» Prom Photos

In 1/1000th of a second — faster than you can lip the ch in cheese — memories that will last a lifetime are frozen onto wallet-sized glossy paper.

Captured in that shutter frame are the moments parents want to frame and display on fireplace mantels. Teens will trade the images between classes. It’s a rite of passage you can hold in your hands: prom photos.

“Chin this way, head down just a bit,” photographer Rob Paino said at El Segundo High School’s prom Saturday. “Chin down, gentleman, just a bit more. Big smile!”

Ruben Figueroa, 18, wearing a zoot suit and a fedora hat, had one hand on his girlfriend’s back, another by her elbow. On “three,” they smiled broadly.

His date, Emily Curtin, explained the significance of ritual — the part they’d remember.

“It’s not the picture,” she said, “it’s the moment.”

Millions of such moments are captured this time of year, when teenagers across the nation don gowns and tuxedos for this hallowed high school tradition. And like a lot of high school traditions, it can be exciting, giddy, and, as many adults will remember, a little awkward.

Here in 2004, technology has made for some changes. Rather than wait three weeks for the photographs to arrive by mail, couples can review pictures on a computer screen and select their favorite.

And due to the influence of the movie “Dumb and Dumber,” which featured two dweeby characters in pastel tuxedos, traditional black tuxes are so five years ago. Retro colors are back, Paino said. Pick any school dance today, and you’ll find baby blue and cream orange ruffled suits, top hats with matching canes, and heavy gold chains worn ostentatiously around the neck. The El Segundo prom, held at Ft. MacArthur in San Pedro, even included a couple with a kilt and matching dress.

High-tech advances and cultural shifts aside, much of prom photography remains the same. The cheesy backdrops. The stilted poses. The uncomfortable closeness of “just friends” cuddling up for a picture.

“Look right here. I’ll take two pictures,” one photographer said. “One, two, three big smile!”

Bradley Harris’ lips were twitching. As the photographer counted to three, he waited until 2 1/2 to display his toothy grin. A bright flash illuminated the couple’s faces, and then, a sigh of relief.

“It was kind of weird; they were pushing us close,” the 17-year-old said of the pose.

His date, Christina Pellican, 17, compared the two pictures on the computer screen.

“I like two,” she decided.

Picture No. 2, not much different from picture No. 1, showed the couple standing in front of a simple, not-too-cheesy magenta backdrop with clouds and twinkling stars. He wore a classic black tuxedo, she a flowing, light blue dress.

This is the busy season for Paino’s photography studio, which handled five other school dances last weekend. Typically, his company will gear up for 50 promseach spring.

“I’m a firm believer this is the most important picture of their high school career,” Paino said. He recalled his own prom photos, which his father’s company took. “Being in the yearbook is not something as important as prom pictures.”

Hierarchy

At his company, Albert and James Photographers, there’s a hierarchal chain of jobs based on experience, Paino said. The most coveted position is the group photographer, who handles large clusters of teenagers who want to be photographed together.

“It really is a different ballgame,” he said. “It’s a shot in the dark in many cases; you have to get 15, 20, 30 smiles.”

Matt Roberts, who graduated from El Segundo High, led one such assembly. His group of 16 people decided to take a group shot, and he played cashier, trying to collect $80. Packages for couples range from $8 to $60, and can even come in book or CD-ROM format.

“I still need money from Megan and Adam,” he said. “Oh, and Susan and A.J., too.”

Once assembled, the ladies squeezed onto two “granite” benches, made of plastic. The gentlemen stood behind their dates. But one of the guys, wearing a white suit, was throwing off the all-black tuxedo color balance and kept trying to find the right place to stand.

“OK, we need to hurry up and take the picture,” someone said.

“Dude, I’m real hungry,” another complained.

“Why are we doing this again?”

“Why does he need to be in the middle? It’s way off-balanced.”

The camera flashed, and the group scattered to the dining room.

One step down in prestige from group photographer, though equally important, is the couples photographer. Novices will typically begin their careers as posers. But Paino said that could be the toughest job of all.

“Make sure his hands are on her shoulder blades and not showing any finger tips,” poser Irma Olivas instructed a trainee. The trainee asked the couple to keep their fingers together.

“Very good,” Olivas said in approval.

A lot of posing is based on gut instinct.

“When they first come over, if the couple is close together and touchy-feely, I assume they’re boyfriend-girlfriend,” Olivas said. “I’ll give them a more intimate pose.” Upon giving the couple the once-over, she directs them to stand on a marker in front of the starry-sky backdrop. Immediately, Olivas will put his arm on her shoulder blade, her arm around his waist, and offer gentle commands. Chin up, shoulder down, heads slightly to the left. No, your left. OK, now you’ve gone too far left.

All the while, the couples stand like pliable action figures, contorting to the whim of Olivas.

“I need you two to stand closer to each other,” she said on several occasions.

Some couples snuggled in with no hesitation, while others awkwardly inched closer.

Taking in the scene was Aline Fillers, an English teacher spending the night as a chaperone. She remembers at her senior prom, when there was only one photographer, she and her date stood in line for an hour and a half.

Fillers was in awe of how beautiful and elegant the students looked, in contrast to her own senior class of 1962. With a laugh, she recalled her own prompictures.

“I couldn’t remember looking that geeky,” she said.

By 9:30 p.m., the line for photos had stretched to a hundred deep. Earlier in the evening, photographers spent three minutes for each couple. By now, they’re shooting three couples every five minutes.

Tough Question

At one point, Olivas saw a couple approaching and knew she had to ask the single most uncomfortable question a prom photographer can ask.

She looked at the young man square in the eyes and asked: “Do you want to stand on a box?”

This is not the first time that Jeremy Anderson, a 17-year-old senior who is 5 feet 5, has been posed this question at a school dance.

“I’m not standing on a box,” Jeremy snapped back. “Don’t want a box.”

His date, freshman Colleen Murphy, stands 5 feet 6, but looked about 5 feet 10 with her heels on.

“She’s taking off her shoes,” he told Olivas.

Colleen appeared visibly irked.

“See, now you’re in trouble,” Olivas jokingly tells him. But sensing he wouldn’t budge, she put aside the booster box, about the size of a round birthday cake. But Colleen was equally adamant.

“Why should I have to take off my shoes?”

“Because it’s my senior prom. I’m a senior,” Jeremy said. “I’d laugh at somebody if they stood on a box.”

Prom photos show only from the knees up, Colleen told him, so why make a big fuss?

“It’s about the surroundings,” he said as couples waited in line. “I was here last year, and instead of a circular box, it was a big box with steps leading up to it.”

Colleen rolled her eyes and grudgingly took off her shoes. “He cares too much about how it makes him look.”

The photographer brought the couple back to the moment: “One, two, three … big smile!”

The shot done, Colleen put her shoes back on and, still slightly peeved, the couple walked away.

But look on the computer screen, and there’s Jeremy and Colleen, two vibrant-looking teens gushing with youthful delight.

All signs of petulance had disappeared — just a moment in time when a group of friends were having the time of their lives.

—Los Angeles Times, 5/21/2004

» Grand Slam, Thank You Ma’am

We stand here in 2009, our collective pants pockets inside out, hands upturned with a penniless shrug.

Denny’s, the chain diner responsible for lengthening breakfast into a 24-hour enterprise, feels our pain. During its commercial on Super Bowl Sunday, it “surprised millions of Americans” (so exclaimed the press release) by offering a free Grand Slam breakfast Tuesday from 6 a.m. to 2 p.m.

I, ever opportunistic and eager for free pancakes, took Denny’s up on their offer.

Grand Slam No. 1
Harwood Heights, 5:36 a.m.

A new day dawns with the promise of high cholesterol. At Denny’s No. 1, the manager gives a pep talk to his staff: “Good luck today. Pace yourself.” Instead of the usual single cook, there are three working. The excitement is palpable.

For those to whom “bacon or sausage?” is a veritable Sophie’s Choice of decision-making, Denny’s Grand Slam Breakfast is a blessed reprieve. You get two bacons andtwo sausages, along with two eggs and two pancakes. The only issue facing me is how I want my eggs prepared. I tell them sunny side up.

Within seven minutes of sitting down, Slam No. 1 arrives.

I think of the many firsts in my life. This ranks up there. The syrup mingling with the sunflower yellow yolks on the plate, a dance of sweet and savory, emulsified into a singular taste sensation. I slosh the sausage through the yolky-syrupy mix. The bacon is crisp and oily. The pancakes are buttery and ethereal. I take a sip of grapefruit juice and sigh.

Grand Slam No. 2 
Schiller Park, 6:22 a.m.

There are no spaces left in the restaurant lot, so I park in an adjacent apartment complex — risking a tow, but confident that they can’t tow us all.

I wait all of three minutes, then I’m seated at a table still wet from being wiped down. Next booth over, a woman chatters into her cell phone, her voice almost in disbelief that breakfast is free. Free.

I choose my eggs scrambled this time. And milk. It arrives 14 minutes later. The bacon is not as crispy, cursed with a flimsy, pliable texture. The eggs are 30 seconds overdone. The pancakes don’t have that golden hue, a sign they’re pushing them onto plates as fast as they can almost cook them. But the price is right.

Grand Slam No. 3 
Franklin Park, 7:08 a.m.

Oh, is it positively festive! Eight balloons float above the cashier stand. A security guard hovers, watching for riff-raff. But there is none, as there is no wait. The server, glances at me and asks, “Eggs?” He cuts down the waiter-customer interaction to the fewest words possible. “Over easy, my man,” I respond.

No. 3 arrives in an astonishing 90 seconds. But it is beginning to all taste the same. Dreams of sweet and savory are now just ponderous realities of salt and high-fructose corn syrup. If I take just one bite from every food item on the plate, it still counts, right?

Grand Slam No. 4
Melrose Park, 7:41 a.m.

I fight with a fat woman over a parking space, who glares icy daggers and eventually wins. Inside the restaurant, there is a 14-minute wait (an outrage, considering my need for instant gratification).

I am running out of creative egg preparations, so I go with no-cholesterol, substitute Egg Beaters. I will not make that mistake the next time. It is the Alpo of eggs. It is flavorless and evil. Worse yet, my sausage links have shriveled into dried lumps of brown matter.

The decline is precipitous. Cranberry juice fails to calm my nerves. However, the lady who took my parking space appears to be enjoying herself.

Grand Slam No. 5
Oak Park, 8:57 a.m.

In three hours, my mood has changed from joyful to blinding rage. My stomach aches, and my esophagus is lined with a shellac of grease in need of scraping out.

This Denny’s has never been this full. The wait is half an hour, the manager says. The 60 or so people in line are too loud.

Twenty eight minutes later, I am sitting in the far back corner. I don’t even say a word to the waiter; I simply release a series of guttural sounds and labored finger points. I resort to tomato juice and eggs-over-hard.

Another 10 minutes later, I stare at a plate that has lost its thrill, that magic. I poke aimlessly with the fork — is it weird to have a moral objection to breakfast sausage? Just as I take my third bite, a woman at the next table flings her arms, striking the glass of tomato juice, its contents cross-haired at my new pair of jeans. Red, viscous liquid spills all over. Now might be an appropriate time to throw in the white flag of surrender.

