The Crashers

It's been a busy holiday season this year, juggling family stuff, finances, gadgets and the purchasing of presents, but somehow we found time to create this heartwarming tale of a man (me) who contracts a computer virus and unwittingly infects the entire city of Chicago.

Enjoy.

Too Long

I once decided that if I ever wrote a book about improv, I would dedicate it to my favorite improv teachers. Del Close and Martin de Maat, two men who often saw themselves on opposite sides of the fence, died less than two years apart, and Chicago improvisation has never been the same since. I think they would have both chuckled to find that they share space in my head. Martin served as artistic director of Second City's Training Center, an amusing choice, since Martin often quipped, "It's so easy to be funny. Why bother?" He's the main reason why, when I graduated college in 1994, I wanted to move up to Chicago. Sure, I had vague ideas about making it big in improvisation, then returning to my main love, science fiction, with all of the leisure time I would have, but at this point it's clear that I might as well have said, "I'll get that transfusion as soon as I've squeezed this blood from this stone. Hope it's A-positive!"

Martin taught me to stop seeing life as a series of stepping stones. He observed that everyone who auditioned for Second City's Touring Company didn't want to understudy TourCo at all. They wanted the movie deal based on their hit SNL character. To do that, they had to get TourCo, move on to ETC, then mainstage, land a gig performing for Lorne Michaels, and finally score a hit with viewers with something inane but irresistible, the "Lothar" of the modern era. Consider this: it's like throwing a dart and hitting five consecutive bulls eyes. With the same dart.

So, I can't say that I didn't expect the day that I would graduate the Training Center with nothing more than an expensive t-shirt. I just wish I had had more time with Martin, or that more teachers took on his, "You are pure potential" viewpoint. Stephen Colbert taught my Level 5 class, and he was very nice, but my class didn't get along and he wasn't the character he plays on TV. He was interesting and hardworking and, in retrospect, I wish I had gotten to know him better, because he says such interesting things about Del.

It took me a long time to get into Del. My first workshop with him proved only how much of a jerk he could be toward college students. I guess having written The Book on what he saw as the future of improvisation led him to feel a little embittered about having to give workshops to people who had never read it, but, man, watching him bum and smoke cigarettes while he visibly hated our game of Freeze Tag made it hard to like that son of a bitch. It wasn't until I reached the end of my IO classes that I realized how much we had in common: the man was a science fiction nerd. That was cool.

More than that, once he saw a scene break out of the usual tropes of improv, becoming something closer to Art, he opened up like a flower. I was lucky enough to perform with some of the most talented and motivated people at the theatre at the time, and together all of us learned new stuff every time we took the stage. If Martin saw us as pure potential, Del saw us as the fathers of Art, mothers of Chaos, children of Science, siblings of Melodramatic Capitalization.

Too many years have gone by since their passing, and there's no rhyme or reason why I would think of them today. Perhaps it's just the season, or the loved ones we've lost recently and the many more ahead of us. It's too bad that just coming up with the quote doesn't get the book written, but that's life. Here's what I would have said:

To Del and Martin, who would have been surprised to find they share this page.
Gurus, legends, friends (but not with each other). May the heavens thunder with your wit.

Successories

A little while ago -- perhaps years, it's hard to tell with my porous brain -- my friend Sara asked me to help her out with her parents' anniversary making cool fake Successories signs that she and her sisters could print out and frame to mock/honor their folks. I just ran across one of them, a graphic I faked up of a signpost leading to nowhere, and liked it so much I thought I would upload it.

Sara's caption:
Direction: not letting the claim of a "one-way street" stop you from driving the wrong way. Or driving on the sidewalk. Or knowing where you're going at all.

Sara is cool.

Evan

Monday Pictures is a group formed at the start of the summer of 2007 to make short, fun movies to share on YouTube and various other short, fun movie outlets. We were sad to lose Bob and Stacey at the end of the summer, but otherwise life goes on. And on it did go, as Ryan Dee Gilmour and I took turns directing the script written and co-starring the brilliant Erin Pallesen. Here is the embedded video.

My name is Matt and...

...and I confess I have no idea how to pronounce the name of the actor Matthew McConaughey.

A. Muh Con A Hee ?
B. Muh Con Uh Ghee ?
C. Mih Conga Hee ?
D. All of the above ?

I'm lucky he's not in more movies. Maybe an easy to pronounce name is Kevin Bacon's career secret. You can't imagine six degrees of Jürgen Prochnow*, can you?

* Most recently seen in Primeval but also known for starring in Das Böot and The Keep.

'Bye Jihaboy

Last week, my good friend and occasional partner Bob left for Portland with his lovely S.O. Stacey to start what will doubtless be an amazing theatre. I'm going to miss him.

Bob and I met at an Annoyance class before the turn of the millennium. I hope I wasn't a jerk. We met again for my second children's show, "Kid Mystery". Hilariously, I cast him as eating machine Tad Huff. It wasn't until rehearsals began that Bob said, "I'm a diabetic. It's okay. I'll just eat during the show." From then on, Bob showed me that there was, for all practical purposes, nothing he would not do for stage artistry. This is why I know he's got nothing but success in his future.

Bob and I also performed together at ComedySportz, ImprovOlympic, and, for one shining moment, a two-man show at the Playground called (for reasons that now escape me) "Laws of Dynamics". It was a fun show. Bob was also many of the Earthlings in the ComedySportz Family Matinee of "The Paper Spaceship", a role I cast him in because it was thankless and I knew he'd be great. He was. He is.

Bob and I worked together on video projects, starting after the turn of the millennium when I'd just bought my first and only (so far) video camera, when he asked if I'd like to help him and Amber out with a music video, "Lines in the Suit". He had the idea that he would walk toward the camera, smoking like a chimney. "All well and good," I said, "but we should probably give Amber," fire-headed goddess that she is, "something parallel to do." So we made her smoke off-camera, then enter the camera walking backwards, and played it back in reverse. In the final video, it kind of looks like she's receiving his smoke. It looks pretty good, and I thank Bob and Amber for their patience with me, having taken four of their Sunday mornings to shoot it.

