CHAPTER EEE—THEME 2
March 1980
Uptown, Chicago
I’ve been living in Chicago for seven months, working as a receiving clerk for a B. Dalton Bookseller chain-store on North Michigan Avenue. I’m dating my boss.
I dropped out of Yale to study music with the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians. My once-a-month teacher is sax and flute master Douglas Ewart. I also take twice-weekly theater improv lessons with Josephine Forsberg, founder of Players Workshop of Second City. I rehearse every other night with singer/songwriter Ellen Rosner’s band, Fine Tuning. I perform in schools sometimes, as Jim Hawkins in Treasure Island, opposite Earth Theater founder Rudolf Munro’s Long John Silver.
One night, I get home to find in my mailbox a thick nine by twelve manilla envelope from Germany. My high-school friend Laura Kelsey’s familiar handwriting is on the outside. I wait till I’m at the kitchen table in my eighth-floor studio apartment before opening the package.
Laura is spending her junior year in Munich. Her letter explains how, on receiving my request, she’d visited the university library, and yes, there were the collected works of Kurt Schwitters. Five volumes. She’d copied the pages I needed.
I flip the stack. So beautiful. I can hear Peter Froehlich.
I try reciting. It comes out jazz. Tapping my foot, I sing, off-beat, “Dedesnn nn rrrrr, Ii Ee, mpiff tillff toooo. Dedesnn nn rrrrr, desnn nn rrrrr, nn nn rrrrr, nn rrrrr, Iiiii Eeeee, m, mpe, mpff, mpiffte, mpiff till, mpiff tillff, mpiff tillff toooo. Dedesnn nn rrrrr, Ii Ee, mpiff tillff toooo, Dedesnn nn rrrrr, Ii Ee, mpiff tillff toooo tillll. Dedesnn nn rrrrr, Ii Ee, mpiff tillff toooo, tillll, Jüü-Kaa?”
Will I ever perform it?
***
March 1997
Downtown, Chicago
Lynn Book moved to New York a few years ago; last March, she had a solo Ur Sonata show in Brooklyn, at Roulette. I’m working a thousand hours a week at our new Navy Pier place: Children’s Museum Store. A regular customer from my killed-by-chainstores Children’s Bookstore, mentions, at the register, that he saw a photo of me in the MCA.
What?
I contact Lynn. A couple months ago, a Museum of Contemporary Art curator phoned, asking for relics of our Ur Sonata shows to include in the exhibit Art in Chicago, 1945-1995. Lynn dug up some photos and a piece of gardenhose.
I’ve got to see this. Our store is super-busy, but I zip over on a Sunday morning.
The museum is packed: I’ve never seen a crowd like this at the MCA. I’m scanning left and right: it’s paintings, sculptures, more paintings. On the lower level, there’s a Time Arts side-exhibit. There, in a plexiglass case, sits a five-inch segment of green hose, plus a photo of Lynn and me doing one of our Club Lower Links shows, wearing industrial hoses.
Thousands and thousands of Chicago artists—fifty years’ worth—and from all these—along with the two-hundred-odd others in this retrospective—the curators chose us.
