CLIMBING TOWARD A UNION
Workers at First Ascent climbing gyms’ four Chicago locations are unionizing.
by Devyn-Marshall Brown, p. 7
Consume or be consumed: a Q&A with Emily Mester by Katie Prout, p. 10
Footwork producer DJ Elmoe takes a big step by Noah
Berlatsky, p. 18
Gretchen Hasse’s The Dinosaur Opera by Kerry Reid, p. 13
05 Reader Bites Orange Dream smoothie at Jackalope Coffee & Tea House
06 Street View Opera looks
07 Labor Pains | DMB First Ascent workers push for a union.
08 Make it Make Sense | Mulcahy Private equity buys Walgreens, state lawmakers push for fentanyl crackdown, and more.
COMMENTARY
09 On Prisons A ban on paper products in Illinois prisons would hurt the prison education system.
ARTS & CULTURE
10 Q&A | Prout Emily Mester’s essay collection explores the many faces of hoarding.
12 Book Review | Cardoza A new anthology from Haymarket Books expands our understanding of parenting.
THEATER
13 Feature | Reid Gretchen Hasse’s puppet epicin-progress The Dinosaur Opera explores “time, purpose, and meaning.”
14 Plays of Note Esho Rasho’s Edinburgh Fringe hit Dummy in Diaspora gets a U.S. premiere with Jackalope, Black Ensemble’s Jackie Taylor gets personal in Elvis Presley Was a Black Man Named Joe, and Facility Theatre drills deep for Pussy Sludge
16 Movies of Note The Day the Earth Blew Up is a loving throwback to early Looney Tunes animations, Last Breath works better as a documentary than a survivalist thriller, and more.
17 Moviegoer Good night, Godard
18 Feature Footwork producer DJ Elmoe takes a big step.
20 Chicagoans of Note | Caporale Glamhag, music video maker and multimedia artist
22 Shows of Note Previews of concerts including Juliana Huxtable, Coroner, Cari Cari, and Julian Lage
26 Savage Love Newly wed but still haven’t done the deed
KAULIG
EDITOR IN CHIEF SALEM COLLO-JULIN ASSISTANT MANAGING EDITOR
SAVANNAH RAY HUGUELEY
PRODUCTION MANAGER KIRK WILLIAMSON SENIOR GRAPHIC DESIGNER AMBER HUFF GRAPHIC DESIGNER AND PHOTO RESEARCHER SHIRA FRIEDMAN-PARKS
ARCHITECTURE, BOOKS KERRY CARDOZA
NEWS EDITOR SHAWN MULCAHY
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SENIOR WRITERS LEOR GALIL, DEANNA ISAACS, BEN JORAVSKY, MIKE SULA
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Chicago’s in bloom! Clockwise from top le : Marquette Park, 1972; Lincoln Square Farmers’ Market, 1988;
Beach Park, 1965; Indian
FOOD & DRINK
Orange Dream smoothie at
Coffee & Tea House
Feel like going back to a more cheerful time? It seems to drive many of us in our current climate, and Jackalope Coffee & Tea House certainly has my number in this regard. Personally, one of my favorite early memories remains the pleasing taste of an orange push-up ice cream treat, and Jackalope’s Orange Dream smoothie is, well, a dream. One sip is all it takes to have my childhood dreams come flooding back. In this case, though, the Orange Dream achieves that rare feat of being even better than my memories, since this smoothie comes with optional whipped
cream to add to the decadence. With all the lure of ice cream sliding down your throat, invoking summer even when it’s chilly outside, the Orange Dream is the perfect comfort food. It’s a simple, no-frills delight that I personally find irresistible at any time of the year.
It’s always fun to treat yourself in a way that feels both nostalgically comforting and very current. Trust a small, local cafe (with a whole lot of character, if you happen to stop by in person) to deliver a treat that can not only live up to memories and expectations, but surpass them.
—ANDREA THOMPSON
JACKALOPE COFFEE & TEA HOUSE 755 W. 32nd Street, $4.75–$5.50, 312-888-3468, jackalopecoffee.com v
Reader Bites celebrates dishes, drinks, and atmospheres from the Chicagoland food scene. Have you had a recent food or drink experience that you can’t stop thinking about? Share it with us at fooddrink@chicagoreader.com.
FOODBALL MONDAY NIGHT
The Reader’s weekly chef popup series, now at Frank and Mary’s Tavern, 2905 N. Elston, Avondale
Follow the chefs, @chicago_reader, and @mikesula on Instagram for weekly menu drops, ordering info, updates, and the stories behind Chicago’s most exciting foodlums.
March 17 The Saint Paddy’s Chicago chipper by the Wurst and Miner-Dunn @thewurstmeats @Minerdunn_hamburgers
March 24 Brazil to Chicago via Clinton Street Smoked Meats @clintonstreetsmokedmeats
March 31 Coming soon: NEMANJA by Nemanja Milunovic @nemanja_milunovic_011
April 7 Sicilian-style bakery by the Focaccia Mama @thefocacciamama
April 14 The Temptation by Gilda @gildachicago
April 21 A midwestern flower rises from the ashes with Las Flores @lasfloreschicago
April 28 Cocinero Verde is risen! @cocinero.verde
May 5 Cinco de Mayo with Tacos Las Manitas @tacos_lasmanitas
May 12 The revenge of Logan Oyster Socials @loganoystersocials
May 19 The long-awaited return of Links Taproom @linkstaproom
May 26 Memorial Day West African barbecue with Dozzy’s Grill @dozzysgrill
June 2 Indigenous-inspired fermentation freaks Piñatta Chicago @pinattachicago
Jackalope
CITY LIFE
Drama in the lobby
At the opera, the show continues during intermission.
By ISA GIALLORENZO
“At the opera, we are used to drama,” says Michael Solomon, director of media relations at Lyric Opera of Chicago. And drama is what many audience members serve with their attire, be it classic, modern, casual, or formal.
“I have [received] quite the fashion education by going to the opera,” says Solomon. “Because the opera is a safe place to experiment, I have seen some wild and wonderful looks.”
Sometimes the details in audience mem-
ber’s outfits are inspired by the performance itself. “I have sometimes seen audiences dress like the characters on stage, donning braids and breastplates like the heroine in Wagner’s Ring cycle,” Solomon adds.
At a performance of Aida at the Lyric last March, I spotted video editor Taylor Hanks sporting Egyptian references inspired by the setting of the performance. Hanks collaborated with her mother to design the stunning collar she added to her cape. She previously wore
LYRIC OPERA OF CHICAGO 20 N. Wacker, 312- 827- 5600, lyricopera.org
La Bohème opens Saturday, March 15 and runs through Saturday, April 12
the cape while attending a Lyric production of Don Giovanni in 2019. Hanks and her mother also created Hanks’ pyramid bag, inspired by the Chanel 2019 pre-fall collection.
For those planning on attending Lyric’s La Bohème, which opens on Saturday, March 15, Lyric’s costume director Kim Buetzow suggests embracing a free-spirited joie de vivre.
“La Bohème celebrates people who come from all walks of life,” Buetzow told me. “Lean into some extra pops of color to feel like you’re a part of the vibrant Parisian atmosphere,” she recommends. Set in the bohemian Latin Quarter of 1830s Paris, La Bohème displays the joy and sorrow of the starving artist.
Erin Michelle Wright, who I also photographed while attending Aida , could have well been inspired by the exuberant Musetta, one of La Bohème’s main characters. Wright’s dress, an online sensation inspired by a Reem
Acra design, is a true opera evergreen. It can be worn for every performance and beautifully complements the Lyric’s golden art deco accents. Wright’s flower headdress is a welcome nod to spring and proves that hair accessories can make quite a di erence.
“I personally have a deep a nity for every hat in the show,” shares Buetzow, who supervised the adaptation of La Bohème’s costumes from an earlier Los Angeles Opera production to the Lyric’s version. During intermission, guests are sure to provide plenty of visual appeal. “I think the high drama inherent in opera brings out the drama in people’s wardrobes. The most stylish looks I remember are the boldest ones,” Solomon says. “The big bright colors, the towering hats . . . just please take them o during the show.” v
m letters@chicagoreader.com
From le : Erin Michelle Wright wears a fl ower headdress; Taylor Hanks designed her collar and bag with the help of her mother.
ISA GIALLORENZO
LABOR PAINS
First Ascent sta launch union drive
Workers at the climbing gym’s four Chicago locations are organizing for improved pay, staffing, and safety.
By DEVYN-MARSHALL BROWN (DMB)
Before First Ascent opened its Avondale location in 2015, there were few if any dedicated climbing gyms in Chicago. The climbing scene was less accessible; it was dicult to break into if you weren’t already traveling and climbing outdoors on your own.
Now with four Chicago gyms, First Ascent has built a reputation as a social hub for newcomers, who are welcomed with an array of weekly meetups for solo climbers and perks that let members bring first-time guests for free.
“There’s a reason that this gym is called First Ascent,” says Fauna Stumpf, who has worked at the Uptown location since 2021. “Its primary clientele are people who don’t climb.”
Whether a novice or a seasoned pro, falling and hurting yourself is a normal risk that comes with the sport. “I’ve had people come in on their first day and break their ankles clean,” Stumpf says. First Ascent’s gyms are focused on bouldering, which involves following paths of varying di culties up walls of ten to 20 feet without using rope. But the Avondale location also offers top roping, where climbers can scale walls up to 60 feet high.
First-time climbers regularly scale this distance o the ground. But workers who spoke with me said understa ng can make it di cult to respond to potential safety risks or help new climbers.
Stumpf is part of a bloc of employees across First Ascent’s four Chicago gyms that is pushing for a union. Workers are seeking improved pay and scheduling, staffing standards, professional development, and increased safety training. The group took their union campaign public with the support of 70 percent of workers in a February 5 letter to management
requesting voluntary recognition, but the company declined. Workers are now waiting for the National Labor Relations Board to schedule an election.
In an email, owners Jon Shepard and Dan Bartz write that sta have said they don’t want a union because leadership has a reputation of solving problems directly with them, and it doesn’t make sense to pay dues for something they believe they already have. The owners say the majority of sta who signed on to the e ort work fewer than one shift per week and have been with the company for fewer than two years.
Shepard and Bartz say safety is their top priority and that their gyms are staffed and workers are trained according to industry standards. “When staff have voiced areas to improve our standards, we have a strong history of listening and making adjustments that address those concerns,” they write. “Injuries are very rare at First Ascent. We review every injury report thoroughly, though there’s only been a handful of rope climbing injuries since
NEWS & POLITICS
we opened in 2015.”
First Ascent isn’t the first climbing gym to unionize. Two north-side locations of Movement, a national chain, unionized last year with the Chicago and Midwest Regional Joint Board (CMRJB) of Workers United, the same union that is now working with First Ascent. According to CMRJB, 23 climbing gyms across the country have formed or are organizing unions, 18 of which are with Workers United.
Many of First Ascent’s employees work in hospitality, the gyms’ lowestpaid roles. The job encompasses everything from checking in guests to responding to emergencies. Hospitality sta work all hours, but the union feels they’re also listened to the least. Hospitality sta are trained to perform emergency rope rescues in teams of two, but workers recall periods of a few months at Avondale where only one staffer worked the closing shift.
Shepard and Bartz write that the Avondale location hasn’t had an open shift in more than a year. “During that period when we had one staff member working the closing shift, that decision was made based on customer visitation. We were seeing little to no gym usage during the closing shifts.”
Sta ng issues at First Ascent are exacerbated by low pay, workers say. Many employees work multiple jobs or receive government assistance. Stumpf works 28 hours per week and makes $17.50 an hour. Like many employees, Stumpf couldn’t a ord a gym membership without the free one offered to employees. They moved into low-income housing last year—a studio that costs $945 per month. “I manage. I break even,” they say. “I’ve got a few thousand dollars saved so I can a ord to not worry about my groceries. But still, it’s really bleak.”
Farbota Lynn, an employee at the Avondale location, calls themself a “shift vulture” because they’re always looking for more work. “I just pick up everything I can because this is my primary source of income,” they say.
Lynn says they feel their passion for climbing is “being taken advantage of” and would like a union to help ensure a steady schedule and a living wage. They say management cuts hours during the gym’s slow season in the
summer. Despite promises to bring them back in the fall, Lynn says that hasn’t happened. “We have generally felt understaffed [more and more] when it comes back to our busy season each year as they keep cutting hours.”
“Several of us are on food stamps,” they say. “I don’t think that the same people who are responsible for the safety of their community should be running on just passion.”
Understa ng impacts more than just safety. “Ever noticed how dirty a bouldering gym is? It’s disgusting,” Stumpf says. “It’s covered in chalk. It’s covered in shoe rubber. There is hair and skin all over the place constantly.” After workers raised the issue with management in their union e ort, the company agreed to create designated cleaning shifts.
Above all, workers say, a union will give them a sense that their concerns are being thoroughly considered and addressed. Stumpf says they and others don’t want to bring concerns through the proper channels because “nothing happens,” and they’ve seen workers receive unequal treatment depending on their job title and gym location. They also fear retaliation because they’ve seen management fire workers without warning.
“Within the company, their word is law,” Stumpf says of the owners. “They have the final say. There isn’t accountability for their actions. . . . It’s not like they’re going to lose their jobs for following a procedure wrong.” Shepard and Bartz, the owners, claim they’ve never fired an employee without warning except for severe policy violations like sexual harassment and time theft. They say that First Ascent and other small businesses have been “impacted by rising costs.”
“It’s a difficult question to decide how to spread limited company resources,” they write. “We believe these questions are best handled between sta and leadership directly, and we have a strong track record using that approach.”