I could go on, but this post would be endless. Suffice it to say, Portland has gained mightily and Chicago lost a favored son, but I know our paths will cross again, and I look forward to it.

A cell phone warning

Inappropriate cell phone use bugs me, sometimes. Not all the time; if your grandfather is going into surgery and your family crowding the waiting room tells you, "Relax. It's nothing. Go see a movie!" and you do, you have my blessing to leave your phone on. I'm assuming you have a twitchy leg and can't put it on vibrate. If, on the other hand, your wife went shopping and you wanted to catch "Cold Mountain" then you probably should leave the phone off even if you left the credit card with her. The damage has been done. Enjoy that hilarious Renee Zellwegger.

I'm of two minds with cell phones and cars, and which mind usually depends on my proximity to the steering wheel. If I'm behind it and lost, sometimes I'll call for directions or to let the party expecting me know I'm running late. This is strictly a courtesy as I am always running late. As a pedestrian, though, I despise drivers with cell phones, certainly if they're not talking and particularly if they're driving an SUV. Big cars plus distracted driving equals bigger nastiness for the rest of us. If the driver isn't talking, it means they are having a Conversation. I can't think of a more inappropriate time.

Yes, I can.

It happened the other day when I took a bathroom break from my job in the afternoon. I work at the University of Chicago and during the summer the campus is a ghost town punctuated by the occasional conference, cheer camp or social function. I knew immediately I was not the only person in the bathroom. One half of a heated conversation came from one of the stalls and at first I figured two guys were arguing and pooping. I was wrong. One guy was arguing and pooping on his cell phone. That bugged me.

I decided then to get my petty revenge by dropping the caller's illusion. On a cell phone, you never know where the person is, though it's generally considered rude to have a conversation in the bathroom. I made certain to flush the toilet. I might have flushed a second time (just to be sure). Then I washed my hands as loudly as I could and, unusually for me, used the blow dryer that takes ten minutes to do what a paper towel can do in ten seconds. This time, I didn't mind the wait. I luxuriated. I don't know what my cell phone talker said during those precious minutes. I can only hope neither did he.

He was still talking, loudly, when I finished. What a jerk.

I hope he comes back. Let this be a warning: I've got a lot of cell phone rage.

Handsome

It's headshot-choosin' time, now that more than three months have elapsed since my session with Brian McConkey. He did such a great job, I'm faced with the conundrum of picking the right ones to reproduce. Please feel free to weigh in with your favorite or favorites in the comments section, or you can just email me to tell me if I really do look like a young Hugh Laurie.








Other fun things are afoot at the Larsen household, including some strained ankle tendons (no pun intended), lots of day job uptime (never stand in the crossfire when someone essential quits), and a rapidly-diminishing summer that will see several dear friends departing this city for the foreseeable future. I'll post on those later. For now: me!

Literary Barometer

Remember that contraption you used to be able to buy at Sharper Image with the glass bulbs filled with colored water and air? You could tell the barometric pressure based on how high the "10", "5" and "1" were floating. I think. I never owned one.

I think you could build an analogous device to work on Chicago's elevated trains. You can measure literary pressure by how many people per car are reading "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows". I counted four tonight.

I think that means a storm is coming.

Literary Barometer

Remember that contraption you used to be able to buy at Sharper Image with the glass bulbs filled with colored water and air? You could tell the barometric pressure based on how high the "10", "5" and "1" were floating. I think. I never owned one.

I think you could build an analogous device to work on Chicago's elevated trains. You can measure literary pressure by how many people per car are reading "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows". I counted four tonight.

I think that means a storm is coming.

Brandi's Giant Boyfriend

In Illinois, the Land of Lincoln, you can't go far without running into Abraham Lincoln statuary, and indeed, that's exactly what happened the other day when Brandi and I went in search of Mexican food in Andersonville. On the walk down, we diverted into a park so that I could take notes from a cell phone call. It turned out, there was a very large bronze Lincoln at the north end. I thought it was neat. You don't often see anything other than old Lincoln, the one stooped both by Civil War and being 4" taller than anyone else he knew, 8" with his hat on. Young Lincoln, while no more pretty, at least doesn't look like you can break him in half just by sneezing on him. Here is what Mary Todd married and became an opium addict for.

Now, looking at this photo, you are no doubt left to conclude that a) the real Abraham Lincoln was actually much smaller than this reproduction and they only made him larger because of the bronze surplus, or b) Brandi is a perfectly proportioned and very thin Little Person. Draw your own conclusions.

Here is a clue in the form of another photo, showing me with Brandi's bronze boyfriend. From this photo, I think you can conclude that I call it a Sling Blade, though some call it a Kaiser Blade. Mmmn-hmmn.

Amsterdamoramas

While in Amsterdam, I tool a couple of panoramic photos with my trusty little Canon which, coincidentally enough, comes with a panoramic function that lets you take multiple pictures to be stitched together in the image editing program of your choice (Photoshop CS3 for me). First, we see the Dam. This plus the Amstel river gives Amsterdam its name, or so I was led to believe by the canal tour. Admittedly, I was not able to hear all of this because the boat was crowded and the Spanish family near me would only stop talking loudly during the Spanish bits, leaving me, the English speaker, a bit out of luck.

One sees very quickly while at the Dam no evidence of water being held back by man- or beaver-made structure. Either it is so large that I was standing on it or the name migrated over from another part of the city. Again, answers were not forthcoming.

My second panorama is a shot of one of the wider canals of Amsterdam. Natives will probably recognize it immediately. I have no idea. Street names were posted on the sides of buildings, and were in fact reasonably handy to navigate by using the Amsterdam rule of thumb: think in circles. Everything past the harbor is built in a loose loop. I wish I had planned my trip better and bought a book with an actual foldout map in place of the dummy map my Frommer's guide came with. It looked good enough in the bookstore, but I realized soon enough that it did not have all the streets listed when I folded it out and tried to navigate by it. I had a similar fear in Amsterdam that Brandi and I had when we first got into Rome: that bands of thieves would stalk me the moment they saw me holding a guide book and knew I was a tourist. The only thing that happened when I held a book and a quizzical expression was a nice man who looked like he was on the way home from work asked me if I needed help finding anything. I said "no". I had scarier moments getting Euros out of the ATM, when I was approached by a scraggly-looking man of indeterminate age speaking German at me and clearly looking for some kind of handout. I walked away quickly. Following the usual big city safety precautions has served pretty well in all the cities I've visited so far, so, yes, a small amount of paranoia serves me just fine.

