The jazz singer is talking about her clothes. 

She has pale skin, blue eyes, ruby lips, black hair that’s curly bordering on frantic. A thin silver chain dangles from a small skull on her right ear. Her left earring’s a small hoop. Black bandanna around her neck.

Brook Umbrell — “Brooke without the E, umbrella without the A,” she jokes — said she’s a jeans-and-T-shirt sort of woman most days, and this appears to be most days. Her black T says “Sweet and Toxic,” but those aren’t the clothes she’s talking about.

She’s talking about the clothes she wears as Brooklyn Britches, songstress head of The Whispers. She’s talking about vintage panties, nipple-covering pasties, fringy Gatsby affairs and the other outfitting she took with her when she made the jump from burlesque dancer to chanteuse.

“I realized after a while that it was a very important way for me and for a lot of women to express our sexuality in an environment that is safe, powerful and comfortable. To be on stage and wear whatever you want — as much as you want or as little as you want — is a very, very powerful thing. It feels…”

Here she trailed off, just for a moment. We’re sitting on a couch. I’m sipping tea. R2D2 is saying nothing.

She glanced back up and continued.

“I have a sexual assault in my background,” she said. “I felt like there were so many things in life that were saying ‘Your body doesn’t belong to you. It belongs to this other person, this other person and everybody else that’s out there.’ In doing something like burlesque, you realize ‘Oh no, it’s mine. I can do what I want with it. I can wear what I want. I can show myself in whatever light that I want.’

“For me, in a lot of the costuming that I have, it is very showy. It is very like you know, high-waisted underwear and maybe a bra or some pasties. Sometimes I’ll just wear a fringy thing with some pasties on. Because I can. Because I think it’s important for women to express themselves in a way that is sexual but also doesn’t say ‘I’m inviting you to come into my space.’ It’s saying ‘I will allow who I want when I want to come into my space.’”

You can google the videos. You can see Brooklyn sing. You can see her belt jazz standards while glammed to the nines, tens, elevens, or maybe close her eyes and shimmy to swanked-up covers of Radiohead, Erykah Badu or the thus far one-hitter who did “Ex’s and Oh’s.”

Brook Umbrell is 38. She decided to start singing at 34 or 35 — she can’t recall.

“It wasn’t like I had just gotten out of high school doing choir kind of stuff and my voice was prepared,” she said. “It was all kind of rugged whatever was coming out.”

Vocal lessons quickly turned into an offer to sing backup for the teacher’s band. From when she was a kid in Ohio, there was just always music in her life.

“My grandfather was a preacher, my uncle was a preacher,” Umbrell said. “Grew up in the Baptist church. My mom played piano. In the Baptist church where we went, there were no other instruments aside from piano. So most of it was acapella, a lot of harmonies. So I grew up hearing all of that, hearing the harmonies, hearing how the sounds went together and it made sense to me. A lot of my family’s from the South, so there’s a lot of banjos and guitars and sitting around a bonfire and kind of making our own fun. And I grew up in the country so it was again that. Not just with the church stuff. My friends all played guitar and we sang. It’s something that I kind of was just doing.”

Umbrell moved to Chicago in 2011.

“I had gone through a breakup, started dating somebody else who suggested ‘You should do something for yourself’ — I think I was probably just hanging around too much to be honest,” she said, laughing.

After a trip with friends to see Michelle L’amour’s troupe at the now-closed burlesque venue The Everleigh Social Club, Umbrell decided to sign up for classes.

“My ex was like ‘Oh. So that’s what you’re going to do,’” Umbrell said, putting an arched eyebrow and disgust-crinkled nose into the impression. “I think she thought I was going to take needle point or a sewing class or clay or something like that.”

The relationship didn’t last. The burlesque did.

After a few years of classes, she decided to take to the stage for the first time in 2014. Prepping for her first performance, Umbrell couldn’t find music she liked. So she decided to sing it herself, disrobing for the crowd as she belted a swing-infused version of Yiddish-theater-turned-Andrews-Sisters classic “Bei Mir Bist Du Schoen.”

