One of the teenage girls who waited in line for me to sign her book yesterday afternoon had a voice like a young Viola Davis. “You are a POWerful person,” she told me, stressing the “pow”in powerful. Just in case I didn’t hear her, she said it again. “You must be a POWerful person,“ she reasoned. ”Going through all that and getting up there talking about it all…”.

As I autographed their books, I got the privilege of talking with each participating high school girl. (Photo: Dana Ellenby-Bergeron).

I’m not sure anyone has ever used that word to describe me before. I didn’t know what to say in response, so I just thanked her. “You make me feel good!” I said, feeling my face start to blush. Time to refocus the conversation. ”Are you a writer?” I asked.

”I keep a journal,” she said. “But no one else reads it.” It sounded like she thought that didn’t count. Au contraire!

“That’s what journals are for!” I said. And with that simple statement, we were off, sharing stories of using journal-writing to help make decisions, express anger, share secrets. We could have gone on and on, but with other girls waiting behind her, we knew she had to take off.

I didn’t have to be able to see to know that everyone at Friday’s International Women’s Day celebration at Chicago’s Cliff Dwellers Club was happy to be there — you could feel the energy. Friends from college, writers in my memoir classes, and neighbors from our Printers Row neighborhood were there for moral support, including Ellen Sandmeyer, who lugged a cartful of books from Sandmeyer’s Bookstore for those interested in purchasing one. Eve Moran, the member of Cliff Dwellers who was in charge of the event, had already purchased a book for each of the 30 Chicago high school girls there to take home as a gift. “If you’re over 18?” I said at the end of my talk. “I’m afraid you have to pay for yours!”

The event was sold out. (Photo: Al Hippensteel.)

Sharing the stage with other women artists — a soprano from the Lyric Opera, a sculptor, a photographer and a children’s book author — to celebrate International Women’s Day together was an honor. Having an opportunity to talk about reading and writing with each of the students there as I signed their books? That was a privilege.

I felt a tap on my shoulder as I was gathering my things to leave once the event was over. It was the teenager with the velvety Viola-like voice again. She had one more thing to tell me before she got on the bus back to school.

I’m told one of the great things about the Cliff Dwellers Club is the views it offers. (Photo: Al Hippensteel.)

“Keep me in your prayers,” she said. “I’m having eye surgery next week.” Whitney’s harness fell from my palm. The news was stunning. She is so young. Once again, I didn’t know what to say, so I asked a question instead. “Can I give you a hug?”

She stayed with me long enough to talk about her diagnosis — she doesn’t have the same eye condition I do, but I knew enough about hers to talk with her about the upcoming surgery, let her know I understand how scary this is, reassure her that science and technology has come a long long way in the 30+ years since I lost my sight. I promised her I’d keep her in my prayers.

I’m guessing, though, she’ll come through with flying colors, and in the process, she’ll realize she’s powerful, too.

Every year the Cliff Dwellers (a private arts club in Chicago) invites girls from nearby public high schools and their teachers to join them for a special lunch to celebrate International Women’s Day. Last year the keynote speaker for the event was Toni Preckwinkle, one of the two African American women in the upcoming run-off election for Chicago mayor. This year, the keynote speaker is…me.

Learn more about the Cliff Dwellers Club at their site.

Can I fill those shoes? Not likely. But I’ll have help. The theme for Friday’s event is “Telling Our Stories,” and The Cliff Dwellers have already ordered copies of my book Writing Out Loud to give as a gift to each high school girl in attendance. That is my favorite part of this whole shindig: I’ll be able to talk one-on-one with each and every teenager as they come up to have me sign their copy. Something tells me they’ll enjoy meeting Whitney, too.

I need to polish off notes for my talk now. How about I leave you with the press release – it says it all, including that the event is sold out. Sorry! But happy.

