A concept album and later musical by lyricist Tim Rice and the B’s from ABBA, it’s mostly known for cheesy ’80s chart-flare “One Night in Bangkok,” an ode to the sexy, seamy world of Southeast Asian underground chess tournaments.

And it was one of the possessions up for grabs at the estate sale of late, disgraced U.S. Rep. Daniel “Rosty” Rostenkowski, D-Illinois.

Dan Rostenkowski died in 2010 after a life that took him as high as the chairmanship of the Ways and Means Committee and as low as federal prisons in Minnesota and Wisconsin, and a Near West Side halfway house. His official Congressional vehicle’s license plate number was 8. His prison jumpsuit was 25338016.

Over the weekend, the Rostenkowski family held an estate sale — the second in as many months — to try and free themselves from the decades of the late man’s mementos. On Sunday morning, two friends and I found the barely marked door across from Pulaski Park in the former heart of Chicago’s Polish community and went to play among the last of his possessions.

The home was deliriously ’70s, from the paneling in the closed-off kitchen to the massive woodland mural painted on one of the walls. A floor-to-waist-high carpeted family room had been carved from the former Rostenkowski tavern that saw the family’s rise. As a sign of wealth, the walls were mirrored and there were two separate tube televisions positioned from the ceiling.

I learned Dan Rostenkowski liked albums, books and seemingly kept every plaque, trophy and honorary award any political group or golf tournament ever offered. He had so many boxes of his own political signs and buttons the estate sale company was giving them away free with purchase. He had his grandchildren’s Cabbage Patch dolls and his children’s Barbies up for sale with the lot. He had a weathered Chicago flag on a pike-topped pole, the stars and streams so aged the thing looked pink.

My two friends and I danced among it, marveled at trophies, pawed through albums, tried on Press Corps raincoats. One of the friends had been there the day before as well. He had picked us up never-worn sweaters embroidered with “Chairman Dan Rostenkowski Ways and Means Committee.” He bought Rosty’s personal kegerator.

We learned that Rostenkowski kept and framed critical articles. He had a large framed copy of an early ’90s political cartoon of him and the non-worldbreaking President Bush as Laurel and Hardy, with the “Another fine mess” swamp they drove the jalopy into clearly labeled “BUDGET” so as not to tax the Tribune readers’ understanding of metaphor. He had two separate metal plaques made of the same 1985 Jack Higgins Sun-Times cartoon showing “Rusty” turning his back on Chicago political infighting to go play golf.

When home, I found one of the many Rostenkowski labeled envelopes I picked up (because envelopes) was full of newspaper clippings about himself from 1959, his first year in Congress. It included two separate Inez Robb columns taking D.C. to task for exorbitant legislator salaries. It seems newspapers’ efforts to shame and chasten the distinguished gentleman from Illinois became his keepsakes.

At times pawing among the congressman’s life, I felt hilarious. We tried on “Ways and Means” hats and felt the heft of Rosty’s golf clubs.

At times I felt like the crones hocking Scrooge’s bedsheets in the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come part of “A Christmas Carol.” Here the charwoman. Here the laundress. Here the undertaker’s man.

A stack of low-digit license plates made me smirk. A built-in bookshelf designed for bound volumes of every National Geographic from 1966 to 2002 filled me with admiration. A wedding dress marked $75 made me want to leave.

The family wants to sell the building, one of the men from the estate sale company said. I found later it had been in the family for generations, was the home of Rostenkowski’s alderman father “Big Joe Rusty” and the family tavern. It was where two precinct captains were shot dead at 6:30 a.m. Aug. 2, 1938 as they sat in watch in a car outside, whatever message their deaths sent to Big Joe lost to the ages.

Heroes past, felons present. The Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come.

After our shopping spree, the three of us went to one of the few lingers left of West Town’s Polish community — an old pierogi joint just south of the triangle made of Division, Ashland and Milwaukee, nestled by a late night dance club and an early morning newsstand slinging Polish magazines and the Sun-Times.