Burlesque felt a fit, but the performances started to stress her out, giving her near panicked bouts of stage fright before each show. It wasn’t the nudity; it was the perfectionism. If she flubs a lyric or blanks on a word as a singer, Brooklyn Britches can give a glance to her co-Whispers NumbChuck on guitar and Just Martin on upright bass so they know to vamp and improv to cover the gaffe. If she forgets a choreographed move, she’s on her own in the wrong position in the wrong place on stage.

She thought she could be an OK singing dancer or a good singer. The choice was simple.

The gig as vocal coach Katie Kaden’s backup singer put her in touch with a new community — musicians, not the burlesque performers she spent the last few years with. Friends of friends of friends and chance run-ins with NumbChuck and Just Martin birthed The Whispers.

The combination of well-loved standards, identifiable modern songs done with “a swanky twist” and the portability of a three-person band has given The Whispers regular gigs at bars across the city. The Drifter under the Green Door Tavern. Tiny Tapp on the Riverwalk. Sunday brunch at The Dearborn.

It’s not always been easy. And venues aren’t always obliging when a woman’s calling the shots.

“I’m a woman who runs a band with two men who are very masculine men. Sometimes that’s a challenge. Just being a woman in the world can be a challenge. I got offered a job, gave them a bid, they told me it was too high — they could only offer me so much money. One of my friends called me up and said ‘Hey, I need a singer for this thing.’ It was the same gig that I had been offered. He got offered $250 more. More than their top bid. More than ‘That’s the top price we can pay.’”

But it’s happening. The Whispers are playing. They’re making money. She’s still working as a salon esthetician, but the day job is taking less prominence in her economics. She co-produces a live-band burlesque show with Eva la Feva. She plays at circus shows for Aloft Loft.

“I’m working with drag kings and queens. I’m working with burlesque dancers and tightrope walkers and aerial artists and strongmen and all these amazing people that are just wonderful to watch,” she said. “But also, I’m working for super-cool people, really great venues, people that I adore.”

Umbrell’s wife comes in while we’re talking. She smiles at me and later shows me how R2D2 runs. From the beginning, Umbrell knew this one was someone who got her.

“When we met, I told her I did burlesque and she said, ‘That’s so badass!’” Umbrell said, flashing a smile.

Meet The Whispers

Meet a woman breaking into breakdancing

And one whose muse also wears fancy lingerie

And one whose designs run all-black

It was a one-woman show by storyteller Ada Cheng, and I did not intend to write about this. I went because my wife bought tickets. I went because a friend I hadn’t seen in too long was going too. I went to check out the museum upstairs (which I did), make some contact for a future story (did) and then grab dinner after (mission accomplished there as well).

But then Cheng opened her mouth and I couldn’t not write about it.

Ada Cheng is short to a noticeable level. She’s short and smiling, with a pixie cut of hair and long bangs flopping in her eyes. After introductory poems and pretension — the sine qua non of both the theater world and people who say things like “sine qua non” — she came out and flashed that smile, flashed those glinting eyes, opened her mouth and became a child again.

Gently, gently over the next few hours, she went from a 6-year-old in Taiwan crying for her mommy not to leave to a 27-year-old running away herself, leaving for America, academia and what she thought would be freedom. She took us from city to city, year to year, devastating relationship to devastating relationship.

I can’t explain it without losing some of the magic. Aside from the introductory play-acting as a child and a few bits of pantomime, they were just stories. It was just talking. But somehow it felt more real than the room.

When I remember the show, I don’t picture the basement of a Cambodian service center with some stackable plastic chairs and rigged-up curtains that cordon off the paperwork. I picture a payphone in Taiwan, a dance club in Texas, a fateful SRO transient hotel in Uptown. Even now, I’m picturing these places I haven’t seen but Ada’s words made real.

The world her words spun seem more real than reality, and that’s the highest compliment I can offer.

Meet another local storyteller

On a cold winter night, a group gathered to enjoy Empirical Brewery’s craft selection, look at chicken fetus and corn cell slides through paper microscopes from Foldscope Instruments and paint designs on petri dishes of agar using bacteria that will, in a few hours from this writing, glow Christmas colors.