Media Contact:
Eve Moran (312) 720-5803
Email: evemoran128@gmail.com

Attention: Assignment Editors and Producers – Important opportunity
International Women’s Day Program

On March 8 (12 -2 p.m.), Beth Finke (NPR commentator, author, teacher: who also happens to be blind) will deliver the Keynote address. Further, artists talks will be presented by the distinguished artists currently on exhibit at the Club: Debra Hand (sculptor), and Barbara Karant, (photographer). Finally, Michelle Duster (writer, speaker educator) will speak on the impactful life of her great-grandmother, Ida B. Wells, as we celebrate the recent street naming, Ida B. Wells Drive, in her honor.

Since 2012, The Cliff Dwellers has been celebrating International Women’s Day in a very special way. Students and teachers from nearby high schools (Chicago Tech, Jones, and Muchin) are invited to a lunch program featuring inspiring speakers. They sit among women (and men) of different backgrounds and work experiences to share personal stories. The interaction makes it an uplifting event for all participants.

Acclaimed Soprano Kimberly Jones is also scheduled to perform.

The event is Sold-Out.
Press is invited.

Background

The Cliff Dwellers is a haven for artists and arts lovers. Founded in 1907 (as the Attic Club), it was re-named The Cliff Dwellers and incorporated in 1909. The Cliff Dwellers is a private club and its members are either professionally engaged in literature, painting, music, architecture, sculpture, or one of the allied arts, or embrace and support the fine arts and the performing arts. See www.cliff-chicago.org
200 S. Michigan Avenue
Chicago, IL 60604
312-922-808

I met Doug Colbeth back in, oh, well, before the web, before the Internet, before social media—it was when cell phones were really large, didn’t have screens, and they were actually primarily phones. Doug was my boss at a little tech startup that was a University of Illinois spinoff. The company was based in Champaign, Illinois, and Doug drove down each week from his home in Naperville to spend part of the week at the office, working from home the rest of the time.

We were maybe 10 people back then, and we all worked a lot of hours trying to figure out how to make the company survive, and eventually to thrive. By 1997, when I left the company, Spyglass was a publicly traded company employing hundreds of people. It was an incredible ride, and lucrative in every sense of the word. I can say that the most valuable, most lasting thing about that time for me is my friendship with Doug.

Doug is like one of those teachers you remember your entire life—the ones that unlock something in you, open up worlds. Over the decades we’ve stayed in touch. He eventually took the reins at another software company in Canada—that company, too, went public.

He’s still doing the entrepreneur thing, this time in the service of bringing people out of the dark when it comes to mental health. For Doug and his wife Margey, mental health is personal, and they’ve put their money and their blood, sweat, and tears behind helping. Years ago, they founded the Colbeth Clinic at the University of Illinois-Chicago’s Institute for Juvenile Research. The clinic provides treatment to kids who otherwise could not afford psychiatric care.

Visit MedCircle and play the video to let Doug tell you about MedCircle.

After he retired, Doug had a couple shoulders surgically replaced, had his back tuned up, and got back to work. The result is a novel startup company called MedCircle. MedCircle produces videos of interviews with some of the best mental health professionals in the country. The videos are not intended as treatment, but as education, and a safe, secure way for people to learn about the most prevalent disorders—and how to address them.

I think anyone who has dealt with things like depression, bipolar disorder, or other mental health issues (or is close to someone who has) understands the chasm one faces when it comes to getting treatment. Where to start? The web? It’s easy to self-diagnose (incorrectly) and difficult to find the right therapist or psychiatrist. Not everyone is comfortable asking friends and family for therapist recommendations, and the truth is, it’s a matchmaking process—your friend’s provider might be great, just not for you. How do you even know what you need?

MedCircle’s mission is to help people cross that chasm. To give people a comfortable, private way to better understand mental health disorders, to understand how they can be treated, to get a sense of different therapists’ styles—in general, to destigmatize mental health issues and equip people to deal with them.

Debunking depression, with Dr. Sue Varma.

