The RMS Titanic hit an iceberg and started sinking 107 years ago today, at almost exactly the time I’m posting this

I’ve had a lifelong fascination with the tragedy—mostly from the perspective of wanting to know what it was like to be on such a grand ship ... and then to have it slowly, terrifyingly disappear under my feet. I’ve recorded the sinking as an annual event on my google calendar so I get a pop-up reminder every year to take a moment to think about the people who died and the horrors they and the survivors endured.

I just saw a matinee of the incredible musical Come From Away, which tells the story of the small town in Newfoundland that almost doubled in size for a week when American airspace was closed on 9/11 and flights from all over the world were diverted there. Now every flight out of NYC was canceled tonight due to weather, and I’m stranded here until Tuesday. But I’m safe. And I’ve found that these two events have subtly enriched whatever emotional connection I’ve given myself to the Titanic passengers and crew I technically know nothing about but still mourn.

Don’t wait for tragedy. Don’t wait for averted tragedy. Take a moment every day to be thankful for the people you love in your life.

SPOILER ALERTS:

The Lusitania sinks. There’s a war. Everyone eventually dies. I give the VERY AWESOME book to someone else to enjoy. Sondheim writes a breathtaking show that gives me the gay shudders. I start reading the book about it for the second time. I regret bringing a massive gallon of already-watery-already-flat Diet Coke on my plane home.

The house across the street from my reading porch is new and stately and handsome and suitably-New-England-architecturey, but it seems to have an epic design flaw:

How the hell are they going to replace the shingles between those smooshed-together dormers?

Also: The Lusitania has FINALLY set sail. Its safe passage to Liverpool is secured!

My last vacation adventure started with a 19-hour-four-airport-plus-an-impromptu-four-hour-drive-with-total-strangers nightmare commute

This vacation adventure is starting with no Diet Coke in the you’re-trapped-here-and-this-is-your-only-option-I-hate-my-job-so-I’m-going-to-mumble-at-you-that’ll-be-shrvkorsln-dollars-please airport-gate kiosk.

I don’t know which is worse. All I can say is the damn Lusitania better not sink at the end of this book.

Also: Our gate agent just told us we have “free wi-fi available for purchase” on our flight.

Plus she just said we’re now boarding for our flight to Charlotte O’Hare.

Plus she pronounces it conci-air.

This commute is immeasurably worse.

Stop pretending to show compassion, Ivanka

Gerhard Richter: "September" (2009)

Like Picasso, Matisse, Pollock and a host of iconic 20th century painters, Gerhard Richter has developed a signature visual vocabulary of sometimes photorealistic images obscured to varying degrees in scrapes, blurs, flecks, and pulls of wet and dry paint. Evoking at once powerful movement and misty tranquility, his works require a commitment of effort and time to absorb. His “September” (2009) utilizes this technique to stunning effect. Two silvery twin towers, the tops of which disappear into monumental clouds of opaque browns and blacks, stand defiantly against horizontal winds of scrapes and streaks and blurs. The painting captures a moment of enormity with grace and respect and breathtaking radiance.

16 years ago today

16 years ago this morning I ran a little late and didn't get a seat on the EL train. But as a relatively new Chicagoan I was still in awe of the fact that I actually lived in Chicago and rode a train to work and I reveled in the fact that I was one of THEM: my fellow Chicagoans packed in the train car with me, commuting to (or from) our jobs as waiters, insurance brokers, construction workers, actuaries, janitors, bankers, personal trainers, writers and every other career imaginable.

When I finally arrived at work and got off the elevator, I saw everyone in my office crowded around a TV in a conference room. My first thought was that my colleagues would see I was late. But after joining them and watching the towers burn and fall, seeing the gaping wound in the Pentagon, learning of the disappearance of an entire airplane and its passengers in a fiery pit, I was struck by the fact that my underground commute that morning with my fellow train riders -- a microcosm of the city, if not the country -- was our last collective moment of innocence before we had access to any news and we suddenly had to face the sickening enormity wrought by other human beings on a scale none of us could have imagined.

16 years ago today I never felt closer to friends, family members and even strangers as we worked to understand the hatred and comprehend the savagery of perhaps the ugliest tragedy in our lifetimes.

16 years ago today we lost a certainty in our collective safety but we gained a powerful strength in our ability to care for and protect and even love each other when we needed to ... and even when we didn't.

16 years ago today, our world changed immeasurably. Our hearts broke irreparably. Our determination grew mightily. Our humanity spread defiantly. Time may erode the intensity of our initial united magnanimity, but we will never forget.

Tweets That Always Come Back To Make Him Look Stupider And Staggeringly More Inept If That's Even Possible: Chapter 8,492

Twenty-six years ago today

I’d finished my classes for the semester and my dad had come to pick me up from college for the holiday break. 1988 had been an emotional roller coaster for our family. We’d lost four family friends in a small plane crash Easter morning, my mom had undergone a radical mastectomy in October and she was just starting her first rounds of chemo before Christmas. I was in the middle of my junior year in college, and I’d finally found a major I was willing to stick with: English. But since I’d waited a full two years to admit to myself I always should have been an English major, I had a lot of catching up to do. And my first-semester courseload had been heavy.

December 21 is the winter solstice—the day of the year with the shortest amount of sunlight—but it was beautiful and sunny in Eastern Iowa that afternoon in 1988. And Dad and I had a nice chat over the 40-minute drive home. My family has always been close, so when we saw Mom standing in the driveway as we pulled up to the house, I figured she was just excited to see me.

