In 2020, when Illinois legalized recreational marijuana sales, its process for dispensing licenses included a promise to favor “social equity” applicants—businesses that are at least 51 percent owned by someone who (or whose family member) had a prior cannabis conviction, and businesses that planned to hire people with such convictions. Moncheri Robinson and her family jumped at the opportunity. 

Three years and tens of thousands of dollars later, the family still doesn’t have a license.  

Robinson and four family members emptied their savings to pay a team of legal writers $85,000 to craft a competitive application for the first round of applications. They also paid $2,500 for the application fee. Multiple applicants the Reader spoke to also described spending upwards of $100,000 for similar services.

Robinson and her family felt confident about their odds. Their writers had recently won other competitive markets in Arkansas and Oklahoma, which are similar to how Illinois is set up, and the family assumed their social equity designation would give them a leg up. 

“We’re literally everyday people,” Robinson said. “My aunt was a store clerk; my husband, a school teacher, so I work in student affairs in higher ed . . . my cousin is a nurse, my brother is a nurse.” She said it was understood that if you weren’t able to qualify for social equity, you weren’t gonna win. 

Their business concept was designed to resemble a gas station, carrying the items one would expect at a convenience store, plus dank bud. They submitted their application in January 2020, and waited. 

“I’ll never forget checking that email every single day,” Robinson said. “And it was September 3, 2020. I’m on the Dan Ryan . . . and I’ll never forget [when] that email came through. And gosh, I just remember just reading it over and over, I was shaking so bad. Thank God, I wasn’t driving and my husband was. We didn’t see our name on that list. It was just like, ‘Wait a minute. This can’t be happening.’ Like, ‘I know we had a good application.’”

Frustrated, Robinson responded to the email to request her application’s score—the total number of points awarded based on criteria such as the planned facilities, employee training plans, security and product safety, and social equity status, which gave qualified applicants an additional 50 points out of a maximum 250. 

Her family’s application hadn’t been allotted the 50 social equity points, nor had it gotten points for being an Illinois-based business. “I’m not a sore loser,” Robinson said, “but it’s another thing to get cheated. . . . It was basic, surface-level mistakes in the grading.”

In February 2021, following litigation and protests, state regulators allowed applicants to submit supplemental information and request their applications be reevaluated. Robinson’s recalculated score was 245 points, a near-perfect application, and qualified for the lottery. When the day of the lottery came, Robinson said that to her confusion, bigger companies were able to submit multiple applications and obtain more chances in the lottery; one such company, Cresco Labs, won three dispensary licenses. 

Ultimately, Robinson’s family did not win a dispensary license, and she expressed frustration that this process was stacked against social equity applicants who didn’t have hundreds of thousands of dollars to submit multiple applications. “If you were truly social equity, could you truly afford to stuff the box with essentially 100 applications at $2,500 a whop?”

On September 27—the first bitterly cold morning of fall—an alliance of social-equity business owners and cannabis advocates held a press conference outside the governor’s West Loop high-rise to demand immediate relief for businesses that were awarded social equity licenses in the past year. Such businesses have 180 days to begin operations, after which the state may revoke their licenses. The social equity license winners described the struggles they’ve encountered in meeting that deadline. 

The speakers shivered in the brisk weather as they described feeling unsupported by the state. Licensees floundered to compete with multistate operations (MSOs)—large cannabis companies like Cresco, many of whom profited early from medical marijuana sales and have more cash than small business owners to pay for recreational applications and navigate the state’s expensive and arduous hurdles. 

In an interview with the Reader, Paul Pearson, who created the first Illinois Cannabis Law program with the City of Chicago Colleges and is currently running for 4th Ward alderperson, explained that MSOs saturate the licensing process by submitting many applications. MSOs can also afford lobbyists to advocate on their behalf. And, under state guidelines, these companies can qualify as social equity applicants if they hire employees from areas disproportionately impacted by cannabis arrests. 

Kalee Hooghkirk, a partner at a small business licensed to infuse products with distilled THC, said the state must mandate pricing controls for the distillate MSOs sell to infusers. “The same multistate operators who have lobbied against our interests and delayed this program are the same ones we are being asked to depend on for the very core of our business,” Hooghkirk said. “Infusers are being asked to pay $20,000 for liters [of distillate] that cost four to $7,000 in states with similar programs. “

Lisbeth Vargas Jaimes, the executive director of the Illinois Independent Craft Growers Association, said the state’s canopy rules, which limit the square footage of grow operations, “are the reason why there aren’t many financial opportunities afforded to social equity businesses in this market.”