Inside, we sat at the counter, across from the microwave, decorative blunderbuss and painting on the mirror of two pheasants. Under an Old Style chandelier hearkening to when blintzes weren’t the only menu item, the back wall was lined with peasant figurines, old clocks, pictures of John Paul II and two old political programs with Dan Rostenkowski’s face on them.

A gregarious, smiling, gray-haired mass of buzzcut and muscles whipped out a pad to take our order. My friend asked about the programs. The man’s face tensed and darkened. He looked down at his order pad.

“He used to sit where you’re sitting,” he said, nodding up at my friend momentarily.

My friend mentioned the estate sale. The man looked off at nothing happening in the corner and said he knew. He asked if we knew Dan Rostenkowski went to prison for a while. I nodded.

“I don’t understand those people,” the old muscle man said. “You have all that money, all that power. Why you steal?”

My friend started to say something the man interpreted as an excuse. The man cut my friend off, brooking no defense of the former neighborhood hero.

“It don’t matter,” he said. “You steal.”

He left to get our soup.

Like 1,001 Chicago Afternoons on Facebook for photos of the sale

Read why the license plates made me smirk

Read about a concert at the Polish Triangle

Read about the only other Chicago newsstand I’m aware of

We sang its highs and lows. We sang its long, straight streets perfect for getting lost when you’re in the mood to do so. We sang the communities that made us young black girls and the bars that made us wild and wanton gentrifiers.

And I even got a free pin.

This is an ad of sorts, but one from which I’m not going to profit monetarily. But buy this book.

The book is “Rust Belt Chicago: An Anthology,” published by Belt Publishing, a small press dedicated to telling the stories of the post-industrial Midwest. The Rust Belt, if you will.

Belt’s anthology series has put out collections of writings for, from and about cities like Akron, Cleveland, Buffalo, Detroit, Flint, Pittsburgh — places that had to find new identities after the jobs went away. And now Chicago joins the list.

The book (which you should buy) struggles with the question of whether Chicago belongs in the Rust Belt, editor Martha Bayne told a group of contributors, fans and sundry well-wishers at the book’s release party last night at The Hideout. We have poverty, lost jobs, empty lots and decay. We have wealth, fancy bars, skyscrapers touching the heavens and opportunity.

The Hideout was the perfect spot for this divided book. An enclave of hipsters and activists, the bar has been nestled since the 1800s in an industrial park. Once a spot for an after-shift beer, it has become a little hive of socialism and social activity right next to the city’s fleet maintenance facilities.

But the neighborhood is changing as the factories and scrapyards of the Second Ward move and the city chips away at the Planned Manufacturing District status that protected the industrial jobs since the 1980s. The Hideout’s industrial park is less industrial each day. Just because the rust will be plastered over with luxury condos from developer Sterling Bay doesn’t mean it isn’t Rust Belt.

At the reading in the lovingly rickety bar’s crowded back room, Rob Miller read about the exodus of Detroiters to this town. Kevin Coval read a poem about the real subtext of Disco Demolition Night. Zoe Zolbrod wrote about being what she called “the first wave of gentrifiers” when Wicker Park was cool.

Britt Julious on black girlhood. Paul Durica on being a Clevelander during the World Series bid. David Issacson on sports and masculinity. Yana Kunichoff on police torture reparations. Kathleen Rooney on wandering city streets. Rayshauna Gray on tracing black identity through memory.

They’re all in the book, which you should buy. Bayne collected essays, fiction, poems and journalism from 52 contributors to tell the story of this city.

You’re reading a sentence by one of them right now.

You should buy this book. 

Read another tale of the Hideout and politics

Read one of the Hideout and soup

He was old and middle-age fat. Not obese, just a spare tire that wouldn’t go anywhere even if he tried to do anything about it, which he hadn’t.

But it wasn’t his girth that attracted me, nor his close-cropped buzz, nor the fact I was a few seconds from finding out he was one of the last holders of a North Side Chicago accent.