But she was sobbing.

I assumed she’d gotten some bad news about her cancer while Dad was gone, so I jumped out of the car before it even came to a stop and I ran up to hug her. But the bad news was something entirely different: Miriam’s plane had gone down.

Miriam was a friend of mine who had spent the semester in London studying under the auspices of Syracuse University. I’d just visited her over the Thanksgiving break, and we’d had an awesome time seeing the sights, exploring the museums and taking in all the shows we could afford on our college-student budgets. Among the four we saw were Les Misérables and an extraordinary revival of Stephen Sondheim’s Follies. Sondheim was just starting to appear on our collective radar, and we both agreed that seeing Follies together was a mountaintop experience for us to have shared over our magical week together in London.

But by December 21, I’d come home, a whole month had passed and I’d been so caught up in my finals and holiday preparations that I’d had no idea Miriam was flying back to the States that day—much less what flight she was on. Neither had my mom. But our friend Jody in Ohio did. And when the initial reports that Pan Am flight 103 had disappeared out of the sky over Lockerbie, Scotland, started washing over the newswires, Jody had called everyone she could think of.

Mom and Dad and I raced to the family room and crowded around the TV that crisp, sunny Iowa afternoon to see what we could find out about Miriam’s plane. It was the early days of CNN and 24-hour news, so we were able to get (spotty) information right away about the mysterious crash, along with grainy images of the wreckage shining dimly in the emergency lights that were working so hard to pierce the solstice blackness six time zones away.

Over the next few months and weeks, the world came to learn about the bomb, the Libyans, the retribution, the embargoes, the bankruptcies. We cautiously wrapped our brains around the unthinkable efficiencies of global terrorism at the dawn of the Information Age. And the friends and families of the victims of the 103 bombing started experiencing the bizarre dichotomy of watching our personal tragedy play itself out on the world stage.

In the years since Miriam’s murder, I’ve befriended her parents and friends. I’ve gotten in touch with the roommates she lived with in London, none of whom had been on her plane with her that day. I’ve written pieces about my relatively removed perspective on the bombing that were published in newspapers and scholarly journals and read on NPR. And since I had been in London and had hung out with a lot of the Syracuse students a month before the bombing, I’ve actually been interviewed by the FBI.

And as I’ve grieved and matured over the last 26 years, I’ve discovered that I now tend to be efficiently emotionless when I hear about epic tragedies like the 9/11 bombings and the Newtown massacre ... but I’ll still burst into tears over emotional pablum like Christmas cookie commercials.

Twenty-six years ago today, the world learned what a volatile mix misanthropy and religion and blind nationalism can be in a global melting pot.

Twenty-six years ago today, Miriam and her fellow passengers and their families and friends learned violently and unwillingly about harsh brutalities that the rest of the world got the relative luxury of absorbing over time.

Twenty-six years ago today, I learned that the distant tragedies that so often happen to “other people” should never be observed as abstractions.

I discovered that news of plane crashes and acts of terrorism that play endlessly in 24-hour newscycles can be both disturbing and strangely comforting. I learned that life is precious, that there are no guarantees, that people who waste your time are just robbing you, that small gestures can make heroic impressions, that your pain and suffering and anguish and heartbreak do not make you special, that no matter how bad it gets you should find solace in the fact that it will probably get better … or at least easier.

Twenty-six years is enough time for someone to raise a child and send him or her off into the world. Enough time for six presidential elections and four new Sondheim musicals. (Six, if you count Saturday Night and The Frogs.)

It’s enough time for a gangly, unsure college boy to cycle through four cars and seven houses and six jobs and three cities as he grows into a successful (more or less), confident (more or less) man.

It’s enough time for him to realize that the world is not fair. That bad things happen to good people. That the bad people who did them don’t always get punished. That horrible tragedy gets easier to accept over time, though it remains impossible to forget. That the hate that some people burn into your heart never entirely leaves, and that the smug, satisfied self-righteousness you feel when you finally see images of Moammar Gadhafi’s bloodied, abused corpse feels powerfully good.

I often wonder what Miriam would be if she were alive today. Famous actress? Influential journalist? Stay-at-home mom? She was among those people you just knew were going somewhere big with their lives. I’m sure that wherever the fates would have taken her, she’d be someone people knew about.

I also wonder if we would still be friends. We’d met that summer when we were singing and dancing in the shows at Darien Lake amusement park just outside Buffalo, New York. Our friendship lasted just seven months until she was murdered. I’m only barely in touch with the other friends I made at the park that summer. Miriam’s family and I aren’t in touch nearly as much as I’d like either (though her mother recently published a book of Miriam's writings along with essays from people who knew and loved her, including me).

Would Miriam and I have drifted apart as well?

Since at this point I’m pretty much in control of our story, I choose to believe that by now I’d have sung in her wedding and helped her decorate her baby’s room and given her a prominent link on my blogroll and kept her on my speed dial from the moment I got my first cell phone.

And I’m pretty sure she’d have written the same story for me if our fates had been reversed.

Twenty-six years ago today was the last, devastating act in a year that had shaken my family to its core. It was the day my worldview changed from naive to guarded, from optimistic to cynical, from insular to secular.

It was the day my friend Miriam was murdered.

And it was just another day for most people.

And though the world continues to spin forward—as it should—and people’s memories continue to fade—as they do—I will never forget.