Craft growers currently can only grow a maximum of 5,000 square feet of cannabis; the association is asking for that maximum to be upped to 14,000 square feet. Jordan Melendez, an organizer with the Southwest Side Coalition for Change, said canopy limitations force small business owners to give a large percentage of ownership to financiers. 

Debt financing options in the cannabis industry are often punitively priced, Melendez said. 

Willie “J.R.” Fleming, representing the Southwest Side of Chicago Couriers, spoke on behalf of those with transportation license grievances. He urged the governor to delay the release of new transportation licenses until the current licensees can find business. “The existing multistate operators in Illinois have not produced opportunities in the contract for transporters to be successful,” Fleming said in an interview with the Reader. “It is imperative that legislation include a requirement for existing cultivators to contract with a transportation licensee for at least 75 percent of their business.”

At the press conference, speakers also said  that the Department of Commerce & Economic Opportunity loan program created to assist small businesses has yet to release any of the funds. One speaker noted that there are too many stipulations on the money regardless. The funds can only be used to be “operational,” but many businesses need the money for construction or for acquisition.

Former state senator Rickey Hendon and State representative La Shawn Ford spoke last. 

“The governor, who I love, needs to know what we’re going through,” Hendon said. “We wouldn’t be out here freezing our ass off if this wasn’t serious. We’re asking for an additional 180 days for true social equity. . . . Because if you don’t open in 180 days, you’ll lose your license. They set us up for failure, and they don’t even know it.”

“These are not nonprofit entities,” said Ford, who was in his shirtsleeves despite the bracing cold. “These are business people that have put their life savings on the line in order to help the state, reduce unemployment, and rebuild communities.”

Fleming co-owns several cannabis equity companies in Illinois, including Public Square LLC and South and West Side Carriers LLC. 

Fleming said he strategically partnered with different cannabis companies and teams to submit multiple applications. He won a dispensary license with Justice Grown, run by two civil rights law partners in Chicago.

He sold weed in his younger days in the Chicago “legacy,” or underground, market. He said he’s been arrested and charged with multiple counts of possession with intent to deliver cannabis, but never convicted. “That’s the legal way to say I was selling weed,” he laughed. When he heard the state was legalizing medical marijuana in 2013, he started organizing to prepare his people to participate in the market.

Fleming and his teammates were awarded transportation, cultivation, and infusion licenses in Illinois, but he spoke on behalf of transportation because it’s the license he hasn’t been able to monetize. Ironically, these licenses have the lowest application fees and need the least additional infrastructure and partners to monetize.

But Fleming said they’re the least valuable licenses right now because you must transport marijuana from a legal Illinois entity, and the big MSOs will not give anyone a contract to begin. “You’d be a fool to believe that they’re gonna give you a contract,” he chuckled, “You really think these white people gonna let you move they drugs?”

As a social equity business owner, he said that it’s hard to find locations on the southwest side because those facilities don’t exist there already, and his team doesn’t have the capital to build them. The only people in this industry who would lend money to cannabis start-ups are hedge funds and other financial interests, he said. To try to lessen the widespread dependence on white investors, Fleming has reached out to Black athletes and Black entertainers to invest. 

“There should be more opportunities and resources put forth by the government to support social equity winners,” he said. “We feel like the city [and] the state, they should be providing the same resources that they do for big corporations coming to Illinois, to social equity winners.”

Elijah Hamilton is the CEO and Founder of Chummy’s Organix, a Chicago-based cannabidiol (CBD, a legal, nonpsychoactive by-product of cannabis) brand. “That’s the one that’s actually functioning, up and running right now,” Hamilton said. “And then I have Chummy’s Edibles, which was the brand that we attempted to get into the mainstream cannabis market . . . we went through that whole tumultuous process back in 2020. You know, going through the rush of trying to get into the game, so to speak.”

Long before being a business owner, Hamilton worked in the consumer packaged goods industry for a decade as a district manager of PepsiCo and Frito-Lay. “That’s pretty much where I got most of my skills from . . . market strategy, direct store delivery, how to IRI data, Nelson statistics planograms, how to structure route delivery.” By the time he considered making a dime off the cannabis industry, he was nearly bankrupt. A former friend showed him how to make edibles, and he started selling those casually to help him get back on his feet.