It was the fact he was decked head to toe in my college colors did.

“M-I-Z!” I called to him.

He looked at me blankly, so I kept walking.

“Z-O-U!” he finally called after me. “Sorry, I only had that once before. It was a little boy and I didn’t know what the hell he was talking about.”

He apologized for not instantly recognizing the first half of the university’s famed call-and-response. He didn’t go there, he said. The yellow University of Missouri T and the black Mizzou jams were in honor of his daughter, currently a student.

“She was in journalism-”

Here my heart both skipped a beat and swelled.

Journalism at Mizzou. My past. My heritage. Walking through the Columns. Parties at the J-Slums. The Maneater. The Missourian. The four-year academic program I spent five of the best years of my life finishing, leading to a career in the profession and practice of news.

“-but thank God she got out of that,” he finished. “She’s in elementary education now.”

Ouch, old man. Ouch.

As a Midwestern man of a certain age, I’m required to start caring about my undergraduate education. It starts with giving the first half of a call-and-response to strangers in your college colors (“M-I-Z-” for Missouri, “Go Green” for Michigan State, “We are” for Penn State). Then your eyes start to linger on your alumni magazine, the stray thought passing that maybe you could afford to give them a few bucks this year.

Finally you find yourself yelling at a small child to mow the lawn better as you wear jorts and a ratted Mizzou sweatshirt, sip a domestic beer from a Mizzou koozie, watch Mizzou Tigers football and check MIZZOU Magazine to see which classmates have either surpassed you or died. It, like shag carpets and rec rooms, is the law of the Middle West.

In reality, college was good for me, but I was also annoyed and depressed much of the time. I champed at the bit to get out in life. I wanted my career in journalism, as I tediously phrased and rephrased it to anyone who would listen, to follow “the Jimmy Olsen route,” learning from the newsroom, not the classroom.

Now, out in the world for 15 and counting, I’m glad there are young women studying elementary education there. I’m glad there are dads decked head to toe in black and gold to support their daughters. I’m glad for this man on this chair by a car wash in the city I call home, making me think of a place I called home before.

Wishes for more recent students

The best teacher I ever had

I’m here. It smells amazing. You’re both lucky I’m a nice man and will wait for you.

Response. 5:43 p.m. Wednesday, March 1.

I’m on the bus. It smells like the bus.

…

You do notice the smell first.

It’s warm and filling, the type of smell where “aroma” seems a better fit for a word than “odor.”

It smells like rice and chicken, sweet potatoes and hot sauce with peanuts on top. It smells like cilantro and beans and mushrooms and barley and maybe a little of the beers and whiskeys being pulled in the front room.

The laughter’s what you notice next.

Wednesday after Wednesday in the winter months, people gather at an old watering hole in an industrial district by the north branch of the river for Soup and Bread. Before I get into what “Soup and Bread” means, I want to explain what I mean by “people.”

I mean everybody.

Leather-clad punk rockers mingle with elderly gay couples and young families wrangling passels of little ones. At one table, a man reads Superman comics out loud to his wide-eyed son. At another, early 20s scenesters look pretty for the Insta. A woman bounces a baby on her knee at one corner of the Hideout’s bar. The tattoo-and-nose-ring brigade bullies a different corner to down the liquid wares and outdo each other on bands they know.

From infants to the aged, people come to this bar from 5:30 to 8 p.m. Wednesdays from January to the end of March for three things: soup, bread and community.

“Some people tell me it’s a mental health break in the middle of the week,” Soup and Bread creator Martha Bayne said amid the chaos.

To get down to nuts and bolts: Soup and Bread is a weekly free meal at the Hideout bar by the maintenance lots for the city’s fleets of cars, vans and dump trucks. The Hideout’s a hip little dive and live music venue in a ramshackle 1800s house turned shanty turned bar turned punk club turned community hot spot. You can see lectures here, or rock out at shows. You can get blitzed at the bar or, on Wednesdays between January and March, watch local families, kids and hard-ass punks laugh and down hot, warm soup cooked up and served by local restaurants, caterers, schoolchildren, home cooks and anyone else wanting to be part of the scene.