It is over, 345 grams of fat and more than 4,100 calories later (though I didn’t finish it all). Many have braved long lines to eat free what ordinarily would have cost $6.

This is America.

— Chicago Tribune, 2/6/2009

» The Many Secrets of Richard Simmons

You know what he looks like. The sparkling tank top and barely there short-shorts. That hair.

Perhaps you know he wasn’t always in the greatest shape. A New Orleans boy in love with his hometown food (and it showed), he turned himself into America’s loudest, dancingest, sweatiest, most-recognizable fitness icon.

But did you know Richard Simmons turns 60 this year? Speaks Italian? Read the pope’s color aura (gold, yellow, orange, green)? Did you know that pseudo-Afro on his head is a result of three “horribly painful” hair transplants, 4,000 follicles each time, necessitated after a crash diet at age 19 turned him bald? You may not know that he describes himself as an “extreme Catholic,” who will, in a quieter moment, pray with you. He’ll embrace you, close his eyes and tears will form. He’ll whisper in your ear that God is looking out for you from above, and that He created only one of you, so take care of yourself.

And then, he will burst into a chorus of Captain & Tennille in that inimitable tenor —”Do that to me one more time. Once is never enough!” — just to remind us that, after all, he is Richard Simmons.

But the biggest thing you don’t know about the man born Milton Teagle Simmons is that he’s in on the joke. You may see him as an exercise icon or the butt of the joke —he doesn’t care either way. You can laugh with him or laugh at him, as long as you’re just laughing. This he wants you to know.

*****

And so we find Simmons at WGN studios, having just led the “Morning News” crew in a group cardio-dance. In the hallways, Simmons runs into meteorologist Tom Skilling. Naturally, Simmons accosts him.

Simmons (singing): Tommy, Tommy, Tommy, do you love me?

Skilling: We all love you. How are you?!

Simmons: Tommy, am I a shower, or am I a storm?

Skilling: You are a storm …

(Simmons grabs Skilling by the noggin and kisses his head four times.)

Skilling: Oh, are you something else!

Today is one of the 200 days each year Richard Simmons is on the road, giving motivational speeches, posing for fan pictures or promoting whatever new product he has out. This time, he’s in Chicago because his “Sweatin’ to the Oldies” — the “Citizen Kane” of workout videos — turns 20 this year. (But wait, there’s more! It’s out now in a five-disc DVD boxed set!)

Richard Simmons travels everywhere dressed like Richard Simmons. On this trip, Simmons has five pairs of tank tops and shorts with him, including a crystal-encrusted black top with the word “SWEAT” in ruby red (he has hundreds of different ones back home in Los Angeles). In his carry-on bag are underwear, socks, pajamas and bedroom slippers.

“I’ve never seen him in jeans,” said his longtime manager Michael Catalano. “It’s not his style.” When not at his personal appearances, Simmons does not leave his hotel room. Rarely does he do restaurants because people are always curious about what’s on Simmons’ plate. Also, he thinks those in the same dining room as Simmons get self-conscious about eating in the company of a fitness guru — wouldn’t you feel weird asking for extra bearnaise sauce with Richard Simmons at the next table? So he prefers room service.

For breakfast this morning (he’s in bed by 9 p.m., awake around 4:30 a.m.), the Peninsula hotel staff brought Simmons cereal and fruit — always fruit.

*****

The first word (or so he claims) that came out of baby Simmons’ mouth was a portentous one: “kitchen.” Growing up in New Orleans in the 1950s, Simmons would head to the French Quarter every day after school and sell pralines on the street corner.

By eighth grade, Simmons weighed more than 200 pounds. In his autobiography, “Still Hungry — After All These Years,” he wrote: “While other kids my age began exploring their sexuality, I spent time exploring food. Food became sex for me — it became my pleasure.”

Simmons’ weight made him the target of bullies. The only way to fend them off, he found out, was through laughter.

“In high school, I could get beaten up all the time, or I could be something better. I became the court jester.”

That’s his schtick now. Here is a man who acts on his impulses — he sees, he reacts. It is why Simmons is prone to hugs, seconds after meeting you. He will grab your hand and kiss it with an audible smack of the lips. When he enters a building, he goes through the revolving door twice for comedic effect. It’s campy and over-the-top, and you don’t quite know how to react, except to think, “Ohmigosh … It’s Richard Simmons.”

In the mid-’70s, Simmons opened Slimmons, a health club that catered to the overweight (he still teaches classes there today). The success of his club led to fame and television stardom. He appeared as himself on the soap opera “General Hospital,” and later hosted a syndicated daytime talk show.

Then there are his notorious appearances on David Letterman’s show, going back 20 years now, with whom he has a fractious but entertaining on-screen relationship. Just a few nights earlier, Dave led off his monologue with this crack:

“Here in NYC, what a beautiful day today … it’s sunny and 74 — like Richard Simmons.”

Asked about his relationship with Letterman, Simmons responds: “It’s so hard to talk about him. I don’t really know him.”

Simmons talks while sitting cross-legged on the floor in the middle of the WGN hallway. Again, the impulsiveness — he will grab your arm and sit you down in the middle of anywhere, so you’re both on the same level.

“I do this because I’m supposed to do this. Every morning when I get up, I ask God what he wants me to do, ask him to lead me to the right people to help them.”

His voice breaks. It’s the first of several times this day he’ll cry while reminiscing about his younger days, and how this has shaped his life’s mission. Mention that kids today will live a shorter life than their parents because of their eating habits, and Simmons chokes up, his ebullient voice turned into a whisper.

“All I’ve found are snake-oil salesmen who want to sell these overweight and obese people pills and shots and surgeries. I didn’t think that was ever going to happen.”

Last year, his celebrity reached Capitol Hill. Simmons worked with Reps. Ron Kind, D-Wis., and Zach Wamp, R-Tenn., on a House bill giving financial incentives to schools that integrate physical education into their curriculum. Right now, the bill is in a holding pattern, and Simmons doesn’t expect anything to be signed until the next president is inaugurated. But more than the TV appearances, the cookbooks, all his videos combined, he wants to be remembered for this.

*****

One big thing you and I don’t know about Richard Simmons is his personal life. He rarely discusses it, and when prodded, says there is none to speak of.

“There are sacrifices you have to make. I don’t have a lot to offer one person. I have a lot to offer to a lot of people.”

He says he has very few friends. He calls himself a loner. He lives in the Hollywood Hills with two maids and his Dalmatians, which he named after characters from “Gone With the Wind” (Scarlett, Pittypat, Melanie). When he’s out of town, he calls his house every night to talk with his dogs, and sing to them.

He says his life companions are the fans who line up for hours to tell Simmons their life stories, who sum it up in the few seconds they have together.

The day brings him to a Walgreens in Western Springs, where he is greeted by 200 or so people.

“Hiiiiii everybody!” Simmons practically yells out. He walks past the stacks of Pringles Cheddar Cheese chips on sale, past the cashier and plops himself on top of a table.

He has had a costume change since the WGN appearance earlier — Simmons now sports a blue “Sweatin’ to the Oldies” tank, with blue-and-white striped shorts that barely cover his upper thigh.

The first person waiting for him is Joan Ochwatt, who is 72 but looks several decades younger. She credits Richard Simmons. Ochwatt has built an exercise room in her Willow Springs home, where she works out to Simmons’ tapes every day.

“I used to wear this shirt,” Ochwatt said, showing off an extra-large Richard Simmons T-shirt. “And look at me now!” She poses with the “after” exuberance of a before-and-after shot.

One high school boy, a football player type, asks for a picture. Simmons takes a few steps back and, with a running start, jumps on the kid, wrapping his bare legs around the waist of the visibly bewildered student. Camera bulbs flash. “Straight to the Facebook page,” the student said, catching his breath.

Simmons spots a woman eating ice cream in line. “What are you eating?!” Richard shouts. “Security!”

Just as quickly, the moment turns quiet. An obese woman approaches Simmons. Even surrounded by people, no one can hear what the two are saying to each other. You see they are staring into each other’s eyes. Simmons whispers something, and she nods. He grabs her by the hand; they bow their heads and begin to pray together.

Long after the crowd disperses and night falls in Western Springs, Simmons wants to find a quiet place to talk.

He heads straight into the employee washroom. He plops right down on the spotless floor, cross-legged. He takes several deep breaths. The past two hours — the people, their stories, the emotional feedback — have overwhelmed him.

Richard Simmons begins to weep again.

“I just hope I help some people, that’s all.”

Minutes later, he’s back by the cosmetics aisle, singing snatches of music and posing for group shots with the Walgreens staff just as they return to their shifts. And his audience is laughing, as they always do, just as he wants.

—Chicago Tribune, 6/4/08

» Plan D

Reality show contender Dale Levitski lost “Top Chef,” lost his dream restaurant, then his mother and finally his spirits before re-emerging at Sprout. How fitting. 

A plan was hatched. The moment his name was announced, they’d jump-tackle him onstage, ruffle his Mohawk on live television. That’s how sure the other contestants were that Dale Levitski would win “Top Chef.” Levitski would accept the $100,000 — money that would help launch his downtown Chicago restaurant, his dream restaurant, an upscale diner called Town & Country.

It was written in stone. Levitski sailed through auditions for the Bravo cooking competition on charm, and through 14 episodes on ability. His pedigree was golden: Deleece, Blackbird, and head chef at La Tache and the acclaimed Trio Atelier.

Then the host announced the winner, and it was someone else. Second place wins nothing, and Levitski came home with $50, all he had. The months dragged, and Town & Country drifted from his grasp. With no income, he was evicted from his apartment. Then came word about his mother: Doctors found a lump in her breast. The depression came, the weight packed on, he alienated his closest friends. How did it go wrong for a chef on the verge of becoming the next Rick Bayless or Charlie Trotter?

***

Henry Adaniya found his man in a sandwich.

The owner of Evanston’s Trio was looking to replace Grant Achatz, who was leaving to open Alinea, the Lincoln Park restaurant that would be named best in America. Adaniya was rebranding Trio as Trio Atelier, a more casual, bistro version of its avant-garde former self.

It was 2004, and Adaniya found him at La Tache, the Andersonville bistro where Levitski was chef.

In his croque monsieur, Adaniya saw a revelation.

“Dale saw something in food that most people don’t — this emotional factor that food can have,” Adaniya said. “That croque monsieur hit me right (on) the breastbone.”

In Levitski’s hands, the classic French sandwich became a playful interpretation — rosemary ham, with aged Cheddar inside and outside the bread, cooked in a way that one can’t tell when the crisp halo of cheese stopped and the sandwich started.

”That was why I hired him,” Adaniya said.

For 18 months at Trio Atelier, Levitski cooked the best food of his life. Tribune restaurant critic Phil Vettel awarded him three stars, writing “Levitski has risen to the challenge.”

But in January 2006, Adaniya gathered his staff and announced the restaurant would close after 12 years.

“I cried,” Levitski said. “The day the doors to Trio shut, something in me shut down.”

Levitski moved on with an ambitious concept in mind: a 200-seat, breakfast-to-dinner diner downtown called Town & Country.

Around that time, Levitski found himself yelling at the TV whenever “Top Chef” aired. He was also coming out of a painful breakup with his boyfriend. Motivated to move past the relationship, he told himself: “I could out-cook anyone on this show.”

