woman is a fine thing.
That's pretty cool.
(Of course, she also later told me that her family had previously discussed the issue and decided I was "too skinny" and very lucky to have landed a husband. Oh well.)
I'm pretty ambivalent on a good day about the whole door-holding thing. Generally, I try not to make an issue of it, unlike, say, the woman who I know who once spat out, "I'm not a damn cripple" when a date opened a door for her, or the other friend who tends to stand in front of closed doors, as if she does not know how to operate them, until an able-bodied man happens along.
Basically, I've come to realize that what I value in the whole transaction is smoothness: if someone manages to open the door for me without making a big production of it, excellent. If it seems to be a "thing," with some sort of message attached, it tends to irritate me.
As I get more and more obviously pregnant (by the day, it seems . . . maybe I should be watching the candy intake just a little bit), I'm getting more and more of those quasi-heroic let-me-leap-in-front-of-you-to-get-the-door moments. Which is, mostly, nice.
Because walking around with the equivalent to a large sack of flour attached to your person is a bit of pain sometimes. (It's kind of like trying to parallel park a rental car; you just don't know where your bumpers are any more.)
But there's also something slightly creepy about people going out of their way to be extra nice to you. Like you don't want to get all "a woman in my delicate condition" about it. And there's just something unavoidably awkward about the whole thing. Last week, a guy (very nicely) offered me his seat on the El, by asking, as he pointed to my belly, "Would you like to sit down?"
I didn't need to sit down (the next stop was mine), so I just said, "No thanks, I'm fine." But then I wondered if I should have accepted the offer, just so he's not discouraged from being such a good guy. And then there was the finger-pointing thing. Like he was really asking, "Would you AND YOUR DISTENDED UTERUS like to sit down?"
Anyway, it's increasingly obvious, in this post-feminist age, that there are no hard-and-fast rules on this stuff anymore, especially when people like me decide to over-think everything and make it difficult.
But I had one encounter today that made me wonder about how gay men fit into the whole chivalry picture.
I was walking out of the office (to get food, yes, but not at the dammed food court) this afternoon when I encountered a male colleague who was obviously headed the same way.
He actually seemed to slow his pace to avoid getting to the door at the same time I did and went out his way (in what seemed to me a fairly obvious manner) to avoid dealing with the door opening situation. In fact, he pretty much waited for me to open the door for him.
Though I don't know him all that well, I do happen to know that this guy is gay (has Seinfeld obligated us to say "not that there's anything wrong with that" whenever this comes up?).
So, I had to wonder (but it seemed too rude to ask) about how he views the whole chivalry deal. I mean, look, he's obviously way more oppressed by The Man than I'll ever be. (Please, as a married pregnant woman, I'm so frustratingly mainstream that I might as well be a Republican at this point.) Maybe I should be holding the door for him.
Or, um, you know, like I said, maybe I'm just overthinking this.
It always amuses me when someone writes to complain about my being snarky or rude in writing about someone else. Because, almost inevitably, they end up being far more nasty than I would ever be. In print or otherwise.
Here's a brilliant example from this weekend. (Just to clarify one reference in the letter: I co-authored a book with my boss, the founder of a Human Resources consulting firm when I was 22. The wretched book is, alas, still in print. And he's still making all the money from it.)
Anyway, please enjoy some writing that far exceeds my limited talent for rudeness . . .
Dear Ms. Pickett:
Usually, If I were to write to a columnist, I would address him or her by first name, as their column has moved me in a positive and friendly direction, causing me to believe that they might just be a friend that I have yet to meet. In fact, I have made many such friends by stepping up, so-to-speak, and voicing my opinion relative to their work.
I am sorry to say that this writing is not such a case. You, Madam, are no friend of mine, nor do I believe that you ever could be, after reading your column of Sunday morning and your unfair and derogatory banter and baseless belligerence toward a highly talented and brilliant young author named Caprice Crane.
Miss Crane has proven her worth over a long career with MTV and others and finally was fortunate to be able to share with readers everywhere her wonderfully conceived and well planned story of Heaven and Brady in her book "Stupid and Contagious".
Sure the story is, as you put it, "a cute romantic comedy", but SO WHAT? This reader, and thousands of others have found it to be both well written and hilarious to the point of laughing out loud, and putting the phone on DND (that's Do Not Disturb, in case you didn't know that), so as not to be bothered by silly things called "Clients" while enthralled by this purely enjoyable 321 pages.
Ms. Pickett... Have you ever written 321 enjoyable and funny pages that were published, or is your resume limited to the 200 page Self Help "Guide" to getting a job? Obviously your target demographic consists of the unemployed and unemployable, who do not have enough sense to even properly interview for a position. In reading reviews of your book, I understand that this is in fact the case, else, why would anyone need or even WANT to read the book that you helped write!
The first sentence of your vile review states the obvious, and also shows that you care not if your review is inappropriate or not. You wrote it. You submitted it to your editor. You printed it. Shame on you, Ms. Pickett. Shame on you.
The one hope that I have, is that as many people who were unfortunate to have stumbled across your misconstrued and malicious diatribe of Sunday morning are also the same folks who have read reviews of your work and take your opinions with a grain of salt. Maybe they'll even be so curious that they'll rush out and buy "Stupid and Contagious" just to see what you are so uppity about! Does the publication "Chicagoist" ring a bell?
In fact, did your parents never teach you that if you have nothing nice to say about someone, don't say anything? I understand that it is your job to review books. OK. You didn't enjoy this book. That's okay too. You know what they say about opinions and........... Everyone has one.
My beef with you is plain and simple, Ms. Pickett: You were inappropriate in your review. You knew it when you wrote it, yet you wrote it anyway. You accuse a first time novelist of being untalented. You credit her parental ties with her publishing this novel. Please, lady. At least have some class.
Are you upset that Miss Crane is an extremely attractive, witty, intelligent and "got it all going on lady", and that you are... Well..... We have all seen your picture and read reviews of your work.... Or are you just jealous that Miss Crane has a hit on her hands at thirty years of age and you have..... Well..... a Co-Authored "How to book"...?
I for one think that if you have one shred of decency about yourself, at minimum you should apologize to your readers for losing your cool and allowing your own insecurities dictate your work.
It's cold and rainy and generally not a good day to sit outside munching on a dog from Wiener's Circle. So Mike Greenberg, the ESPN sportscaster, is glad he changed his mind about a lunch venue.
Impeccably dressed, as always, the man who refers to himself as "the first metrosexual sportscaster" is waiting in front of the Oaktree restaurant, inside the 900 N. Michigan shopping center, when I arrive. He easily blends in to the setting, rich with high-end shops and their high-end customers and, upon catching my first glimpse of him, from the escalator up to the sixth floor, I realize that his Wiener's Circle days are over.
Sure, the Clark Street stand was a favorite hangout in Greenberg's young bachelor days, when he lived in Chicago and worked a series of sports jobs from radio reporting to CLTV hosting. But Greeny -- as the fans of his morning radio show, "Mike and Mike in the Morning," all know him -- is all grown up now.
He's on his cell phone, trying to broker an emergency child care deal with his mother, since his kids' nanny has to fly back to South America for her grandmother's funeral.
