The Weekend in Foolish Attention
Bits and bytes of the week
STRANGELY PROFOUND. Thursday, the cast and crew of NPR’s “Wait, Wait… Don’t Tell Me!” descended upon the park and performed a live taping for approximately 4,000 devotees. Their CFO told me that they were on the fence about the show because it has been a bit disorganized in the past few years and it’s a heavy lift for them but when they heard I’d be on the ground looking out for them, they unanimously dove in.
It was slightly surreal being the House Manager for the show after my decade doing it at Chase Bank but fun—really fun. A group of kids from Minneapolis attended like a little t-shirt wearing cult of seventh graders and I came over before things started. One kid was practically foaming at the mouth in excitement so I took him backstage and he met Bill Kurtis. As always, Bill was generous and kind, and the kid got a photo of proof he’d met the legend.
The host, Peter Sagal, breezed in moments before the taping started so I didn’t have a chance to check on him and the show went off without a hitch. After, he does a Q&A with the crowd. At the close, Peter introduces the crew and ended that portion with a very sweet shout-out to yours truly. A set up that the program had been taping in front of live audiences for 26 years and giving me an outsized bit of credit for its success. He welcomed me back to Chicago and told the crowd that Chicago was lucky to have me back.
In the grand scheme, it was a lovely thing to do. It has had an oddly profound effect on me as the full circle, seventeen years in the making, was codified in that announcement. It declared in no uncertain terms that I’m back and welcome.
ALL THINGS ROCKY. I have a couple of podcasts that I work on and the latest two episodes of the I Like to Watch podcast (episodes 65 & 66) involve Donnie (my co-host in L.A.), myself, Nikki Miller, and Himmel as we go through all six Rocky films. It was a big lift and I had a ball with it. If you like podcasts, movies, Rocky, or all three, give them a listen.
A WALK IN THE PARK. “Olivia to M.O.D.”
“Go for M.O.D.”
“We have a guest opportunity at the PSC.”
“On my way.”
I jaunt across the park, up the stairs, and I walk up to three women. The locus of attention is on a thin, frail ninety-year old lady who seems a bit out of it in a park with approximately 15,000 people milling around, listening to the blues emanating from the Pritzker stage, drinking, and having loud Chicago fun.
The second woman is her seventy-five-year old daughter who brought her to the park. A younger third seems to be the one in charge.
“We need a wheelchair now!” she barks.
I spin and hop on over to the Welcome Center on Randolph and check out one of the park wheelchairs, flashing rock and roll horns to the security officers at the checkpoint along the way. Back with the wheelchair, the two more functional ladies try to get the eldest to sit in the chair but she is afraid to lower as if she doesn’t trust that there is something to catch her. The youngest barks at me to secure the chair and to shift it and adjust it so she can finally, after nearly seven minutes, get seated.
Satisfied that they are all set, I pop on down the stairs to deal with other issues.
Fifteen minutes later I’m called back up for a customer issue. The difference between an opportunity and an issue is one of urgency.
I find out that the younger woman was not with the other two. She claimed to be a nurse and was helping but the pushed the eldest out into the park, leaving the daughter behind. She has no idea where her mother is in a crowd of thousands. Oof.
For about ten seconds, I stop and think through solutions. I want to admonish the daughter and ask her what the hell she was thinking letting a perfect stranger just take her mother but I know that isn’t going solve anything. I gently suggest that we will definitely find her even though I have no idea how that will be accomplished. We start walking toward the EMT station. I’ve made nice with their crew earlier in the day and figure they might be able to at least offer a suggestion or two.
A few minutes later, I see her mother surrounded by EMTs and security. She is visibly frightened and seems to have no clue where she is. I bring the daughter over and make sure all involved understand that they are together. I get a high sign from one of the security officers, make sure the daughter is good, and bolt away for another typical day at Blues Fest.
FATHERS AND SONS. I’ve told this story dozens of times and it’s that day, so here it is!
