And now about the two Writing Out Loud events I did with writers from my memoir classes last week.

Audrey Mitchell opened our presentation at Skyline Village on Friday by reading one of her essays from Writing Out Loud. She took questions from the audience afterwards and wowed them with stories of her life and her decision to enroll in our Me, Myself and I class at the Chicago Cultural Center. “I was into Geneology,” she said, explaining that her research led her to the U.S. Census. “I found out my great-grandparents lived in Edgefield County in South Carolina back in 1870; I have oral history and written data to back that up,” she told the audience. “But what I’m missing is the voice of my older relatives, what they were thinking, what they were feeling and like that. That’s why I keep taking the writing class, to keep their stories alive, so the stories I know about them — and about my own life — won’t be lost forever.”

We were treated to lunch at the event, I gave a short writing exercise after dessert, and everyone sounded pleased to read a bit of their work out loud. Some stayed late to ask Audrey about the memoir-writing class she leads at her local library, and others had me sign copies of Writing Out Loud to read at home. An unqualified success.

Our friend Laura did a screen capture of the live feed screen from the WGN studio. There’s Wanda in the upper left screen.

The next night 95-year-old writer Wanda Bridgeforth joined me on WGN Radio for Dave Hoekstra’s Nocturnal Journal program. From the WGN web site:

Dave Hoekstra talks with author and journalist Beth Finke about her book Writing Out Loud: What a Blind Teacher Learned from Leading a Memoir Class for Seniors.

She talks about how losing her eyesight affected her career and her approach to writing (and listening to people), and celebrating the “community” of all the people she’s connected with during her time teaching the course. One of her students, Wanda Bridgeforth shares some of her stories of growing up in Bronzeville and going to high school with Nat King Cole and Redd Foxx , why she was inspired to take Beth’s class, and more.

Dave was an excellent host — he’d actually read Writing Out Loud before the show and complimented the book on the air. “It’s “very conversational,” he told his listeners. “Very breezy.”

The interview started with questions on how losing my sight changed the way I write, and when he turned to Wanda to ask her what made her sign up for my memoir-writing class, she laughed and described coming to one of my booksignings a decade ago. “When I saw she was blind,I thought, holy Toledo, how in the Sam Hill is she going to teach writing? I had to find out!”

We all laughed along, but soon Wanda got quite serious. “Her class was my salvation,” she said, almost whispering now. “I was just retired at the time and at loose ends.”

A music lover, Dave was particularly intrigued with Wanda’s years at DuSable high School on Chicago’s South Side: Wanda walked the halls there with jazz great Nat King Cole and Dinah Washington, Queen of the Blues. “Nat Cole added King to his name later,” Wanda said with a laugh. “You know, like Old King Cole!” She remembers Dinah Washington when she was Ruthie Jones, and she knew comedian Redd Foxx when he was John Sanford, another DuSable alum. “he was a bowl of fun,” Wanda told Dave during the interview, explaining that the TV show Sanford & Son was named for John Sanforrd’s brother Fred, who also went to DuSable. “We only had one school we could go to, we were a group, we all went to the same parties, shopped at the same stores.”

When Dave asked how Wanda felt about living in Bronzeville before integration, she said, “I think we were so used to segregation that we just accepted it.” She told Dave that she regards her time at DuSable among her happiest years. “We had our city within a city, we hired our own, we patronized our own. We were family.”

But hey. Wait a minute. Why the Sam Hil am I quoting the entire interview here? You can hear Wanda tell her stories in her own voice — the interview is available online now, just click here and hit play. I promise you won’t be disappointed.

We like to look at other peoples’ jobs as easy. If they don’t meet our standards? They’re lazy or incompetent. Sure, we bow to brain surgeons, airline pilots, elite athletes and the like. But waiters, bartenders, construction workers who have the nerve to be taking a break—we freely disparage them when they fall short. We’re a bunch of Yelpers.

I’ve come to realize that everybody’s job is actually harder than it looks. I had a discussion with a bartender a few days ago and after trading stories, we agreed: The United States should adopt a military draft with a national service option. Don’t want to go into the military? Then national service, with an emphasis on service. Waiter. Customer service agent. Gate agent at the airport. No one gets out of it, regardless of family wealth or education.

I got to thinking about all this after getting the chance to do a ride-along of sorts with our friend, Chuck Gullett, who’s a successful real estate agent. (We’re not moving, so sorry Printers Row, you don’t get rid of us.)