Twenty-five years ago today

I’d finished my classes for the semester and my dad had come to pick me up from college for the holiday break. 1988 had been an emotional roller coaster for our family. We’d lost four family friends in a small plane crash Easter morning, my mom had undergone a radical mastectomy in October and she was just starting her first rounds of chemo before Christmas. I was in the middle of my junior year in college, and I’d finally found a major I was willing to stick with: English. But since I’d waited a full two years to admit to myself I always should have been an English major, I had a lot of catching up to do. And my first-semester courseload had been heavy.

December 21 is the winter solstice—the day of the year with the shortest amount of sunlight—but it was beautiful and sunny in Eastern Iowa that afternoon in 1988. And Dad and I had a nice chat over the 40-minute drive home. My family has always been close, so when we saw Mom standing in the driveway as we pulled up to the house, I figured she was just excited to see me.

But she was sobbing.

I assumed she’d gotten some bad news about her cancer while Dad was gone, so I jumped out of the car before it even came to a stop and I ran up to hug her. But the bad news was something entirely different: Miriam’s plane had gone down.

Miriam was a friend of mine who had spent the semester in London studying under the auspices of Syracuse University. I’d just visited her over the Thanksgiving break, and we’d had an awesome time seeing the sights, exploring the museums and taking in all the shows we could afford on our college-student budgets. Among the four we saw were Les Misérables and an extraordinary revival of Stephen Sondheim’s Follies. Sondheim was just starting to appear on our collective radar, and we both agreed that seeing Follies together was a mountaintop experience for us to have shared over our magical week together in London.

But by December 21, I’d come home, a whole month had passed and I’d been so caught up in my finals and holiday preparations that I’d had no idea Miriam was flying back to the States that day—much less what flight she was on. Neither had my mom. But our friend Jody in Ohio did. And when the initial reports that Pan Am flight 103 had disappeared out of the sky over Lockerbie, Scotland, started washing over the newswires, Jody had called everyone she could think of.

Mom and Dad and I raced to the family room and crowded around the TV that crisp, sunny Iowa afternoon to see what we could find out about Miriam’s plane. It was the early days of CNN and 24-hour news, so we were able to get (spotty) information right away about the mysterious crash, along with grainy images of the wreckage shining dimly in the emergency lights that were working so hard to pierce the solstice blackness six time zones away.

Over the next few months and weeks, the world came to learn about the bomb, the Libyans, the retribution, the embargoes, the bankruptcies. We cautiously wrapped our brains around the unthinkable efficiencies of global terrorism at the dawn of the Information Age. And the friends and families of the victims of the 103 bombing started experiencing the bizarre dichotomy of watching our personal tragedy play itself out on the world stage.

In the years since Miriam’s murder, I’ve befriended her parents and friends. I’ve gotten in touch with the roommates she lived with in London, none of whom had been on her plane with her that day. I’ve written pieces about my relatively removed perspective on the bombing that were published in newspapers and scholarly journals and read on NPR. And since I had been in London and had hung out with a lot of the Syracuse students a month before the bombing, I’ve actually been interviewed by the FBI.

And as I’ve grieved and matured over the last 25 years, I’ve discovered that I now tend to be efficiently emotionless when I hear about epic tragedies like the 9/11 bombings and the Newtown massacre ... but I’ll still burst into tears over emotional pablum like Christmas cookie commercials.

Twenty-five years ago today, the world learned what a volatile mix misanthropy and religion and blind nationalism can be in a global melting pot.

Twenty-five years ago today, Miriam and her fellow passengers and their families and friends learned violently and unwillingly about harsh brutalities that the rest of the world got the relative luxury of absorbing over time.

Twenty-five years ago today, I learned that the distant tragedies that so often happen to “other people” should never be observed as abstractions.

I discovered that news of plane crashes and acts of terrorism that play endlessly in 24-hour newscycles can be both disturbing and strangely comforting. I learned that life is precious, that there are no guarantees, that people who waste your time are just robbing you, that small gestures can make heroic impressions, that your pain and suffering and anguish and heartbreak do not make you special, that no matter how bad it gets you should find solace in the fact that it will probably get better … or at least easier.

Twenty-five years is enough time for someone to raise a child and send him or her off into the world. Enough time for six presidential elections and four new Sondheim musicals. (Six, if you count Saturday Night and The Frogs.)

It’s enough time for a gangly, unsure college boy to cycle through four cars and six houses and six jobs and three cities as he grows into a successful, confident (more or less) man.

It’s enough time for him to realize that the world is not fair. That bad things happen to good people. That the bad people who did them don’t always get punished. That horrible tragedy gets easier to accept over time, though it remains impossible to forget. That the hate that some people burn into your heart never entirely leaves, and that the smug, satisfied self-righteousness you feel when you finally see images of Moammar Gadhafi’s bloodied, abused corpse feels powerfully good.

I often wonder what Miriam would be if she were alive today. Famous actress? Influential journalist? Stay-at-home mom? She was among those people you just knew were going somewhere big with their lives. I’m sure that wherever the fates would have taken her, she’d be someone people knew about.

I also wonder if we would still be friends. We’d met that summer when we were singing and dancing in the shows at Darien Lake amusement park just outside Buffalo, New York. Our friendship lasted just seven months until she was murdered. I’m only barely in touch with the other friends I made at the park that summer. Miriam’s family and I aren’t in touch nearly as much as I’d like either (though her mother recently published a book of Miriam's writings along with essays from people who knew and loved her, including me).

