This past week I attended two plays I would have never seen experienced otherwise.

Let me explain.

Chicago’s Victory Gardens Theater moved to its new location at Biograph Theater in 2006  (yes, the landmark building where gangster John Dillinger was ambushed). The refurbished building boasts an elevator, ramps, wide hallways, widened doorways. A perfect location for Access Project, a nationally-recognized outreach effort to involve people with disabilities in all aspects of theater. Access Project designates certain performances as “Access Nights” by offering additional accessibility services to Victory Garden patrons. But wait…there’s more! Access Project also teams up with smaller theater companies (some who usually perform in small inaccessible spaces in basements, above taverns, down narrow hallways) from time to time to sponsor a one-night-fits-all production in Victory Gardens’ very accessible space.

Both productions I went to this week were produced by smaller Chicago theater companies hosted by Victory Gardens at the refurbished Biograph Theater:

1. Once in a Lifetime, a 1930 play by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart, was performed by Strawdog Theatre company at Victory Gardens Thursday night.  a review by Kerry Reid in the Chicago Tribune said the play is “seldom revived, and a lot of that has to do with the humongous cast of characters, featuring nearly 40 speaking parts.”
2. Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go blind is a production by the Neo-Futurists that attempts to perform 30 skits in 60 minutes. They performed their “ever-changing menu” last Saturday night at Victory Gardens.

Dozens of characters. Actors playing multiple parts. Many, many scene changes. These particular two plays could have been recipes for blind disaster, but the thought put into the touch tours before each production — coupled with speedy Shayne Kennedy providing audio description in my headset for both plays — helped me take it all in.

Okay, maybe not all, but far more than I would have otherwise. Because, honestly, without this sort of special accommodation, I wouldn’t have considered attending these two complicated plays at all.

Audio touch tours are 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, hear the voices they’ll be using on stage, and learn about the characters they play

When the plays were about to start, I was offered an ear piece connected to a small device the size of an old-fashioned cell phone — the contraption had a volume control dial so I could rev it up to hear the audio describer alert me to scene changes, character entrances/exits and other movements during the play. I usually can follow the play just fine and opt to go without the ear piece. Not this time, though. With one show offering 30 skits in 60 minutes, and the other featuring 40 speaking parts, trust me, I cherished those headphones — almost as much as I cherished the opportunity to seetake in these two lively performances.

I suppose in a perfect world, every Chicago theater — big or small, well-funded or not — would be wheelchair accessible and offer ASL and audio description at their site, but hey — I got the memo. The world isn’t perfect. I’m a huge fan of “reasonable accommodation” and believe that the “reasonable” part should go both ways. Expecting every tiny theater company in Chicago to refurbish the space they rent or pay for an ASL interpreter or audio description for every play would not be reasonable, but it is reasonable on their parts to pair up with established theaters already set up for this —steppenwolf theater did exactly that when working with Gift Theater to produce Richard III. I have learned first-hand that efforts like those by Steppenwolf and Victory Gardens Theater’s Access Project can put a human face to people with disabilities and inspire their fellow arts organizations to keep us in mind when making plans.

The Neo-Futurists who put on the accessible performance of Too Much Light last Saturday are offering a class this summer to explore the process of creating a 2-minute play in the Too Much Light style, writing and crafting pieces based on true life experiences. In partnership with Victory Gardens’ Artist Development Workshop, Intro to TML at VG will meet at Victory Gardens Theater, thus offering an opportunity to study the fundamentals of Neo-Futurism in a physically accessible setting. Accommodations will be provided for students with other disabilities, too. Artists with disabilities are strongly encouraged to apply and will be given preference in acceptance into the workshop.

As for Strawdog, after the show was over Thursday night, the company’s general manager announced that the second-floor venue they usually perform in is going to be demolished soon and replaced with condos. “All of our productions next season will take place at The Factory Theater,,” he said, adding with glee that the new place is at street level. “It’s wheelchair accessible!” The crowd, well, we couldn’t all rise to our feet, but trust me, we showed our appreciation.

In 2014 I had an op-ed piece published in the Chicago Tribune called “Should ride-sharing services adhere to the Americans with Disabilities Act?” Well, two years later, ride-sharing for people with disabilities — namely, those of us who use service dogs — is back in the news.

Up to now Uber has not required drivers to allow people who use service animals in their cars. The only reference to animals in their policy statement was one that says they “leave the decision whether or not to transport pets at the discretion of your driver.”

Since Uber cars are privately owned and operated by independent contractors, Uber maintains they don’t have to follow the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). The ADA says “public transportation authorities may not discriminate against people with disabilities in the provision of their services,” but it doesn’t say anything about private rides.

