In defense of Chicago Teachers Union leader Stacy Davis Gates

& a report on Heidi Stevens' marathon effort, Songs of Good Cheer, a Steve & Garry anniversary and more

9-14-2023 (issue No. 105)

This week

• Last week’s winning tweet

• In defense of Stacy Davis Gates

• Convenient truths about Heidi Stevens’ marathon effort

• Land of Linkin’ — Where I tell readers where to go

• Squaring up the news — Where Charlie Meyerson tells readers where to go

• Wanna feel old? Steve & Garry broke up 30 years ago this week

• Party-cut or pie-cut? The only local food debate that really matters

• Update on “Songs of Good Cheer,” including a ticket link

• Mary Schmich — On cicadas and summer

• Results of the ‘never have I ever in Chicago’ poll

• “The Mincing Rascals” preview

• Re:Tweets — Featuring the winner of the visual tweets poll and this week’s finalists

• Tune of the Week — “Walking in Memphis” nominated by Jon Hansen

Last week’s winning tweets

Once you hit a certain age, life is just a delicate balance of trying to stay awake and trying to fall asleep while slowly getting worse at both — unknown

And the winner of the “Bleak Peanuts” poll to choose the best, dark version of “You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown,” was:

"Yes, I'm Pregnant, Charlie Brown."— @AndyJokedAgain

Here are this week’s nominees and the winner of the Tuesday visual-tweets poll. Here is the direct link to the new poll.

In defense of Stacy Davis Gates

The news last week that Chicago Teachers Union President Stacy Davis Gates sends one of her children to a private high school prompted a pious scolding from critics:

She is an outspoken opponent of “school choice” — programs that direct education dollars away from public schools to private and charter schools — yet she wants to deny low-income parents the same choice that she herself has made! Such hypocrisy!

Such piffle.

Davis Gates is choosing to spend her money on tuition for a school that best suits the needs of her child, which is the same choice that any family can exercise, at least theoretically.

Her opposition to diverting tax dollars to help low-income families make that choice is no more hypocritical than dining at a fancy restaurant and opposing a “food choice” program that heavily subsidizes fine dining for the poor.

It’s no more hypocritical than living in a Gold Coast condo and opposing a tax-funded “shelter choice” voucher program that would allow low-income people to move into the unit next door.

It’s no more hypocritical than using insurance coverage to avail yourself of the finest medical care at local hospitals, but opposing a “health choice” program of socialized medicine that would give low-income people on Medicaid similar access to those hospitals.

Low-income families lack the financial wherewithal to make all sorts of choices that middle- and upper-income families make. That’s a stark truth of living in a capitalist society — or any society, really — and it’s generally the impulse of progressive and liberal people to coax government into funding programs that offer the disadvantaged more palatable options when it comes to the basics of life: assistance in paying for groceries, housing support, Obamacare and so on.

Why not tuition support to allow parents to send their children to a school of their choice? A religious school, secular private school or even a home-based school?

Because opponents of redirecting tax money to such entities — and I’m one of them — believe that such programs will further weaken public education by diluting its funding stream, which in turn will drive still more parents away from public schools, weakening them still further and ultimately leaving education to the not-so-tender mercies of the marketplace.

Supporters of voucher programs view this as a feature, not a bug. They’re hostile to teachers unions and think it’s just fine for public money to fund religious indoctrination. They claim the reason many private and public charter schools outperform conventional public schools is because lazy public school teachers and administrators don’t feel the motivational spur of competition.

But, really now, what is the supposed “secret sauce” of private and charter schools? Is it that they have more energetic teachers (despite the generally lower pay? )

Or is it maybe that they can select and curate their student populations? Easily oust the difficult and expensive-to-educate pupils who, for one reason or another, cause disruptions and drain resources? Is it perhaps that students whose parents are literally invested in their children’s education are more involved in encouraging, supporting and, as necessary, disciplining them?

Put another way, what is the “secret sauce” of high-performing suburban schools and selective enrollment public high schools like the ones my children attended? More motivated teachers? Please.

We ask our public schools to handle some of our toughest social pathologies and medical issues — kids with learning disabilities and physical and behavioral problems, hungry kids, kids experiencing homelessness and living with trauma — and then the critics climb up on their high horses to airily dismiss underperforming schools as failures.

It’s ludicrous to think that if we have voucher and charter programs that lure away the most motivated, best behaved students, it will improve the lot of the students left behind.