MedCircle produces in-depth series on topics like depression—over the course of several interviews, nationally renowned clinicians provide a thorough education. (Here’s one on understanding the difference between dementia and Alzheimer’s.) The first part of each series is absolutely free, and you don’t even have to provide an email address. If you decide to subscribe, you get access to all episodes of every series—and eventually, to participate in online Q&A sessions given by featured providers.

I’ve watched a lot of these sessions—I can tell you, they’re good. They can help one understand disorders, get ideas about what to do, and get a sense of what style of therapist might fit. More than that, they’re fundamentally hopeful. Even if you never subscribe and watch only the first episodes, they’re valuable. And there’s a weekly news digest.

Full disclosure: I do some work for MedCircle, and I do have an interest in its success. It is a for-profit business, not a charity.

All that said, MedCircle embodies my friends Doug and Margey’s spirits: You can do good while doing well. I hope you’ll check it out.

Wanda shared her copies of Scott’s Blue Book with me. Priceless.

I posted about the movie “Green Book” awhile back. I liked the movie then, and I like it now.

The wonderful Wanda Bridgeforth.

Whatever you think about the movie, I think there is one inarguably good thing about it: A ton of people who knew nothing about the Green Book before the movie now do know about it. I’m sorry they didn’t know before, but am happy they do now—thanks to the movie. It brought alive how awful that was and how recently that book was necessary.

I didn’t know about the Green Book until Beth related stories told by some writers in the  memoir classes she teaches. These people lived through the Green Book era, and used the Green Book. One of them is the wonderful Wanda Bridgeforth, now 98 years old. Beth has written often about Wanda, and Wanda has been a guest blogger several times. (Here’s one about her time at DuSable High School.)

The cover of the 1947 Scott’s Blue Book.

We are so lucky to know Wanda. I know of no one like her. Wanda somehow does not deny the awfulness of racism, speaks openly and in detail about it, yet goes through life with joy, humor, and grace.

We saw her last week. Wanda missed Beth’s Wednesday memoir class at the Chicago Cultural Center because she’d hot-rodded with her walker and taken a fall and sprained her ankle and banged up her hand. Beth and I had tickets to a play at the Court Theater in Hyde Park — Wanda’s apartment was on the route there, so Beth collected printed copies of the essays that had been read outloud at the class Wanda had missed that day and we delivered them, along with a get-well card from the whole class.

Wanda greeted us in the hallway outside her apartment. She’d seen us come in the lobby via the closed circuit TV channel, the little sneak. She was already healed enough to motor on with her walker.

We sat at her dining room table and chatted, and then Wanda said, “Michael, look at these.” She pushed two blue plastic bags toward me. Inside each was a “Scott’s Blue Book.” Wanda had told Beth about the Blue Book after Beth mentioned that she’d seen “Green Book.”

Need an orchestra? Scott’s has you covered. By the way, Walter Dyett had a distinguished career as a music educator at DuSable High School.

The Blue Book was a kind of Yellow Pages—except it listed only black-owned and operated businesses, centered in the old segregated South Side of Chicago. Residents there couldn’t venture downtown or other places, so they built a black metropolis within the city. Wanda and others have taught me and Beth (and anybody smart enough to listen) a whole lot about the rich, vibrant, textured, literate, musical life in the black island that was Bronzeville and beyond. To hear her stories is to lose preconceptions and assumptions about what South Side Chicago meant, or means today. And to mourn the loss of the community and social fabric that Wanda grew up in.

Anyway, those Blue Books. What can I say? Leafing through them was a wonder, a passage to a world where Wanda lived, and that, thanks to Wanda, I am able to imagine. Some businesses had only a single line entry, others purchased full pages. Many included a photograph and biography of the business owner or the family of proprietors. Typically, the photographs were portraits of business owners in dressy attire. The bios were written formally and impeccably.

As I leafed through one Blue Book slack-jawed, Wanda paged through the other, pausing to tell us about one or another business she’d patronized, or a business owner she’d known.

Thanks to Wanda, that vibrant world came to life. Beth and I and everybody who knows her will always be better for it.

