Friday's column: The return of the skinny black pant
"It's back!" declares the beautiful, artsy poster on bus shelters and billboards around town.
And though I know I'm supposed to react with relief, even joy, at the news of this return to a simpler, lovelier fashion sensibility, instead I find myself griping about it.
In an ad campaign featuring the timelessly beautiful Audrey Hepburn, the Gap has decreed that the skinny black pant is back.
But, really, did anyone miss the skinny black pant? Had anyone even noticed its absence?
Have there been great sighs of relief from tall, thin women -- that incredibly underserved fashion demographic -- as billboards have gone up all over Chicago to announce that the Gap has revived a style of trousers that looks good on approximately 1 percent of the population? Did the Audrey Hepburns of the world just not have enough fashion options?
Friday's column: Politicians find novel way to bond with nerds
Mayor Daley, in a moment of uncharacteristic candor, was bold enough to admit this week that he had "not yet" had a chance to read the latest "One Book, One Chicago" selection: Jhumpa Lahiri's Interpreter of Maladies. With the holiday weekend coming up, plus the very long flight on his planned I'm-cool-like-Obama trip to Ghana, I'm sure he'll have a chance to get to it soon. After all, the pressure's on.
President Bush upped the summer reading ante this year, when, in early August, he announced that he'd read Albert Camus' The Stranger. Since then, public figures everywhere have been scrambling to find "smart" books to tuck under their arms and tote around.
This weekend, as summer winds down, it might even be time for a few of the more conscientious among them to crack open a cover or two.
Friday's column: Resisting the pull of fabulous baby furniture
The single greatest thing my husband did when we were getting married was to leave the country for several weeks. There really wasn't a huge amount of work involved in organizing our simple 60-person wedding, or even in combining our two single households into one, but the few tasks that did exist were made infinitely simpler by the fact that only one of us was making the decisions.
I did, of course, consult with him on the important stuff, and saved all the receipts on purchases made with our joint credit card. But not the itemized receipts. Please.
William Kaper is apparently unfamiliar with the Saturn test. Kaper, the Barrington attorney who made headlines by suing the ex-wife he'd hoped to re-marry in order to get back the $98,000 engagement ring he'd given her, says he was shocked -- shocked! -- by the raw materialism of the dozens of angry women who left nasty messages on his office phone last week.
"All of them disliked me," he said, sounding just a little too sensitive for the aggressive litigator he actually is, "but none of them even knew me."
Friday's column: When saving the world gets complicated
I gave up on saving the world a long time ago, right about the time that the kids who didn't mind being poor got into one line at the career planning center and I got into another. But, in recent years, I'd begun to think I had a reasonable shot at making a difference in the lives of a few hundred children. Having lucked into finding a Chicago organization, Global Alliance for Africa, that identifies and supports community groups working with kids who've been orphaned by AIDS, I'd started to think of myself as one of those people who has a "calling."
Friday's column: Does this hiring scandal make us look fat?
Must we now pretend to take seriously the city's campaign to land the 2016 Olympics? Is that really what we've come to?
This week's news that we beat out Houston and Philadelphia to make the top three finalists for a potential U.S. bid to host the Games was not exactly earth-shattering. (It is, after all, hard to imagine being a less-attractive summer destination than Houston.)
But we got all puffed up and celebratory about it anyway. Because, frankly, we've been feeling a little desperate lately.
Friday's column: War wrecks wedding dreams, but love and life go on
Amira and Karim wanted their wedding to be memorable.
They planned a week-long series of events for their families and friends -- 300 guests in total -- that was to culminate, Saturday night, with a lavish ceremony and black-tie reception.
Now, instead, they will -- if they're lucky -- be spending Saturday night in transit, somewhere between the Middle East and Chicago.
Amira and Karim were supposed to get married in Beirut.
