Chicago Girl: Essays on Art, Politics, and Life

By Nancy S Bishop

A Chicago native and critic collects her essays about theater, books, music, art, architecture, and her beloved Chicago. Nancy S. Bishop is editor and publisher and chief theater critic for Third Coast Review.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Parafine Press
• Release date: Oct 15, 2020
• ISBN: 9780578844657

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Copyright © 2020 by Nancy S. Bishop

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the author except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

Printer’s Daughter Media

ISBN: 978-1-950843-29-9

ISBN: 978-0-578844-65-7 (e-book)

Cover photo: Lake Michigan, looking south toward Navy Pier from the Chess Pavilion at North Avenue beach. Photo by the author.

Book and cover design by David Wilson

DEDICATION

To Andy, Steve, and All Those Boys

TABLE OF CONTENTS

PREFACE: ALL IS TRUE

SECTION 1. ALL ABOUT ME

1.Blossoming: How I Became a Writer

2.My Beginnings: Ernie and Muriel

3.My City, My Neighborhood: Montclare

4.Meet the 3CR Staff: Nancy Bishop, Editor in Chief and Theater Critic

5.The 27 Club: Lives, Finished and Unfinished

6.Telling Tales: All Those Boys

7.The Story of Max, the World’s Greatest Cat

SECTION 2. MUSIC: THE SOUNDS OF MY LIFE

1.How Bruce Springsteen Made a Middle-Aged Woman Believe in the Magic of Rock and Roll

2.The Power of Music: John Hammond, Robert Johnson, and Bruce Springsteen

3.The Rock and Roll Escape Route

4.The Day I Discovered Bluegrass

5.The Glory and Heartbeat of Live Music

SECTION 3: ON BOOKS AND WRITING

1.Short Stories: Fiction for the Digital Age

2.Why Words Matter: Books That Change Lives

3.Richard Powers: Orfeo, and a Dog Named Fidelio

4.David Carr: His Caper Ended Way Too Soon

5.Poetry on the Bus: Jim Jarmusch and Paterson

6.We’re Having a Poetry Renaissance and I Couldn’t be happier

SECTION 4. THE ART OF POLITICS

1.No Pasarán!: The Spanish Civil War in My Dreams

2.Art and Politics Tangle around the Irish Troubles

3.Celebrating the Life and Music of Joe Hill, Executed by Capitalists One Hundred Years Ago

4.My Half-Century as a Card-Carrying Member of the ACLU

5.She’s Beautiful When She’s Angry: This Feminist Film Will Amuse and Infuriate You

SECTION 5. TECH AND TOOLS

1.Timeline of My Life in Technology

2.I Love Type: My Lifelong Love Affair with Letterforms

3.Technology Disruption: The Revolution Happened While We Weren’t Looking

4.Technology and Romance in Spike Jonze’s Her: Samantha vs. Galatea

5.Analog Rhapsody: An Essay on Typewriters

6.Lovable or Sinister, Robots Rule Industry, Technology, and Culture

SECTION 6. LIFE ON STAGE AND SCREEN

1.Hanging Out at O’Neill’s: Long Day’s Journey to Become a Critic

2.Feasting on Drama and Lit in Tennessee Williams’s New Orleans

3.Oh, Roger, the Balcony is Closed

4.Style and Shadows in the Vienna of The Third Man

5.Reliving the Sixties: Inside Llewyn Davis

6.True Detective: It’s Weird, It’s Over, and So Is My Obsession

7.A Glimpse into the Surreal World of Filmmaker Guy Maddin

SECTION 7. STORY ARCS OF ART

1.An Essay in Which I Ponder the Meaning of Art

2.Troubling Questions about Art: Who Gets to Tell Our Stories?