"Are you available Tuesday?" he asks her, a slightly desperate tone creeping in to his voice. "If you are, I think it would be a pretty fun day."
She doesn't commit, so Greenberg has to leave off with a trying-not-to-be-needy request that she "Just think about it."
'I will move back here'
Greenberg, 38, whose new book, Why My Wife Thinks I'm an Idiot," (Villard, 219 pages, $22.95), is subtitled, The Life and Times of a Sportscaster Dad, swears this moment of modern dad-hood was not a setup.
This is just how his life goes, he says, since his wife has an executive career and his hours align more closely to the kids' schedule. He has a level of involvement in his children's life that would have been unheard of a generation ago.
"The book, if nothing else, is meant to be a tribute to all the dads of my generation who are trying to do it," he explains. "It's not about sports. At the end of the day, it's really about my family."
And this restaurant, he adds, happens to be a favorite Chicago haunt for the Greenbergs. His wife, Stacy, grew up in Lincoln Park, and their two children, ages 3 and 5, love to visit their extended family here.
"This is a great place to take them for breakfast," Greenberg says, before ordering a cup of vegetable soup and a Cobb salad.
Having gone to Northwestern and having started his career here, Greenberg says that, despite actually growing up in New York City, he considers himself a Chicagoan.
His ESPN gig means living in Connecticut for now, but "I will move back here," he says.
"Chicago is a very provincial city, sportswise and otherwise," he says, "So it's like, 'You're either one of us or you're not.' . . . And I'm in. People here think of me as a Chicagoan and I think of myself that way, too. I just happen not to live here right now."
The son of two writers, Greenberg says he always wanted to be a writer. The new book, he says, is actually his third, but "it's the first one I can prove."
After two novels were rejected by publishers, Greenberg met with his literary agent in February 2002 and declared himself officially done with writing.
"I said, 'I'm done. I'm devastated.' And I said the only writing I was going to do was in a journal I'd been keeping, which I'd come to think of as The Hysterical Man's Guide to Being an Expectant Father. My agent said, 'Michael, that's the book,' " Greenberg says, between careful spoonfuls of his soup.
'Narcissistic sissy boy'
He landed a book deal based on a 10-page sample of his journal writing and then, he says, "Basically, they give you the money, your wife spends the money and you're on the hook to finish writing the book."
Greenberg stands out from the typical ex-jock sports guys mainly for his self-deprecating willingness to discuss his life as a very involved modern dad and his well-developed taste in clothes and grooming.
"What I like about the word 'metrosexual,'" he says, "is that it's so much better than 'narcissistic sissy boy,' which is what they used to call me. I like clothes. I like fancy things. I kind of grew up with that. And, over the years, it's become a sort of shtick. Sports guys, there are so many of us . . . this stands out."
As he does on the radio each weekday morning, Greenberg is happy to hold forth on all topics sporting -- yes, he's heard Dusty Baker might be fired soon -- but he's also happy to tell stories about his personal life.
A life in anecdotes
On Mike and Mike, which he co-hosts with Mike Golic, he says, "We can sit there and talk about Barry Bonds for an hour, but the stuff that people really relate to is the everyday stuff. It's those stories that get the biggest response."
Many of those stories, like the time he said at a dinner party that he thought the experience of pregnancy was probably harder on men than on women, have been captured in Greenberg's book.
But Greenberg also seems to be one of those people who lives his life in anecdotes. When he mentions that he met his wife at the East Bank Club, he quickly explains that "whenever I say that, my wife always insists that I say we were introduced by a mutual friend over lunch there so it doesn't sound like I just picked her up over the weight machine or something."
Greenberg says he's planning to head over to East Bank right after lunch to take his son and daughter swimming, so I figure he's in a hurry to get going. But his wife ends up taking them instead.
After he finishes his lunch -- a crisis is averted when a drop of salad dressing falls on his tie, but is easily removed -- he decides to linger for a while over a cup of green tea.
"I love being on a book tour," he says, "because I get to sit around and talk about myself."
By the time we're finished, the kids are done swimming.
Dear Petty Criminal, I have to admit that I'm impressed with your dexterity. To be able to reach into my purse, extract my wallet, remove the cash, credit card and driver's license from the wallet and then -- this, I consider the coup de grace -- slip the wallet back into the bag without my noticing is a pretty spectacular feat.
So congratulations on that.
I'm guessing also that your observational skills are fairly well-developed, too. Because a pregnant woman -- yes it's true, due in October, thanks -- eating a Billy Goat cheeseburger, even if it is an ersatz food court version of a Billy Goat cheeseburger, is pretty much completely tuned out from the world around her. And a pregnant woman eating a Billy Goat cheeseburger while reading The New Yorker and struggling to come up with a funny, interesting idea for a newspaper column that can be written in under an hour is unlikely to notice anything short of a supercell tornado.
It's not all that surprising, then, that I didn't sense your presence. And, sure, I had slung my bag over the back of my chair, which is one of those things, like using the same password for all your accounts, that everyone knows you're not supposed to do.
In that regard, I was the perfect mark: careless, distracted, totally self-absorbed.
The M&M factor
But there were a few things you didn't count on, Ms. Pickpocket. (I've decided to think of you as a woman because of the whole manual dexterity thing and, more significantly, because that way, I'm somehow slightly less freaked out by the idea of you reaching into a bag that was never more than a few inches away from my body.)
First, you probably figured I'd have more than 25 bucks on me. Really, though, between cab fare and snacks, I'm pretty much always tapped out these days. If you're looking for cash, I'd have to suggest moving on to single people and empty-nesters.
And, second, you might have figured that it would have taken me a while to notice what was missing. You didn't count on me leaving the food court and heading right for the adjacent news stand to buy a package of Almond M&Ms to sustain me over the long walk back to my desk. Normal people might not be inclined to buy more food immediately following the consumption of a large lunch, but I am several months past normal.
That, actually, is how I discovered the stuff was missing. Because you didn't leave me a dollar to buy candy. That really ticked me off.
Walking away from the newsstand without my M&Ms was far worse than, say, calling my credit card company to find out that you'd already bought cell phones from U.S. Cellular and Sprint. (Two different companies? Who are you, the NSA? Seriously, you could have at least done a little comparison shopping.)
Fair warning
I do, however, appreciate your leaving my cell phone alone. And I almost feel sorry for you that you didn't get my press pass. (It's totally fun to flash at doormen and security guards. And who knows what an enterprising person like you might have done with it.)
You're probably not the type to listen to unsolicited advice, but, really, I don't recommend going to the trouble of stealing my identity. My credit rating isn't that great anyway and you'll just wind up on a million irritating mailing lists. Also -- and I hate to bring this up, because I don't like trafficking in these silly gender-based stereotypes, but this one happens to be absolutely true -- it is an extremely bad idea to mess with a pregnant woman.
I've spent the last few months dealing with exhaustion and ridiculous food restrictions. I've met all my deadlines without help from caffeinated beverages. My clothes don't fit, my allergy medicine is off-limits and I can't conduct a long interview without needing to take a bathroom break. So, seriously, my patience has been worn a little thin.
Should you happen to make a mistake and get caught, I will not be inclined toward mercy. Especially after the whole M&M thing.