Would Miriam and I have drifted apart as well?

Since at this point I’m pretty much in control of our story, I choose to believe that by now I’d have sung in her wedding and helped her decorate her baby’s room and given her a prominent link on my blogroll and kept her on my speed dial from the moment I got my first cell phone.

And I’m pretty sure she’d have written the same story for me if our fates had been reversed.

Twenty-five years ago today was the last, devastating act in a year that had shaken my family to its core. It was the day my worldview changed from naive to guarded, from optimistic to cynical, from insular to secular.

It was the day my friend Miriam was murdered.

And it was just another day for most people.

And though the world continues to spin forward—as it should—and people’s memories continue to fade—as they do—I will never forget.

24 years ago today

I’d finished my classes for the semester and my dad had come to pick me up from college for the holiday break. 1988 had been an emotional roller coaster for our family. We’d lost four family friends in a small plane crash Easter morning, my mom had undergone a radical mastectomy in October and she was just starting her first rounds of chemo before Christmas. I was in the middle of my junior year in college, and I’d finally found a major I was willing to stick with: English. But since I’d waited a full two years to admit to myself I always should have been an English major, I had a lot of catching up to do. And my first-semester courseload had been heavy.

December 21 is the winter solstice—the day of the year with the shortest amount of sunlight—but it was beautiful and sunny in Eastern Iowa that afternoon in 1988. And Dad and I had a nice chat over the 40-minute drive home. My family has always been close, so when we saw Mom standing in the driveway as we pulled up to the house, I figured she was just excited to see me.

But she was sobbing.

I assumed she’d gotten some bad news about her cancer while Dad was gone, so I jumped out of the car before it even came to a stop and I ran up to hug her. But the bad news was something entirely different: Miriam’s plane had gone down.

Miriam was a friend of mine who had spent the semester in London studying under the auspices of Syracuse University. I’d just visited her over the Thanksgiving break, and we’d had an awesome time seeing the sights, exploring the museums and taking in all the shows we could afford on our college-student budgets. Among the four we saw were Les Misérables and an extraordinary revival of Stephen Sondheim’s Follies. Sondheim was just starting to appear on our collective radar, and we both agreed that seeing Follies together was a mountaintop experience for us to have shared over our magical week together in London.

But by December 21, I’d come home, a whole month had passed and I’d been so caught up in my finals and holiday preparations that I’d had no idea Miriam was flying back to the States that day—much less what flight she was on. Neither had my mom. But our friend Jody in Ohio did. And when the initial reports that Pan Am flight 103 had disappeared out of the sky over Lockerbie, Scotland, started washing over the newswires, Jody had called everyone she could think of.

Mom and Dad and I raced to the family room and crowded around the TV that crisp, sunny Iowa afternoon to see what we could find out about Miriam’s plane. It was the early days of CNN and 24-hour news, so we were able to get (spotty) information right away about the mysterious crash, along with grainy images of the wreckage shining dimly in the emergency lights that were working so hard to pierce the solstice blackness six time zones away.

Over the next few months and weeks, the world came to learn about the bomb, the Libyans, the retribution, the embargoes, the bankruptcies. We cautiously wrapped our brains around the unthinkable efficiencies of global terrorism at the dawn of the Information Age. And the friends and families of the victims of the 103 bombing started experiencing the bizarre dichotomy of watching our personal tragedy play itself out on the world stage.

In the years since Miriam’s murder, I’ve befriended her parents and friends. I’ve gotten in touch with the roommates she lived with in London, none of whom had been on her plane with her that day. I’ve written pieces about my relatively removed perspective on the bombing that were published in newspapers and scholarly journals and read on NPR. And since I had been in London and had hung out with a lot of the Syracuse students a month before the bombing, I’ve actually been interviewed by the FBI.

And as I’ve grieved and matured over the last 24 years, I’ve discovered that I now tend to be efficiently emotionless when I hear about epic tragedies like the 9/11 bombings and the Newtown massacre ... but I’ll still burst into tears over emotional pablum like Christmas cookie commercials.

Twenty-four years ago today, the world learned what a volatile mix misanthropy and religion and blind nationalism can be in a global melting pot.

Twenty-four years ago today, Miriam and her fellow passengers and their families and friends learned violently and unwillingly about harsh brutalities that the rest of the world got the relative luxury of absorbing over time.

Twenty-four years ago today, I learned that the distant tragedies that so often happen to “other people” should never be observed as abstractions.

I discovered that news of plane crashes and acts of terrorism that play endlessly in 24-hour newscycles can be both disturbing and strangely comforting. I learned that life is precious, that there are no guarantees, that people who waste your time are just robbing you, that small gestures can make heroic impressions, that your pain and suffering and anguish and heartbreak do not make you special, that no matter how bad it gets you should find solace in the fact that it will probably get better … or at least easier.

Twenty-four years is enough time for someone to raise a child and send him or her off into the world. Enough time for six presidential elections and four new Sondheim musicals. (Six, if you count Saturday Night and The Frogs.)

It’s enough time for a gangly, unsure college boy to cycle through four cars and five houses and six jobs and three cities and one engagement as he grows into a successful, confident (more or less) man. It’s enough time for him to realize that the world is not fair. That bad things happen to good people. That the bad people who did them don’t always get punished. That horrible tragedy gets easier to accept over time, though it remains impossible to forget. That the hate that some people burn into your heart never entirely leaves, and that the smug, satisfied self-righteousness you feel when you finally see images of Moammar Gadhafi’s bloodied, abused corpse feels powerfully good.