3.Narrative Art: Archibald Motley’s Vivid Paintings Light Up African American Life in Chicago

4.Mecca Flat Blues: Where Modernism Began in Chicago

5.The Whole World a Bauhaus: Celebrating the One Hundredth Anniversary (and Remembering the Fiftieth)

6.The Exhibit David Bowie Is Reveals a Cultural Icon, Beyond the Pop

7.A Meander through Art in the Modern Wing with Poet Stuart Dybek

8.Cuba, Land of Hope and Dreams, Music and Art

SECTION 8. FARRAGO

1.Baseball in Chicago: History, Myth, and Magic

2.On Being a Lefty

3.New Yorker for a Month: My Diary

4.City Lady Blues

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

PREFACE: ALL IS TRUE

This isn’t an autobiography. It isn’t a memoir either. This collection of essays, mostly written over a period of eight years, is an episodic story of my life. Given that most of it was written recently, it emphasizes my post-retirement life and my immersion in writing about arts and culture—primarily theater, music, and arts, with some of it intertwined with politics. And it’s all Chicago—my birthplace, my hometown, and the place to which I always return.

The story skims over most of my marriage to the estimable Donald and our family life with our two sons, Andrew and Stephen, to early boyfriends and later love affairs. It also pays little attention to the decades I spent in the corporate world, working in public relations, marketing communications, and speech writing.

For decades I was a writer for hire—a speechwriter or corporate ghostwriter or PR or marketing manager—working for a couple of public universities, several major corporations, and professional services firms. I always thought of myself as a writer, but for all those years, I never had the intellectual stamina to write about what I was interested in. When I retired (from making money) in 2012, my plan was to become the writer I had always thought I was. Except now I would write about what I was interested in—and only about topics that were fun. No, I don’t want to write your website copy or your marketing brochure, even if you want to pay me a decent sum of money. I saved money all those years so I could say no to things like that.

One of the first things I did when I started writing for myself was to start a blog, an online journal, as a place to deposit my writing and perhaps find an audience for it. This is what I wrote in the introduction to nancybishopsjournal.com.

I believe that it’s my duty as a writer and a human being to reflect on the things that are important to me in this blog—especially after 35 or 40 years of writing whatever my employer was interested in. So this blog is about me, me, me. As the late Roger Ebert said in his memoir, Life Itself, his blog taught him how to organize the accumulation of a lifetime. It pushed me into first-person confession, it insisted on the personal, it seemed to organize itself into manageable fragments. For Ebert, his blog was the beginning of writing a memoir. Writing a memoir in fragments is not my intention here. But you never know.

And as it happened for that great film critic, it happened for me. This collection of essays is sort of a memoir, sort of a picture of my life, like a jigsaw puzzle with a bunch of pieces missing.

In the 2018 Kenneth Branagh film, All Is True, he plays a retired William Shakespeare, at home in Stratford-upon-Avon, reading and tending his garden. One day, as he’s in his garden, a young man stops by to question him. Here’s how the conversation goes.

Young Man: Mr. Shakespeare. I don’t want to pester you. I just wanted to ask you . . .Shakespeare: The best way to get started as a writer is to start writing.

Young Man: Could I just . . .?Shakespeare: I don’t have a favorite play. I admire all my fellow dramatists equally. And yes, I do think women should be allowed to perform female roles, as is the practice on the continent.

Young Man: I just wanted to ask how you knew.

Shakespeare: Knew what?

Young Man: Everything.

Shakespeare: My friend, I don’t even know how to keep the slugs out of the hollyhocks.

Young Man: There is no corner of this world you have not explored, no geography of the soul which you have not navigated. How? How do you know?

Shakespeare: Just what I know . . . if I know, and I

Young Man: But they say that you left school at fourteen and never traveled. Imagined from what?

Shakespeare: From myself.

Young Man: Yourself?

Shakespeare: Yes! Everything I’ve ever done, everything I’ve ever seen, every book I’ve ever read, every conversation I’ve ever had, including, God help me, this one.

If you want to be a writer, and speak to others and for others, speak first for yourself. Search within. Consider the contents of your own soul . . . . Your humanity. And if you’re honest with yourself, then whatever you write, all is true.

And so it is.

For this book, I’ve chosen about fifty of the essays and reviews from my blog, Gapers Block, and Third Coast Review, plus another set of new pieces for this book. In length, they tend to be like newspaper op-ed columns, although some are longer. I’ve categorized them into eight sections on music, books and writing, politics, technology, theater and film, art, and farrago—and first of all, my own personal stories. I hope you’ll browse (because books like this aren’t meant to be read straight through from beginning to end) and find some that pique your interest.