Chuck was one of Whitney’s walkers while Beth was incapacitated by her heart issue a few years ago. You may remember he guest posted about a visit to the eye prosthetic studio with Beth, too.

Now, I’ve groused about real estate agents in the past—but really, it’s more about the whole process—which a good agent like Chuck helps one negotiate.

There are the requirements of the clients, which aren’t realistic. And not always consistent between both parties of a couple.

Then there are the descriptions, which make pretty much every cozy cottage seem ideal. So you don’t know anything until you visit a place.

Let’s play guess the lockbox!

That’s when Chuck becomes chauffeur. And he drives, and drives. North Side, Lincoln Park, South Side, West Loop, and back again, and sometimes during rush hour.

Chuck has a dash cam.

I asked him about it. Seems he got clobbered awhile back and while the car is back in one piece and he was uninjured, the settling of things remains messy. He doesn’t want that to happen again, so he wants video.

He’s already caught one accident—a scooter in front of him getting put down by a car. He stopped to get the scooter rider’s email, and he later sent the video for insurance purposes.

Then, finding parking. You think we can get away with doubling up here? Can we be done in 15 minutes? Take a shot.

Sometimes there’s a building with a doorman that has a key. Many, many other times, there are lockboxes. Plural emphasis. Sometimes a dozen, lined up on wrought iron fences, or low-lying pipes. As in low enough to be left-dogleg level.

Directions can go something like this: It’s the lockbox to the left of the water meter right next to the hydrangea bush.

Eventually, it’s found. If it’s one of the low lying ones and liquid comes out when you open the box, you hope it was from a recent rain.

Sometimes, there is a not a key, but a ring of say, a half dozen unlabeled keys. After trial and error and jiggling, you finally get in and…

…it’s a dump, not a fantastic cozy cottage.

The client’s face droops. Chuck goes into his best therapy routine.

Off to the next one, it’ll be better.

Then, once a property is found, there are inspections, closing agents and lawyers.

Thank goodness it’s not my job! And thank goodness there are the Chucks of the world, who can do it with aplomb.

Wanda Bridgeforth and I had a ball during our interview on WGN Radio last night, and as our amiable host Dave Hoekstra walked us out of the studio afterward, he called out, “Wanda, you’re a pistol! Will you come back to do another show?” As they say in radioland, “Stay tuned.”

Audrey Mitchell and I were a hit at our Skyline Village presentation Friday afternoon, too. More on both of those events later this week. After Dave Hoekstra’s program comes out online I’ll be able to blog with a link to the radio interview and publish some photos from last night — and photos from Audrey’s Friday afternoon appearance at Skyline Village, too. In the meantime, allow me to introduce a couple other writers in my life.

Some of the most talented writers in my memoir classes are immigrants. Wanda is one of them: born in Canada, she came to Chicago as an infant. Other older adults in my classes came to Chicago from Czechoslovakia, Austria, the Philippines, Germany, India, France, Egypt. Anu Agrawal immigrated to America from India in 1969. She’s in Wanda and Audrey’s downtown memoir-writing class and generously agreed to let me publish an excerpt here from one of her essays.

“The Travel” opens with Anu pointing out that “when we travel by bus, train or airplane, we have all the information about our travel plans.” What would life be like if we had the same information for our life journey, she wonders. Would we live differently if we knew how long our life journey would last, if we knew when we’d arrive at our final destination?

“Maybe not,” she decides.

“I see the same human behavior in our short travel by bus, train or airplane,” she writes. “Some passengers are good decent people, who are warm and helpful to others; but some are selfish and mean.”

Two women Anu encountered on an overnight train journey in India in the 1970s still stick with her now, some 40 years later. From her essay:

One good looking seemingly wealthy woman in her early forties was sitting across my seat. She had occupied two other seats by putting her belongings, which she could have easily put under her seat. But she wanted to grab as much space as she could and did not care for the inconvenience to other passengers. She had an arrogant and smug look on her face.

There was another young woman with a child who had occupied only one seat. she had simply put her belongings under her seat and held her child in her arms. She looked very contented and had gentle, calming look on her face.

Whenever I have doubt about my travel behavior, these two women pop up in my mind to guide me.

That’s my friend, Carolyn Alessio.

Another talented writer in my life, my friend Carolyn Alessio left her job as a writer and editor for the Chicago Tribune Book Section years ago to teach at Chicago’s Cristo Rey Jesuit High School, a school known nationally for its innovative ideas and emphasis on building student character.