 I often wonder what Miriam would be if she were alive today. Famous actress? Influential journalist? Stay-at-home mom? She was among those people you just knew were going somewhere big with their lives. I’m sure that wherever the fates would have taken her, she’d be someone people knew about.

I also wonder if we would still be friends. We’d met that summer when we were singing and dancing in the shows at Darien Lake amusement park just outside Buffalo, New York. Our friendship lasted just seven months until she was murdered. I’m only barely in touch with the other friends I made at the park that summer. Miriam’s family and I aren’t in touch nearly as much as I’d like either (though her mother recently published a book of Miriam's writings along with essays from people who knew and loved her, including me).

Would Miriam and I have drifted apart as well? Since at this point I’m pretty much in control of our story, I choose to believe that by now I’d have sung in her wedding and helped her decorate her baby’s room and given her a prominent link on my blogroll and kept her on my speed dial from the moment I got my first cell phone. And I’m pretty sure she’d have written the same story for me if our fates had been reversed.

Twenty-four years ago today was the last, devastating act in a year that had shaken my family to its core. It was the day my worldview changed from naive to guarded, from optimistic to cynical, from insular to secular.

It was the day my friend Miriam was murdered.

And it was just another day for most people. And though the world continues to spin forward—as it should—and people’s memories continue to fade—as they do—I will never forget.

ChicagoRound: Iroquois Theatre

Chicago emerged from its devastating Great Fire on October 10, 1871, after a two-day conflagration that destroyed 17,500 buildings over four square miles, left 90,000 of the city’s 300,000 inhabitants homeless and killed an impossible-to-quantify-accurately 200–300 people.

And the city immediately began rebuilding.

Thirty-two years and two months later, after rising both literally and proverbially from its ashes to reclaim its place as one of America’s most populous and vital cities, Chicago was devastated by another fire … this time in the month-old, state-of-the-art, “fireproof” Iroquois Theatre.


When it opened on November 23, 1903, the Iroquois Theatre was hailed as an architectural masterpiece and a jewel in the crown of Chicago’s theater scene. Designed in the highly ornate French baroque style, it featured grand staircases, gilded ornamentation, lush velvet curtains and a 6,300-square-foot domed auditorium with a dropped stage to improve the sightlines from every seat in the house. And though it was billed confidently as “absolutely fireproof,” the Iroquois contained almost no fire-safety features. No fire alarm. No backstage telephone. No labeled fire exits (most exits were hidden behind velvet curtains anyway). Even its supposedly fireproof asbestos curtain was made of a highly flammable wood pulp. (Less than ten years later, the “unsinkable” Titanic would succumb to a similarly overconfident hubris.)


The theater’s opening production was a touring musical pastiche called Mr. Bluebeard, which featured a 400-person cast and starred popular Vaudeville comedian Eddie Foy. It had enjoyed critical and popular success for over a month when its December 30 audience filed in on a freezing Wednesday afternoon during the break between Christmas and New Year’s Day. Since the theater’s opening had been delayed repeatedly, its owners were desperate to make up for lost revenue, so they habitually oversold the house, seating extra patrons up and down the aisles in the orchestra and balconies.

The fire started at the top of Act II when an overhead light shorted and sent sparks leaping to a nearby curtain. As the fire spread through the flylines and burning bits of scenery rained down on the stage, the actors continued soldiering through their performance, confident in their understanding that the theater was fireproof. A handful of people in the audience got nervous enough to leave, but many chose to stay in their seats (or aisles) until it became obvious the fire was not going to be contained.

And then panic set in.

The ensuing stampede up overcrowded aisles through an unfamiliar theater with hidden exits left trampled bodies everywhere. And since most of the Iroquois exit doors opened inward, the bodies piled up in front of the doors, leaving no hope of escape.

The actors, too, created their own stampede to find exits. And when they finally pried open the giant freight door on the north end of the stage, the arctic winter blast that blew into the building combined with the fiery gases above the stage to create a superheated fireball that exploded into the auditorium and incinerated everything in its path, including hundreds of people still in their seats.

Many of the people who did manage to get out of the building found themselves trapped high in the air on unfinished fire escapes. As these fire escapes got more and more crowded, people begin to fall (or jump) to their deaths in the alley below. By the time the fire was over, bodies were piled 10 deep in what is still called to this day Death Alley.


Though it was contained to one building and it burned less than an hour, the fire killed over 600 people (twice the number killed in the two-day Great Fire of 1871), shut down theaters around the world out of fire-safety concerns (leaving thousands of actors and theater employees unemployed), generated worldwide outpourings of sympathy, exposed yet another Chicago corruption scandal in the years of ensuing lawsuits, and ultimately brought about great changes in the way we respond to massive disasters and catalogue and identify disaster victims. It even inspired an Indianapolis hardware salesman named Carl Prinzler, who randomly had to miss the deadly performance, to invent what he called the Self Releasing Fire Exit Bolt once he learned that a disproportionate number of victims had died in desperate piles in front of the inward-opening exit doors with confusing European-style bascule locks. Known today as the “panic bar,” his invention—along with outward-opening exit doors—are perhaps the biggest public-safety legacy of the Iroquois disaster.


Today, the stunning Asian-baroque Oriental Theatre sits pretty much on the exact footprint of the Iroquois Theatre. A thriving part of the Broadway in Chicago theater collective, it features touring productions that play year-round to thousands upon thousands of theater patrons who largely have no idea that they’re sitting on a historic graveyard of sorts. To my knowledge there isn’t even a memorial on the property commemorating the fire.