Friday's column: Sometimes, it's mom's health vs. baby's
Right from the start, we should have known something was wrong. But the study, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association last February, came as such a breath of fresh air that we didn't dare question it. Still, when an influential group of doctors bucked current baby-centric trends to suggest that the benefits of keeping depressed women on their medication during pregnancy might outweigh any potential risks to their unborn children, we should have noted just how remarkable it was.
Instead, we thought it was just a much-needed return to something resembling common sense: the notion that a woman's health rightly comes first in most circumstances, since, ultimately, it is her well-being that will help her baby thrive.
It was a rather jarring sight: The friendliest of our neighborhood dog walkers -- a woman I think of as not just sweet or pleasant or nice, but, in fact, Minnesota nice -- was headed down the street in her trademark wide-brimmed hat, one hand on two enthusiastically towed leashes, the other clutching a book that had clearly drawn her attention away from her canine charges, who looked ready to take off at any moment.
You couldn't possibly miss the title of the book, which was printed in big, bold capital letters on a plain white background. Why Men Marry Bitches, it screamed, with that last word designed to look like it had been scrawled in hot pink lipstick.
That was the first I'd seen of Sherry Argov's book (Simon & Shuster: 246 pages, $14.95), which hit bookstores in June and has been selling briskly ever since.
Perhaps it still seemed possible, last summer, to stem the tide of thwick-thwacking, near-naked feet invading offices and social events and White House photo opportunities. But, at a certain moment, the once-humble rubber thong crossed over into mainstream acceptability.
The flip-flop is, in fact, rather understated when compared to the latest craze in plastic footwear: the Croc.
They should call it the Taste of Indiana," sniffed the well-dressed guy in the elevator. "They're the only people who go." And the rest of us smiled and nodded, the way you do when someone says something in an elevator that is obviously meant to be overheard. Because it is, of course, required of city dwellers that we express a certain baseline level of contempt for the people who merely visit the downtown area. None of us wanted to look like suburban rubes.
It has become a ritual of the summer festival season in Chicago -- a natural evolution of the festivals themselves, really -- to bemoan the crowded awfulness of the largest street fairs. True Chicagoans remember when these events were better. Things were more real then, before the tourists and poseurs started coming, before there were corporate sponsors and live radio broadcasts.
And, the rest of us, late-comers who know, because we cannot say which ward we were born in, that we can make no real claim to originality or authenticity of experience, have to cling to our own complicated levels of snobbery. At least we didn't drive. Or buy the T-shirt.
The modern mother comes in many forms. There are career balancers and stay-at-homes. There are hip, yummy fashion-plate mothers who favor expensive strollers and resolutely uncoiffed, Birkenstock-wearing attachment moms who prefer to carry their babies in batik-print slings.
There are the early-in-life moms, embracing the post-feminist new domesticity, and the late-in-life ones, making last-ditch attempts to have it all. There are home-schoolers and ultra-competitive pre-schoolers, La Leche disciples and bottle-feeders, Baby-Whisperers and Ferberizers.
Now that Niles mayor Nicholas Blase has been arrested on corruption charges, it's even harder -- like Cicero wasn't confusing enough -- to distinguish the city from the suburbs.
So we're going to have to do something to make ourselves really stand out. And I think Ald. Ed Burke has got exactly the right idea.
If other municipalities are going to horn in on the corruption thing, we can easily outflank them by going the other way. As everyone else chases that whole Sopranos-inspired corruption-is-cool-again trend, we can go to work on the next big thing in local government: the nanny city.
Friday's column: Encasing the nursery in bubble wrap
People don't generally try to freak out expectant parents. It just happens.
So I'm sure that when our friends came over for dinner the other night, with their adorable toddler son in tow, they had not actually planned to demonstrate that our lovingly remodeled home is, in fact, a nightmarish death trap.
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?
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.
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.
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.
Today's column: Want to clean up juries? Bring in the yuppies
The snobbish, cynical view of the Ryan trial and its aftermath is that it's perfectly appropriate that a jury of the former governor's peers would turn out to be full of liars and petty criminals.