“I got pretty good at it. And then when I found Illinois was about to become recreational, we had decided, ‘Hey, let’s go ahead, start out.’”

Hamilton vertically integrated his company with seven others, and Chummy’s was the flagship brand because it already had recognition due to its success in the legacy market. But he said that once he saw how the state was dealing with the first round of dispensary licenses, he decided to pivot and start a CBD brand just in case it didn’t happen. 

“Turns out I was right.”

Hamilton ultimately left the dispensary license application process because Illinois kept adding stipulations. He found the cost of writing and submitting a social equity application—which he said could be more than $100,000—unreasonably high.

He added that commercial property owners have raised rents by thousands of dollars after learning spaces would be used as a cannabis kitchen or for a craft grower. And businesses require aldermanic approval before they can set up a dispensary. As he watched people around him go bankrupt in hopes of creating generational wealth, Hamilton pivoted to developing his CBD brand. 

“I didn’t want to throw all my eggs in one basket,” he said, “and then just kind of be left holding nothing.”

Since applying, both Robinson and Hamilton have become advocates with the Social Equity Empowerment Network (SEEN), which serves the Black community nationally by helping cannabis sellers move from the legacy to the legal market. Robinson has also worked to change state laws to prevent their experiences from being replicated. Hamilton uses his business as a model for other legacy businesses to move into the mainstream market. “The goal is to get [them] above ground,” he said. 

Robinson lives in Virginia now. She joined a few fruitless class-action lawsuits against the state of Illinois before moving there. She says the Illinois market is too unstable for her to encourage anyone to get involved now. “They’ve been guessing this whole process,” she said. “They’ve been putting pieces in place in real time instead of having these things in place prior” to opening the application process. 

Sometimes she regrets that she wasn’t able to afford more applications, but she comes back to the fact that her business may not have gotten the necessary governmental support to succeed regardless. “These people still out here having press conferences with the governor, that’s like the fifth press conference that they done had, to petition the governor to do something to continue to fix our open wounds with a Band-Aid.”

The process caused friction between her and her family members, and one of her family members who invested $20,000 while close to retirement won’t speak to her anymore. 

“To not even have a relationship with truly one of my favorite [family members] in the world is hurtful,” Robinson said. “They don’t understand the devastation that they brought to just not only individuals, but families.”

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I first met Batman battling villains from the Hall of Justice with the other Super Friends, part of the Saturday morning cartoon lineup of the 1970s, and soon afterward I caught the campy reruns of the 1960s live-action TV show. This led me to scour my brother Aaron’s Bronze Age collection of DC Comics, the ones with macabre covers by the likes of Dave Cockrum and Neal Adams, like Robin hanging dead or a menacing-looking Batman seeking vengeance. 

Here I discovered the real Batman, the one envisioned by his creators Bob Kane and Bill Finger in Detective Comics #27 which debuted on March 30, 1939, a dark knight fighting for justice. While Superman was all-powerful, and Spider-Man could climb walls, Batman was just a man. A rich man, with badass training, and cool gadgets, but a man nonetheless. He had his demons, his strengths, and his failings but he was, and still is, my all-time favorite comic book hero.

The Mark of KaneThrough 12/4: Fri-Sat 7:30 PM, Sun 3 PM; also Mon 11/21 and 11/28 7:30 PM; City Lit Theater, 1020 W. Bryn Mawr, 773-293-3682, citylit.org, $30 previews through 10/29 ($25 seniors, $12 students, and military); regular run 10/30-12/4 $34 ($29 seniors, $12 students, and military)

He is also Mark Pracht’s favorite hero, which inspired Pracht to write the play The Mark of Kane, making its world premiere at City Lit Theater, directed by City Lit artistic director Terry McCabe. Spanning eight decades, the play delves into the relationship between Kane and Finger, how Kane went on to fame and fortune and Finger languished in obscurity and poverty.

“The Bob Kane and Bill Finger story is just so fascinating,” says Pracht, who notes that the Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster story (the creators of Superman) is more like David and Goliath, the small-time artists versus a corporation, “but Bill Finger and Bob Kane is like Cain and Abel . . . artists conflicting with each other.”

While the exact facts of who created what remains unclear (the play is historical fiction based on a conflicting loose set of facts) it is generally accepted that Kane and Finger, two friends in a Bronx apartment, created the character of Batman over a few days. Kane has claimed sole creation credit and in 1939 ultimately got written credit from DC Comics in perpetuity, leaving him to decide what credit, if any, Finger received. Finger’s granddaughter, Athena (who along with her son are his only living heirs) fought to restore his legacy, which led Warner Brothers to officially recognize Finger as cocreator of Batman on film and TV projects going forward.