Bigger fish to fry
On the other hand, you are, at the moment, the least of my concerns.
I suddenly find myself dealing with life's big questions in non-hypothetical terms. The idea of being responsible for another human being is wondrous and overwhelming and all the other cliche stuff that people always say it is and you don't believe them. A lot of my theories about life are about to be put into practice and I don't know how well they're going to hold up.
If nothing else, you've reminded me that I'm going to have to start paying more attention to the world around me, being on the lookout for strangers and sharp objects and fast-moving traffic and all those other things that only parents see coming. So thanks for that, whoever you are.
This is one of two "busy seasons" for the interview business. Basically, the book publishing industry does two big marketing pushes each year -- for Christmas and for "graduation season" -- which means that there are a zillion authors doing book tours right now. And I'm trying to lunch with as many of them as possible, sort of stockpiling lunches for the summer, when it's hard to schedule people for interviews because they're all on vacation.
Having "Lunch With . . ." two or three times a week doesn't exactly sound like hard work, I know. So I generally try to avoid complaining about how busy I am because people are (righfully) incredibly unsympathetic about it: "Oh, gee, you had to go to three great restaurants and chat with three famous people this week . . . poor thing."
But, believe it or not, there is some other work that goes into the whole lunch gig. Like research and scheduling and, in the case of authors, reading their books.
So I've started to fall behind.
I figured I could catch up last night, since R. was going to be away on a business trip. I stayed at the office until I was too hungry and cold (the air conditioning vent above my cube is the bane of my existence) to stand it a minute longer. I packed up my stuff and figured I'd finish what I was writing from the comfort of my home office.
Unfortunately, while eating my single-person dinner (bagel chips and salmon pate), I happened to turn on BBC America. I got completely sucked in to back-to-back episodes of What Not to Wear.
By 10 o'clock, I'd slid into the classic college freshman mistake of deciding that I'd get a good night's sleep, wake up early, and write in the morning.
Um, yeah.
Now, as I'm about to head into the office, I've backed myself into a deadline corner of having to write two columns in a day. And I'm such a nerd that I feel like if I beg for mercy, I'm just going to end up blurting out a confession about the tv-watching.
If Friday's column features lots of letters from readers, you'll know it's because I didn't have time to write anything myself.
As someone who eats lunch with people professionally, I tend to take a sociological approach to the whole restaurant experience. I'm constantly looking for insights into people based on their dining behaviors. There's the obvious stuff, like whether someone is rude to a waiter (kiss of death, as far I'm concerned; a near-fatal character flaw), as well as more subtle indications, like how long a person looks at a menu (quick look = decisive, in command, well-organized) and how many special instructions they give when ordering (two or more = self-centered).
But I've never quite figured out the water test. In my experience, bottled water does not reliably correlate with trendiness, health-consciousness or wealth. And tap water doesn't connect to frugality or modesty, either, especially since many people who choose it end up leaving it untouched.
For my part, I'm not even consistent about which option I choose, though it's almost never "still" -- the choice, for me, is all about bubbles.
I was pretty much monogamous by the time the question started to be asked regularly, so I haven't had the chance to test it out in a dating pool. (R., being from Iowa, is a pretty consistent tap water guy, though he drinks the bubbly stuff when I order it.)
Anyway, the question presented itself at a lunch interview this afternoon and, since I was the first one to arrive, I had to make the water call on my own. I went with tap, but then felt weird about it through the whole interview, since the question never came up again and the guest was pretty much locked in to my choice. If any of the big etiquette experts have weighed in on this question, I've missed it. Is there a proper water choice when entertaining?
I was pretty strongly resolved that, when I got married, I would not become a nagging wife. But I quickly came to understand the temptation.
It's deeply strange to me that while my mind can lock in on a full trash can or an empty tissue box or a dishwasher in need of unloading, R.'s brain simply does not process things in the same way. I look around our home and see jobs that need to be done. He doesn't.
Of course he always offers to help, but it seems weird to ask someone to do something so quick and menial and basic. So, in the beginning, I'd just do everything myself.
This made him feel weird and inadequate, like I was having to clean up after him. "Just ask me to do it," he'd say.
I did start asking, but not much happened. It was like he'd agree, in principle, that the trash needed to be taken out, but he wouldn't actually do it. Or, he wouldn't do it immediately and then he'd forget about it and then I, not wanting to ask twice, lest that be counted as nagging, would just do it myself. Which would kind of lead back to whole weird and inadequate thing, but with a side helping, also, of "judged to be a useless slob."
So that wasn't good.
Then, utterly randomly, we happened upon a brilliant solution. (Actually, the brilliant solution existed in R.'s head for a long time. I just didn't know about it.)
We were walking down Armitage Ave. -- when he works from home, he walks with me to the train in the morning; it's super-newlyweddish and extra gooey and I totally dig it -- and the term "passive-aggressive" came up. It wasn't in relation to either of us.
I just used it to describe someone else and he asked me for a precise definition. (It's kind of funny how you can drop a term into conversation liberally but then struggle to come up with exactly what it means; one of the many things I love about R. is that he almost never does this.)
I finally did come up with a definition, but was almost sorry I had, since R. then asked if he ever behaved that way.
I tried the "I think we all do, sometimes" dodge, but he wasn't having it. So I was forced to actually answer. And I did, describing how the way he sometimes pouts in response to me repeatedly asking him to do something (yes, I guess that is, technically, nagging), makes me feel so bad about asking in the first place that it completely lets him off the hook for having failed to do whatever it was.
"There's an easy solution to that," he said lightly. Which I took to mean, "Don't ask me to do anything."
But, lucky for me, that wasn't what he meant. Actually, he just suggested that I write down what (by my standards) "needed" to be done and post the list on the fridge.
It sounded too good to be true.
But I tried it yesterday, with:
- Combine bathroom/bedroom trash with kitchen trash; take out
- Move laundry from washer to dryer
- Replace empty tissue box in main bathroom (extras on top laundry room shelf)
- Move dishes in sink to dishwasher
And it worked: all four items done by the end of the day. Today, I left only one item (Take stuff to dry cleaner's), since it involved leaving the house.
The sickest part is that this really does have the effect of making him more attractive and appealing to me. So there's kind of a reward system built right in.
Can it really be this easy to housebreak a new husband?
If it is, I'm totally writing a book, "The Husband Whisperer."
Three security guards are standing watch in the lobby of the downtown office building that is home to the big law firm Mayer, Brown, Rowe and Maw.
They are waiting for Shirin Ebadi, the Iranian human rights activist and Nobel Peace Prize winner. It is not clear, exactly, from whom they are guarding her -- she has already spent time in a Tehran jail and lives, even now, in a sort of tense legal limbo when she is at home in Iran -- but Ebadi seems unsurprised at their presence.
Standing less than 5 feet tall, Ebadi nonetheless has a long, quick stride, and the guards hasten their steps to keep up with her as she makes her way from a chauffeured car through the lobby and up to the law firm's offices on the 32nd floor.
When she travels internationally, Ebadi sheds the modest head covering required in Iran. She is dressed today in a plain gray pantsuit and a black silk blouse. A touch of red lipstick is visible on her mouth, setting off the hennaed tones in her short, dark hair. She does not smile, but neither does she look particularly anxious. She wears the practiced, neutral expression of someone who simply does not want any trouble.
