Sugar Rautbord is running a little late for lunch because, well, she had the Trumps at 11. And, the long pause from her assistant implies, you know how that can be.
Still, she has already arrived at RL, the clubby restaurant attached to Michigan Avenue's flagship Polo store, when I get there for our appointment. She has not, of course, taken a seat at our table -- the one that magically became available when I dropped her name in making the reservation -- but is, the host tells me, "visiting."
Nearly everyone in the crowded dining room seems to know Sugar, or to want to, so she flutters happily between the tables, offering smiles and personal greetings and more than a few of those oddly charming air kisses one generally associates with high society.
Throughout most of the 1980s -- the height of his TV production career -- Stephen J. Cannell had five or six shows on the air simultaneously.
Then, on a single Friday in 1990, he had two pilots rejected by the networks and five of his six existing shows were canceled. The following Monday, he had two new development deals in place.
Beneath the white beard and the slightly disheveled white hair, Stacy Keach has a familiar face.
His career, he says good-naturedly, has evolved from "'Oh, he used to play Mike Hammer' to 'Oh yeah, that's Titus' dad' to 'Oh, he's the warden on "Prison Break."'"
"That's all OK," Keach says, taking off his black "Prison Break" baseball cap and the Goodman Theater credentials he wears around his neck and settling comfortably into a large, corner booth at Petterino's.
Leeza Gibbons, as you have probably long suspected, is very, very nice.
At 48, she is unchanged from her days as the anchor of "Entertainment Tonight" and the host of the daytime talk show "Leeza," her slim figure cloaked in a blue wrap dress and her unlined face framed by flawlessly straightened hair. She is also, from the moment I walk into 437 Rush to meet her, absolutely "on."
"You have a great life," she gushes as I sit down, raving about how much fun it must be to eat lunch and read chick lit for a living.
She has done her homework, reading up on past columns, and is in full-on charm mode. She even smells sweetly fabulous, like a combination of baby skin and fresh flowers.
And if all her niceness is meant to result in a ridiculously friendly interview, it's totally working.
And, while he says he wasn't in it for the glory, exactly, he did have certain ideas about redeeming himself, most of which have not really worked out.
I've called his cell phone multiple times to arrange our lunch meeting. Each time, he's called me back from a different land line. Most of them have had different area codes. He says he's "between homes" right now, mostly staying with friends around the country, living off a Social Security check he collects under a different name.
Two days before we're supposed to meet, he tells me what time.
One day before we're supposed to meet, he tells me the place will be "on the South Side."
A few hours before we're supposed to meet, he picks the restaurant: Fox's Pizza in Orland Park.
Katrina Markoff arrives a little late for lunch, breathlessly explaining that she has been testing a new product and things aren't going well.
"It's just too hot in Chicago right now," she says. "Nothing is working."
Markoff, the 33-year-old entrepreneur behind Vosges Haut-Chocolate, the gourmet chocolate company with the distinctive purple packaging, offers up a small white takeout food box as evidence: The truffles inside are delicious, but disk flat. Definitely not up to Vosges' (it's pronounced by combining "Vo" --as in Vogue magazine -- with a very French "j" sound, in a single syllable, sort of like "Voujsh") usual standards.
Sunday Lunch with WNBA players Stacey Lovelace and Jia Perkins
Here's how the WNBA is different from the NBA: When Chicago Sky players Stacey Lovelace and Jia Perkins arrive, escorted by a publicist, for our lunch interview, the first thing they do is ask the publicist for some cash so they'll have enough for cab fare on the way home.
Perkins, a single mother, has brought 2-year-old Aalirah along for a kid-friendly meal at the extra-touristy Ed Debevic's. Lovelace's daughter Ryann, who turned 3 on Friday, is vacationing out of town with her dad.
"I feel I've rather let the side down, getting the small filet," says Toby Young after placing his order at Gibsons, the uber-manly Rush Street steakhouse.
But the British writer best known for his comic memoir How to Lose Friends and Alienate People (Da Capo, paperback, 340 pages, $14.95) is used to disappointing people. He's made it his stock in trade.
Now touring the United States to promote his follow-up book, The Sound of No Hands Clapping (Da Capo, 264 pages, $24.95), Young has spent the past week reliving tales of the spectacular failure of his New York magazine-writing career, chronicled in the first book, and the faster, if somewhat less flashy, demise of his attempt at becoming a Hollywood screenwriter, chronicled in the second.
"You can fail upwards in Hollywood, too," he says, summing up the new memoir.
As we sit down for lunch at Navy Pier's Riva restaurant, Chicago Shakespeare Theater director and founder Barbara Gaines glows with the slightly flustered enthusiasm of a parent about to send her only child off to a highly competitive college.
