Goodbye to CBGB's

One night in the late seventies, in Chicago, this exchange took place at a Patti Smith show:

Audience Member: "They burned down 'Le Mer'!"
Patti Smith: "Yeah? Build another one."

It was funny this morning reading about Patti crying at the last show at CBGB's, generally considered to be the first punk club. "I'm sentimental" she said.

Sentimental? Patti Smith?

How things have changed. Patti is sentimental and punk is celebrated. Punk was scorned in its early days. Now, CBGBs' closing was on the front page of the New York Times.

A few years ago, Patti Smith played a concert for the Old Town School of Folk Music at Welles Park, here in Chicago, where my son plays baseball in the summers. It was the single busiest night I ever remember at Jury's, the little restaurant I work at down the street. Chatting with people, I found that people had come in from all over the country to see her. Punk had finally arrived.

There's been a lot of hand-wringing about the closing of the club. Yes, I'm sad about it, but in reality, we've lost lots of good clubs everywhere. Here in Chicago, Over Easy, a great club on the southwest side, closed in 1986. The Exit's never been the same since it moved off of Wells Street and on to to North Avenue. Gaspar's got sold and turned into Schuba's-- it's a nice club, but not a punk bar anymore. Club Dreamerz closed years ago. The G-Spot lasted only a year or so in the '90's. About the only real punk club left is my friend Chuck Uchida's club on Augusta, Club Foot.

After Le Mer burned down, there was O'Banion's. And there was Tut's, which came and went. It's funny to hear people talk about all of these places with reverence, but in the end, there was a wonderful seediness and a million tawdry stories. I was too young to get into these places (or not, according to a lot of the people I met who made it into these places underage). I never made it to CBGB's, either. But CBGB's made it to me.

Punk saved me. Punk was a million things to me and everybody else: it was intelligent, stupid, sweet, angry, funny, humorless, incisive, historical, loving, hateful, romantic, simple, complex-- the list is endless. It gave my generation a way to bang heads and still have some brains.

Listening to the Clash and others made me realize that someone else had figured out that there was something wrong in the world. The Ramones, who I always called the Beach Boys of punk (I was stunned to find, when I went to New York for the first time in 1998 that there really WAS a Rockaway Beach!) brought fun to punk-- though they could be a little serious, like in Bonzo Goes to Bitburg. The New York Dolls, the Dictators, the Dickies-- there's a ton of old punk to explore. (BTW, a good start is the Rhino "No Thanks!" collection of '70's punk.)

I have to confess to neglecting music for a long time. Kurt Cobain killed himself a couple of weeks after my son was born. It was already a really emotional time in my life. I remember coming home from work late that night, picking up my newspaper, reading the story and then crying while I changed a diaper and fed my newborn son. It affected me deeply. For a long time, I just didn't listen to new music. I was heartbroken. And busy.

Now, with my kids starting to listen to punk-- and after getting Sirius radio from my wife for my birthday this year-- I've been listening to new music again. The Boss Martians, the Fondas and others are getting me to listen to new stuff for the first time in years. I'm even catching up with some stuff I missed the first time around.

Closing CBGB's is the end of an era, to be sure. But the fact that its passing is noted shows that punk made its mark. Punk lives. It lives in the great memories of the bands I heard; it lives in the friendships I have in which punk has been the soundtrack to our lives; and it lives in the new bands that are influenced by the old stuff. Punk gave my generation a refuge from Reagan and conformity and jocks and all the other bullshit that surrounded us. We heard bands like the Clash and the Dead Kennedys standing up to the crap all around us. It made me realize that there were other people thinking the same things about what was going on-- and still does. I hope it does the same for this generation.

Last night Patti rattled off a list of the people who weren't there for CBGB's send-off. Most of the Ramones. Stiv Bators. Most of the New York Dolls. A bunch of people. Being a punk-rocker was a high-risk profession. I was only a fan, and I put some hard miles on my odometer. Punk, though, is still alive and well. People are falling in love with punk for the same reasons I did. As Bubs said in his blog today, "the spirit lives on."

