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Viv Pidgeon

Sometimes those Brits act in a way that is not only civlized, but highly respectable. I wanted to cook a chocolate, orange and prune cake for my sister's birthday. I got this recipe out of a cookbook I have back in Brooklyn. I've made it twice before and it's a hit, with a lovely bittersweet chocolate icing that gets quite hard. But the cookbook is in Brooklyn and I'm in Chicago.

I looked high and low on the internet, where I usually have luck finding favorite recipes, but found nothing. I had already announced the type of cake I was going to make and my sister got really excited, so I didn't want to let her down. I looked on Amazon to find the exact name of the book, hoping that would help in my google quest. After typing in "latin american cooking" I saw the familiar image of my book and got its exact name: Leith's Latin American Cooking, written by the chefs at the Leith's School of Food and Wine in London. I visited the site, hopeful that they might post recipes. They don't, but they do offer the services of a private chef from Leith's to come and cook you an individual lunch or dinner for just 20 pounds. And they do offer cooking classes for the public. And (!) they do have a button for "internet enquiries." I sent off an email explaining my predicament and requesting assistance.

This morning at 3:44 am Viv Pidgeon from the Leith's School of Food and Wine responded to my enquiry:
___
I could fax it to you - what is your fax number?
Best Wishes
Viv
___

And fax it she did, making my day. For not only had I gotten my hands on the coveted recipe, but I had met someone named Viv Pidgeon. And sometimes, my friends, life just doesn't get much better than that.

The Ass Mass

Tonight I experienced the Chicago phenomenon known as "The Ass Mass." It's a Catholic mass geared towards young adults who might want to kill two birds with one stone. Find God and find a honey, all in the same building, all in the same hour. Such masses tend to take place on Sunday evenings, fitting in quite nicely with the schedule of hip, urban, single who stays out late on Saturday nights. I've heard about the Ass Mass for a while, but have never attended. There are a few well-known ones on the north side, one of them being a 10 minute walk from my apartment.

At St. Ben's tonight, the church was pretty full with a mix of both hip and un-hip families, young couples (all straight from what I could tell), old people, and at last, YOUNG SINGLES. With so much being made of the goods that one is to find at an Ass Mass, clear evidence of the YOUNG SINGLES upon walking in the door validates the advertising. Catholic social ventures for young people tend to be small, kind of duddy, and decidedly un-hip. On a couple of occasions I have gone to a post-mass pizza party that was advertised as the greatest-place-to-meet-like-minded-friends-who-believe-in-the-Trinity. Both times, I extracted myself as quickly as possible, not wanting to be a part of a quasi-pathetic-faith-based-recruitment-tool.

Now, it's true that tonight I did not eat pizza with anyone and maybe if I had, I would have drawn the same conclusions about Ravenswoods Catholics Young Adults, the group based at St. Ben's and several other north side parishes that "sponsors" this weekly mass and various social and community service events. [Let me digress to say that I'm sad they changed their name. According to my sister, it used to be called Ravenswood Catholics in Action, which we fondly referred to as Ravenswood Catholics Looking for Action.] Anyway, all I can really say about it is that there were a lot of good looking, single-seeming people there. Including a total punkified-hipster who wore tight jeans, pumas, had funky glasses and spiky hair. This was a total first for me to see at church. And lest you think my trip was purely superficial, I did think the priest gave a nice homily, which included us closing our eyes and envisioning the person we most detested. And then there was talk of darkness and light and I started to feel like I was in my favorite yoga class. And I managed to keep my eyes off of other people's asses (for the most part).

Machine Wins Again

For those of you wondering how it all turned out, they are still counting ballots (que disastre) but Forrest Claypool has conceded. Now we have the worst situation of all, which is that the 80 Democratic committeemen (This is the 80 faces of the machine) of the county are going to decide who will replace Stroger, and lead the Cook County Board, since it seems unlikely he is going to recover enough to serve.

Election Day in Chicago

Ooohh, I'm so excited. I love being in Chicago on Election Day. I only wish I had gotten my act together to volunteer for Forrest Claypool's campaign for Cook County Board President. He kind of looks like Kevin Spacey and his campaign office is next to a good Mexican restaurant with great Mexican coffee. But more importantly he is going to kick some serious Dem machine butt. He's the "reform" candidate (in quotes because he was Daley's Chief of Staff so I take that title with a grain of salt) and a dangerous threat to the party organization. The political analyst on ABC just went so far as to say that the organization would rather have a Republican in that seat than have Claypool. And we're not just talking local. Dick Durbin and Bill Clinton were among the party heavies who fell into line behind Stroger.

