The glassiness wasn’t from tiredness. She was too young to be tired. She was tired of, not tired in general.

She was tired of work, she was tired of being in a crisp white shirt and a black Golden Nugget Pancake House Family Restaurant apron. She was tired of being in a diner completely empty but for staff and a lanky boy with long, ratty hair waiting for her in a closed-off section.

But no, she wasn’t tired. She was just tired of.

She asked if I would be drinking coffee, told me someone would be with me shortly, kept gathering her pile of menus from behind the empty diner counter.

I had just come from the suburbs, where I had visited a friend in the hospital. That friend always likes getting referenced in the blog, but I think having three strokes is a pretty extreme way of getting a 1,001 nod. You could have just taken me to the zoo, kiddo.

She’ll be fine. Long road ahead, but she’ll get there.

But tired, hungry, late, fresh from a bus ride from where I had picked up the car share car to go to Naperville and with another bus ride in my future before home, I decided some curly fries sounded good. And the Golden Nugget’s marquee entranced.

I came during the restaurant’s dead zone. The dinner diners had gone home hours ago. The after-bar crowd wouldn’t show up for hours. The 11ish spot was reserved for cleaning, for the staff sashaying around humming radio songs and laughing together in Spanish while the glassy-eyed Anglo teenager they had hired eyed the clock and the boy waiting for her.

When she got the OK to go, she did a little happy dance for the boy. They seemed to be a couple in, if not love, the like/lust combo that’s really all you need as a teenager.

They scampered off, so eager to get out of there it was 20 minutes before the girl came back, having left her wallet in their rush to kiss and such.

I considered the boy, admitted that he would be considered damn good looking if I had trusted him. Since I didn’t, I found his long hair more ratty than rebellious, his mien more tedious than provoking.

Typical teen going for a bad boy complex, even though he was clearly nice enough to wait for her at work. I hoped whatever they had planned for the evening wouldn’t take her out too late — it was a school night, after all.

I chuckled for a moment, realizing I had seen a young couple in like/lust and had cast myself as the girl’s disapproving father. No strolls past the intersection of lanes Memory and Lovers. No mind cast back to ‘90s canoodling where I was the ratty kid waiting for some other pretty-eyed young woman to kiss and such. I instead mentally went forward to staying up late and yelling stuff like “My house, my rules” and “Look here, young lady!”

It was a nice feeling, like I had more future than past.

The cook and the two remaining waitresses chattered in Spanish. One of the waitresses watched TV with me, just on the other side of the counter, while I failed at sudoku. We listened to a pop song on the radio overhead, the one about the guy asking a girl’s father for his blessing and not getting it.

She hummed it for the rest of the night.

Enjoy dirty politics and dirty martinis with me at “How to Steal an Election,” a night I’m running with Atlas Obscura and the Room 13 speakeasy a week before the election. Swill craft cocktails while I take you through decades of COMPLETELY LEGAL voter manipulation in Chicago and elsewhere. Fun, civics and the best damn Old Fashioned I’ve had in years. Tickets are going fast.

It was the single silliest, most ridiculous and just plain most daffy Chicago-based movie I had ever seen.

Until Sunday.

On Sunday, amid homemade Indian food, mango lassi, rosewater and some weird almond/saffron/milk thing, I witnessed the Chicago-filmed 2013 Bollywood debacle known as “Dhoom 3.”

The film — which I loved wholeheartedly, unironically and completely — was an exploration of odd, from the Inspector Gadget-y motorcycle/jet ski/two-motorcycles-linked-together-to-become-a-rocket to the romantistalking musical number apparently location scouted by the Chicagoland Chamber of Commerce.

But between the two, which is daffier? Would the daffy crown go to lazily crooked cop Johnny Kelly or crookedly lazy cop Ali Akbar? Would the magician thief of record be Sahir Khan or Hayes Stewart? What is, in fact, the most ridiculous cinematic abomination to film on these sacred shores?

By the numbers, we at 1,001 Chicago Afternoons break it down.

Best IMBD description:

City: Johnny Kelly, who plans on resigning from the police force and leaving his wife the next day, has a very eventful last night on duty.

Dhoom: To avenge his father’s death, a circus entertainer trained in magic and acrobatics turns thief to take down a corrupt bank in Chicago. Two cops from Mumbai are assigned to the case.