There is a memorial about three blocks away, in Chicago’s classical-revival City Hall building. Designed by Chicago sculptor Laredo Taft, the bas-relief plaque currently sits above a glass column that houses a revolving door, so it’s both hard to see up close and hard to photograph, especially with an iPhone.


Thankfully, it’s accompanied by an eye-level plaque that explains it context and memorializes the 600 lives lost on December 30, 1903, in one of the worst theater disasters in history.

The floodwaters are receding

The massive stained glass window in the Cedar Rapids veterans' coliseum has survived the flood. The coliseum is one of the three federal buildings on May's Island in the middle of the Cedar River. The island was completely submerged in the flood, and in the few aerial shots I saw, the waters looked as though they climbed about a third of the way up the window.


The window was designed by Grant Wood after the first world war. It features an angelic female figure hovering over six American soldiers representing the six major wars America participated in before 1928, when the window was commissioned. The model for the female figure was Grant Wood's sister, Nan Wood Graham, who is best known as the model for the dour wife in Grant Wood's iconic American Gothic. The window also comes with a great story—click here to read about it.
Amid all the destruction the flood caused, there is a striking beauty in this image. The benevolent figure hovers over the mud and muck left behind, and the window's reflection in the puddle gives the promise of hope that early daffodils bring at the end of a harsh winter.


The beautiful Paramount Theatre didn't fare as well. Built in the 1920s, it shimmered in ornate rococo reds and golds, with grand staircases, dramatic balconies, alcoves filled with statuary, mysterious catacombs, a mirrored lobby inspired by Versailles, and hundreds of happy memories for me as an audience member and performer in the 32 years I lived in Cedar Rapids. The floodwaters rose just below the marquee last weekend, and in their fury, they managed to knock the entire wall of front doors out of its framing and onto the marbled ticket lobby floor:


While the mud and the muck pose a formidable cleaning challenge alone, I wonder what hidden damage the water did to the marble walls and the two sub-basements of dressing rooms, boiler rooms and storage.

Here is what's left of the mighty Wurlitzer organ, which sat on hydraulics in the 2,000-seat theater's orchestra pit. The water obviously floated it out of the pit and banged it around before leaving it dead and broken on the stage. There was no power on in the Paramount when this picture was taken, so the wreckage in its dramatic shafts of dark and sunlight evoke the early images of the debris fields when the Titanic was finally found 20 years ago:

Fortunately, the organ's pipes are high in the theater's walls, where the only damage they could have sustained is from humidity and mold. I'm sure we have a lot more disheartening discoveries all across Cedar Rapids before people can repair and rebuild their lives.

We are back from Iowa

In the legendary floods of 1993, the Cedar River rose to the point where it was just lapping at the support beams of its bridges in my hometown, Cedar Rapids. But it stayed within its banks. The real destruction came from the rising water table, which filled basements with water, left lawns across the city squishy and wet, and caused giant trees to become so waterlogged that they snapped at their bases and crashed into houses and cars.

The flood damage of 2008 is the opposite. The lawns are fine. The trees are standing. But more than 1,300 city blocks within a mile of the river are completely submerged. See the horizontal stripe of water near the top of the photo below this paragraph? That's the river. The little tufts of buildings just left of center in the middle of the river are the veterans' coliseum and the courthouse and the jail that occupy the charmingly landscaped four-block stretch known as May's Island, where horse thief and general roustabout Osgood Shepard purportedly settled what was to become Cedar Rapids in 1837:

Here's a New York Times photo taken this weekend at the height of the flooding. The skyways in downtown Cedar Rapids connected buildings at the second floor:

This is the jewelry store where I bought our engagements rings last July. The owners are old friends of mine, and they still can't even get in the store to get a sense of what their future holds:

The old Roosevelt Hotel (in the foreground) was a magical place for me as a kid. It had a subterranean barber shop that I thought was pretty cool because it had no windows! And down the hall from the barber shop was an Atlantis-themed swimming pool with columns and statuary and giant palm fronds. I'm sure it was a remnant of a 1960s makeover, and looking back I'm sure it was probably horribly tacky, but it was glorious and theatrical and positively magical to me when I was a little proto-gay. The building was converted to apartments more than a decade ago and I haven't been in it since. Now I'm sure that whatever was in the basement is gone for good:

Here's a shot down First Avenue, the city's main drag. The river officially crosses under First Avenue four blocks from where you see the water starting. The Roosevelt Hotel is hidden behind the giant concrete structure on the right. Behind that is my dad's office. Or what's left of it. There is talk that his office building -- a 20ish-story highrise -- is so compromised it may have to be torn down:

Here's that same spot on First Avenue taken from a parking ramp that we snuck into ... and subsequently got kicked out of by the National Guard. The building to the left with the asymmetrical white paint is the back of Theatre Cedar Rapids, my second home when I lived in Cedar Rapids. Some of my favorite memories ever are from the shows I've done there, including Forever Plaid, A Chorus Line, Big River, Little Shop of Horrors and Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.
Theatre Cedar Rapids had a fabulous theater organ with a console covered in black velvet and rhinestones. Early word is that the organ was saved, though everything below stage level was completely flooded. I haven't heard anything even that positive about the mighty Wurlitzer in the architecturally extravagant Paramount Theatre a couple blocks closer to the river. Early word has it that the organ was completely submerged, along with a great deal of the first floor of the theater.