In the meantime, First Ascent workers are looking to other unionized climbing gyms for tips as they move forward. Stumpf is in a Discord server with sta from at least 20 other gyms across the country.
Lynn says they hope to work with the company to improve the experience for everyone. “I don’t want to bargain them into a position where they’re hurting,” they say. “I don’t plan to go into this in bad faith . . . but I think there must be a way for them to prioritize us a little more.” v m dmbrown@chicagoreader.com
First Ascent in Avondale KIRK WILLIAMSON
NEWS & POLITICS
Introducing: Make It Make Sense
These days, there’s simply too much news. (Seriously, can someone make it stop?) As a small but freaky weekly newspaper, we’ve struggled to keep up with the fire hose of information drowning media organizations ten times our size.
That inspired a short-lived online news column that ran from late 2023 through last June. In the months since, things have only gotten worse. So, we figured we’d give it another shot—this time online and in print. Welcome (back) to Make It Make Sense.
Each week, you can expect a collection of top headlines, upcoming events, and ways to take action in your community. We also hope to use this space for the nuggets of information we collect that don’t make it into their own stories. While other outlets tell you what’s happening, we want to help you understand why it’s happening.
Have thoughts about what you’d like to see covered? An upcoming event? A tip? Let me know at smulcahy@chicagoreader.com.
Walgreens sold to private equity
Walgreens is betting on private equity to fix its financial woes. The international drugstore giant, headquartered in suburban Deerfield, announced a $10 billion deal on March 6 to sell the company to Sycamore Partners, a private equity firm in New York City.
Private equity has a penchant for swooping in like vultures and picking apart the carcasses of once imposing corporations like the Tribune and Toys “R” Us. It works by pooling large investments to take control of a company, slashing costs, then selling the business (or whatever is left of it) for a profit. Think house flippers but with power ties and contracts instead of coveralls and power tools.
The Walgreens deal has stoked fears that communities could be left without drugstores. In the 2010s, Walgreens embarked on ambitious expansion plans and edged out or gobbled up competitors. Since then, however, it has struggled to turn a profit. The company sunk billions of dollars into a plan to break into the health care provider market only to
reclassify the charge as a Class X felony, the most serious felony charge, with a prison term of nine to 40 years and up to $250,000 in fines. Under one bill, anyone arrested for making or selling 15 grams of drugs containing fentanyl would also face mandatory imprisonment before trial unless they can prove their freedom “does not pose a real and present threat.” Another would order the state health department to reclassify fentanyl-related overdose deaths as “fentanyl poisonings.” State representative La Shawn Ford, a Democrat, told Capitol News Illinois that he supports these two efforts and planned to file a companion bill in the house.
Strike season
Chicago is a union town—and these days, I’m not just talking about labor unions. In buildings across the city, renters are organizing with their neighbors against de facto evictions, rent hikes, and absentee landlords.
Since March 1, at least two groups of Chicago tenants have gone public with coordinated rent strikes to fight displacement and ensure their housing remains affordable. In Logan Square, the Belden Sawyer Tenant Association hopes to pressure their building’s new corporate owner to scrap plans to force out current residents, renovate the property, and rent it for a higher price.
reverse course. Last year, Walgreens laid o hundreds of employees in Illinois as part of a broader cost-cutting e ort that will see 1,200 stores shuttered by 2027.
Walgreens CEO Tim Wentworth said in a news release that private equity is the best answer to “meaningful value creation.” Whether that’s enough to keep Walgreens afloat remains to be seen.
Just say no?
State lawmakers are pushing for legislation to further stigmatize and criminalize drug use even as a growing consensus of research points to drug use as an issue of public health—rather than of public safety.
Republican state senators Sue Rezin and Sally Turner unveiled a package of four bills at a March 6 news conference aimed at “holding the perpetrators of [the fentanyl] crisis accountable.” The proposals would increase the mandatory minimum prison sentence for people convicted of making or selling drugs that contain fentanyl from three to five years and
Meanwhile, residents of a Kenwood apartment building hope their rent strike will give them a say in their building’s maintenance and management. The Ellis Lakeview Tenants Association, a union of Section 8 renters, successfully organized last year to give their previous landlord the boot after years of neglect and disrepair, sending the building into foreclosure. The group came together in 2020 to document maintenance issues and submit complaints to federal housing o cials. They want whoever buys their building to agree to a collective bargaining agreement that outlines practices for repairs, building management, security, and more.
Tenant unions lack the legal protections a orded to labor unions, like freedom from retaliation, the right to strike, or even the right to organize in the first place. Nonetheless, a burgeoning movement of tenant organizing is taking root in Chicago. —SHAWN MULCAHY v
Make It Make Sense is a weekly column about what’s happening and why it matters. m smulcahy@chicagoreader.com
A Walgreens drugstore in Chicago SHIRA FRIEDMAN-PARKS
ON PRISONS
Don’t ban paper in prisons
Depriving incarcerated people of paper would limit educational opportunities and communication with loved ones.
By ANTHONY EHLERS
This spring, the Illinois House is set to take up a bill that would make all prisons in the state paperless. This legislation is sponsored by Republican lawmakers and supported by American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees Council 31, the public-sector employee union that represents corrections o cers. If it passes, new rules will ban all mail to prisoners until it is digitized, as well as books and newspapers. Why would they do this? Ostensibly, it’s necessary in the name of public safety: keeping Illinois Department of Corrections (IDOC) employees and residents safe. A common refrain is that paper is a conduit for illegal drugs. One of the things that happened in the wake of legalizing marijuana was the proliferation of synthetic cannabinoid products, which are largely unregulated. One, called K2, is a synthetic form of cannabis that’s illegal in Illinois. It gets sprayed on paper, and these pieces of paper can be eaten or smoked. It’s one way prisoners get high. They usually cut the paper into small pieces called “strips.”
Preventing K2 from entering prisons is part of the excuse behind the push to ban all paper products. Another reason put forth is that a paper ban is needed for the safety of correctional o cers who handle the mail.
There have been numerous reports in local and nationwide media about officers in mail rooms in prisons throughout the country
who have been made sick or died due to drugsoaked paper and things like that. At Shawnee Correctional Center in downstate Illinois, six correctional officers experienced “medical symptoms” while sorting mail in September. The prison was put on lockdown, mail rooms in prisons across the state were alerted, and all mail in that prison was temporarily stopped. This sounds like a reasonable response, right? However, the Illinois hazardous materials team that responded to the prison found no evidence of drugs on any paper or the o cers’ clothes.
These synthetic drugs aren’t as dangerous as they are being made out to be. How do I know? For the last 23 years, until its closure in September, I was in Stateville Correctional Center. “Strips” had permeated the prison. Many guys smoked these drugs; you could constantly smell the smoke throughout the joint. This wasn’t a problem the prison cared to address.
In 2020, the Wisconsin Department of Corrections (DOC) began sending all prisoner mail to a company called TextBehind in Maryland. The company scans the mail and sends digital copies to prisoners. The nonprofit newsroom Wisconsin Watch reported that the DOC has paid nearly $4 million for those services since they began.
Going paperless is not only costly, it simply does not work. Evidence suggests that going
books, which many guys in this place can’t a ord. This has made it extremely di cult for people in prison to get books.
Organizations such as Midwest Books to Prisoners take donations of lightly used books and send them to prisoners. Many of these organizations are spending thousands of dollars on postage only to have the books returned undelivered.
This will also hugely impact education and learning in prison. Many men take correspondence courses from places such as Blackstone Career Institute, which certifies graduates to become paralegals. Various other colleges and universities across the country o er correspondence courses, like Colorado’s Adams State University and Colorado State University Pueblo. If this bill passes, such learning opportunities will be much more difficult to participate in.
paperless does not accomplish authorities’ stated end goals of stopping drugs. Wisconsin Watch reported that in 2021, the year the Wisconsin DOC began restricting prisoners’ mail, there were 49 incidents of drugs being found on paper. By October 2024, there were already 55 incidents.
A 2021 Marshall Project investigation found that restricting mail did not curb drugs found in Texas prisons. In 2023, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania’s Patriot-News reported that after the banning of physical mail in 2018, the number of Pennsylvania prisoners who tested positive on random drug tests actually increased.
Do you want to know why going paperless and restricting mail doesn’t work? Because most drugs are brought into the prison by the people who work here. At Stateville, sta had been fired for bringing in drugs, selling cell phones, or having sex with prisoners.
Make no mistake, this paperless agenda will a ect more than prisoners’ personal letters. It will also stop us from being able to purchase books, magazines, and newspapers. IDOC has already severely curtailed our ability to get books. Everyone knows that buying used books is cheaper than buying new books. However, IDOC has employed a policy that will not allow any books with highlighted passages, underlined sentences, or stains. This seriously limits our ability to get used books, forcing us and our loved ones to spend money on new
It’s not just limited to correspondence courses either. There are higher education programs scattered across Illinois’ state prisons, such as Northwestern University’s Prison Education Program (NPEP) and Lewis University’s Prison Education Program. These programs largely rely on printed articles and course materials. This could also be threatened. The guys in these programs would not be able to do their coursework. It would have the larger e ect of shutting down higher education in prison.
Some incarcerated people write books. I’m working on one, and my friend Michael Broadway, who died in July, was a published author. An NPEP graduate, Broadway self-published a semi-autobiographical novel about growing up in Chicago called One Foot In . Other guys have published poetry books or memoirs. Banning paper would stop all of that. It would stop incarcerated men and women from becoming better people, and worse still, stop them from expressing themselves.
Books are a huge part of prison culture. You have to while away the hours in prison, and many do that by reading. Reading books helped me get on a better path, grow, and become self-rehabilitated. Some books are so valuable in prison that I’ve seen them used as currency. That’s how precious books can be in a place like this, and lawmakers are trying to take that away. v
Anthony Ehlers is a writer incarcerated at Sheridan Correctional Center. Find out more about incarcerated journalists from the Prison Journalism Project (prisonjournalismproject.org).
m letters@chicagoreader.com
Geese gather on the grounds outside Taylorville Correctional Center in Christian County, Illinois. JASON MATTHEWS/FLICKR VIA CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
ARTS & CULTURE
Consume or be consumed
“Culturally,
people see hoarding as
something that has to be a little bit dirty.”
By KATIE PROUT
Emily Mester is one of the best writers I know, and sometimes that really pisses me o . Her book, American Bulk: Essays on Excess , covers the upper-middle-class American desire to consume or be consumed, via personal and critical essays on Costco as church, fat camp as liberation, the Chicago suburbs, Olive Garden, Ulta, and the mall. They’re about coveting, longing, and trying to soothe the ache you feel when the family who is supposed to love you hurts you deep. The prose that makes up these essays is clear, beautiful, and funny, as it has been since our first writing workshops together ten years ago. It pisses me o because I wish I could do what she does. The other day, I called her up for a conversation about class, craft, and culture. What follows has been lightly edited for clarity.
Katie Prout: This is gonna sound like an insulting compliment, but we’ll start here: I usually don’t like class analysis from people that come from wealthy backgrounds, but in your book I actually did. The thing about Costco is that you have to be able to a ord to go there, and you have to have the space to be able to store what you get, and that’s something you mentioned pretty matter-of-factly in the book.
Emily Mester: People don’t interview me that much about class. They talk about consumption, but they don’t talk about class. But it’s fucking expensive to buy a big thing of toilet paper.
Then there’s the kind of hoarding your dad does in the book compared to your grandma’s. The difference has to do with
R American Bulk: Essays on Excess by Emily Mester W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., paperback, 240 pp., $17 99, wwnorton.com/books/9781324035237
generation, but class too. One is about getting as much as you can for free. The other one is, like, getting as many deals, and often only the rich can afford deals. Both have an anxiety around security. I feel like your position as a writer and narrator is to bridge this more agricultural farming class background with the new money, corporate lawyer–type, and to find the similarities and di erences there.
When I used to describe my dad, I didn’t feel like I could just be like, “He’s a hoarder too.” If we’re judging by the kind of underlying impulse, he is, but it wouldn’t make it onto TV. It’s hemmed in by the ability to have multiple houses, to have cleaning people who come in every week. I think culturally, people see hoarding as something that has to be a little bit dirty, the objects have to be valueless to most people. It’s about class
definitions. But what do you call it when it’s a bunch of iPods or a bunch of Leatherman tools?
Like when is it pathologized? This might be a jump, but it makes me think of what we call crime and what we don’t. The far larger financial crime is wage theft, right? That impacts more people, but we’re culturally hyper-focused on the moral panic around shoplifting. One is far more prosecuted and criminalized than the other.
Yes! I think that my biggest fear writing the book was that somebody would be like, “Why do I care what this rich girl has to say”— which, you know, I wouldn’t begrudge them. I was trying to figure out how to go about it, because I think a lot of modern nonfiction has this scourge I call the “to be sure” paragraph. I was reading a woman talking about her fertility journey, and in the middle of it, she’s like,
“and I know that other people have it worse.” It’s basically that: I know other people have it worse. I get the impulse, because you want to signal to the reader that you are not blind, you can see what they see, and you can see the indignities of the world. You can see the layout of things. But I feel like it becomes this, like, mea culpa.
I was thinking, “What if Marie Antoinette wrote a memoir? What do people want from her?” I don’t think they want her to be like, “Oh my God. I feel soooo bad, so weird about Versailles.” They kinda just want her to be like, “Dude, this is fucking crazy. Do you want to hear more about how fucking crazy this is?” I really tried to not do the “to be sure.” I would occasionally do things like, “Oh, hey, I do see this. I know this.”