Fought against sanctions
There is, it must be said, nothing particularly extraordinary about her presence or her manner. But she receives a hero's welcome at the firm that represented her, starting in 2004, in a groundbreaking lawsuit challenging key components of the U.S. government's economic sanctions against Iran.
Though Ebadi, who was awarded the peace prize in 2003 for her work providing legal representation to those who suffered under the Iranian regime, was offered an exemption to the federal regulations that made it impossible for writers in Iran, Sudan and Cuba to commercially publish their work here, she declined that special consideration and elected instead to challenge the government's interpretation of the Trading With the Enemy Act.
"I said that cultural affairs are not covered by the sanctions," Ebadi explains, speaking through an interpreter, as we share a pre-lunch coffee in a corner conference room, "and that, by not allowing this book to be published, you are actually imposing censorship on the American people and, according to the Constitution, censorship is against the law. . . . I am very happy and thankful to my American colleagues at Mayer Brown for helping me, and I'm grateful to the American courts who proved they are independent. After the court's decision, many Iranians were able to publish their books and sell their music in the U.S."
Ebadi's memoir, Iran Awakening (Random House, $24.95), written with Azadeh Moaveni, has just been published, and she is touring the United States to promote it. This is either a very good time or a very bad time to be an Iranian dissident making public appearances across America, and for Ebadi, it is an occasion to bring into broad relief the complicated nature of her feelings toward both her native country and the country that has embraced her as a symbol of democratic resistance to a radical Islamist regime.
"No country needs an atomic bomb," she'll tell the Mayer Brown attorneys later over lunch, "neither Iran nor the United States."
And there will be an uncomfortable silence in the room that has been decorated to celebrate Ebadi's legal victory and the release of her book.
"When Mr. Bush says, 'We will not dismiss any alternative, even war,' then the Iranian government will use this excuse to suppress the internal opposition," she'll say, taking a certain amount of air out of that whole democracy promotion balloon. "This sort of thing happens even here. In the U.S., with the excuse of finding terrorists and [protecting] national security, they have eliminated a lot of freedoms. For example: listening in on telephone conversations, which is against the Constitution."
And the applause that comes at the end of her speech will be polite, but not entirely warm.
Islam's varied interpretations
Now, though, as she waits for this speaking engagement to begin, she relaxes for a moment. She sees a certain amount of humor in her situation. She is too much of a reformer for her life in Iran to be entirely comfortable, but she is also too committed to peaceful change and working within the system to ever be fully understood outside her own country.
"Iran has bad laws, which are very prejudicial against women," says Ebadi, who, after learning that she'd won the Nobel Peace Prize while on a trip to Paris, was taken into an Iranian court to face charges (later dropped, due to pressure from the international community) because she'd been photographed -- hair uncovered -- shaking the hand of French Prime Minister Jacques Chirac. "The Iranian government claims that these laws are Islamic, and my job is to prove that these laws are not Islamic but come from wrong interpretations of Islamic laws. I have to prove to the government that they can change. Islam, like any religion, has many interpretations. In Saudi Arabia, women cannot even drive cars, while in Indonesia and Bangladesh and Pakistan, we see that women can even become prime minister. So the real question is which Islam? Which interpretation?"
Ebadi, 59, was once her country's highest-ranking female judge. But after the 1979 revolution, she was demoted from judge to secretary and given a job as a clerk-typist in the same courtroom where she'd once presided. Later reforms allowed women to once again practice law, and Ebadi founded Human Rights Defenders, a group of activist attorneys who take on political and human rights cases. She knows that, as a woman, her rights -- and those of her two daughters -- exist mainly at the pleasure of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
Both daughters are now attending graduate school in Canada, Ebadi says, "but they have both promised me that they will return to Iran. I hope they keep their promise."
She pauses for a moment, seeming to consider how this might sound, if it might be too much to ask of bright young women who have tasted Western freedoms.
"Of course," she adds, "they are free to live where they live. But, as a mother, I am also free to wish whatever I wish."
Before the Valentine-esque price gouging on flowers and the four-course brunches and the treacly Hallmark cards and the uber-pink kitsch of the Breast Cancer Walk, it was a day with a serious point of view. And it had nothing to do with celebrating some June Cleaver ideal of sweet, feminine domesticity.
When Julia Ward Howe, the American suffragist and peace activist, started lobbying for a "Mothers' Day for Peace" in 1870, she envisioned it as a war protest.
The Civil War -- an unimaginably brutal and bloody conflict -- had just ended and, in Europe, the Franco-Prussian War was just beginning, setting the stage for the world wars to come. So Howe organized women to rally for peace, declaring, "Our husbands shall not come to us, reeking with carnage, for caresses and applause. Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn all that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience. We women of one country will be too tender of those of another country to allow our sons to be train.
The idea that only men wage war, and that only women nurture the homefront, seems painfully old-fashioned now. But the image of the "war mother," desperately worried for the safety of her soldier-child, stays with us.
Sometimes, in fact, it seems like mothers are the only ones who can talk about war in purely human terms. The rest of us are expected to be somehow more worldly in our perspective, taking politics and strategy into account. We are supposed to think of the loss of human life as "regrettable." We are not supposed to take it personally.
Changing more than punctuation
When Anna Jarvis picked up the idea of a Mothers' Day in 1907, she was seeking a way to honor her own mother, Ann Marie Jarvis, who had been a community organizer in West Virginia and was the force behind several "Mothers Friendship Day" meetings that, in the aftermath of the Civil War, reconnected families that had been divided by the war.
Anna Jarvis managed to build national momentum for the holiday, which was recognized by President Woodrow Wilson in 1914.
But something got lost in translation.
Instead of a day for mothers, in the collective sense, recognizing their power as social reformers and advocates for peace, the day became a celebration of your mother and what she did for you. It was no longer Mothers' Day, but Mother's Day -- and that difference in that apostrophe, moving from the plural to the singular, was all the difference in the world. Instead of celebrating what mothers could do out in the streets, the day recognized only what they did at home.
Several wars and social movements later, we still stick to that official script about Mother's Day. We say that being a mother is the most important job in the world -- Really? More important than teacher or medical researcher or war crimes investigator? -- and that motherhood is all about the kind of selfless sacrifice that only the most colorful flower arrangement can repay.
But for all the conservative rhetoric about how life begins at the moment of conception, giving biological mothers a special connection to the value of human life, we don't hear much about how mothers might also have a special perspective on war.
Cindy Sheehan can't be the only mother out there who feels ripped off by the idea that the life of the son she carried for nine months was later so easily given away. When was it, exactly, that the life of her child was supposed to stop being sacred?
Celebrate with spirit
True to the original spirit of Mothers' Day, the women's antiwar group Code Pink is planning a weekend vigil outside the White House to protest the war in Iraq. And, closer to home, peace groups will be handing out Mother's Day flowers at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial at Wacker and Wabash and rallying in Independence Park on the North Side.
But even if your mother, like mine, is not exactly the protest marching sort, it's still possible to celebrate this weekend's holiday with a little less Hallmark commercialism and a little more community spirit.