In reality, Finger, as a writer, claims to have contributed quite a bit, from the look of Batman, his costume, his skills as a detective, and his secret identity of Bruce Wayne. “Most of the things that we think of as Batman came out of his mind,” Pracht says. 

What contribution Bob Kane actually made, as writer and artist, to the creation of Batman, including the name itself and even the actual artwork, remains a debate. Even the characters of Robin and the Joker were allegedly mainly created by Finger, with Jerry Robinson contributing to the latter.

When the Batman TV show became a hit in the 1960s, it made Kane a millionaire. Finger (along with his writing partner Charles Sinclair) wrote a two-part episode (introducing the villain the Clock King), which became Finger’s only public credit for anything related to Batman in his lifetime.

When Batman was originally created for DC (Detective Comics), these two were just young men, happy to be making something new. This love of art for art’s sake was what drew many early comic book artists to this growing industry. Neither expected it to live much beyond a handful of issues, and no one could predict what a huge impact Batman would have on the world now over 80 years later and how many billions (gazillions?) of dollars would be made from this one character alone.

As Batman’s fame grew, so did Kane’s, who became a kind of caricature of the big-time Hollywood hotshot, Pracht notes. Kane worked hard on generating a persona. “Bob Kane had one good idea that he got untold scores of other people to work on,” Pracht says.

In contrast, fellow comic artist Jim Steranko (famous for his work on Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D.), who is a featured character in the play The Mark of Kane, also built a mythology around himself, though his was well-earned—Steranko not only was a seminal artist, but in his early career worked as an escape artist, illusionist, and musician. Jack Kirby, considered one of the greatest comic book creators and artists in history, claims to have created his character of Mister Miracle, an escape artist, through inspiration drawn from Steranko’s early life.

In addition to the relationship between these two men, The Mark of Kane is also about the birth of an art form as well as a multimedia empire. Like many of the great art forms, comics were rife with plagiarism, cronyism—even gangsters. (The first Batman story, “The Case of the Chemical Syndicate” in Detective Comics #27 was essentially a copy of the story from popular pulp comic The Shadow #113, written by Theodore Tinsley, and Kane claims to have been “inspired” by Leonardo da Vinci’s ornithopter design for Batman’s wings.)

Plus, as Pracht says, it is a story of “kids just making stuff up by the seat of their pants. And out of this comes these things that are so beloved and so part of our national consciousness.”

Pracht notes that for something like Batman to survive this long proves what a significant creation it was. “This art form has become so important in the American experience. Knowing these people who maybe got forgotten for a while . . . I think it behooves us to know where these characters came from. They’re important in a way I don’t think anybody really comprehended until now, almost 100 years later. We’re still going to the movies to see it, we’re still buying comic books and playing video games.”

Through this play and a lifetime collecting and appreciating comics, Pracht has considered the roles that superheroes play in our lives and our psyche. “It’s a safe way to confront ideas that are not acceptable. It’s their job to show us there is a way to stand up to things that are frightening and stand up to things that are wrong. You can still do that and be compassionate and still be thoughtful. Bill Finger says, ‘What if we tell kids that they don’t have to be an alien from another planet to be a hero?’”

And that is the core of Batman. You can be just a human being and still be a hero. And we can turn to these comic books, these disposable stories that have been derided for so long, and find inspiration and even art. “Comics are a viable and interesting art form, and it is a medium that is worth talking about as an art form,” Pracht says.

In addition to his own contribution to the comics-as-art-form movement through The Mark of Kane, Pracht will be presenting two additional world premieres of his work in what he is calling the “Four-Color Trilogy.” The second play will be called Innocence of Seduction and will be set in the 1950s during the juvenile delinquency scare and will highlight, among other things, the contribution of Black and female comic book artists as well as the creation of the Comic Code, which grew out of the moral panic of the 50s into the de facto censor for the comic industry for decades. The third play, tentatively titled The House of Ideas, will focus on two titans of the comic book industry, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, and their working partnership.

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On October 28, Pop-Up Magazine will be staged at the Athenaeum Center for Thought and Culture. But what exactly is it? Cofounder and editor in chief Douglas McGray explains.