Photos from Amsterdam

View from the top - even if your seat on the ultra-sophisticated 747 cost the same as a used car, it still might suck like mine did for the flight to Amsterdam. I was in the very back, wedged between two irate women who obviously wanted to be anywhere but there. Why? Our seat backs were against the galley wall and did not recline, but the seats in front of us did. It felt a little like the moment in Star Wars when Luke, Leia and everyone realized they were stuck in the Death Star's trash compactor. I had my Shuffle, my computer and my book and spent it reasonably comfortable, but boy was I glad I packed the earphones because the middle-aged Dutch woman to my right just could not stop making "tsk" sounds with her mouth every time she shifted to make her back more comfortable. Let's just say the only people having a good time in our section were the Dutch college students wearing cowboy hats and clearly enjoying the mediocrity that was "Wild Hogs", the in-flight movie.


Here I am at Schipol Airport in Amsterdam. If you say it fast enough, it sounds like "sh*thole", which it isn't. Rather, it's the hub for air and ground transportation, as the train to the city departs from there, as well as the shuttle to my hotel, the Amsterdam Radisson SAS. I left at 4:00 PM Monday afternoon and, due to the strangeness of a rotating, round Earth and time zones, arrived 8 hours later at 7:00 AM Tuesday morning. Mostly, I did not worry about jet lag because I rarely sleep much anyway at conferences, and this was no exception. I think in my three nights there I slept a total of about ten hours, which is pretty dismal, as was the weather when I got in. People were friendly, however, and everyone in hospitality spoke English, although since I looked somewhat German I got a few greetings in Dutch and a quick shift to the Queen's tongue when I looked quizzical and said, "Uh, hello?"

The hotel was not very far from the airport. In fact, it was close enough to snap this picture from my room. The sound of approaching airplanes did not bother me too badly - as I said, sleep was pretty rare anyway - although you can see how crummy the weather was the first day. It gave me good justification for a nap on the right side of the pushed-together king size bed made of two twins.

The hotel was located in a business park surrounded by, among other corporations, Microsoft and Kyocera.

Hamsterland

NOTE: this is a post I wrote on my Treo at the conference in Amsterdam but did not get a chance to post, as my Google came up in Dutch. Here it is in all its glory, several days late, but no dollars short...

I'm finally tired. It figures the jet lag would wait until the conference started to strike. I went to bed last night at 10:30 PM, tired but a little giddy about my role as producer-director-AV guy. People ask for my opinion! Sometimes they disagree with me! I actually like it when everyone pours in all of their divergent opinions into the big bucket of a Project. It's convergence via Darwinian meme selection.

Granted, it's plenty easy to praise democracy when you get the most votes. When it came time to decide on two speakers or four in the small-ish starting room, Frank, the quite competent head of the team setting my client up clearly disagreed with my opinion that it was better to have and not need four than need and not have. He had a point. The speakers aren't pretty and the room is too small to hide them behind, say, a plant. Still, he did his best to make my bad orders good. I get nervous when equipment ordered doesn't show up and I figure if the client feels the same, we might all be in trouble. So I played it safe and ugly.

Speaking of ugly, the weather here is apparently abnormally bad. Where? Amsterdam! It's been windy and autumn-y at least since I landed and, although you don't normally see much of a place during conferences like this one, it's been kind of sad to look out the window and see gray.

The little things are cheering, though. Breakfast this morning was elaborate and over too quickly. I've only myself to blame for making it abundantly clear to the client that I would be keeping buffet hours... 7:00 - 8:30, right up to the start of the show. Technical director Alex covered for me while I ran for lox, a roll, a mini Brie round (3 oz), apple and caramel Nutella. The breakfast Brie was as good as the lunch Brie was bad; apparently, one is French and the other Dutch. I can see why, since it tastes like it came out of a swamp. At any rate, I'm saving the apple and precious, precious Nutella for later. Nothing like hoarding in Europe, where everything is novelty-sized. Cars, food, Diet Coke (Coca-Cola Light), rooms. My king-sized bed is two twins pushed together, with separate covers for each. Perhaps that's how they save marriages on the Continent; a Berlin wall for the unconscious. I can't say that I would have slept better with the full bed to stretch out on, but it would have been a perk.

Funny enough, I woke up last night twenty minutes after 1:00 and fifteen minutes after my phone alarm was supposed to wake me, which it did not because it was set to 1:00 PM. Duh. This worried me, so I struggled to wake all the way up because I wanted to make certain I had a wakeup call set for five AM, to give myself time to finish up presentation formatting, run, wash my socks, shower and arrive in time for my self-set seven AM call.

You heard right: wash my socks. In the process of shedding weight by repacking my bag, I managed to repack my socks into my closet. I'm committing many fashion faux pas by wearing white socks with business casual attire. Times like now, Del Close's words haunt me. Channeling a director who had criticized him after a similar misstep, he said, "Close, all I could see were your ankles twinkling in the stagelights." Twankles? Not his term. My feet are wet now. I washed my socks this morning thinking a couple hours were all I needed to dry heavy cotton. No. Even fifteen minutes' hard ironing would not dry those suckers, and by go time it was catch-as-catch-can. At this rate, I should be comfortable by this afternoon, though I'm intrigued by this thing the natives call "shopping".

Probably not. There are always a million details for these events and getting away for anything is a chore. I remember doing a gig in Birmingham, Alabama in a four star hotel next to a mall. I got away from the ballroom twice, for a combined total of twenty minutes, enough to get panoramic photos of the Merry-Go-Round I would never have the chance to ride.

Boo-hoo. I'm in Amsterdam.