And if it’s hypocrisy we’re talking about, do “school choice” advocates in Oak Park, Evanston, Lincolnwood, Oak Lawn and other close-in suburbs want to see enacted voucher programs that would allow students from low-income Chicago neighborhoods to attend public schools in their community? Or would they rather deny those low-income families the opportunity to make the same choice they’ve made to send their children to high-quality public schools?

Davis Gates has an obvious dog in this race. She represents public school teachers in Chicago who will struggle if “school choice” programs siphon students to nonunion private schools.

But all city residents also have a dog in the race, in that stronger, better funded public schools will ultimately make our neighborhoods more livable, improve the local economy, cut crime, create jobs and help those most in need of assistance.

As I wrote in my online debate on this issue 23 years ago, whenever I start thinking through the idea of vouchers — when I get beyond the utopian slogans and capitalistic bromides about the elevating value of competition — I quickly reach a vision of chaos.

I see public schools trying to educate the left-behind students with less money than they had before. I see snarky entrepreneurs starting up lightly regulated, bare-bones private schools selling false hopes and hocus-pocus to parents in order to have at their voucher money. I see good private schools raising tuition and admission standards in order to keep out kids they consider undesirable.

I see transportation, enrollment and special-education nightmares for parents. I see the emergence of a private-school culture in which we further segregate ourselves by race, income, religion, ethnicity and so on, and in which shabby, defunded public schools cater only to pupils with various disorders or whose parents who just don’t care. I see teaching devalued as a profession as pay for teachers falls.

Voucher proponents speak of “school choice,” but how much choice will there really be for the poor? Will they have the same kind of choice in schools as they have in, say, local supermarkets or housing?

And why are voucher proponents waving the white flag on public education? Why don’t we put their brainpower and our education tax resources into making public schools as successful and enriching as we can?

Melissa Conyears-Ervin and the $100,000 bar

A detail that ought to bother you in the recent story about alleged misconduct by city Treasurer Conyears-Ervin is the amount that the whistleblowers were paid to shut up and go away.

From WBEZ-FM:

The employees accused Conyears-Ervin of requiring staff to perform personal tasks — such as planning her daughter’s birthday party or grocery shopping — and of trying to force a bank the city does business with to issue a mortgage on her husband’s aldermanic office, according to a letter of complaint the Tribune obtained and posted (Sept. 5).

The city settled the complaint for $100,000, putting an end to the possibility of a wrongful termination lawsuit. The settlement amount kept it just short of requiring Chicago City Council approval — which would have come with a public hearing on the matter — and the terms of it have been kept confidential.

Just short, as in literally one penny under the bar. A $100,000.01 settlement payment would have required aldermanic approval that would have in turn required a public airing of the grievances in that December, 2020 letter that stood — and still stand— to torpedo Conyears-Ervin’s aspirations for higher office.

Former Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s administration approved this payout — if you want to call it hush money I will not correct you — in October, 2021, roughly a month after Conyears-Ervin’s husband, Ald. Jason Ervin, 28th, chairman of the City Council’s Black Caucus, offered a surprise endorsement of Lightfoot’s reelection in 2023, an effort Lightfoot would not announce until June, 2022.

Lightfoot’s administration then made every legal effort to block Tribune reporter Gregory Royal Pratt’s Freedom of Information Act requests for a copy of the letter from the lawyer for the whistleblowers. Lightfoot’s successor, Mayor Brandon Johnson, recently allowed for the release of that letter.

Not to be the guy with the yarn and thumbtacks illustrating a conspiracy theory, but this story has quid pro quo written all over it. Any investigation of Coyears-Ervin’s allegedly sleazy conduct ought to cast a flinty eye at our former mayor as well.,

Heidi Stevens

Heidi Stevens wants to beat Al Gore

I recently sat in for WCPT-AM 820 afternoon host Joan Esposito and, for one segment, I spoke with my former Tribune colleague Heidi Stevens about her attempt to run the 26.2-mile Chicago Marathon on Oct. 8. Stevens writes a syndicated Tribune News Service column that runs every Sunday in the Tribune, and she’s been sharing some of her progress there.

She’ll be running to raise money for Nourishing Hope — formerly the Lakeview Food Pantry— which provides social services and mental health support as well as nourishment to low-income people.