He almost did. He was cast in the show’s third season, in 2007, then strode past the field into the show’s final three. After cooking four courses in the finale (including a poached Colorado lamb with eggplant puree that stunned judges), Levitski thought he’d won.

The host announced the winner’s name, and it was … someone else.

Levitski didn’t care as much about the “Top Chef” title. He needed the money to stay afloat. This is one of the falsehoods of the culinary world, that chefs rake in the money. Even in the whitest of white tablecloth restaurants, the size of the kitchen staff means chefs are paid menial wages — a $25,000-a-year salary for a cook would be generous.

So his savings evaporated, and the kind landlord who let Levitski go six months without paying rent couldn’t afford to let him stay anymore. After months of couch-crashing, he moved in with Sara Nguyen, a fellow “Top Chef” contestant who became Levitski’s closest friend. She moved to Chicago to work for him.

The economy then began to tank, and Levitski couldn’t raise the $4 million necessary for Town & Country. Six-months-until-opening turned into 18 months. This demoralized Levitski. But he felt most guilty for dragging Nguyen into his morass.

For all the good the reality show had done, it transformed his identity from chef into TV persona. Levitski heard it from fans: “You should’ve won,” not, “You’re a great cook.” This reinforced the pity party he threw for himself.

He served tables for a while at Sola, working for chef Carol Wallack, his mentor from Deleece. Curious onlookers snapped pictures as Levitski served Diet Cokes.

One lady told Levitski: “I thought this show would help your career.”

His sense of embarrassment fed his atrophy. Levitski — the chef who used to dance to Madonna songs with his cooks — disappeared from the world.

“It was months,” sister Karin Levitski said. “There was no way of getting a hold of him, and you just sort of give up.”

There were days, Nguyen said, when Levitski stayed in bed and refused to leave his room. He fed himself a Tombstone frozen pizza a day and gained 20 pounds. He drank. He kept his phone off. He could recite plotlines from “All My Children” and “One Life to Live.”

In June came his lowest point: His mother’s breast cancer, diagnosed soon after “Top Chef” ended, became terminal. Joan Levitski, who worked at a Dominick’s bakery in Des Plaines, had been the source of his cooking talent and dry humor.

“That’s when I was really alone,” Levitski said. “The restaurant’s not working out, my mom’s dying, I moved one of my best friends from New York — there was nothing positive in my life.”

His mother’s burial took place on a rain-soaked Friday in October; her memorial service the next day was gloriously sunny. The pain of watching his mother’s last months, when cancer ravaged her brain, lifted.

“I was very proud and happy the day of my mom’s funeral. I had no regrets with her,” he said. “Now it was my turn to move on.”

Levitski began calling everyone important in his life.

He called Adaniya, his old boss at Trio.

“That day,” Adaniya said, “he went from a boy to a man.”

He called Wallack, his old boss at Deleece and Sola.

“The day he called me,” she said, “Dale was back.”

***

In Lincoln Park, restaurateur Mike Causevic was scrambling to open his organic restaurant, Sprout. His first chef wanted to serve a $120 veal filet mignon. Two successors didn’t work out either.

Then the general manager he had hired, Tofer Kristofer, remembered Levitski.

Within 45 minutes of walking into the Sprout space, and five days after his mother’s funeral, Levitski agreed to become its new head chef. He called Nguyen, who screamed on the phone and ran in circles around their apartment.

“The one thing my mom wanted to see before she died was me open a restaurant,” said the 36-year-old Levitski. “I think she gave this to me.”

Just its name, Sprout — the symbolism is not lost on those closest to him.

“He did a 180 once the restaurant fell into his lap,” Nguyen said. “He’s the guy I met on the show.”

Two days after Levitski signed the contract, he and Nguyen were splayed on their living room couch, their noses buried in every cookbook they owned. They settled into a food-film marathon, from “Ratatouille” to “Mostly Martha.” The Sprout menu came together in a few hours — three years of creativity gushed out like a spigot unhinged.

It was a Dale’s Greatest Hits of dishes: a braised beef short rib with dumplings made from truffle flour. Lamb poached in duck fat, with tomatoes, capers, white anchovies, and bread cubes that soaked up the pan sauce and exploded in the mouth.

A new take on his croque monsieur was back.

Sprout, version 4.0, opened a few weeks later — Friday the 13th of November — under executive chef Dale Levitski and sous chef Sara Nguyen. On opening night, the two were served court papers for owing back rent.

“We were in such a good mood, we started laughing,” Levitski said. (They’ve since paid it off.)

One afternoon, Levitski sat at the bar, inspected a head of Romanesco broccoli, signed delivery orders and surveyed the room around him. He wore a Town & Country T-shirt he’d had made years ago.

This 35-seat restaurant wasn’t Town & Country, nor Trio. It didn’t have the glaring lights of the “Top Chef” kitchen. But it’s enough of a start.

So why would he still wear that shirt?

“It’s a reminder that dreams are always a work in progress.”

—Chicago Tribune, 12.10.2009

» Here, All Sales Are Final

Along the desolate, gray-boxed stretch of Elston Avenue lies the sad, tattered remains of an America that once was. These were heady times, when happiness was measured by the inch-count on your plasma TV or the number of language subtitles available on “Nights in Rodanthe.”

Then, our economy leapt out from cruising altitude with neither chute nor cord, and once-mighty retailer Circuit City is reduced to a going-out-of-business sale—the saddest of all sales—where shoppers fight one another for scraps off bones.

After this Sunday, Circuit Cities across the nation close for good, and its 30,000-member workforce (whoever is left, anyway) will join the ranks of the unemployed. Inside the store near Fullerton Avenue and the Kennedy Expressway on Monday, there’s a funereal quality to it. 

Employees wear sullen, indifferent faces, who when asked if a display model Sony Vaio laptop missing nine keys is still $623.99, answer with a mechanical, leave-me-the-hell-alone “yep.” It’s not as if they object to helping, but they’re also texting while ringing up customers at the checkout line, because really, what are they gonna do, fire them?

Yellow “caution” tape crisscrosses entire aisles, like a crime scene. Workers strip metal mounts off walls that months earlier held up $5,000 high-definition TVs (a half dozen remain for $1,300 or so). Wall fixtures, checkout counters, glass cases and hand carts—it’s all for sale here. 

Hanging above all is a poster board counting down the days until Circuit City is no more, and for the next six days, the store is pushing to sell off its remaining merchandise, which one could describe as, oh, scrap heap? Too generous. Bottom of the barrel? Let’s not sully the good name of barrels.

Just the Friday before, CDs, DVDs and computer games each had a dedicated aisle. By Monday, they have all been bunched into one 70-percent-off row of pop cultural tragedies.

One can’t help but empathize with the hardworking artists who toil in creative sweat in the name of art and commerce, but one is also forced to ask: “Is a greatest hits compilation from the Insane Clown Posse really worth $3.60?”

Within these racks we find the career vestiges of “American Idol” castoffs.

There’s Bucky Covington, the country crooner who placed eighth in Season 5, and Constantine Maroulis, who finished sixth in Season 4, and some guy named Josh Gracin, and this gal, and that other dude, and somebody else, and Phil Stacey, whose self-titled CD has a sticker attached reminding all that, “YES! He’s the Phil Stacey you saw on national TV.” 

The “American Idol” brand extends to computer software: Show judge Randy Jackson proudly endorses the “American Idol Extreme Music Creator,” a recording and mixing program for your PC. Quoth Jackson: “This software is the bomb!”

Liquidation sales contain, after all, the word “sales,” and Circuit City employs the sneaky technique of screaming “huge discount!” while jacking the original sticker price to exorbitant amounts. Case in point: “Digital Video for Dummies,” a book Amazon.com says is $24.99 but is first marked here at $63.99—but now “70 percent” off.

But there’s no point in speaking ill of the corporate dead, even if they decide to charge $14.99 (40 percent off!) for four AA batteries. Let us remember the employees, who are the messengers and not the message, and who must be thinking on this sad week, “Oh, how I wish I worked for Best Buy.”

—Chicago Tribune, 3/3/09

» The Best Cakes on the Block

On a stretch of South Fairfax Avenue dotted by Ethiopian restaurants and thrift stores stands a cake maker that has been catering to Hollywood’s A-list for nearly 60 years.

Hansen’s Cakes has produced thousands of elaborate concoctions, from two-story wedding cakes dressed in butter cream and Grand Marnier frosting to specialty birthday cakes made for the likes of John Wayne, Bob Hope and Johnny Carson.

But five years ago, another cake maker came to Fairfax Avenue — not just down the street, not just next door, but jammed into a storefront between Hansen’s bakery and showroom.

Regal Cake Gallery quickly emerged as a formidable competitor.

The arrangement puzzles and amuses those who come across the battling bakeries. With Regal’s display window full of cakes, surrounded on both sides by display windows filled with Hansen’s treats, customers often walk into one shop thinking it’s the other.

Competition between the businesses has gone well beyond who bakes the best cake.

There have been accusations of recipe thieving, chef pirating and sign trickery; claims that one baker secretly called health inspectors out to the other; even a clash over the display of R-rated cake designs. Both bakers say they are trying to achieve detente — but admit it’s hard.

“The employees between the two shops have a good relationship; we speak to each other,” said Jennifer Center, a sales clerk at Regal. “But there’s institutional tension between the two. How can you have a good relationship with your competitor?”

The rivalry belies the sugary happiness that both shops exude. Each bakery is filled with cakes of all shapes and sizes — a champagne bottle with an edible ice bucket, a soccer ball resting on a field of green frosting. A cake castle stands 5 feet tall, with sugar-encrusted spires and a cream ivy overhang.

Kirk Rossberg, president of the California Retail Bakers Assn. and a former Hansen’s employee, says the side-by-side-by-side competition is the talk of Los Angeles baking circles, especially because Regal and Hansen’s are among only a dozen or so high-end specialty cake shops in Southern California.

“It’s gutsy, and pretty bizarre,” Rossberg said of Regal. “It’s a little surprising to go up against somebody that is strong and has such a well-known cake.”

And therein hangs a tale.

***

At Hansen’s, baking cakes is a tradition that family members say dates to 16th century Scandinavia.

Holger “Bud” Hansen arrived in California in the 1930s and set up shop near Farmers Market, moving to South Fairfax between Pico and Olympic boulevards after World War II. In its early days, Hansen’s baked everything: bread, rolls, pastries, cookies and danishes. But competition was tough, and Bud Hansen decided to focus on cakes.

After eating many prop wedding cakes that Hansen’s baked for movie studios, celebrities began ordering the real thing.

Today, hundreds of autographed glossy head shots line the cake shop’s walls.

Bud Hansen’s son, Gary, joined the business just as it was establishing its Hollywood clientele.

In the early 1960s, Gary Hansen got an order to deliver a birthday cake to John Wayne’s boat in Newport Harbor. When he arrived, the boat was offshore. Hansen rented a rowboat, paddled out and banged on the hull.

“What the hell is that racket?” he heard Wayne say.

Hansen — sweat-soaked, with birthday cake in hand — waited as Wayne came to the rail. The movie star invited him aboard and shared a beer with him, Hansen said, and they talked for more than an hour.

“John Wayne became a [regular] customer,” Hansen said.