Things are looking good. It's 11pm and Claypool's in the lead. But it will be a long night. They have new voting machines in Chicago and the votes are very slow coming in. They're saying now that the West Side and South Side votes are very slow in coming in, and that could account for Stroger being behind--those being his strongholds. You may notice that the Stroger hyperlink is not his campaign web page. He doesn't have one! His machine operation is polished in the old-school way, and apparently doesn't rely on new-fangled internet politiking.

Meanwhile, Judy Baar Topinka is getting ready to claim a victory in the Republican primary for governor and is itching for her big fight against incumbent Blagojevich. Saying that Blago has already had his chance in his four years in office, Topinka closed her early victory speech with "The Rooster done crowed, but this hen's going to deliver!" She's quite the Chicago lady, with a raspy voice and enough eyebrow pencil to sign all of her campaign thank you notes.

Meanwhile, back in the Stroger/Claypool race, nearly half of the ballots have yet to be counted and it's past midnight. There is talk of some of the city ballots not being counted until tomorrow. David Axelrod (Claypool's media strategist) is alleging that ballots have been sealed in plastic and are being left unguarded overnight. With Stroger in the hospital recovering from his stroke last week (not in his eponymous Stroger County Hospital by the way), the machine is feeling desperate. I wouldn't put it past the Chicago Dems to go old-school at this hour. The story of the ballot-counting is quickly eclipsing that of the individual races.

Meanwhile, the Dems-led-by-Rahm have had their way with the voters in the heavily-Republican western suburbs, winning the nomination for their woman Tammy Duckworth, the Iraq vet with missing limbs who apparently presented no "danger" to the party, as did Christine Cegelis, the independent-minded Dem with grassroots support. Let's hope that Duckworth can present the kind of danger to the GOP in November that Cegelis did in the last election (she won 44% of the vote against GOP heavy Henry Hyde in 2002! Why not let her at him again?!).

Chuck Goudie on ABC doing a helluva job right now, grilling Chicago Board of Elections officials over the vote-counting process, refusing to let them off the hook over why this vote count is taking so long and why they will recess until 1pm tomorrow to resume the count.

Unfortunately, the majority of the Chicagoans are not as interested in this process as Chuck Goudie. Reports at this hour show that voter turnout was at an all-time low of 25%.

Poetry Finds Room

In any given week I juggle a mixture of creative and mundane stimuli. The chore of cooking my oatmeal gives way to reading a newspaper article about the Kurds, which gives way to a moment of silence, which gives way to the hectic navigation of the El station, which gives way to matters at work. And at the end of the day, a bit of exercise and the cooking of my dinner leave me seated on my couch, ready to take in another article, a phone conversation or an email, or, on good days, a bit of writing or watching a film. I often feel that there's not enough room for any more stimuli or interests. There's never enough quiet time to pursue the running list of creative endeavors I already have. And in recent memory, poetry has not even made it on to the list. If I was going to carry around the weight of the creative activities I did not pursue but should have because I would have felt more balanced and fulfilled if I had, then I would keep it to things that interested me. Poetry was not on my list.

Enter Ted Kooser, the U.S. Poet Laureate. He read a poem on the morning features program on WBEZ and I liked his voice. And the poem. And they said he would be reading at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago on Wednesday night. And mostly I thought about how my Dad would like it and how it would be something nice we could do together. So we made a plan and we went. Kooser spoke in a plain and clear voice. A good voice for radio. He introduced his poems with little stories, some funny and others poignant. And he read poem after poem about small gestures, conversations, memories, Nebraska, widows, peonies, sandwiches, ghosts, death, and urine. It was marvelous. And he talked about the creative process and the hard work and the persistence and the love of writing.

Widow

She's combed his neckties out of her hair
and torn out the tongues of his shoes.
She's poured his ashes out of their urn
and into his humidor. For the very last time,
she's scrubbed the floor around the toilet.
She hates him even more for dying.

I read poetry on my El ride the next morning. It's on my list. And it's not a weight, but a joy.

Miss Almonte, the Verizon Customer Service Queen

In the infuriating world of customer service phone reps and the even more infuriating subset of that world occupied by Verizon, it's good to have a friend.