And we've still got Patti Smith, bless her heart.

Just When You Thought You'd Seen It All...

"You wanted the Littlest, you GOT the Littlest... the shortest band in America...."

Say hello to Minikiss.

I have seen some fucked-up things in my life, but a bunch of midget Kiss impersonators has got to take the cake. The really sick thing is that I went on the website and checked their schedule to see when they're playing in Chicago.

I can't help wondering-- do they have midget groupies?

My Random 10

Random Itunes Shuffle 10

1. Death or Glory- The Clash
2. Parachute Woman- Rolling Stones
3. Bloodletting- Concrete Blonde
4. Hootenanny- The Replacements
5. Martha Say- John Mellencamp
6. Dancing in the Moonlight- Thin Lizzy
7. You Wear it Well- Rod Stewart
8. Teenage Jail- The Eagles
9. Middle Class- The Uptown Rulers
10. Black Jesus- Everlast

There is an End...

I've mentioned before in this blog my friend Mark Evans, who everybody called "Atwood" after the downstate Illinois town he'd grown up in. Mark was murdered in June. He was the center, pretty much the ringleader of a group of people who coalesced at Eastern Illinois University around 1983. We all hung out at the Uptowner/Cellar tavern in downtown Charleston, Illinois. The lefties, artists, gay men and women, journalists, punk rockers, etc. all sort of found one another. My roommate Jim Reilly formed a punk/new wave band called "DUI" (my suggestion, "The Dust Bunnies" did not win) with some other guys, and the singer, as a joke, ran for class president under the aegis "The Silly Party" (borrowed, of course, from Monty Python), and unintentionally won. And of course, we all went wild for the next couple of years. The best and closest friendships of my life were formed then, including the guys in the picture with me.

In the weeks after Mark's death, we all started scanning and emailing old photos to one another. I had never seen this picture. It was taken one night in 1998. I was shocked to see how worn I looked (I'm the guy on the left). It made sense, though; I had, in the previous year, finished my teaching certification while in the midst of a vicious custody fight with an ex-girlfriend, who had tried to take sole custody of our son. And of course wife #1 had, in the midst of it, decided she didn't want to deal with it all, and asked for a divorce. It was, up to that point, the worst time in my life. At the time the picture was taken, I had signed divorce papers, had settled with the ex-girlfriend with a joint custody agreement (the money I spent fighting her would eventually bankrupt me) and was working at the Smokehouse while I looked for a teaching job. I was physically and emotionally exhausted at that point in my life.

Atwood, whom I always called Mark, unless I was talking to other people about him (there were people at our college who knew him only by his nickname) is the guy in the middle in the picture. It was at a joint birthday party for he and Dan, the guy on the right. I showed up late, after work. I had brought the gag gifts Mark and Dan were holding. I had gotten Mark, who was always complaining about not being able to meet women, Beavis and Butthead boxer shorts (purchased, of course, at Uncle Fun's, the greatest store in the world). I told him that chicks couldn't resist a guy in Beavis and Butthead boxer shorts. I'd gotten Dan the Spiro Agnew puppet he is delightedly holding in the picture.

In the days after Mark died, friends gathered at his house to help his family clear it out. His ex-girlfriend Stacy, whom he'd stayed friends with, and I were in his room clearing out his closets and dressers, putting stuff in bags to bring to Goodwill. It was already hard enough to be bagging clothes we'd seen our friend in for the last twenty-some years. When I came across the boxer shorts I'd given him, I nearly lost it. I nearly had to walk out of the room. The grief was staggering. Up until that point, having a woman I'd loved and lived with try to take my kid away from me was the worst thing to ever happen to me. At that moment, my friend's death moved into first place.