One cake that became a Hansen’s legend went to the Playboy Mansion in 1965. The organizers of a party requested that its top tier accommodate the ample dimensions of a model, who would leap out, Gary Hansen recalled.

She test-jumped. She got stuck. Someone had underestimated.

Hansen’s chefs rebuilt the top layer of the cake, larger this time, in just two hours.

For the celebration of Bob Hope’s 50th anniversary with NBC in 1986, Hansen’s built a 25-layer, two-story cake that required a crane and four workers to assemble on-site. The cake cost $18,000 and fed 2,800 people.

By that time, Hansen’s had expanded its operation, but in an unusual way. In 1983, the only space available was two storefronts away — a Chinese restaurant was in between. Real estate in the area was scarce, so Hansen’s snatched up the vacant store.

Today, Gary’s son Patrick, 41, oversees 27 employees producing nearly 100 cakes a day. He says the secret to their success is a patented cake mix — a concoction of several hundred ingredients known only to people whose last name is Hansen.

A few degrees’ variance in room temperature can send a batch of batter into the garbage. Refrigerator humidity must be perfect.

Patrick places his cake pans on a composite used for the heat shield on the Apollo space capsule. It costs more than $100,000, but Hansen says he can taste the difference.

Through the 1990s, Hansen’s business continued to grow, and eventually the shop added showrooms in Beverly Hills and Tarzana. One day, Hansen’s got word that the restaurant standing between its Fairfax showroom and bakery was about to shut down after an unsuccessful run as an Ethiopian eatery. The family set its sights on leasing the property and finally uniting its operation.

But then entered Rosa Leung.

***

Compared to the Hansens, Leung is new to the cake business. After immigrating to California from Taiwan in 1979, the slight, bespectacled woman worked as an accountant and ran an import-export business that handled zippers, electrical motors and other steel products.

But she was always interested in food. She was a nutritionist by training, and her father worked in the sugar industry.

Tired from the grind of her export business, she had an idea one day: wedding cakes.

“A happy business,” she said. “It’s one of the reasons I jumped in.”

In 1995, she and her husband bought Regal Cake Gallery, a then-44-year-old bakery in Canoga Park. Within a year, Leung said, she heard that Hansen’s might be interested in selling its business on Fairfax. She spotted the vacant storefront between Hansen’s bakery and showroom and leased it, anticipating, she said, that she would eventually own Hansen’s and simply knock out the walls.

The Hansens dispute her story, saying it was Leung who approached them and offered to buy the business. They said that there was a bidding war for the vacant space and that Leung ultimately made the better offer.

So in January 1999, she opened her second Regal Cake Gallery — right in the middle of Hansen’s Cakes. And she catered to the same Hollywood clientele that made Hansen’s famous.

Regal made birthday cakes for Bill Clinton and Tipper Gore as well as a going-away cake for George Clooney when he left “ER.”

For the movie “American Wedding,” Regal made nine five-tiered cakes used in the banquet scene. Customers who had seen the movie have asked for the same cake so many times that Regal includes it in its catalog, priced at $1,000.

In her kitchen, Leung demonstrates her deft touch with a sculpting knife, smoothing the icing on a cake fashioned like a wedding gown.

She compares it to writing Chinese calligraphy. “Your emotion is in the brush stroke, the speed, the energy.”

It took her only a few sessions in the kitchen to know that the cake business was for her.

“Cakes are associated with warm, happy emotions.”

***

For their part, the Hansens said they were outraged when Leung decided to open shop in the middle of their business.

The family learned from a lawyer that there was nothing they could do.

“I was surprised, unhappy, kind of shocked,” Patrick Hansen said. “But this is the American way.”

Leung says she tries to keep the rivalry out of her mind and to focus on baking the best cake.

“If you have good skill, good quality, good products and good service, that’s all you need for business,” she said. “If people like my cakes, they will come to me.”

Relationships between the two were rocky from the start.

A pastry chef left Hansen’s after 16 years on the job. A month later, he started at Regal.

“She went after our ex-employees,” Gary Hansen said. Leung insists that the chef approached her — and only after leaving Hansen’s. She even made him sign an affidavit saying he initiated contact.

Then, Los Angeles County health inspectors made a surprise visit to Regal. Leung said the inspectors told her that someone made an anonymous complaint against the bakery. The Hansens deny they had anything to do with it.

The Hansens accuse Leung of sending her family members into their bakery to try free samples, so she could figure out what ingredients they were using.

Leung laughs off the charge: “There are other Asian people, not just me.”

One time, Hansen put a sign on the sidewalk pointing to his bakery.

Leung countered with a sign of her own.

The Los Angeles Department of Public Works arrived, she says, and told her that her sign was obstructing the sidewalk.

“What about their sign?” she said she asked. She turned to point — and discovered that the Hansen’s sign was no longer there.

Patrick Hansen denies setting her up.

A few years later, he told Leung that he wanted to install an awning over his storefront and asked her to sign papers giving her approval.

She said that it would have blocked her Regal sign and that she threw the papers away.

Hansen put up the awning anyway. “I didn’t hear from her,” he said, “so I didn’t think it was a problem.”

Leung said she suffered the awning for nearly a year, and finally called City Hall.

The awning came down.

Controversy resurfaced when Regal purchased another bakery, Exotic Cakes of West Hollywood, and placed some adult-themed cakes in the window display on Fairfax. One of the cakes was in the shape of a woman’s bosoms covered in pink frosting to resemble a bikini. The cake was on a pedestal that accidentally tipped over, pressing it against the window in a manner that had passersby aghast. Leung said she didn’t notice, but Patrick Hansen did.

“The neighborhood association got really upset,” said Hansen, whose bakery also makes adult-oriented cakes but keeps the designs in a red binder. “They came in and talked to us, and my dad said, ‘Hey, it’s them, not us.’ “

Leung moved the display cake inside their showroom. Regal later returned the cake to the outside display, this time mounted on a reinforced stand and placed several shelves higher.

***

While not exactly light and sweet, the relationship between Hansen’s and Regal has improved, although the owners won’t go beyond a nod and “good morning” if they happen to meet.

“Sure, I’ll say, ‘Hi, how are you doing, just fine,’ … small talk,” Leung said. Patrick Hansen said things had been less hostile since the 2000 retirement of his father, Gary.

“I think my dad may hold a grudge, just a little,” Patrick said. “He’s not happy with the way everything went down.”

But both stores said the competition ultimately improved each of their businesses.

“When Regal bought it, we started to clean up our bakeries, repainted, got the cobwebs out of our windows and opened up a bigger showroom,” Patrick Hansen said.

Leung said the competition pushed her to conjure up new designs. One recent creation is a four-layer cake fashioned like Tiffany gift boxes.

Regal and Hansen’s hope that a revitalization project planned for Little Ethiopia later this year will bring even more business.

But the competing bakeries continue to astound and confuse customers.

Kimberly Marable, who was recently introduced to Hansen’s Cakes, said she just assumed the three storefronts were one business until someone pointed out the competitors.

“If they’re both getting business, there’s room for opportunity for everyone,” said Marable, who walked out of Hansen’s with a 9-inch French vanilla cake with chocolate frosting for her son’s birthday.

Marable said she loved Hansen’s cakes but might well try one from Regal.

Tamara Valdry, a dance teacher from Baldwin Hills, has been a loyal Hansen’s Cakes customer for nearly 30 years.

On a recent afternoon, Valdry walked down Fairfax toward Hansen’s and saw Regal’s burgundy sign. She had never noticed the other bakery there before. Drawn by the floral baskets in their display window, she wandered in.

For the first time since she was 12, Valdry bought a cake from someone other than Hansen’s — a lemon-raspberry Regal birthday cake for her pastor.

As she walked out, she saw Hansen’s to her left.

And she saw Hansen’s to her right.

“This is amazing,” Valdry said. “It’s so hard to find a good bakery in Los Angeles, and for this to be smack dab in the middle, it doesn’t make sense almost.”

—Los Angeles Times, 4/29/2004

» Green Passion

REPORTED FROM GENOA, Italy — If this Mediterranean port city was just known for its breezy, sun-soaked hills and as the birthplace of Christopher Columbus, those selling points would be enough to satisfy the local tourism board.

But Genoa, Italy’s sixth largest city, has also given the world pesto, the basil sauce that’s now inescapable on Stateside menus each summer: slathered on sandwiches, grilled onto chicken breast, placed atop California-style pizzas and the like. In the nearly 150 years since the recipe was first in print, pesto has evolved (at least in American kitchens) to where it’s no longer that specific green sauce made from those specific ingredients. It is an idea, a catchall word, a culinary term sexier than plain old “sauce.” Olive oil mixed with pureed mint sounds better when you call it “mint pesto.”

But not in Genoa. Never here.

Atop the kneecap of Italy’s boot, in the northwest region called Liguria, pesto is a fact of life. Variations abound. Pesto will contain a combination of basil, salt, garlic, cheese and olive oil. It accompanies pastas such as lasagna or trenette (flat-stranded spaghetti), is spread on focaccia and spooned on minestrone. Some eat it for lunch and dinner seven days a week, others only during holidays. Its influence in Liguria is all the same: Pesto is as integral here as salsa in Mexico or nam pla (fish sauce) in Thailand.

But there lies a distinction. Ligurians are so fiercely protective of pesto, their passion can stupefy non-Italians.

Basil, they say, should come from the western neighborhood in Genoa called Pra. Salt must be coarse from the Mediterranean Sea. Garlic is best from the province of Imperia, preferably the village of Vessalico 55 miles southwest of Genoa. Extra-virgin olive oil must be cold-pressed from the tiny olives of Taggia. And so on, and so forth. The very French notion of terroir rings true here: Food tastes better when its ingredients are from the same land.

When Italians use pesto, little is actually used, perhaps a tablespoonful for every cup of pasta. There are no green oil puddles left on the plate. In Italy, sauce always serves as a flavor enhancer for pasta; rarely will pesto receive top billing. Unlike the cheese-heavy pesto prevalent in American kitchens, Ligurian pesto is aromatic but light, tasting more like fresh asparagus or string beans than an herbs-and-cheese mixture.

A natural obsession

If you could concentrate the quintessence of pesto alla Genovese to one spot in the world, it could well be at Mercato Orientale, a vibrant covered market in the bustling heart of Genoa.

There is enough food on display to make a gastronome tremble: tires of Parmigiano-Reggiano, coils and tubes of salumi, hand-cut pasta as fresh and abundant as the daily bread. Fishmongers sell octopus, mussels and sardines caught hours earlier, with aromas of the sea.

Produce seller Simona Nucera operates stall No. 142 with her husband, Hafid. Simona is a Ligurian native but lived in England for 16 years. She left her advertising job last year and moved back to Genoa for la dolce vita — the sweet life. Now, the Nuceras are living it, selling local fruits and vegetables at the Mercato Orientale.

“It’s very natural to eat pesto,” Simona Nucera said during one busy Thursday morning. “It’s like eating corn flakes in the States.”

A top seller for the Nuceras is basilico di Pra, or basil from Pra. The area of Pra is industrial and gritty, where overpasses and gray factories converge. Yet it is inside its protective hothouses where some of the world’s most fragrant basil is grown (peak season is mid-April through May). Compared to basil found in the U.S., the leaves of basilico di Pra are smaller with a convex shape, like a turtle’s shell. It is less minty and more sweet, the delicate texture of bibb lettuce. At stall No. 142, the basil’s roots remain encased in soil so it’s still “living” at time of purchase.