Winner: “Dhoom 3,” although the IMBD description for “City” omits Greg the Mechanical Man, Angel Face the tap-dancing stripper, a magician-gangster played by the actor who kept losing court cases to Perry Mason and — please read this next bit several times — the living spirit of the City of Chicago becoming a cop with a Texas accent for the night.

Single greatest scene:

City: The magician-gangster placing a rabbit in a top hat and pulling out a gun.

Dhoom: Lower Wacker motorcycle fire-jousting.

Winner: “Dhoom 3,” if only because a Lower Wacker motorcycle chase scene is the least of what this movie ripped off from Christopher Nolan.

Worst geography:

City: Wow, where to begin? There’s the police dispatcher blaring out addresses like “50th and Dearborn” and the intersection of “Superior and Huron streets, east of Hudson Avenue,” the not-the-Marquette-Building-but-totally-the-Marquette-Building shootout and the random Wrigley Building shot before the North Side ‘L’ electrocution foot chase.

Dhoom: Wow, where to stop? There’s the Lake Shore Drive bus that ends up at what might be Six Flags, the Quincy Blue Line stop, the out-of-business Indian Circus that’s clearly the Shedd Aquarium, the American (actually Australian) female Chicago cop’s palm-tree-laden beachfront apartment with the mountain view and the Chicago River jet ski chase that heads toward the locks before popping up in Chinatown and turning into a motorcycle/helicopter chase that winds through the North Side, apparently rural Idaho and finally the spot where Columbus Drive goes underneath the Aon Center. The effect of seeing my sacred local geography mangled for cinema’s sake was rather like being any European watching any film featuring James Bond, Jason Bourne or a Paris-based couple falling in rom-com love. (“Eh, why do all ze apartamentes in l’France have ze view of la Tour Eiffel?”)

Winner: “Dhoom 3,” mainly for the climactic scene at the Great Chicago Dam amid the beautiful Chicago Mountains.

Weirdest thing the entire plot hinges on:

City: The entire plot hinges on Little Stubby and the magician-gangster arguing over whether the man pretending to be a robot in a nightclub’s storefront window is an actual robot (in which case they’re fine) or an actor (in which case they have to kill him because of the murder he witnessed).

Dhoom: The entire plot hinges on whether the clown-thief recognizes the homeless man he’s been spending weekends with at Six Flags is a Mumbai cop who plays by nobody’s rules but his own.

Winner: “City That Never Sleeps.” Little Stubby!

A thing that must have been said while pitching the movie:

City: “Well, we can’t show her stripping, but we can have her throw clothes on-screen while we play audio of a tap dancer.”

Dhoom: “Oh come on. Who in Mumbai knows who Christopher Nolan even is?”

Winner: “City That Never Sleeps.”

Best line:

City: “That’s the way a man is when he’s made of sawdust.” (Spoken by the Mechanical Man)

Dhoom: “They say never hurt a clown’s feelings.”

Winner: “Dhoom 3.” Because no one has ever said that, not even professional circus clowns who did not wish their feelings hurt.

Most annoying verbal trait:

Dhoom: All conversations — even conversations broadcast on Chicago’s apparently quite popular Asian news station — alternated sentences between Hindi and English.

City: Everyone pronounced “hood” like it rhymes with “dude.”

Winner: “City That Never Sleeps.” Say “hude” in a few sentences and tell me that’s not more annoying.

Best still that explains everything and nothing at the same time:

City:

Dhoom:

Winner:

x

I would have watched an entire movie of:

Dhoom: Goofy cop sidekick/underground motorcycle racer Ali’s semi-racist musical romantic fantasies whenever he sees a woman.

City: Little Stubby!

Winner: “City That Never Sleeps.” I mean, come on. His name is Little Stubby.

The final tally:

By a vote of 5-4 with the tiebreaker being “I am terribly amused by the character name of ‘Little Stubby,’” the winner of 1,001 Chicago Afternoons’ 2016 Daffiest Chicago Movie award is… 1953′s “City That Never Sleeps.”

I would like to thank all the other candidates for quantifiably ridiculous film shot in Chicago, from 1896′s “The Tramp and The Dog” to whatever municipal service Dick Wolf will romanticize next (my bet is “Chicago Streets and San” starring Laura Linney and Paul Giamatti).