“The name is inspired by the idea of a pop-up book, like books you may remember from when you were a kid. Sort of flat, you open [it] up, and then all of a sudden it springs to life in this three-dimensional way. . . . We were inspired by the idea of a classic general interest magazine, stories about anything and everything, but performed by writers, filmmakers, audio producers, artists, musicians, and other kinds of performers, with different kinds of media mixed together and live music.” 

The event will also offer accessibility features such as ASL interpretation, open captions, and audio descriptions, sponsored by Google. McGray and his friends initially staged the concept in San Francisco a few times for fun, then realized that there was a broader opportunity to take the storytelling show across the country. In 2016 they restaged it as a national touring show. McGray sets the stage for what the audience can expect on a typical night. 

“So you’re in this big beautiful venue, the lights go down, and somebody takes the stage. And they start to tell a story. And maybe it’s a personal story. Maybe it’s something about other people, places, things. As they start to tell that story there’s a band onstage, and the band begins to play underneath them like a movie soundtrack. And then images begin to appear on the screen—we’ve commissioned original film and photography and animation, then the story begins to come to life visually. Sometimes it’s a fast and funny story, sometimes it’s beautiful and epic, and there are typically about seven of those stories in a show.” 

Overall, it creates the effect of a multimedia variety show, offering the audience a sampler of artistic genres that would rarely inhabit the same space. Most of the time, the stories shared are disparate, without an obvious connection. However for the Chicago edition of the show, the theme is love. McGray shares:

“The theme is love stories. And that means all different kinds of love stories—you know, everything from first loves, blind dates, and heartbreak and disconnection, but also music and animals, and place and purpose, and all the different ways that you can feel that kind of connection. We’ll see stories that are really funny, and stories that are profound and moving.”

While some of the guests are unknown, others have a bit of notoriety, and some are downright famous, and the Chicago edition has some interesting characters. McGray shares the lineup.

“There’s Ryan O’Connell (Queer as Folk), who is the writer and star and creator of a show on Netflix called Special. And Sarah Kay (Project VOICE) is a brilliant poet and performer, Victoria Canal (Elegy EP) an amazing musician. Writer Jenée Desmond Harris (Slate’s Dear Prudence), advice columnist and contributing writer for the New York Times. Rachel Cusick, who’s with Radiolab. Filmmaker Nadav Kurtz (Paraiso) and comedian Pamela Rae Schuller (What Makes Me Tic). And then Ben-Alex Dupris (Sweetheart Dancers). A really great filmmaker who has a really beautiful, sweet story.”

While the stories are supposed to be a surprise each night, McGray shares a tantalizing preview. 

“Someone discovers a story from her own family. Someone as a teenager discovers a pretty incredible family secret that she never knew about. Everything’s totally out of character for her parents. So she gets to the bottom of this incredible saga from when they were younger, before she was born, that they’d never told her about. There’s another story about this pretty epic secret love affair between an intelligence officer stationed overseas and a famous international actress that had been kept a secret for their entire lives.”

Pop-Up MagazineFri 10/28, 7:30 PM, Athenaeum Center for Thought and Culture, 2936 N. Southport, $39, popupmagazine.com

This isn’t Pop-Up Magazine’s first time in Chicago, and during their last visit, before the pandemic, they staged a really unique collaborative story. McGray recalls:

“So you know, we like to figure out all the different kinds of ways that we can tell a story. One example is Jenna Wortham, who is a writer and podcast host for the New York Times, who did a story about someone who lost the ability to form memories. She did it in collaboration with the amazing Chicago shadow puppet theater company Manual Cinema. So, she told the story, and Manual Cinema brought it to life in shadows.”

If your instincts are like mine, you love watching someone spin a great yarn and will want to go online and binge-watch past shows—but these are one-of-a-kind experiences meant to be shared communally. McGray explains:

“You have to be there. We won’t be filming the show and putting the stories online. You have to be there.”

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There are some 38 uninhabited islands in Norway,* and three in Humboldt Park. Of course, there are the two in the Lagoon, but these days Ørkenoy—the two-year-oldNordic-inspired brewery, cocktail bar, and restaurant—is “deserted” in name only. (The word is a rough mash-up of two Norwegian words: ørken, for desert, and oy, for island.)

But at its seemingly ill-timed opening, at the height of the pandemic, the threat that the seats in its bright, open confines—hard by the elevated Bloomingdale Trail greenway—would remain empty was very real to chef-partner Ryan Sanders. The name, he says, “was in relation to the fact that we are in a space still off the beaten path, the idea of the 606 as a current that would bring things to us. It was the question, ‘If you got to bring one thing to a desert island, what would it be?’ Our answer was beer.”