At the drink-and-draw organized by ChiTown Bio, you could paint whatever you wanted, but the choices of pre-made designs to trace included snowman, reindeer or diagram of a bacteriophage virus. I chose bright red for both the virus and the initials PD I improvised on the side. My wife chose a palette of red, green and white for her hand-drawn petri dreidel.

I’ll write again about the group when I have a chance to sit down with them and talk about the organization in depth. They have hopes and plans for a public lab — which I’ll get into in the future story — but right now ChiTown Bio is a small group of biologists sharing the joy of E. Coli with anyone interested.

The wife and I chatted with the crowd, as much as we could keep up with the talk of gut biomes, art products that become poison gas when mixed and the fact one of the co-founders once tried to calm an arachnophobic ex by explaining we are at every moment crawling with invisible mites that devour our dead skin, which is what keeps us youthful and pretty.

The ex was not calmed.

A constant source of joy for me is learning how others see the world. Sociologists look at life and see a constant class battle; artists a painting not yet painted. Mathematicians see it as a series of invisible rules to suss out, criminals as a battle to win, writers as a series of stories to tell.

I’ve touched on the theme before, but for a specific example, I once wrote a newspaper feature on an early 20th-century wackadoodle who “applied the lessons of common sense” in proposing the scientific theory that the earth was in fact hollow with a 600-mile-diameter central sun and marshy, unexplored continents full of mastodons and Asians.

Marshall Gardener was a machinist at a corset company by trade, and the holder of several patents for sewing machines. He also held two patents related to his hollow earth theory — #1,096,102 for a “Geographic Apparatus” replica of the planet as he saw it and Des. 63,362 for a small necklace or fob ornament hollow earth.

Even though his world was a hollowed gourd of mastodons and Asians (their eyes were slanted through constant squinting at that central sun — let us not pretend this is a fully charming man), an inventor saw the world as something to patent.

What then of people who see life as life? The ones who see the world as something to look at through microscopes? What of those who look at you, see a teeming heap of gut biome with facefuls of invisible flesh-spiders and find it all beautiful?

There’s a table waiting for them at ChiTown Bio, one full of paper microscopes, craft beer and holiday doodles glowing red and green with life.

Read about the hollow earth guy

Read about a man who finds joy through bookbinding

Tonight’s theme is Little Known Facts, so I decided to share a mishmash of some of the odd Chicagoana I’ve learned from writing this site and from running the Chicago Corruption Walking Tour. 

It’s about how I get through the day knowing all the often-depressing facts both require, plus about some of the ghosts following me around the city.

…

The Art Institute of Chicago is beautiful, but everybody knows that.

The stately downtown retreat between the gray stone lions is a temple of art, history, culture and beauty. You can stroll by thousands of years and hundreds of cultures’ worth of painting, sculpture, pottery, costume, architecture and design. More than 300,000 breathtaking pieces.

Here’s the little-known fact: The Art Institute of Chicago exists because a woman’s legal rights didn’t. Her name was Sarah Daggett.

A bit of history. As early as 1836, a year before the town of Chicago became a city, the lakefront was deemed public land, “forever open, clear and free.”

The specifics of the law have changed over the years, but it’s land meant – by law – for barbecues, picnics, Frisbee and a place in a choked urban area to have a moment of peaceful green.

Developing it would be, to quote lakefront watchdog A. Montgomery Ward, who spent millions of his own money to keep the Field Museum off of the grass and peace we now call Grant Park. “transforming the breathing spot for the poor into a showground of the educated rich.”

So, whether or not we happen to personally like the art museum in it, why do we have a four-story building in a park?

In the 1880s, the city wanted to build a world-class art museum for the upcoming Columbian Exhibition world’s fair. Under the law of the time, all they needed to build that museum on park land was the unanimous consent of all adjacent property owners.

Two property owners, William Leland and his neighbor Sarah Daggett, didn’t consent. Leland got an injunction. Daggett joined it.

The world’s fair was the ticking clock on this. If the Art Institute would be opened by the start of the fair, it would receive $200,000 of World’s Columbian Exposition funds for construction. If not, the museum planners would have to pay that money — roughly $5.3 million in today’s cash — out of pocket.