Equally as crucial is olive oil, and the extra-virgin variety of Liguria is more delicate than those found in the rest of Italy. Tuscan olive oil is more robust, better suited for meat. Ligurian oil is fruitier, lighter and more seafood-friendly for this coastal region. Many Italian chefs look for the word “Taggiasca” on the bottle label. This ensures the oil comes from the sweet, tiny black fruits plucked from the silver-leafed olive trees of Taggia, a town near the French border.

After discussing the merits of pine nuts versus walnuts (both are traditional; the former makes the sauce sweeter, the latter provides a tannic sharpness), the pesto debate intensifies with cheese. Parmigiano-Reggiano, the prized nutty cheese made from cow’s milk, is option one. Pecorino, made from the whey of sheep’s milk (specifically from the island of Sardinia), is option 1A. A mixture of both in equal amounts might be used, or perhaps one slightly more than the other.

Or neither. As many towns in this region are separated by hills, each commune has its own recipe and cooking style. In the town of Camogli, 15 miles east of Genoa, ricotta is favored, giving its pesto sweet tones.

Even if a dozen cooks were given the same ingredients, acute Ligurians will claim they could tell all 12 pesto sauces apart. The difference, they say, is in how the pesto is prepared in the mortar and pestle (the word “pesto” is a derivative of pestle, which comes from the Italian word pestare, meaning to crush). Each hand mashes the leaves with a certain pressure and emulsifies with olive oil at a certain tempo. No two pestos, the theory goes, are ever alike.

Liguria’s pasta

Fred Plotkin is a food writer, Italian historian, a renowned opera expert and spends part of the year living in Camogli (home of that sweet ricotta pesto). He once wrote that Liguria “may be as close to paradise as one can find on this earth.”

His cookbook/love letter, “Recipes from Paradise: Life and Food on the Italian Riviera,” is considered the bible on Ligurian cuisine. To fully breathe in the region’s soul, Plotkin says one must travel to Recco, a town that understands that its identity comes through food.

The workaday town lies southeast of Genoa, a half-hour ride aboard the slow-moving local train. Unlike the pastoral, centuries-old architecture that sprouts along the coast, Recco’s is a patchwork of homely, uninteresting ’60s-era buildings constructed after World War II, when German war planes destroyed the town.

The Recco townspeople had little to rebuild upon after the war ended, but they had a unique cuisine. Centuries earlier, the story goes that a local woman was making pasta and had dough stuck to her hands. Using every last bit of her meager ingredients (the Ligurians are ridiculed for their frugality), she rubbed her palms together and created skinny inch-long twists. The pasta, made with chestnut flour, became known as trofie (pronounced TRO-fee-ay). Trofie al pesto is the best-known dish of Recco.

“There are more restaurants and more bakers and more everything of high quality in Recco than anywhere in Liguria,” Plotkin said.

The most legendary is Manuelina, a restaurant Plotkin calls “the citadel of cooking in Liguria.”

Maria Rosa Carbone and husband Gianni are the current patriarchs of Manuelina, first opened in 1885. The restaurant has an austere sense, with a brick-walled interior, red tablecloths, ornate plates and a large portrait of the woman who founded it, Emanuela Capurro.

The restaurant is known for three dishes. One is a crisp focaccia baked with gooey Crescenza (a tangy cow’s milk cheese). Another is pansotti alla salsa di noci, a heaving ravioli of ricotta and mixed greens, with a sweet walnut sauce.

And, like the town itself, Manuelina is famous for trofie al pesto.

Maria Rosa Carbone, a sweet grandmotherly type, demonstrates her pesto preparation one evening before dinner service. She speaks no English, but her body language is clear.

Carbone picks basil leaves off its stems. She pinches sea salt into the mortar and gestures big with her hands, as if holding an imaginary cantaloupe. The larger and coarser the salt, the better it mashes into the basil, which releases an essence that no food processor could replicate. She minces garlic, removing the core first, because the flavor there is too intense.

She begins mashing with a pestle, a kneading motion heavy with wrist action. She adds a few roasted pine nuts, a few more basil leaves, massaging, kneading, until the mixture turns into a bright green paste. Then a spoonful each of Parmigiano-Reggiano and pecorino adds savoriness and character. Switching to a wooden spoon, Carbone pours olive oil a few drops at a time, until the paste turns shiny, creamy and luscious. It smells like spring.

Finally, it is time to taste. A spoonful is topped on trofie, an al dente bite to the curled pasta. The accompanying fava beans add freshness and texture. Unlike the oft-harsh and intense jar versions, this pesto is mellow and perfumed, reflective of the season.

The colors are vivid, the taste reminiscent on the palate of something familiar. Yet it is miles away from any other dish Stateside with pesto to its name. Everything else is a pale imitation.

Genoa’s culinary contribution to the world, turns out, is also its best-kept secret. 

—Chicago Tribune, 7/11/2007

» The Last Verse

In the 49th year of his life, the poet would rather not beg for bus fare, but it happens. How did it get to this? His life savings is one dollar, in his pocket. Spare change is not just something found in the couch; it means eating dinner tonight.

“I am basically a failure,” the poet wrote on his MySpace page. “I am very poor and am eager to make money with poetry any way I can. I love to get out and I’m willing to read anywhere.”

The poet may have little, but he has his words. They mean everything to him. Adjectives don’t just modify nouns, they penetrate like daggers deep into his prose. Metaphors turn the abstract into color and melody.

He even has the lyrical name of a poet: Thaxter Elliot Douglas III. On the Chicago music scene, he is simply Thax, the rock ‘n’ roll poet. On most nights, Thax — an imposing figure with circa-’70s glasses and a Santa’s beard — lurches onto the stage of a local rock show, gazes into his notebook and reads a poem he wrote just for the band about to play.

Some in the audience will get it, some won’t. But for 30 seconds, Thax and his words hold court.

His resume includes Wilco, Billy Corgan and countless important bands Chicago has given to music. Thax performed for out-of-towners, before The Flaming Lips’ set at Lollapalooza this year. Some consider him Chicago’s poet laureate.

“Thax has a VIP pass to the city,” said Tim Tuten, co-owner of the Hideout. “I know for young bands, when Thax shows up, he’s like a seal of approval.”

When Thax performs onstage, he is home. The unpaid rent … that’s the last thing on his mind. He doesn’t think about the crudely made sign his landlord gave him, stuck to his bedroom wall: “(no money) + smell = sidewalk.” That a city he has given so much to, he said, still views him as a one-trick pony.

Or that he loved someone but has never been loved back.

How did it ever get to this?

* * * * *

Thax grew up in suburban Woodridge in the 1960s, a rural village where gossip carried across town with the wind.

An only child, Thax spent entire days in his bedroom, finding solace in music. He collected vinyl 45s — his first record was Ritchie Valens’ “Donna,” a nickel at the corner drugstore.

Thax’s relationship with his parents, Ted and Gabrielle, was tenuous at best. When he was 10, something changed. He stopped listening to pop music and gave away all his records. Now he wanted to be a composer. He listened to classical music, mostly works by German composers. That’s what his mother heard growing up in World War II-era Germany, in the shadows of the Nazis.

Two years younger than his classmates (he skipped to the 3rd grade), Thax fell deeper into his reclusive world. He eventually moved into the basement. It all could have been typical teenage rebellion and angst … but those images in his head … those demons acting out twisted fantasies … well, this he knew wasn’t normal. Thax drowned them out with Mozart, Haydn and Beethoven.

At Downers Grove South High School, he played trombone in the marching band and acted in theater. Thax played the Wizard in “The Wizard of Oz” and Murray the cop in “The Odd Couple.” He came into his writing style at 15 — strange, non-linear, stream-of-consciousness short stories that flowed from his imagination through the tip of his pen. These words, he thought, held power.

Thax hid a secret from his few friends: he was gay. In the early ’70s, in a small community, homosexuality was hardly accepted, and in turn, society conditioned Thax into thinking he had a mental disease. He wanted nothing more than to be cured of liking other boys.

His parents were sympathetic and hired a psychiatrist for Thax, but the man told Thax to keep his secret to himself.

So he told no one, but those other thoughts … ones he tried to drown out … would not let up.

Thax was 17, and the edge of the cliff was in view. He spiraled into an incessant cycle of questions he could not answer: why it made his life a waking nightmare, why it made him not like girls, why he was overweight, why it made him think about those violent, sexual fantasies that pervaded his dreams.

On a Saturday night, as his parents watched “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” Thax went into the bathroom and swallowed a handful of his mother’s prescription pills. When he awoke three days later in a hospital room, his father was clutching his hand.

Doctors suggested Thax be transferred to a psychiatric hospital, where he stayed for a month, his parents said. Thax was given shock therapy, the theory being his mental state might improve after inducing brain seizures.

Electrodes were planted on Thax’s head. His whole body went numb and his consciousness went last. When he came to, those hideous thoughts vanished, and they have not come back since.

* * * * *

Humboldt Park, July 2006.

The door to the poet’s room only opened halfway. The windows were shut. The fan turned off. The room, no larger than an office cubicle, was squalid and stifling.

Thax sleeps on the floor, because his back aches. Every night, he lays his head on a filthy black pillow. He sleeps beside a garbage bag that’s full, a stereo, a stack of albums and headphones to lose himself in the music.

“I can’t live in poverty like this anymore,” Thax said. “I can’t go begging people for a dollar to take the bus home every day. I’m sick of it.”

He’d pay rent if he had a steady income. Poetry was a labor of love. He was fired from his last job, transcribing radio ads for businesses, nearly nine years ago. To support himself, Thax gave plasma twice a week for six years. Food stamps helped for a while.

Friends said Thax is at his lowest when he’s not performing, which is most of the day.

“He lives life like [he’s] waiting for the government check to come,” said Rich Szczepanski, a good friend of Thax’s. “He feels trapped … he has to lie low and the only place that can be is at home.”

Rich has had countless conversations with Thax about getting a day job, but those usually end in an argument.

So his schedule goes like this: Thax stays up past midnight, reading thick books of Russian poetry and listening to the radio. At 4:30 a.m., he watches “The Andy Griffith Show.” “The BBC World News” at 6, “Saved By The Bell” at 7. As the day begins for most, Thax calls it a night.

“I sleep all day and get up at 4, go to work …”

Thax caught himself midsentence and pursed his lips.

“Heh … go to work … that’s a weird slip.”

“But in a way, I do go to work. The bohemian ideal is that your life is sacrificed for the art and you do what you have to do.”

That night, he’ll perform at Wicker Park’s Subterranean, and it’ll take 45 minutes to walk there. A torrential downpour drenched the city and Thax waited until the clouds cleared to leave home.

* * * * *

The shock of turning 30 shook Thax Douglas to the bone. He had tried three different colleges, still lived with his parents and was working at a hospital admitting emergency-room patients. He felt his life had not been defined.

Thax had been attending the Green Mill Poetry Slam in Uptown. A day after his 30th birthday in 1987, he mustered the courage to perform in front of a crowd. It took 45 minutes to write 191 words.

