The good news is Lollapalooza, the mega-music festival that brings hundreds of thousands of fans to Chicago over four days, is over. The bad news is that the City just signed a deal to hold Lolla for the next 10 years. (And, next year, we’ll also have a NASCAR race downtown that will shut down […]

In August of 1978, I was newly returned to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign from an internship in Washington, D.C. And, for the first time in my life, I was a little cocky. I’d lived outside of the Chicago area! I knew stuff that you didn’t’! I’d lived in Washington, D.C. dammit! I held […]

Don’t let that headline mislead you about what I think about COVID. COVID continues to suck. Not as bad as it did, but still pretty bad. I, for example, still have spells where my balance is compromised and it feels like I’m going to tip over. It’s not often, but still too often. Based on […]

Yesterday, we celebrated the Fourth of July on the third of July: We traveled to Glen Ellyn Illinois and spent the afternoon with lovely friends in one of their lovely backyards. We noshed and drank, we talked SCOTUS (and then drank some more) and laughed a lot. In spite of SCOTUS. We took the Metra […]

The permutations of the circumstances around women’s pregnancies are infinite. I can only speak of Beth’s. In 1985, shortly after we learned that Beth wouldn’t ever see again, she was enrolled at the Illinois Visually Handicapped Institute, later to be nicknamed “Braille Jail” by Beth. Unfortunately, that moniker is less of an exaggeration than you […]