The meal is free. You pay what you can, either tossing cash in a basket at the door or by making a tax-deductible contribution on their website. The money goes for local soup kitchens and food pantries.

At the Hideout and at a smattering of ad hoc events in other American cities over the last eight years, Soup and Bread has raised more than $60,000 for Chicago-area food pantries as well as the Greater Chicago Food Depository, the New York City Coalition Against Hunger and Western Washington’s Food Lifeline.

I’ve known Soup and Bread creator Martha Bayne for more than three years, but just met her in October.

In 2013, I wrote a story for this site about a fundraiser she was running to cover the medical bills of the owner of a coffee shop I frequented at the time. We did the interview by phone. Over the years, she and I would trade emails about various projects she was organizing. A clown show. Veggie Bingo. A literary journal she co-organized that I submitted to. A reading I co-organized that she submitted to. A haunted house based on housing market and public health issues of historically lower-income South Side communities.

We had traded emails for years, but it wasn’t until I showed up at her haunted house this fall that I realized it — I don’t think I’d ever met this person. Martha’s sort of like that. She creates community. You’re in before you realize it.

Martha Bayne is not one of a kind. Martha Bayne is not magic or a Disney princess whose very presence gathers spontaneous acts of civic pride, community involvement and possibly choreographed dance numbers.

She’s a woman who works her ass off on projects that bring people together. She does the work we all say we could do to create the sense of community we all give lip service to wanting.

We talk and whine about urban isolation. She gets some folks together and asks who wants soup.

Soup and Bread homepage

Read about the coffee shop owner

Read about the clown show

Read about Veggie Bingo (external link)

Pre-order the issue of the literary journal I’m in (external link)

Read about the social justice haunted house

He was long-haired and unkempt, with dirt dug deep under lengthening nails. He had the typical homeless earthy smell, coupled with that wet dog odor only white people seem to get.

I liked him a great deal.

He had pull-rolled himself up to me at the bus stop a few minutes before. It was early evening, and I was returning from a yearly shopping cart charity race I help judge.

To the north, people filtered in and out of a brightly lit liquor store. Cars raced up and down Western. And a man pulled his wheelchair up to me to ask for a cigarette.

Not a smoker, I had none, but gave him a little airplane bottle of vodka one of the shopping cart racers had given me as a little perk of judging.

“Oooooooooooooooeeeeeeeeee,” he said, appreciatively eying the bottle I shouldn’t have given him.

That’s when he asked if I wanted to see a ghost.

“Sure,” I said.

He pulled out his phone. It was a small, white burner phone with a crackled screen and worn buttons. He jabbed at a few buttons until turning his phone.

It was a picture of an empty street at night. I looked again for someone loitering in the bushes, peeking a face from behind a corner or streetlamp.

Nothing. It was just an empty street with most of the photo staring at the street.

“I took this by Hubbard. There’s a pothole there and I wanted to take a picture so the city would know.”

It was a glistening patch on dark pavement, a reflection of streetlight above.

The glisten looked face-ish, sure. Less like a face than the Man in the Moon, more like a face than your average stick man head.

“I saw this and I was like,” he blinked widely a few times for comedic effect, rubbed his eyes like a drunk in an old Looney Tunes who just saw a pink elephant. “I couldn’t get to sleep. Just seeing that. I drank a whole pint’a peach schnapps and I still couldn’t sleep.”

It’s hard to say what makes you like a person. I liked his enthusiasm, sure. And I liked his big, scattertooth smile. I still shouldn’t have given him liquor, but I could tell this was not someone who went without.

I guess I liked him because he wanted to document potholes. He cared a little, and cared for someone not him. He had no car and I doubt he took his wheelchair in the street, or at least down main drags.

He’s another bum in a city of bums. He’s a drunk, a rummy, a stinking hobo who bums for cigarettes and change and goes “Oooooooooooooooeeeeeeeeee,” at little airline bottles of vodka.