Sanders and his former partner, brewerJonny Ifergan, spent a year and a half building out the space in the Kimball Arts Center, planning to offer an alternative to the hoppy, IPA-dominant brewery scene: Scandinavian-inspired lagers and farmhouse ales to accompany Sanders’s nimble menu built around open-faced smørrebrød on dense sourdough rye rugbrød.

“When the pandemic happened, floors were torn out, plumbing was going in,” says Sanders, who’d previously cooked in the taproom at Lagunitas Brewing. “There was no slowing down at that point. We couldn’t stop if we wanted to. The bank wants its money. The landlord wants his rent.”

They’d opened in September 2020 with all the precautions and safety measures they could establish: reservations only, QR code menus, and rigorously minimal contact between staff and guests. “It was, from a service perspective, awful.” Six weeks later, the city shut everything down again, and Sanders and Ifergan had to lay off their entire staff, apart from brewer Briana Hestad.

Still, the space came to life as conditions relaxed. The following June they introduced biannual block parties and pop-up markets for independent, itinerant craft and food businesses, which was always part of the plan. “The very first one, of course, there was, like, a hurricane that day,” says Sanders. “We thought the building was going to flood, but this place was packed to the gills. There were still masks and we were still asking for vax cards and all that stuff, but people just wanted to be out. They just wanted something to do.”

The vibe is much less restrictive these days, though guests still order from their phones, and when Ifergan stepped away at theendof last year to start his own brewery, Hestad stepped up. Both the beer and Sanders’s menu began to evolve, and he’s just introduced a bunch of new fall dishes, highlighted by larger shareable plates and dishes that range far beyond northern European flavors.

Right now he’s braising pork ribs for 36 hours with Mick Klug plums, and shellacking them on the pickup with mezcal barbecue sauce. There’s a dino-sized lamb shank, barely clinging to the bone, drenched in an orange wine-spiked reduction of its braising liquid, its richness offset by a crunchy herb salad.

Credit: Ryan Sanders

These augment the portable smørrebrød and small bites core, which now features a dollop of chicken liver mousse atop a tiny apple cider donut with a drizzle of lingonberry glaze, which can serve as a kind of gateway organ for the offal adverse. He’s brought back brussels sprouts, this season seared in brown butter and glazed in cider-gochujang sauce, which ought not deter anyone weary of this menu standard. And some of the open-faced sandwiches have gone pretty far afield from the more traditional mainstays, like the Seitalian Stallion, a vegan riff on Italian beef—a “sacrilege,” jokes Sanders, with mushroom seitan drenched in a caramelized onion bechamel.

The bar is now fully open, serving luminous, fruit-forward cocktails, in addition to the drafts, which Hestad, who has a PhD in Scandinavian language, culture, and history, has scaled back from some of the more challenging smoked beers (though a very approachable one remains), in favor of lighter, refreshing, herbal-kissed brews like a farmhouse ale with lemon verbena and shiso, and a gooseberry wheat with lemon balm and sage.

Ørkenoy1757 N Kimball312-929-4024orkenoy.com

Ørkenoy continues to evolve into an ever more multifaceted concept, hosting Wednesday oyster nights, art exhibits, and dance parties, and selling a carefully curated selection of packaged goods out of its retail market. Friday, October 28, it’s staging an interactive beer blending dinner with Primary Colors, whose customizable brews are also produced on-site, and its next midwinter market featuring some two dozen-plus independent vendors is set for December 3.

In some ways the long, slow, organic easing out of isolation was good for the brewery. “It’s been an interesting few years for everyone,” says Sanders. “I like the box because then you can bounce off the walls and find something to create with what you have. We don’t have a wealth of resources, but the silver lining was everybody brought something to the desert island and we got to create with what we have.”

*so says Wikipedia

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Sarah Shook is best known as the singer and guitarist for rowdy country band Sarah Shook & the Disarmers, but Cruel Liars, the debut album from their latest project, the darker and more intimate Mightmare, proves that pigeonholing them would be a grave mistake. Shook grew up in a fundamentalist Christian household where their exposure to music was limited to classical and religious styles, but in their late teens a friend turned them on to secular music and they became enamored with indie rock. After relocating from the northeast to North Carolina, they found their stride as a country musician, naming their first band Sarah Shook & the Devil as a tongue-in-cheek nod to their pious upbringing. By then, they were a divorced, single parent in their early 20s, working several jobs to make ends meet while gigging on the side. With the Disarmers, launched in 2014, Shook has poured their rebellious spirit and hardscrabble wisdom into three albums of effusive, outlaw country music that elicits a smile as often as a tear in the proverbial beer—most recently with Nightroamer, which came out on Thirty Tigers in February. 

