The (drag) show must go on!
The ACLU is right to fight for the suburban bakery at the center of a controversy
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Eric Zorn is a former opinion columnist for the Chicago Tribune. Find a longer bio and contact information here. This issue exceeds in size the maximum length for a standard email. To read the entire issue in your browser, click on the headline link above.
Why the ACLU is right to drag the village of Lake in the Hills into court
I’m not particularly entertained by drag shows but evidently some people are. Fine. It takes all kinds to fill the freeways, as the saying goes.
It surprised and disappointed me to learn that the UpRising Bakery and Café in Lake in the Hills was being deluged with hateful, threatening messages prior to “Starry Night Drag Brunch,” a family-friendly event scheduled for Saturday, July 23. And it disgusted and disturbed me that the event had to be cancelled when a vandal broke windows at the bakery and defaced the property with anti LGBTQ graffiti early in the morning before the event.
A 24-year-old man from Alsip, some 60 miles from the bakery/café, was arrested and charged with a felony hate crime.
It then seemed tone deaf to me when Lake in the Hills cracked down on the bakery.
(UpRising owner) Corinna Sac said she received a letter on Friday (July 29) following a meeting with the Village of Lake in the Hills. The letter ordered Sac's business to stop hosting entertainment events, saying that UpRising was not zoned for them.
The village said they would pursue "appropriate enforcement actions" if the business continued hosting events.
The letter said that municipal code and zoning ordinance violations could be issued against Sac and her landlord. The village also said they could suspend or revoke business licenses.
"We've been holding events pretty much since the day we've opened. Live music, or paint and sips, cookie making classes and cake decorating classes," Sac said. "It is essential for UpRising to be able to host these events. It is what bridges the gap in our daily sales to ensure we can pay our rent, pay our taxes, and pay our employees," Sac said.
It sure looked like an effort to suppress family-friendly drag shows and further harm the victims of the toxic hatred that forced the cancellation of the event. But then again, I thought, rules are rules. And the village released a lengthy statement to the media making that very claim:
The operation of an entertainment business is not a permitted use at that location. Cedar Ridge Plaza is zoned B-2, Neighborhood Convenience Business District, which is defined as follows:
The B-2 District is established to meet the needs of the immediate neighborhood. It is intended to provide convenience shopping for persons living in adjacent residential areas. Permitted uses shall be those that are appropriate to satisfy basic shopping needs which occur on a frequent or daily basis.
This zoning designation prohibits entertainment in large part due to the close proximity to residential neighborhoods and shared tenant parking.
The American Civil Liberties Union has come to UpRising’s defense:
Village officials initially seemed inclined to support Ms. Sac and her business in the wake of this horrific event. Unfortunately, they have chosen instead to give the person who attacked and vandalized UpRising exactly what he apparently wanted. That is, the Village is attempting to block the drag brunch and any other program at UpRising that the Village deems (for the first time) an “entertainment event,” by threatening Ms. Sac and her landlord with fines, license revocations, and other “enforcement actions.” … The Village’s sudden determination to enforce the code against UpRising or Ms. Sac based on their exercise of First Amendment rights constitutes unconstitutional retaliation.
And about those rigid rules, the ACLU has a compelling card to play in court — a July 8 letter to Sac from Joshua Langen, Lake in the Hills’ Community and Economic Development Director, in which Langen was clear that the village had no principled objection to Starry Night Drag Brunch aside from its use of the advertising slogan “Get those dollar bills ready,” which sounded a bit too much like a come-on for a strip club. Lagen wrote:
Beyond that, the village appreciates and respects your efforts to operate your business. And while we are not aware that any specific issue would arise from the planned event, there are a few non-exhaustive reminders we wish to communicate, to ensure that no complaints are made and that no violations occur during the event:
Please observe all occupancy requirements so as not to create a fire hazard, as well as ensuring all events and business activities occur within the interior of your business.
If alcoholic beverages will be sold, the event must be confined to the hours allowed by your liquor license and all other liquor license requirements must be observed.
Please be respectful to ensure the entertainment or your guests do not create a noise or other nuisance to surrounding businesses and properties including ensuring that parking is maintained so as not to create any traffic hazards.
Please also be aware that the entertainment must not constitute what would be defined as “adult cabaret" as defined in section 11.01 of the Lake in the Hills municipal code.
After a reminder about the village’s amusement tax ordinance, the letter concludes, “We wish you continued success with your business and appreciate in advance your compliance with the Village’s requirements.”
UpRising has optimistically rescheduled the drag show for this coming Sunday. I won’t attend, but if you want to, you ought to be able to.
Notes and comments from readers —lightly edited —- along with my responses
Pete P. —I give you no credit for your “I was wrong” confession last week. “The one time I was really wrong was when I understated how horrible Trump and his fans are. Never again.” This is like saying in job interview, “My biggest flaw is that I care too much.” I know you can find something truly cringy to confess to.