You can give to charity in your mother's name -- even if she's secretly disappointed at not getting flowers, she'll have to be happy about having raised you with such good values -- or help her sort through some of your childhood possessions to see what could be donated to others.
You can organize the mothers in your neighborhood to tackle a project, like cleaning up a playlot or helping out a needy family.
You can find a soup kitchen or food depository that needs volunteers and sign up to spend a shift there with your mom.
Or you can just go to brunch like you always do. But, this year, maybe take a moment, between bites of $20 French toast, to think about those seriously cool mothers who try to make the world a better place, not just for their own children, but for all of us.
I know I can be thrown out of the girls' tree house for even thinking this, but I can't stop myself: Isn't the big Mother's Day / breast cancer thing getting just a little out of hand?
Leaving aside, for the moment, the incredible, cloying pink-ness of it, I think what really gets to me is the narrowness of its focus. Is breast cancer bad? Yes, obviously. As far as I know, no one is staging a big march in favor of it.
And, though I've never seen any real proof of this, I'm willing to believe that, at some point in our history, The Man, in the guise of the mainstream medical establishment, didn't pay as much attention to breast cancer as other diseases because only women got it. But I have the feeling that moment has passed.
And, anyway, more women now die of lung cancer than breast cancer anyway.
And there's pretty compelling evidence that for many women -- especially poor and minority women -- heart disease is a far greater threat.
Internationally, AIDS kills so many young women that they never get old enough to even develop breast cancer.
Wouldn't it be nice to pay attention to those women's health issues, too? (I mean, since we were busily printing up pink t-shirts anyway.)
My weekly "commentary" (I think that's a slightly inflated term for it) on WTTW's Chicago Tonight airs this evening. (Or, tomorrow morning, if you prefer to catch the 4:30 am re-broadcast.)
And the producers are getting a little crazy, adding video footage and some high production value stuff, beyond just my giant head on TV for 2 solid minutes.
Post a comment here if you have an opinion on whether the new, fancier format is an improvement.
While driving on the Kennedy yesterday during rush hour (a situation I usually work hard to avoid), I was lucky enough to catch a glimpse of a guy I've come to think of as the Ultimate American.
First, he managed to cross 4 lanes of traffic, from the far left lane to his exit, in an incredible display of nerve. It's like he was able to drive sideways. And, though it seemed like he wasn't looking at all, he avoided sideswiping anyone by at least 6 inches.
True, he was in a German car -- a silver Mercedes sports coupe -- but even that, in these worldly times, seems like an utterly American declaration of status. Especially since so few Europeans drive such gas guzzlers any more.
But what really capped it was the cell phone he had (illegally) in once hand and (seriously!) the big, fat cigar he had in the other.
From now on, whenever I hear stories about the horrible image that people abroad have of America, I will think of this guy.
Was it just me, or was this an absolutely outstanding morning to sleep late?
There's one level of pleasure to be found in lingering too long in a deep, unconsciousness. But, to me, there's something even more exquisite in waking up, looking at the clock, knowing you're late, and then just snuggling in and dozing there anyway.
I particularly enjoy it when the people in my dreams take on the voices coming from my radio. This morning I dreamed that I was throwing a dinner party and one of my guests decided to entertain everyone by doing a dead-on impersonation of NPR's Carl Kasell.
It's Monday morning and I'm feeling a little cocky about having used the word "anthropomorphous" in my Lunch column yesterday. Every now and then, I just like to slip something in to see if the editors are paying attention.
I'm also really happy with all the reaction I've gotten from Friday's column. Some comments are posted here, while others came in by e-mail and I'm checking with their authors before publishing them anywhere.
I wasn't really going for any sort of this is right / this is wrong resolution (I almost never am, which is probably a sign that I'll never be a great pundit), but I thought the question of how to devote one's time/resources was worth raising. The whole idea of "take care of your own first" is a powerful one, which many of the folks commenting on the column mentioned.
On a side note, a colleague sent me this link to a great piece in Granta magazine titled, "How to Write About Africa."
It's a pretty good laundry list of the cliches I've tried really hard to avoid, though I'm sure I hit a few of them over the years.
The thing I remember most vividly about the first major piece I wrote about traveling to Africa was that, while standing in an orphanage in Nairobi, I found myself completely unable to take pictures of the kids. It just felt like it would be exploitation. So I discussed those feelings in the essay. And then, as it was being laid out on the page to go into the newspaper, the designer went searching the web for an appropriate "African orphan" photo to include with it. I pitched a ridiculously large fit and, amazingly enough, the piece ran without a single photo of a child. Instead, they used the pictures I'd taken of livestock and other scnenery.
Click "continue reading" to read the original essay, provocatively titled (not by me) "Orphan Porn."
March 11, 2004 Orphan Porn
by Debra Pickett
About 80 [in 2006, it's now about 120] children live at the Good Samaritan Home in Nairobi's Mathare slum, and the thing I think about most when I look at them is how many I could take home.
This, I have to admit, is probably not the most productive, developmentally correct approach to meeting the needs of Africa's AIDS orphans, the generation of kids who have lost their parents to the AIDS pandemic that is still raging across the continent. There are 10 million to 15 million of these children in Africa. About half a million of them live in Kenya and Tanzania, where I traveled last month.
I figure I've got room for at least four of them in my one-bedroom apartment.
That would be something, I suppose, some tiny difference I could make. I've spent so many years thinking I need more money and more space -- and, OK, probably either a husband or a really great nanny -- before I start a family, but I look at these kids and I realize how ridiculous all of that is. I have enough. I have too much. I could support a few of these kids. And then the logic starts to fall apart.
Which ones do you choose?
There is the tiny boy, about 3 (most of these children don't know how old they are or when their birthdays are) who everyone calls John-O. He sits on the ground to eat his lunch because he doesn't like the way his legs dangle from the too-high benches and his favorite toy is an improvised version of hoop and stick, made from old wire, that he can only play with when the other, bigger kids are distracted by something else. It takes me half a minute to fall in love with his big, bright eyes. Yes, I could easily take him home.
But what does that do? What does that do for the other children here, who love him as their brother? What does it do for Mathare, with its open sewers and its air of anger and desperation? What does it do for Good Samaritan -- just picking out the cute ones and taking them away?
The beauty of pigs
I've traveled here with supporters and representatives of Global Alliance for Africa, a Chicago not-for-profit organization devoted to caring for the AIDS orphans and other vulnerable children of this region. The group's founder and executive director, Tom Derdak, has an approach that manages to be both thoughtful and tough-minded. They are not in the business, he frequently says, of delivering emergency relief or pulling kids out of their communities.
Instead, Global Alliance focuses on building on the strengths -- and there are strengths to be found here -- of existing local programs. At Good Samaritan, they've provided tools to help the kids and their caretakers grow vegetables, plus goats, chickens and pigs that will be a low-cost source of both nutrition and income. They also paid the start-up costs for vocational training programs, in tailoring and carpentry, for some of the older kids. The idea is that, with a pretty small initial investment from Global Alliance, the orphanage can become self-supporting, selling goat milk, eggs and pork, along with clothing and small pieces of furniture, while the kids gain some practical skills.
