Gangs. Drugs. Violence. Poverty. Those were my lingering images of Chicago’s housing projects after they were torn down a decade or so ago. I know a lot more about the history of those projects and the people who lived in them now, though, thanks to my friend Audrey Petty, an Associate Professor of English at the University of Illinois.

That’s Audrey with Alex Kotlowitz during her presentation in Oak Park. (Photo: Janet Smith)

You might remember Audrey from blog posts I’ve written about her before. She started thinking about doing an oral history of people who’d lived in high rise public housing back in 2008. Robert Taylor Homes had already been completely demolished by then, and Stateway Gardens, Rockwell Gardens and Cabrini-Green were next. “I grew up on the South Side,” she said in an interview with McSweeney’s.  “And so I was stunned by the sudden erasure of all these structures that had been such a familiar part of the city.” She’d read and heard about the Chicago Housing Authority’s plans, but said it was something else to experience those enormous gaps in the landscape. “The first thing I wanted to know was where people were going. The next question—the bigger question that felt urgent—was what had those places been like for those who called them home?”

Audrey spent most of the past three years tracking down former residents of Chicago’s housing projects and interviewing them for High Rise Stories: Voices From Chicago Public Housing, published by McSweeney’s Voice of Witness series just a few weeks ago.

Alex Kotlowitz wrote the foreword, and last Monday he was on stage with Audrey at the book’s “coming out” party at Frank Lloyd Wright’s historic Unity Temple. My Seeing Eye dog Whitney and I took a train to Oak park to be there. The event was well-attended,  and we’d learn during the Q & A session afterwards that a fair number of people in the audience had grown up in Chicago’s public housing. The line to have Audrey sign a book was so long that we only had time for a quick hug.

During the talk I was sandwiched on a pew between my friends Linda Downing Miller and Janet Smith — Mike met us there later. Linda is a writer and lives in Oak park, so she met Whitney and me at the train station. Janet is the Co-Director of the Urban Planning and Policy Center at the University of Illinois at Chicago and a true scholar. I wasn’t at all surprised to hear her swoon over the appendix to Audrey’s book. A review of High Rise Stories in Sunday’s Chicago Tribune confirmed that “The timeline regarding public housing history and other materials in the book’s six appendices will become essential historical resources.”

My favorite part of the evening was listening to Audrey sweet sincere voice reading “On Plans and Transformations,” the introduction she wrote for the book. She did a beautiful job weaving her own story with the history of public housing, and then went right to reading a story from one of the High Rise Stories narrators. Again, from the Chicago Tribune review:

But the book’s primary value comes from the narratives of former CHA tenants. The range of speakers exemplifies the diversity of people who formerly lived in the projects, from ex-cons trying to straighten out their lives to youthful idealists.

After Audrey finished her readings, Alex Kotlowitz talked with her about how she tracked down the residents and managed the difficult but necessary task of paring down hundreds of hours of interviews into a 250-page oral history. It was exciting to have my friend up there with the author of the award-winning book There are No Children Here, and now I’m hooked. Tonight Whitney and I are heading to Audrey’s next event, and this time two of the narrators she interviewed will be on stage with her. Care to join us? Here’s the info :

Sept. 24th, 2013: Audrey Petty in conversation with Natalie Moore from WBEZ moderating and narrators Ms. Wilson & Sabrina Nixon at Hull-House
800 S Halsted Street
Chicago, IL 60607</blockquote

My dog got carded last week. Not at Hackney’s, don’t be silly. Everyone there knows Whitney is 21 (in dog years).

My Seeing Eye dog Whitney was carded last week in the lobby at 30 N. Michigan, a Chicago high-rise where my doctor’s office is. Every human who walks in has to show an i.d. card, but this is the first time they’ve asked for an i.d. to prove that the superbly-trained three-year-old Golden Retriever/Labrador Cross who guides me through a revolving door, into their lobby, around their desk and onto the elevator is legit.

The building’s security guard told me they’d all been told to ask for certification when anyone comes into the building claiming the dog at their side is a service dog. “A lot of them fake it,” the guard said with a shrug. I wasn’t surprised. I’ve written posts here about people I’ve run into who pretend to have a disability in order to bring their dogs everywhere, and my husband Mike has written a post about this, too.

Let’s face it. It’s not hard to tie a vest on a dog, and it’s pretty easy to get fake certification for a dog as well. It’s not easy to live with a significant disability, however, and faking that you have one is an insult to everyone who really needs their dog, and to the airlines, hotels, restaurants and stores who are trying to do what’s right.

Last week National Public Radio (NPR) ran a story called Four-legged Impostors Give Service Dog Owners Pause and interviewed Tim Livingood, a man running one of the many,many businesses you can find on line that sells bogus service dog certificates and vests:

For $65, customers can procure papers, patches and vests to make their dogs look official. They can even buy a prescription letter from a psychiatrist after taking an online quiz. The laws are broad enough to allow that, Livingood says. While his business, the National Service Animal Registry, sounds official, he says government-sanctioned registration agencies do not exist — federal law does not actually require registration or identification patches.