I’m pleased to have Regan Burke back as a guest blogger today. She’s been a member of many of my classes over the years (Regan is featured in “Writing Out Loud”) and maintains her own blog, Backstory Essays, and she’s been published in The Christian Science Monitor and a variety of other publications.

It’s the bomb
by Regan Burke

This past Friday morning Beth, Whitney the Seeing Eye dog, and I met at one of Columbia College’s Michigan Avenue buildings in Chicago to volunteer for this year’s Louder Than A Bomb poetry slam. In the elevator up to check in, DJ Ca$hera gave us a hearty hello. She’s Louder Than A Bomb’s famous house DJ, working the entire six-week competition.

Louder Than A Bomb (LTAB) is Chicago’s annual youth poetry slam. Sponsored by Young Chicago Authors, the slam hosts over 1,000 youth poets in tournament-style bouts, all open to the public. Students representing Chicago area high schools stand on stage performing their own original poems to an audience of spoken word coaches, teachers, peers and strangers.

These kids filled the room with energy.

LTAB requires an army of volunteers for the events to run smoothly. Beth and I could have been check-in/greeters, merchandise sellers, timekeepers, social media ambassadors or judges. Judges! What could be more perfect for Beth, who teaches writing by listening to student recitations in her five weekly classes, than to be a judge for a spoken word competition? When I offered to be at her side for the first round, she agreed to sign up.

So there we were Friday morning, seated ten feet from the stage in the front row with lap-size white boards and markers. This was one of the first rounds of the five-week competition, so before the bout began, the MC briefed us on how to judge. “Write numbers on the board from 7-10. Use decimals,” he said. “A ten means the student is so good you’d pay their college tuition.” Translation: don’t give tens out too easily.

I sat next to Beth thinking I’d help her write on the board. But guess what? Beth didn’t need help. I was at the ready with the eraser, though, to clean Beth’s white board for each new poet.

On stage, DJ Ca$hera fired out bouncy hip-hop tunes. A “sacrificial” poet came first to get the ball rolling, make the room competition-ready, and give the judges a practice round. Then one after the other, poets from four different high schools kicked up onto the stage, introducing themselves by giving their names and the name of their poem before starting their reading. Many poets read from their phones, beating out words that particularized a slice of their lives: hard-bitten parents, bullies, sisters getting raped, and “fear of falling off a mountain of success.” One girl pushed through tears throwing down bars about her mother’s drinking, “her cheeks deflated like old birthday balloons.”

DJ Ca$hera turntabled tunes that artfully reflected the poets’ words. The MC shouted out the numbers we wrote on our boards, and his playful comebacks to some of our votes encouraged the students in the audience to join in. Anytime a poet got a score of 9.0 or lower, the audience chided our judgment by yelling “listen to the poem!!”

Next we judged the entire team of poets from each school. Each group performed one poem together, succinct, snappy and sophisticated.

In the end all of the young poets — twenty or so –hopped onto the stage to hear the winners. While waiting for the decision, they cheered and hugged and jammed to DJ Ca$hera’s rousing wind-up.

Whitney, unharnessed, made friends with the high schoolers sitting behind us, squirreling her way under Beth’s chair, encouraging them to rub her ears. We had to dig her out from under there when it was time to leave.

On the way out we met Eric Coval, the Maine East spoken word coach. Eric’s brother, Kevin Coval, Chicago’s unofficial poet laureate, created LTAB 19 years ago.

It was only 1:00 in the afternoon when we breezed back onto Michigan Avenue, fully entertained and far too stimulated. Now we’re checking the online schedule to see if we can find a time slot to come back and judge again. #LTAB is still looking for volunteers, no experience necessary, The slam continues through March 17, shifts are available weekdays and weekends, and you can sign up here.

Tickets still available for the final rounds of Louder Than A Bomb at Chicago’s Auditorium Theater on Sunday, March 17, 2019. Look for me there.