I’m not sure how she finds the time, but while teaching a talented group of high-energy teenagers, Carolyn has also managed to continue writing. She is the prose editor at Crab Orchard Review, and her work has appeared in The Pushcart Prize Anthology, TriQuarterly, Boulevard, and, last week, in Scoundrel Time.

Carolyn’s Scoundrel Time article Sanctuary, City begins with a description of reading Elie Wiesel’s Night with a freshmen English class on Chicago’s largely Latino Southwest Side. She had to go over vocabulary words like “invective” and “anti-Semitism” with her students, but one term they had no trouble understanding? Deportation.

From the piece:

Even though our school’s students reside legally in the United States—documentation is required for the corporate internships that finance their tuition—everyone knows members of the community who are not so fortunate. To my students from La Villita, or Little Village and nearby, the number includes neighbors, friends, relatives, coaches, church members, and local business owners.

Carolyn’s piece is very well-written, and the first-person accounts of her teenage students (all of them documented) and the feelings they carry around for relatives and neighbors that may be taken away from them gave me a different look at immigration–and immigrants–in our country today. It also reminded me of how much we can learn about ourselves and our country from the experiences of immigrants. I hope you’ll read the entire piece — we can all learn a lot from these high schoolers.

That’s Wanda years ago with my second Seeing Eye dog Hanni.

Anyone who has followed our Safe & Sound blog for a while knows who Wanda Bridgeforth is. You’ve seen her photo here. You’ve read her writing here. But do you know what she sounds like? Now’s your chance! Wanda Bridgeforth is going to be on the radio with me tonight!

Saturday, July 29, 9:30 p.m.

WGN Radio, AM 720, Nocturnal Journal

We’ll be on the radio from 9:30 pm to 10 pm, a live half-hour interview with Chicago journalist and author Dave Hoekstra.

You can also watch and listen to us live in the studio via WGN’s lifestream. And, if you’re out and about on Michigan Avenue, we’ll be in the sidewalk level studio at the Tribune Tower (435 N. Michigan)–you can look and and listen to audio that’s piped to the street.

A 95-year-old witty, wise and talented writer, Wanda has attended the memoir writing class I lead in downtown Chicago for over a decade now. On WGN Radio we’ll talk about her life, her writing, our memoir class and her role in my new book, Writing Out Loud: What a Blind Teacher Learned from Leading a Memoir Class for Seniors. To give you a better taste of what you might hear on air tonight, I’ll leave you here with an excerpt from Writing Out Loud where I introduce Wanda and her friend the late great Minerva Bell to readers. From Chapter 19, “Friends”:

Minerva and Wanda bring a slice of Chicago history with them. Tens of thousands of Southern blacks flooded into Chicago during the Great Migration of the early 20th century. The friends’ essays describe Bronzeville, the segregated neighborhood they grew up in, as a “city within a city.” Overcrowding,  joblessness, and poverty were facts of life, but so was literature, jazz, blues, and gospel music.
DuSable High School, the first Chicago high school built exclusively for African-American students, opened in the Bronzeville neighborhood in 1935. Minerva transferred in as a sophomore, and Wanda was a freshman. “I was in the birthday class,” Wanda reminds us.

DuSable was built on Chicago’s South Side 15 years before the Brown v. Board of Education decision. Wanda says it was built to keep schools segregated. “We were blocked in,” she writes. “We knew not to cross Cottage Grove, 51st Street or the train tracks.” Everyone inside those boundaries was Black. “That was our neighborhood, and DuSable was our neighborhood high school.”

When DuSable first opened, some neighborhood parents applied for permits to get their children into nearby White high schools. “Their parents didn’t think a Black school could be any good,” Wanda writes, adding that she felt sorry for those kids. True, DuSable classes could be very crowded; she remembers 50 or so students squeezing into classrooms. “But at those other schools, if you were Black and you wanted to be in a play, you had to be a maid or a butler,” she writes. “At DuSable, we did everything, we were in all the plays, we wrote the school newspaper. We were having such a good time at DuSable.”

Between the two of them, Minerva and Wanda were at the high school between 1935 and 1939. During those years they walked the hallways with some pretty impressive classmates, including Nat King Cole; John H. Johnson, publisher of Ebony and Jet magazines; Harold Washington, first African-American mayor of Chicago; Redd Foxx; and Dinah Washington.