I think you were successful in that. “To
Emily Mester’s essay collection intertwines memoir with cultural critique. AUTHOR PHOTO BY JOHN KHUSZAGH
be sure”s are hand-wringing, and handwringing is boring, and also not analysis. And instead of letting the reader know you, and perhaps not like you, they hold the reader at a distance. Whereas in your book, I think you allow both yourself and your family to be unlikable at times, which is a terrifying thing for a writer to do and feel, but it makes the book better and the narrator more trustworthy.
It’s terrifying. You’re an essayist because you really, really don’t want to be misunderstood. Even though you’re like, “No, I’m gonna literally say what happened. This is not a poem, this is not a story. Here it is.” It’s really scary to be unlikable, but I think you become even more unlikable when you’re just like, “Please don’t be mad at me.” When you make someone you love into a character, it’s very scary whether people are going to see them as you see them. Sometimes people you love do bad stu . In earlier drafts,
ARTS & CULTURE
version of herself.” You didn’t point at it with a bunch of lights and arrows for the reader, but it was where the book was leading.
The things people like or dislike, it’s actually the same thing, usually. Some people are like, “Oh, this is actually really personal. This is kind of a memoir. These are not essays at all,” to which I say, it’s called a personal essay. [Laughs.] But I think the personal grounds it. I also shied away from memoir at first because I thought it wasn’t marketable, and I thought “cultural criticism” was more intelligent, and there’s lots to unpack there. It’s loaded and gendered. So I was like, “No, no, no, this is cultural critique laced with memoir.” Now I’m like, “Maybe it’s memoir laced with cultural critique.” Like, that’s really more accurate.
“What if Marie Antoinette wrote a memoir? What do people want from her?” I don’t think they want her to be like, “Oh my God. I feel soooo bad, so weird about Versailles.”
my grandma was coming off a little too angelic, and my dad was coming o a little too villainous. In treating them like characters, I got this critical distance of being like, “Oh my God. Like, of course he’s like that. Like, this makes so much sense.” It was doing character analysis on this person as opposed to therapy analysis: not just “what you’ve done to me,” but, “What’s happened to you and why?”
I loved the three Storm Lake, Iowa, chapters that define the beginning, middle, and end of the book. In the last, you confront the hoarding of your grandma’s house years after she abandoned it because it was literally too stu ed for her to live in. In doing so, you also see how that house had no room for your dad—that in a way, she hoarded to push him, and other parts of her life that she felt trapped by, out of her space. In turn, he hoards now under the fig leaf of providing his children with every good or luxury they could need—except for emotional warmth. You write, “I am exactly like him. I regard him in the way a medical student regards a cadaver, awed and queasy because she’s looking at a
repetition & repetition & By
Nathan Marshall
Yeah, personal experience happens within a culture! You can critique it from there. The first time we talked about [your fat camp] essay, years ago, I imagined it being kind of a trauma essay, because of my own problems [laughs] and also the cultural narrative around fat camps, right? Which is that they are abusive and bad, but for you, for the characters that we read, it’s a place of play, friendship, camaraderie, and support. The problem isn’t the camp. The problem is everybody outside of the camp.
Yeah, the wincing people do when they hear about it—for a lot of people, that wincing is what it feels like all the time. That wincing is just what it feels like to be fat in the world. I wrote this in the book, but I was told again and again that to be in America was to be surrounded by fat people, but that was the first time it actually happened. Being fat, for a lot of people, feels like a weird, open secret. And fat camp was the only time where I even felt comfortable describing myself that way. It was really liberating to just acknowledge the fact of my body. The approach to weight loss at the camp was very workmanlike. It was almost sort of just, “Well, the world sucks. And we feel like we got to change being fat. And we’re all very tortured by it,” but I wasn’t tortured there. I could’ve lived there forever. v
m kprout@chicagoreader.com
Ours is a long love song, A push out into open air, A stare into the barrel, A pool of grief pudding Under our single body. A national shame Amnesia & shame again. We are a pattern, A percussive imperative, A break beat. We are live On the airwaves, Until they close, In the pubs, Until they close, In the schools Until they close We are close. To the edge of the city limits we are limited to the hood Until we decide we are not.
Baby we are hundreds: Wild until we are free. Wild like amnesia & shame
Amnesia until We realize that its Crazy to keep forgetting & we aint crazy Baby we are wild We are 1 We are love.
Poem curated by Frsh Waters. Frsh Waters from Chicago’s Westside is a writer, performance artist, & community outreach coordinator for Chicago youth arts non-profit John Walt Foundation and is a Co-Founder of Chicago’s incomparable Pivot Gang. He believes writing is a road map to the world. Frsh is a street food lover & appreciator of art. His mantra is “Change is the crossroads to innovation; either be the change you want to see envisioned on a canvas, or wonder why it doesn’t exist.”
Opening Hours
Wednesday, Friday, Saturday: 11:00 AM–5:00 PM Thursday: 11:00 AM–6:00 PM
Powertripping
Join us for an evening of performances and readings by Karen Finley, Jada Renée Allen, Odette Stout, and Ruby Que with Ále Campos. March 20, 2025 at 6:00 PM
Blood Wolf Moon
Join us for an evening of poetry readings by Elise Paschen and Esther Belin plus artist talks by June Carpenter and Lydia Cheshewalla, followed by a reception. April 10, 2025 at 6:00 PM
Learn more at PoetryFoundation.org
A weekly series curated by the Chicago Reader and sponsored by the Poetry Foundation.
ARTS & CULTURE
REVIEW
Caregiving as community building
We Grow the World Together shows that parenting and abolition go hand in hand.
BY KERRY CARDOZA
In September, the Gaza Health Ministry released an incomplete list of the names and ages of Palestinians killed by Israeli armed forces since the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack. The first 14 pages of the 649-page list contains solely the names of babies. At the time, the death count was over 34,000 people; 11,355 of the identified bodies were under the age of 18. As Reuters reported this week, these numbers make sense—in 2022, the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics reported that 40 percent of Gazans were under age 15. Nearly one third of the almost 50,000 people estimated to have been killed in Gaza thus far were under the age of 18. The assault on Gaza is largely a war on children.
“As a world, we have failed the children of Gaza,” writes Heba Gowayed, associate professor of sociology at CUNY Hunter College, in We Grow the World Together: Parenting Toward Abolition, a new anthology edited by Maya Schenwar and Kim Wilson. Most parents and caregivers will probably agree they want their children to be safe. But Gowayed and other contributors persuasively make the case that our children’s well-being is tied up with that of all children. How can we expect our children to live free lives when those in Palestine are being born under an occupation, always at risk of harm from a bullet or a bomb—weapons that the U.S. is ever eager to fund? And when Israeli surveillance tactics and policing techniques are exported around the world, including to the Chicago Police Department.
We Grow the World Together explains that abolition means breaking out of the ingrained perspective that child-rearing is an individualized endeavor. As Sarah Tyson writes about becoming a new parent, “I was overwhelmed by the way I was supposed to be personally responsible for protecting this child from forces so much bigger than me.” She refers not just to state violence but to “inadequate healthcare,”
environmental hazards, and so much more.
Schenwar lays out the stakes in her moving introduction. For weeks, Schenwar tried to send a postcard to her incarcerated sister with the simple message: “I’m pregnant.” But week after week the postcard was confiscated by prison personnel—a galling illustration of the cruelty inherent in the prison system—one that aims to ensure its population remains isolated and unconnected from all that makes us human.
The book’s first two sections, Lessons From Our Kids, Lessons From Our Parents and Parents and Caregivers in Movement, continue on this theme, telling one heart-wrenching story after another about what incarceration does to families. An essay from six-year-old EJ notes how they need to share details about
RWe Grow the World Together: Parenting Toward Abolition edited by Maya Schenwar and Kim Wilson Haymarket Books, paperback, 288 pp., $11 97, haymarketbooks.org/ books/2446 -we-grow-the-world-together
their day-to-day life with their incarcerated father, or else he won’t know them. “When I go to school this year, I will learn to write him letters,” EJ explains. Erika Ray shares a letter to her daughter on the di culties of parenting her from inside prison. “There have been days that you struggled and needed a hug from me, but that hug was trapped behind a razor-wire fence,” she writes.
The book contains gruesome details of babies wrenched from their mothers just hours after birth, about parents delivering their children while shackled to the bed, about breast
milk flushed down prison drains instead of fed to newborns, about family policing further tearing apart families instead of providing them with the resources they need to thrive. In a particularly moving essay, Chicago organizer Holly Krig, cofounder of Moms United Against Violence and Incarceration, writes about undergoing an ultrasound while in jail, being arrested while pregnant, and pumping on the way to a Sheri ’s Work Alternative Program site. These experiences led Krig to a lifetime of abolitionist solidarity work. “I came to understand that the measure of my mothering was not only in the care of my child, but in my solidarity with other mothers. . . . I rejected the idea that the actions of one mother should be judged against another, especially when the circumstances in which we provide care are
divided by skillfully drawn inequities.”
The book’s final two sections, Caregiving Dreams Beyond Normative Family Structures and Practicing Abolitionist Caregiving, explore some more practical aspects of abolitionist parenting. Victoria Law writes about the importance of supporting caregivers in movement work so they don’t have to step back from organizing when caring for children. (Her book, Don’t Leave Your Friends Behind: Concrete Ways to Support Families in Social Justice Movements and Communities, coauthored with China Martens, delves into this more fully.) She details the importance of childcare at meetings and events and suggests ways to tangibly support care providers.
Elsewhere, Rania El Mugammar o ers advice on challenging copaganda in children’s media, Jennifer Viets writes about how her family practices restorative justice at home, and Mariame Kaba talks with Schenwar about using children’s books as tools for abolition. Several essays discuss the importance of disrupting heteronormative, patriarchal family structures, equating the nuclear family with the authoritarianism of the state.
In the conclusion, coeditor Kim Wilson— who has two currently incarcerated children—sums up the importance of the book’s contributions, outlining the necessity of understanding the context in which we parent and the history of how we got to where we are today. “The American ethos of hyperindividualism undermines parenting and caregiving while it simultaneously blames parents for failures that are beyond any one person’s capacity,” she writes. She notes that her family survives thanks to the myriad supportive relationships in their lives, and that that is at the core of parenting toward abolition. “We read, think, grow, and struggle together, and through these processes we find solutions, but, more importantly, we are building relationships that make this work sustainable.”
We Grow the World Together isn’t necessarily a how-to guide on abolitionist parenting, because it’s inherently expansive. Instead, it provides various threads you might explore more deeply with a multitude of examples of how other caregivers are doing the work. It shows that raising the next generation is a communal effort, one that involves parents, caregivers, and those without children; its authors illustrate how the world will be a more just place once we expand our capacity for love beyond the nuclear family. v
m kcardoza@chicagoreader.com
Top: Maya Schenwar; Bottom: Kim Wilson FROM TOP: SALLY BLOOD; COURTESY OF AUTHOR
PUPPETS AND PALEONTOLOGY
Raptor rapture
In The Dinosaur Opera, Gretchen Hasse uses puppetry to explore “time, purpose, and meaning.”
By KERRY REID
Chicago artist Gretchen Hasse’s work stretches over many media, including video, animation, comics, painting and drawing, kinetic sculptures, robotics, and public murals. She’s also a cofounder of the Logan Square collective gallery space Agitator. But her latest creative obsession, The Dinosaur Opera, is perhaps the simplest to explain.
“People will ask, ‘Well, what got you interested in dinosaurs? And I’m like, ‘Who isn’t interested in dinosaurs?’ What a weird question,” says Hasse, 57, over co ee at Logan
THEATER
something that I was doing forever,” she says. “Just because that’s what you do sometimes, if you have narrative inclinations and you’re a maker. It’s comics, puppets, ‘I don’t know, let’s do some video.’ All of that sort of serves the purpose of narrative. Even some murals that I’ve done, or basically every mural that I’ve done, has had a narrative element to it.” (In 2017, her design called Resilience, using characters from her ongoing online graphic novel Freaks’ Progress, was selected for the Rogers Park Mile of Murals program and adorns the underpass at Pratt and Glenwood.)
She hit upon dinosaurs as the connective element for the project during a 2022-23 residency with the Chicago International Puppet Theater Festival’s Puppet Lab program. Hasse has written extensively about her experiences starting at age 15 with rheumatoid arthritis. (It formed the basis for her piece The Knee Plays, produced as part of Rough House’s ongoing Nasty, Brutish & Short puppet cabaret in this year’s Puppet Festival.) Her knee replacement surgery in 2018 also helped spark an interest in exploring live performance as the chronic pain she’d lived with for decades diminished, and her past experience with robotics and kinetic sculpture also fed her curiosity about moving into puppetry—especially puppetry around dinosaurs.
Square’s Cafe Mustache.
The project currently consists of three short chapters using puppetry, movement, music, and text alongside some smaller digital components. The latest installment, History and Time , premiered at the Beverly Arts Center on March 7. The earlier sections—The Thing With Wings and With Their Very Bones—were previously unveiled at Chopin Theatre and Aloft Circus Arts, respectively. Hasse returns to Aloft April 19 with another installment, Defend and Display, utilizing shadow puppets.
Despite the title, the evolving work isn’t an actual opera; Hasse notes that she chose that descriptor as a way of expressing something epic in scope. The idea is that the short chapters of The Dinosaur Opera (the first two were each around five minutes, and History and Time is about 15 minutes) can be performed as stand-alone pieces or eventually as an entire evening’s performance. In the written description for the project, Hasse says, “Each chapter will explore time, purpose, and meaning, through the eternally fascinating lens of dinosaurs.”
Hasse was always interested in the possibilities of puppetry, but the pandemic shutdown and the current political climate made her long for the immediacy of live performance especially. “Lately, I’m very interested in people being in the same room together. And I just think people are hungry for that.”