The subject of marathon running is of particular interest to me because, 25 years ago, I wrote numerous columns about a similar effort to train for and complete the Chicago race. Here’s an edited transcript of our conversation:

Eric Zorn : I saw an interview with you in which you said this all started when a friend of yours ran the Minneapolis marathon and then messaged, "You've got to do a marathon with me. Like, I hated it. It was awful. It changed my life. I need you to do it so we can talk about it.”

So he told you he hated running the marathon and you said, “I'm in!”?

Heidi Stevens: That's basically how it happened.

EZ: When did you start training?

HS: I’m following the Chicago Endurance Sports plan, which officially began in June. But I wasn’t starting from zero. I’ve been a runner for a long time, but just usually 2 or 3 miles at a time. The longest race I ever ran was a 10k, and I’d never run more than 8 miles at a time. I train on my own during the week, then on Saturday I meet up with my pace group in Old Town for the long runs. I’ll do 20 miles on Sept. 16, then the Chicago half marathon on Sept. 24 and the marathon is two weeks later.

EZ: When I trained, I used the Chicago Area Runners Association (CARA) plan that sounds very similar. Run shorter distances by yourself during the week, then longer distances with your group on the weekends. And to me, those weekend training runs were the most fun.

HS: I love them, totally. And I thought I would hate them. I'm usually a people person, but running I really like to do on my own. It's my one solitary endeavor. I like to put my AirPods in, listen to music, ignore everybody and run. So the idea of talking to strangers during a run sounded kind of awful. But the first time I did it, I was like, “Oh, I love these people, they talk about anything and everything. Nobody puts on airs..It was just was lovely. And you're on this journey together.

EZ: I talked with all kinds of people when I was training with my pace group — opera singers, engineers, doctors, college students, federal prosecutors and so on. And the idea is that you’re running at a pace where you can talk. Then you get to the 20-mile run — the longest run in the training program — and although it’s exhausting, it’s also exhilarating. You can’t believe how far you’ve come, literally. So runners will want to know:

What pace group are you in?

HS: I'm in an 11-minutes-a-mile pace group and find that I can carry on conversations at that speed, which they say is the benchmark. I'm hoping to finish the marathon in 4 hours, 45 minutes to 5 hours. (Note: Finishing in 4 hours, 45 minutes requires you to run a pace of 10 minutes, 52 seconds per mile. Finishing in 5 hours requires a pace of 11 minutes, 26 seconds per mile).

It’s very empowering to think that you can attack a goal that not long ago seemed far out of the realm of possibility and steadily go after it. Just this same summer, I wasn't sure I could go out and run5 miles with these people. And now I'm about to go run 20 with them. That changes your headspace, it changes the way you approach your projects at work, it changes the way you approach your relationships. It tells you, “I can do hard stuff if I put my mind to it. I can follow a plan.”

EZ: And there's a backstory here, which is that you had had a couple of serious health issues having to do with your heart that made you wonder at one point whether you were ever going to be able to run any distance at all.

HS: Yeah, I had viral meningitis in 2011, and that left me with heart damage —pericardial effusion is the name of the condition. I just sort of live with it. It doesn’t have a huge effect on my day to day life, but it's there. Then I got a severe case of COVID-19 in 2020 that damaged my heart. So I thought, “Oof! Double whammy. Heart damage.”

I thought my running days were basically over But my cardiologists did not support that. They told me to run as much as I want to as long as I didn’t have chest pains or shortness of breath. So part of this for me is overcoming the stories I told myself about my body’s limitations and my lack of time and freedom to train for a marathon. I'm busy. You were busy. Your kids were still at home at the time.

EZ: Our twins were 1 when I trained for my first marathon. That put a lot on Johanna. “Honey, I'm going off with my with my running friends for five hours on Saturday morning. And then I'll be flat on my back most of the day, and you'll have to baby me.“

My publicly stated goal — and the goal I imparted to the group of first-time runners I was leading — was to beat Oprah Winfrey’s marathon time. In 1994, she’d run it in 4 hours and 29 minutes, which is about 10 minutes and 15 seconds per mile.

I didn’t make it. Four members of my group and I finished a whisker under 4:32, in part because we’d taken a three-minute pee break at mile 5. We thought we'd still have plenty of time to spare, but we really slowed down at the end. Because what you read in all the training books is true — the 20-mile mark is the halfway point in the marathon in terms of physical and psychological effort required. You've only got 6 miles left, but they are really hard miles because your body just doesn't want to go much further than 20 miles.