To close this story in the words of lazily crooked cop Johnny Kelly, who doesn’t yet understand all that the universe offers and who certainly doesn’t understand how cement mixers work, “I feel like I’m in a cement mixer being slowly chopped and pounded to death.”

Sure, that line doesn’t make sense here, but do you know where it fits? In the reigning champion ridiculous Chicago movie, “City That Never Sleeps!”

Taking the Black Line to Banacaville in Chicago’s worst transit map

Watch the world’s first cinematic pie in the face, filmed in Chicago in 1909

Past the gamut of Snickers and other impulse buys, the line of punks continued back through half the Walgreens, petering out by the premade turkey sandwiches.

“Did a show just let out?” I asked four sweaty white teens whose brand-new Streetlight Manifesto T-shirts hung limply over their scrawn.

“Yeah,” they said in unison.

“I picked the wrong day to need toilet paper,” I said.

They laughed.

Streetlight Manifesto is an American ska punk band from New Brunswick, New Jersey formed in 2002, Wikipedia tells me because I’m 36 and stopped caring about bands at roughly the moment they formed. I listened to an album of theirs on YouTube once I got home. I would have liked them, when I cared.

As I picked up the most on-sale toilet paper, dish soap and dishwasher liquid the Walgreens offered, I had to dodge little spots and clusters of sweaty punks raiding the Gatorade and eying the six packs they wished they were old enough to buy.

Lavender hair and red lipstick for the girls. Scrawny bowl cuts for the zit-clad boys. Dabbles of conversation heard in the air about how to head home, about pulling fast ones on parents, about good nights had and good nights yet to come.

Earlier in the night, I had been sipping middle to highfalutin ginger ale at a backyard barbecue birthday party with some of the roughest scumbags I know.

I don’t mean this in the way that everyone thinks their friends are a rowdy bunch. (“Did you see Tony? Man, he once stayed out until eleven!”) I mean that these are fascinating, complicated people whose stories might blow the little ska punk kids’ minds. Various levels of sin, various levels of legality, various levels of how much each of these people could physical hurt you.

We talked about gardening. We talked about the marinade used on the chicken. We talked about plans for the future now that we realized that rougher days are past and we actually do have futures.

My nasty, tattoo-clad bunch talked about ways to keep bunny rabbits from nibbling at the lettuce.

I’m not putting on airs over the children swarming the Walgreens after a show. I don’t know them, and I’m sure some have struggles and depth not immediately apparent while rushing for sports drinks in matching band shirts.

But what’s next, little ones, is a few years of sin. You’ll make your parents worry, you’ll break some hearts, you’ll lose your taste for novelty. You’ll never in your life care as much about bands as you do right now.

And someday you’ll be the one getting toilet paper at a Walgreens, the taste of natural ginger ale still on your tongue. And you’ll look on a crowd of kids wearing shirts from a band you never heard of, and you’ll shake your head thinking, “If they only knew what’s coming.”

Just like someone a bit down the path is shaking their head right now, looking at me.

Read about some teenagers who gave me hope

Read about others who took my hope away

Join my campaign to declare myself a sandwich

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Brought by pick-up by a man with slicked-back hair who kept calling one of them by the wrong name, the four yawned their way into the defunct Polish-language parish school to fill out poll watcher forms, then to the trucks for signs.

Signs after signs.

Signs for the committeeman they were paid to electioneer for, signs for his slate, his friends, aligned political candidates in races from local judicial seats to Congress. Paid for by different “Friends of” and “Citizens for” groups, but delivered from the same truck by the same four men who would spend the next 13 hours standing outside a closed parish school.

I volunteered for a campaign yesterday. I was a poll watcher in name, but my work involved standing outside the opposite street corner from a friend, accosting voters with fliers and pledges.

The four other men outside the polling place were paid, I believe. Or at least Israel said he was.

He wasn’t sure how much it would be, but he would be glad to have it. He had been picking up shifts at a chocolate factory on the South Side, he said. They hadn’t put him on the schedule in two weeks.

Juan left a little before 7 p.m. to go to work. He had been at the polling place since 6 a.m. but had to go to his night job, booting cars for the city.

He hated working the South Side. They always hear him coming.

“They can hear a pin drop,” he said.

Juan said he had worked every election for 26 years. He couldn’t have been more than 30, probably four years less. He and Omar talked lovingly about candidates they knew, respected, admired.

Piotr, he didn’t talk much. What he did say in broken Polish-English was kind.