But, tempting as it is to trot out the old saw about a jury being a collection of 12 people who aren't smart enough to get out of jury duty, it isn't fair to cast aspersions on the folks who -- whether they started out in good faith or not -- spent six months of their lives hearing testimony in a complicated, slow-moving legal matter. They were willing to show up and serve, which is more than you can say for a lot of us.
Today's column: Bringing your dirty laundry to the dry cleaner
Dry cleaners are the new hairdressers. While there used to be many things in a person's -- OK, a woman's -- life that only her hairdresser knew for sure, those secrets are now hardly worth keeping. These days, everybody highlights. Minimum.
In fact, there's not much that passes for private anymore. Except your waist size. And the keeper of that particular secret -- your friendly neighborhood dry cleaner -- has come to take on a unique role in modern life, one that is a perfect hybrid of confidant and busybody.
Friday's column: Don't underestimate the role of mother's-best-friend
Baby Charlotte was born one month ago today. And, though I occupy no formal position in her life, I do expect to have a front-row seat for much of it. Charley's mother is my best friend, which is the sort of thing that sounds all goofy and sixth-grade when you say it, but takes on a certain reverence at times like these. Because the role of mother's-best-friend is a serious deal.
Friday's column: Warmer weather ushers in cell phone humility
Something happened Thursday morning, when the sun came out and the first warm, spring breezes nuzzled into the tulip planters downtown. Chicago's seasons change without warning, rhyme or reason, without anything so pedestrian as a transition period or a gradual warming trend. One day it's winter, same as it's been since October, and the next day the banks' time-and-temp displays are racing each other to get to 70 degrees.
Harvard Professor Harvey C. Mansfield thinks there's a crisis of manliness in America, that the all-powerful liberal feminists have gone too far in establishing a "gender neutral" society that won't let boys be boys or men be men.
His new book, Manliness (Yale University Press, 304 pages, $27.50), argues that this problem of "unemployed manliness" is a critical issue of modern life and if we keep on trying to squelch manly behavior, we'll soon be living with a generation of boys who have no idea how to safely, productively channel their aggressive, masculine impulses.
There will come a point in your life when you will have to do some renovation.
I'm not talking about some deep, metaphorical reconstruction of the soul. I mean a literal tear-out-the-old-cabinets, replace-them-with-new-ones, repaint-the-walls, refinish-the-floors and buy-new-appliances kind of renovation.
The apology, which enjoyed a brief heyday during the Clinton years, seemed lately to have fallen out of fashion, replaced by spin-doctored non-admissions, like the lawyerly "mistakes were made" and the passive-aggressive "sorry you took offense."
Amazingly, though, actual contrition made a comeback this week, launched by a strong effort from Cardinal Francis George and buoyed along by an as-sorry-as-one-can-possibly-be-while-still-sneering Dick Cheney.
To encourage this positive trend, I offer the "Sorries," an annual award I hope will someday rival the local Daytime Emmys for prestige.
This week, I'm pleased to present the first batch of nominations for the 2006 statuettes.
Today's column: Valentine's Day puts guys through their paces
They say a good man is hard to find. This seems particularly true when Valentine's Day rolls around and all the guys you know are either griping about having to shell out for a romantic gift or busy planning a celebration so over-the-top fabulous that it makes you deeply suspicious about their behavior on the other 364 days of the year.
To me, the great mystery of Valentine's Day has always been why so few men are able to figure out how to play it correctly. The question of what women want might be deep and mysterious, unknowable even to us, but the question of what we want for Valentine's Day is absolutely straightforward. There's a very standard list.
The mysterious singleton.
We all know at least one: that reasonably attractive, perfectly normal person who just never seems to find a match.
Behind their backs — and sometimes right to their faces — people speculate on what must secretly be wrong with the perpetually single. Too picky. High maintenance. Weird relationship with mother.