I estimate that since November I have spent 15-20 hours on the phone with Verizon in pursuit of dry loop DSL. Somehow in my mind I must have built my dry-loop/Vonage combo telecom fantasy into a true Mecca, because God only knows why I have continued to pursue it in the face of such adversity. The reasons and technology behind this journey (I will save $30-40 per month if I ever reach Mecca) are no longer the point.

The point is to hold Verizon to their word and to see if I CAN CONQUER THEM. At least that was my attitude until one day in December, about 8 hours into my journey, when Miss Almonte took my call, transferred from a bitchy queen who was yelling at me for not being home when the repair guy came even though there was no reason for the repair guy to come in the first place and it was their mistake. Miss Almonte is a supervisor in the White Plains Verizon Encore office. She immediately apologized for all of my troubles, said that she is a consumer too and she understands how frustrating this can be. She told me she was going to take care of me from now and and she gave me her direct number! She talked to me in a sweet, calming voice as if she were a nurse and I was a post-op patient in the ICU. She indicated that there would be some fair financial arrangement at the end of it all. Wow! I was so happy. We just had to wait for Vonage to take over the phone number from my old Verizon landline and then we could get going. Everything was going to be ok.

The next few weeks passed fairly easily. Miss Almonte had heard my cries and was on the case. I didn't think about Verizon much. I told my sisters about my good friend at Verizon and I slept fairly well. But then, in early January the troubles started up again. I called Miss Almonte on the day I was supposed to. She left me a message saying she needed my credit card number to proceed. It was clear from her voice that she hadn't gotten my messages. She was wondering where I was too. I called again and again and left messages at the number she had given me--her supervisor's. But she had stopped trying to call me.

Around this time, I doubted Miss Almonte's faithfulness long enough and deeply enough to do the most absurd thing. I called the MAIN TECHNICAL SUPPORT NUMBER, aka HELL. I spent about 4 hours on that part of the journey, half of it just getting everyone to try to locate Miss Almonte within the company for me. According to the five people I spoke to, she didn't exist and there was NO MISS ALMONTE working for Verizon! Was she a fake? Was she just an actor that Verizon employed to pacify irate customers and get them off the phone?

And then, one cold day in late January, I was sitting in a cafe in Evaston, Illinois, and Miss Almonte called me on my cell phone. I leapt out of my chair to get to better reception by the window. What happened, I cried? Why haven't you called me back? Where have you been? She replied with her usual sweet and genuine voice and after giving me some explanation of having been in training for a week and having had a problem with the message system, I forgave her immediately. She told me that the office that needed to do the next step was closed until February 20th for upgrade. She listened to my disbelief of that impossible situation, gave me new phone numbers to reach her at and said, There, now you've got everything except my cell phone and I can't give you that honey. Smile. Giggle. I felt all warm and fuzzy and she apologized some more and said, Don't worry, I haven't forgotten about you.

I called my sisters full of the good news: Miss Almonte is back! February 20th came and went and my messages to Miss Almonte went unanswered. In my current job I kept coming across the name of a guy at a New York non profit named David Almonte. I wondered if he was related to Miss Almonte. I daydreamed: Was he going to have Sunday dinner with his cousin this week? Is the family house in New Rochelle, close to the White Plains office where she works every day? But when I wasn't daydreaming I felt very sad and alone. Was I a fool for keeping the dream alive?

Yesterday, she called my cell phone. I'm so sorry! she cried. I've been out sick for a week. I had my wisdom teeth out. Oh, it was so painful. But I didn't forget about you, don't worry. I said, what about the office opening on February 20th? It didn't happen, she sighed. The tone of her voice said, I know, it's awful, can you believe it? But it's open now. Do you still want the service? Of course! i cried. Ok, great, she laughed. She took my credit card number for the second time in two months. We chatted about bank fraud and a recent letter I had gotten from my bank about potentially compromising activity. No, you're kidding, she exclaimed. Oh my goodness, I was noticing on my Citibank account, and you know, I'm anal about my checking account, pardon my French, but that's one thing I'm anal about and recently there was an extra charge for $9 and then another one for $15. Oh my goodness, I need to look into this!

She promised my DSL will be working by March 18th and promised me 3 free months of service. We still have a couple more phone dates before it's all over. I don't know if I'll be ready to say goodbye to her. When it's bad with Miss Almonte, it's really bad. But when it's good, it's a feeling like none other.

Don't worry, I haven't forgotten about you. Have a good week, ok?

Aren't those just the words we all want to hear?