If it weren’t already clear that Shook has a knack for reinvention, Cruel Liars provides ample evidence. They began working on the material in the pandemic lockdown of early 2020 and wound up writing, recording, and producing the record at home, playing all the instruments (with the exception of a handful of bass tracks by Aaron Oliva). More bedroom than barroom, Cruel Liars grapples with heartache, loss, and self-discovery in intricate tunes that merge Shook’s indie-rock influences with dark, stripped-down Americana and pop. While the record is most powerful in its most intense moments, such as the driving, shadowy “Enemy,” the whole thing is made more compelling by Shook’s characteristically sharp lyrics and richly layered vocal harmonies. Mightmare doesn’t sound like the Disarmers, but Shook’s ability to mine something universal from intimate thoughts and tales connects them at their core. The strength of this first release already makes an urgent question of where Shook will take the project from here.

Mightmare Sun 10/30, 8:30 PM, Empty Bottle, 1035 N. Western, $15 ($12 in advance), 21+

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Chicago Reader 2022 print issue dates

The Chicago Reader is published in print every other week. Issues are dated Thursday. Distribution usually happens Wednesday morning through Thursday night of the issue date. Upcoming print issue dates through December 2022 are:

11/10/202211/24/202212/8/202212/22/2022

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2023 print issue dates

The first print issue in 2023 will be published three weeks after the 12/22/2022 issue, the final issue of 2022. The print issue dates through June 2023 are:

1/12/20231/26/20232/9/20232/23/20233/9/20233/23/20234/6/20234/20/20235/4/20235/18/20236/1/20236/15/20236/29/2023

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Healing is often a long and winding process. Try as we might to pretend that we have it under control, healing is usually messy and nonlinear. But even when all seems lost, there are moments that remind us that the light at the end of the tunnel is still worth venturing toward.  

South side rapper Freddie Old Soul’s healing process began when she picked up a pen and expressed herself creatively. She also credits music for helping her find God. That discovery led to digging deeper into spirituality, following a West African tradition known as Ifa, and becoming a trained healer.

“I started to go to herbal school with an organization called Gold Water Alchemy, and I just naturally became a woman healer before I knew it. I was doing healing circles to help women get through very traumatic experiences that have happened to them,” she said with pride. “When I say I help heal women, it’s more so about ‘what are the tools that God gave you? And how can you best utilize those tools to be the best version of yourself?’ So that’s my gift back to the community.”

Freddie’s healing work goes hand in hand with her music. She refined her craft as a spoken word poet at the Young Chicago Authors program Louder Than a Bomb (LTAB, since renamed the Rooted & Radical Youth Poetry Festival). That later translated into musical projects. Her lyricism invokes messages of inner work and self-love over mellow boom-bap production. It’s smooth and easy to listen to, allowing you to truly absorb every word she spits. The end result is alchemized gold.

“Writing poetry, being a part of LTAB, and literally sometimes even locking myself up in my room until I just got the words out of me—I would discover more about myself,” she said. “That’s why music is so important to me, because without it I just wouldn’t be able to self-reflect the way that I do. A lot of the times I rap about something and then like three months to a year later, it’s literally happening to me. I had to get through it because I wrote about it. So it’s magic, kinda, in a way.”

Freddie’s upcoming album Water, Music, and Love focuses on the transitional period of her life as a mother and her journey to rediscover herself as a musician. The title represents the three things that she says are essential to her well-being. The project’s genesis came from making music every day in her living room with her close friends and collaborators JazStarr and _Stepchild, which was a healing process in and of itself. 

With the album, Freddie Old Soul looks to claim her place among Chicago’s pantheon of great rappers, something she humbly but firmly believes she’s worthy of already.

“I think the people have been waiting on me to realize how much of an impact I truly make. I think when we name people like Mother Nature, Semiratruth, and Brittney Carter, these are my friends,” she says with earnest. “These people are reflections of me and they’ve come into my life and reminded me, like, ‘Freddie, you the coldest.’ I feel the community, and the people are waiting on me to be the impact that I know that I always have been.”