I expected to hate these men, or at least feel better than them. I was a volunteer, free for a candidate I believed in. They were paid party operatives, stumbling over names of the candidates on their slate and pulling out sign after sign for Machine flunkies they had never heard of.

Instead, I found myself admiring their hustle. They were making a buck, yes, but doing it for an alderman/committeeman they liked, even if the other names on their signs and fliers (including my candidate’s opponent) were blanks to them.

Other precincts had the opponent’s smear campaign ads. We had four tired guys handing out lists of candidates their guy liked. Other precincts had ballot confusion and election judges who threatened our peers. Our judges offered us pizza.

Other precincts were everything they said Chicago voting is.

Ours either was a kind blip or I was too dumb to catch on what was beneath the surface. But the system worked. The stupid, brutal, horrible, corrupt, venal, money-laden political system created something nice and kind, at least for a few hours on the grass outside one defunct Polish-language parish school in Chicago, Illinois.

Why vote?

How vote?

Amoeba or ward map?

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He and his friends used to cut class to head to the beaches of New South Wales. They would cut class, then head to the store, buy fresh bread and some meat. They would make sandwiches to eat as they swam and sunned themselves.

He’s a chef now. He works at a downtown fancy place, one so fancy the name’s not a real English word. He makes his living among the highest end of cuisine, but the only food he waxed poetic about when we talked were the sandwiches he and friends a world and lifetime away made on hooky days at the beach.

Oh, and he loves fucking bitches.

“I love fucking bitches!” he yelled as the bar dog whined at a newcomer and the bartender pretended not to see that the Aussie was flagging for shots.

The bar itself was a wonderful dive, a semi-Simpson-themed Avondale spot where old Latinos and Poles gather to watch hockey and play blues. The “semi-Simpson” means the place was decorated with characters just recognizable enough to be the Springfield family, but not enough to summon Fox copyright attorneys.

“Homer” had a full black pompadour. Bart, Lisa and Marge were redheads, with cartoon locks just a skosh more realistic than yellow spikes or a giant blue pussy willow.

I was there to see a friend I hadn’t seen in months, to catch up, touch base and get back in each other’s lives. We gabbed and gossiped, talked about Ralph Steadman and Hunter Thompson with the bartender, a nice hippie kid who goes tightrope walking in Joshua Tree.

The Aussie sidled up while my friend was in the bathroom. Soon we somehow had a trio.

The Aussie was tall, lanky, admittedly handsome. He had a well-coiffed hip beard and fashionable clothes. His name was Brendan or Brandon, something like that. He never asked me my name.

He was very drunk, a semi-regular occurrence, the bartender told us later.

Brendan or Brandon wanted my friend and me to join him, to head down to Logan Square and hit a bar where the music goes “oonce oonce oonce” and the place is wall-to-wall women.

“Bitches will fuck me because of the accent,” he said. “But then I want to get rid of them.”

I said I had to work in the morning. He called me a name, asked if I had “an old lady” and said I should take photographs of sex on my phone to show my boss in the morning explaining why I’m late.

He acted this out for about 40 seconds, which doesn’t seem like a long period of time until you have to spend it watching someone give hypothetical commentary on hypothetical sex acts to a hypothetical boss while pantomiming swiping through homemade porno on a hypothetical iPhone 6.

“Uhh… yeah… look at this one, boss… yeah… I was on that… and he’ll be like, ‘All right then.’”

He pestered the bartender for his number so he could send over vegetarian recipes. The bartender kept pretending to see drink orders on the other side of the room, but eventually couldn’t keep the lie up and punched numbers in the Aussie’s phone.

“Did you give him a fake number?” I asked the bartender once Brendan or Brandon left.

“Of course,” the hippie kid said.

People say truth is stranger than fiction, but that’s just because no one would have the guts to put a guy like this in fiction. Too unrealistic, critics would say. Too broad and stereotypical. No points for effort, a straw man for jackasses amid the semi-Simpsons scenery.

But he was real. And he wanted two strangers to think him cool.

I wonder if the Australian chef with the fashion beard and wild stories has any friends here at all.

He mentioned a Chicago woman he used to date and a boss who would let him slide on work duty if he had a great story about the night before, but as Brendan or Brandon fist bumped us and called us “mate,” it occurred to me he mentioned no other mates.

The bartender said he comes in alone.