We joked yesterday about how little I actually do and yet I still collect a paycheck. Oh, the airplane ride was no vacation, not for me. though, technically that wasn't true for everyone on my particular 747, unless they recently added cowboy hats and t-shirts to Dutch business casual. Boy, those kids were loud. My most important job right now is to press a button when the MicroCue goes off, and it has both lights and sounds, so I'd half to be twice the village idiot to miss it. Every event I expect to be replaced by a trained chicken. Of course, the real trick is knowing when not to hit the button. I have nine presentations in the cue for today. In theory, I could allow any of my ten presenters to advance slides to the end, "End of show" black screen, then simply load up the presentation while everyone watched, but this would look uncool, too much like sitting at the computer. If, though, I can load and switch presentations seamlessly, it's a magic trick for which people will pay quite handsomely. The switch to do this is also trained chicken simple. It's one button. So eat more chicken, because one trained roster cannot do my job but two might, so the only chance we should give them to gather is at the wrong end of a Chicken McNugget.

I am also responsible for proper room setup, general client satisfaction, and redesigning presentations to follow a shifting template even as I incorporate changed and eliminated slides and propagating this among two computers while maintaining th aforementioned "magic". But this is not as entertaining as saying my job is threatened by poultry, so I don't include it in my verbal resume. That's what keeps me up at night.

That and what Michael Bay's done to Transformers. I want it to be great, but will I be amazed at the end or merely numb like I was by the time Bruce Willis detonated himself at the end of "Armageddon"?

I had a scare one presentation when my speaker suggested I break out of the slide show to play a six-second MPEG-4. Magic, people! I instead suggested I embed it in the presentation although I would not have a chance to test it on screen. He agreed, with the understanding that I could always kill the magic if he needed it that badly. I tested it on both computers. Offline, it worked fine. When it came time to show on the big screen, however, my computer crapped out and showed only a big black box where the movie would have been. I loaded the slide on backup and switched quickly. By some miracle of computation, it not only played in the dinky square I'd embedded it in, it played full screen. The switching error almost looked right, and Magic would be conserved.

Here is my second scary moment: in the main presenter's show, the screen started cutting to black. A list of gremlins ran through my mind, cavorting, I think. The graphics card might have crapped out. The connection between graphics card and motherboard had loosened on one of my users' laptops at the University, something I realized after a modicum of Googling and an unbelievable amount of screw removal. I simply did not have the time to deal with that much screwball behavior. The VGA cable might have come loose, in which case a speedy jiggle would fix it. I looked down. The screen flickered, utterly without my permission. I looked at the graphics switcher - to the AV company, it's an Extron DVS 406, but to me it's a big black box with LEDs, one button I must press and many more I must not. My theory, eventually and with a good deal of angst as the screen went black and my paranoid ears picked up a startled murmur, was that the switcher had gone into a kind of power saver mode and gone down and back up quickly. It happened a few more times before it normalized. I still can't be sure what it was, but at least I have the satisfaction of also stumping the AV guys.

The final bits of Day One were brutal, as many details needed answering and the conference ran more than an hour late. I could not stop thinking about sleeping. The room was too public and the work too urgent to do so, but I do see how close that much tired is to being drunk.

Non-bothersome bothers

So deep was I watching the movie on Sunday that my phone fell out of my pocket with a rather alarming, plasticky metal clatter. It took me a moment to find it in the dark. When I had it safely back in hand, I secured it in the cargo pocket on the thigh of my pants and continued watching the film. Later, walking out of the theater, I reached down to restore order to my pockets - the phone must go in the hip-level pocket or it will bang against my knee when I walk - I realized I was missing something. The stylus had fallen out.

I didn't treat this as a big deal then and it's not one now, but it is one of those annoyances that does not go away with forgetting. For one, I always used to play with it while my mail downloaded, prying it up just a bit with my nail, pushing it back down until the curvature of its head was flush with the body of the Treo, reversing it so that it looked like the pull up antennas we all endured in the early days of cell phones.

For two, sometimes pen input really does work better, or at least my bitten short nails serve me poorly. I've always hated the form of Palm styli even as I loved the function. The fact that the designers built the carrying of the stylus into the case of every Palm I've ever known showed a love and understanding of the consumer who spends at least ninety seconds of every financial transaction looking for his/her wallet at the bottom of his/her purse/man purse. But the body of the stylus is too small and short to write well with, and there's no good way to build a pen into it. Brandi bought me a three-in-one stylus/pen/pencil once, which was cool except that I spent a minimum of three minutes of every day searching for the thing in coat pockets, pants, bathrooms and man purses.

For three, there is now a tiny but significant hole in the back of my Treo, a little piece of despoilage where I would like to see at least a stab at seamlessness. Since I popped out my SD card Sunday as well - the small digital camera runs it for storage and I wanted to be able to take beautiful pictures on the way to the movie theater on our walk down - the unit just looks a mess. Nobody should have to walk around with holes in them (besides the usual ones for respiration, eating and elimination). We even try to cover up pores.

Speaking of beautifying, I put up shelves last night over the bed (photograph here). Along the way, I used the level, the cordless screwdriver, a pen and even fired up the table saw, which scares the crap out of me. The whole project took about ninety minutes and required the participation of both humans. I needed Brandi's opinion and called her in from the other room several times until she gave up and joined me in the bedroom while she worked on the computer.

After I had the shelves installed and reasonably secured, I set up a small reading light and a dimmer so that now, instead of having to kick the cats off, stagger over to the light switch then back to the bed to rearrange blankets and pets in the dark, we only have to dim the light to darkness and kiss goodnight. I'll work myself to the bone to make things easier for myself. It's part of being a systems administrator, or perhaps it's part of why I fell into this field.

As proud as I was of the shelf installation, I was nearly immediately humbled by a tour of our neighbors' place. How it shook out was this: lazy again, tired and ready to settle down for the evening, I planned to set the cardboard the shelves came in on the back porch hoping somebody else (Brandi) might come along and tidy up my mess. When I opened the door, there were my neighbors, Todd and Aaron, smoking, eating peanuts and enjoying the night air and a brief respite from their dog, Sampson. We started chatting. Brandi joined us. Sampson came out and so did the cats, Patrick bringing along his foil ball which Sampson played with and eventually was loathe to part with. We talked movies, weather and condos. As we often do when broaching the subject of living spaces, we became curious about Todd and Aaron's condo, and the two were kind enough to invite us inside. It was amazing.