So rather than be satisfied at the end, I told myself, "I've got to do this again, I've got to beat Oprah."

So I ended up doingth marathon again the following year in a much less public way, and I had a pretty good run. Beat Oprah by about seven minutes. But I’d become obsessed with my time. I thought I could do even better so I trained a little bit harder the year after that. Then I got too excited at the start and ran so fast in the first half of the race that I hit the wall even before mile 20. I came away with my worst time yet.

I realized that if I kept running, my obsession with improving my time would add anxiety and sap joy from the experience. So I just had to stop. I had to stop doing it. I went cold turkey on marathon running, but I look back on it with such pleasure. And I love reading about your effort and I can't wait to see how you do, how you feel about it and what you write. I still think more people should try it. It sounds crazy, but the marathon is so empowering and doable if you train in the proper chunks.

HS: Yeah, I love that about it. Did you ever hear from Oprah?

EZ: No, I never did. I reached out to her through her people several times but got no response. She only ran it once and had a pretty darn good time for someone with her weight challenges.

HS: Four hours and 29 minutes. That's really fast.

EZ: Al Gore ran his marathon in 4 hours and 54 minutes (11 minutes and 13 seconds per mile). So you could race against him.

HS: Okay, my goal is gonna be to beat Al Gore then.

EZ: I want to urge everyone to keep checking in with Heidi's column so see how she’s doing and then how she did.

Land of Linkin’

• South Side Weekly: “Larry Snelling Garnered Multiple Use-of-Force Complaints in the 1990s: The mayor’s pick to lead CPD was accused of slapping and punching young men when he was a patrol officer on the South Side.” This is the best coverage yet of this part of the Snelling story. See also South Side Weekly’s “‘Doesn’t Make it Wrong’: CPD Chief (nominee) Larry Snelling testified in 2015 that an officer’s use of force was appropriate, but IPRA and the then-superintendent found otherwise.”

• Glamour: “The Inventor of the Birth Control Pill Designed It to Please the Pope—Not Women.” “Medically speaking, periods aren't necessary. If you're on ( birth control pills), you can safely skip your period—and the anxiety-ridden mood swings, acne, and debilitating pain that can sometimes come with them—entirely. So why have women been taking week after week of placebo pills to keep their period coming every month? … It all goes back to John Rock, one of the gynecologists who invented the pill. A devout Catholic, Dr. Rock built in the break in order to please the Catholic Church and, he hoped, earn the endorsement of the pope at the time. … Dr. Rock's plan didn't work—the pope didn't go for it and ultimately decided the Church wouldn't support Catholics using birth control—but nevertheless, the built-in breaks to allow for a monthly period stuck. In other words, the reason women on the pill have been having regular periods month after month, for the past 60 years, is all because a man was trying to please another man. Seriously.”

• Here is a transcript of CNN’s interview Tuesday with Chicago Teachers Union President Stacy Davis Gates.

• From the Washington Post: “Designed by the architects of (Texas’) ‘heartbeat’ (abortion) ban that took effect months before Roe fell, ordinances … make it illegal to transport anyone to get an abortion on roads within the city or county limits. The laws allow any private citizen to sue a person or organization they suspect of violating the ordinance.”

• “Is Facebook Set To Begin Charging $4.99 Per Month?” No. C’mon people. Stop falling for this!

• The term “Gish gallop” is new to me, and I feel it will be useful: “A rhetorical technique in which a person in a debate attempts to overwhelm their opponent by providing an excessive number of arguments with no regard for the accuracy or strength of those arguments. Gish galloping prioritizes the quantity of the galloper's arguments at the expense of their quality. The term was coined in 1994 by anthropologist Eugenie Scott, who named it after American creationist Duane Gish and argued that Gish used the technique frequently when challenging the scientific fact of evolution.”

• Frighteningly populist Republican presidential hopeful “Vivek Ramaswamy says he'll deport children of undocumented immigrants born in the U.S.”

• The Tribune’s Rick Kogan has a nice writeup of local banjo wizard Michael J. Miles, whom I interviewed in PS No. 99.

• The Picayune Sentinel preview: Tuesday at 11:30 a.m. I talk with WGN-AM 720 host John Williams about what’s making news and likely to be grist for the PS mill. The WGN listen-live link is here.

