So many dog lovers who see me out and about with Whitney stop, sigh, and say, “I wish I could bring my dog with me to the store.” This month, if you live anywhere near Chicago, you finally can!

My longtime friend Jenny Foucre Fischer works at The Bookstore in Glen Ellyn, Ill, The store is celebrating the dog days of summer this month — not only are they encouraging customers to bring their “furry, feathery and scaly friends” along when they come to shop for books, but they’ll give you a reward if you do. Don’t believe me? Here’s a quote from their August newsletter: “Stop by with your pet and meet us in person, — or show us a photo of your favorite animal companion (real, stuffed or imaginary) — and you’ll receive 10% off an animal-related book in August. What can I say? The Bookstore is a rare breed, ahem, and this story about them in the Chicago Tribune explains why:

The store is one of about 50 independent retail booksellers in the Chicago area. Not too long ago, all of them and the other roughly 4,000 independents across the U.S. were supposed to vaporize. By some estimates, more than 2,000 did.

But about 1,500 survived. And as the Tribune story says, “through a mix of obsessive attention to detail, lean inventory, an embrace of technology and resourceful salesmanship, they hang in there.”

The Bookstore has been extremely supportive of my books over the years, and of course Hanni and Beth: Safe & Sound is one of the books you can purchase with your discount when you bring your companion animal with you to shop there this month.</

“That’s Jenny with Hanni and me a few years ago at The Bookstore in Glen Ellyn.”

And wait. There’s more! Email The Bookstore at justbook475@yahoo.com to share a photo of yourself or someone in your family reading to your pets, and if you give them permission to use the photo on their website & social media pages, they’ll give you an additional 10% off an animal-related book, bringing your total discount to 20%. What. A. Deal.

Our current ride

For her birthday, on December 23 1983, I gave Beth a brand new Peugeot bicycle. It was a dandy ride—a lovely light blue, classic upright riding position, folding saddle baskets, three speeds. Perfect for the young and lovely university professional who wanted to commute to campus and run errands on her bicycle.

She loved that bike. But Beth only got one good season out of it, then the diabetic retinopathy put an end to her riding days. We eventually gave it to an exchange student at the university. Beth wasn’t sentimental about many things after losing her sight, but somehow the presence of that bicycle gave us both stomach aches, so we got rid of it.

Back then, can’t remember exactly what year, our good friend Greg Schafer called one day and said he’d spotted a Schwinn Twinn tandem in one of those weekly ad papers. He and I took a look, and I took possession.

We’ve had a tandem ever since. Just this past Saturday, we schlepped our big long bike out of the basement of our building and rode to another hood for a terrific breakfast. Later we headed out on and did some grocery shopping.

It was a swell day. But. Our tandem bicycles—the Twinn lasted a long time but we’re on our third now—have been, in a very real way, a telling representation of how Beth’s blindness changes things, and how it doesn’t.

On the one hand, it’s cool we can go for rides together. And Beth still gets that feeling of the wind in her hair. On the other, it’s a circumstance that’s dictated. It’s not like we rode a tandem and fell in love with riding together one day. Back on the first hand, it’s another example of how adaptation can help fill gaps left by Beth’s disability. On the thumbs down side, like most of the adaptations—a talking computer, audio books—it’s not the same.

For Beth, she has to follow my lead and put an enormous amount of trust in me. She can’t just go for a ride if she feels like it. I have to feel like it, too. And even recruiting other friends isn’t a great solution—because in truth, it takes some practice to ride these things safely, and you have to learn to work together.

It hasn’t always been easy. And it’s sort of representative of a lot of the give and take we’ve had to work through. I have short stocky legs and prefer a faster pace in a lower gear. Beth likes pedaling slower at higher gears. I like to coast when Beth likes to get on the crank. I have to be vigilant about traffic and such, she’s just pedaling away.

And so on. It’s like that in other scenarios off the bike. It just is. And I wish it weren’t so. But it is. It’s not what we’d choose if we had the power. But we don’t. It’s the best we can do. And it’s pretty good.

It’s been a pretty stimulating month so far:

From front to back that’s Anita, Floey, Moi, my sister Cheryl, and Ray at the Cougars game. My niece Janet took the picture.