It began: “It’s wet outside — is it still raining out there? Each raindrop was a tender special aesthetic pointillistic moment that I would have liked to examine in detail — to see what made it tick, but I had a poem to write … “

The audience of 40 or so gave him a hearty round of applause, and that was the moment Thax knew he had something to rely on. His words.

And so began an on-again, off-again relationship with poetry that lasted throughout the ’90s, including Thax hosting a poetry and music variety show called “Thax After Dark” at local clubs. Some of his poems were recorded in studio with renowned Nirvana producer Steve Albini.

His fame took off in 2001 when Thax bought a bus pass and followed the indie-rock group Guided By Voices, reading poems before every show. The endless touring, the different cities, the loud music still ringing in his ears the next morning — this was Thax’s idea of rock ‘n’ roll.

One summer night, Thax was walking out of a North Side grocery store when a couple approached.

“Excuse me, are you the guy that does the poems?” they asked. “We really like it.”

Thax could only mutter a “thanks,” but inside, he was beaming.

“It was a very happy moment,” Thax recalled. “When it started happening every day, that became a positive force.”

He started showing up at local shows nightly. His name grew bigger. The acts he read for grew bigger. Yo La Tengo, The Flaming Lips, The White Stripes, the names went on and on. Thax asked the bands if he could write them a poem and then perform it. The bands would almost always say yes.

But he was seldom paid, and Thax correlated compensation with self-worth. He knew his words couldn’t be quantified in dollars and cents, but still, a man’s got to live. He was taking weekly shots for what doctors called “cerebral allergies.” Certain foods made him sick to the point of affecting his mental health. (Thax stopped taking the shots several years ago.) His frustrations began to surface.

In May, when the Chicagoist blog mentioned Thax, some commenters called him “half baked” and “rambling.”

Thax wrote an angry response: “You dorks are jealous because I’m actually doing something creative. … You jealous [expletive] are pathetic.”

Said friend Mitch Marlow: “For anybody who’s part of the music scene, he’s absolutely respected … but Chicago didn’t really get behind him as much as they could have.”

There was, as some observers described, a one-sided feud with Wilco, an act Thax had read for many times. But when he showed up unannounced in New York a few years ago, hoping to read before Wilco’s set at Madison Square Garden, Thax didn’t get to. A long, irate posting on a Wilco fan site by Thax did not help relations (when confronted by the band, he originally denied writing it).

Thax showed up at the Pitchfork Music Festival in Chicago last month. The temperature that day crept past 100. Thax had a backstage pass, but wanted to go inside the air-conditioned field house. Organizers said that was for performing artists only. He left without reading a poem.

“There’s just a lot of ambiguity as to what Thax Douglas means to Chicago,” says Thax.

“That’s why I’m leaving.”

* * * * *

Thax is adored by bands, club owners and more than 2,200 friends on his MySpace page. Still, Thax has never experienced a real relationship.

Years ago, he fell in love with an author. He was offered a job outside Chicago, moving expenses and all. But Thax said no because he thought this man was the one. He fought hard through shyness to tell him how he felt. But not only did he not love Thax back, but … Thax stopped and said he doesn’t want to talk about it.

“I’m not going to fall in love anymore. It’s not for me. I’m tired of trying.”

A few times a year, he’ll visit his parents, who now live in southern Wisconsin.

“If he was a Nobel laureate, I’d be proud of him, but what he’s doing now, I’m proud of it too,” said his father, Ted, a retired engineer. “As long as he’s happy doing what he’s doing … I wish he had some luck.”

Many view him through the lens of novelty, as the guy who reads poems before rock shows. Thax just wants to be known as a poet. For his words.

And so it has come to this. The week after Labor Day, Thax will leave Chicago. A fresh start is in order, and New York is where artists go to follow their ghosts.

There, he plans to record with a small band backing his poetry. He’ll sleep in the studio for the first few weeks.

“Usually when someone from Chicago is successful, it’s because they’re validated outside of Chicago,” he said.

Thax is happier than ever, but he feels he’s exhausted his city of 48 years.

“People like Thax Douglas are doing something more important than a 9-to-5 job,” said Justin Baren, bassist for The Redwalls. “It might be a good step for him. It’s where Thax would probably be more appreciated.”

* * * * *

After the rainstorm passed, Thax arrived at Wicker Park’s Subterranean and climbed the stairs into a dimly lit, cavernous room, his tote bag in tow.

“Thax!”

Through the dark, people immediately recognized him.

Thax found Chad Matheny, in town from Florida with his band Emperor X. Thax spoke up in his quiet, plaintive voice.

“I want to do a poem for you.”

“Oh God, yeah! I would be honored.”

Thax sat by the merchandise table with his spiral notebook and pen, deep in thought.

Then he stepped stage center, a man alone and his words.

“Turned ship winks a wake like a locust rush up to a curious eye island. The eye revels in the shower of luminous eye icons, the eye party being so much fun the original ship is forgotten, even though that’s what the eye island was searching for.”

“He totally understands,” Matheny said. “It just made sense. Anyone who writes lyrics knows exactly what he’s doing when he writes.”

The few dozen in the crowd applauded Thax’s efforts. He stepped off and stood near the front of the stage. As the music began, his head bobbed side-to-side to the thump of the bass. He tapped the top of his belly in rhythm. Then, without an encore for band or poet, amidst the sounds of tired patrons filing out, the show ended, and the poet began the long walk home.

—Chicago Tribune, 8/18/2006

» Are Funny Women Intimidating?

We met at a New Year’s Eve party. She was blond, I was nervous. So I slipped in a joke, something stupid from third grade, but it did the trick. A first date was granted, followed by three more. I found her affable, warm, possessed of most excellent hugging skills.

But the three most peculiar seconds of my past year occurred shortly after my relationship with this woman – who shall hereafter be referred to as “Woman” – became official.

We drove one night southbound on Lake Shore Drive. I, man I was, attempted to retort something she said with a humorous response, hoping to elicit laughs.

Woman laughed. All was proceeding as planned. What happened next threw me for a loop.

She answered with a funnier line. At least twice as funny as the funny response I had made moments before. The exact line of conversation and punch line escapes me, but this is irrelevant. What mattered was the manner in which I reacted.

The normal physiological response would be to laugh, but here, I did not. For three seconds, I froze in confusion. The thought entered, God forbid, that this girl might be funnier than me.

Look. I am no chauvinist. The premise that a woman could not, should not be funnier than a man was absurd and offensive. Still, at the root of my reaction was a question I had never considered: Are men intimidated by funny women?

I turned to a source with scores of funny women – Chicago’s improv community – to find the answer. While it would be reckless to make a blanket statement, conversations with nearly two dozen improvisers bore a similar refrain: Not everyone gets them, or their jokes.

*****

Here’s what ends up happening: Although male improvisers date both within and outside the community, many female improvisers only date fellow performers.

Susan Messing, one of our finest improvisers – male or female – began performing 23 years ago when women in Chicago improv were such an anomaly that she was referred to as ”the girl.” When I asked how many improvisers she has dated, she laughed: “I went to the 25th anniversary of iO, looked around and said, ‘You, you, you, you, you …’ ”

Messing resisted dating non-improvisers for years (“civilian” is the favored term), because in too many instances someone said, “Oh, you’re a comedian, say something funny.”

“I have to be with someone who gets my gig,” Messing said, “someone who doesn’t think it’s weird or exotic or insane.”

Emily Candini, who started as a stand-up comedian and now performs at iO and Annoyance, speaks, too, of civilian men who complained that she was too intimidating.

“I’ve been told that I’m not the type of girl that they could take home and meet their parents,” she said. “I’ve had guys that say I embarrass them. It’s hurtful, but I’m not going to fundamentally change who I am.”

There’s Lyndsay Hailey, whom I sat down with one night at iO after her one-woman show, “30 Percent Chance of Hailey.”

“I tried my hardest never to date improvisers,” said Hailey, all toothsome smile, flowing brown hair and fabulous Virginian accent.

Beneath her polite veneer, Hailey has the capacity to blare into a megaphone and rap about a man’s nether region, as she did that night.

Hailey spoke about a non-improviser she dated for 18 months. Last Halloween, this boyfriend decided he and friends would dress as Michael Phelps’ relay swim team, in matching Speedos and warm-up suits. Hailey wasn’t feeling well and hadn’t planned to go out, but grudgingly joined the boys last minute. Scrounging around her apartment, she found khaki pants and brown twine.

“I’ve always done funny, never the sexy Halloween costume,” she said. “So I decided to be human hair. I wore a sign that said ‘Team USA’s back hair.’ ”

When the boyfriend saw Hailey’s outfit, he said: “What the hell are you? Why are you always trying to embarrass me?”

Hailey called that night “awful.” She had complained to her closest friends for some time about this boyfriend, how she felt suppressed and couldn’t be herself. “It just wasn’t fostering a creative environment for me.”

*****

At any given moment, 3,000 students are enrolled in improv classes in Chicago, the “big three” being The Second City, iO and Annoyance Theatre.

Many who take a beginning-level class have no aspirations of performing full time. Then there’s the cadre of serious students who set their sights on Chicago (with “Saturday Night Live” in the distance), ones who spend thousands of dollars and commit the three or so years it takes to complete training at all three schools. At least a third, if not half, of those students, Annoyance teacher Rebecca Sohn told me, are new arrivals to the city with glints in their eyes and are here just to study improv.

These students shuffle from night class to night rehearsal to late night and weekend performances. There’s hardly time for fraternizing outside the community; the social circle is built into the schedule.

“You immediately have so much in common. You’re in the same world, know the same people, seen the same shows, probably studied with the same teacher,” said Jennifer Estlin, executive producer at Annoyance (she and Annoyance founder Mick Napier have been together for 14 years).

But there’s a deeper, more intrinsic reason that attraction might occur. It’s based in the tenets of improvisation itself.

Teacher and iO co-founder Charna Halpern said in the first day of her level-one class that much of improv is based on agreement. Trust your fellow actors. Don’t have preconceived ideas when you walk onstage. Start with a blank canvas and discover the moment together. Support, respect, listen to your partners onstage.

“There’s a connection in class,” said Conner O’Malley, who met his girlfriend Aidy Bryant a year ago while performing. “You learn a lot about someone when you’re performing with them. An improv scene isn’t my scene or the other person’s scene. It’s our scene.”

One Friday night, I stopped by Second City’s Training Center, where a group was rehearsing for that evening’s performance of “Oh Banana.” During a break, director Anne Marie Saviano told me she has watched countless students perform, get drinks afterward, then discreetly leave together. She chalks it up to the hormonal ebbs of 20-somethings, amplified by the rush of endorphins created onstage.

“You learn more about someone in one or two improv classes than you do on six dates,” she said.

*****

The argument, I realized, might not be that female performers can’t date noncomedians, but that they gravitate toward funnier men. And Chicago’s improv community is a veritable meat locker, with men outnumbering women at least 3-to-1.

Annoyance performer/teacher Rich Sohn summed it up best: “Laughter is an involuntary noise of pleasure coming from someone. It’s not that far from an orgasm.”

“Over lunch at Wrigleyville’s Uncommon Ground, Jet Eveleth recalls a recent conversation she had with her mother.

“She was concerned. I just had a relationship with an improviser end a few months ago, and she noticed a trend,” Eveleth said. “She said, ‘Do you think you’ll only continue to date comedians?’ ”

The redheaded Eveleth exudes a 1950s Life magazine elegance about her. So it can be jarring to watch her perform – debonair one minute, caustic the next, a whirlwind of physical comedy and pretzel contortions.