Uber identifies as a technology company — not a transportation company — and claims it is not required to provide ADA-mandated vehicles. Their stance has stirred criticism from disability advocate groups, and in 2014 the National Federation of the Blind of California filed a suit claiming many Uber drivers have refused to take passengers with guide dogs.

Uber denied discriminating and argued that, as a ride-hailing service that merely connects drivers and passengers, it wasn’t covered by laws that require taxis and other transportation services to carry a passenger’s service animal.

A federal magistrate in San Francisco refused to dismiss the suit last year, leading to a settlement late last month before the case was scheduled for trial. According to the agreement, Uber will tell their drivers they have an obligation to carry guide dogs, and Uber will also be required to dismiss any driver who knowingly violates that policy a single time. The Uber site has added a paragraph to its “bringing along a pet” page about service dogs now, too. It reads:

Please note: All drivers are required by law to transport service animals. If you experience issues using Uber with your service animal, please reach out to us by reporting an issue with your trip.

Is it me, or does that language seem a little evasive? All drivers are required by law…. Uber will also be required to dismiss any driver who knowingly violates…. Required under the settlement — who’s monitoring and who’s enforcing? This smells like it’s still putting the burden on the guide dog user who has been refused the service to ultimately press the case.

The settlement was proposed to the court on April 29, 2016, and copies are available online.

I want this to be good news. But who exactly do we “reach out” to if a driver refuses to pick us up? Uber has become somewhat notorious for non-responsiveness, and connecting with a human seems nearly impossible. I know exactly what to do if a taxi refuses service. Contact the City of Chicago office that handles such complaints, online or by phone. I’ve done it, and it works. And the ongoing enforcement helps keep taxi drivers honest (I’m happy to report that it’s been years since I’ve had cause to complain about a registered Chicago cab driver refusing to take my guide dog).

I’m still left with some questions about Uber. Will this new policy they’ve agreed to only apply in California, or all over the United States? Can Uber still claim that because they simply connect drivers with passengers, they don’t have to adhere to the Americans with Disabilities Act?

If you ask me, when it comes to Uber, the jury is still out.

Well, we got through another Mothers Day. Not that there’s anything wrong with mothers, mind you.

Beth and I celebrated by riding our tandem bicycle to U.S Cellular Field to watch a White Sox win with our generous friends Don and Juli (seats to die for, btw). And at our son Gus’ direction, I bought some very fragrant lilies and presented them to Beth on Gus’ behalf.

Esther Knezovich, nee Latini, a 5’1″ stick of dynamite.

Which was all nice. It’s just that the avalanche of sentimentality and tributes and bragging’ on our moms can get a little cloying sometimes. And dare I say, dishonest? Maybe, a little? (And then there’s the equal time thing—as our single friend Brad asked our single bartender Sean at Hackney’s last night, “When’s bachelor’s day?”)

On Mothers Day (and Fathers Day, of course), somehow the notion that some people had really awful mothers — that any mothers can be awful — gets lost. I know, I know, that shouldn’t keep us from appreciating the “good” ones. But you know, I didn’t see any pictures of Faye Dunaway as Joan Crawford in Mommy Dearest in my Facebook feed yesterday.

Plus, there just seems to be no room for ambiguity. Let me put it this way: to use a gender-neutral term, women can be assholes sometimes. Even the best of them. Ergo, mothers can be assholes.

I know mine could be. She could be abusive in her criticism of me and my sister. She had a crazy temper, and threw stuff at us. She could be defensive and insecure and combative to an extreme degree. She did everything she could to give me and my sister opportunities she didn’t have, but at times couldn’t hide her envy.

And I will always love and admire her.

She was born to Italian immigrants. She grew up 40 miles from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, a row house that was in a town owned by the coal mining company her father worked for. Paolo—as I would observe as a child—was a relentless critic of his children, even in their adulthood. So my mom, Esther, came by it honestly. Nothing she did was good enough for him. And so it was for me and my sister.

She won forensics competitions in high school, and traveled all the way to California to compete. She was smart as a whip. And probably could’ve been anything. I always thought a career in law would’ve suited her. Back then, though, the only option she had was state teachers’ college.

No doubt in my mind it wasn’t her first choice. But she did it. She started her career teaching Marines’ kids at Camp Lejeune during the war. She endured tragedy with the loss of her first husband when my sister was only six months old.

She went on to be a fantastic teacher for decades. I know this because of the many parents who have told me so, and from the kids I went to high school with who’d had her in grade school. (Who also professed some wonder at how I survived being Mrs. K.’s son.)