Well, I listed several other columns I would retract if I could. And just about any statement that says “I was wrong then and I’m right now” runs the risk of stinking of self congratulation. I really did fail late last November to grasp the seriousness of the threat posed by Trump’s post-election tantrum, which revealed genuinely flawed judgment on my part that I can’t chalk up to youth or naivete.
Perhaps as time goes on I’ll dig methodically through my archives and present more of my regrettable opinions.
Jake H. — I was wrong about Crimea and Putin. Russia didn't seem like much of a threat at the time, the Russian claim on Crimea seemed historically plausible (its having been gifted by the USSR mid-century), it didn't seem like one people was subjugating another, I didn't have great sympathy for Ukraine which seemed like a thoroughly corrupt backwater, and I saw Putin as a thug but a relatively unimportant one who wanted power and wealth, had it, and wouldn't be so stupid as to take on the West in a big way. There were commentators (and friends of mine at the time) who saw it much differently -- as an outrageous encroachment on another independent, (sorta) democratic nation's sovereignty in Europe, as Hitler-ish, as akin to basically how we feel about Ukraine today, and that Obama's (and, to be fair, just about *everyone else's*) functional acquiescence (amid near-universal lack of interest in doing anything serious about it) would be taken as a green light for worse to come. But I pshawed those arguments as overwrought. It seems they were right, and I was wrong.
Bring back pshaw!
Ann H. F. — I was wrong to have opposed gay marriage. I was all for equal rights, but didn't see why a registered domestic partnership with the same legal rights wouldn't achieve the same goals. Andrew Sullivan convinced me I was wrong. Your bigoted great aunt won't care at all if you have a registered domestic partnership, but she might actually show up for a wedding and begin to realize that love is still love.
A lot of people were wrong to have opposed gay marriage including, for a time, the sainted Barack Obama. The idea that the U.S. Supreme Court might reverse its prior ruling and allow individual states to decide whether or not to permit same sex marriages is comprehensively appalling.
Daniel P. — Regarding Bruce Springsteen and Ticketmaster using “dynamic pricing” so that concertgoers have to pay the price that scalpers would be asking: I get the fundamentals of capitalism, but what about the idealism of some artists who many people of modest means have been supporting for the better part of their lifetimes? I agree artists should be pocketing money that has been instead going to scalpers seemingly forever. But some form of regulation seems in order here, to be applied at the discretion of the artist who is reaping the reward from the ticket sales.
An artist like Springsteen surely has the clout to place some limits on the extremes of surge pricing, to improve the affordability of tickets for his longtime fans, many of whom are very much blue collar citizens who perfectly reflect the characters frequently presented in his music.
The Boss deserves to be paid well for his outstanding talent. Maybe tickets to his shows are worth $200 or $300, perhaps a bit more for the best seats. But $1500? $2200? It just isn’t right.
One way to discourage scalping wouldbe to make tickets far less transferable by selling certain seats — or all seats — with the requirement that the purchaser must show at the entrance gate a photo ID matching the name on the ticket order. Some universities have a version of this method of discouraging resales when they require those using student tickets to sporting events also to show their student IDs for admission.
But that still doesn’t get around the basic, bottom line economic fact: If people are willing to pay those high prices for the best seats, then they are manifestly worth those prices. And the artist ought to benefit.
Maybe entertainers wanting to boost their populist cred could arrange to play occasional open-air free shows underwritten by the greater receipts they’ll get from the dynamically priced tickets.
Marilyn — I've long found Twitter to be a smarmy cesspool. I'll never understand why people live and die by what's going on there.
The best way to enjoy Twitter and stay out of the cesspools is to create separate lists of people to follow that’s independent of and more focused than the list of everyone you follow that pops up in your mail feed. Click on “Lists” from your profile, then the little icon that looks like a page with a plus on it to create a new list.
You can make a list for your real life friends, one for local news sources, one for the hobbies or sports or issues that you’re especially interested in. You can keep your lists private, though some users make their lists public so you can simply follow them. Here, for example, is Michael Miner’s “Columnists” list.
Marty T. — The Picayune Sentinel is fun, challenging, informative and I look forward to it every week. My only complaint, for which there may be no fix, is that you link to such things as the New York Times confessions and I don't subscribe to the Times so I can't read the articles.
This is a dilemma faced by all of us who curate and aggregate content. Some sites allow visitors a couple two three free reads, while others won’t give you squat unless you subscribe. It’s pretty obvious by now that we’re not going to see the micro-payment option of, say, a dime or a quarter or even a dollar to read one article without subscribing. Media industry Substacker Simon Owens explained why.