Political pressure mounted. Personal pressure mounted. The suit went up to the Illinois Supreme Court. The newspapers, their friends, their officials all yelled, screamed, pushed for these two to drop their completely legal opposition to this museum. Leland caved, but Sarah Daggett would not give in, would not sign away her consent.

So her husband did it for her.

It was not his property or even shared property. The property adjacent to the future Art Institute was wholly owned by Sarah Daggett. But she was a woman. Under the law at the time, a husband could sign legal documents on behalf of his wife, even if her personal objections were a well-known matter of public record.

We have this beautiful, amazing museum that I truly love with all my heart, we have this beautiful museum directly, wholly and entirely because American law considered women inferior.

Little-known fact.

My name’s Paul. I’m a journalist, blogger and tour guide. I run the Chicago Corruption Walking Tour. It’s popular. A lot of people want to hear these little known facts of injustice and sin bouncing around my head.

I know the elevated Loop trains exists because of Charles Yerkes, who would hire prostitutes to seduce and blackmail lawmakers who opposed his attempts to make a streetcar monopoly. Yerkes funded that big observatory in Wisconsin. He has two separate craters on the moon named in his honor.

I know the first murder in Chicago’s history was the stabbing death of translator Jean La Lime in 1812. It might have been a dispute over property, it might have been because La Lime was supplying information to the War Department about the rampant corruption, bribery, smuggling and illegal trading at Fort Dearborn. You’ve never heard of Jean La Lime, but the man who stabbed him to death in a fight, John Kinzie, has streets and schools named in his honor. They buried Jean La Lime where the now-closed Jazz Record Mart sits. The Chicago History Museum still owns his corpse.

I’ve read the Chicago Police Department’s annual statistical summary from 1974, a year whose record of 974 murders still stands.

I’m full of all these little-known facts, these depressing, defying stories of corruption both economic and spiritual. I can’t take a train without seeing Charles Yerkes, can’t pass the Jazz Record Mart without seeing Jean La Lime.

So how can I go to the Art Institute and not see Sarah Daggett? How can I enjoy this wonderful, wonderful museum knowing what I know? Now that you know Sarah Daggett’s story, how can you?

I get through by knowing little-known facts…

To find out the happy little-known facts that get me through the day, come to Is This a Thing? at 7 p.m. tonight at O’Shaughnessy’s Public House in Ravenswood.

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The older white woman with the massive cat’s eye glasses, smiled and laughed at him, pushing the button on the machine that ground peanuts and almonds right there into homemade butter.

I stood with my list and looked at the world around me.

I’ve written about the luxury Mariano’s by the Metra tracks in Ravenswood before. I’ve written about the piano bar and the full pints of beer you can purchase when you’re dining in amid the produce aisles.

I put the place in local context, talking about food deserts a few miles south while here people wandered amid luxury. And I made people laugh. I swore a lot.

But I never wrote about this place for what it is on its own.

The homemade peanut-almond butter oozed into the plastic container like soft-serve ice cream, overflowing suddenly. The boy with the intricate tattoo lunged over the counter, indicating the woman should hand him the plastic jar.

“I’ll pay for all of it,” the woman said.

The boy just smiled and took the container, slapping the bottom over and over and over until the nut spread settled.

A commuter train shrieked by in the darkness outside.

The grocery store was mid-filled, not quite packed but a long way from empty. People milled and pushed carts and did grocery things, but others sat at the wine bar to listen to a pianist bundled up in winter wear play trickling songs on the ivories.

At the sushi bar, a woman quietly flipped through a magazine while waiting for sashimi. Other customers milled by the BBQ grill while excited teenagers and less-thrilled adults rushed about restocking the infinite rolling shelves and counters packed high with food.

On the muted overhead TV, a local chef shopped in full chef whites, mouthing what was presumably a lecture to an off-camera narrator about why he comes to Mariano’s for veggies, meat and brand-name Daisy Cutter beer.

There’s a certain blind spot observers of the world have, one where they don’t realize they’re part of the scene. That’s why I write in first person. The journalistic voice of God coming down from above to say this is this and that is that never seemed fair to me. I was there too, not as a narrator but as a guy who didn’t want to buy whole jars of the crazy spices I need for a recipe. I went to the place where a young guy with an intricate tattoo will scoop just what I need from the bulk jars. The $6 meal counter is nice too.