A week or so later, we all met at Mark's funeral, downstate. It was strange-- it was a beautiful June day and it was actually nice seeing a lot of the old crew from the Uptowner days. Tim Broderick had brought a collection of Mark's cartoons from the daily newspaper our school had. Atwood was a remarkably creative and talented artist and cartoonist. A lot of his cartoons were based on the antics of us, his friends, and we loved seeing ourselves portrayed five days a week. Seeing old friends and seeing these cartoons was simutaneously sad and healing.

As the time came to inter Mark's cremated remains, something really odd happened. The perfectly clear blue sky suddenly clouded up as we drove to the cemetary, and a huge thunderstorm erupted right above us. A bolt of lightning struck nearby. The rain died down enough for us to get out of our cars and put the wooden box with Mark's ashes into his grave. That was nearly my breaking point. I could not grasp how this vibrant, funny, intelligent, creative friend, whom I and so many others loved so dearly, was now a box of ashes being put in the ground. With that, I literally, physically went numb.

I got some comic relief when Dan, who'd shared an apartment with me and Atwood in Wrigleyville in the late eighties, leaned over and whispered that the rain was Atwood getting back at me for the night he'd been tripping and I kept talking like Bob Dylan to freak him out.

It was all I could do to drive back into town for the dinner. As we drove back, the sky cleared up; by the time we got back into town, the sky was crystal-clear again.

I had been asked to do a reading at the dinner. Dave Schmittgens, a member of that college group, who is now a high school English teacher, helped me pick out a quote to wrap the reading around-- John Donne's "For Whom the Bell Tolls" quote. I talked about the sorrow and the grief we were sharing, and how in the end, the sorrow was for ourselves-- that we were denied having our beautiful friend for the rest of our lives.

In digging out old photos, I came across pictures taken at my first apartment I had by myself in Chicago after I graduated, at a party I'd thrown in 1986. Mark had helped me move into that apartment, which was at Ashland and Berteau, then not too great a neighborhood. I did not have a car, and Mark offered to move me from the dump I was sharing with two roommates in Rogers Park to my new one. To thank him, I treated him to a night out at the Exit (the old one, in Old Town). They had a kaoroke machine there that night, the first one I'd ever seen. After a few drinks, Mark and I hatched a scheme; we got the dj to take our requests: we asked him to play "Wipeout" by the Surfaris and "Buck Hill" by the Replacements. Of course, the dj was oblivious to our joke: those are both instrumentals. We both had to work the next morning, and left before he played either one, but we really cracked ourselves up.

This picture was sent by Larry, who is the second guy from the right. The guys in the picture are me, Atwood, Larry and Curt. At the time the picture was taken, I was rooming with Larry. In fact, I roomed with the other two guys at some point as well. We were all a pretty tight little bunch, and still largely are. I lost track of Curt (whom I lived in a trailer with) but Atwood, Larry and I stayed tight.

I struggled with my grief all summer. My teaching job had ended-- I'd been dismissed after a two-year battle with a horrible administrator. Fortunately, I was on year-round pay, so I got a little buffer. I staggered through the summer, busying myself working my part-time restaurant job and working with Matt, another friend from Eastern, in dealing with the details of everything-- helping Mark's family take care of the house, getting together a reward fund, putting up posters and staying on the police to work on his case. I half-heartedly looked for a new job. My wife, I knew, was worried about me; I was always the guy taking care of everybody else, and here I was, totally unable to deal with this loss. I think she figured out that there wasn't much she or anybody else could do; I was going to have to find my own way out of it.

I talked to my twelve-year-old son, who had known Mark his whole life, about it. I told him that Atwood had been murdered. He was great-- he was understanding when I missed time with him to go to Mark's services, and talked to me about Mark and about my grief. I didn't tell my step-daughter, who is nine, that Mark was murdered-- I thought it would be a little much for her. I simply told her that Mark had died. In her youthful wisdom, I think she understood the best of anybody. Though she didn't know the details, she could sense I was struggling with a crushing sadness. As we ate breakfast together one Saturday morning, she told me that she thought she knew how I felt: like I had been punched REALLY hard in the stomach. I actually laughed out loud, and told her "You know, you are absolutely right." And she was. That gave me a moment of relief.