The ideas are simple but also stunningly original. In this crowded slum, teeming with garbage, there is plenty of free food for the goats. And no one complains about the smell of the pigs. Yet, before Good Samaritan, no one had thought of animal husbandry as a way to make a living in this urban slum.
Etiquette for aliens
Standing in the middle of Good Samaritan's ramshackle compound, where the only level floors are made of dirt and there is not a single, perfectly straight wall or finished ceiling to be found, it is easy to feel discouraged, even despairing, about the state of things in Africa's slums. Children wear secondhand clothes in varying degrees of shabbiness and seasonal appropriateness. Classrooms double as sleeping quarters and seem adequate as neither. Lesson books are dated and falling apart.
But it's also easy to see why Derdak and his organization chose Good Samaritan as a partner -- they never say "recipient" or "beneficiary." There is a vibrancy here, a spirit of optimism, that is almost palpable. The kids, many of whom speak English in addition to Swahili, are not afraid of adults. When they play games in the safety of the compound's courtyard, there is true joy written on their faces. The adults who work here love to talk about what they're doing and what's coming next and how well things have been going. Somehow, the place even smells better than the rest of the slum.
Still, it is hard to be here, hard to know what to do.
When we walked in -- 12 white Americans emerging from two white vans, parked on a narrow street where almost no one ever drives -- we were immediately conscious of our difference, our alien-ness. Adults and children gathered outside Good Samaritan to stare at us. We barely looked at them, busy as we were, trying not to appear squeamish as we carefully stepped over the streams of raw sewage running through the middle of the unpaved road. The engineers and developers among us were sizing up the building, which makes a joke of the concept of "up to code," and thinking they should avoid stepping inside its walls, just on general principle. We were all making mental lists of how to "fix" the place.
The children already had gathered in the open courtyard, seated in U-shaped rows of benches, waiting for us -- and the nyama choma (roasted goat dinner) we'd supplied. We were invited to sit on benches, too, except ours were in the shade of a corrugated-tin awning and directly faced the children. It was hard to tell who was more on display. For a while, we all just stared.
The adults had cooked three goats, plus a massive pot of pilau. They proudly showed us how they were frugally saving the goats' heads for soup. We smiled and tried to make appreciative noises.
They served us first -- hospitality -- even though we would have gladly skipped the meal to save more meat for the children. But Mama Mercy, the incredibly charismatic woman who runs the place, and her assistant, Rose, wouldn't hear of it, insisting we eat -- and heartily. They had saved big, fat slices of goat liver, the best part, for us. Despite the discomfort of feeling the kids watch us eat, we could not refuse. We shoveled the food into our mouths as fast as we could, hoping to get to the kids' turn a little faster.
We felt like we were walking a fine line, wanting to politely accept our role as honored guests but also itching to get out of our assigned seats and end our staring contest with the kids.
Finally, one of us -- 22-year-old Steve Frederick, a Northwestern University senior who'll become a teacher when he graduates -- did. Almost all of us quickly followed suit.
Why I didn't take their pictures
And now we're sitting here, in a hot, dusty courtyard, making fools of ourselves. Many of the kids understand English, but most are too shy to speak it, and so we resort to the funny faces and broad gestures that form the lingua franca of too-enthusiastic adults meeting too-reticent children. The kids indulge us, laughing when they know they are supposed to and nodding excitedly at the big plates of food finally being served to them.
They eat happily, and without reservation, swapping food from plate to plate in the grand tradition of school lunches everywhere.
Then, the adults tell them it is time to perform for us. Small groups of them get up to sing and dance and put on a skit about the importance of learning English. We clap and cheer, musing on what it is OK to notice -- the jovial sexiness of even the youngest girls' dance moves? -- and what we should try to ignore.
I keep wondering if there is a right way to act. Are the sun hats and glasses a bit much, making us look more like space aliens than we already do? And what about the way many of us take breaks from sitting in the direct sun light, with the kids, to retreat to the shade for a cold drink of bottled water or to put on sunscreen and lip balm?
And I think, too, about what I am supposed to be doing here, what the proper etiquette is for a journalist in an orphanage. A hundred times, I reach for my tape recorder and camera. And a hundred times I decided to let them sit, unused, in my bag. I know I should be clicking away, taking snapshots of the most appealingly shabby children, but I can't make myself do it.
What would be the point? To make you feel bad? Convince you to send a check? Show you what a saint I am for spending a few hours of my life here?
While I am here, sitting on the ground, talking and laughing and fooling around, the kids of Good Samaritan are not AIDS orphans, not symbols of the dozens of desperate crises in Africa. They are just kids.
And I know the minute I take my camera out, they won't be. Somewhere between the lens and this page, they'll go back to being abstractions, participants in what is, essentially, orphan porn.
So, if you want to know what they look like, you have to imagine it for yourself. Just picture the children you know, the way they giggle and wrinkle their noses and stare when they think no one is looking.
Picture those kids. And then subtract everything they have.
If not morality, national security
There probably is, in some ultimate way, a moral reason for helping Africa's most vulnerable children. We have so much and they have so little. It would be so easy for us to give resources that would mean the world to them. It cannot be right to let them go hungry while we keep getting fatter.
But there is also a pragmatic, self-interested reason for doing it and, this, Derdak knows, is probably his best hope for bringing in big donations for his cause.
"The future political and social stability of Africa depends on these children," he says.
This is an entire generation of children who've grown up without parents and, in many cases, without any adult guidance at all. They have grown up without hope. They have plenty of reason to hate the "developed world." They could easily become the terrorists and guerrilla fighters of tomorrow. They could easily come after us.
Reason for hope?
At Good Samaritan, no one says the word AIDS. You think of the kids just as children, rather than as orphans, and it is so easy to lose yourself in their songs and laughter.
There are 80 children here, flourishing in Mama Mercy's care, but there are hundreds of thousands more across other parts of Kenya and Tanzania. And there is only one Mercy.
You think of it that way, and it is just as easy to lose yourself in despair.
Can it really make a difference? Can it ever be enough?
Global Alliance looks for partners with a demonstrated commitment to helping orphans in a specific community, trying to find way to keep children with relatives or foster families, rather than in big, expensive orphanages. In Meru, in northern Kenya, they've sponsored a chicken-farming program for families who take in children from the Rural Vision Orphanage. Selling eggs provides the families with enough income to support and educate the kids they take in.
In a similar program in Arusha, Tanzania, they're working with the Tanzania Capital Boosting Association to provide small "microcredit" loans to families whose primary breadwinner has died of AIDS so they can start their own businesses, like selling corn or frying fish.
Each of these programs helps a few dozen children.
It takes an enormous amount of research to find programs like these -- run by local people, rather than big, international organizations and emphasizing self-sufficiency rather than charity. There's no easy way to "scale" them, mass-producing a single solution for all the challenges faced by communities in Africa. It takes a stubborn kind of faith to see this as worth doing, to get yourself out of the American "expert" role and replace your instinct to rescue children with a goal that is both deeper and more modest: to cheer on the good work that other people are doing, while resisting the urge to do it yourself.
All in all, there are about 1,000 children who benefit directly from the work Global Alliance does. By the end of next year, Derdak projects, it will be 5,000.