It’s true. There is no national registry of service dogs, and therefore no official i.d. to certify that a dog qualifies. The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) allows employees to ask a person if the dog is a service dog, and if the dog is required because of a disability. Documentation of the person’s disability or the dog’s training can NOT be required for entry into a business, but non-disabled amateurs think letters from bogus psychiatrists and dog vests will help them look legit, so they buy them online.

The Seeing Eye gives graduates an i.d. card for our dogs, and while I do carry Whitney’s i.d. card with me, I’ve never had to use it before last week. It wasn’t much trouble to fetch Whitney’s i.d. out of my wallet, I’m just sorry that fakers have brought us to the point where the managers at the building require security guards to ask for such things.

It is a privilege to go through life without a significant disability, and I wouldn’t wish blindness, or any other disability, on my worst enemy. Hearing stories like these, however, start me thinking we should come up with harsher punishments for people who fake or exaggerate disabilities in order to gain privileges from the government.

All that time filming, and we already know who will be the star of the video: Whitney.

Last Tuesday afternoon four creative and energetic young guys showed up at our door armed with audio equipment and cameras.

Ho hum, just another day for Beth Finke.

One of the four guys was my friend Mike Grant’s son, Sam. Sam and his buddies Craig Benzine, Matt Weber and David Wolff got some good news earlier this year: they received a grant from Google! The money is helping them fund a new channel on YouTube called The Good Stuff, and now they’re busy producing videos. Every few weeks The Good Stuff puts together a playlist of five or six videos centered around a theme (they’ve already covered subjects like Geeks, Origins, Airplanes, Miniature) and if I were you I’d subscribe to The Good Stuff channel right now so you won’t miss the episode coming up. The next theme is “Senses,” and these guys have already arranged interviews with:

• experts from the Smell & Taste Treatment and Research Foundation,
• a professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolution at The University of Chicago named Jerry Coyne who studies the concept of free will and how that helps determine ones sense of self,
• Alpana Singh, the renowned Chicago sommelier who hosted the PBS program Check, Please and wrote the book Alpana Pours: About Being a Woman, Loving Wine, and Having Great Relationships, and
• Me!

After giving Whitney some affectionate pats and belly rubs, Matt, David, Sam and Craig got to work right away, finding just the right spot for me to sit at in our apartment for the interview and making extra sure all audio and light levels were perfect before they started filming. Craig Benzine conducted my interview and made me feel comfortable in front of the cameras. He’s very familiar with YouTube: he already has an uber-popular vlog on YouTube called wheezywaiter that has half a million followers. That was not a typo. Half a million people subscribe to wheezywaiter, and Craig, Sam, Matt and David are hoping that someday a million people will be tuning in to The Good Stuff.

Craig was armed with all sorts of questions for me, many of them centering on my concept of beauty. Some examples:

• Did your concept of beauty change after you couldn’t see anymore?
• You hear stories on the news about the obesity epidemic, so when you’re going down the street with Whitney, doo you imagine everyone walking in front of you looking like balloon characters?
• The people you were able to see, when you imagine them now, do you picture them aging?
• Everyone describes Brad Pitt as so good looking, when you hear his name, do you come up with an image of what he looks like?
• Do you have an image of what the four of us look like?

When the interview was over, they took some short takes of me playing piano and working at my computer, and then we headed outside so they could follow Whitney and me to her favorite tree. The guys had been with us for hours by then, and Whitney needed to go!

So is beauty in the eyes of the beholder? Find out the answer to that and other intriguing questions by tuning in to The Good Stuff now. All the previous episodes are there for you to watch, free of charge, and the producers hope to have “Senses” up by the end of the month.

To whet your appetite , how about I tease you with the answer to Craig’s last softball question. The response to whether or not I had conjured up an image of what these four guys looked like in the short time I’d come to know them was obvious. “You all look like Brad Pitt,” I shrugged, and funny thing, not a single one of them denied it.

My Wednesday writing class and I will sure miss Pat.

I’ve run across some bottles of wine with Braille labels on them over the years, and when I found out that the woman who’s been running programs for senior citizens at Renaissance Court ever since I started leading memoir classes there was retiring today, I thought a bottle of wine might be the perfect gift. Pat O’Malley is not blind, but a Braille bottle from me would be unique, meaningful, celebratory, and, most importantly: something she can enjoy in her retirement. I put my talking computer to work and unearthed a handful of winemakers who produce wine labels in Braille:

• Michel Chapoutier, a well-known winemaker from France, claims to be the first to use Braille labels on wine bottles
• Lazarus Wine is produced in Spain with the help of blind winemakers, so Braille labels are not just a nicety, they’re a necessity
• Galant, a Czech wine producer, uses Braille labels designed in Moravia
• Pyrotech produces wine bottle labels in Braille that are endorsed by the Institute for the Blind
• Azienda Ciavolich in Abruzzo, Italy came out with wine labels in Braille thanks to the collaboration and assistance of the Pescara chapter of the Union Italian Ciechi (Italian Association of Blind People)
• Fox Creek Wines received help from the Royal Society for the Blind in Australia to put out bottles marked in Braille and in large print, too.