The evolution to dinosaurs and puppetry came naturally. “Comics and puppets is
“I don’t remember how long ago it was becoming common knowledge that they had feathers. And I was like, ‘Oh, this changes everything.’ Just to think about how beautiful that must have been—how crazy and just, I don’t know, deadly and gorgeous. I was just like, ‘I love this. There’s so much creative potential here.’ And just the way they move is di erent, ’cause they’re birdlike.”
“People will ask, ’Well, what got you interested in dinosaurs? And I’m like, ‘Who isn’t interested in dinosaurs?’ What a weird question.”
The culture of paleontology also inspires Hasse, who recently attended PaleoFest at Rockford’s Burpee Museum of Natural History. “A lot of the grunt work is done by dedicated volunteers. There’s never enough money, but
Clockwise from L: Suitcase the Dinosaur in With Their Very Bones; Gretchen Hasse; Wendy Madrigal (L) and Alonso Galue in The Thing With Wings VIDEO STILL BY DANNY SMITHERMAN, EEI MEDIA; NANCY BEHALL; LOREN TONEY/CHICAGO PUPPET LAB
continued from p. 13
there’s a whole lot of people really passionate about dinosaurs.”
In the first (mostly wordless) chapter, The Thing With Wings (Hasse notes with a laugh that it comes from a mistaken interpretation of Emily Dickinson’s famous description of hope as “the thing with feathers”), a dinosaur called Dahlia (constructed of cardboard and operated by puppeteer Alonso Galue from inside the puppet) protectively approaches an
“We are one of the species who has ever lived on this planet. We really haven’t been here that long at all.”
“egg” lit up from inside, showing the silhouette of a fetal dinosaur. In the background, a video projection shows the mouth of a cave, through which we see first another dinosaur, and then some apocalyptic event that kills Dahlia and her video counterpart. This section is labeled “Pleistocene.” The second section, labeled “Wednesday,” shows a contemporary paleontologist (Wendy Madrigal) excitedly stumbling upon the fossilized egg, dusting o debris while a puppet bird on a stick (operated by Galue) flies overhead.
In With Their Very Bones, the long, unsavory history of profiteering off dinosaur remains comes into focus, as Hasse plays “the Thief” (dressed in vaguely 19th-century garb) who travels on a train with a small dinosaur named (appropriately enough) “Suitcase” in a small valise. The adorable hand puppet dino (sporting a feathery head) proclaims, “I’m horrible, and portable!” The Thief reminds Suitcase, “You’re worth more dead than alive.”
History and Time combines elements of the first two shorter pieces in a more dialogue-heavy episode. “The concept is just observing and acknowledging that the history of our species is just this little time. We are one of the species who has ever lived on this planet. We really haven’t been here that long at all,” says Hasse. “So our concept of what has occurred in the world is small and specific.” She adds that this chapter “is much more about the characters than it is about the dinosaurs.” Dahlia returns, snoring in the background, and the Thief is also there.
At the Beverly Arts Center performance,
History was portrayed by dancer Melissa Simo, and the Thief (this time portrayed by August Boyne) represented Time. Hasse took on the role of slumbering Dahlia.
“History is sort of sassy,” notes Hasse. “She dances around with these artifacts hanging o her. It’s completely goofy. The Thief is trying to steal artifacts to sell to make money for his family.” She adds, “It’s the idea of how history is kind of an accident, and also defined by the people who interpret it.” Boyne also wrote a song that’s incorporated into History and Time, which includes the lyrics, “With some patience you’ll see it crumble / One day we’ll all be part of the rubble / What’s lost, I’ll find / Once theirs, now mine / Until the right price comes to say hello.”
Hasse notes that Craig Childs’s 2013 book, Finders Keepers: A Tale of Archaeological Plunder and Obsession , helped spark her interest in exploring the ethical contexts around paleontology and artifacts, and she’s hoping to work more closely with paleontologists as she continues to craft the pieces. (One of the elements she brought into With Their Very Bones played into the now-discredited notion that dinosaurs are part of fossil fuels.) She praises “the kind of dedication and imagination it takes” to do paleontological research, finding it compatible with the collaborative work she’s been building in The Dinosaur Opera. Just as she emphasizes that Agitator is a collective without owners, Hasse also takes pains to note that this project is an ongoing experiment with many collaborators adding their talents to the matrix.
In a profile by Reader staff writer Micco Caporale last spring on the Puppetqueers collective, puppet artist Grace Needlman called puppet artists “the misfit toys of the misfit toys,” and Hasse echoes that assessment. She also finds the immediacy of performance and the bespoke nature of puppetry reassuring in an age of isolation and AI—perhaps a way of fighting back against corporate forces pressing in to make human creativity and connection extinct.
“AI just deflates me so much,” Hasse says. “Because it’s like, ‘What is this? What’s it doing?’ It’s removing imagination. It’s just like harvesting people’s brains and leaving them to just be this desiccated mass. I suppose there are uses for it in medicine and everything, and that’s cool, but when you’re trying to go and treat creativity like just another product? This isn’t progress.” v
m kreid@chicagoreader.com
OPENING
RPersonal Essa
Dummy in Diaspora is an absorbing second-generation immigrant story.
In his solo Dummy in Diaspora, Esho Rasho takes us through the story of Essa (whose name means “Jesus” in Arabic, as he reminds us more than once), the U.S.born child of Christian Assyrian immigrant parents. But unlike the Christian messiah, Essa is plagued with doubts about his own destiny. His dad fled Iraq during the Iran–Iraq War in the 1980s, and his mom le her native Beirut, both seeking calmer waters in the U.S. But Essa finds himself adri , facing all the usual challenges of adolescence and early adulthood, and then some. In Essa’s case, being gay adds to the angst, even though his coming out to his mother as a teenager comes across as remarkably free of the parental guilt and recrimination that sometimes mark such narratives.
Throughout this charming and absorbing 70-minute show (directed by Karina Patel), Rasho ping-pongs through Essa’s desultory approach to adulting. (From the playwright’s program note, it’s pretty clear that much of Essa’s story belongs to Rasho himself.) As Essa tells us early on while pulling on a vape (his promises to quit are a running motif in the piece), his very existence was a matter of fate and chance. His mother sensed something was wrong when he was in utero and insisted on going to the hospital before her due date, where they found that the umbilical cord had wrapped itself around Essa’s neck. He frequently references this incident to illustrate his sense of displacement—maybe he was never meant to be to begin with.
Rasho first presented this show to acclaim at the 2024 Edinburgh Festival Fringe, and he’s brought it back to Chicago (where he graduated from the Theatre School at DePaul) for its U.S. premiere at Jackalope Theatre. There’s a lot to unpack here: the lingering effects of colonialism (Essa’s dad was given the name “William” so he’d fit in better with the Brits who ran Iraq in his own youth); the othering that the children of immigrants face even as they try to assimilate (Essa had to take ESL classes from an early age, and laments no longer knowing his mother tongue); the shame at even finding anything to complain about in his life when his parents’ history is so fraught. Essa’s mother at one point asks him with exasperation, “What is so hard about your life? Tell me”—which is probably something many children of immigrants have heard as they struggle to find their own footing, embracing both their parents’ culture and their own lives in the U.S.
The cozy living room set by Olivia Volk, filled with warm Persian rugs, makes us feel like we’re settling in with a trusted friend, which is exactly the right vibe for this show. It’s not breaking new ground in solo work, and it doesn’t need to. What Rasho has to tell us, o en with unabashed openness and wit, opens another lens
on the complicated stories of SWANA American lives and families. And it sure makes us glad that Essa’s mom trusted her instincts about her son before he was even born. —KERRY REID DUMMY IN DIASPORA Through 3/23: Mon and Fri–Sat 7:30 PM, Sun 2 PM; Broadway Armory, 5917 N. Broadway, 773-340-2543, jackalopetheatre.org, $35 reserved, $30 general admission, $25 Edgewater resident, $20 seniors, $15 students
RFrom Tupelo to Cabrini-Green Elvis Presley Was a Black Man Named Joe lets Jackie Taylor get personal.
Jackie Taylor, founder and CEO of Black Ensemble Theater (BET), has spent many years creating bio-musicals around the lives and song catalogs of famous Black artists. Now she’s excavating her own family’s history in Elvis Presley Was a Black Man Named Joe, a moving tribute both to her late younger brother, Joe (separated from her by only nine months), and the rock icon from Tupelo.
We meet Janet, as she’s called here, through a memory-play device. The older version of Janet, played with panache by BET stalwart Rhonda Preston, and a quartet of male singers provide the framework and transitions. Through flashbacks to the Cabrini-Green home young Janet (Britt Edwards) and Joe (Dennis Dent) share with their parents, we see how Joe’s obsession with the King becomes Janet’s. The two spend hours watching Elvis movies at the local theater (o en the only ones that would be booked there, Preston’s older Janet notes). When the local gang tries to put pressure on him, Joe claims he threw them off with an impromptu performance of “Jailhouse Rock.”
As with past Black Ensemble shows, Elvis’s own history, including the many influences of Black musicians like Chuck Berry, Roy Hamilton, and the pair of Fats (Waller and Domino) on his work, comes into sharp focus. (At one point, Little Richard, as embodied by the splendid Trequon Tate, shows up in all his glory to demand that Jackie Wilson be given his due as an Elvis influence.)
In one of the more moving interludes, young Janet, having heard a (false) rumor that Elvis said, “The only thing Negroes can do for me is buy my records and shine my shoes,” writes a letter asking him if he’s prejudiced. Months later, she receives a handwritten reply from Presley, outlining his own hardscrabble childhood in Tupelo, where his family lived either close to or actually in the Black section of town, and the respect he has for Black artists and people. Elvis had a lot of problems, and the history of rock ’n’ roll is filled with white appropriation of Black artists, as this show makes clear—though perhaps oddly, Big Mama Thornton, the first artist to record “Hound Dog,” isn’t mentioned here. But Taylor clearly doesn’t find the man himself to be racist. And neither did many of his Black contemporaries in music.
The similarities between Joe and Elvis are also present beyond growing up in tough economic circumstances: both served in the Army in Germany, and both ended up facing issues with substance abuse that cost them their lives. But it’s the love that flows through Janet and Joe’s family that stands out in the narrative, as they negotiate the changing world around them with steadfast belief in themselves and each other. In one humorous interlude, Janet’s dad (Jaitee Thomas) urges her to use words and her brain to fight back against those that would denigrate her—while her mom (Melanie McCullough) reminds her that sometimes a well-timed punch to the chin can get a bully off your back. Thomas and McCullough bring
Esho Rasho in Dummy in Diaspora
JOEL MAISONET
delightful marital chemistry to their roles.
The songs of course are the main attraction, and the closing medley gives all nine of the cast members a chance to shine on numbers like “Heartbreak Hotel,” “Unchained Melody,” and “How Great Thou Art.” It feels fitting that Taylor (who also directs and composed the title song) has, a er so many years of celebrating the roots of others, given her own upbringing and influences the flowers they deserve. —KERRY REID ELVIS PRESLEY WAS A BLACK MAN NAMED JOE Through 4/20: Fri 8 PM, Sat 3 and 8 PM, Sun 3 PM; Black Ensemble Theater Cultural Center, 4450 N. Clark, 773-7694451, blackensembletheater.org, $56.50-$66.50
RGuys and Dolls delights in Skokie
Music Theater Works rolls the dice on “the perfect musical comedy.”
Years ago, I interviewed my late mentor at Columbia College Chicago, Sheldon Patinkin, around the time his 2008 history of the American musical theater, No Legs, No Jokes, No Chance came out. I asked him if he had a favorite musical and he said that whenever anyone asked that, he would respond that his favorite musical comedy “is Guys and Dolls. Because it’s perfect.”
The current Music Theater Works staging by Sasha Gerritson may not be perfect, but it’s sure delightful, and in the main exquisitely cast. The story of gamblers Nathan Detroit and Sky Masterson and their “dolls”— singer/dancer Miss Adelaide and missionary “sergeant” Sarah Brown—feels fizzy, full of life and optimism without losing the hard-boiled gloss of the original Damon Runyon stories on which the 1950 musical (music and lyrics by Frank Loesser and book by Jo Swerling and Abe Burrows) is based.
Detroit (played with note-perfect jittery nerves by Callan Roberts) seeks a place for his “oldest established permanent floating crap game in New York”—no easy feat since a nosy cop is breathing down his neck. He needs a thousand dollars to secure a location, and in order to acquire the cash, he makes a bet with Masterson (Jeffrey Charles, knowing and suave) that Masterson can’t whisk the upright Sarah (Cecilia Iole) to Havana for a night. But as we know, good girls like falling for bad boys, and musical comedies love an opposites-attract storyline. Meantime, Adelaide (a splendid Kristin Brintnall, echoing Judy Holliday’s Billie Dawn from Born Yesterday as a tough but loving dame) grows tired of waiting for her 14-year engagement to Detroit to bear fruit. And a mobster from Chicago named Big Jule (played for laughs by the diminutive Andrew Freeland, who is no less menacing for being shorter than the rest, thanks to the outsize pistol on his hip) won’t take no for an answer when it comes to keeping the (literally) underground craps game going.
