Oh, I Think So

I am once of those who believes in libraries.  It saves money and I am exposed to a huge variety of books for which I don't have to pay.  Even better -- I can snap up CDs, take them home and listen to them, then decide if I want to copy them.  There are art exhibits at the main library.  As long as you have a library card and have made a reservation, you can use the library's computers for things as mundane as passing the time with a game. On the weekend, I listen to NPR in my car as I drive around on errands.  There are shows that feature musicians and music, there are interviews with authors and book reviews.  If I hear about a book or CD that seems interesting to me, I go to the library website and reserve it.  When it comes in, they give me nine days to come and get it. Here's my rule for reading a new book:  If I get to the page that is my age and I am still not into the book, I ditch it.  I got this from an interview I read with Nan...

While I am neither beautiful nor pretty and while I am charming and clever, I am also a tap dancer  and not a particularly good one.  Last week I went to Friday Night Tap Jam at the American Rhythm Center in Chicago and it was awesome.  Bril Barrett, professional tap dancer, runs it and it is every sort of terrific. How Friday Night Tap Jam works is like this:  Everyone gets in a big circle.  Each person has four bars and it goes around the circle, everyone improvising whatever tap moves they feel like offering at that moment to those four bars.  There are some sensationally talented, longtime students of the art who do magical ethereal things when it gets to them, people like Bril who runs M.A.D.D. Rhythms, the professional tap company, and another guy who had such flair and was so smooth and who brought out such different awesome steps each time it was his turn that I told my sister I wanted to marry him (except I am ancient and he is young) and she pro...

Chicago is a city with a well-publicized hard winter.  Detroit, Cleveland, St. Louis, Kansas City, New York, Boston, Minneapolis-St. Paul also have well-publicized hard winters and Detroit does it without much salt and almost no snow removal to speak of.  Chicago likes to whine about it but the freeze and thaw (or freeze and freeze or freeze and salt into watery submission and then that whole mess freezes) situation creates some giant potholes.  Some neighborhoods are worse than others and mine might be one of them. On North Milwaukee in northwest Chicago, there are at least three potholes I know of in a three-block stretch that are about six inches deep, eight inches long, and six inches wide.  The dimensions are stunning and if you hit one at the right angle, it can screw up your tires, the rims, and all that lies-below stuff that's underneath the car that you mostly don't want to think about.  Links, ball joints, your gas tank -- that stuff. This year I'v...

Today was shaping up to be yet another day of nothing, nothing, and more of the same but I looked at my still-living fiddle leaf fig and decided it was a good idea to get it rebooted as the pot was solid roots.  I am not as full of my plant expertise as I once was -- I went through a serious black-thumb phase -- and called the place where I got the plant and asked if they'd repot it. "It's the weekend," they said.  "It's super busy right at the beginning of planting season.  We might have to keep your plant overnight and you can get it tomorrow.  Or can you please come another time?" "I can come next Saturday," I said.  "Right when you open!" "No, next Saturday we're having a special event that will go on all day," they said. "Sunday!"  I exclaimed.  "I will come on Sunday right when you open." They sighed.  "Come now," they said.  "We'll get it done." They said i...

I used to work with two guys who had a joke between them and if they liked you they assumed you would also think it hilarious.  What was the cause of their hilarity?  There was a woman in the office who wore voluminous dresses that they termed caftans and they liked to rewrite songs to include the word caftan.  Dozens of songs, including obscure arias from operas that were no longer performed.  They are two sweet men who really shouldn't work together ever again because they wound each other up and kept winding each other up until the spring wound down and then they would wind it up again.  They were very proud of themselves about this whole thing except that it was funny to just them.  They found it so hilarious that they didn't understand why other people stopped laughing.  It amused them and it didn't hurt anyone but, really, only they got it.  I think I said Ha Ha Ha many times because they were quite clever but, again, it was their joke. A ...

In honor of the arrival of spring, I am taking a break. See you next week!

"Post Secret is an ongoing community art project where people mail in their secrets anonymously on one side of a postcard." That's the idea behind Post Secret.  Make an art postcard with your secret and send it to Frank Warren, the founder of Post Secret.  Frank gets hundreds and hundreds of secrets and he goes through and chooses which ones to share.  Secrets cover the gamut -- a woman who is annoyed that her mother-in-law buys her Costco muffins all the time and, two weeks later, that she was sorry she sent that secret because her mother-in-law is a wonderful, generous, caring woman; how someone didn't commit suicide and a year later was better; how someone wasn't sorry for turning in a criminal who  was doing hard time (it was a Polaroid showing the man celebrating at a Mexican restaurant, drinking a Margarita, and wearing a huge sombrero with a black strip over his face to protect his identity) -- and they're published by Frank every week. It's the...