Everybody really stepped up to the plate. Mark's friend Aaron put up a tribute website. We all contributed pictures. Eric, Jim Reilly and Bill took it a step further and composed and recorded a startlingly beautiful song, For You, that immediately went on our ipods. Mark's parents loved the song, too.

We put together a candlelight vigil meant to keep awareness of the case. A few days before the vigil, I was out on my back porch sipping wine and looking over digital photos I'd taken on a recent trip to Seattle to visit Andreas, another friend from Eastern. I got a call from Matt: they had solved the case and arrested someone.

The details emerged over the next few days. As we had suspected, the son of a former tenant of Mark's was involved. He was the son of Sudanese refugees whom Mark had rented the other apartment in his building to. The kid had gotten involved, ironically, in a hispanic/white street gang; he and fellow gang members had burgalarized Mark's apartment. Mark eventually evicted the tenants, but on the night of June 3/4, four of the thugs, including the Sudanese kid, had shown up at his door with a gun, intending to rob him. He had no money in the house, and they tried to take him to an ATM. At some point, Mark tried to resist and escape, but was shot in the neck. They chased him down and caught him after he collapsed. As he lay in the street next to his house, they shot him three more times, probably killing him instantly.

The Sudanese kid was murdered a month later, on July 8. The cops think it was probably by his fellow robbers, who were afraid he'd "roll" on them. In August, WBEZ did a sympathetic piece on him. I shook with anger as I listened to it, knowing that this kid had led a crew of gang-bangers to rob and murder my friend. Where was the story on my beloved friend, this kid's victim?

That night, the night the case was solved, Matt and I talked for about an hour. I stayed up late into the night sipping scotch. Learning the details of Mark's death did not bring me peace. To the contrary-- the thought of how terrifying Mark's last 10 or 15 minutes of life must have been, getting abducted, getting pistol-whipped, led around at gunpoint and then murdered-- had left me shaken. I had to drink myself to sleep that night.

We went ahead and had the candlelight vigil, right by the spot near his house where Mark was murdered.

I finally began to get a handle on my grief one day late in August. I was putzing around the house with the television on in the background. Jim Jarmusch's "Broken Flowers" came on, and I started watching it. The ending is heartbreaking, and they had a wonderfully appropriate song at the end: "There is an End," by the Greenhornes, with Holly Golightly singing. I had to go right away to my laptop and track down the song. It immediately became a favorite.

There Is An End

Words disappear,
Words weren't so clear,
Only echos passing through the night.

The lines on my face,
Your fingers once traced,
Fading reflection of what was.

Thoughts re-arrange,
Familar now strange,
All my skin is drifting on the wind.

Spring brings the rain,
With winter comes pain,
Every season has an end.

I try to see through the disguise,
But the clouds were there,
Blocking out the sun (the sun).

Thoughts re-arrange,
Familar now strange,
All my skin is drifting on the wind.

Spring brings the rain,
With winter comes pain,
Every season has an end.

There's an end,
There's an end,
There's an end,
There's an end,
There's an end.

The song is about a love affair ending, but it helped me crack the code of my grief. Mark's murder, particularly the horrific way it happened, bothered me. But what I was really having trouble getting past was the reality that the friendship was over. A guy who I'd assumed I'd grow old with was gone. The friendship had ended, a friendship I'd enjoyed and depended on for decades. Realizing that this was the root of the problem helped me begin the process of healing.

In early September, I got a phone call from an old friend, whom I'd taught with at a West Side school my first year as a teacher. They needed a teacher at the charter school she worked at, and would I be interested? It was an "alternative" high school-- a high school to help young adults who'd dropped out of high school to finish their diplomas. I talked it over with my wife, and interviewed for the job, which they offered to me on the spot. I accepted.

The first couple of weeks were awful; the school had been slated to be closed, but was reopened at the last minute-- there was total disarray and chaos. Classes started. It was rough at first, but after a couple more weeks, things settled down.