Not a single American wine in the bunch, sorry to say. The Lazarus wine from Spain sounded particularly intriguing. Blind people interested in working at Lazarus learn the Sensorial Winemaking method by successfully completing one course on “viticulture, winemaking and wine tasting” (offered by The Spanish National Organization of Blind People) and a second “Sensory Course” (taught at the University of La Rioja). If any of you blog readers out there have tried Lazarus Wine, I’d love to know what you think, and where you found it!

In the end, when it came to choosing a wine for my friend who is retiring, I went with Chapoutier — it was the only one available off the shelf here in Chicago. I left Pat’s gift on her desk on my way to leading my memoir-writing class Wednesday. When she caught up with me later on to say thanks, Pat said she knew who that bottle was from the minute she sawfelt it. Cheers!

I’m meeting a Major League Baseball scout for batting practice at White Sox park this afternoon.

That’s Kevin at home with his favorite pooch Otto.

Okay, okay, enough with the jokes. Sure, the White Sox are having a bad year, but no, they are not so desperate they want me to play for them. The guy I’m meeting on the field really and truly is a baseball scout, though. The Sox are playing Houston, Kevin Goldstein is Director of Pro Scouting for the Astros, and he’s an old friend of ours. I got to know Kevin back in the 1990s, when he was working with my husband Mike at a start-up company called Spyglass. Kevin is smart, and he’s computer savvy, too, but so were most of the people I met at Spyglass. Kevin stood out, though:

• He didn’t have a college degree (I think he was the youngest person working there, and Mike says he was one of the smartest).
• He shaved his head long before it was popular (and he let me feel his scalp).
• He listened to The Pixies and They Might be Giants (long before Indy rock was a category on You Tube).
• He paid attention to new-age baseball stats, otherwise known as sabermetrics (long before the book Moneyball was published).
• He knew about minor league prospects (long before anyone else did).

I worked in the ticket office at the minor league A team called the Kane County Cougars when Kevin and Mike worked at Spyglass. We enjoyed many a game there together, and when I went with Mike on a business trip once, we joined Kevin for a game during something called the “Arizona Fall League.” Today, the Arizona Fall League is a renowned showcase for up-and-coming minor leaguers. Kevin knew that a hot pitching prospect with the Cleveland organization named  Jaret Wright was scheduled to pitch. Who knew there was such a thing as an Arizona Fall League back then, and if there was, what day Jaret Wright would be starting? Kevin did. When Mike left Spyglass, we moved to North Carolina. When Kevin left Spyglass, he moved to baseball. This story on the Astros web site explains:

It wasn’t until Goldstein, who dabbled in the interactive industry and worked in consulting and marketing, started writing for Baseball America and developing his email prospect newsletter did he one day envision working for a Major League club. “It was something fun that I had a passion for,” he said. “I started Prospect Report, and it started growing on a strange level and some teams were interested in the information I was putting out there.

Mike subscribed to Baseball Prospect Report, and we were all excited when Kevin and that newsletter were mentioned in an ESPN article by Peter Gammons. Tens of thousands subscribed to Kevin’s newsletter after that, Baseball Prospectus (BP) hired him to write for them, and Kevin’s reputation grew as the analytical mind to go to when it came to scouting reports. He eventually took over at BP for Nate Silver — yes, Nate Silver of 538 fame. Mike and I started getting used to turning on the radio or TV and, ho-hum, there was Kevin again, being interviewed on sports shows about prospects. Major League Baseball teams started noticing Kevin, too. Last year while the Houston Astros were in town to play the Cubs, their general manager Jeff Luhnow contacted Kevin for an interview. They talked for about three hours, and Kevin told Mike afterwards that he thought it went well. Jeff Luhnow must have thought it went well, too: last December he hired Kevin to oversee the Astros’ pro scouting efforts. That includes comprehensive scouting of both Minor League and Major League players across the 30 teams, plus independent and foreign professional leagues, too. We are thrilled for Kevin, of course, and especially thrilled he took the time to contact us and invite us to today’s game. Batting practice, too! (I’ve never been on the field during batting practice, and I’m eager to eavesdrop on the players and coaches while they warm up). It’s hot and humid in Chicago this week. I don’t know exactly where we’ll be sitting during the game, but in any case, Whitney is staying home. I’m just not sure how White Sox superstar groundskeeper Roger Bossard might feel about having a dog with me out on the grass, if you know what I mean…!