Featuring a stellar eight-piece orchestra under conductor Kevin Disch (Linda Madonia is the music director) and a strong supporting cast (including Cary Lovett as Detroit’s sidekick Nicely-Nicely Johnson), along with supple choreography by Clayton Cross (particularly notable in the wordless interludes “Runyonland” and the “Crapshooters Ballet”), the show has few weak links. Iole, who has a gorgeous soprano, did seem to take a little while to warm up her Sarah at first—she’s moralistic, but not rigid, as Jean Simmons so beautifully demonstrated in the 1955 film, and at first Iole’s Brown seems more hesitant than frustrated by the lack of response to her missionary work among the New York scoundrel set. But I get the sense that Iole will find even more layers
to Sarah’s worldview as the show continues, and her chemistry with Charles is already on point. Is there a reason right now to revive this show? Not particularly, but if you like fun and some of the best songs ever composed for the American musical theater, you could do a whole lot worse than head up to Skokie and roll the dice on Gerritson’s Guys and Dolls —KERRY REID GUYS AND DOLLS Through 3/30: Wed 2 PM, Fri 7:30 PM, Sat 2 and 7:30 PM, Sun 2 PM; ASL interpretation Sat 3/22 7:30 PM; North Shore Center for the Performing Arts, 9501 Skokie Blvd., Skokie, 847-673-6300, musictheaterworks.com, $19.50-$106
RFemale trouble
Pussy Sludge is an absurdist but pointed feminist fable.
THEATER Spotlight: Poland Chicago European Union Film Festival
In 2022, Writers Theatre staged Gracie Gardner’s Athena, a sensitive character study of two adolescent girls who meet as fencing competitors and become close. Now Facility Theatre stages the local premiere of Gardner’s absolutely bonkers Pussy Sludge, an extravagantly absurd but pointed dissection of female body image, mother-daughter relationships, queer attraction, environmental depredations, and a whole lot more. Directed by Ava Calabrese Grob with a mostly surehanded mix of gleeful histrionics and tender revelation, it’s a highly theatrical piece that deserves the attention of anyone who is tired of realism (or the real world right now, for that matter).
We first meet the title character, played by Hannah Ottenfeld with kinetic angular hypnotism reminiscent of Patti Smith (in fact, I had just noted how much she reminds me of Smith when she burst into a high-octane dance to “Because the Night” at the top of the show) as she crawls out of her bed. There is a pulsating mass of black fabric moving in and around her, and we soon learn that her name refers to the fact that she leaks crude oil out of her vagina. She takes refuge in a swamp in a national park, where she’s visited by her mother (a hilarious and fierce Carolyn Hoerdemann), who tries to set her up with RJ (Layke Fowler), a nerdy can factory manager. (He wears a propeller beanie—hard to be geekier than that.)
But Pussy Sludge (who loves to masturbate) feels an erotic connection to goth Courtney (Seneca Sims), even as annoying Girl Scout Becca (Michaela Voit) decides that cleaning up Pussy’s swamp is her designated good deed. “I love this place. And I want to protect it. And when I hear there’s a woman barking at people, sludging up my favorite place in the world? It’s a temperate rainforest. It’s a fragile ecosystem. I get worried.”
The entire world of Gardner’s odd but bold feminist parable feels like a fragile ecosystem—appropriate for the dangers facing women under the darkness of the new administration. I was entranced especially by the relationship between Sims and Ottenfeld (aided by intimacy director Bianca Thompson) and by longtime stalwart Hoerdermann’s complicated mother. The movement work throughout is excellent as the oil slick expands, contracts, and consumes the characters.
Gardner’s darkly funny and sometimes mournful piece serves as a reminder that hatred of women’s bodies and queer relationships drives us into a swamp of self-loathing and isolation that can only be broken by refusing to play by society’s rules at all. “You have sludge coming out of you. You’re gonna be nauseating to someone no matter what you do,” Courtney tells Pussy. Draining the swamp of our received narratives is hard and dangerous. But it’s necessary. —KERRY REID PUSSY
SLUDGE Through 4/5: Thu–Sat 7:30 PM; Facility Theatre, 1138 N. California, facilitytheatre.org, $25 suggested donation v
March 7–20
FILM
NOW PLAYING
RThe Day the Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie
In 2022, amid massive restructuring, Warner Bros. Discovery removed The Day the Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie from its release schedule. That’s a shame, because the film—an anarchic and deeply silly spin on the alien invasion science fiction subgenre—is an absolute treat. Luckily, the brave souls at Ketchup Entertainment picked up the film for distribution.
When Daffy Duck and Porky Pig are targeted by their homeowners association for a hole in their roof, they take jobs at the Goodie Gum gum factory to keep their home. The pair stumble into a massive conspiracy, and teaming up with renegade flavor scientist Petunia Pig, they embark on an intergalactic adventure involving gum, aliens, and mind control. The animation, seamlessly blending CGI and hand-drawn elements, is a joy to watch, particularly a WPA art–inspired fantasy sequence early in the film. Eric Bauza’s dual role as Daffy and Porky is impressive, combining the audience’s idea of what those characters should sound like with proper character work. While the script is suitably wacky and full of beloved cartoon tropes (white boxers with polka dots, anyone?), Petunia and Porky’s blossoming relationship is legitimately charming and makes for a lovely breather within the antics.
With shades of They Live (1988), the subtle criticism of corporate monoliths is surprisingly trenchant for a film in which characters leave holes shaped like themselves in walls. The Day the Earth Blew Up is an animated feature the likes of which rarely make it to the big screen, a loving throwback to the early Looney Tunes animations that can also stand on its own. —ROB SILVERMAN ASCHER PG, 91 min. Wide release in theaters
Last Breath
It’s never a good sign when a movie starts off with a strapping young man calming his anxious fiancee about his perilous job, ensuring her that everything will go as planned. Chris Lemons (Finn Cole) is preparing to suit up for his inaugural deep-sea saturation dive, where he’ll work on fixing gas pipelines at 300 feet below sea level. No—nothing to worry about.
The ragtag team he’s diving with comprises Duncan Allock (Woody Harrelson), a veteran diver about to get snuffed by the “company,” and David Yuasa (Simu Liu), a stoic expert diver and even better compartmentalizer. Speaking of compartments, the three divers spend time warming up to one another in the pressurization pod. This sequence comes and goes all too quickly, and suddenly, Chris and David descend to the ocean floor, where the darkness evokes a sense of dread. Up top, the stakes are becoming clear as a storm ravages across the North Sea, with massive swells crashing against the ship. Still, it looks routine. Everyone is calm, until, well, they’re not. The GPS and automated control malfunc-
tion, and the ship begins to dri . On the sea floor, Chris and David rush back to the diving pod, but, as if hexed by his earlier reassurance, Chris’s “umbilical”—the lifesupport cord connecting him to the ship—gets caught and snaps. And just like that, he’s lost on the ocean floor with nothing but a few flares and ten minutes of oxygen. This really happened. Last Breath is Alex Parkinson’s dramatization of his own 2019 documentary of the same name. The story lends itself to a heart-pounding survival thriller. It’s pressurized: a fatal time limit, a limited setting, and three primary characters doing everything they can to stay alive. What gives Last Breath its heart is just how real the situation is as a study of a specialized job thousands of people do every day, risking their lives for us to live comfortably.
Unfortunately, Last Breath squeezes every ounce of emotion from its premise. The suspense of locating Chris and determining his survival is extended to near excess. The dramatization overly focuses on the bridge dynamics, lingering on the minutiae of how the ship will be rebooted rather than giving us something tangible to grab onto between the characters it spent the first half introducing. This dragging sequence may start taut, but as we await the (predictable) finale of a 93-minute movie, it leaves us untethered from the characters we are meant to care about. Instead, watch the documentary. —MAXWELL RABB PG-13, 93 min. Wide release in theaters
R Mickey 17
What does it feel like to die? It’s a question repeatedly posed to Mickey Barnes (Robert Pattinson), o en not out of concern or a genuine interest for his personhood, but out of a morbid curiosity for his unusual job. In an attempt to escape a significant debt on Earth, Mickey joins a space mission to the planet Niflheim where he’s known as an “expendable.” He exposes himself to harmful viruses, experimental food
sources, and other foreign ails that will kill him over and over again in an effort to better understand how humans can survive in the new world they’re set to conquer. Each time he dies, his body is reprinted and his memory is uploaded into his new body, but chaos ensues when he returns from a mission that should have ended in another death and finds that his replacement has already been created. Adapted from Edward Ashton’s novel Mickey7, Bong Joon Ho’s Mickey 17 is an enjoyable, action-packed romp that leads with an undeniable earnestness. Much like the director’s other films, Mickey 17 has its eyes set firmly on capitalism and colonization— from Mark Ruffalo’s embodiment of an all-too-familiar failed politician turned birth rate–obsessed billionaire, to the resignation of what lengths people will go to to survive in an unwinnable system, and the pitfalls of man’s obsession with taking what doesn’t belong to him to soothe his own ego. Pattinson is wonderfully goofy in this role as he executes some truly infectious physical comedy and dons an accent that is both grating and delightful—all while being able to inhabit the “Mickeys” distinctively from head to toe. As a testament to the human spirit, Mickey 17 is audacious and over-the-top in all the right ways. —CODY CORRALL R, 137 min. Wide release in theaters
ROpus
A er the Music Box Theatre’s early screening of Opus, director (and former journalist) Mark Anthony Green told the crowd during a postfilm Q&A, “If you’re a journalist, Mark Anthony loves you.” But let’s be clear— that flattery is not the reason this critic has high praise for his debut feature film.
Opus follows Ariel Ecton (Ayo Edebiri), an ambitious early-career magazine journalist frustrated by her years stuck at the bottom of the ladder. Ariel’s boss, Stan (Murray Bartlett), is reluctant to take a chance on her, but he can’t resist when they both receive invitations to
a hyperexclusive listening party for the newest album by universally beloved pop icon Alfred Moretti (John Malkovich), back in the biz a er a decades-long hiatus.
One flight and a four-hour bus ride into the Utah desert later, Ariel and Stan arrive for a weekend stay at the religious compound where Moretti resides, ready to report on the musical genius’s return. (Stan will write the story, of course; Ariel is just there as his notetaker.) For the pair, along with a handful of other legacy journalists, there’s a full itinerary of meals, pampering, networking, and most importantly, Moretti’s new music. But our protagonist is not as easily swept up in the pomp and circumstance as the other guests. Ariel is critical and unsettled, and she feels there’s an equally compelling story to be reported about Moretti’s religion and its followers, the “Levelists.” But the more threads she tugs on, the more everything unravels around her.
The performances are singular: Malkovich drips with o eat charisma and incites a curious perturbation. People’s princess Ayo Edebiri is an unsurprisingly terrific final girl, injecting humor in delivery and expression at every turn without undermining the story’s horror elements. And Opus is horror at its heart, with unexpected pacing and jump scares, cultish parallels to Midsommar (2019), and violence that comes suddenly and brutally. But all of that—“A lot of honey with the medicine,” as Green put it— is in service of a thrilling story that considers journalism, tribalism, celebrity, religion, power, and more.
Sure, the general setup has been done before (think the Knives Out films), and there’s some suspension of disbelief required in seeing Malkovich as an unquestionable musical icon and the other journalists as unquestioning fools. But still, with original songs from Nile Rodgers and The-Dream (who, amid a long list of other accolades, recently worked on Beyoncé’s Grammy-winning song “Cuff It”) and Edebiri written all over it, Opus is a fun ride. —TARYN MCFADDEN R, 103 min. Wide release in theaters v
Stills from Mickey 17 and Opus
Irarely fall asleep during movies, but this International Women’s Day, I treated myself to a little nap during Jean-Luc Godard’s A Woman Is a Woman (1961) at the Gene Siskel Film Center. I’d had a few drinks at a birthday lunch a few hours prior, the likely culprit for my fatigue, but really, I just don’t enjoy the movie. One thing I did notice during this viewing, however, were several references to one of my all-time favorite filmmakers, Agnès Varda, and a scene during which her short film L’opéra-mouffe (1958) is being shown on a TV in a shop window; a year later, Godard and A Woman star Anna Karina, his real-life lover, would appear in a movie within Varda’s Cléo From 5 to 7 (1962). I may not have gained any newfound appreciation for this particular Godard film, but it was nice to see and hear the references to Varda.
My husband and I did a double feature of A Woman Is a Woman and Atom Egoyan’s latest, Seven Veils (2023), which I enjoyed. I wrote several weeks ago that I was still mulling over an Egoyan film I had seen at Doc Films, The Adjuster (1991), so my interest was piqued by this newest one. Starring Amanda Seyfried as Jeanine, it centers on a remounting of Richard Strauss’s opera Salome. Jeanine takes the helm from Charles, the renowned director who’d initially mounted it, and with whom she’d been having an a air; her childhood abuse at the hands of her father also inspired aspects of his famous staging. Egoyan has mounted his own production of the opera with the Canadian Opera Company four times, and the most recent staging, from 2023, is the one we see in the film. Seven Veils is not perfect, but I’m nevertheless interested in a film with a premise so highly personal to both the filmmaker and his characters. There are also unnerving corollaries between this and Rungano Nyoni’s On Becoming a Guinea Fowl (2024), which I reviewed for the Reader this week.
Despite not seeing any films made by women on International Women’s Day, I have been spoiled as of late, seeing several in theaters. Two
A still from Compensation (1999) GENE SISKEL FILM CENTER
weeks ago I saw Roberta Findlay’s 1977 protoslasher exploitation film, A Woman’s Torment, at the Alamo Drafthouse (aka “A Worker’s Torment,” in light of recent layo s ahead of a strike at the theater chain) as part of the Terror Tuesday series. It was a revelation, even as it concealed more than the original hardcore version would have shown. In this homage to Roman Polanski’s Repulsion (1965), exploitation is not just its genre but that against which the murderous protagonist is fighting. And fucking, because there’s still a lot of that, too.