But he wants the city to fix potholes. He believes in ghosts and wants to share it. He smiles broadly and wants to talk to strangers.

He’s another person in a city of people. Pull-rolling his chair down darkened streets with a phone full of ghosts, he’s another Chicagoan in this city of stories.

Another tale of Chicago’s invisible

And another

And another

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I caught up with him by the bar. I smiled nervously and introduced myself, extending my hand for him to shake.

What do you say to a stranger who changed your life?

In 2002, there was a woman I had been following around like a sad puppy since high school. My visits home from college had included lunches or coffees or just hellos with her, her, her whenever I could arrange it.

I had recently graduated and was hanging out in my hometown, sending résumés into the void. She asked if I wanted to visit her in Chicago and see a play. Yes, sure, of course, plays are great (a night with her, her, her).

The play was “1001 Afternoons in Chicago” by the man who would be shaking my hand in a Nutcracker-swathed lobby 13 years later, Paul Peditto. His play had been my first introduction to the newspaper column that would inspire this project.

I didn’t get the girl. I got Ben Hecht instead.

And, in the lobby of West Town’s Chopin Theatre on Tuesday night, I met the man who made that possible.

We had just finished a viewing of a film by another group of people whose lives have been altered by Hecht.

Moving briefly from vignette to review, “1001 Afternoons in Chicago – The Film” is a beautiful, surreal take on the Daily News column, bringing Hecht’s stories to life with a combination of original music, live action, radio play, historical photos, modern scenery and animation.

It’s a wonderful project I’ve been lucky enough to document since its 2013 incarnation as a radio play. The Chicago Tribune’s Rick Kogan called the film “a spectacular and original work” (in the same article where he referred to this blog as “delightful and artful” — Thanks, Mr. Kogan!)

You don’t have to take my or Kogan’s words for it, though. You can watch it yourself tomorrow night on WTTW.

Peditto, who was part of a panel discussion on Hecht that preceded Tuesday’s showing, was pleasant and kind. He brought a friend of his in for our deep-dive nerd session on Hecht. I felt too tired and embarrassed to make an impression, so opted for nodding and occasional ohs yeah rather than risk sounding either stupid or pompous.

It was a nice interaction considering all I wanted to do was thank him to the point of discomfort for roundabout sending me on the path that hit #557 with these lines today.

I guess you can’t know who will change everything, how a life’s path can be nudged as much by a random playwright, a long-dead newsman or a girl you had a thing for in ninth grade.

A theater full of people had the same newsman nudge their lives’ paths on Tuesday. Tomorrow, thousands of PBS viewers will feel the same nudge as they watch the movie.

For most, I’m sure it’ll be remembered as a fun night out or an enjoyable half-hour amid a channel surf.

But for just a few people out there, there’s an odd off-chance that Hecht’s 94-year-old words could changes their lives, just like they changed mine.

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I’ve been following the project’s progress since 2013.

Part 1, The Composer

Part 2. The Scriptwriters (illustrated by Dmitry Samarov)

Part 3, The Rehearsal (illustrated by Dmitry Samarov)

Part 4, The Performance (illustrated by Dmitry Samarov)

Part 5, The Film

I also occasionally write about Hecht himself. Here’s a sampling.

Hecht’s collection at the Newberry Library

Hecht’s lies

“1,001 Chicago Nights,” an even earlier forgotten column by Jack Lait

So what should I write this milestone story about?

I decided to toss that question to the folks who made up the first 499, asking the people who got me this far how I should kick off the second half.

My first call was to honorary nephew Roland, age 10, who appeared in #362: Uncle Go Paul and #237: On Dining with Children Where I Used to Get Shitfaced and who was the subject of #365: Why Write? A Letter to my Nephew.

He wanted to talk history, surprisingly focused on the 1893 Columbian Exhibition for someone who still makes up stories about robots.