Aaron used to work at Marshall Fields - back when there was a Marshall Fields - at the makeup counter, and had a deal worked out with the ladies on all of the floors above him. He brought home some amazing bits of furniture, frames, mirrors and, surprising even him, a tea service. He doesn't drink tea; neither of them do. Nevertheless, the service is beautiful. His drapery alone shamed our bare windows. We brought them over to our messy place, and they made appropriately nice comments, but my pitiful shelving doesn't hold a candle to the thought they put into their decor. Yet another thing lost: the contest with the Joneses. Only, they're both so nice and good to have across the way, I don't mind particularly much. Like a slow news day, I'm thankful when the 6:00 news shows a fluff piece on the dog walker who specializes in pugs. It means that, for the moment, my life is undramatic and reasonably safe. The future is dangerous enough. Let it be.

Zander's Rainbow Brain

This photo comes from a visit to the Brown Elephant Zander and his wife Julie made with Brandi and me during their visit with us late last January. The Brown Elephant is in Chicago, at Halsted and Waveland, in Boystown, not that you would know it except by the "umph-umph!" of deep-bassed electronica coming from Circuit night club next door.

All of this is to explain why my cool friend Zander looks like he has a rainbow popping out of his brain.

Funny enough, Zander is one of my friends from the furthest back, having known him more or less continuously since second grade in Lakewood, Ohio. His parents were always cool and enjoyed and encouraged his off-kilter attitude toward life. I remember in the early eighties when novelty hats really took off, he came to school with an umbrella hat, also a rainbow. I guess it pays to have a sunny attitude even when it's raining. Or when the thunder is the deep bassy "umph-umph!" of the latest Pet Shop Boys single.

St. Patrick's in Pictures

St. Patrick's celebrations this year meant getting up at 7:15 AM on a Saturday. Punishment like that deserves a reward just as large: drinking. We officially started at 8:00 AM when our neighbor John kindly prepared coffee spiked with Bailey's Mint Creme, to get us properly warmed up for our ride by Red Line train downtown to watch the Chicago Police dye the river green. Since the dying did not start until 11:00 and we got downtown at about 9:00, that left a significant gap which we handily filled with a stop at a bar for green beer and the most godawful sandwiches I have ever seen. The corned beef looked like it had been sheared from an animal fed for the majority of its short, artery-hardened life with 100% pure lard, and that it had fought the cutting. They came with "chips" (British for French Fries, I guess because they don't like the French either, after that whole Henry V thing), but the whole thing looked so impregnated with fat that open flame nearby would probably have been considered a fire hazard.


Eventually, we got to the river, and waited forever for the dying to begin. I have lived in Chicago for almost thirteen years now, and had never seen the river dyed. Saturday, therefore, was one of the most anticlimactic days I have ever lived, since, when the dying finally started, most of us had no idea that it had, or whether the Chicago Police had even finished. From our vantage point by the Clark street bridge, all we saw were slightly brighter green tendrils drifting downstream, mingling amongst the ordinary dark green of the Chicago River. We went upstream to see if we could spot the dye bombs or whatever they use to turn the river an unnatural Leprechaun green, but they had already finished. Yet, looking downstream, we still saw hundreds of people perched on the bridges and all along the river, hoping to catch a glimpse of whatever the hell we had been looking for moments earlier. Maybe, after enough time elapses, all of the green coagulates into some awesome monster, or turns into money, but about the only entertainment we got out of it was trying to catch necklaces the Heineken people were throwing to promote their Dutch beer on the Irish holiday.

Oh, and the above picture is my wife, against the green river. It's pretty bright. As they remarked in the Harrison Ford film, "The Fugitive", "If they can dye the river green today, why can't they dye it blue the other 364 days of the year? "

Touche, Marshall Biggs.

Year Three!

I realize it's supposed to be leather or crystal, but after three years' marriage to my amazing and quite patient wife (as well as being pretty smart, sometimes I am completely insane in the membrane), I am loading these three pictures of her Gorgeousness. I realize the gift should be leather or crystal, but besides the fact that the Tron technology to upload physical things to the Internet won't exist until the MCP forces programmer Kevin Flynn to play Frisbee for his life inside the computer, what I got probably won't fit you.

So here are some fancy photos...
This is Brandi at Year two, double-fisting wine as her reward for enduring my so-called "jokes" and "science". We took it at a winery in Utica, Illinois after a wine tasting that left Brandi sober enough to drive to Starved Rock and me dumb enough to giggle all the way there.

Here's the Brandi after losing about four pounds of hair. I'd always really liked the idea of Brandi with short hair and been tantalized a few times by the inevitable post-hair show shearing that followed the infamous year of the "rat tail" and the "blonde 'do" (same year?). And I was right. She looks gorgeous.

Even cooler, after the cut she and her mom had similar-length hair. Even though my mom-in-law won in the "shortest hair" contest, Brandi swore revenge.


Sorry to hurt your necks, but that's Brandi, too, on our bed minus the mattress, after I assembled all of the IKEA stuff we bought. The slats take the place of the box spring mattress we had to leave at our old place because we weren't going to get it out the door without major plaster renovation. Until the movers hauled over the queen mattress, we slept on this getup with an air mattress teasing us with what the real one would feel like. I guess it's like marriage: sometimes it takes a little negotiation, but the aches and pains just let you know that you're building something better.

My wife is cool.

The Lion, the Witch and the...

To put the happy ending first, I did build both wardrobes, and they're very tall and good looking enough that I've temporarily christened the bedroom the Colonial Room. I look forward to putting stuff in them.

I wasn't always so optimistic.

I started building the wardrobe just shy of noon last Friday, the day after we closed on our condominium, had our IKEA blowout (many dollars spent), and celebrated our new lives as adults in thirty-year debt. IKEA flat packs as much as it can, so this very tall, heavy item was packaged in a cardboard box just a little longer than its longest side panels, three feet wide and maybe six inches deep. It's not very expensive in its base configuration because IKEA makes it out of relatively flimsy particleboard - understandably, since you never pay much attention to the ceiling or floor of your wardrobe. It's the doors that are made out of nice stuff, possibly wood, probably particleboard coated in a heavier grade of white plastic, plus a pane of glass you can't make out of recycled stuff (except sand, I guess). You pay as much for one door as you would for the entire wardrobe. I would remind myself of this several times during the afternoon debacle.