And then last Monday, I went to see the restoration of Zeinabu irene Davis’s Compensation (1999). I’d seen it before, but I felt as excited watching it again as I did the first time, as I imagine others have felt newly watching it. Filmed entirely in Chicago, it centers on the romance between a deaf woman (Michelle A. Banks) and a hearing man (John Earl Jelks) whose love story is transposed between 1910—this part of the film shot as if a silent—and the present day. Its formal ambition is evocative, yet the story and characterizations are tender, almost comforting in their familiarity. Also formally daring were the short film Painéis do Porto (1963) and feature film Trás-os-Montes (1976), which I saw at Doc Films as part of a short series dedicated to the work of Portuguese filmmakers António Reis and Margarida Cordeiro. Trás-os-Montes reminded me of Sergei Parajanov by way of Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, folksy yet rigorous in a way not immediately understandable.
Anyway, along this theme of films made by women, on Saturday, March 29, after an 11 AM screening of Jane Campion’s Bright Star (2009), I’ll be in conversation with film critic Marya E. Gates about her new book, Cinema Her Way . Which is the way I like it.
Until next time, moviegoers. —KAT SACHS v
The Moviegoer is the diary of a local film bu , collecting the best of what Chicago’s independent and underground film scene has to o er.
MUSIC Footwork producer DJ Elmoe takes a big step
Fi een years ago, while still a teenager, the south-side native appeared on the classic compilation Bangs & Works Vol. 1—and now he finally has a formal album release of his idiosyncratic tracks.
By NOAH BERLATSKY
“D. . . DJ . . . DJ Elmoe . . . El,” announces a laid-back, distorted voice in the first moments of Bangs & Works Vol. 1 , a classic compilation of Chicago footwork released in 2010 by UK label Planet Mu. The comp’s opening track, DJ Elmoe’s “Whea Yo Ghost At, Whea Yo Dead Man,” is an oddly mellow hybrid, layering rapid juke beats over and behind a hazy Vangelis sample, as though you’re floating down a gentle cosmic stream while pleasantly barraged with stochastic space debris. The track is both the announcement of a musical movement and an individual, idiosyncratic statement of purpose.
Elmoe, aka Johnathan Tapp, was 17 when Bangs & Works Vol. 1 came out, and it includes two of his tracks: “Whea Yo Ghost At” and the dreamily profane “Yo Shit Fucked Up.” Now 32, Tapp is finally releasing his first album on an established label. Battle Zone is due Friday, March 14, also on Planet Mu.
This album has been a long time coming, but the signature style Tapp showcased on Bangs & Works is still in place. The title track’s drum and synth loops repeat and repeat and repeat, as per usual for footwork—but it’s less the kind of rhythmic assault you might get from, say, RP Boo, and more the ripple of water flowing over the same bed (flowing over the same bed, over the same bed . . . ), maybe with mermaids muttering weird melodies way down underneath. “Ina Rain” is built on a Delfonics sample sped up, slowed down, and peppered with percolating percussion; the track feels like smooth soul has ingested a heroic dose of hallucinogens, turning it ever more frenetically mellow.
Tapp grew up on the south side of Chicago, and he says his parents constantly played soul and jazz records when he was a kid. Other relatives introduced him to house music, and when he was in fourth grade, his family enrolled him in school band as a percussionist.
“I always was in love with music, but what
gravitated me to juke was my sister,” says Tapp. She was five years older and thus tended to discover things first. “She used to be in a dance group called Terra Squad back in the day. She kind of brought me around the culture of footwork.”
Tapp started out as a footwork dancer
One standout on the latter is “Waitin’ for You,” which shifts between almost painfully highpitched helium vocals and soulful pleading, as if it’s caught between self-parody and genuine heartache. Another, “U Mad,” scatters skittering beats atop a soul sample stretched out like ta y until its melody feels like a single extended distant throb, pulling you into uncharted rapture.
Those early recordings—again, created before Tapp could legally drive—are brief, bizarre blips of genius. It’s no wonder Planet Mu wanted him on Bangs & Works, where his music is now immortalized alongside titans of the genre such as Traxman, RP Boo, DJ Clent, and of course DJ Rashad.
Tapp got “a lot of recognition and a lot of exposure thanks to that compilation,” he says. He’s not exactly sure why it’s taken him 15 years to place an album with a label. “It’s been a long time,” he says ruefully. But he hasn’t been idle; he’s been performing live and putting out singles and EPs independently (and prolifically). His Bandcamp page overflows with releases dating back to the late 2000s— the most recent is the 2023 album 7.5.3 Code (Deluxe)
“My drive has been consistent,” he says—an understated way of describing what most people would see as an intense work ethic. He has a day job at an Amazon fulfillment center, and though he describes his hours as “crazy,” he doesn’t let that interfere with his creativity. “Every chance I get, I make music,” he says. “Every day, when I get off work, I’m sitting right there in front of my speaker, monitors, in front of my laptop, and I’m getting busy.” He says he works on music for four or five hours daily, and he’s also been mentoring younger producers—including one of his sons. “If I could make music all day, I definitely would,” he says, “because that’s my main passion.”
Asked about his influences, Tapp namedrops a lot of footwork legends: DJ Rashad, DJ Royal, DJ Solo. “I pay homage to all the DJs,” he says. He also mentions Atlanta rapper O set, whose name he used to title a sweeping, almost filmic track on his 2014 EP Burnin Season 2
too, but he quickly moved into production and composition. By the time he was in high school, he was making professional quality music. He finished his first album-length project, Werkin in da Circle, in 2007, and in 2008 he followed it with Burn Up Vol. 1, a 19-track, 32-minute EP that he produced in a single day.
Tapp is also a fan of Latin jazz, which you can hear in his choice of samples—for recent examples, check out “Yes I Do” from 7.5.3 Code or “Give It to Em” on Battle Zone . Brazilian singer and composer Arthur Verocai has been a particular passion of his lately. “The intricate melodies they use in Latin jazz—I’m a very melodic type of person,” he says. “So soulful samples, Latin-jazz samples—I gravitate to
“If I could make music all day, I defi nitely would,” says DJ Elmoe. COURTESY THE ARTIST
those types of things.”
Planet Mu describes Elmoe’s work as a kind of chopped-and-screwed footwork—a deliberately paradoxical formulation, considering the manic tempos of footwork and the syrupy drag of the Houston chopped-andscrewed sound. “My style is a tad bit slowed down,” at least compared to other footwork artists, Tapp says. “Because some people can’t keep up like that—especially at the age that I’m at! So it’s a more chill vibe. I want my music to start o unpredictable, and then when it all comes together it just grabs you.”
With the release of Battle Zone , Tapp hopes to raise his profile at least a bit. He plans to tour outside Chicago for the first time. He’s also got more material on the way: He says he’s spent the past year working on an independent album, Burnin Season 3, that he plans to release later in 2025.
MUSIC
“My music is not just for dancing,” he says. “I want it in the realm of other things as well, as far as a vibe just to listen to. I look at my music for all aspects of life.” Seventeen years into his career, Tapp is just getting started. v
m letters@chicagoreader.com
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MAR 22
Liquid Stranger WITH TVBOO, SMITH., XOTIX AND EVALUTION
MAR 14 & 15 LSZEE ................ THE SHED WITH LSDREAM, CLOZEE, WRECKNO, ZINGARA AND MADDY O’NEAL
MAR 21 FLIPTURN ............. THE SHED WITH ARCY DRIVE
MAR 23 GLORILLA ............. THE SHED WITH REAL BOSTON RICHEY AND QUEEN KEY
MAR 24 IGGY POP ............. THE SHED MAR 25 REFUSED .............. THE SHED WITH QUICKSAND
MAR 26 & 27 FKA TWIGS ............ THE SHED ON SALE NOW
The cover of DJ Elmoe’s new Battle Zone
Glamhag on the set of the Finom video for
CHICAGOANS OF NOTE
When I was in my very early 20s, I came up with the name “Glamhag.” I was open to Glamhag being a collective or, like, an ethos or North Star, if that makes sense. I was awakening to feminism and reading about the etymology of the word “glamour” and that being a spell—something witches would use. I was thinking about different meanings of glamour and how now it’s more associated with fashion, femininity, and allure. In my reading, these 70s feminists were kind of rejecting that kind of femininity, and then it came back to being recognized as this, like, empowering thing.
A hag is, like, a witch or this woman who’s no longer desirable—she no longer has cultural currency. She’s passed her expiration date. But she is considered magical, powerful, or evil—someone who has this secret knowledge or something. There’s a lot of really loaded things in these two words. So that’s the name I came up with. I started doing performance and drag as Glamhag. Then people started calling me “Glam” or “Glamhag” on sets. I was like, “You know what? That fits.” So yeah—it’s just this North Star my work has followed, and now it’s fused with my identity.
Glamhag, music video maker and multimedia artist
“I want to keep making music videos. It’s my favorite thing to do. There’s so much freedom in it.” As told to MICCO CAPORALE
Multimedia artist Glamhag chose a name that shaped their identity. When they moved to Chicago for art school in 2010, they started learning about feminism and became enamored with the histories of glamour and the hag archetype. The tension between enchantment and undesirability felt like everything they wanted to explore. As they got involved in the DIY scene, they started going by “Glamhag” when performing in variety and drag shows. Soon people didn’t know them by any other name.
Today Glamhag is primarily known for their
video work—a culmination of their diverse practice, which includes sculpture, fashion, performance, and production design. They run a production company of the same name and have worked on music videos for the likes of Dehd, Kara Jackson, Finom, and Pixel Grip. They infuse those videos with their signature cocktail of camp, glamour, and surrealism, which is indebted to the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost of queer filmmaking: John Waters, Gregg Araki, and David Lynch. In 2019, they released their first feature film, Holy Trinity, which follows a queer dominatrix whose habit
of huffing from aerosol cans unexpectedly gives her the ability to commune with the dead. Earlier this year, the movie was released on VHS via Lunchmeat, and a Blu-ray is in the works.
But Glamhag’s work isn’t limited to film. Last summer, they created the installation environment for the Pitchfork Music Festival’s VIP area, and they still regularly perform and exhibit art objects. Much of their output is animated by a musical heartbeat, but they just want to keep it glamorous, haggy, and liberatory however they can.
I’ve always been somebody that’s created sort of compulsively. When I was younger, I did a lot of painting and embroidery. I was very interested in all kinds of multimedia, and I would perform in school plays. I was never the lead—I was always some sort of comedic side character. I would make little videos on my computer with Photo Booth and iMovie. Me and my siblings and my friends would take photos with those awesome cameras from the 90s that would print tiny little photo stickers. We would dress up and print stickers and make a giant family tree of all of these characters we came up with. I think I was very much trying to emulate The Amanda Show—there was a lot of character work and comedy in that, and that’s continued into my work now.
I was born and raised in London, but I’ve been living in the States since I was 13. I had a hard time with my identity when I was younger, because I had a really strong English accent. People in the United States can be really big Anglophiles and, like, love an accent. People don’t necessarily listen to you—they’re, like, tokenizing or exoticizing you. So it’s hard when you’re 13 and coming into your own and
“Haircut” SARAH LARSON
MUSIC
you’re getting a lot of really specific attention. Sometimes getting attention is fun, but sometimes you just want to be a normal person who’s ignored or like everybody else.
I don’t think that immigrating from the UK is as extreme of a cultural di erence as, like, immigrating from somewhere where people speak a di erent language or being a person of color who immigrates here or something, but it’s still culturally di erent—even more so then than it is now. So it was di cult learning to navigate that, but it expanded my worldview massively. I learned to find my people wherever I am.
I like to do a lot of things, and I’ve found [that] the more you do, the more you create your own language. I was part of a really amazing DIY performance and video scene when I first moved here. There were so many DIY shows all over the city, so I had the opportunity to perform all the time. When the stakes are lower in that way and you’re not being as precious, you have a chance to show a lot, so you’re making a lot. I think the key to finding your practice is just making a lot of work and not being concerned with this perfect outcome. Time-based media always made sense to me because it’s a way of combining all my interests. I can use my sculptures as props; I can use my garments as costumes; I can design a set. I focused on video a lot in school, and once I left school, I was like, “This is what I want to do. I’m going to figure it out.” So I started doing DIY projects with my friends.
or being in them. I did production design on a video called “Lucky,” and I had a little cameo as a waitress, which turned into this ongoing joke where I kept appearing in their videos as some sort of food-service person. I have a little cameo in “Mood Ring.” I’m wearing a chef outfit on the train. It’s very much an Easter egg, but it’s funny.
Then they decided to hand me the reins for their last two music videos, “Mood Ring” and “Dog Days.” They’re super down for there to be interludes and a long credit sequence. It’s really an opportunity to make, like, a short film. I wrote the script for “Mood Ring” with Alex Grelle, who stars in the video as this defeated protagonist who finds herself. It felt very serendipitous that all these people came together and were excited to make something.
“I think the key to finding your practice is just making a lot of work and not being concerned with this perfect outcome.”
Sometimes people will bring me an idea or vibe, and sometimes people will be completely “Do whatever you want!” I try to start with a blank slate and listen to the song and see what comes to me in that moment. When I did “Mood Ring,” I was really interested in making something narrative with specific elements of dreamlike stu that crosses over into reality, and working with lots of locations.
I think, because of the nature of my aesthetic and building things and styling things and doing drag and just having that repertoire, I started to get asked to do production design on music videos and shorts and make props or do stage design. Production design and making props and stu is kind of a practical way to be making art in a collaborative way with other people. I was saying yes to everything, and then it ended up making a lot of sense to direct.
The first music video I made was for a song called “Red Dress” by a band called Cool Memories. That was really exciting for me, because I was a huge fan. I made all the props for it and an environment, and I shot and edited it myself. It was really fun!