1. ALL ABOUT ME

Blossoming: How I Became a Writer

I’m an American. Chicago born—Chicago, that somber city—and go at things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way. Saul Bellow wrote one of the most memorable openings in American literature. I’ve always remembered those words. When I recently reread my battered old copy of The Adventures of Augie March, those words still resonated.

I’ve no illusions about being another Saul Bellow. While I have dabbled in fiction and occasionally write poetry, journalistic or observational writing—creative nonfiction as it is known today—has always been my main interest. I have been a writer all my life. But I think that I only became a real writer in the last few years. This is how it started . . .

I was always an avid reader. (My mother sometimes chided me for being a bookworm and forgetting to do the household tasks I was expected to do, like watching a kettle on the stove for dinner or keeping my little sister out of trouble.) Some of my childhood and tween-age girlfriends (Dolores, Carol, and Genevieve, who lived on Rutherford) were more interested in boys and clothes, but my friend Joanie, who lived a block away on Normandy, was a bookworm too. We would go to the public library at Sayre Park (later it was in a storefront on Grand Avenue) and load our satchels with books on whatever topic we were reading about at the time. After Nancy Drew and the Bobbsey Twins, I read about all the Greek and Roman gods and goddesses. Some kids’ history books. Then I discovered the baseball shelves. (This was just about the time I became a Cubs fan.) I read all the histories of major league baseball teams and plenty of player biographies. Joanie and I would walk home and sit on my back porch or on a bench in her backyard and read. That’s what I remember most about my childhood summers. Words, words, words. That’s how it started.

The first time I remember writing was for the Harriet E. Sayre Grammar School eighth grade newsletter. I was the editor. And it was mimeographed, of course. And I wrote in my red diary, sometimes noodling short poems. In junior high, I wrote a news column for the neighborhood paper—it was called Leaves from the Branch. The branch was the Steinmetz High School branch I attended (yes, still at Sayre School). When I finally got to the real high school, I was a reporter for and finally editor of the Steinmetz Star. I loved that, especially going to the printer to read proofs and make final corrections every two weeks.

In college, first at UIC and then at Mizzou (the University of Missouri in Columbia), I took composition courses and poetry writing. At UIC (then located at Navy Pier), I was a reporter for the Pier Illini, which was housed in a barracks-type building at the west end of the pier. It’s gone now of course. I loved my years at the pier and remember my many friends, most of whom lived in Hyde Park, a world away from my neighborhood on the northwest side. Years later, in 1965, UIC moved to a real campus on the west side of Chicago and became a four-year school.

For my last two years, I went to journalism school at Mizzou. I wrote for the Maneater, the unofficial student newspaper. And even more importantly, I was co-editor (and the first woman in that role) of Showme, the Missouri humor magazine. All the major universities had humor magazines in those days: Illinois’s Shaft, Alabama’s Rammerjammer, Harvard’s Lampoon, Michigan’s Gargoyle (which still exists). Showme was funded by the U so we had to put up with censor reviews. All the magazines were slightly raunchy. The humor involved beer and male-female relations, but this was the fifties and sixties, so the raunch was very mild.

At Mizzou, I took the best course I ever took in all my university years, graduate and undergraduate. It was a poetry writing class with John Neihardt, a poet and historian of Native American culture and religion. I still have a folder of the poems I wrote in Professor Neihardt’s class. There were twelve or fourteen students in the class, and in each class, we read and critiqued each other’s poems. And sometimes Neihardt would read to us from his poetry or one of his books, like the famous Black Elk Speaks, the story of the Lakota visionary and healer.

Then I graduated, got married, and went to work. For the next fifty-plus years, every job I had involved writing—reporting for two newspapers, then jobs in university publications, and corporate jobs in internal communications, press relations, marketing communications, creative services, yada yada yada. I wrote news releases, newsletter articles, brochures, speeches, advertising copy, white papers, presentations, and memo after memo after memo. But in all those years, I never wrote anything for myself.