The company's production of "Henry IV, Parts One and Two," is about to move from Chicago, where it has run for five weeks, to England, where it will be performed as part of the Royal Shakespeare Company's prestigious Complete Works festival. The logistics of moving a play -- including all of its sets, its cast and technical elements like its lighting design -- across an ocean are daunting. But the challenge is well worth it, says Gaines, because of what it means to have the company perform on Shakespeare's home ground at Stratford-Upon-Avon.
Once the company arrives in England, Gaines says she plans to take them all for a walk, along the River Avon to Holy Trinity Church, where Shakespeare was christened and buried. There, she says, they can all "say our own thank yous, privately, to the old man who started it all."
Her message, she says, is that you can overcome any obstacle. But what I've learned, in an afternoon with "success coach" and author Aleta St. James, is that, sometimes, being self-centered and slightly clueless can really work out well for a person.
St. James has arrived in Chicago for an engagement at a new age-y alternative medicine conference at the Donald E. Stephens Convention Center in Rosemont. Despite having a reservation at a hotel adjacent to O'Hare Airport, she has flown in to Midway. And she has made no arrangements to get from one place to another.
There's an old adage about how, if someone makes you nervous, you should just visualize them in their underwear, and they won't be nearly so intimidating.
It doesn't work.
The idea behind it, I guess, is that we all look rather ridiculous when stripped down to our skivvies. But the truth of the matter is that not everyone looks silly and harmless. Some people look really, really hot.
And I happen to remember Jim Palmer, the major league pitching legend and Jockey underwear pitchman, as one of them. I used to cut out his ads from my dad's Sports Illustrated magazine and pin them up on the cork board in my bedroom.
So thinking about him in his underwear isn't making me less anxious. It's making me feel like a giddy kid with a pathetic crush.
Elizabeth Berg, the accomplished novelist who lives in Oak Park, has just published a beautiful new book, inspired by an incredible true story. She has just been on a national book tour. She has established herself -- following a mid-career boost when her 2000 book, Open House, was an Oprah's Book Club selection -- as a consistent presence on the best-seller lists.
So I feel a little guilty when, moments after sitting down at an unadorned booth at the Cozy Corner restaurant, we fall into conversation about a million different things, almost none of them even remotely literary.
For all of its 150 years, Baird & Warner, the Chicago real estate company, has been a family business.
Current chairman of the board John Baird, 91, passed day-to-day control to his son Stephen, 53, now CEO and president, in 1991. Three decades earlier, John Baird had taken over for his father, Warner Baird, who remained as the firm's chairman of the board from 1963 to 1983.
These father-to-son handoffs have, all things considered, gone remarkably smoothly.
Sporting a Greg Norman windbreaker and the pale, slightly scruffy look known in geek circles as a "monitor tan," Larry Hodgson looks just like the software engineer and hack golfer that he is. There is little about him that screams "major technology mogul."
But Hodgson, 44, is, in fact, a pretty big deal.
The coin-operated video game he invented, Golden Tee, is the most popular such game in the world. Ever. And Hodgson, known mostly as "the Golden Tee guy," is both hero and tormentor to the more than 20 million people who play the video golf game in restaurants and bars.
There is only one thing you can think about when you meet Nando Parrado for the first time. And, though it is not fair to base your entire impression of him on something he did more than 30 years ago, you find yourself doing it anyway.
Parrado has crossed a line that most of us will never even get close to. And you can't look at him without wondering how it has changed him.
One of 16 survivors of a 1972 plane crash in the Andes, Parrado spent 72 days in the mountains before hiking his way down to a remote settlement where he was able to summon help. Seventy-two days.
To save themselves from starvation, Parrado and his companions (mostly teammates in his rugby club) ate the bodies of those who had not survived the crash.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Flush with the international success of Simple Abundance (Warner, 528 pages, $24), the inspirational book that debuted 10 years ago, writer Sarah Ban Breathnach once rented a posh New York apartment, right on Central Park West.
"Oh," she almost moans when I ask her about it, as we settle in for afternoon tea at the Drake Hotel, "It was very beautiful."
"I look at 'Check, Please!' as being authentic and diverse," says David Manilow, creator of the popular restaurant review show. "And the thing I'm really proud of is that people are exploring the city because of the show."
We're sitting at a sidewalk table on the corner of 16th Street and 61st Avenue in Cicero, and Manilow, trim and handsome in a sport coat and dress slacks, cheerfully allows that "without the show, I'd never know about a place like this."
The place is Freddy's Pizza, a bustling neighborhood Italian grocery, pizza place and gelateria that, since winning rave reviews on the show, which airs on WTTW-Channel 11, two years ago, has drawn customers from all over the city and suburbs. Manilow gets a hero's welcome here, due only in part to the fact that his show has brought loads of new business to Freddy's. Almost everyone who stops by more than a few times gets a similarly warm greeting, full of how's-the-family banter.