I think of the man wandering alone into the cold Chicago night in pursuit of dance clubs and “bitches.”

And I think of his thoughts turning to a New South Wales beach and perfect sandwiches split with the last real friends he had.

A few more immigrant stories:

• A Romanian man sees his mother for the first time in 13 years
• A Korean cabbie talks persistence and ping pong
  
• An Armenian country music singer sells magic
• Ulan from Kyrgyzstan handles the International Cluster of Dogs
• A suspicious Chinese egg

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“In the world that we operate in, for me, the names are very important,” the breakdancer said. “In the institutional world, your PhD is your credentials, right? When someone has their doctorate or their PhD, they take it as disrespect when you don’t address them as doctor. It’s like you devalue their training and their expertise.

“And the names in this forum are earned. If you have a wack name, it’s either going to change at some point, or you’re not just going to be relevant. People will look at you as a joke.”

It’s been a while since the last story of how the residents of the Avondale apartment nicknamed The Dojo each came to breakdancing, and BRAVEMONK is the reason. I started playing the interview tape to transcribe his story half a dozen times, each time not feeling up to the challenge of BRAVEMONK’s language.

Here was a 34-year-old Normal, Ill., native who delved into a story of Native American rites of passage, Afro-Brazilian martial arts, Shaolin history and AOL Instant Messenger when I asked his name. How could I write that?

But then I realized I didn’t have to write it. BRAVEMONK already wrote it for me.

Supporters of the site’s ongoing Patreon campaign can hear my full interview with BRAVEMONK through the 1,001 Chicago Afternoons podcast, but otherwise, I felt the best way to capture BRAVEMONK is to step aside and let him speak for himself.

So, with some minor tweaks for clarity and length, here’s the story about how BRAVEMONK got his B-Boy name.

“It’s not just your name, it’s you empowering your name or you embodying whatever the characteristic of that name is.

“To kind of touch back onto you to how names are, oftentimes people get blessed with a name by people, but it’s just like any rites of passage that have been around for thousands of years. I could use native indigenous culture, where there will be someone from the tribe who will go on a vision quest. Upon them receiving a vision, they’ll come down from like the mountaintop and the chief, the elder will have a name for them.

“There’s a divine, there’s a spiritual connection to it. It’s not just, ‘Huh, let me just think of a name.’

“It’s the same thing with capoeiristas. I’m not sure if you’re familiar with Capoeira. Afro-Brazilian martial arts. It’s culture, right? What happens is during the roda — for us [breakdancers], that’s like the cipher, the circle — the mestre, the master will give the student a name when he gives them a cord.

“The way he names them is based off of personality, a trait, it can be a physical trait or something.”

Here, fellow breakdancer and Dojo resident ManOfGod joined in BRAVEMONK’s story, telling how his mestre gave him the name Caveira (Skull) during his batizado (baptism, symbolized by the granting of a cord).

“I’m skinny and I had my tank top and everything, like slim outfit, so the only thing he saw was head and hair,” ManOfGod said. “So he called me Caveira, Skull. Because that was the biggest thing on my body, according to him. But that’s how black folks do in general.”

BRAVEMONK agreed.

“In more modern context, nicknames. The community will name you,” BRAVEMONK said. “You just get a nickname when you’re in the neighborhood, people develop a nickname for you. Sometimes it might be your first name twice. Ray-Ray.”

Release joined in as well.

“My nickname was my full name back home. Aaron Gray. Everybody just called me by my full name,” Release said, to the laughter of his friends.

BRAVEMONK continued.

“BRAVEMONK, to me, is a combination of some of what used to be said about me when I was younger, but it’s also mainly a divine inspiration. I’ve been into martial arts when I was younger. I started tai kwon do when I was 4, but I always wanted to study kung fu.

“I got every little name in the book because I was this African-American kid, black kid, that was so into martial arts at the time. Dance too as well, but my focus was on becoming a master.

“I had names like Bruce Leroy, which is named after a character off of a very popular movie in the ‘80s called ‘The Last Dragon.’ It was produced by Barry Gordy of Motown. So I would get that nickname, Bruce Leroy. Some people called me Chinaman.

“When I was about 17, America Online became very popular. It got introduced to the world, I think it was AOL 2.0. 56K. Dial-up modem.