One day we got a new kid. He stuck out like a sore thumb; he was the only white kid in the school. I found out shortly thereafter that he was a member of the gang that killed my friend. It was a small gang, so he almost certainly knew the guys who did it, and knew of the crime. I also found out that he was trying to get out of the gang.

I had planned to leave the teaching profession, and probably still will. But I've realized I need to do it for one more year.

There are a handful of "kids" (they're actually young adults, 17 to 21 years old) who I've taken under my wing, including the new guy. It's helped me deal with my loss-- to take the focus off of my feelings.

I came to realize how the kids had gotten to the point they had-- everybody and every thing had failed them. Their schools had failed them; their families had failed them; their churches, neighborhoods, even their street gangs had failed to bring them what they needed to find a way to function in life. I came to the sobering realization that I was it-- I was the last stop, the last chance to get them off the path they were on.

I take a few minutes every school day to talk to that handful of students, including the guy I've mentioned. Some of them, including that guy, don't even have class with me. I just keep hoping that just the realization that somebody does give a shit will help pull them through a rough day and help them figure out that they have value as human beings.

I don't know if I'll ever tell this kid about Mark. I have this fantasy that he'll find his way to a productive and happy life, and that some day years from now, I'll be walking down the street and run into him. He'll thank me for the talks and advice I gave him, for how it helped him find a better path. Maybe then I'll tell him what happened to my friend, and why it was so important to me to work with he and the others.

I don't know if I'll ever know if what I'm doing will actually help any of these kids in the long run, but for now it's what I have to do. It's the only way I've found that's helping me through my grief at the end of a splendid friendship.

Heaven is a Place Where Nothing Ever Happens

About 15 or 16 years ago, I went on a reading frenzy. I was determined to answer every history question I had. And as any historian can tell you, this is futile-- every question you answer in history brings up 2 or 3 new questions.

In this spate of reading (back when I had time to read everything I wanted) I read a great book: Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States, by Kenneth T. Jackson. Jackson is best known as the guy who writes the "Don't Know Much About History" series of books. I highly recommend you add Crabgrass Frontier to your reading list. Here are some things I learned in it:

• Where the term "redlining", the bank practice of not making loans in certain neighborhoods came from, and how it helped create segregated ghettoes


• That there were hundreds of excellent "interurban" electric rail lines between large and medium-sized towns throughout the US, that were bought and killed off by GM, so that they could sell buses to municipalities


• That with FHA and VA loans, it was frequently cheaper for people to buy a new home in the 'burbs, than to renovate or expand their home in the city


• That there was almost zero growth in the number of residences built between 1930 and 1945, meaning that veterans coming home from WWII had a tough time finding housing

One of the things that became clear as I read the book is that millions of guys who survived the brutalities of the Great Depression and then World War II came home and were quite content to have the rest of their lives be boring as can be. A job, a wife, 2.3 kids, a ranch house, a beer in hand, a barbecue and a big manicured-lawn suburb was just what they wanted.

Unfortunately, this was not necessarily what their kids wanted. I wondered if a lot of the craziness of the sixties was because a generation of kids, educated and filled with expectations, exploded with boredom.

One day, a few years later, I had a tape (remember cassette tapes?) of the Talking Heads' 1979 album "Fear of Music," one of my favorite records playing. The song "Heaven" came on. In the context of having just read Crabgrass Frontier, I heard the song in a new way. David Byrne sang, dreamily:

Heaven, Heaven is a place/Where nothing/Nothing ever happens...

It was a brilliant commentary by a baby-boomer on suburbia; this place where nothing ever happens, was heaven to the generation before.

I congratulated myself on my new interpretation of the song, and went through life with my belief in the deeper meaning of the song.

My bliss was, alas, not meant to last. One day I was listening to the radio , and heard Heaven. At the end of the song, the deejay mentioned that David Byrne had said it was about a nightclub in late seventies Manhattan-- a placed called "Heaven," where nothing ever happened. The song was about a stupid, boring Soho nightclub. I was scarred for life.