The others in this sprawling complex of food also had their reasons for being there. Some, I’m sure, just lived by there or popped in from the Metra station. Convenience over any particular desire to be there.

Some, I’m sure, were like me and had also come in for a particular thing, making their own wry mental notes about the glitz. My observer eye does not make me special.

Some came to eat alone at one of the various stations, a clean, well-lighted place to enjoy a meal where no one would look at them.

But I’m sure some came for the glitz. I’m not creating a fictive fancyman who pooh-poohs establishments where you can’t get a glass of cabernet amid the cabbages. The influence is more subtle.

Maybe a few shoppers revel in the fancy. Maybe more just saw it, liked it and when they had to buy their next round of groceries thought they might as well do it at the place that’s just a tad nicer.

Although we’re not the only culture afflicted with this crave, in America as we toddle toward 2016, food has become cultural capital. The spot where you buy your veggies and boxed pasta has become a way of trumpeting social standing, similar to a high-status car or a shirt with the expensive logo facing out.

We shop at Mariano’s to say we’re glitzy, at Eataly to say we’re rich, at Aldi to say we’re sensible, at Whole Foods to tell the world we’re a good, caring, health-conscious person. Even people who buy their stuff at the carniceria down the block, if they do it by choice and not by circumstance, will let the world know once in a while that they’re the type of person who supports local businesses.

Not every customer shops to be fancy. But enough that it became the chain’s business model.

They paid to produce a running loop of TV chefs shopping. They paid for a wine bar, for an in-house pianist. They invested in our desire to look at a massive showcase of food and be impressed, knowing that shopping there will make us feel just a tad more impressive too.

The chef on the muted TV was now grilling his Mariano’s meat on a brand-name The Big Green Egg grill. Both the Big Green Egg and the Daisy Cutter beer had their product names perfectly framed in shot at all moments.

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The original Mariano’s story

Food deserts and an abuelita

He takes their money and he takes their sleep. He screams at all hours and for no reason. He burbles up spit on their clothes and has made 8 p.m. a late night.

And they could not love him more.

“He is shitting himself right now,” Jake said as he bounced his son on his knee in their backyard.

My friends Jake and Bekah and I finally got that beer. For months we had been talking about it, but there were schedules and misfires. Relatives, both mine and theirs, came into town and left. I got a weeks-long cold that I didn’t want to transmit to the little fella.

But the stars aligned and there we were, sitting in a backyard in Ravenswood with beers, Bloody Marys, a mussy-haired baby and a curly-haired dog that kept returning a chew toy to the baby’s head every time we threw it.

“Could you please not put this wet, disgusting thing on the baby?” Bekah asked the dog.

The conversation was almost ruthlessly grown up, delving into politics, dating, civil rights, family dynamics and alcohol. We talked about North Korean travel restrictions and dissected the recent mayoral race. Any Alex stories were at my prompting. They were just glad to have an adult around.

There have been times where we talked all night, the three of us. We would pound booze and have fascinating discussions and I would end up on the couch, with the promise of breakfast in the morning.

Now there were four — five counting the dog — and night came at 7 p.m.

I know this won’t last. Right now Kim Jong Alex just sort of sits there, looking around. He doesn’t need constant interaction, stimulation and answers to eternal “Why? Why? Why?” He doesn’t make up jokes that don’t end, sulk surly in his room or tell pompous stories about something life-changing his Philosophy 101 professor said about Ayn Rand.

He’s at the cute part of life, the one where you can still have a conversation with him around, as long as you’re not distracted by his grumpy widdle face. (He is adorable, I should have mentioned.)

I’m not a parent, so anything I would say here would be as welcome as telling women I understand sexual harassment because I once got patted on the ass by a gay guy in Boystown. But I’ll go ahead anyway (and yes, I know the guy was just messing with me, but it was still an ego boost).

No, I don’t think every child is magic, or that every stupid thing they say is worthy of a Facebook post, email, in-person anecdote and public service announcement blasted on all broadcast frequencies.