I don't know if it's enough. But it is more than I can fit in my apartment.
If you look at him from a certain angle, Marc Brown, the creator of the popular children's character Arthur, does look a little like his own creation.
"You should see my third-grade class picture," he says with a laugh. Apparently, the resemblance between Brown and the anthropomorphous aardvark was even more striking back then.
"They're all based on real people," Brown says of his many characters. In 30 years of drawing Arthur, Brown has developed a whole neighborhood full of friends, classmates, teachers and parents so true to life, despite their existence as cartoon animals, that kids often ask for their phone numbers and e-mail addresses.
In fact, in one of the early Arthur books, Brown included a reference to his own home phone number, where he still occasionally gets calls asking, "Is Arthur home?"
"My wife," Brown reports, "came up with the best answer for that one. She says, 'He's at the library.'"
Too much licensing?
Brown, who trained as a painter and once aspired to make beautiful illustrations for other people's books, never quite expected to be the center of a big commercial enterprise. In fact, he declined several offers to turn the Arthur books into a television show before striking a deal, which he guessed would last about two years, with PBS 11 years ago.
"I came to TV," he says, "like Fred Rogers -- who was a good friend -- from the position of really hating TV. So much of what was available for kids -- they didn't tell good stories. . . . It's really important for kids to get fully developed characters, and they just don't get a lot of that."
Unfortunately, despite a few exceptions like "Blue's Clues" and "Dora the Explorer," says Brown, the landscape hasn't really improved since then.
"My big problem with the current state of children's television is that there's more time spent on the licensing than on the content," he explains. "Ever since Barney . . . you know, Barney had 400 licenses [for different products] and that, to me, was a little scary. At the height of things with Arthur, I've had 40. And, in my heart, I knew that was too much."
Brown is down to about 15 licensed products now, he says, and those are mostly things like vitamins, bandage strips and organic pasta, that are "good for kids."
Because his current project -- the one non-Arthur-related endeavor he's got time for this year, a book called The Gulps Go Green -- deals with childhood obesity and issues of nutrition, Brown requested that we meet at a "healthy, vegetarian spot" for our lunch interview. So we're sharing a small table in the Roscoe Village cafe Victory's Banner, known for its vegetarian cuisine, and drinking organic tea while eating raspberry pancakes.
"You don't want to use humans for something like that," Brown says of the Gulps book. "It's too close, too touchy a subject for people. So that's where animals come in."
Brown has never shied away from dealing with touchy subjects, so his characters deal with many of the challenges that face today's kids, from asthma to peanut allergies. His work has never been controversial, though -- or it was never controversial -- until an episode of "Postcards from Buster," an Arthur spinoff, included two children with same-sex couples for parents.
To Brown's great surprise, then-newly appointed Secretary of Education Margaret Spelling issued a strong condemnation of the show, leading PBS to cancel a planned broadcast (though some local stations opted to show it anyway).
'I'm such a control freak'
"I was terribly disappointed that the secretary of education would single out people in this way," Brown says now. "I don't understand why you would want to exclude a group of children. I was so disappointed in her wanting to exclude the kids and disappointed that PBS backed down a little bit, too."
When I suggest that all the publicity might have actually been good for the show, Brown looks confused. He seems not to have a cynical bone in his body. And, so, when a sari-clad waitress with a cool, European accent -- the restaurant is owned by a student of meditation guru Sri Chimoy and many employees are also Chimoy followers -- swoops by our table and removes Brown's plate before he's had the chance to take more than a couple bites of his pancakes, he just smiles politely and notes that he doesn't like to have a heavy meal in the middle of the day anyway.
Brown, who lives in Massachusetts, is dressed in a navy blue blazer that's adorned with a silk pocket square. And, though he looks every bit the New England patrician, he has a mischievous sense of humor that occasionally sneaks out from beneath his polite and dapper shell.
He grins broadly, for example, when he describes the time he pulled the plug on an Arthur movie because the quality of animation wasn't up to his standards.
"I'm such a control freak," he says with a laugh, and looks, for a moment, like he might be deeply enjoying the memory of tormenting a bunch of Hollywood executives.
There's a new movie project in the works, he says, this one a computer-generated animation video due out in August.
"This could be Arthur's leap to the big screen," he says.
The timing is good -- Arthur, already seen in 110 countries and territories around the world, is making his debut in Japan, a huge market for animated features -- but Brown's enthusiasm is measured.
"We'll see how it goes," he says.
Franchise will end with him
Ever the protective father, Brown already has decreed that Arthur will never grow up -- "he will always be exactly 8 years old" -- and that the Arthur franchise will not pass from his hands to another author. He seems, too, to have a certain ambivalence about the idea of his young alter ego becoming a movie star.
"I once thought I'd lost my childhood, but it came back to me when my kids were born," Brown says, with all the reverence of a guy who understands what a fine thing it is to be able to hold onto childhood for as long as you possibly can.
I was that girl you knew in college who'd always buy lunch for the homeless guys.
How could a person, I wondered then, walk into Burger King, buy a meal and walk out again, right past the man begging for change on the corner? And so, even though my financial situation was pathetic enough that I knew the location of all the campus ATMs that dispensed money in $5 increments, I always got an extra sandwich to give to someone on the way out.
I don't remember the precise moment when I gave this up -- it probably overlapped with graduation and the end of parental subsidies -- but there are still moments when I think about it and wonder if I haven't somehow taken a wrong turn in life.
Back then, I knew exactly where I stood in the complicated moral hierarchy of the self-righteous: near the top, only a couple notches below the kids joining the Peace Corps and Teach for America. Now, my do-gooder credentials are tattered and torn, almost illegible.
This was painfully obvious Saturday night, when my husband, our good friend Katy and I headed down to The Grand Ballroom, an elegantly restored art deco hall at 63rd and Cottage Grove, to attend a gala fund-raising dinner. We'd all volunteered and raised money for the organization hosting the event, Global Alliance for Africa. We'd all visited the children's homes and foster care programs sponsored by the group in AIDS-ravaged sections of Kenya and Tanzania.
But we were hard-pressed to remember ever having set foot in Woodlawn, the South Side neighborhood where the ballroom is located.
I have spent more time in Mathare and Kibera, the worst slums of Nairobi, than I have in Englewood or Auburn Gresham. Which is, of course, appalling.
Reasons I can't explain
I first wrote about the plight of the millions of African children orphaned by AIDS in February 2003. It was an assignment.
Three years and four trips to Africa later, I've come to believe that the small amount of volunteer work I do there -- helping local community groups connect with resources to help them better manage their organizations -- is the most important thing I'll ever do with my life.
I've also come to see this work as an intensely personal choice about how I spend my time and money.
The hours I spent traveling could have been spent at a community center a few miles from home, helping out with reading programs or homework assistance. The dollars I spent on airfare could easily have bought school supplies for an under-resourced classroom in a Chicago school or funded a recreation program for local kids whose neighborhoods are sometimes too dangerous for outdoor play.
There are all sorts of sputtering explanations I can offer up to people who want to know why I'm more interested in vulnerable kids a half a world away than those in my own city. Children in Africa don't have access to clean water or decent health care, I tell them. Many of them are growing up without adult guidance and they're at risk of becoming child soldiers and future terrorists.