“I thought you were talking about writing a fiction story, but I like, um, I can’t remember the name of it, but it’s the Ferris wheel. Because it involves the Fair,” he said.

“And if I were writing a fiction story?” I asked.

“The Cubs winning the World Series.”

“Did your dad tell you to say that?”

“Yes.”

His brother Milo, 7, suggested I write about boats.

“They would go boating!” Milo said.

The unnamed narrator of The Nut Hut Trilogy (#193, #196 and #199) is an old friend of mine who sat down for tripe soup and a chat about how she used to be the bait in a phony prostitution scam (read the stories — it’ll make sense).

“In keeping with my theme,” she said, she’s digging up the name of a church group she’s heard of that goes out to “minister to prostitutes, porn stars, strippers and other sex workers.”

Another longtime friend, fellow hipster striver Steven Gilpin, who made his musical debut at Schuba’s last month, was profiled in #140: Evil Twins back in 2013. He suggested I talk to the Chicago tamale guys, those saviors of hungry nights out who circle local bars with coolers full of hot, homemade tamales.

Puppeteer Stephanie Díaz, whose handmade constructions told the tales of Mariposa Nocturna: A Puppet Triptych in #424: Paper, Wood and Wire, suggested I profile the famous Chicago Puppet Bike.

However, this is the only of the ideas I already had myself, profiling the mobile puppet show in #66: The Kitties Dance to Country.

Geologist and paleobiologist Asa Kaplan of #484: The Man in the Dinosaur Hat sent this as a response, which I’ve decided to run verbatim because I’m pretty sure he’s messing with me.

“Hmm something about lightning bugs? Midsummer, I mean. Something in the middle of something.”

Joann Martyn, who each year celebrates the day she didn’t die in #444: Didn’t Kick the Bucket Day, took a different approach.

“You’ve profiled a lot of people and told us their stories, but what I want to know — how have those stories impacted you? How has your life changed because of these stories you craft and share with the rest of the world?”

The answer, of course, is that when I started this project, I was 6 foot 5 and so muscled I looked like an over-inflated Stretch Armstrong.

Martha Bayne was first featured in late 2013 in #251: Karen’s Stone Soup, which was about a fundraiser Bayne and her friends held for Swim Café owner Karen Gerod’s medical bills. Gerod passed away the next summer, much missed by the Noble Square community.

Although she didn’t appear by name, Bayne next showed on the site through artist collective Theater Oobleck, the focus of #344: The Most Sarcastic Child in Chicago Watches a Clown Show.

So it’s only appropriate that a two-timer give two suggestions, “one self serving and one a wild card.”

One’s on the Veggie Bingo event she holds at The Hideout (itself the setting of #473: Autophagy, or Why Progressives Lose). The event looks as insane as the name implies, and you can bet your kale and golden beets I’ll be writing about that soon.

Bayne’s other idea, which I might do as early as next week, is to “go to the corner of 500 N/500 W and then 500 S/500 E and report on the street life.”

Absolutely perfect. I think it’ll still work even if it’s not story #500 on the nose.

Sculptor, graphic recorder and one of Chicago Magazine’s Most Eligible Singles in 2014 Dusty Folwarczny also worked with the number notion.

“I think you should write about something that has to do with the number 500 and Chicago. Maybe it’s the address of where you interview, or how many bottles of beer are produced in an hour, or how many oysters are consumed at Shaw’s happy hour,” she said.

Dusty’s company Ink Factory appeared in #162: The Graphic Recorders and she guided me through the why of modern sculpture in #197: The Hypothetical Zulu Test.

Rachel Hyman, my co-organizer co-host in the Welcome to the Neighborhood reading series, suggested I do something lighthearted and fun, “Since you already took the meta angle with the last story.”

Yeah… wouldn’t want to get too… meta.

Hm.

I don’t think I’ll be writing about the Cubs winning the series, and technically every story I write is “something in the middle of something.” But I want to take this chance to thank all the people who have shared their stories with me over these last three years. And I’m looking forward to the people I’ll meet in the next three.