Working with Dehd has been really amazing. I had worked on several of their videos before, like doing makeup or production design
With “Dog Days,” the next video I directed for Dehd, the song’s vibe is super di erent— and I wanted to make things easier, because “Mood Ring” was a three-day shoot. I was like, “What if we did one day, one location?” I decided to do a one-shot music video, which is something I’ve always wanted to do. So we choreographed that with everybody and the cinematographer, Kevin Veselka. I like leaning into restrictions. A lot of my best things come from that.
I want to keep making music videos. It’s my favorite thing to do. There’s so much freedom in it, and I think it’s so cool that there’s space for it to be avant-garde in a way that’s accepted. You make a weird avant-garde movie, and generally people are like, “Uh, I don’t get it. . . . ” But if it’s a music video, everyone’s like, “Hell yeah!” v
Play!
Make time to learn something new with music and dance classes at Old Town School! We offer flexible schedules for all skill levels both in-person and online.
Recommended and notable shows with critics’ insights for the week of March 13
MUSIC
JULIANA HUXTABLE IS ONE OF THE MOST creatively lethal working artists right now— she’s an immense force in fashion, poetry, fine art, and electronic music. In 2022, she was among the artists featured in a Pitchfork article about trans women taking over the DJ booth, and for good reason. She first rose to prominence on Tumblr in the early 2010s with socially conscious critiques, streamof- consciousness poems, and introspective selfies that meditated on identity. By 2013, she’d left her job as a legal assistant (working on racial justice cases at the American Civil Liberties Union) to devote herself full-time to New York’s queer nightlife, with a particular focus on DJing. She quickly attracted the attention of underground tastemaking publications such as Dazed , C ☆ndy , and the now defunct Mask, and she often used these platforms to elevate common concerns in the scene: Why is there so much hostility toward lesbians in gay male spaces? And why do so many parties feature house beats but attract so few Black attendees?
In December, I attended a DIY show in New Orleans where a Black trans woman clutched the mike and read an essay from her Notes app about the religious pull that Huxtable’s work has had on her and the fervent pilgrimages she’s made to di erent parts of the country to hear Huxtable spin or speak. To her, Huxtable is more than a club character—she’s a prophet, experienced as precious, knowing, and transformative, not only for how densely she layers ideas into her art but also for the portals to possibilities she creates without regard to whether more powerful people can appreciate them.
In recent weeks, Huxtable has been using her Instagram account, where she’s grown a sizable following, to express outrage over how quickly trans people have been abandoned in the face of fascism. “Fuck all you who are unable to see what’s happening,” she wrote on her stories on Feburary 19. “I reserve the most shame for you leftist activists . . . and media who have taken this bate [ sic ] and thrown us under the bus again. Get fucking real.” In subsequent stories, she called out liberal and left-leaning figures such as Chris Hedges and Catherine Liu for their superficial understandings of trans rights and of the origins of conversations about them—and for ignoring the
PICK OF THE WEEK
Electronic musician Juliana Huxtable shares radical visions of love and unity
FRIDAY14
Coroner Deceased, Morta Skuld, and Misfire open. 8 PM, Reggies Rock Club, 2105 S. State, $30, $60 VIP. 17+
Zurich thrash-metal trio Coroner emerged in the early 1980s out of a Swiss scene that included pioneering extreme-metal outfit Celtic Frost. After some big changes in personnel and sound, in 1985 they settled on the trio lineup that would earn the loyalty of metalheads across Europe: guitarist Tommy Vetterli, bassist Ron Broder, and drummer Marky Edelmann. Members of Coroner had roadied on Celtic Frost’s early tours, and the band invited Celtic Frost front man Tom G. Warrior to provide guest vocals on their 1986 demo, Death Cult (Broder has done all the singing since.) That same year, Coroner played their first gig, opening in their hometown for Celtic Frost and German thrash legends Kreator.
Coroner’s third album, 1989’s No More Color , showed off Vetterli’s musical prowess and introduced the band’s trademark sound, which joined guitar-focused technical metal with a mix of prog, avant-garde experimentation, and thrash akin to that of contemporaries such as Quebec four-piece Voivod and Texas prog-metal band Watch tower (both of whom are still active). Coroner never achieved much commercial success in the States, and in 1996 they broke up following a farewell tour. However, in 2011, they reunited to play several festival dates, including Maryland Deathfest.
The reignited Coroner continued to perform with their 1985 lineup for a few more years, and a er Edelmann le in 2014 to work on other projects, Vetterli and Broder recruited Swiss drummer Diego Rapacchietti to replace him. Coroner have been threatening a new album for more than a decade, and they’ve incorporated new material into their sets since at least 2017. Optimistic interpretations of recent interviews suggest that the band will finally release a sixth full-length (their first since 1993’s Grin ) later this year. When Coroner’s 40th- anniversary tour stops at Reggies this Friday, it’ll feature a solid bill that includes Wisconsin death-metal mainstays Morta Skuld and 80s-inspired local thrashers Misfire. Don’t sleep on Virginia’s Deceased, the speed-death band that in 1990 became the first band signed to Relapse Records. —SALEM COLLO-JULIN
Juliana Huxtable See Pick of the Week at le . Miss Twink USA and Him Hun open. 10 PM, Smart Bar, 3730 N. Clark, $20, $15 in advance. 21+
JULIANA HUXTABLE, MISS TWINK USA, HIM HUN Fri 3/14, 10 PM, Smart Bar, 3730 N. Clark, $20, $15 in advance. 21+
material and social reality that trans people disproportionately live in poverty and are regularly subjected to systemic and interpersonal violence.
Few artists are as e ective as Huxtable at using bleeps and blorps to generate radical, unifying visions of love, passion, and potential—and she’s drawn her line in the sand.
Don’t approach her dance floor if you “shame working class people out of radical spaces” by dismissing “attacks on trans people and pronouns as the product of some liberal identitarian ploy.” She argues that this divisive approach destroys any potential for a “working class, coalition-based political shift.” This show is for real ones only. —MICCO CAPORALE
MONDAY17
Cari Cari Sears Tower of Folk opens. 9 PM, Empty Bottle, 1035 N. Western, $20. 21+
Austrian duo Cari Cari started out making music inspired by films that didn’t exist, but then a twist of fate made them darlings of filmmakers in need of songs. Stephanie Widmer (vocals, drums, didgeridoo) and Alexander Köck (vocals, guitar) formed Cari Cari in 2011, and they released their first EP,
COURTESY THE ARTIST
THE MC TAYLOR GOLDSMITH SHOW
+ JONNY FRITZ
LIME CORDIALE
ENOUGH OF THE SWEET TALK + THE ORPHAN POET WILLIS
INTERVALS
MEMORY PALACE TOUR 2025 + VOLA / ARCH ECHO
LAST DINOSAURS
+ TIPLING ROCK / JASPER BONES
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF A MURDERER
MAGGIE WINTERS + CONNOR WOOD
WE WENT TO THE GUINNESS FACTORY LAST YEAR
MARC BROUSSAR
TIME IS A THIEF TOUR + KENDRA MORRIS
PARIS PALOMA CACAOPHONY TOUR
THE
SPAFFORD + HOT LIKE MARS
YUGYEOM
YASUAKI SHIMIZU + MACIE THWART/LIA KOHL/ WHITNEY JOHNSON
TIGRAN HAMASYAN
THE BIRD OF A THOUSAND VOICES
VANSIRE + JORDANN
RARE AMERICANS NORTH AMERICAN TOUR
WAX TAILOR DJ SET + NAPOLEON DA LEGEND
GAME CHANGER WRESTLING
THE ROCK AND ROLL PLAYHOUSE PLAYS MUSIC OF GRATEFUL DEAD + MORE FOR KIDS
THE HARD QUARTET + SHARP PINS
THE RETURN OF TOP 8 WITH ROD THILL
TAMINO + PLUS +.+
EBO TAYLOR & PAT THOMAS
ALAN SPARHAWK OF LOW IN THE ROUND
ANI DIFRANCO
+ SPECIAL GUEST WRYN
MUSIC
continued from p. 22
Amerippindunkler, in 2014. Köck said in a 2018 interview that a er U.S. music blog Indie Shuffle spotlit one of their songs, their music got licensed for TV in a flash (it appeared in episodes of the Syfy fantasy series The Magicians and the U.S. version of Shameless) and the band were able to tour abroad. Cari Cari fuse understated, bluesy psychedelic pop with cinematic sounds that nod to Serge Gainsbourg’s orchestral ambience and Ennio Morricone’s spaghetti western scores, and music supervisors have continued to use their tracks in movies and on TV. Though they certainly have a Hollywoodfriendly sound (and a self-conscious boho-chic aesthetic to go with it), they’ve remained skeptical of the industry that seems to love them. When Fifteen Questions asked the band about their sense of identity and how it affects their creativity, Widmer responded, “Embracing mistakes and weirdness and last but not least . . . never listening to music business people.”
Over the years, Cari Cari have enmeshed themselves in the artistic communities of London, Hamburg, and Tokyo, but these days they’re back in Austria, where they work out of their own studio. The duo have devoted a lot of energy to developing a creative world of their own, which they see as a private utopian space, and their 2022 album, Welcome to Kookoo Island , gives that space a name. Made during the early stages of the pandemic, it reflects the joy they could find in the relative isolation of those days, combining beachy soundscapes, retro Laurel Canyon–style folk rock, and quirky, childlike electro-pop. (The trippy “Enter Crocodile Mountain” would only need a viral moment to give “Baby Shark” a run for its money.) The band are
currently on tour to support the brand-new One More Trip Around the Sun , which merges Krautrock rhythms and psychedelic haze with warm alt-rock guitars, coloring it all with imagery from the great outdoors and nostalgia for better days.
—JAMIE LUDWIG
Julian Lage 7 and 9 PM, Maurer Hall, Old Town School of Folk Music, 4544 N. Lincoln, early show sold out, $45, $43 members. b
Guitarist Julian Lage is still in his 30s, but in the breadth of his career he can already rival jazz musicians twice his age. He first picked up his instrument at age five, and at eight, he played onstage with Carlos Santana. At 15, he became a faculty member at Stanford University’s Stanford Jazz Workshop. At 21, he released his debut solo album, 2009’s Sounding Point, and he’s since made dozens of recordings—as a bandleader, in collaboration with pianist Fred Hersch and fellow guitarists Nels Cline (Wilco) and Chris Eldridge, and on projects helmed by masters such as vibraphonist Gary Burton, vocalist Yoko Ono, and avant-garde saxophonist John Zorn, among others.
Lage’s catalog demonstrates his creative ingenuity and dexterity, his ability to connect with fellow players, and his broad swath of interests from across American music history. On 2019’s Love Hurts (recorded at Wilco’s studio, the Lo ) he works with his longtime trio partners, bassist Jorge Roeder and drummer Dave King, on understated, charming versions of favorite jazz and pop songs by the likes of Ornette Coleman, Roy Orbison, Keith Jarrett, and Jimmy Giuffre. In 2021, Lage signed with Blue Note,
where he’s since released four full-lengths, most recently last year’s Joe Henry–produced Speak to Me . That album features Lage (alongside Roeder and King) on acoustic and electric guitars, with appearances by keyboardist Patrick Warren, pianist Kris Davis, and reedist Levon Henry. The rollicking cacophony of “76” and the dusky groove of the title track contribute to the record’s bold, propulsive vibe, but its highlights also include the gentle solo piece “Myself Around You,” where Lage’s swirling acoustic guitar wordlessly intimates passionate confessions. —JAMIE LUDWIG
TUESDAY18
Alcest Mono and Kælan Mikla open. 7:30 PM, Metro, 3730 N. Clark, $35, $29.50 advance. 18+
The Elon Musk administration seems intent on plunging us into a terrifyingly bleak future, so it’s easy to imagine a time when international artists stop wanting to play on American stages—or simply can’t get into the country anymore. That makes this stacked bill of bands from France, Japan, and Iceland feel all the more precious. Headliners Alcest began as the solo black-metal project of French multi-instrumentalist Stéphane “Neige” Paut in 2000, and he’s spent 25 years testing the limits of that often austere genre with his wistful, atmospheric melodies and towering, melodramatic arrangements—and in the process, he inadvertently pioneered what’s become known as “blackgaze.” Since 2009, Alcest have operated as a duo in the studio, with Jean “Winterhalter” Deflandre
Find more music listings at chicagoreader.com/musicreviews
on drums and Neige on guitars, keys, and vocals, and since 2010, they’ve been joined onstage by guitarist Pierre “Zero” Corson and bassist Indria Saray. Last year, the band released their seventh full-length, Les Chants de L’aurore (Nuclear Blast), whose lyrics Neige wrote a er a period of recentering and recharging early in the COVID pandemic—he’d been burned out and blocked after many years of cycling from touring to writing and back without a pause between. The new album leans into that feeling of restoration, and it includes some of Alcest’s most accessible and optimistic material to date. Though the shimmering textures of Les Chants might turn off hardened black-metal fans (not everybody thinks the genre should ever be upli ing), its inspired way of infusing postrock bliss into songs scoured by blastbeats and blackened screams could make it a gateway for curious rockers and punks looking to explore an o en inaccessible sound.