• August 1: A lot of talented writers attended my Getting Your Memoir Off the Ground workshop at Northwestern Summer Writers’ Conference, and now I can look forward to reading their memoirs once they’re published!
• August 2: Sat in on Kevin Davis’ two-hour workshop at the writer’s conference. My neighbor Margaret was at the conference, too, and on our walk home together we talked about all the new ideas we have now to make the characters we write about come alive.
• August 3: Took a commuter train to the suburbs with Whitney to join family members for a Kane County Cougars baseball game. Renowned baseball organist Nancy Faust has been playing for Sunday afternoon home games for the Cougars ever since retiring from her White Sox gig in 2008, and my friend Amy Mason is the Director of Ticket Operations for the Cougars. So of course Amy set us up with a row of tickets right in front of Nancy — we could actually turn around, name a song, and have Nancy play it instantly on her Hammond B3. I requested Stevie Wonder’s “I wish” and marveled at how she nailed the bass part on the organ’s foot pedals. She played a UB40 tune for my niece Janet, a song from Beauty and the Beast for Floey, and even managed to honor five-year-old Raymond’s request:“Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star.”
• August 4: Put together a post for my part-time job moderating the Easter Seals blog in the morning, hopped on a CTA bus with Whitney to lead my Monday memoir-writing class in Lincoln Park in the afternoon, then put on a fancy dress and headed to the Chicago Shakespeare Theatre. The opening reception for the Leadership Exchange in Arts and Disability (LEAD) conference was in the lobby there, Mike came along with me, and few things make me happier than being on the arm of a handsome man and having wait staff come around with teeny-tiny unidentifiable concoctions for me to try. Heaven.
  

  That’s me and the legendary baseball organist Nancy Faust. (Cub fans, that’s what a World Series ring looks like.)

• August 5: Our panel at the LEAD conference about the challenges and successes in accessing arts programs if you can’t see was a hit, but that was no surprise — I had Sally Cooper (Volunteer Coordinator at Blind Service Association here in Chicago) and George Abbott (Director of the eLearning Center at the American Foundation of the Blind in New York) at my side! At lunch afterwards I had the good fortune to be seated next to some very fun people from the Pittsburgh Arts Council, and now, who knows, maybe Whitney and I will be heading out there sometime to give presentations and check out the Pittsburgh art scene.
• August 6 & 7 Led my Wednesday and Thursday memoir-writing classes and made some progress on the book I’m writing about all I learn from the writers in those classes . Their topic for next week is “The Best Job I Ever Had,” and after reviewing everything that went on this week, I’d have to say that, hands down, the best job I’ve ever had is the one I have right now. Who could ask for anything more?

Well, we just survived another Lollapalooza, the gargantuan music festival that takes over Grant Park and major thoroughfares like Columbus Avenue for what seems forever every summer. I was going to blog about it–but Beth reminded me, I already had. On August 4, 2014. Since my sentiment’s the same and Lolla is still, OMG, Lolla, I’m just going to repost the first one. 

Mondays with Mike: Note to self—next Lolla, get out of town
Originally published August 4, 2014

Summers in Chicago have dazzled Beth and me since we moved downtown in 2003. Free concerts and movies at Millennium Park. Printers Row Lit Fest right at our front door. Free dance lessons and swing bands at Chicago SummerDance. Every weekend a music and/or neighborhood fest.

Imagine this group, times 50,000, everywhere. For three days.

On the flip side, summer brings lots of tourists. And they seem to have difficulty driving and especially walking—yes walking—in the big city. As in, they like to saunter four abreast unaware of the walking commuters who are trying to get somewhere. They like to stop abruptly on the Michigan Avenue Bridge to take a picture. At 5:00 p.m. on a workday. They rent Divvy bikes and ride them on the sidewalk.

Mostly, I hold the “get off my lawn” cranky old man attitude at bay. I’m happy to have visitors enjoy themselves and spend money here. But it’s hard during the biggest tourist event of the season: Lollapalooza. Helicopters. Traffic. Hordes (an estimated 300,000 last year) of young people traveling around the city in marauding bands of six to 12, trying to figure out the CTA. Now mostly, they seem well behaved, save for the odd midday sidewalk vomiter and the ODs being rushed to hospitals by ambulance.

These three Lolla people had become separated from their pack. As I followed them headed north on Clark, the tall guy screamed into his phone, “We’re headed south on LaSalle.”

But there’s something lemming-like about the whole thing. They all look alike. Almost all appear 24-26 years old. Almost all Caucasian. All working hard at clothing that says I’m a laid back music festival goer. And the obligatory tie-dyed t-shirt/headband “Hey this is sorta like Woodstock, right?” look.

They are by their very presence and number annoying as hell. This isn’t a rant about young people. I work with young people who defy all stupid stereotypes of them. There’s just something painfully contrived about this whole event.

Next year, maybe we’ll head up to Wisconsin to see gus.

Meantime, for now: Lolla people! Get off my lawn!

One of the many, many things Mike and I did to celebrate our wedding anniversary last week was attend the play This Is Our Youth at Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre. The play starred Michael Cera (of Arrested Development and Juno fame) and nearly all the performances were sold out. The only reason we were able to score tickets last Saturday is because that happened to be the day Steppenwolf set aside a number of tickets for a special audio touch tour of the set for people with visual impairments and their guests.