During adolescence, I had some vicious battles with my mom. There were times when I hated her.

And then, thanks in large part to who she was, I grew up and became a young man. With an analytical mind like hers. A sense of civic and social responsibility. A respect for the English language. A love of baseball. And an eternal suspicion of school administrators and gimmicks like charter schools and NCLB blah blah. And, yeah, sometimes with a temper like hers.

The very things that made me despise her in my high school years were the things I empathized with as a young adult. I could read her frustration with her lot in life, her ambiguous and simultaneous support and envy of her kids’ opportunities, and the source of her insecurity. It’s also clear to me now that she was prone to depression in an age where the idea of going to a shrink was unthinkable in her milieu. It wasn’t always pretty, but she slogged through.

And so, this year, in my world, Mothers Day will come again November 8. That’s when I expect to celebrate one brilliant, flawed, confounding, tough-as-nails mother by voting for another one.

And if you don’t do the same—don’t tell me, or be prepared for a coffee cup to come whizzing by your head.

Bob Eisenberg, author of today’s guest post.

In my previous post I mentioned that one writer chose Vidal Sassoon’s death as one that had made him particularly sad. A Blog follower left a comment saying she’d love to read that essay, and writer Bob Eisenberg graciously gave us permission to publish it here.

Bob Eisenberg is still styling hair after 60 years in the business, but he takes an afternoon off every week to join our Monday Lincoln Park Village memoir class. Here’s his essay.

by Bob Eisenberg

Sitting next to my favorite celebrity at a Beverly Hills hotel bar was one of the most exciting experiences in my life. I was in California for a workshop, and when I saw him there sitting alone I walked up to him and said how much I appreciated his talents. “I’ve followed your teaching for years,” I said.

He asked me to have a seat at the bar and have a drink. I was overwhelmed. This man was the best-known celebrity in the hair styling industry: Vidal Sassoon.

We talked for the longest time about the salon industry, our exciting salon businesses, and then went on to talk about philosophy and spirituality. I told him he was my mentor and that I’d been following his teachings for many years.

My hair styling story started years before when I was 20 and just got out of the army. I took my girlfriend to fabulous Vicks beauty salon, and while I was attentively watching the stylist cut her hair, a flash went through me. “I could do that,” I said to myself.

I had been drawing faces of classmates all my life and got disciplined in high school for doodling instead of paying attention to the teacher. It would be exciting to style hair around a face. The next day I enrolled in a neighborhood beauty school.

As I was getting close to graduating, my neighborhood friend Lenny Messeli came up to me and asked, “Bob, what are you going to do after we graduate?”

”Just look for a job,” I said with a shrug.

Lenny said his uncle had a beauty salon called The Magic Touch in Chicago’s Rogers Park neighborhood. “He wants to sell it for $1500,” Lenny said. “We could buy it for $750 a piece and be partners.”

”I’m just out of school!” I told Lenny. “I don’t even know how to do hair yet.”

Lenny had an answer. “My uncle say’s you don’t have to know how to do hair at his salon,” he said. “All you need is a good joke, and they’ll keep coming back.”

So Lenny and I became partners. After two years of joke telling and $3.50 hair cuts, I became burnt out. I saw an ad in The Hairdressers Journal that advertised a Vidal Sassoon workshop. It said I could learn a method of hair styling that doesn’t require any ruffing, teasing, hair spray or heavy gels. I attended the workshop and found my place in the salon industry. After a number of work shops I discovered a new approach to styling hair. I attended Vidal Sassoon workshops all over the country. Soon I put a sign up in the window of our salon:

Bob’s hair cut and style $25.00 including personal consultation.

I was on my way to becoming a real high end stylist, someone who could design a hair style according to someone’s life style, bone structure and face shape. A hair style that requires very low maintenance.

Vidal Sassoon has been a powerful influence for the entire hairstyling industry, but especially for me. I will always be grateful for the direction he has guided me.

Mike’s post last month about using Facebook to mourn for Prince motivated me to ask the writers in the memoir classes I lead to write about a celebrity’s death that made them really sad. “The celebrity can be an author, an artist, an athlete, a musician, an actor, an actress, a political figure, anyone who is famous and died,” I told them, urging them to write about themselves and their circumstances. “If the person you’re writing about is famous, your readers will already know about them,” I said. What I was after in their essays was an idea of how old they were when that celebrity died, what was going on in their worlds at the time, why the loss was so significant to them and how they grieved.

My downtown class, the one with Wanda in it, is taking a few months off. Writers in my other three memoir classes came back with essays about Vidal Sassoon, Grace Kelly, Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Princess Diana, Wiley Post, Will Rogers, Van Johnson, Mary Travers of “Peter, Paul and Mary.”