Sharing the bill are Japanese instrumental postrock group Mono, who’ve become familiar faces in Chicago—and not just because they tour so extensively. They had a long working relationship with Steve Albini, and they recorded their gorgeous 12th album, last year’s Oath (Temporary Residence), at his Chicago studio in 2023. They’ve also partnered with Chicago-based four-piece Pelican, including on a 2005 split record and subsequent tour. Mono create quasi-orchestral songs, sometimes huge enough to move mountains and sometimes as intimate as a whisper, and at either extreme they can tug at your heartstrings like virtuosos. Icelandic trio Kælen Mikla open the show with a striking, ethereal blend of witchy darkwave and chilly, synth-driven postpunk. —JAMIE LUDWIG v
Coroner COURTESY THE ARTIST
Cari Cari: Alexander Köck and Stephanie Widmer ANDREAS JAKWERTH
Neige and Winterhalter of Alcest ANDY JULIA
Julian Lage SHERVIN LAINEZ
SAVAGE LOVE
AND RELATIONSHIPS
Run away, bride!
Newlyweds who haven’t done it yet; hot friend keeps flirting
By DAN SAVAGE
Q : I’m a 28-year-old woman married to my husband (a 29-year-old man) for almost two years and we still haven’t had sex. We met through mutual friends, dated for less than a year, and knew pretty quickly that we wanted to get married. Things between us felt right. We genuinely liked each other, and everything felt pretty great. On our wedding night, we decided to leave the hotel early to spend time with family since many had traveled far for the wedding. A er the wedding, life got hectic. Before we realized it, months had passed. I initiated intimacy a few times, but we never followed through. I’ve brought it up multiple times, and he always says he feels self-conscious about his body but promises to try harder. We even scheduled times for intimacy, but when the time came, he was either too busy or
he would ask if we could try tomorrow instead. I’ve given him oral sex and a hand job but other than that, nothing. Yes, we were both virgins on our wedding night, and I guess we still are. Every time we have a heart-to-heart, he promises to do better, but nothing changes. I’ve stopped bringing it up because I feel like I’m nagging, but it’s breaking me inside. We’ve talked about wanting children and when we should start trying, but it feels so painful to have those conversations when we haven’t even had sex yet. I feel heartbroken watching our friends start families while we’re stuck in this place. I don’t know if therapy would help, if I should involve his parents, if I need to worry about something or someone else, or if I should accept that this might never change. I feel lost. Has anyone else been through some-
out what that thing is.
Best-case scenario: Your husband agrees to therapy and you somehow manage to find the perfect therapist right away, i.e. the kind of therapist with the power to heal their clients in one or two visits. And then at your second appointment with this miracle-working therapist, your husband tells you that thing you had a right to know before you married him. It turns out to be something silly and trivial and your husband is in such a hurry to fuck you after that silly and trivial thing is out in the open that you wind up having PIV sex for the first time in the parking garage of your therapist’s office building.
with me
thing like this? What would you do? —MARRIED IN NAME ONLY
a : I would leave.
Zooming out for a second: Anyone out there who wants to be sexually active in the context of a sexually exclusive relationship needs to establish sexual compatibility before the wedding. If a good sex life isn’t important to you (if you don’t just want to be married for the companionship and/or the tax break) don’t wait until after the wedding to see if the sex works. Fuck first—before you get married, before you get engaged, before you go steady.
Alright, MINO, there’s clearly something your husband isn’t telling you—something you had a right to know before you married him—but you need to ask yourself how much more time you’re willing to waste before you find
Worst-case scenario: Your husband agrees to therapy, but years go by before your husband finally levels with you about that thing you had a right to know before you married him. It’s not something silly, or trivial, and saying it out loud doesn’t make it go away. Then you would have to live with the realization that you didn’t just waste years of your life on a man who couldn’t love you the way you deserve to be loved, but you wasted years on a man who could see that sexual rejection was breaking you and didn’t love you enough to let you go.
P.S. Don’t involve his parents.
Q
: What do you recommend doing if you have a good friend who is dizzyingly hot, totally off limits, and has been flirting with you for two years?
I am conflicted because I find it pretty fun, but I periodically feel guilty because he is in a monogamous relationship and has a new baby. On the other hand, it’s limited to him making sort of mild flirtatious comments and sending occasional (fully clothed!) selfies. I don’t think I’m misreading the situation here, as I’ve spoken at length
with friends and my partner, all of whom joke about his glances and body language around me. I have pretty good self-control, and I don’t want to be party to him blowing up his life because he is my friend, first and foremost. I don’t think he wants to blow up his life, seeing as the flirting hasn’t escalated over time. And despite the chemistry that’s obvious to the people around us, I don’t get any sense that it pisses off his partner when the three of us hang out. However, I’m writing to you for a gut check. The photos feel like a little step over the line. I redirect the conversation when he sends them and don’t send any photos in return, but I’ve never shut him down explicitly. Should I? I’m trying to be a good (if horny) friend, but I worry that I’m enjoying this hot, funny, tattooed guy’s ridiculous teasing too much. What are the ethics here, Dan? Do I need to shut this down entirely or lay down clear boundaries? —FRIENDLY LAD IS REALLY TEMPTING
a : For all you know, FLIRT, Mrs. Hot Tattoos puts on a brave face when her husband flirts with you in front of a room full of people. She clocks how he looks at you, she clocks how you look at him—and then she cries herself to sleep at night from the humiliation of it all. Or Mrs. Hot Tattoos is a cuckquean and, although their marriage is monogamous, she encourages her husband to flirt with other women in front of other people and comes extra hard from the humiliation of it all. Or Mr. and Mrs. Hot Tattoos are monogamish. For some couples, being monogamish means there’s some allowance for outside sexual contact, FLIRT. For others, it means they don’t have to hide evidence they’re attracted to someone else.
So long as crushes remain crushes (and so long as flirtations don’t become action plans), they’re allowed. Basically, FLIRT, other people’s marriages are a mystery. In normal circumstances, these mysteries are none of our business, but, seeing as your sustained flirtation with Mr. Hot Tattoos has created an ethical dilemma for you, their mystery is now your business. Because if what you’re doing is hurting this other woman—if this is causing her pain—you don’t (or shouldn’t) want any part of it. So, I recommend putting the dreaded direct question (DDQ) to this Mr. Hot Tattoos: “Does it bother your wife when we flirt? I know it can’t go any further than flirting—because your marriage is monogamous and I respect that—but if what we are doing is hurting your wife’s feelings, we should stop. So, does this bother her?”
If Mr. Hot Tattoos says it’s killing his wife—if he admits she’s crying herself to sleep at night from the humiliation of it all—then you can bet he’s telling the truth. On the other hand, FLIRT, if he tells you his wife is fine with it (or that she likes it) . . . there’s a somewhat decent chance he’s telling the truth, given as his wife seems unbothered by it. However, “she’s fine with it” is exactly the sort of lie a married man might tell when asked whether his behavior is hurting his wife. So, if you get the first response (it’s killing his wife), stop flirting with him. If he tells you his wife is fine with it, FLIRT, and you want to make sure he’s not lying to you, then you’ll need to ask him the obvious followup question: “Can I check with Mrs. Hot Tattoos about that?” v
Read the rest of this column, ask your burning questions, download podcasts, buy merch, and more at the URL savage.love. m mailbox@savage.love
To have and to hold from this day forward . . . or sometime in the next few years
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CLASSIFIEDS
JOBS
BDO USA, P.C. seeks Tax Managing Director in Chicago, IL to be responsible for applying industry specific knowledge to advise clients on the tax implications of their business objectives, evaluating & selecting alternative actions to lessen tax burden & cost of compliance, identifying different methods of complying with tax regulations while acting as the primary client contact for complex tax issues. Telecommuting allowed for this position. Req Bach degree in Accounting, Finance, Economics, Statistics or rel fld + 5 yrs relevant exp in tax accounting, public accounting, private industry accounting or consulting/professional services. Required: CPA certification; OR Internal Revenue Service Enrolled Agent (“EA”) license; OR sufficient educational/ experience requirements (as determined by state Board of Accountancy for CPA or by the Internal Revenue Service for EA) to receive CPA or EA within 24 months of hire or promotion; OR be a member of a US state bar. Salary: $160,000. For benefits info, see https://www.bdo.com/ careers#benefits. Send resume & cover ltr to BDO JobApplications@bdo. com using Ref # 003963.
Health Care Service Corporation seeks Counsel (Chicago, IL) to handle a variety of routine legal projects & assignments & assisting on more complex matters. REQS: Juris Doctor & a license to practice law issued by the Supreme Court of Illinois. Telecommuting:
Flex role (3 days in office / 2 days remote). Rate of pay: $86,819 - $180,700 / yr. Benefits: https:// careers.hcsc.com/ totalrewards. Email resume to hrci app@bcbsil. com & refer R0041277
Logstics Mgmt Coordnatr (Rosemont, IL): Maintain databases of logstcs informtn to robust longterm freight markt standng & comptitvness. Reqs: Bach or equiv in Logstcs, Int’l Reltions or rel & 1 yr exp as Logstcs Anlyst, Logstcs Mgmt Coordnatr, Oprations Spcialst or rel positn. Salary: $69,300/ yr. Mail resume to: Barsan Global Logistics Inc, 36 W 44th St, Ste 1212, NY, NY 10036.
Medline Industries, LP is seek’g experienced Sr. Business Systems Analyst(s) (WMS/ Logistics) in Mundelein, IL to implemt warehouse mgmt sys’s or warehouse automat’n such as Goods to Person, Pick/Put to Light, & Sortation. No trvl req. WFH benefits avail. Salary: $148,949/yr. Apply at: https://tinyurl. com/4kv6exht https:// tinyurl.com/4kv6exht
Mirage Software Inc. dba Bourntec Solutions in Schaumburg, IL is seek’g
A)Software Developers to dsgn & dvlp comp & ntwrk SW. Slry:$148,949/yr.; B)
Software Developers to dsgn, implmnt, & maintain customized e-comm. & enterprise apps. Slry:$148,949/yr. Post’ns A & B job duties proj-based @ unanticipated sites w/ in U.S. Relo may be req’d @ proj end. Send resumes to: Mirage Software Inc. dba: Bourntec Solutions, ATTN: HR 1701 E Woodfield Rd., Ste. 200, Schaumburg, IL 60173
Panto-Ulema Inc dba Dearborn Architects is hiring for a Project Manager/ Technical Architectural position. This role manages small/medium projects, coordinates all aspects of assigned projects, and estimates scope of work. Responsible for the
coordination of technical project efforts. Serves as a client liaison. Actively manages schedules, and programs; project communications and documentation; office administrative tasks; and project team assignments. Employee must have an advanced understanding of MEP/S systems. Our multi-lingual practice requires proficiency in English and Mandarin Chinese. A Master Degree in Architecture and Proficiency in specific computer programs such as AutoCAD, Sketch-up, and word processing programs is required. This position requires full-time permanent employment at our Chicago office at 141 W. Jackson Blvd #3820 Chicago, IL. Compensation is $79,000 or additional as commensurate with experience. Email your resume and portfolio to Homan Wong, President at hsw@panto-ulema. com Homan Wong
Data Engineer Team Leader, HDI Global Insurance Company, Chicago, IL (remote role): Create & lead data-related projects to support existing data structures & envision a future optimized data structure in line with our IT strategy. Perform data warehouse design & testing, including data design, database architecture, metadata, & repository creation. Optimize data pipeline performance & solve issues around data quality. Work directly with & provide support to all teams effected by the initiatives assigned to the Business Solutions Lead. Position has additional supervisory & managerial responsibilities. Must have a Master’s in Mathematics, Data Analytics, or related field & 2 years of work experience as a data analyst in data warehousing. Of work experience required, must have 2 years of: (i) Programming with Microsoft (MS) Structured Query Language (SQL) Server, Oracle, & MySQL;
(ii) Using Qlik Sense to build data models using three-tier architecture; (iii) Building QlikView Data files (QVDs) & QlikView Worksheets (QVWs); (iv) Designing star & snowflake schema data warehouses; & (v) Working with Azure Cloud Services. Certifications required: Microsoft Azure Certified (DP-900 & DP-203). Alternatively, would accept a Bachelors in Mathematics, Data Analytics, or related field & 6 years of work experience as a data analyst in data warehousing, & of work experience required, must have 6 years of (i) through (v), & the listed Certification. Experience may be gained concurrently. Would accept any suitable combination of education, training, or experience. Telecommuting is permitted from any location in the United States. Pay range: $138,715-$148,300/ yr. View benefits offered & apply at: recruitingbypaycor.com/ career/CareerHome. action?clientId= 8a7883d0922b0 c8c019248 b5043a060b
Exelon Business Services Company LLC seeks Senior Software Engineer in Oakbrook Terrace, IL to lead team in gathering info. & anlyzng reqs to deliver cost-effective IT solutions for web, mobile app, full stack, or integrations hosted on premises data centers or in the cloud. Specs. Incl. writing product specs & doc. for assigned sys. components; dvlpng & reviewing code to ensure solutions meet functional & technical reqs; dvlpng & reviewing technical archt.; dvlpng automated Unit tests &/or automated UI tests; supp. dvlpmnt of version control principles (e.g. Git & wrking w/in an agile environment), CI/CD pipeline, & automations; & participating in IT archt. rev. & standards setting. Position reqs U.S. or foreign equiv. bach.’s deg. in Comp. Sci. or rel. field & 5 yrs soft. dvlpmnt
exp. using Python, Perl, C#, JavaScript, NodeJS, .NET, HTML, AngularJS; Android Mobile; ASP.Net webAPI, WCF Services; SSIS Integration; SSRS & PowerBI reporting tools; SQL & NoSQL databases - Oracle, SQL Server, Cosmos DB, MySQL, PostgreSQL & Splunk; Windows & Linux op. sys.; & Azure & Google cloud platforms. Salary range is from $148,949 to $170,400. Telecomm. 2 days/wk permitted. Reply by email w/ resume to jobposting@ exeloncorp.com
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