I'm "It"

Phil tagged me. Here's my list:

FOUR JOBS YOU'VE HAD IN YOUR LIFE
1. Construction Worker
2. Waiter (still have this one)
3. Sixth Grade Teacher
4. Ice cream factory worker

FOUR FICTIONAL JOBS YOU WISH YOU HAD
1. Engineer on a Starfleet Ship (I’d have to resist the urge to speak to the captain in a Scottish or Irish accent, though.)
2. Knight of the Round Table
3. Multi-Millionaire industrialist/Ironman
4. Manager leading the Chicago Cubs to a World Series victory

FOUR MOVIES YOU COULD WATCH OVER AND OVER AGAIN
1. “From the Earth to the Moon” Miniseries
2. True Believer
3. Detroit Rock City
4. Bullitt

FOUR CITIES YOU'VE LIVED IN
1. Chicago.
2. Salt Lake City, Utah.
3. Champaign, Illinois.
4. Charleston, Illinois.

FOUR TV SHOWS YOU LOVE TO WATCH
1. “Modern Marvels” on the History Channel
2. Enterprise (cancelled)
3. Baseball
4. X-Files reruns

FOUR PLACES YOU'VE BEEN ON VACATION/TRAVELED TO
1. Toronto, Canada
2. Oakland, California
3. Seattle, Washington
4. Shanghai, China

FOUR WEBSITES YOU VISIT DAILY
1. New York Times (www.nytimes.com)
2. Dvd Verdict (www.dvdverdict.com)
3. Deep Discount Dvds (www.deepdiscountdvd.com_
4. The Internet Movie Database (www.imdb.com)

I visit God's Own Suburb almost every day. It was my inspiration to finally start blogging. Phil gives good blog.

FOUR OF YOUR FAVORITE FOODS
1. Paella
2. Thai Chicken with Broccoli—lots of chili paste
3. Baked Chicken, with bbq sauce
4. Strawberries

FOUR THINGS YOU WISH YOU COULD EAT OR DRINK
I found out a couple of years ago I have Celiac Disease, a genetic wheat/barley allergy, so I miss:
1. Pizza
2. Bread
3. Spaghetti
4. Beer

I’ve actually found non-wheat substitutes for the pizza dough and spaghetti noodles. When I go to the west coast, I cheat and drink beer. I usually smoke a cigar or two as well. It's only a couple of times a year.

FOUR THINGS IN YOUR ROOM
My room is in my home is the kitchen. In it, besides the regular kitchen things are:
1. My g3 ibook
2. Two lava lamps, one with a ceramic skull for a base-- see above.
3. A string of little white Christmas lights
4. A bunch of bottles of wine in a rack. Mostly red.

FOUR THINGS YOU WISH YOU HAD IN YOUR BEDROOM
1. A lot more space
2. Bookshelves (see #1)
3. Another closet, so my wife wouldn’t have to use the one in the dining room
4. A nicer stereo

FOUR THINGS YOU ARE WEARING RIGHT NOW
1. a wedding band-- from my lovely wife
2. jeans—Levi’s, the only jeans that fit me right
3. a silver and turqoise post earring-- a gift from my friend Viktor Zeitgeist
4. contact lenses

FOUR PLACES I'D RATHER BE RIGHT NOW
1. Seattle, Washington
2. Oakland, California
3. In an old convertible, following the old Route 66 with my father
4. On my back porch, on a warm July night, with my wife, my kids, this laptop (god bless wi-fi!) and a glass of Barefoot Zinfandel.

FOUR FICTIONAL PLACES I'D RATHER BE RIGHT NOW
1. Shangri La.
2. Mysterious Island
3. Atlantis
4. The bridge of the original Enterprise (the one on the cancelled “Enterprise” television show)

FOUR PEOPLE YOU’D REALLY LOVE TO HAVE DINNER WITH
When my wife and I met a couple of years ago, this question was one of the prompt questions in the Reader Matches online thing. My answer then was:
1. Lucy Parsons (labor and civil rights activist)
2. Nikita Krushchev—Soviet leader—most interesting memoirs I’ve ever read
3. Lenny Bruce—comedian, social commentator
4. Lucinda Williams-- musician.