Nearly all of Eveleth’s female improv friends, she said, are dating improvisers. And with the exception of a few men (who were the artistic type anyway), it has been the same case for Eveleth. At one point, she had a three-year live-in relationship with an improviser on her team.

“I’m attracted to artists and comedians because I don’t want to be strange,” said Eveleth, who began a relationship last month with an improviser she has known for seven years. “I want to be able to laugh, and I want to be able to elicit laughs. It’s important that the relationship goes both ways.”

There are those who try avoiding civilian men altogether.

“Boring,” was the way Natalie Sullivan described them.

“They don’t get why I spend my time doing something that often seems frivolous and nonsensical,” said Sullivan, a performer at ComedySportz and a Second City Touring Company understudy. “It’s hard to explain to someone who holds a normal and lucrative 9-5 (job) why I work so hard to get paid so little. … I don’t want to explain these things to my significant other. I want him to get it.”

*****

Even in 2009, we live among antiquated conventions. No matter how much we push against what we know feels wrong, gender stereotypes still are embedded in us.

I asked Bernard Beck, associate professor emeritus of sociology at Northwestern University and a stage actor for 30 years.

“Even after a long period of transformation of women’s role in society, older, traditional images are still on everyone’s mind,” he said. “In relationships, women seem to be pleased more often with somebody who shows power, ingenuity and can put on a good show. Men seem to more often look for a good audience. And if the person you want to be an audience to you is instead seizing the limelight, that may not be the bargain you’re looking for.”

Those different standards might not be in plain view, but they are there. Eveleth teaches a class in physical movement at Second City and Columbia College Chicago. One lesson in slapstick involves pratfalls (comedically falling on a banana peel). She’s noticed a trend in her students: When men fall, people laugh.

“When I’ve fallen in public, people get concerned, say I’m crazy or drunk,” Eveleth said. “But not always that I’m joking around.”

The prejudice can be true of even other women. One of Eveleth’s best friends is Holly Laurent, and the two have performed at iO’s “The Reckoning” for the past eight years. A woman walked up to her after a show several weeks ago.

“She said, ‘You and Jet were really funny. You really made me laugh, and I don’t think chicks are funny,’ ” Laurent said. “Sometimes it feels like a bit of a blow, but at the same time it puts a fire in my gut to make them laugh next time.”

In 2007, Vanity Fair contributing editor Christopher Hitchens wrote a piece titled “Why Women Aren’t Funny,” a column name-checked by those I interviewed no less than a half-dozen times.

The headline was predictably provocative, but it’s hard to ignore several points he makes.

The central thesis, he theorized, was biology: It’s in men’s DNA to impress the opposite sex, while women don’t have to work as hard the other way around. To make someone laugh is to trigger an involuntary response in humans, a powerful trait indeed. The ability to make women laugh is one tool Mother Nature has gifted us, therefore, men are funnier than women, ipso facto, women aren’t funny (Hitchens’ words, not mine).

*****

By the time Lyndsay Hailey’s boyfriend reacted to her Halloween costume, Hailey knew the relationship was heading south. All along, friends dropped hints that she had another suitor.

Hailey had known of Michael Patrick O’Brien, who was starring on the main stage at Second City and is now a writer for “Saturday Night Live.” Newly single, Hailey attended his one-man show at iO. It was her first time out of the apartment since the breakup, and she wanted to feel good about herself. Bear in mind, standard women’s attire at the theater consisted of jeans and a shirt.

As O’Brien remembered that night: “I told the lighting guy, ‘Whoa, red tights just walked in!’ She had yellow boots that stood out, some sort of dark gray dress.”

That meeting turned into conversations over Facebook. The back and forth went on for weeks, with little movement. Then at 3 a.m. one Friday, O’Brien texted Hailey. He wrote: “I’m standing outside your apartment. Let me in. I have to pee.”

“In that moment, it was funnier than it was creepy,” she said. “But Michael walks that fine line with his comedy constantly, which is why I was so intrigued.”

She let him in. They stayed up all night, talking at the kitchen table until the sun came up. It has been six months now.

She said, clutching O’Brien’s hand, “I think he’s the funniest person I’ve ever met.”

*****

A sense of humor comes with a price. Bernard Beck, the sociologist: “Being funny is a charming and also frightening skill. People who have it are forces to be reckoned with.”

Those who can make others laugh are the puppeteers of life. They pull strings, tugging and slacking people’s emotions. And that’s a powerful thing, perhaps too much for some men to accept.

When I told Woman about my moment of insecurity on Lake Shore Drive, I figured she would get angry. She didn’t. She said I was brave for being honest enough to admit this.

Then came the realization: This was never about funny women. It’s about weak men.

—Chicago Tribune, 11/8/2009

» The Magician

A wire snakes from the EKG monitor, swoops past the rolling cart with the chocolate milk and orange wedges, up the bed, past the pink teddy bear and around Sarah’s thumb.

Inside Room 504 at Rush Children’s Hospital, the EKG monitor blips. Sarah’s heart is beating normally, 88 times a minute.

“Hi, I’m Mike, the hospital magician. Would you like to see some close-up magic?”

Sure, Sarah says. She’s 11, with sandy-blond hair and wire-rimmed glasses.

The heart monitor pulses — 88, 88, 89.

Mike Walton hands her the four of hearts and asks her to hold the playing card between her palms. Walton is holding the jack of spades. Slowly, he waves his card in tiny circles — 87.

Sarah turns over her card: the jack of spades. Walton is now holding her four of hearts.

“What the …,” Sarah says. “Holy cow!”

The heart monitor jumps — 98. Instantaneously. Like magic.

* * * * *

Walton, 35, is not the kind to pull rabbits out of hats or saw assistants in half. He is a close-up magician, a one-man walking act starring only his two hands.

After most tricks, kids ask him, “How did you do that?”

But Walton never tells. The first rule of magic: Never reveal your secrets.

At the same time, there are questions Walton doesn’t ask the children. Why are you in a hospital? Will you be all right?

Two kids he performed for died shortly after his visits. One girl’s left arm was amputated at the shoulder just weeks after Walton showed her a card trick.

“I probably couldn’t handle it week after week,” he said. “My job is not to feel sorry for these kids. The focus is on the magic.”

Walton left his futures market trading job two years ago to start his non-profit group, Open Heart Magic. He spends 50 hours a week performing, pitching to prospective sponsors and teaching the seven volunteer magicians who work children’s hospitals throughout Chicago.

Walton saw more than 600 kids last year. He’d get his list of patients every week, perform for them, then leave.

Most kids are at the hospital for a week or two before checking out. Week after week, though, one name kept appearing on the list.

Arthur.

From the first time he met the 15-year-old in November, Walton knew he’d love performing for him. He digs that “Arthur laugh,” and more important, Arthur hadn’t figured out any of his secrets.

Arthur’s favorite trick involved a deck of cards and a matchbox. Arthur would select a card, sign it and replace it in the deck. The cards were divided into three piles, and whichever pile he placed the matchbox on, the card would appear on top.

Then Arthur chose the middle pile. The top card was turned over … and … it was the wrong card. Walton searched through the deck in vain. It was nowhere to be found. He asked Arthur to peek inside the matchbox.

And there, folded up, was Arthur’s signed card.

To Walton, Arthur was just another kid who stayed at the hospital longer than most. The way he saw it, the more time Arthur spent here, the more tricks Walton had to learn.

What was to be a short stay for Arthur became a few weeks, then a month, which turned into two. Christmas passed, then New Year’s came, and there was Arthur on the 5th floor of the children’s ward, and Walton, wondering how many more tricks he could possibly learn.

* * * * *

When Arthur was first hospitalized, he was more concerned with catching up on homework than being bothered by visitors. But for some reason, he was curious about magic.

In photographs taken for the hospital newsletter, Walton is perched over Arthur’s bed, flicking and shuffling playing cards with Arthur, his mother, Tina, watching.

There’s Arthur in the pictures — the boyish teen with the buzz-cut hair; the 10th grader at De La Salle Institute, an avid fan of basketball, Hugo Boss cologne and PlayStation 2; who when he could still eat solid foods enjoyed steak cut into strips and cooked well-done, in a soft corn tortilla with a squeeze of lime.

In the pictures, Arthur is laughing. It’s a cross between a chuckle and a giggle — a chuggle, Walton calls it — a childlike laugh that belies Arthur’s age. This was when Arthur was still on his feet, planting whoopee cushions and squirting water guns at nurses.

But his condition got worse. Walton heard Arthur was transferred from the general ward to the intermediate ward.

“I don’t want to know,” Walton said. “It doesn’t matter.”

When Walton couldn’t think of any other tricks to show, he taught Arthur some instead.

For five minutes, there were no doctors adjusting tubes in Arthur’s abdomen. It was just Walton taking Arthur to a place where there were no CT scans, no epidurals, no cameras down Arthur’s esophagus.

When beginning magicians start out, they learn about an important principle, mastering the art of misdirection.

This is the second rule of magic: Divert attention from where you don’t want them to look.

* * * * *

The hallways in the children’s ward are bright with aquariums filled with tropical fish, children’s artwork, video game consoles and the sounds of a toy playing Bach’s Minuet in G.

The illusion eventually fades. Patients are reminded exactly where they are: One girl is wearing a bright pink T-shirt that reads, “Cancer Sucks.”

By early February, there were more tubes and wires and machines attached to Arthur.

When Walton performed one morning, Arthur tried his best to crack a smile, but his eyes barely opened.

“He wasn’t at a spot where he can see magic,” Walton said afterward.

The next week, there were more doctors in the room. Walton knocked. Through the window, Arthur shook his head no.

Walton couldn’t believe it. In three months of visits, Arthur had never refused to see him.

Walton broke his own rule and asked a hospital colleague about Arthur’s condition.

The answers he got weren’t answers at all — they were unsatisfying, unsettling, vague. Arthur’s not feeling well. He’s sedated and not on his feet.

The following week, Arthur’s name was missing from his list of patients. When Walton was done performing for the others, he stopped by Arthur’s room.

Arthur was not there. Over the weekend, he was transferred to the intensive care unit.

Walton arrived at Room 533 and found Arthur. Walton waved wildly at him through the glass partition.

Arthur shook his head, no.

“For someone who absolutely loves magic, that can’t be good,” Walton said walking away. “Maybe he’s not doing well, or maybe he’s too busy.”

Walton was wearing his “What, me worry?” button.

But he was thinking, and thinking some more.

“When you don’t see progress … I’m not used to it.”

Sometimes, Walton wondered if he’d ever have children of his own. He had discussed it with his wife, Sue, whom he met 10 years ago while they served in the Peace Corps in Estonia.

The two would go on long runs along Lake Shore Drive, when their minds were clearest.

If we choose to not have kids, there are a lot of experiences we’re really going to miss out on, Sue told her husband.

Walton tried to put Arthur out of his mind. Other patients deserve equal attention.

* * * * *

In March, doctors decided Arthur needed surgery.

He had not been outside since his hospital stay had begun, four days before Halloween.

On that overcast Wednesday night, Arthur woke up screaming with pain in his abdomen and was taken to Rush University Medical Center.