“The Internet was a huge buzz in society. It was like the Information Superhighway. And I had wanted to enter into this Information Superhighway with a name that would serve as a call sign for truth and light and wisdom. And I was into martial arts also.

“It said ‘ENTER YOUR NAME.’ I put in Goldenmonk, and it was like ‘EHH ACCESS DENIED.’

“So then I thought about it for a moment and then it hit me, like a lightbulb, like [singing angelically]. And I was like… BRAVEMONK!

“To me, brave represents a fist. It means go and I fight. Monk represents discipline. It means I can hold back. A fist in a palm is BRAVEMONK, you know what I’m saying?”

Read ManOfGod’s story

Read Release’s story

Read about B-Girl Miss Sweetfeet

Like BRAVEMONK on Facebook

Listen to the podcast version of this interview (Patreon supporters only)

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Read the original stories from the teaser:

Hunter of Magic

Goodnight Wicker Park

The Smell of Magic

Cockroach on the Factory Floor

A Blue (Line) Christmas

Miss Sweetfeet Breaks

The Evidence of Leather

Yeah, it’s sort of a dojo.

Last week, we heard the story of B-Boy ManOfGod, who recently moved from The Dojo to Hong Kong.

Today, here’s the story of Dojo resident Aaron Gray, AKA Release.

Release Falls in Love

“From where I’m from, South Bend, Ind., if you don’t have anything to do with Notre Dame, there’s nothing going on,” Release said, leaning back in his chair.

Aaron “Release” Gray, 31, is one of the newest Dojo tenants. He had only been in the apartment — and in Chicago — for a few months by the time we sat down together in October.

“There are dancers, but they just like to dance,” he said. “They don’t want to get better. They don’t want to try to elevate their skill or nothing like that. To a point, I just got tired. And the people I grew up with in the dance scene that live in South Bend, they’re all married, got kids, they don’t really got time to practice anymore. Their mindset is not even on dancing anymore.”

Around the time he hit 30, Release stopped dancing for a long, tedious year.

“I pretty much moved here just to start anew and just to get that love of dancing back,” he said. “I’m slowly but surely falling in love with dancing.”

Schooling

“I started out breaking when I was in eighth grade. I got called out in a battle at a school dance. I really didn’t know how to break, but I didn’t want to be no punk about myself, like ‘He ain’t gonna show me up,’” he said, dropping into an impression of himself as a puffed-up eighth grader for the last bit.

He accepted the dance-off challenge, with potentially predictable results.

“I tried to do a 190. A 190 is when you stand on your hands and you spin. I tried it, and I never tried it before and I ended up, like, my hands gave out and I fell on my head. Ever since then, I got kind of paranoid about breaking. So I started popping.”

Popping is a cousin to hip-hop dance. It was created in California in the early 1970s. People who pop mostly dance to funk music because it was created in funk era. Parliment-Funkadelic, George Clinton, James Brown, etc.

Popping is contraction of the muscle. It’s more twitches, controlled action, jerky motions than a breakdance toprock or powerhead move. Popping turns your whole body staccato.

Think “The Robot” done by someone who actually knows how to do “The Robot.”

But, being from Indiana, Gray had another patron saint of dance to look toward.

“I was all Michael Jackson. Just do all Michael Jackson moves and everything like that, like imitate him,” Gray said.

In high school, a friend introduced him to the movie “Breakin’” and its sequel, “Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo.”

“As soon as he showed me that movie, I was watching it every night. Like every night.”

Pausing and slow-mo on VHS, recording and studying bits. Pause, slow-mo, study, rehearse, learn.

Teeny-Boppers and Mr. Wiggles

“I didn’t really focus on dancing like that because I was all into sports. I was running track, I was playing football, stuff like that. Dancing was still within me, but I never took it seriously until I was out of high school.”

He graduated in 2003, settling into life in non-Notre Dame South Bend. He worked at Walmart, hung out with friends and went to clubs where he could, accepting battle challenges when offered.

That’s where he caught the attention of dancer Stefan “Sagewise” Rios.

“That’s pretty much where I started battling was at little teeny-bopper clubs and stuff like that. He saw me and was like, ‘Hey, man, let’s go to a jam,’” Release said.

That jam in 2004 was where he saw the next level. The 19 year old didn’t know people took breakdancing as seriously as they did. He didn’t know people still popped.

“Then I saw footage of Mr. Wiggles and it was over.”

