Were I to ask you to start naming Dr. Seuss books go ahead: The Cat in the Hat, Green Eggs and Ham, How the Grinch Stole Christmas . . . I believe you would name as many as you could name Hop on Pop, The Lorax, Horton Hears a Who and never get to my favorite.
Late Tuesday, backers of the city's first high school catering to gay and lesbian students withdrew their proposal for the time being. Good. The special school is a bad idea, and not just because the name -- "The Social Justice Solidarity High School" -- sounds like something Kim Il Jong would establish in Pyongyang.
A love story between a "lonely cripple" and a "liquor-guzzling slut," set against a backdrop of drug addiction, gambling, murder, mangled syntax and inescapable poverty whose sweetest moment, the opening number "Summertime," is a lullaby sung to a baby who will pass through the hands of three mothers before the play is over.
The problem with grasping a crisis is that while it's going on all over, it can still seem contradicted by localized events -- thus, on every cool day in July, those ideologically opposed to the idea of global warming get to shout, "See? Fifty-nine degrees in July -- some warming, huh?"
The word "politics" comes from the Greek "polis," meaning city, and it is an irony of American politics that our cities tend to get the backhand. No candidate hesitates to stand in a cornfield and declare that he will bring this nation back to its cherished small-town roots. But what politician holds a photo-op beside a chain-link fence on a gritty urban block and endorses the values of the hardworking bus driver? Very few.
Slavery was the law of the land for the first 87 years of this nation's existence. Nearly a century of informal oppression almost as bad followed. The end of that period is hazy -- the 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education ruling rejecting segregation was important. So too the 1965 Voting Rights Act. But those milestones were not the end, just the beginning of the end. Marking historical eras is the business of academics, but it is interesting for regular folk to wonder what event historians will point to as the moment when the long civil rights struggle shifted into whatever new phase follows. Perhaps, if all goes well, that moment will occur Tuesday.
When I heard of the Election Day victory rally that Barack Obama is throwing in Grant Park Tuesday evening, my first thought was that I would have to bring the boys downtown to take part in this historic event.
The 1957 Ford belonging to Richard Coreno's dad was two-tone, gray and rose, with stubby tail fins and chrome-rimmed gauges. I remember it well because it was the first car where I spent time behind the wheel -- not driving, just sitting in the front seat, steering, signaling, pushing all the buttons, the way kids do.