Now come back Friday for the completely original idea I came up with myself about boats that go boating.

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Do you know former South Side steelworkers? I’m writing a book on the mills and want to hear their stories. Email me.

It’s not entirely headcheese, which is a cold cut made from the meat parts of the head of a pig. There was also Vietnamese ham, pâté, something called “pork roll” and the regular bahn mi fixins — carrot/daikon slaw, cilantro, cucumber, jalapeños and mayo on a baguette (the latter a product of French colonialism).

It’s a damn tasty sandwich, and my friend Tommy and I decided to get the one made of pig head.

Back, forth, back, forth. No, headcheese. No, ginger chicken. No, headcheese and a ginger chicken as fallback in case it’s horrible. Headcheese and some fries, so at least we have fries?

Soon, sanity, face meat and the fact a nearby pizza place could serve as backup prevailed.

“At worst, it’s $5 to get a couple slices,” Tommy pointed out.

I couldn’t get a 100-percent verdict online, but it generally appears the brain is not part of headcheese, which meant we freaked out Colleen for no reason.

“That’s what headcheese is?” she kept repeating. “I didn’t know. I didn’t know.”

We unwrapped our feast. Colleen blanched. I thought about how much I like Bon Bon’s ginger chicken. We bit in.

It tasted like a ham sandwich. In the bites where pâté was involved, it just tasted like pâté.

It was delicious, don’t get me wrong. And the fact we were still under the impression it contained brain added to the fun a bit. But it was just a delightful spicy sammich.

I guess I should close with a point, some wonderful life lesson about trying new things, some Green Eggs and Face Meat analogy about expanding horizons.

But instead, I’m going to simply wish you all a wonderful July 4 weekend. I want your day to be filled with laughter, joy, new experiences, friends, family, food and as much relaxation as you can muster.

Whether you grill up some ground cow muscle or your intestine-encased sausage of choice, I hope your stomach is full and your family happy.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to brush my teeth until I can’t taste pig.

In which I eat tripe with an old Romanian woman

In which I don’t eat tripe with a fake prostitute from a confidence game

In which a woman works two jobs on July 4

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They came on bikes, on foot, in aging, limping, soot-chuffing hatchbacks slathered in anti-oil bumper stickers. They came with buttons and reason.

They came to see the journalists.

The Hideout is a bar tucked in industry, a 19th-century balloon-frame house lodged amid warehouses and a monstrous City of Chicago Department of Fleet and Facility Management garage.

It’s the home of rockabilly and punk shows, political rallies, spoken word duels and “First Tuesdays with Mick and Ben,” where reporters Mick Dumke and Ben Joravsky of the Chicago Reader gather journo buddies and talk about politics the way only people who know the cameras aren’t rolling can.

That’s who the progressives came for.

The vast majority of the standing-room-only First Tuesday event were informed, involved people who care about the issues that affect their lives. They wanted to gather, grab a beer and hear the stories the reporters can’t put on the TV or print in the paper.

Then, they all go home and a Kinks cover band takes the stage.

But each group of humans has its extremes, the ones at the ends of the bell curve who act as a parody of the whole. These are the bro-dawgs who make Cubs games atrocious, the wooing, brawling party girls who ruin New Years for unassuming sippers of low-rent sparkling white.

Only a few, only a smatter among the crowd, but these are the ones I remember.

You know them. They come to events asking questions that aren’t questions, just self-made segues to whatever speech they’ll complete. They glare and yell at people who don’t go far enough, anything less than full commitment to the leftmost option seen as the only thing worse than fascism — half-assism.

They’re usually old, always white and wear political buttons as regular fashion choices.

And for the record, I almost always agree with them. It’s hard not to agree with people describing Narnia.

He gathered to quiz ABC-7 political reporter Charles Thomas after the event about health care, interrupting whatever answer Thomas was about to give to say that single-payer is the only true solution.

Thomas agreed, but doesn’t make health care law.