I figured that building a wardrobe would be like building bookcases. They look alike, especially the way IKEA makes them: tall side panels with evenly spaced holes for customizing the interior with additional shelves, attaching doors, or mounting a simple light so you don't have to fumble around in the dark for your blazer during the long, dark northern winter months. They've got a lot of the same hardware, including screws, more screws but with flat heads for latching other, sort-of-screws that look like a marriage between a miniature coffee can and a flying saucer that latch onto the flat head screws to tighten the join between planes. Add to this list wooden dowels for those parts requiring not so many screws and a packet of tiny nails that would lose in a fight against thumb tacks used for tacking down the flimsy white wardrobe backing and hopefully providing a little more stability. One thing IKEA did not provide? A hammer.

I remembered with some excitement having run past Clark-Devon Hardware not more than four blocks away, so, since I was running short on time, I hopped in the car (sorry, environment, Al Gore). Parking at the meters on the side was my first mistake. Though the side looks like the entrance, the builders very cleverly constructed this hardware store so the only front facing the street is a large, foreboding brick wall punctuated occasionally with sealed up doors with instructions to go north. Here, the zombies had already attacked and won. The side entrance, closest to the meters, held the rental office. I discovered this when I followed the guy in front of me under the assumption that he knew what he was doing, then bumped into him as he turned on his heel as soon after realizing he'd walked into the wrong entrance. It's funny, but it normally doesn't take very long for me to figure out north, but maybe the signs of zombie plague had freaked me out.

When I did at last find the entrance, the interior was about as far from Home Depot as you can expect. Tiny aisles, everything under glass, and a nail department that seemed to stretch to infinity. It took me about five minutes' questing through the labyrinth to find my $5 hammer, at which point I had to ask an employee to open it up. He was fast, nice, and told me repeatedly to have a nice day. Would that I had heeded this omen.

I paid for my hammer with my debit card, barely twenty four hours into my home ownership and already ridiculously cash poor. The gas company representative - the reason I had taken the day off work, though, honestly, I could have used any excuse - still had not showed up, so I arranged my tools and started screwing. Or should I say, "screwing up."

Sorry for the cleverness.

Not to brag, but I've built a lot of Legos in my life. I understand step-by-step instructions and can usually parse where a screw is supposed to go based on the dotted lines and diagrams that apparently accompany any Scandinavian export. My first four screws I messed up in four different ways. I just could not get it right. Usually, the little piece of my brain that serves as fact-checker helps me here, since I'm always asking, "Why?" If it doesn't serve any obvious purpose, can I throw it away without consequence? How much should I allow myself to be directed by these so-called "directions"? This brain part was not helping me, perhaps taking a nap like dolphins whose brain hemispheres take turns sleeping. Whatever the reason, I kept assuming I knew the next step, taking the plunge and then having to undo the screw or screws. Hence, I was only about an eighth of the way through wardrobe one of two before I spied the gas company rep sitting in his van across the street from us, reading the paper.

Rather than wait for him to hit the buzzer when I was in the bathroom or some place equally inconvenient, I threw on shoes and walked out to his van. He was very nice and quite Chicagoan, big, young face, attitude that says, "Yeah, you might be tough, but we made our city out of slaughterhouses, so fuhgeddaboudit." He checked our pilot lights. The gas had not been turned off since the previous occupants had owned and heated the unit to the very moment we bought it, so the pilots were fine, although he did recommend moving the flammable paint supplies away from where the realtor had stowed them, right next to the furnace. Stupid realtor.

Unfortunately, we couldn't find the gas meter. I found out later where the room was, and that I didn't have the key to it and would not until the owners mailed the additional keys to us. A further wrinkle to that plan was the fact that they were mailing our keys to our new address. The address for which we did not have a key to the mailbox because they were going to mail it to us. This logic loop was eventually settled by the former owner, who stopped by on Sunday to drop off a bag of keys, some of which were labeled, others not so much. I am proud to say we can now get mail and access the gas and electrical meters. This didn't help me much Friday, when I had to send the gas man on his way. He said I could make another appointment and, encouragingly, "You've got gas now, at least." When I called Brandi, she took this as an ominous sign, but I assured her the gas company could not shut off your heat when the weather dipped below freezing, and I think that helped and might even have been true or at least based on solid Internet rumor. But I didn't call Brandi just then, either. No, to alleviate my frustration with the weather, the keys, the gas and the hammer, I thought I would get something big done and assemble Wardrobe Number One.

So there are six sides to a wardrobe: top, bottom, left, right, front and back. Front will eventually hold the doors and back is kind of flimsy cardboard, so initially you only have to make the sides, top and bottom. According to the directions, once you have all of the hardware attached, you attach the bottom panel to one of the long nine foot side panels resting on the floor, and tighten. You then stand the assembly and have a friend stand on a ladder and hold it while you attach the side panel, tighten, then the top panel, and tighten, after which everything should stand on its own.

I didn't have a ladder. Improvising like MacGuyver, I took our IKEA Poang chair from the sun room and tested out its steadiness, which was about on par with the slick deck of a sailboat on heavy seas. In other words: lousy. Unfortunately, unless I wanted to grab our neighbors' porch chairs or take an hourlong trip back to the old apartment, I didn't see much of a choice. More worrying, I didn't have a second person, and those panels were heavy. Improvising with less-than-Macguyver-like inventiveness, I steadied the side panels against the walls at the corners of the room, climbed up on the flexing wooden chair I couldn't be certain would not snap in two under my two hundred pound burden, and set the top panel on the edges of the precarious side panels.

For a moment, everything held.