Towering above
Impossibly imposing
His presence is indelible
Even in his absence
Fred Sanford provided a living for his son
Darth Vader took away a hand
Andy Griffith was all homespun wisdom
Uncle Ben's death propelled a superhero
He is All of These and More
A Source
Of Encouragement
Of Reproach
Of Protection
Of Distance
The Connection is in the DNA (perhaps)
But not umbilically
The Connection is in the Guidance
To please, to model, to reflect upon
The Best among them are
Teachers
Counselors
Examples to Emulate
The Worst among them are
In Absentia
A Mold to Break
A Cautionary Tale
But Good or Bad
He leaves a mark
As deep as the marrow in our bones
As lasting as a scar across our faces
Am I destined to become Him by genetic fate
Or only through exposure?
Will I be like him?
Do I want to be?
Stan worked as a storm window installer and repairman. His job required long drives to homes out and around the Texas landscape. He was unmarried but dating a woman who had a daughter my age. His home was sort of dingy and perpetually cluttered. Looking back, it was the home of someone who never went to college but had adopted the dorm room aesthetic as a grown man. Empty beer and whiskey bottles. Used roaches. A bong. Dirty clothes in not just one but several corners of almost every room. Pizza boxes and frozen burrito wrappers strewn like a Jackson Pollack diorama.
I was fourteen. Stan was my father. He had been out of the familial picture since I was four years old.
He was drafted into the Viet Nam debacle and knocked my teenage mother up just prior. I was born in the Millington Naval Base near Memphis, TN (my first crib was a dresser drawer on that base) and Stan Hall shipped out not long after. A couple of years later, my sister Vicki was added to my mom's tiny entourage. When Stan finally came back, he had been so damaged by the war, mom divorced him and we moved on to a series of stepfather's who ranged from the wife beater to the loser. Mom didn't find The One until I was in college.
So, I didn't really know my father at all. Sure, the Hall family was in my life. Once in a while mom would transport my sister and I out to the middle of Kansas and we'd visit them. They were a Midwest version of The Sons of Anarchy—my Uncle Ronnie would've fit perfectly in the cast of that show—but Stan was almost never around.
The summer of my fourteenth year, it was decided that I would spend a summer with Stan in his home in Irving, Texas. It was the second summer in a row my mother needed a break from me—I was a living terror as a teenager. Far too much energy, horny, reckless and with a ragged temper that flared like a Roman Candle.
Mom didn't talk much about him so the buildup to the summer was deliciously exciting. What would he be like? Would he like me? Was I anything like him? Maybe I could spend every summer with him, soaking in the fatherly advice and wise manly ways that a real father might impart. I had seen pictures and knew OF him but not much ABOUT him. It felt like I was about to discover a vital and important missing piece of the answer to that elusive question: WHO AM I?
Stan turned out to be far more like Wooderson—the perpetually adolescent hornball played by Matthew McConaughy in Richard Linklater's "Dazed and Confused"—than like the father I was envisioning. He started drinking by 10AM and took me out on his jobs—at first, teaching me how to install storm windows, cut glass, repair cracks and caulking. Then he took me out on others so I could just do his job all summer while he listened to 8-track tapes of Rod Stewart and Billy Joel and got high in his truck.
We would go over to his girlfriend's house and they would go fuck in the back room, leaving her daughter and I to awkwardly hang out. Later, he encouraged me in the ways of how to get her into bed and what to do once I got her there. His friends would come over on the weekends and they would drink and smoke and talk endlessly about pussy and getting pussy and stupid women with their pussies.
It was like a crash course in every single thing I did NOT want to emulate.
And, worse than not wanting to be like Stan, I realized I really didn't like him at all. He was kind of mean and lazy and complacent. He made fun of the fact that I liked to read. He was horrified that I was good in school but thrilled that I was always getting suspended for doing reckless, stupid things. I was a nerd. I needed to relax. I felt smaller and smaller every day because, even though I didn't care much for him, this man really seemed disappointed that I was his son. I had had enough. I called my mother the next morning and BEGGED to come home. And my mother heard me. Although I never really told her about the summer, I think she understood because she never even broached the subject of another summer with him.
And that was the very last time I ever even saw my natural father. I don't even know if he is alive today. And, if I'm honest, I don't really care. They say that we all are a sum total of both Nature and Nurture. If I am to understand myself, I can accept that, from my father, I got a genetic tendency that became spinal Meningitis when I was five and an addictive personality. I've chosen for my addictions nicotine and caffeine which, in my opinion, is better than being an alcoholic or a hard drug addict. The nurture was never there—for that I got my mother. My brilliant, spitfire do-gooder mother turned out to be the best father and mother I could have ever wanted.