Two of the younger writers wrote about the death of musician John Lennon. Michael admitted that John hadn’t always been his favorite Beatle. “He seemed aloof, mean, and sarcastic.” He wrote that the “seemingly cheerful Paul and George” were more his type until later on, when he realized the Beatle’s songs he loved to play on his guitar were Lennon songs.

Lorraine fell in love with John Lennon the first time she saw him on TV. “I wouldn’t say John and I were intimate,” she wrote., “I was only 13.” She confessed she never liked Yoko Ono. “I was jealous,” she conceded, describing John Lennon’s murder in 1980 like this. “He was walking down the street with Ono. Of course she didn’t save him.”

For one student in class, FDR was THE PRESIDENT.

Kathy wrote about John Lennon, too, but she wasn’t a teenager when she first laid eyes on him. “My lack of knowledge of pop culture is a monumental failing. But even I knew about The Beatles!” In 1980, Kathy was the mother of four and the volunteer Executive Director of the Illinois Citizens for Handgun Control. “Our political action was sorely hampered by the small size and homogeneity of our membership,” she wrote. “And then Mark Chapman pulled out a handgun and fired four bullets into the body of John Lennon.” Chicago scheduled a memorial event eight days later at Lincoln Park’s Cricket Hill.

The Illinois Citizens for Handgun Control created bumper stickers that said Imagine a world, along with an arrow pointing to the words without handguns, and volunteers handed out flyers with information on how to order a bumper sticker for a dollar. From Kathy’s essay:

December 15 was clear and cold. 3000 Lennon mourners gathered for the program and the 10 minutes of silence that was observed around the world. We handed out our flyers as participants departed. In the days that followed, hundreds of orders with crumpled dollar bills arrived in my office.

Membership information accompanied the bumper stickers and a surprising number responded. Some of the respondents became the organization’s most effective leaders. Diversified and energized, the Illinois Citizens for Handgun Control organized their first annual Walk Against Gun Violence in 1982 as an effort to educate people and encourage widespread advocacy efforts. “I think John Lennon would have approved of us,” Kathy wrote.

In the end, more writers wrote about presidents than musicians. Most presidential essays were written about John F. Kennedy. One writer was in Paris when JFK died, another was supposed to celebrate her first wedding anniversary on November 22, 1963, and a writer who worked at Life Magazine accompanied a photographer to Arlington Cemetery in Washington, D.C. to cover the president’s burial there. Another was in high school when he got the news. “When he died, everything slowed down,” he wrote. ”We watched on color TVs, some of us, but it all seemed to be in black and white.”

Hugh said he was moved by the death of President Kennedy, “but I was an adult in my 30s then, and I understood what it was all about.” He was only 13 when President Roosevelt died in 1945, however. “I had never dealt with the death of a famous person” he wrote. “For me, Roosevelt was THE PRESIDENT. He was first elected in the year I was born and went on to be elected for an unprecedented four terms. I knew who he was. I heard his distinctive voice on the radio and saw his big grin in newsreels.”

Mary Lou was playing hopscotch with friends the day FDR died and knew something was wrong when she came home and found her mother at the front entrance of their Chicago two-flat. “We never used the front door unless company came,” she wrote. “So I was very surprised when I saw Mommy at the front door of 4523, still wearing her apron and using it to pat her eyes.”

Regan wrote about a president, too, but not one who died. She’d worked on Bill Clinton’s campaign in 1992, and when he won, she relocated from Chicago to D.C. to work in his administration. “In 1994 he passed a crime bill I thought went too far. Next he signed NAFTA, an agreement opposed by every Democrat I respected,” she wrote. “Dissatisfaction settled in the space between my bones and muscled me awake at 3 o’clock in the morning for the next seven years.”

Regan turned on the radio in her DuPont Circle townhouse one morning in 1995 and learned Jerry Garcia had died overnight. “I collapsed on the bathroom floor weeping over the death of something I couldn’t put words to. At 49-years-old my idealism had come to an end: my false world of everlasting good died with Jerry Garcia.”

Regan started sobbing again when her friend picked her up for work that day. From her essay:

Keith waited a few respectful minutes, and then, with one simple sentence, he opened a new, naked reality that included the unspoken caveat of don’t take yourself too seriously.

He said, “well, it’s not as if it’s Aretha Franklin.”

Regan Burke started a blog of her own after she joined the memoir-writing class I lead in Printer’s Row last year. You can read her entire Jerry Garcia essay , along with other fabulous essays she’s written — at BackStory Essays – Short Essays from Chicago Writers.