Of course, a proper wardrobe has to do more than balance. I would have to maneuver the top panel so the holes in its sides matched with the screws I'd previously installed during the "which screw goes where?" phase. I got one side matched up - the left? So hard to say now... - but couldn't tighten it down because the holes were in the bottom of the board, against gravity, so the hardware I had to drop in would just fall out without a steadying hand. At this point, I realized the IKEA directions may have called for too few people. Raising a child takes a village; raising a wardrobe, about three-fourths of one. Still, I figured if I could get both sides at least hanging from the screws, I could head down my rickety Poang chair, grab the hardware, tighten, lather, rinse, repeat with the second unit.

I pulled the top panel up, off its resting place on the side panel, then over towards the other side. That's when it slipped off the screws loosely holding it. It came crashing down. The swell, cheap particleboard did what it does naturally and shattered where it could. The top panel was broken. The bottom panel was broken in many places and looked like it had gone on an ill-fated skiing trip. One side panel was mostly intact... except for the holes one might use to, for instance, hold together a wardrobe. These had been yanked by the screws and the passage of the top shelf towards the earth, and the particleboard here, too, crumbled appropriately.

I sat for a little while in my Poang chair and cried. Eventually, I called Brandi, who said it was going to be okay, we're going back to IKEA anyway for bookshelves, and did the gas man come, by the way? I told her about that failed quest and she was upset that I had not called since she had just spoken with John, a member of our condo board who might have been able to get us into the basement space. In as calm a voice as possible, I said, "Now... is... NOT... the... time."

That would come later, when I realized I could ignore IKEA directions and build the way I wanted, on the floor, where you don't need to balance and gravity holds your tightening hardware in instead of mocking your efforts to defy it. Later, when I guiltily disposed of the corpse of our first wardrobe, leaving one panel next to the dumpster because it would not fit inside. I kept the hardware because, very, very rarely IKEA omits a part and you have to call their version of tech support and wait to have it shipped to you. I want to build NOW, even if it means screwing it up and developing a blister stigmata from pressing the screwdriver into the center of my hand. It's a desire that can not be and was not held back by failure.

The room looks beautiful now, still not complete, but moving forward.

The Condo - 1

We signed the papers Thursday, the week after Thanksgiving. Brandi and can now call ourselves homeowners, landed gentry, barons (but not robber barons, that comes later). Mostly everything went right, as right as the process ever goes, everyone else around the table assured us. We met at Ticor, a TItle CORporation downtown, and in fact shared the elevator down from the parking garage, walked through the lobby, then rode in the elevator up to the office where we signed with our attorney before we even realized she was our attorney. Brandi had her suspicions, but I kept wondering, "Who is this woman smiling at us?" I thought she looked too young. I hope she reads this post; maybe she'll give us a discount on future legal expenses. It wasn't until we got off at the proper floor - one floor below the floor we thought we were going to - that she turned to us and asked us who we were. Then the truth came out. We met our lender, Britt, our lawyer, Catherine, the sellers' lawyer, Holliday/Holly, the Ticor agent whose name escapes me and our realtor, Iliana, who arrived a little sleepy because she had gotten roped into a "Lost" marathon the night before and, really, once you start with that show it is dreadfully hard to stop. She had a big mug of coffee and slumped a little. Compare her to Brandi. My adorable wife had woken up at three in the morning, seven and a half hours before our closing, posted a blog update, written a website, and called the title company to make sure our check cleared and we were coming in for a smooth landing. As we sat in the Ticor office, Brandi practically vibrated herself to invisibility, she was so excited.

As it turns out, the bank check was one of the few bumps in the road to closing. The title company had not received word of its clearing and the deal would not go through without that word. We owed a certain amount for closing and had overpaid, and so would receive money back... if the check cleared. If not, we would have to get a certified check from the bank, eating up more time for the closing, return, then cancel the old check we had written. Probably it would have tacked on another hour to the closing, which bothered us not very much because we had both taken the day off of work to see to it this property came into our hands. Our attorney, however, who by this time we recognized, had another closing a little after noon and another closing after that. Her Blackberry went off about twenty times as she sat there, talking us through the legalese. We knew we chose right when we went with her for our attorney, since, every time her phone went off she would pull it out of its cradle, glance at it or send the caller to voice mail, then stick it back on her belt without breaking stride. She just kept on talking. I'd like to know where they teach people to multitask like that. "Busy day," she muttered, each of the twenty times. Do you think?

At any rate, using the Ticorp agent's Internet connection, Brandi accessed our bank records to prove that, yes, the check cleared, after having been deposited Monday. Monday? We wrote it the Wednesday before... but, because of the Thanksgiving holiday, of course, it had not been fully processed until after the weekend. Stupid banks and lenders... though we adore them as well and will for the next thirty years or more.

Speaking of lenders, Britt was incredibly sweet and patient, watching over the transfer process. At one point, she asked if Brandi had received her email. We thought it an odd question until we realized that she had taken a picture of us signing and emailed it to us from her phone. Technology is great.

As far as the signing itself, I have few complaints. The monetary amounts being so large, the lenders, sellers, city, county and state all not only want you to know the rules and what it takes to break them and default on your loan, they want you to acknowledge you've read them and sign in triplicate that you understand. Unfortunately, the process is so choked with these documents that by the end you're barely glancing at the paper, so if a bunch of guys in scrubs come to my new condo to take one or both of my kidneys, we'll all know why.

We had an additional speed bump at "Avenue" versus "Street". The lender played it smart and just put the street name on all the lending documents. Not so the title company. Rather than wait to reprint every changed page, our attorney added a third task to her multitasking and crossed out every instance of "street" and put in "avenue". She said the word started to lose meaning after a while. We initialed at every change, effectively doubling our signing burden. At the end of the signing, we had to sign a sheet of just signatures to give the title company, lender and anyone else who now owns a piece of us something to compare to in case someone comes to them with a legal document claiming something outrageous like, "I hearby stake the next round of poker on my condo... signed, M. K. L." Now they have the MKL to prove it was me and, yes, I was both drunk and stupid.

Signing complete, we all shook hands and Brandi and I thanked everyone. It was during the thanking that the sellers' lawyer finally said the two words she was ever going to say to us, "You're welcome." I think she also commented about the weather to our lawyer in a snarky way, as in, "It looks like snow. Good luck getting to your other closings...", but that may have been my imagination.