David L. — I regret that your personal animus toward your former colleague John Kaas is on full display in your remarks about him. The insinuation is that his ability to write about Chicago people and events is somehow no longer credible since he has moved just across the border into Indiana, and also that he is hypocritical in wanting to maintain the privacy of his residence. The first insinuation is fully without support, and the second represents a very real concern for any conservative public figure, given the left's newfound tactics of targeting people whom they are unhappy with at their family residence.
I have never contended that his move to the exurbs removes his right to opine on Chicago and Illinois politics. And he was quite open about it when he moved to Chicago from the burbs a few years ago, so the secrecy in which he tried to cloak this move suggested that he felt the move weakened his standing. That secrecy and his recent self-pitying tantrum over the Tribune column item about his move have drawn way more attention to the information than it ever would have gotten if he'd been matter-of-fact about it.
The political right fought in court to defend their practice of conducting protests at the homes of doctors who perform abortions and violent extremism is heavily concentrated on the right. To suggest that “targeting people whom they are unhappy with” is a left-wing thing or that there is a notable problem with targeting print pundits at their homes is not accurate.
As for my "personal animus," well, I don't know if it you’d call personal, but I lost respect for Kass after the churlish dishonesty that I chronicled here.
Neil Steinberg of the Sun-Times posts Tuesday on the topic of Kass, his move to Indiana and his comical overreaction to coverage of that move:
You have to remember the central place that fear occupies in the conservative mindset. Kass dwells in the realm of panic rooms and alarm systems and doxxing, the fear — perhaps justified — of encountering the baked-in malice of people such as himself. The fear that the harassment they inflict on others might be returned. Then mix-in self-importance. Perhaps he is genuinely terrified that if the liberals he imagines are so tormented by his fierce sweeping beacon of truth knew what state he lives in, he might wake up one morning and find his lawn crowded with outraged trans protesters barking through megaphones, waving signs as young folk who believe in reproductive rights link arms with Jane Fonda and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and trample his petunias.
Michael C. — Why can’t the Picayune Sentinel be an icon on my Kindle page like the Trib, SunTimes, Axios and Kass?
Gosh, I don’t know. I hope readers can answer your question in comments.
Dan W. (a June 17, 2020, email found during an inbox purge) — You will soon be unemployed and then what? This crap you write week after week I’m done. Support all this left wing garbage. Why? Support a governor’s “fair tax”. No questions asked. You are a true liberal. Good luck when the paper goes under hope you and your family suffer. Goodbye.
I have added Dan as a subscriber just to tell him that neither my family nor I am suffering, that I left the Tribune voluntarily and the paper appears far from going under. Also to apologize publicly for not responding sooner. It was rude of me.
Some of these messages are in reference to items in last Thursday’s Picayune Sentinel.
The ‘ayes’ have it in Indiana’s Pulaski County
Pulaski County Indiana, is about 100 miles from Chicago but from a promotional TV ad this past weekend I learned that the folks there pronounce it “Puh-lask-aye” instead of “Puh-lask-ee,” as nearly everyone else does.
The county’s website admits theirs is a mispronunciation of the last name of Polish-born U.S. Revolutionary War hero Casimir Pulaski, and takes a stab at why that is:
George Terry (an early resident of the area) … had come to Indiana from Upstate New York. His father, Charles, lost his life due to wounds suffered during the War of 1812 Battle of Sodus Point, fought near Fishville, New York, which was renamed ‘Pulaski’ — pronounced with a long ‘i’, rather than a long ‘e’ — upon incorporation in 1832.
Our best guess is that Mr. Terry carried the mispronunciation from New York to Indiana, and the opportunities for long-distance spoken communication being non-existent, locals had no way of knowing that the final syllable should have sounded like a long ‘e’
Indeed residents of the village of Fishville in far upstate New York chose “Puh-lask-aye” during a town meeting held in a local tavern, village historian Shawn Doyle told me.
“We have pretty strong New England accents up here, and I guess no one knew how to pronounce the name,” he said.
This error is distinct from an Americanization — think of the Illinois towns pronounced KAY-ro, DEZ Plaines and ver-SAILS, for instance — and one to keep in mind when next you take back roads to Indianapolis.
Ya gotta see these tweets!
I often run across tweets that rely on visual humor and so can’t be included in the Tweet of the Week contest (the template for the poll does not allow the use of images). Here are a few good ones I’ve come across recently:
Vote for your favorite. I’ll share the winner in Thursday’s main edition.
There’s still time to vote in the conventional Tweet of the Week poll!
Thank you for supporting the Picayune Sentinel. I really appreciate it. To help this publication continue and grow, please consider spreading the word to friends, family, associates, neighbors and agreeable strangers.
And here I thought that after the war was over, Pulaski moved to suburban Chicago, changing his name to “Crawford”.
Not sure if he still does it, but for years/decades Springsteen had his people pick 10 to 20 people with the worst seats in the house and put them in “house seats” right in front of stage.