Oh wait, early in that period there was a six-year child-raising stretch where I did do some writing. I had two boys, three years apart, and I always put them to bed for naps, later known as quiet time since we all knew no one was sleeping. They were upstairs in our big old two-story house, so even if they were noisy, they didn’t bother me. That hour of peace and quiet saved my sanity. Sometimes I would just sit and read. But for a long stretch, I would sit at the old, round, oak dining-room table on Maple Street in River Falls, Wisconsin, and write. I was writing a novel, but it was never finished, and it has disappeared into the way stations of multiple moves. As I recall, it was a comic novel in the style of Max Shulman, based on my early years of marriage when my husband and I lived in Cortez, Colorado, an oil boom town next door to the Ute Indian reservation.

Before I retired in 2012, I spent a lot of time planning what I wanted to do. I knew I wanted to write, and I made up a long list of topics for essays. Most of those have already appeared on my personal blog, Nancy Bishop’s Journal. I thought I might write a biography or a book on some aspect of popular culture. (I’m sure there haven’t been nearly enough Bruce Springsteen biographies yet.) I might still do that. But fiction is not my forte or interest. So I doubt there will be any short stories, novels, or plays churned out on my MacBook. Poetry, maybe.

I started writing essays, and after a couple of months, I decided to start a blog, just to have a repository for my writing. I thought maybe my children might like to read their mother’s work someday. (Do you think I can get my sons to follow me on Twitter or sign up for my blog? No. Although I think they occasionally peek.)

So here I am eight years later. A writer. I’ve written 225 essays for my personal website, another 400 theater reviews and art commentaries for Third Coast Review, and another 200 before that for Gapers Block and two other websites. In my focus on theater, I studied at an intense National Critics Institute at the O’Neill Theater Center in Connecticut and I joined the American Theatre Critics Association. In 2016, I started a new website with a few other writers—Third Coast Review—to cover Chicago arts and culture after Gapers Block went on permanent hiatus. Now most of my writing is posted there.

I write almost every day. My work is usually a personal, observational style of writing, where I use my knowledge and experience studying and absorbing art, architecture, design, and theater, and blend it with comments on events and trends of the day. That’s why I call it my journal and refer to my posts as essays.

In his 2011 memoir, Life Itself, Roger Ebert said, Most people choose to write a blog. I needed to. I didn’t intend for it to drift into autobiography, but in blogging there is a tidal drift that pushes you that way. . . . It pushed me into first-person confession; it insisted on the personal. . . . [These words] come pouring forth in a flood of relief.

The career of essayist is a noble tradition. Essays were the minor works of Samuel Johnson, who, at times during his illustrious writing career, wrote twice-weekly essays called The Rambler. They sold for twopence each and were later collected into a book. Later he wrote another series titled The Idler, which was published in a weekly news journal.

Essayist E. B. White once described an essayist as he might today describe a blogger. An essayist is sustained by the childish belief that everything he thinks about, everything that happens to him, is of general interest, he writes in Essays of E. B. White. He . . . enjoys his work, just as people who take bird walks enjoy theirs. Each new excursion of the essayist . . . differs from the last and takes him into new country. This delights him. Only a person who is congenitally self-centered has the effrontery and the stamina to write essays.

I never thought of myself as especially self-centered, but perhaps that is an attribute of the blogger or essayist. In traditional journalism, this kind of non-news commentary was referred to as navel-gazing or thumb-sucking. Many of my daily articles are critical reviews of theater or other arts. Most of the essays in this book begin with a work of art—a play, film, or book—or a cultural event, and then meander off into my own memories and observations. Life is raw material, after all.

My Beginnings: Ernie and Muriel

John Cleese, one of my favorite comedians, was being interviewed about his memoir, So, Anyway. The interviewer asked about his family. (Did I tell you Cleese and I have the same birthday? October 27.) Cleese said that in his childhood, his parents did not get along well and the family moved constantly. He concluded, based on almost no research, that the combination of parental disharmony and constant relocation was associated with creativity.

That started me thinking, not only about the source of creativity, but about my own parents, who seemed to have a harmonious marriage and who never moved. In all the