“Nat Cole added King to his name later,” Wanda tells me with a laugh. “You know, like Old King Cole!”

They remember Dinah Washington when she was Ruth Jones, and they knew Redd Foxx as Jon Sanford. “His brother was Fred, that’s who Sanford and Son is named for,” Wanda tells us. “They changed their names once they were stars.”

DuSable’s initial fame was in its music program, and Wanda and Minerva both sang during the “Hi-Jinks” student talent shows there. “We were in the background, but we put on shows that were better than what was going on in Chicago professional theatres,” Wanda writes. “With musicians like Ruthie Jones and Nat Cole and all of those guys, we couldn’t miss!”

Tune in to WGN Radio tonight to hear Wanda tell her story in her own words. I promise you won’t be disappointed!

Hey! I’m doing another Writing Out Loud event in Chicago this Friday, and Audrey Mitchell (a writer from the “Me, Myself and I” class I lead at the Chicago Cultural Center) is going to be with me at this one, too:

Friday, July 28, 2017
1:00pm – 3:00pm
Ditka’s Restaurant, 100 E. Chestnut

That’s Audrey being recorded for a video about our class.

I’ll be signing copies of Writing Out Loud afterwards like always, but the Friday presentation itself will be different than the others I’ve done lately. For starters, this one is at Ditka’s! The restaurant provides lunch (Dutch treat). Second, I’ll be giving a very short in-class writing exercise during this presentation. My hope is that a quick assignment like this might encourage attendees to start writing their own life stories. Third, I’ll have Audrey up there with me!

The event is sponsored by Skyline Village Chicago, a community of older adults in the high-rise neighborhoods on the north side of the Loop. You don’t have to be a member to attend the Friday Forum event, but you do need to bring $5 along on Friday to help cover the cost of the room. You also need to save a spot (no charge for that!), by registering online by the end of the day today, Wednesday, July 26, 2017. You may also register by emailing RSVP@skylinevillagechicago.org with Friday Forum in the subject line, just make sure to do it today.

I can promise you the whole event will be worth attending just so you can meet Audrey Mitchell and hear her read her work. Audrey’s parents came to Chicago from Edgefield County, South Carolina, during the Great Migration. Before signing up for my class, Audrey had spent hours at her computer tracking down genealogical information about her family. After even more time at the South Carolina Archives, the Old Edgefield District Genealogical Society, the Great Lakes Regional Archives, and Chicago’s Newberry Library, Audrey ended up with pages of names, dates, and addresses.

But no stories.

All her family stories were oral. None of them were written. Now Audrey is changing that. She’s getting family stories down on paper, and those of us who are fortunate enough to be in the Me, Myself and I class downtown get to hear her read them out loud every Wednesday .

Once it was decided that Audrey would be one of the writers we’d feature in Writing Out Loud, I took her out for coffee, brought my digital recorder (I told her it was running!) and enjoyed a couple of magical hours listening to her answer some lingering questions about her life story. Here’s an excerpt from Writing Out Loud where I mention that coffee date: Chapter 68, Why Audrey Stays in Chicago.

Audrey can tell how intrigued I am by all her research. Over a cup of coffee at a local coffee shop, she tells me more of what she’s learned.
The 1870 Census was the first U.S. census to list all persons, including former slaves, as individuals. “I don’t have their slave records, but I do know my great-grandparents lived in Edgefield County in 1870,” she says, reasoning that they’d stayed there after the Emancipation Proclamation. “I have oral history and written data to back that up, but what I’m missing is the voice of my older relatives, what they were thinking, what they were feeling and like that. That’s why I keep taking your class. So my stories don’t get lost like theirs are.”

She then reveals that she’s pretty sure she’s figured out who owned her great-grandparents as slaves.

I’ve heard this genealogy stuff can get addictive, but does she really want to know who the slave owners are? Audrey doesn’t skip a beat. “Oh, yeah!” she says.

I drum up the courage to ask an even more awkward question: Why?

Her answer is obvious. I’m embarrassed I had to ask.

“Most people do want to know who the slave owners were,” she says. “In most cases, they’re an ancestor, too.”

Audrey’s essay “Why I Have not Moved to South Carolina” is excerpted in Chapter 68, too. She’ll be reading that essay at the Skyline Village Chicago event at Ditka’s Restaurant this Friday, and she’ll be joining me for the Q&A afterwards to answer questions. I hope you can come! Just remember: you have to register by the end of the day today, Wednesday, to save a spot.