* * * * *

When the domestic partner and I arrived in Cedar Rapids late on Thursday night, a call was going out on the local TV stations for volunteers to help sandbag the city's last uncompromised water processing plant. 20 minutes later -- the time it took us to carry our stuff in the house, grab something to eat and run to the bathroom -- the stations were announcing that more volunteers had arrived than they could use so everyone else should just stay home. Which tells you everything you really need to know about Cedar Rapids.

The sandbagged plant survived the night, but the other three that serve Cedar Rapids were flooded. Which left the whole city on extremely limited water use: no bathing, no dishwashing, only judicious flushing. Fortunately, my sister and her husband's house had enough water activity in the basement that their sump pump produced gallon after gallon of water we could use to flush away our ... um ... flushable stuff.

* * * * *

The initial purpose of our trip to Cedar Rapids was a three-day celebration of my folks' anniversary, my sister and her husband's anniversary, my sister's birthday and Father's Day. The restaurant we'd planned to go to was in the historic Amana colonies, half an hour away on roads we didn't trust to be above water. So we went to Plan B: a picnic on my sister's front lawn featuring pizzas from my favorite pizza chain and an ice cream cake that was so delicious I would happily buy bigger jeans if I could eat it for every meal the rest of my life:

The next night I took everyone to the Vernon Inn, known locally as The Greek Place. It's a charming little restaurant with delicious Greek food near the house where we grew up, so it's impossible to go there without running into at least 10 people we know. Even when the city is under water. Since the restaurant was on water restrictions too, they served us our fancy anniversary dinner on paper plates. Which was obviously fine, but I thought it was a little rude that they served us asparagus in the middle of a no-flush injunction.

* * * * *

I was scheduled to run 11 miles on Saturday morning with the AIDS Marathon program, so I dutifully got up early and ran 5.5 miles out and back (see how good I am at math?) with my sister's next-door-neighbor on the scenic and well-manicured Cedar Valley Nature Trail. It cuts a clean, straight swath north of town through endless corn and soybean fields, many of which were sadly buried under pools of standing water. I took this picture at our starting point to show you how relentlessly straight the path is, but my camera phone just doesn't offer much depth of focus:

Here we are at the end, having triumphantly returned from running 11.5 miles (because we got to talking and missed our turnaround) and stinking like pigs in a city that won't let us shower. Fortunately, we had a secret weapon: some friends who live outside the city limits get all their water from a private well, and after the run, my family took turns luxuriating in their shower and changing clothes in front of a big window facing a dense woods.

* * * * *

I've been writing this post in fits and starts all weekend. I apologize if the time references jump around confusingly. But I'm pleased to report that at this writing, the waters have receded enough that I just received this picture of the Alliant Energy tower a block away from the river. It had been submerged to its second floor, and now the sidewalk is exposed again and people are allowed to come back and start surveying the damage. But look how the surging water blew out windows and tore through drywall and left absolute carnage in its wake:

It's devastating to see -- and awe-inspiring to contemplate -- what running water is capable of doing. But my little town is resilient and its people are some of the nicest you'll ever know and though there is a long, ugly journey in front of everyone, I have every confidence Cedar Rapids will emerge better than ever.

Letter from Cedar Rapids

Our weekend in my home town was supposed to be a celebration of my folks' anniversary. And my sister and her husband's anniversary. And my sister's birthday. And Father's Day. June is an expensive month for me, and I was looking forward to treating everyone to an indulgent dinner at any of our favorite restaurants.

But instead we're just staying in and hanging out with each other. And watching the nonstop local news. Because in the last 18 hours, Cedar Rapids has turned into a mini New Orleans. The Cedar River breached its banks around noon on Thursday, and the city has lost staggering numbers of its landmarks. The courthouse. The jail. The veterans' coliseum with the massive Grant Wood stained glass window. The library. My beloved Paramount Theatre. My old second home, Theatre Cedar Rapids. The National Czech and Slovak Museum. My dad's office in one of the two highrises that dominate the Cedar Rapids skyline. Downtown proper is flooded -- in areas to the point of complete submersion -- at least eight blocks in either direction of the river. May's Island -- the mass of land in the middle of the river that holds the beautiful old federal buildings -- is completely under water, along with the three sets of bridges that cross it. It's just gone. The CRANDIC railroad bridge collapsed today with a load of train cars on it. As we speak, they're evacuating everyone in Mercy Hospital -- including its long-term care residents -- ten blocks away from the river. The entire Timecheck neighborhood -- home to countless low-income families -- was evacuated before it completely disappeared under water.

In less than a day, my home town as I know it has changed forever. Here's the photo that currently dominates the home page of the local paper's web site:

At this writing, though, nobody has been killed. And there are countless reports of volunteers showing up in the middle of the night to fill sandbags and direct traffic and open their homes to the newly homeless. Which is why I love my home town so much.

The domestic partner and I left sunny Chicago at 5:00 today, incredulous that there could be such distruction just a few hours away from our beautiful day ... and filled with trepidation about the weather that awaited us as we drove there. The drive was relatively uneventful, though there were deafening periods of torrential rain and entire city grids without power. Outlying towns like Lisbon and Mount Vernon were so black we didn't even realize we were driving through them. We were turned away from only two flooded roads by some very helpful, very wet volunteers. But we made it here in one piece and three huge Diet Cokes and some very tight hugs of relief from my mom.