Footage of South Bronx dancer and graffiti artist Steffan “Mr. Wiggles” Clemente was hard to come by in Indiana in pre-YouTube 2004, but Gray met a guy through work who would lend him DVDs.

Like he did with “Breakin’” and “Breakin’ 2,” like he did with Michael Jackson, the future Release studied, practiced, learned.

The Business of Dance

At that first jam 11 years ago, Release met a B-Boy named BRAVEMONK. They stayed friendly over the years, chatting and catching up at jams and battles through the Midwest.

Earlier this year, Release confided in BRAVEMONK about his frustration with South Bend, about falling out of love with the dance that had powered him since he was 19.

“‘I need a place to stay so I can figure some stuff out, so I can start anew.’ And BRAVEMONK was like, ‘Come here, man. Do what you got to do.’”

“Here” meant The Dojo, the Avondale apartment Release now calls home.

It’s a place where he can not only working on dancing as a practice, but, like BRAVEMONK, ManOfGod and residents you the reader will be meeting at random intervals over the next few weeks, turn it into a career. Teaching. Trophies. Purses sought and won at competitions around the planet.

“I already had the dancing, but for me, I wanted to learn the business tips. They’ve been leading me. You know how they say you lead by example, pretty much they’ve been leading by example. So I’ve just been following their footsteps, like just watching them. They probably don’t know that I’m watching them, but I’m watching what they’re doing as far as the business aspects of dancing and trying to get yourself out there.”

Aaron “Release” Gray on Facebook

Meet ManOfGod

Meet Miss Sweetfeet

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Do you have a story of life in “the sharing economy”?

A second-story flat above a storefront, it has over the last decade through friends of friends and other connections been home and practice space for a rotating group of dancers connected with Chicago’s breakdancing community.

Intermittently over the next several weeks, we will be hearing the stories of several Dojo residents, past and present, about how they came to the apartment and to lives embracing hip-hop dance.

For B-Boy ManOfGod, who recently moved from The Dojo to Hong Kong, it started with a fused spine.

Beat Street

In the summer of 2000, Jarius King, the future ManOfGod, was a 15-year-old kid on the Southeast Side with severe scoliosis, an abnormal curvature of the spine.

After doctors surgically fused his upper and middle spine to straighten it, there wasn’t much to do other than lay around, recuperate and watch HBO.

That was when “Beat Street” came on.

The 1984 drama is a celebration of hip-hop culture in the South Bronx. Graffiti, DJing and, of course, breakdancing. He had seen the movie before, but as a bedridden teen, the movement spoke to him.

“The battle scene in the Roxy night club, I was just like, ‘Yo, I wish I could do that,’” ManOfGod said. “I was always into martial arts. I love the back and forth, the camaraderie, even the respect that two enemies or rivals can have for each other, so I thought that was dope. And just to see that exchange — it was something I could relate to more, versus fantasizing kung fu stuff.”

His doctors advised he wait a year before starting to breakdance. He waited four months.

“Even for like the first few years into it, the first four years into the dance, I didn’t do a lot of like the windmills,” he said, citing one of the more gymnastic and dangerous breakdance moves. “And a lot of crazy moves I’d have to stay away from because it was just too much for my back to handle and it was too much of a risk and I was too afraid.”

As he continued breaking over the years, around the country, around the world, he became less afraid. And less. And less.

First Steps

He was attending a selective enrollment high school in West Englewood, miles away from his home on the Southeast Side. So it was a surprise when he found out a classmate — a classmate who knew how to break, no less — lived exactly one block north of him.

The friend showed him some moves and gave him an instructional video.

“I just kept practicing with that videotape for a while and then found an online forum called chicagobboy.com and met up with some folks,” he said.

From the forum, he found out there was a practice space at Bessemer Park, just five blocks south of him.

“I started meeting breakers and watching them, and I would practice around them. South Side Brickheadz and dudes from Indiana. I would just watch them and I would practice too, because it was a community practice space. Then a couple of the cats kind of took to me,” he said. “They would always help me with moves and show me stuff, just put me onto some knowledge and share things with me.”

He later moved to North Lawndale on the West Side to live with his aunt. One day on AOL Instant Messenger, a stranger reached out to him based on the B-Boy reference in his user name. They started chatting.

A few weeks later the stranger, Skripture, invited him to practice.