Since the “Match” ad worked, and I successfully met someone wonderful and married her, I’d have to take Lucinda off the list and replace her with someone else—maybe Susan Sarandon… (“Ouch—why’d you kick me, honey?”)

FOUR FICTIONAL PEOPLE YOU’D LIKE TO HAVE DINNER WITH
1. Tony Stark
2. Bernard Mickey Wrangle (From “Still Life With Woodpecker”)
3. Lovely Rita, Meter Maid
4. Eleanor Rigby

FOUR MORE PEOPLE YOU’D LIKE TO HAVE DINNER WITH
1. Bruce Cockburn.
2. Bobby Kennedy
3. My late friend Chuck Hall (who I did have dinner with several times) He was a Lincoln Brigade veteran, a lifelong activist, a fantastic family guy and the most impressive person I’ve ever met. I miss him.
4. Hunter S. Thompson

I tag fellow teacher Lulu...

More Brushes With Fame: Appearances Can Be Decieving

In 1980, when I was 19 years old, I was working as a cashier at a Walgreen's in the western suburbs of Chicago. I was in the midst of a year-long break from college, while I worked and saved money for school.

One day while I was working this guy who was a dead ringer for Robert Redford came through my line. I knew it couldn't be him-- why the hell would Robert Redford be in Western Springs, Illinois? And this guy was about 5 foot 5. He was tiny. I'd seen Robert Redford on-screen-- he was at least as tall as I am.

The other cashier made a big hulabaloo-- "Look at that guy", she said, how much he looked like Robert Redford! "Doesn't he look like Robert Redford!" The guy in my line just smiled quietly-- no, he was smirking. I should have known.

Well, a few years later, it dawned on me-- it was Robert Redford. He'd been in the Chicago area at the time filming "Ordinary People." He'd stopped in there for toothpaste or something. And in the meantime I'd heard that he was shorter than he looked on-screen. He was. A lot.

After I finished college, I was indulging in what has become a lifelong habit of working as a waiter, either full time or to support my teaching habit. In 1989, I was working at a restaurant near Depaul. The neighborhood was in the midst of a rapid gentrification, and the restaurant, called Minnie's, became "hot." I loved working there-- it was mostly nice people as customers, and it was like printing money.

There were many celebrities, mostly local ones, particularly media people, that came in there. There was a local newscaster, the late Phil Walters, who came in all the time mid-morning and was pissy with me because I didn't fawn all over him. I didn't even know who he was until someone from the lunch shift saw him and told me who he was-- I never watch tv news. And I wouldn't have anyway-- most of the media people loved the place because it was it was a place they could come in and have nobody made a big deal over them. Pam Zekman came in-- major pain in the ass. She was a big has-been (she had done the Mirage Tavern story years before), and so was trying to hang on to the last scraps of her semi-celebrity status. Bill Curtis, who was very pleasant, was also a regular.

One day, John Cusack was there. I was shocked to see how tall he was. He was much taller than me, and I'm six feet tall. He was the only celebrity I've asked for an autograph, and it was not even for me; it was for an old friend, who'd been a big fan of his from early in his career, and had suffered a huge tragedy (his home had burned down, killing his mother and sister). I thought he could use a little cheering up.

After meeting Cusack, I mused at how he looked short on-screen, but is tall, and Redford looks tall but is short. But, I discovered, it is not only looks that can be misleading on-screen.

There was a group of little punk wannabes that would come in to Minnie's for lunch once in a while. These girls would come in with their silly hair and clothes, trying to show who could be the cutest and the cleverest. I'm the last person to try to be "punker than thou," but I was into the scene-- I hung out at the Exit, Neo and Gaspar's. The guys in Naked Raygun were friends of mine. I'd never seen these girls out anywhere in the bars. They were obnoxious little suburban girls, playing "punk" while they were in college. And they were shitty tippers, to boot. I and everybody else there hated waiting on them.