There are stupid children. And mean ones. And ones where you can’t quite place it, but you know there’s something wrong going on in there.

That’s why it’s such a joy to see parents who feel the same way, who keep perspective and, even if they fail at it among midnight feedings, sleep deprivation and no damn cash, still try to keep as much vestige of personal identity as possible.

I was raised by parents like that. I hope to be one of them someday, but in the meantime I will sure grab a beer and a Bloody with them on a warm spring day.

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Read about Bekah and Jake’s wedding

Read another story about kids I like

It was the same pub I had sat in almost two years before to meet with composer Seth Boustead to talk about the Ben Hecht-inspired radio play he was bringing to fruition. Now I was sipping breakfast tea and considering a faux-Gaelic lunch menu with the director of the film version.

To call the 1001 Afternoons in Chicago film a film is like calling Ben Hecht’s 1920s newspaper column a column: technically true, but so much more than you think. The movie blends live action, narration, historical photos, modern scenery, original classical compositions and more to bring stories nearly a century old to a modern audience.

For example, the pub where I slurped tea was just the scene for the re-enactments of Ben Hecht’s 94-year-old story “Don Quixote and His Last Windmill.” The classical musicians and radio play actors were filmed at a different bar.

“We shot that and it coincidentally turned out to be game five of the Stanley Cup finals, so every other take we had to stop when a goal was scored because you could hear people cheering from all the bars around us. And then we came here and the only night that, coincidentally, that we could get all the actors and all my crew and everybody was the NCAA basketball championship,” Less said, laughing.

“They were really nice and closed off the back half for us, but we have a couple shots where people walk in and there were TVs on in the background I had to frame out.”

The film is using this blend of radio, music, art and documentary to illustrate four of Hecht’s stories: Don Quixote and His Last Windmill, Grass Figures, Clocks and Owl Cars, and Dapper Pete and The Sucker Play

It started when Boustead called Less about turning the radio play he debuted in 2013 into a movie. They have known each other about 10 years, when Less was looking to make a silent film and Boustead was looking to write the score for one.

“Bizarrely, my neighbor was also friends with him and we both mentioned in the same week that we were looking for this,” Less said. “He hooked us up. It was an amazing coincidence.”

Less and Boustead collaborated again a few years later on “Composer Alive: Eastern Expressions,” a documentary that took them to China and was later purchased by WTTW. When Boustead called, Less was thrilled.

Less had first “met” Hecht through a performance piece Boustead wrote years before the radio play and had fallen in love with his work.

“The blend of journalism and literature had never really been done before,” Less said.

To illustrate these stories that straddle journalism and literature, Less worked on a style that straddled documentary and film. The veteran of History Channel and Discovery Channel projects wasn’t interested in spending his free time on yet another doc, but he also didn’t want to shoot a straight movie.

He wanted something other.

So in each story, there are four Ben Hechts: the omniscient “Newspaperman” narrator; the voice actor Hecht performing the dialogue in the radio play; a re-enactor downing drinks with Sherwood Anderson and a man named Sklarz; and the animations of an idealized, non-Hechtian 1920s reporter by illustrator Ian Wilcox.

None of the four is a Hecht impression. No one put on a bow tie or mustache, waxed the hair and practiced Hecht’s beady, perceptive, superior gaze upon the world. A collection of shadows walking down the street symbolize the reporter collecting stories of city life.

Hecht is everybody. Hecht is nobody.

And it works. This film will be exceptional.

Everyone is from Chicago. No one is getting paid. Less’ employer is letting him use the cameras. Funding is out of pocket. The musicians, actors, voice actors, illustrators, animators, director, producer, composers, writers — all volunteer.

Less talked dreams of city grants, PBS, any way he and the dozens of other people involved can spread these stories that have inspired them so.

“Here are these stories,” Less said, “from literally almost a hundred years ago now that you’re connected to…”

A waiter showed up with an Irish pub’s quesadillas as Less completed his thought.

“…by living in Chicago.”