Squaring up the news

This is a bonus supplement to the Land of Linkin’ from veteran radio, internet and newspaper journalist Charlie Meyerson. Each week, he offers a selection of intriguing links from his daily email news briefing Chicago Public Square:

■ An email oversight by The New York Times the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, alerted columnist Matt Baron to “the magnitude of the day’s horribleness”: The subject line “Type headline here.”

■ A firsthand account recalls how the Tribune got the news out as a surge in traffic rendered much of the web mute.

■ 9/11 survivor Carol Marin in 2009: “You spend the rest of the time trying to reconstruct the moment that you didn’t die.”

■ The CDC’s final OK of new COVID-19 shots for everyone over the age of 6 months prompts USA Today (and former Tribune) columnist Rex Huppke to wonder why the Republican Party doesn’t give Donald Trump more credit for “the one thing Trump did right.”

■ Oak Park native—and author of “Ringmaster: Vince McMahon and the Unmaking of America”— Abraham Josephine Riesman tells Popular Information that McMahon is a key to understanding Trump’s enduring appeal.

■ Sun-Times columnist Neil Steinberg mourns the departure of WLS-AM afternoon radio voice John Howell, reportedly because owner Cumulus Media “is clearing the decks of people who think.”

■ At a U.S. Senate hearing on library book bans across the nation, Illinois Secretary of State Alexi Giannoulias—who spearheaded Illinois’ groundbreaking ban on such bans—laid a little snark on Louisiana’s benighted Sen. John Kennedy.

■ Streetsblog Chicago spotlights the problem of motor vehicles where they shouldn’t be: Along the supposedly car-free Lakefront Trail and on Promontory Point.

■ Axios Chicago reports that Illinois is making it easier for residents to get unclaimed property they’re due. Check here with just a last name to see if you have anything coming.

■ Researchers who discovered a spyware flaw in Apple’s operating system recommend owners update iPhones “immediately.”

You can (and should) subscribe to Chicago Public Square free here.

Steve & Garry broke up 30 years ago this week

The radio duo of Steve Dahl and Garry Meier were huge in the Chicago area from 1979 to 1993 — on top of the zeitgeist when they weren’t on top of the ratings at WLUP and WLS ( both AM and FM at different times). Their edgy, free-form brand of chat blended news, sports and pop culture such that, when big stories broke, many listeners, including me, preferred tuning in to their show rather than traditionally more informative and serious stations.

The Tribune’s Rick Kogan told the story in 1996:

Dahl was the more energetic and verbal of the pair, a self-confessional and creative font who pushed the bounds of good taste. Meier, loath to share details of his personal life, was a quick-witted collaborator. …

Dahl was the star in more than billing. He took two-thirds of the duo's salary, estimated to be in the neighborhood of $6.5 million for five years in their last contract, paying Meier himself.

"As the show developed, I think I played a larger and larger part," Meier says. "I thought I deserved to have a 50/50 split, but in the end money didn't matter at all in my decision. I just walked."

What Dahl and Meier did each day was, in essence and reality, improvisational comedy, a high-wire act that was undeniably exhilarating, dangerous and sometimes stultifying. It was thought-provoking and almost always engaging, fostering a fanatical following of as many as 500,000 listeners and inspiring dozens of imitators.

(The breakup on Sept. 12, 1993) was a much-publicized and acrimonious affair. It took place shortly after Meier returned from a two-week honeymoon in Italy with his wife, Cynthia, a corporate real estate executive. It was then — "thanks to some tapes mysteriously left for me," Meier says — that he learned of the "vicious and insulting" things that Dahl had been saying on the air about Meier and his bride.

"I could not understand. The venom and hostility," he says. "But that was merely the final straw. There had been an increasing number of unfortunate incidents, and then at the wedding reception Steve was drunk and telling people — friends I've had for 30 years — what a jerk and what an (expletive) I was. It wasn't any longer a matter of him saying the next day, `Hey, sorry, I was drunk.' At some point a person has to take responsibility for their actions."

A few days after the honeymoon, Meier and Dahl had a meeting.

"Clean up your problems and maybe we can deal with this," Meier says he said.

"I don't have a problem," Dahl said.

"OK," Meier said. "That's it, I'm gone.'

And away he went.

Dahl told Kogan, “I think our problems were a little more complicated than Garry would like to believe. But I'm so glad to hear he's moving on."