Writer Kathleen Norris calls it "interplanetary travel," the way she floats back and forth between conservative Christian settings, like Abilene Christian University in Texas, where she was yesterday, to the liberal, social justice-oriented classrooms of places like Dominican University in River Forest, where she's visiting today.
Norris, acclaimed author of the spiritually themed best-sellers The Cloister Walk (Riverhead, 416 pages, $15) and Dakota: A Spiritual Geography (Mariner, 256 pages, $13), says that, contrary to popular wisdom, she sees more similarities than differences between religious communities at opposite ends of the political spectrum.
Debra Schweiger Berg, Patrick Carron and Leeann McGrath are engrossed in conversation when I arrive for lunch at McGrath's tidy and comfortable Lisle home.
Carron and McGrath have just met a few minutes ago, but Berg, a Downstate author who has profiled them, along with a few dozen fellow "civic entrepreneurs" in her new book, The Power of One (Trafford Publishing, 374 pages, $29.95), knows them each well enough to be sure that finding things to talk about won't be a problem. Carron, founder of the Northwest Indiana-based Aviation Scholarship Foundation, and McGrath, founder of Sharing Connections, a DuPage County organization that offers goods such as baby furniture and small appliances to families in need, are part of what Berg has identified as a growing trend in volunteerism.
The downtown Books-A-Million, on South Clark Street, is not exactly located in the heart of Tucker Max country. Business-casual office workers and well-suited bankers on late-morning coffee breaks mostly cruise past the table stacked with Max's book, I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell (Citadel Press, 277 pages, $12.95), without so much as a second look.
"I like this place because it's nostalgic," state Sen. James Meeks (I-Chicago) says as he settles into a dark, undersized booth at Miller's Pub on South Wabash. "It's not a new, trendy place."
Meeks, dressed in a sharp pin-striped suit, orders a virgin pina colada and looks over the menu.
Gail Sheehy, the best-selling author whose 1977 book Passages (Bantam, 564 pages, $7.99) chronicled the "predictable crises of adult life," makes 60 look very good.
Sheehy is, in fact, 68 now, but she has the ageless, beautifully (and, presumably, expensively) maintained look of the rich and semi-famous. In the gently dimmed light of the Geneva restaurant, downstairs at the Swissotel, she could easily pass for fortysomething.
She's in Chicago promoting her latest work, Sex and the Seasoned Woman (Random House, 354 pages, $25.95), a book that could be summed up, if one was in a cynical summing-up sort of mood, as saying, "60 is the new 40."
When Lovie Smith moved to Lake Forest, he asked around to find the best breakfast place and the best hot dog stand in town. He's still working on the hot dog question, but he's settled on a favorite spot for breakfast: Egg Harbor on Western Avenue, just across from the train station.
"I'm a Southerner," he says jovially. "You've got to have a big breakfast."
"I've been overusing my voice," Camille Paglia says, explaining her hoarse tone without making a pretense of apologizing for it.
Paglia, as always, has a lot to say. Her words pour out at breakneck speed, giving the impression of great urgency, as if she might be pulled away -- or censored -- at any moment. It's a little intense for someone who is, ostensibly, here to talk about a book on poetry.
Kristy Cates has barely settled in to a red velvet booth at Petterino's and just ordered her Diet Coke with lemon when the well-dressed general manager rushes over to the table to begin sucking up.
"We have a standing reservation for you," he says, almost breathlessly. "Anyime you'd like to come over after a show, just call us or have your assistant call, and we'll take care of you."
"My assistant!" Cates says with a laugh. "I wish!"
I did not, of course, have to repeat my cell phone number to Mike Byster. The first time I said it out loud, he'd instantly memorized it, using a complicated mnemonic that adds together the first four digits and then compares that number to the last three digits.
"That's just the first thing that came into my mind," he says genially, as if most anyone would have done the same thing eventually.
“Inevitably you reach a question,� Po Bronson says, as we share a small platter of pate, “which is, you know, what if I didn’t make fun of something and I actually wrote about something I thought was worth not making fun of? And it’s sort of like, as a generation we can put down so many things, but are we ever going to assert the value of anything? How long can we traffic on this premise that the world is ultimately meaningless and we’re just here to have a good time in the meantime and make fun of anybody who tries to say there’s a meaning in it? We live as individuals and mock religion and enjoy consumerism and pretend its all a joke.�
Steve Dolinsky has already sampled the salsa when I arrive at Fonda del Mar, a hip new restaurant just west of Logan Square. He's also clearly already met the partners who run the place: Angel Hernandez and Luis Montero, formerly of Mia Francesca, and chef Raul Arreola, who comes from the famed Frontera Grill downtown. They're giving Dolinsky the VIP treatment.