Doctors diagnosed pancreatitis, an inflammation of the pancreas. The pancreas produces enzymes that help digest fat, proteins and carbohydrates. In Arthur’s body, the pancreatic fluid wasn’t flowing to the right places — it’s as if a meat tenderizer had taken to his organs. He could no longer eat.

Patients with pancreatitis generally recover quickly. But Arthur was suffering from lupus, an immune system disorder, so his pancreatitis had not subsided.

To mitigate the symptoms of lupus, Arthur was taking steroids. But because that causes bone density loss, Arthur had a compound stress fracture in his spine. He could not walk.

There were times when the setbacks made Tina Palos want to scream. Instead, she spent a lot of time praying, often at the hospital chapel on the first floor.

With the father out of the picture, Tina spent every free moment she could with her only child. After work and on weekends, they watched movies like “Miracle” and “Napoleon Dynamite.” She was there every time doctors asked Arthur to rate his pain on a scale of one to 10.

On the morning of his surgery, Arthur handed his mother a cross hanging on a string of beads.

“You have to wear it,” Arthur told his mom. “That’s what Grandma said.”

Arthur’s eyes opened and shut as the anesthetic took effect. A nurse ran her hand across Arthur’s hair and, her voice cracking, told him he’s going to do great.

Walton was learning a new routine for Arthur, a trick pack of cards called the Svengali deck. It’s the third rule of magic: never show the same trick twice.

Inside the family waiting room on the fifth floor, Walton rehearsed. Riffle the cards. Pick a card. Put it back in the middle. Make a magic gesture and produce the card on top of the deck.

When Walton went to the hospital the following week, Arthur wasn’t on his list of patients. Walton walked past Room 533 and saw him sound asleep.

Arthur was sleeping again when Walton visited the next week. What’s the point of devoting so much energy?

Two months had gone by since Walton last performed for Arthur. He had seen more than 50 kids during that time.

And then, one day in early April, there was a familiar name on the top of the list.

Arthur, 15 — Room 510.

Arthur had moved out of the intensive care unit and into the intermediate ward.

“Hey check it out!” Walton said. “Arthur’s here. He’s down the good aisle.”

Walton saw Arthur’s nurse standing outside and started a conversation.

He didn’t know if Arthur was in the mood for visitors. Maybe he’d forgotten about Walton.

“Sometimes he doesn’t feel like seeing me,” Walton said.

The nurse replied, “But he wants to.”

Walton walked in, and there was Arthur watching TV.

“Congratulations on the move. I hear the food is much better here,” Walton said. “You wanna see something?”

He pulled out the Svengali deck. Arthur picked a card — the ace of hearts — and he replaced it somewhere in the middle.

Walton gave the deck a shake, and the ace of hearts jumped to the top of the deck. Just to show the first time wasn’t a fluke, he told Arthur to pick another card. Arthur picked … the ace of hearts again.

Walton showed Arthur that all the cards were different. Arthur picked another card. Again … the ace of hearts.

Walton leaned in close, like he was about to tell him something important. He thumbed through the deck to show every single card had now changed into the ace of hearts. Top card, middle cards, all aces of hearts.

Arthur’s eyes grew large.

“Wanna learn how to do this?”

After he left Arthur’s room, Walton sat in an empty hospital office and stared at the floor. For several minutes, he was deep in thought about the kids—about Arthur—and as he spoke, his voice broke.

“Kids shouldn’t be thinking about disease and being stuck in hospitals. That’s the way it should be, simply put. The only thing that keeps coming back … he’s got that chuggle back. That’s the way it should be.”

In late May, on the 210th day after Arthur awoke in the middle of the night screaming, he left Rush Children’s Hospital for a clinic to rehabilitate his spine. As a going-away gift to the doctors and nurses he calls friends, he did what now comes naturally to him. Arthur put on an impromptu magic show.

In doing so, he drew on Walton’s gift to him: When Walton revealed the secret of the Svengali deck, he brought Arthur into his inner circle.

That very moment, Walton saw his patient as more than just a name on a list. When Arthur nodded, marveling at the workings of the trick deck, the two became brothers in the fraternity of magicians. Instantaneously.

Almost like magic.

—Chicago Tribune, 6/5/2005

» THE JAPANESE OBAMA

The Japanese Obama strides with aplomb into the Hyde Park Hair Salon, the barbershop at 53rd Street and Blackstone Avenue where the real Obama has gotten haircuts for the last 14 years. Two cameramen in dingy sweaters trail behind.

He meets Zariff, Obama’s personal barber. Zariff — he goes by just the one name — is an affable, handsome man with, naturally, impeccable hair.The cameras capture this attempt at conversation:

Japanese Obama: “Ehh, Obama … cut?”

Zariff: “Yup.”

“Where, ehh, Obama, ehh, chair?”

“Right here.”

“This … Obama … chair?!”

Here, the Japanese Obama turns into a man-child. In his country’s style of comedy, which favors physical slapstick over wry wit, the Japanese Obama’s eyes bulge and his eyelids blink with comedic purpose. He lets out a wooooooh! with an upward intonation — a sound halfway between boyish wonder and insane outburst.

“Obama!”

The Japanese Obama falls to his knees, bows at the very chair where the real Obama received a haircut from Zariff six days earlier, and kisses the seat, each smack of the lips audible and wet.

“Obama!!!”

*****

From a distance and with a squint, if the air were sufficiently smoggy, one might think: maybe. It could be him, from an angle. Then the notion evaporates with each step as he approaches.

One step: He’s 5 foot 7 (generously).

Another step: The skin tones don’t match.

And another: Oh, he’s not black. The guy’s Asian.

By any stretch of reasonable imagination, how does this guy resemble the man who could lead the free world beginning Jan. 20?

He doesn’t. Yet when people stand face-to-face with Nozomu Sato, the Japanese comedian known as Mr. Nocchi, they speak to him as if he really is the man racing for the White House. They tell Sato, “I’m going to vote for you!”

They call him Mr. President.

Sato doesn’t understand 99 percent of what they say. What little English he speaks he pieced together from CNN. But then he opens his mouth:

“My name is Barack Obama! Change we need! Yes we can!”

He’s playing to the camera, obviously, but Sato has been at it for 20 years. In Japan, Sato/Mr. Nocchi is one half of a comedy duo called “Dangerous,” performing small bit roles on variety shows. Impersonating Obama has been his most visible role to date.

It was in February that Sato’s wife must have seen her husband from a fortuitous angle, because she noticed that he resembled Barack Obama. She snapped a picture with her cell phone camera and he posted it on his blog. (Subjective viewers might surmise that Sato looks more like comedian Gilbert Gottfried in the picture.)

Sato’s site, where he comedically muses, had generated modest traffic — 200 or so page views a day. When Sato checked the next day, it had shot up to 100,000 hits.

And so Nozomu Sato owes much of his 2008 income to Barack Obama. After getting onscreen job offers, Sato went on a crash course involving all things Barack. Sato bought books of his speeches, learned his catchphrases and got a tan. Recently, Sato-as-Obama stood side-by-side with Will Smith (the real one) in a bit for an afternoon comedy show in Japan.

Let’s give this guy a good once-over. Like Obama, Sato has a prominent facial mole (Sato’s is centered on his right cheek; Obama’s is left of his nose). The suit is crisp, a deep navy blue, the tie crimson and striped. The hair is short, straight and cropped, with only a few strands of gray.

The lapel pin looks like someone printed an American flag on a color laser printer and welded it on.

“My wife made it for me,” Sato explains through his translator.

And the ears. He looks like a car rolling down the street with its front doors open.

“I really feel close to Obama,” Sato says. “I feel like he’s my brother now.”

Sato and crew recently spent five days in Chicago to film a game show pilot called “To Sign a Contract.”

The task?

Convince citizens of Chicago that he is Barack Obama, then get close enough to the man himself so that Obama can autograph Sato’s contract.

If Sato fails, then in the grand tradition of Japanese game shows, a horrible punishment is imposed, with said punishment filmed and broadcast for the nation to enjoy (producers suggested repaying trip expenses or showing up at a McCain/Palin rally).

*****

Sato and camera crew pull up a block from Obama’s Hyde Park home. They devise a course of action: One cameraman will walk behind Sato, while the other films from across the street. They’ll see how close they can get to the house.

The group walks up to a police barricade set up near Greenwood Avenue and Hyde Park Boulevard; they’re greeted by a 6-foot-8 Secret Service guy in a bulletproof vest.

And that’s the end of that.

*****

To the Japanese who are obsessed with Western celebrities, Barack Obama is Warhol pop art.

“For some reason, Obama’s the first person to be mentioned in any news,” Sato says through his interpreter. “There’s no McCain. And Bush doesn’t even appear on TV anymore.”

Sato was hesitant at first to impersonate Obama. He used dark makeup once, but realized a Japanese portraying a black man might bear the whiff of a minstrel show. It was tanning sessions from that point on.

“Sun. Oil,” Sato says in English.

His imitation is so far-fetched it steers clear of insensitivity. There are no exaggerated movements. No accents. It’s subtle, yet unambiguous.

Sato mastered the one-hand-in-pocket-while-walking move; the punctuate-the-air-with-index-finger-while-talking gesture; the pensive-fingers-on-chin look; the furrowed-eyebrow expression. He has noticed Obama prefers holding the microphone in his left hand. That he talks and gestures with a pinched thumb and middle finger.

A debate breaks out over these subtle differences at MacArthur’s, the West Side restaurant Obama cites as one of his favorite dining spots.

One woman says, “A little darker, and he could go for him.”

Someone else says: “You could be a double!”

And a third: “Tell him he needs a little soul food. Then he’ll really be Barack.”

Standing in front of the hot case, Sato tells the server, “Ehh, Obama, favorite, ehh, menu.”

He’s served two plates, filled with fried chicken, fried catfish, BBQ turkey leg, macaroni and cheese and collard greens.

Nibbling on the greens, Sato says through his interpreter: “It tastes very familiar. It’s an interesting combination. We usually drink tea with our meals. Not Pepsi.”

Sato asks those in line who they think he is. One lady guesses Jet Li.

“My name Barack Obama. I have a dream! You have a dream! United States of America! I hope president!”

One gentleman remarks: “If he was tall, they’d look alike.”

Another: “He’s got the same type of ears, same haircut. But he’s got no black in him.”

*****

A few days later, Sato makes his way to St. Louis, where Obama is holding a rally beneath the Gateway Arch. Police estimate the crowd at 100,000. After the speech, Obama greets his supporters and, somehow, Sato and crew make it to the front row.

To Sato’s shock, Obama approaches him.

Sato is paralyzed with fear. Then he musters: “My name is Obama!” Sato screams. “I’m Obama!!!”

Their eyes meet, their hands shake.

The Japanese Obama is hysterical.

The real Obama notices the resemblance. Obama points at himself, points to Sato, back to himself and again to Sato.

“It must have been 5 to 10 seconds at most,” Sato — who in the excitement fails to get Obama’s signature on that pesky contract — says afterward. “But our eyes met, and it felt like 10 minutes for me.”

And if your eyes met Sato, a man stunned into silence, if you squinted from a distance, if the sun sort of blinded you a bit, you too might think, well, maybe …

—Chicago Tribune, 10/28/2008