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Learn more about the movie

Hear and see others’ Chicago stories

Read the four-part path to the radio play:

• The Musicians
• The Writers
• The Actors
• The Show

Read about Ben Hecht’s papers at the Newberry Library:

• The Library
• Rain Editorial

Learn more about Ben Hecht

• Snickersnee Press
• Wikipedia
• IMDB

And finally, on the occasion of my 425th story for 1001 Chicago Afternoons:

• Ben Hecht, Ernest Hemingway, Eliot Ness and Al Capone watching a parade with Indiana Jones

“THANKS FOR THE MEMORIES 1986 2013 SIR ALEX FERGUSON THE GREATEST MANAGER EVER,” the scarf’s embroidery blared, wedged between two faces of the famed Manchester United manager woven rather skillfully into the scarf.

Below the scarf and sign was a flat screen TV, one of several peppered around the place. On the screen, Cameroon and Croatia were 40 minutes into their World Cup match. Each TV had the match. Each TV had a cadre of fans, glaring happily at each screen, cheering, yelling or going “Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhh” as relevant.

Below the TV below the scarf, in front of the array of whiskeys, gins and vodkas, behind the taps of Irish this that and the other, wearing a Magners Original Irish Cider rugby shirt a ruddy-faced, smiling, red-bearded man was talking about how much he disliked soccer.

“I guess I’m a typical American in that I want a lot of action and crazy shit happening all the time,” he said.

On the TV, a player kicked the ball to another one. That one kicked it to a third. The other team tried to get it but didn’t. Later they did. They kicked it. The clock neared 50 minutes.

The bartender feels like a hypocrite because he’ll watch baseball on TV, which he says is also “boring as shit.” And he likes to play soccer. But watching it on TV, on one of the dozens of TVs scattered around the Irish-ish pub in Ravenswood, just isn’t what he considers a good time.

It is good business, he said.

“The Mexico game a had a lot of people and of course the U.S. game was packed,” he said, looking around the bar, already half full at 6 p.m. on a weeknight. “But I guess not as many people have a connection to Cameroon vs. Croatia.”

We watched the match for a few more minutes, but soon he broke away.

“I guess I’m a typical American in that I hate seeing people take a dive, you know where they’re acting all hurt and hop up two seconds later. I guess you don’t get it as much at this level, but some of the club teams,” he said, tapering off and gesturing at the TV where I had just seen a Cameroonian player go from shin-clutching agony to running sprints in a matter of moments.

“A few years ago, I saw the worst dive I’ve ever seen. He was rolling around on the ground,” the bartender gave an impression of the man, pounding his fists in the air and shaking back and forth. It looked like a baby throwing a tantrum. “Then when he noticed none of the referees were watching, he just hopped right up.”

The bartender shook his head staring at the game, then looked around to see if any of the patrons there to watch football amid Irish booze and British soccer scarves had seen. He got a drink order. When he came back he tossed me a candy bar.

It was a Cadbury’s Curly Wurly. A British candy imported by his boss to impress the World Cup crowd. He gave me one for free because nobody was buying them.

Even during the World Cup, there are limits. Even amid soccer scarves and Magners shirts and a half-filled bar cheering for teams they don’t care about and can’t name a single player of, there are overseas imports Americans just can’t convince themselves they like.

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He played from a raised platform in the center of the circular bar, his shining black grand piano surrounded by a Plexiglas barrier. He played beneath that elaborate candelabra of wine bottles and glass as the 5:20 p.m. crowd straight to the piano bar from work sipped dark reds to wash away the first day of a week already sour.

Soft and slow, the notes came. “Monday, Monday.” It was both the song and the day that saw it played.

The Mamas and Papas filtered from the pianist’s delicate, flickering hands, past the candelabra, past the Plexiglas barrier, past the circular bar with the fake wicker front, past dour, tired sippers of wine and cocktails in piano bar chairs designed to look like grass, past all that out into the produce section where there was a special on melons.

What the fuck, North Side?

One of the hottest tickets in Ravenswood, a neighborhood known as much for its tree-lined streets and ritzy enclaves as it is for its Hogwartsian name, isn’t a new nightclub or eight-star restaurant. It’s a grocery store. A goddamn grocery store.

What the fuck, North Side?

I was at the new Mariano’s in Ravenswood. It’s 80,000 square feet, 600 jobs and three stories (if you count the parking lot and attached Sears and L.A. Fitness) of luxury, high-quality, high-end groceries for the luxury, high-quality, high-end people stumbling home from the attached Metra station.