We had plans for the rest of the day and I believe we got about a third of it done. Prior to the signing I had wavered between inordinate optimism and an indifferent pessimism, as in, "They need, what, like five signatures?" to "Shane and Clair spent all day and cried four times before they were even allowed to THINK they could own a house!" so just to be safe we packed in about four weekends' worth of events. We have a lovely problem with our new home that not a lot of first-time homebuyers face: what to do with all the space. Before the villagers start chasing us down with burning torches and pitchforks, I should amend that we are sacrificing a lot of closet space, which we hope to amend through wardrobes, but more on that in a moment. The first place either of us think to go when dire furniture need is Schaumburg... to the great, towering three story blue and yellow anti-zombie fortress and Swedish meatball source that is IKEA. So, after downing a meal at McDonald's (note to Brandi from Brandi: never again with the Chicken McNuggets) and dropping off our four packed bins of cleaning supplies and painting gear, we headed northwest.

We knew what we wanted. We knew where to find it, approximately. We knew the cost. So why did it take us two hours and cost so much more than we budgeted? I blame the Swedes. Their wily design and clever marketing is more captivating than QVC could hope to be. Like an expedition to the Congo, it took an extraordinary effort to find what we were looking for, and I think we lost several of our porters doing it. Since Pip - our Scion xA - despite looking a little like a mini Cooper on steroids isn't more than five feet deep and the boxes we bought topped out at nine, we opted to rent a van to get everything home. IKEA doesn't actually rent vans. Instead, IKEA has a green phone next to the furniture pick up. You take it off the cradle and it automatically dials - that night, it automatically dialed Joe, who had a cell phone and worked for Enterprise. Enterprise rents by the hour, which stinks if most of that time is transit to and from the city of Chicago. Brandi and I loaded boxes. If ever that woman proved to me she could withstand the pain and physical endurance of childbirth, it was watching her huff her way through carrying the other end of the seventy pound wardrobe boxes. That woman has stamina, especially when you realize that she was up hours before the rooster crows. Even our insomniac cat Patrick must have wondered what was up with this woman.

As soon as I got in the van, I made this noise, "Hwannnnghhhh! Hwannghhhh!" because driving it felt like piloting a cruise ship with a periscope for a windshield. Is it a law that heavy, large vehicles must use light, skinny steering wheels and a transmission the size of a popsicle stick attached to the steering column, or do they make the steering controls by ripping the elements out of cars manufactured in the seventies? And while I'm ranting, can IDOT - the Illinois Department of Transportation, but, honestly, just one letter away from IDIOT - please hammer out the lanes for tolls on I-90? As is, you can't figure out if you're in the cash or the automated IPass lane until you're practically on top of it, and I'm surprised there aren't more accidents near the toll booths as unwitting drivers cut across four lanes to pay eighty cents instead of a thirty dollar ticket for running the wrong lane. As it was pointed out to me, Illinois doesn't want you to pay cash. It costs a lot more to staff the toll booths with warm-blooded mammals than the IPass lanes with space age electronics... which is fine, except that a certain percentage of cars will never have an electronic pass, just as a certain percentage of people riding public transportation will have no need to buy an electronic card. Tourists and people with poor credit and hence no credit cards won't have an account to debit, or won't have the desire to open up a small security hole to let a city or state automatically deduct an arbitrary amount of cash from their cash flow. Finally, what ever happened to the machines into which you tossed your eighty cents? Are those gone forever or just phased out while Illinois constructs the Toll Plaza of the Future or something else that would take as many years to develop as the Apollo space program.

When we got home - new home - we unloaded, both of us fairly beat and even more so with the knowledge that, best case scenario, we still had two hours' work ahead of us dropping the van off and driving back again. Gravity had, cruelly, remained unchanged, so getting the wardrobe boxes up two flights of steps proved daunting and would have been impossible if not for IKEA's flat packing and a rather inventive method of carefully flipping the boxes end-over-end up the stairs. Snow was by this point just starting to fall. The only thing more suspenseful than whether or not we would make it to the second floor without broken bones was what was in the boxes once we finally started constructing. Would we find all of our hinges? Had the particleboard survived banging against the sheet steel floor of the van? Did the Swedish inmates who built and packed the boxes include everything or could a hex wrench tucked into the unmentionables prove useful in prison?

We drove back, and back again. The tolls got easier as the landmarks delineating them became more familiar. Two miles southeast of the enormous scrub-covered landfill, we find the southbound toll. Northbound lies not far from the Meijer exit.

Meijer: the Chicagoland WalMart substitute Brandi swears we will never again visit. We tried to take advantage of the Black Friday deal the store offered on 20" flat panel LCD TVs - $99, after $200 rebate - but if a deal sounds too good to be true, it isn't, necessarily, but at least a third of the cash-strapped families in the city will buy a minimum of one, and arrive twelve hours before it opens, effectively negating any swell plans you had to "beat the crowds". Also, the attitude of the employees there really, truly stunk. During the line-up to the $99 TV, one stressed out woman came up to our line, now so long and snaking that it wound from electronics through pharmacy, frozen foods, canned foods, checkout and the entrance, and shouted at us, "What are you thinking, people? Nobody can get into or out of the store! MOVE!" Now, I'm no mind reader, but, I believe from the Meijer Black Friday ads 90 percent of the people in line were clutching that the majority had shown up for cheap TVs and paid only secondary importance to the layout of the line. One might even suspect that that was the Meijer employee's job, but pointing it out to her would probably have gotten me peppersprayed. The second time we went back, just before our IKEA run and suffering from boundless optimism that we knew where to find it. We found it, but, had this been the Yukon, some of our sled dogs would not have made it. As we walked in, a woman, a different employee not necessarily out to prove her worth to management with her technique of Line Management Through Shame, was getting ready to get some carts from the parking lot, swearing like a sailor: "Yeah, I have to grab some f'ing carts and haul them in. F'ing F." Probably, she said more than F, but that's all my delicate ears could hear. Their TV selection was small, and overpriced, and underwhelming, and so we will not be returning to and certainly not purchasing food from (due to possible "not-clean-food" practices from disgruntled employees) this particular Meijer.

I had another adventure with the wardrobe, but that is another story and will be told another time.

We have a condo!