She gathered to smoke angrily outside the bar wearing a Bernie Sanders pin, telling all who would listen that she wanted to slap Ben Joravsky for a pre-election article she saw as tepid on mayoral candidate Chuy Garcia.

Joravsky endorsed Garcia, just not enthusiastically enough for her taste.

They fight for fairness, equality, the environment, honest governance, an end to any ism you find. Everything they fight for is good and they fight for everything.

But they eat their own. They’re the ouroboros, the autophage cannibal. They devour the movements they fight for, blasting weak friends with equal or greater fury than they show strong foes.

It’s not ideology, just convenience. Their foes don’t come to the Hideout.

Their enemies stay in skyscrapers and mansions, office buildings and banks and the halls of Washington, making things worse for the world. They can in part because the people who care are busy yelling at lukewarm friends at the corner bar.

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I was heading to the CHIditarod, the costume contest pub crawl I volunteer for every year. Some friends and I help run the checkpoint at Roots every year, decorating it and coming up with a theme.

We’ve turned the Chicago Avenue pizza place into a Wild West saloon, Canada, a Walmart and, this year, a high school gym class.

So what’s more high school than a cheerleader?

A trip to Boystown for cheerleader uniform that would fit a grown man netted me a flouncy skirt the color of a circus tent, a tight black-and-red top blaring “EG” and the following life lessons, which will follow me all my CHIditaroddy days.

Cheerleading is messed.

First, it is extremely screwed up that they make high school girls dress like this.

A quick online search that no doubt got me on every watch list revealed that my buy was actually an Elk Grove Youth Football cheer top. This is a K-8 program, which means I no longer feel as bad about how bad my muffin toppin’ was.

On the K-8 girls, this would have been a full shirt, so I do feel better about society. But former cheerleader and co-volunteer Kate told me that they had belly shirts at her school and that my skirt, which was well north of the knee, was way too long.

Her school wore tights underneath the belly shirt, Kate clarified, but not all schools did, depending on how wild that district happened to roam.

It is extremely screwed up that they make high school girls dress like this.

Cheerleading is really messed.

I get that having fun, keeping fit and promoting “spirit” for a random collection of individuals that authority figures now tells you is a team are qualities our nation wants to instill in its young people, but you are basically putting young girls in belly shirts and miniskirts and telling them to dance off to the side and yell about how great the boys are.

It’s not the girls; the girls put in an amazing amount of work. Then the adults make them apply that skill, dedication, athleticism and gymnastic talent to making the boys look good. It’s telling future women, “If you work really, really hard, someday you can draw even more attention to the accomplishments of men.”

Competition cheer is fine. That’s where they go to gymnastics competitions against each other instead of just sis boom bah-ing boys athletics. I’m fine with that. Be the event, not the sideline.

(Although I think they would still be just as capable if we let them have pants.)

It’s hard not to flash.

I spread my legs when I sit because it’s more comfortable. This, according to Internet memes, makes me sexist.

But although I sit sexist (and stand racist, walk homophobic and inhabit space hateful of the Irish somehow), it doesn’t usually give anyone a show. Until the circus-tent-colored skirt.

Ankles crossed, my female friends told me. Knees together. Lean the legs a little bit. Never show them what you’ve got. Always be on the lookout. ALWAYS be on the lookout.

Frankly, I’m just not used to paying that much attention to how I sit. I suppose it’s male privilege, but it could also just be pants.

In Conclusion…

So did my day in a dress get me more insight into how the other half lives?

No, don’t be stupid. It was a costume party, not “Tootsie.” I didn’t get any more insight into being a woman this year than I got insight into the true essence of Duran Duran the year I went as Simon Le Bon.

My male privilege never went away.

But I got to be silly at an event that has raised more than $100,000 and 100,000 pounds of canned food for needy in its 10 years. I got to joke with friends and chat with people dressed as bees. I got to participate in what has become a tradition for both the city of Chicago and, on a personal note, for me.

And, honey, I looked damn good doing it.

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Read about the Canada year

Read about the Walmart year

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