In 2013, the year Dahl and Meier were inducted into the Radio Hall of Fame, podcaster Tony Lossano posted a lengthy remembrance and analysis that touched on two brief broadcast reunions and unearthed this 1989 promotional ad:

I reached out to retired local media columnist Robert Feder for his thoughts:

For me, the most revealing moment came 20 years later when the Radio Hall of Fame belatedly tried to honor the duo. The ever-prickly Meier rebuffed Dahl’s entreaties to appear together at the induction.

“I won’t be attending the HOF ceremony, not because I have any animosity, but because it doesn’t seem like the venue for another failed attempt at a Steve and Garry reconciliation,” Dahl said at the time. “We were nominated together, and we should accept the award together, not as separate entities at separate tables. That won’t happen. If I have learned anything about this relationship over the past 20 years, it’s that the Meier family has no inclination to ‘bury the hatchet’ any place other than in my skull.”

In accepting his award that night, Meier thanked 17 individuals by name — I listed them all in this column — but never mentioned Dahl. It spoke volumes about what a bitter, spiteful, churlish ingrate he is.

“Steve didn’t show up, so — what? — I was supposed to carry his water for him?” said Meier when I reached him for comment on the anniversary and asked him about the controversy surrounding the induction ceremony. “He didn’t care enough to be there, and I was supposed to cover for him and cover him with accolades? That’s on me?”

Both men had on-air gigs at various stations after their partnership dissolved — Meier co-hosted afternoons with Roe Conn on WLS-AM 890 for eight years — and both are now off the radio.

Meier, now 73, hosts “The Garry Meier Show,” a thrice-weekly podcast, but says he holds out hope of getting another shot on the radio, “Every now and then, I think back on the good moments, but my memory has mostly scrubbed out all the bad stuff,” he said when I asked for his thoughts about this week’s milestone. He said he and Dahl have not spoken for years.

Dahl, now 68 and reportedly sober since 1995, hosts the daily “Steve Dahl Podcast,” having run “out of radio stations to abuse, and/or to abuse him,” as his website puts it. He did not return my request for comment on the anniversary.

We may never hear the likes of “Steve and Garry” again. The barriers of taste and structure that they so compellingly bashed through barely exist in a media environment where anything has gone for decades now. Audience fragmentation — through social media and streaming audio and video — means that terrestrial radio — like newspapers — will never again have the market share or influence that it had in 1980s and early 1990s.

Re: Gustibus — the great party-cut vs. pie-cut debate

After a correspondent weighed in recently in favor of pizza cut into slices and against pizza cut into squares, I posted a quick click survey in Tuesday’s Picayune Plus to see which iteration my readers favored.

I feel this food debate is far more urgent than the dreary “ketchup on a hot dog?” debate. There is no reason for anyone to care how other people dress their hot dogs, other than to affect snobbery and disdain. But pizza is a group endeavor. Slices and squares are incompatible. Your preference will affect me.

In a 2022 online debate on this issue, Groupon editors made these points:

• With a party-cut pie, everybody gets exactly the type of pizza slice they want, and no crust gets left behind.

• (With party-cut) the person who reaches the pizza first gets stuck with those disgusting corner slices, if you can truly call those lilliputian triangles "slices." Pie-cut pizza provides ample, fair sustenance for all—even the losers who reach the table last.

• Those little squares correspond more precisely to your hunger level.

• Party-cut pies are perfect for feeding groups, especially if you're on a budget. A pie-cut pizza with eight slices might feed twice as many people if it's cut into squares, since people will likely serve themselves less.

I would add that pie-cut pizza, by far my favorite, is neater to eat and provides a superior crust-to-cheese ratio.

A narrow majority of more than 350 readers who voted disagree:

But I would argue that the closeness of the vote argues for pizza purveyors to assume nothing when filling orders to always ask. Those who default to one cut or the other are unnecessarily presumptuous.

Cheer Chat

Mary Schmich fits me with reindeer antlers at this year’s first Songs of Good Cheer planning meeting Tuesday in Lincoln Square

A subset of the cast of “Songs of Good Cheer” had our first organizational meeting Tuesday at a coffee shop near the Old Town School of Folk Music, where we’ll be putting on our 25th annual holiday singalong Dec. 7-10.

Tickets, which tend to go fast, went on sale Wednesday for Old Town School members and will be available to general the public starting Friday morning. Here is the link.

Everyone who was in the band last year has signed on for another tour, and we’ll begin in two weeks auditioning new material and making setlists.