But playing that game of relativism is a bad idea. Do I really want to assert that one impoverished childhood is really "worse" than another? Aren't they all unacceptable?
I can say, too, that I was invited -- and welcomed -- to Africa. But that explanation gets into dangerous territory, too, revealing just how much of my own ego is wrapped up in feeling needed and useful.
Why not the South Side?
The question was hard to avoid on Saturday night, with a near-empty street, almost totally devoid of commercial activity or community life, just outside the beautifully lit windows of The Grand Ballroom. And it's been on my mind ever since.
David Weiner, the Chicago businessman and author whose new book Reality Check (Prometheus Books, 303 pages, $19) is a kind of layman's guide to the latest in brain research, was one of the few people I encountered who was willing to offer an explanation.
"Having a cause," he said, "especially a distant one, stimulates our dopamine response [the brain's 'feel good' mechanism.] When you have a cause, you can say things about it that other people don't know. That makes you feel good. With local things, there's something along the lines of familiarity breeding contempt. But overseas, it's less confusing. And those causes are in the papers -- you can read all about Darfur -- so there's a lot of status attached to them, too."
While I suspect that Weiner is overestimating the status-enhancing capacity of newspaper reports about Sudan, I do see his point. It's hard to come up with urban America's equivalent of, say, Bono or Angelina Jolie.
So maybe it is all, ultimately, just selfishness, a quest for a pure dopamine high.
I suppose there are worse things in life, though you could never tell that to the girl who bought all those extra sandwiches.
How can you not absolutely love this story about the 104-year-old woman who has just married her 21st husband, a 33-year-old guy?
The best part, actually, appears in the Times Online version of the story, which includes a quote saying that -- this has to be a joke, right? -- the bride just hopes the marriage will last.
So, did Kaavya Viswanathan actually write any part of her novel?
Today's news offers up details of another accusation of plagiarism, this time from chick lit doyenne Sophie Kinsella.
To me, one of the most interesting questions in this whole scandal is when Viswanathan started cheating. Was she, at some point, just a standard issue high school writer chick who penned her own angst-filled short stories in the privacy of her big, suburban bedroom? Did the borrowed passages start finding their way in only after a college admissions consultant suggested that literary talent might get her into Harvard? Or was it the pressure of meeting a book-packager-imposed deadline that made her do it?
Or, did she always do it? Was she copying from the encyclopedia and the Internet on her 4th grade book reports?
Was she ever a writer, really?
Wednesday, May 3 update: Even MORE sources she stole from!
My intellectual snobbery is far too advanced and entrenched to allow me to ever admit watching a reality TV show. (OK, The Bachelor. Once. For a period of several weeks.)
So I'll have to come up with another classification for the new PBS series, Texas Ranch House.
The show, part of a series of projects that began with Colonial House in 2004, takes "regular" people from the modern world and, after giving them some basic training, has them live in the manner of a specific historical time and place.
This one has the Cooke family, California suburbanites, taking over an 1867 Texas ranch house. They've got a crew of cowboys (a collection of youngish guys from around the country, plus a polo-playing Eton grad from England, and a New York City chef as their cook) and, best of all, a single servant, who is referred to as their "girl of all work."
Experts on the history of the period act as advisors, keeping things very true to life. No one has anything (clothes, food, linens, furniture) that they wouldn't have had access to in 1867.
This is fascinating, of course, but the real genius of the show is in its casting. (This is where the line between this high-minded historical project and, um, Survivor, gets blurred.)
The "girl of all work" is Maura Finkelstein, a grad student in anthropology at Stanford. She describes herself as a feminist with a rebellious streak, and it's clear from the first two episodes (broadcast back-to-back last night) that she's going to drive everyone else crazy by repeatedly pointing out the oppressive gender roles on the ranch.
Two more episodes air tonight at 8 and repeat at 10.
Would there be a problem with munching on some historically inaccurate microwave popcorn while I watch?
It is wrong, of course, to assert that I love the new kitchen.
But, honestly, when I turned on the fabulous new faucet (it's one of those where the spout pulls out to become a sprayer for washing dishes) to rinse off some very dusty dishes in the fabulous new sink (extra deep, double basin), the rush I felt was something embarassingly close to love.
R. and I had a fun, busy weekend -- an Improv Fest performance on Friday night and a fundraising gala dinner on Saturday -- but the actual highlight for me involved spending hours and hours arranging things as I put them away in the fabulous new kitchen cabinets.
R. had, quite helpfully, already taken our stuff out of the boxes where we'd stashed it. And he'd put most of the stuff into the cabinets.
I never quite know whether it's OK for me to re-do household stuff that R. has done. Is it, for example, utterly self-defeating to re-fold the laundry that he's folded because, well, his folding technique leaves something to be desired? I tell myself that I'm still saving labor by doing this, since, if I smooth it out into sharper folds now, it won't have to be ironed later. But the truth of the matter is that I haven't actually ironed anything in years. And wearing wrinkled stuff doesn't seem to bother him. So, I'm really just doing it because I have some sort of weird control-freak need to have all his t-shirts in neat, even piles in their drawer. (Perhaps I could say that seeing them this way makes me feel like I'm being a good wife. But I've been obsessive about storing clothes in an orderly manner for much longer than I've been a wife.)
So I was acutely aware that if I pulled stuff out of the cabinets, where he'd already put things away, I'd be sending the message that he shouldn't ever bother with such efforts. And I don't want to send that message. Right?
I was just going to re-organize a couple of small things. Like I thought the waffle maker and its extra parts should be in the same cabinet.
But once I started, I couldn't stop.
I couldn't leave the glasses (stored in a glass-front cabinet) in an unsymmetrical arrangement. I wanted the mugs, cups and saucers, tea pots and canisters of tea to all be kept in one hot beverage-themed cabinet. And, naturally, the two different sushi sets we received as wedding gifts had to be shelved together. All the Corningware had to be in one cabinet. All the Pyrex bakeware belonged in another.
And don't get me started on how I arranged the food in the fridge and pantry so that each item is clearly visible.
Yes, I know that there are serial killers who are less anal than this.
And also that the incredible, utterly materialistic glee I take in arranging all these personal posessions is a fine example of consumerist excess.
But, damn, our kitchen is awesome.
We picked out the oak-and-glass cabinets at Ikea, the coffee-colored quartz stone countertop, the white cast iron sink and appliances, the buttery yellow paint and the brushed nickel accessories all at different places and hadn't seen everything all together until the room was actually finished. And, to my great surprise and relief, it all seems to go together and look like we planned it.
There are only two tiny downsides that I can see. First, there is now, officially, no excuse not to cook. And, second, one of the light fixtures (which R. bought on an excursion to Home Depot with our handyman) is really pretty awful.
It's not that the light (a sort of track light thing, with three small bright blue glass lamps hanging from it) is ugly. It's just that it's too blue and too modern to really go with the rest of the room. But, I thought, as I stashed some of R.'s souvenir fraternity cocktail glasses into an inaccesible (non-glass-front) cabinet above the stove, maybe he should get to have the lamp he wants.
And I should learn to live with it. But not, you know, love it.