I’ve written a post about Steppenwolf’s audio touch tours before.

That’s me and my previous Seeing Eye dog Harper with our gracious Steppenwolf hosts on stage a few years ago during the touch tour for Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? One of the staff members from Steppenwolf is holding one of the breakable prop bottles and a bouquet of the plastic snapdragons which figure prominently into the play.

Much more than just the tactile experience the name implies, a Touch Tour is a pre-performance program that gives those of us who are blind or have low vision an opportunity to:

• participate in an artistic conversation about a production
• experience a detailed description of the set, props and costumes
• handle key props, set and costume pieces
• tour the set with a sighted guide
• meet the actors and learn about the characters they play

Our This is Our Youth audio touch tour opened with stage manager Cambra Overend explaining what an alley theatre is (the stage is surrounded by audience members on two sides) and how they blocked the scenes to allow everyone in the audience to follow the action. She described different scenes and lines from the play that had given the three young actors particular trouble. Pretty cool for a bunch of blind people to get an inside look, ahem, of a production that’s heading to New York City now. ( This is Our Youth opens on Broadway the 11th of September, and Cambra will be the stage manager for that production, too).

Next came Jack Miggins, the Audio Describer. In addition to describing the play via headphones during the performance, Jack gets on stage before the play while we’re still in our seats to “show” us what the set looks like. He talks while he darts around the stage — that way we can track his voice and get a sense of how close (or far) objects are from one another.

“Here’s the door to the hallway,” Jack called out from stage left last Saturday, knocking on the door so we’d know exactly where it was. The door squeaked as he opened it, too. “You can see into the hallway, but all that’s out here is a ten-speed bike missing a front wheel.” Closer to the front of the stage, he patted the arm of a couch. “It’s brown,” he said. “The décor in this apartment is just different shades of brown, really.” He picked up a plastic milk crate near the couch and told us it had a few record albums in it, including one by Frank Zappa. “Lots of cassettes, too,” he said, giving it a shake so we could here them flopping around. “Oh, yeah, and a squishy Nerf football.”

The play is set in the 1980s, back when I had just graduated from college and could still see. As Jack continued around the stage describing the small kitchen, the door to the bathroom, the phone, photos hanging on the wall, well, I could picture it all so well that I didn’t bother going on stage for the touch tour.

The final act of the audio/touch tour, when the actors are called up on stage to introduce themselves, is always my favorite. Michael Cera, Kieran Culkin and Tavi Gevinson all seemed happy to answer any questions we had, and it was a thrill to have this private audience with them.

The play was about to start then, so we were offered headphones connected to a small device to use for volume control to hear Jack describe scene changes, character entrances/exits and other movements during the performance. Everyone had done such a tremendous job introducing us to the play ahead of time that I opted to go without the headphones. As the play progressed, I understood why Jack had pointed out certain things during his on-stage romp during the pre-production presentation. Two examples:

• Kieran Culkin’s character told his parents he was working as a bike messenger, but the missing bike wheel told us he was a liar.
• When Michael Cera’s character wanted to “play catch” in the apartment, we knew he was holding a Nerf football.

The timing of this particular audio touch tour was perfect: it will be fresh on my mind when I sit on a panel at the Leadership Exchange in Arts and Disability (LEAD) conference this Tuesday. The conference is in Chicago this year, and it’s put together by the Kennedy Center.

Cultural arts administrators from all over the world (most of them responsible for accessibility at their respective cultural arts organizations) are in town to attend seminars and workshops on everything from” Determining Who is Eligible to Purchase Accessible Seats” to “Reaching out to Museum Visitors with Memory Loss and Dementia.” The panel I’m sitting on is called “Finding and Nurturing an Audience for Audio Description” and encourages conference atendees to hear from experts who use Audio Description services-the audience members of Steppenwolf Theatre Company!

The conference web site explains that we’ll “provide an informative journey on the best way to market the arts as well as the challenges and successes in accessing arts programs.” Evan Hatfield from Steppenwolf will moderate the panel along with Deborah Lewis, CEO of California’s Arts Access Now. George Abbott, who was born blind, and Sally Cooper, who has a visual impairment but still has some sight, will be sitting on the panel with me, and it meets on Tuesday, August 5 from 11:30 am to 12:45 pm at the Sheraton Hotel at 301 North Water Street in Chicago.

LEAD conference attendees will be invited to join us at an audio touch tour of The Qualms at Steppenwolf that same night, too, so if you’re at the LEAD conference and happen to have found this blog post, I hope you’ll join us.