We’ll lead a selection of familiar and unfamiliar but wonderful songs of the season and provide songbooks to everyone in the hall. My former colleague Mary Schmich and I will host the program, as we’ve done from the beginning, and we’re trying to think of ways to incorporate the number 25 into our schtick.

Mary Schmich: As long as the cicadas are singing, summer is not over

My former colleague Mary Schmich posts occasional column-like entries on Facebook. Here, reprinted with permission, is her most recent offering:

The cicadas are going crazy right now, which reminded me of this column I wrote a few years ago. Here's the summary:

When the cicadas stop, a Chicago summer-lover knows, it's over.

"It" is shorthand for heat, light, the fantasy that time can be stretched beyond its ordinary, strangulating, suffocating, life-annihilating boundaries.

"It" contains sunflowers, fresh corn, naked toenails and assorted other opportunities that if not seized immediately will be gone for the eternity called winter.

"Summer's almost over," said Mrs. Kwon, my dry cleaner, when I stopped in the other day.

But as long as the cicadas are still alive and shrieking, summer and the hope of summer carry on.

"Summer's almost gone and I've ridden my bike twice," I heard a woman mourn on Sunday.

No. Let me repeat. The cicadas. Listen. Those guys--and I do mean the guys--still are shaking their maracas. The females still are answering the call. If the cicadas still can roust themselves, so can we. We must do our best not to know that this ruckus is just the party before the funeral.

We live in a noisy city. Sirens, jets, air conditioners, drunks on the sidewalk at 3 a.m. Noise presses in on us like cement. But the cicada noise is different. It reminds us that Chicago is just a prairie in disguise, that we are more than just the sum of our expressways and skyscrapers.

The cicadas evoke time beyond the present, and that's the essential job of summer, to bring us completely into the here and now while simultaneously, like a train in the distance, reminding us that the here and now never stands still.

"Can you believe summer's gone already?" mourned a friend at yoga class, who obviously has not learned the yogic principle of living in the moment.

To which I could only repeat my tiresome platitude: Listen to the cicadas. In Chicago, summer comes late but we lament its passing a little too early.

Listen to the cicadas rev up in the afternoon. It's nature saying, "Go ahead, take a nap." Cicadas are the perfect white noise for a siesta.

Listen at 8 p.m., when they're out there in full throttle, harping: "Cut the TV off. Come outside. Remember 8 p.m. in January?"

Objectively, the cicadas are way too much like cockroaches for my taste. And objectively, the song of the cicadas should be as annoying as the hum of a refrigerator. Or the grind of a power saw. These guys aren't Sting or Frank Sinatra. They're not singing timeless melodies. Musically, their drone is only slightly better than a mosquito's.

But when I hear them I feel the same melancholy thrill I get listening to Sting sing "Fields of Gold" or Sinatra sing "It Was a Very Good Year."

Cicadas stir memory and longing as surely as the best songs. And, like the best songs, they leave you wanting just a little more.

"Late August, early September," Ron Wolford, an urban gardening educator, said when I called the University of Illinois extension to find out when the cicadas would stop singing. "They're at their peak right now."

Hearing the words "early September" gave me chills. Early September is a lovely time, but it's when you feel a meaner season riding toward you, winter chasing with a whip.

But there's still time, as long as the cicadas sing. Don't think too much about the fact that the peak of anything is always the beginning of the fall.

Look on the bright side. The cicadas come out of the ground in summer, they mate and then they die.

They will never see another August. Most of us will, though in January that will be very hard to believe. — Mary Schmich

Results of the ‘never have I ever in Chicago’ poll

Inspired by my friends at Axios, I decided to try to learn what the most likely winning entry would be in a “never have I ever in Chicago” game.

The point of that group party game is to name something that you have never done but that everyone else playing has done. So first, I asked readers to nominate and vote on what they considered to be quintessential Chicago experiences, the ones most people have probably done.

I took the top 13 experiences from survey one and survey two and asked readers to click all the ones that they had not done.

So, for instance, just 2.35% of respondents had not visited the Museum of Science and Industry, making that the most likely winning gambit. If you’ve not visited the MSI, odds are best that everyone else in the game has.