Mom had a rocky road finding the perfect man as if the very idea of perfection were even attainable. In the nurture category, I suppose I picked that up as I've been divorced twice and didn't really have what I consider my first real kiss until I was 42. While mom's lifelong search was not to find me a father - she was looking for a partner, a man who could see her flaws as strengths, someone to balance her eccentricities with his own, a comrade, a supporter. But, as her firstborn, the search was as much for a man I could call my father and not feel shafted somehow by using the label as it was for her to find marital bliss.
By the time I got to college, most of mom's marriages hadn't really lasted that long - a couple of years at most - I think six years was the record. And, to be perfectly honest, I really didn't care for any of them. None of them were great husband material and in the "father" category, my sister and I were almost always seen as baggage to put up with rather than family.
Her father was a Child of the Depression, a WWII Patton's Army Machine Gunnery Sergeant, a hardass oil rigger. In the parlance of another time, Grandpa was a Man's Man. In light of that model, mom had very few men to choose from, so I hold no blame for her failure to land a Quality Guy.
And then there was V.
We call him V because his name is Lawrence Volbrecht - a midwestern cowboy type with a proud German heritage, a laugh as big as thunder, and a career that has included being a Hollywood stunt flyer, a Rock and Roll DJ, and a Real Estate King.
I met V when on Spring Break of my junior year in college. Mom was throwing a Sweet 16 birthday party for a cousin of mine whose friends were not the kind of kids you really want in your house. Some drug addicts, a couple of Gang Members, and at least a few men in their twenties with 14-year old girlfriends. Underage drinking kind of blossomed up in the party before my mom even had time to pretend that my cousin even cared about the beautiful cake she had baked for her. It shortly became chaos.
I was used to being the Alpha in my mom's house. Once we escaped from stepfather number one - the violent domestic abuser - I grabbed hold of The Man of the House belt and wore it defiantly. V was mom's boyfriend. I'd met many of her boyfriends over the years, so I wasn't even suspicious. I was dismissive. He was nice but they all were at first. Mom was sort of scurrying around, trying to get control of this rapidly spinning monstrosity of a Surly, Angry 16 party and it was time for someone to call things to a halt and kick all of these shitheads out on the street.
Mom and I successfully got them out of the house but they weren't ready to leave. They were pissed that we had ended things before they were ready and about twenty of them were still hanging out in the front yard, defying anyone to tell them to leave. I steeled myself. Time to get Wyatt Earp on these fuckers.
And then, like a force of nature, V came strolling out of the house. He looked stern and angry. He slowly but firmly told the kids it was time to go home. And a couple of them laughed. And my mom's new boyfriend kind of...grew. He thundered into the yard and ripped his dress shirt open, popping the buttons and roared at them that they would disperse or there would be hell to pay. The shocked, suddenly taken aback looks on the faces of these thugs and angry young men and girls was hysterical. And they bolted out of there like cartoon characters leaving silhouettes of their bodies in the dust.
I couldn't help myself. I started laughing. Out of surprise, out of amazement. He turned on me in an instant. And smiled the biggest shit-eating grin I've ever seen. "Well... there you go." his deep voice calmly rumbled. It was the start of deep respect and continual admiration I have had for this man called V. He was someone to emulate. He was someone to count upon. He was a Man's Man.
Mom and V have been married for almost a quarter of a century, obliterating her earlier records and, in that time, I have watched him love my mother fiercely and unapologetically. I've gone to him for advice, I've realized that while he is not my blood, he might as well be. We look nothing alike but no one who sees us together would know that he is not the loin from which I sprang.
I've grown to love this man deeply. I have an abiding respect for him and his ways of doing things. I take deadly seriously his words of wisdom. Because, even though it took her until I had become a grown man to do it, mom finally found a man I am proud to call my father.
On to the next week in the park, the heat dome to come, and life in. the big city! Be safe, drink water, and smile some.
He loves you with all his heart.
Man...you swamped me this week...deeply dug, Don...