Flash forward to the mid-nineties. I had become a huge fan of the X-Files, which creator Chris Carter openly declared was influenced by "Kolchak: The Night Stalker," one of my favorite cheesy seventies cult shows. I loved both main characters, Mulder and Scully. Scully was my dream girl-- gorgeous, intelligent, spiritual in her way. But something nagged at me. I knew I'd seen her before. I was reading an article about the X-Files that mentioned that Gillian Anderson, the actress who played Scully, had gone to Depaul. Then it hit me-- I realized where I knew her from; she had been the ringleader of the twerps who had come in to Minnie's. I hated her. She was snotty, vulgar and not nearly as clever as she thought she was. Her real persona couldn't be farther than what she played on television. I couldn't watch the show without thinking of this.

A couple of years ago, I got a huge lesson in how far a person's onscreen personna-- and life-- can be from their reality. There was a Best Buy commercial where a middle-aged, middle-class suburban-- and presumably straight--guy and his son are standing in a store watching a show on a big-screen television. The son asks why they don't simply buy the television. The dad replies that it was because the minute they bought it, no longer how long they waited, the price would drop the next day. I am blessed (and sometimes cursed) with the inability to forget a face. I knew that I knew the guy in the commercial. I suddenly realized that it was Jimmy Doyle, a guy I'd worked with as a waiter nearly twenty years before. Jimmy was an actor, and very, very gay. The last I'd heard of him, in fact, was a one-man show he'd done at the Mercury Theater, on Southport, in Chicago. I'd read the very favorable reviews, which said the show centered on his identity as a gay man. I found it very ironic that the next time I saw him, he was playing this butch suburban dad.

Spending the first years of my adult life in the eighties, I should know better. I should already know that the right actor can "play" anything-- even President.

Guilty Pleasures

Fave Rave: Detroit Rock City

I'm not quite certain why I love this movie so much. I'm not a huge Kiss fan-- not the way my friend Viktor Zeitgeist loved them as an teenager. I like them in sort of the kitsch-loving way I like Elvis. In fact, I had hated them in my 1970's adolescence. I felt like they were manufactured-- like a Heavy Metal Monkees, with bad costumes and even worse music. However, over the years, they grew on me as a reminder of a silly time, the same way disco music has.

Though I've warmed up to some of the music, I don't think that has anything to do with my love of the movie. I think that part of it may be that the story involves 4 guys who are about 17 years old in 1978 in the suburbs of a major rustbelt city-- my exact stats in 1978. In my case, it was Chicago-- in their case, a suburb of Cleveland.

The story revolves around the efforts of the four boys-- Lex,Trip, Hawk and Jam-- to get to a Kiss concert in Detroit. The boys are from very different backgrounds, but are united in their fanatic passion for the group Kiss. They've taken their love of the band to another level, forming a cover band that is, of course, horrendous.

There are so many reminders of the seventies and high school--spilling bongwater, jerks in Trans-Ams, high school security guards, crushes, etc that it's irresistable to me. In the end, it's a retelling of The Odyssey, set in the seventies. The night's journey changes each of the boys in a good way, regardless of whether or not they get to see Kiss that night (you'll have to see the movie to find that out!)

The movie tanked at the box office. It's only "name" actor was Terminator 2's Edward Furlong. But the movie's a gem, and the DVD comes with one of the best extras packages I've ever seen, including commentaries by director Adam Rifkin, who grew up in the Chicago suburbs, cast members and Kiss themselves. Plus, it's cheap these days-- my favorite on-line DVD store, www.deepdiscountdvd.com has it for less than 6 bucks.

One related Fave Rave is the Kiss My Ass album. If you can imagine Kiss covers done by Lenny Kravitz (with Steve Wonder helping out), the Mighty, Might Bosstones, Garth Brooks and Anthrax.