Very close behind, at 2.58%, was eating a deep-dish pizza. Here’s the final ranking

Never have I ever …

• visited the Museum of Science and Industry — 2.35%

• eaten a deep-dish pizza — 2.58%

• visited the Art Institute of Chicago — 3.48%

• visited the Lincoln Park Zoo — 3.64%

• driven on Lower Wacker Drive — 3.86%

• gone to Millennium Park — 4.09%

• ridden the L through the Loop — 5.30%

• eaten an Italian beef sangwich — 5.68%

• attended a Cubs game at Wrigley Field — 5.68%

• been to the top of the Willis Tower (formerly Sears Tower) — 9.24%

• taken an architectural boat tour — 9.62%

• attended either major St. Patrick's Day parade — 26.36%

Meanwhile, 18.11% of respondents reported having done all these things!

Minced Words

Austin Berg of the Illinois Policy Institute and I mixed it up on the topic of vouchers during this week’s episode of “The Mincing Rascals” podcast. Brandon Pope, Jon Hansen and host John Williams rounded out the panel. We also discussed Justin Fields, library book bans, the problems raised by the influx of asylum-seeking migrants in Chicago and whether Joe Biden is too old to run for reelection (answer: yes, but that’s not going to stop him).

Subscribe to us wherever you get your podcasts. Or bookmark this page. If you’re not a podcast listener, you can hear an edited version of the show at 8 p.m. most Saturday evenings on WGN-AM 720.

Our first live public taping in more than two years will be Tuesday, Sept. 26 from 6-8 p.m. at The Second City in the Old Town neighborhood. Ticket info.

Re: Tweets

In Tuesday’s paid-subscriber editions, I present my favorite tweets that rely on visual humor. Subscribers vote for their favorite, and I post the winner here every Thursday:

The new nominees for Tweet of the Week:

• Prepare your kids for social media by putting their artwork on the fridge and writing a bunch of mean comments under it. — @thedad

• The first person to throw out bath water: “Uh oh.” — @benedictsred

• Heat, pressure and time: Three things that make a diamond but also make a waffle. — @CooperLawrence

• I’m open to ideas, but I say step one is we get out of this frying pan. — @capnwatsisname

• My kid handed me a tooth tonight and said, “That’ll be $5.” so I guess we’re done with the tooth fairy. — @mxmclain

• In an infinite universe, over an infinite period of time, it's still unlikely hammer pants will come back into fashion. — @wildethingy

• Don't worry. I'm gonna make this right. *turns right* — @gregreckons

• What are all these babies on board with anyway? — @FuturePopop

• I’ll bet the guy who invented the snooze button never invented anything else. — @BobGolen

• When donuts appear in the breakroom. We cut one in half. We eat half. We return to the breakroom five minutes later and eat the other half. It is the way of our people. — @IamJackBoot

Vote here and check the current results in the poll. For instructions and guidelines regarding the poll, click here.

Tune of the Week

This week’s guest nominator is Jon Hansen of WGN-AM 720 , WCIU-TV and Block Club Chicago. Jon is a veteran member of “The Mincing Rascals” podcast panel and will be part of our live show at The Second City from 6-8 p.m. on Tuesday, Sept. 26. Ticket info.

Any time I hear Marc Cohn's 1991 song “Walking In Memphis” I belt it out loud as it brings back fond memories.

It's the first song I ever memorized. My best friend, Kent, and I were on the same youth baseball team, and his dad would play it every time he took us to baseball practice or a game. And when we carpooled to church in Kent's dad's car, I'd make him turn on “Walking in Memphis.”

I'm sure we wore out the tape. Ever since I moved back to my old neighborhood, I've been playing it during bike rides past all the ballparks where we used to play. I'll have to go play it for Kent's dad sometime soon, he lives a block away from me now!

I know almost nothing about the artist or the song, and I've never been to Memphis. But I love it!

Put on my blue suede shoes
And I boarded the plane
Touched down in the land of the Delta Blues
In the middle of the pouring rain

Note: Cohn, now 64, is considered a “one-hit wonder,” and the backstory of the song is at Smoothradio’s “The Story of... 'Walking in Memphis' by Marc Cohn,” Songwriting magazine’s feature, “How I wrote ‘Walking In Memphis’ by Marc Cohn,” and at Songfacts. He is the ex-husband of network TV news personality Elizabeth Vargas

Consult the complete Tune of the Week archive!

The Picayune Sentinel is a reader-supported publication. Browse and search back issues here. Simply subscribe to receive new posts each Thursday. To support my work, receive bonus issues on Tuesdays and join the zesty commenting community, become a paid subscriber. Thanks for reading!

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