“He invited me to come practice with him at his basement. In his basement at his crib. He was like, ‘Oh, we practice at our crib and stuff.’ I was like, hmm, if he wanted to do some weird stuff or kill me or whatever…” ManOfGod trailed off, laughing. “I was like, ‘Yo, I had been talking to him for weeks and building with him. This dude really knows his stuff about breaking, so I don’t think it’s fake.’ It turned out it wasn’t, thank God.”

The Word of God

ManOfGod took a moment to pray over his sandwich. The name’s not an affectation.

He didn’t start as ManOfGod. His first B-Boy name was Ravenous, a name that gets both him and his friends laughing as they sit around The Dojo’s dining room. It was teen affectation, a name he gave himself because he thought it sounded cool.

“Ravenous” later became “7-Up,” due to his friends’ repeated ribbing that he looked like Orlando Jones, the soft drink’s pitchman at the time.

“I didn’t believe it. I was like, ‘Yo, you’re all Latino. You’re just saying that because I’m the only black dude you hang with,’” ManOfGod said, laughing.

He fought “7-Up” for a year or more until he attended a Christian teen camp that was “like 98 percent black.” When the first thing he heard stepping off the bus was someone yelling Jones’ slogan at him (“Make 7-Up Yours!” for you retro nuts), he decided it might not be a race thing.

Embracing it, he had his B-Boy name, his identity for dancing.

“But they switched spokespeople after a year or two and I was without a name,” he said.

At the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the nameless B-Boy would see an old high school friend and fellow believer. They were part of a cohort attending college together through a scholarship program called POSSE.

When she would see him on campus, she would yell and joke about “There goes a man of God, he’s a man of God.”

It fit. ManOfGod was born.

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Pride of lions, that’s one everyone knows.

A herd of sheep.

Now let’s get more complicated, ratchet it up.

A murder of crows.

A parliament of owls.

A smack of jellyfish.

They’re called nouns of assemblage, linguistic oddities half historic and half made up to describe what a group of things would be. A knot of toads. A leap of leopards. A shoal of bass.

One of the best sources collecting these collectives is James Lipton’s “An Exultation of Larks.” In it, the man who would be mocked as the “Inside the Actors Studio” toady (and past pimp) dove into research to find some terms and made up the others, inviting his readers to do the same.

It’s a fun game, but raises some questions. We see more owls on this continent than lions, but why is a “pride” a well-known term and “parliament” confusing trivia?

Are a group of lawyers playing badminton “an eloquence” for the law or “a battle” for the badminton?

What’s a group of old Polish women riding the bus to church on a gray and misty Sunday morning?

The Milwaukee bus came to a stop in Avondale, by the house of a friend who let me crash the night before. I Ventraed aboard to turn and see the cluster of old Polish women… the slew? The smack?

I came on board the bus and prim and proper unsmiling Polish women turned their white heads to glance at me.

We rode the bus southeast.

They talked softly, practicing their church voices. They weren’t a congregation yet, wouldn’t be until they crossed the church doors. They were too quiet and coiffed to be the “gaggle of women” Lipton found from 13 separate sources in his research.

They spoke in hushed tones, preparing for the piety to come.

A cloud of witnesses.

A gang of elk.

A rash of dermatologists.

And what to call the middle-aged Hispanic man hawking cotton candy through Logan Square?

The gray morning had become a hot and windy afternoon. The man hoisted a pole dappled with bags of pink and blue floss over his shoulder, wiping his head as he walked. He was alone, tramping his path by Western and Fullerton, one of hundreds across the city hoisting a tree’s worth of cotton candy bags on a stick.

A charm of finches.

A hover of trout.

A skulk of thieves.

The Croatians gather to play bocce in Lincoln Square.

The hot afternoon had become a mild and beautiful evening. In Welles Park, they’ve been coming for decades on nights like this to bowl on the lawn in spots not claimed by Little League players and children spinning around until they fall.

The men huddle and yell in Croatian, arguing and bartering with each roll about who hit what and what the strategy should be. Younger generations have crept into the game over the years, the gray heads punctuated by black ones. All laugh and yell and gripe and holler at the game, surrounded by a dray of bounding black squirrels.

A haggle of bocce players arguing in Croatian.

A bindle of cotton candy sellers hoisting their wares on shoulder.

A whisper of old Polish women riding the bus to church on a gray and misty Sunday morning.

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