The flooding has yet to hit its predicted crest, more than 31 feet over its standard level. At least I think that's what they said on the news tonight. I was still a little overwhelmed when they explained it. But all we can do now is sleep. We'll get a better understanding of the devastation in the morning.

Thir. Ty. NINE.

I had a post all set to go to mark my 39th birthday. It was a wish list that included a mercifully swift end to the Dubya kakistocracy, the elimination of the Electoral College, more room in my closet for shoes, a wholly unnecessary reminder to myself to never take my wonderful boyfriend for granted … stuff like that.

But in the last few years, the days around April 18 have become a series of epically tragic anniversaries, most notably the Oklahoma City bombing and the Waco siege on April 19 and the Columbine massacre on April 20.

And now we can add the Virginia Tech shootings to the list. And as I sit here contemplating the outside world from my ivory tower of privilege, prosperity, health and almost obscene levels of happiness, my wish list seems pretty empty. Even the Dubya stuff.

I weep for the parents and brothers and sisters and nieces and nephews and grandparents who are slowly coming to terms with the violent, bloody, terrifying deaths of the young students in whom they had invested so much love and pride and hope. I mourn along with the survivors of earlier tragedies who had to live their first horrifying moments of realization in a national spotlight and who now mourn alone and forgotten. And I hope, along with the nation and the world, that our culture of violence and anger and bloodshed soon evolves into one of respect and magnanimity and benevolence.

And that is my birthday wish.

Flight 93

I was surprised how hard I had to look to find anyone who wanted to see this movie. But I finally got three people together Saturday: a guy in my building and two guys I’ve met through the AIDS Marathon. We saw it that night, only two hours after brief introductions in a car and a quick dinner at a chain restaurant.

Flight 93 is not the ideal movie for four people just getting to know each other. But it’s pretty spectacular.

There’s nothing I can say about it that really hasn’t already been said. It’s as brutal and raw and painful as you’d imagine. It’s a grand opera punctuated by small, poignant details: the routine closing of an airplane door, a choked call on a cell phone, the incredulous comments of an air traffic controller as he struggles to stay focused.

The story isn’t new. We all know what happens. In fact, the film assumes its audience is steeped in enough context that it brushes over basic narrative elements—which is fine today but which might make the film harder to grasp in 50 years.

The film is two stories, actually: the air traffic controllers across America desperately trying to comprehend and manage multiple hijackings, and the events aboard Flight 93 itself. Both stories are riveting, though the events on the ground—in the relative safety of the control towers—are certainly easier to digest, if only because you know everyone will survive.

There is a masterful moment halfway through the film where the Flight 93 pilots have been warned about the World Trade Center attacks and told to be alert for potential cockpit intrusions. It’s told in such a way that you find yourself hoping that maybe—just maybe—the pilots won’t open the cockpit door and set in motion catastrophic events that await them.

But that element of hope is a tiny beacon among crashing waves of dread and panic and anguish and devastating sorrow—waves that left me repeatedly with the urge to throw up as I watched. Where my urge to vomit was stronger than what I’d felt when it fully dawned on me exactly what had happened to my friend Miriam in the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103. Than when I watched breast cancer and the effects of chemotherapy almost destroy my mom. Than when my dad and I cleaned up a family friend’s bloody murder scene so her son and grandson wouldn’t have to do it.

Yet I had to see the movie all the way through. Ever since Pan Am 103, I've had this compulsion to understand devastating tragedies on deeper levels than the it-must-be-horrible-to-die-this-way abstract. It’s the same reason I needed to see Titanic. Silly love story aside, the movie shows you exactly what it was like to watch your world literally disappear beneath your feet, to be crushed by tons of iron and steel, to freeze to death among thousands of wet, screaming, terrified people who were powerless to save themselves.

My complaints about Flight 103 are small, and they’re made only in the spirit of hoping for a more powerful tribute to the victims of the attacks. For starters, the hand-held camera technique, while great for imparting feelings of chaos and panic and immediacy, quickly becomes upsetting in an unhelpful way. And Paul Greengrass’ decision to let his actors—especially his amateur actors—ad lib produced a lot of dialogue that’s awkward, forced, inefficient, self-aware and distractingly unrealistic. For instance, in all my years of flying, I have never had a flight attendant greet me at the door of the plane, check my ticket and point me to my seat. Even first-time flyers can tell that all the seats are to the right anyway. Nobody needs to point. Yet the Flight 93 flight attendants repeatedly said things like “Seat 12B—to your right” as the passengers boarded the plane.

In contrast to these distractions, John Powell’s score is masterful, enhancing the story without ever resorting to manipulation. It’s both spare and charismatic, borrowing traditions of chordant dissonance from Pärt, poignancy from Vaughan Williams and the proud resignation that haunts Górecki’s third symphony. It anchors the final moments of the film, providing a sure-footed foundation for the chaos and panic and uncertainty that drive the story to its devastating conclusion.

The popular consensus is that it’s too soon for this movie, but I disagree. I think the timing is perfect. As a nation, we’ve collectively reached the point of emotional fatigue, where we’re squabbling over memorial architecture and the political posturing of legal action. We’ve started losing sight of the enormity of the events of September 11, the human cost, the transcendent level of Greek tragedy that played out in major cities and lonely fields and 24-hour news stations and private living rooms across the continent—the globe, even—that morning.

It takes us back to the human story. The story that really matters. The story we can’t—we should never—forget.