This place, to quote the Blues Brothers, has got everything.

I should love this. I should love the pants off this. It’s Midwest local. It’s energetic. It’s fancy food and good jobs and goddamn that was an amazing pulled pork sandwich at the barbecue station run by a former McCormick & Schmick’s sous chef.

But something about this freaks the fuck out of me. There’s a part of me screaming not to cross the streams, that maybe the place where we buy lettuce shouldn’t be the place where we eat rib tips shouldn’t be the place where we drink away our sorrows to baby grand covers of 1960s pop songs.

A few miles south, a liquor store is listed as a grocer on city data so my students don’t understand what a food desert is.

A few miles south, volunteer hipsters grow greens when they can be arsed. Those might be the only fresh veggies the neighbors get for a long while.

A few miles south, the black community “travels the farthest distance to any type of grocery store, and their low access communities cluster strikingly,” according to a 2006 study. “Chicago’s food deserts, for the most part, are exclusively African-American.”

Is any of that the fault of Mariano’s or corporate owner Roundy’s, Inc.? No. Not in the slightest. But sometimes heaven only serves to remind you how bad and how close hell is.

I bought pulled pork. I listened to piano music. I looked at a wide assortment of fancy cheeses and alcohols. I did it because I’m well-off, white and the place was built adjacent to a Metra station that can get me home from my job at a suburban university.

Was I being harsh? Was I being judge-y and unkind?

I ate my slow-roasted pulled pork in a dining section looking out on a Metra station. I ate next to a man eating sushi from the sushi bar.

The man eating sushi at the grocery store had a pint of beer. A full pint of draft beer in a Mariano’s branded glass. Not a plastic cup. A glass glass for him to drink from while eating his sushi in the middle of a grocery store deli.

What the fuck, North Side? What the fuck?

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More North Side stories

More info on the Ravenswood Mariano’s

Some stats on the Mariano’s

Certainly not in any way misleading data on Chicago food deserts

A 2011 study that cites the 2006 one I mentioned

“Snake behavior,” the man said as the 12-foot yellow python curled heavily around his neck and explored the air. “If something’s too big for them to eat, he just won’t touch it.”

He said it to reassure a woman Gucci wouldn’t go after her dog. The dog took a four-legged step back and cocked its head to stare confusedly at the yellow, beady-eyed, tongue flickering creature.

“I keep him from some of the smaller dogs,” the man said, less reassuringly.

The man was tall, thin and young. He was black, with tattoos peeking from under the T-shirt he wore advertising the dog training center.

The woman, I and her very confused dog were in a crowd of about five or so drawn by the site of the long, yellow Burmese python in a stretch lush and ritzy even by Ravenswood standards.

Gucci moved, well, like a fat, happy snake. Head and body squirming and waving so unblinking, locked eyes could get a better view. A flickering ribbon of tongue waggling from an angular head to taste the air. Liquid motion, different parts of the creature stretching and coiling at any moment.

And that yellow! That beautiful, unreal mustard-and-white dapple that marks an albino Burmese python.

The man lifted Gucci over his head to put him down on the sidewalk. He shrugged after he did so to stretch out his own shoulders after the heavy weight.

Gucci started moving away from the small crowd, sliding like electric silk across the pavement, A woman who had been taking photographs with her phone leaned over and petted his tail. He didn’t respond one way or the other, just kept tasting the air and heading north.

“My other snake’s just a baby, but he’s bigger,” the man said, taking a step alongside the retreating snake to make sure Gucci didn’t get too far. “18 feet.”

Some mild, idle questions from the small crowd. Chit-chat. Snake trivia. A mother and daughter asking us to move so they could keep walking their bikes up the sidewalk.

“I just brought him out to stretch him out,” the man said, picking up the yellow snake and hoisting it back around his neck. “He’s been sleeping in my car all day.”

“He likes the heat?” a woman asked.

“He loves the heat,” the man said, walking Gucci back to his car.

Gucci had to go. A dog the man was to train had arrived. It was a small one.

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Another odd encounter