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In 2020, when Illinois legalized recreational marijuana sales, its process for dispensing licenses included a promise to favor “social equity” applicants—businesses that are at least 51 percent owned by someone who (or whose family member) had a prior cannabis conviction, and businesses that planned to hire people with such convictions. Moncheri Robinson and her family jumped at the opportunity. 

Three years and tens of thousands of dollars later, the family still doesn’t have a license.  

Robinson and four family members emptied their savings to pay a team of legal writers $85,000 to craft a competitive application for the first round of applications. They also paid $2,500 for the application fee. Multiple applicants the Reader spoke to also described spending upwards of $100,000 for similar services.

Robinson and her family felt confident about their odds. Their writers had recently won other competitive markets in Arkansas and Oklahoma, which are similar to how Illinois is set up, and the family assumed their social equity designation would give them a leg up. 

“We’re literally everyday people,” Robinson said. “My aunt was a store clerk; my husband, a school teacher, so I work in student affairs in higher ed . . . my cousin is a nurse, my brother is a nurse.” She said it was understood that if you weren’t able to qualify for social equity, you weren’t gonna win. 

Their business concept was designed to resemble a gas station, carrying the items one would expect at a convenience store, plus dank bud. They submitted their application in January 2020, and waited. 

“I’ll never forget checking that email every single day,” Robinson said. “And it was September 3, 2020. I’m on the Dan Ryan . . . and I’ll never forget [when] that email came through. And gosh, I just remember just reading it over and over, I was shaking so bad. Thank God, I wasn’t driving and my husband was. We didn’t see our name on that list. It was just like, ‘Wait a minute. This can’t be happening.’ Like, ‘I know we had a good application.’”

Frustrated, Robinson responded to the email to request her application’s score—the total number of points awarded based on criteria such as the planned facilities, employee training plans, security and product safety, and social equity status, which gave qualified applicants an additional 50 points out of a maximum 250. 

Her family’s application hadn’t been allotted the 50 social equity points, nor had it gotten points for being an Illinois-based business. “I’m not a sore loser,” Robinson said, “but it’s another thing to get cheated. . . . It was basic, surface-level mistakes in the grading.”

In February 2021, following litigation and protests, state regulators allowed applicants to submit supplemental information and request their applications be reevaluated. Robinson’s recalculated score was 245 points, a near-perfect application, and qualified for the lottery. When the day of the lottery came, Robinson said that to her confusion, bigger companies were able to submit multiple applications and obtain more chances in the lottery; one such company, Cresco Labs, won three dispensary licenses. 

Ultimately, Robinson’s family did not win a dispensary license, and she expressed frustration that this process was stacked against social equity applicants who didn’t have hundreds of thousands of dollars to submit multiple applications. “If you were truly social equity, could you truly afford to stuff the box with essentially 100 applications at $2,500 a whop?”

On September 27—the first bitterly cold morning of fall—an alliance of social-equity business owners and cannabis advocates held a press conference outside the governor’s West Loop high-rise to demand immediate relief for businesses that were awarded social equity licenses in the past year. Such businesses have 180 days to begin operations, after which the state may revoke their licenses. The social equity license winners described the struggles they’ve encountered in meeting that deadline. 

The speakers shivered in the brisk weather as they described feeling unsupported by the state. Licensees floundered to compete with multistate operations (MSOs)—large cannabis companies like Cresco, many of whom profited early from medical marijuana sales and have more cash than small business owners to pay for recreational applications and navigate the state’s expensive and arduous hurdles. 

In an interview with the Reader, Paul Pearson, who created the first Illinois Cannabis Law program with the City of Chicago Colleges and is currently running for 4th Ward alderperson, explained that MSOs saturate the licensing process by submitting many applications. MSOs can also afford lobbyists to advocate on their behalf. And, under state guidelines, these companies can qualify as social equity applicants if they hire employees from areas disproportionately impacted by cannabis arrests. 

Kalee Hooghkirk, a partner at a small business licensed to infuse products with distilled THC, said the state must mandate pricing controls for the distillate MSOs sell to infusers. “The same multistate operators who have lobbied against our interests and delayed this program are the same ones we are being asked to depend on for the very core of our business,” Hooghkirk said. “Infusers are being asked to pay $20,000 for liters [of distillate] that cost four to $7,000 in states with similar programs. “

Lisbeth Vargas Jaimes, the executive director of the Illinois Independent Craft Growers Association, said the state’s canopy rules, which limit the square footage of grow operations, “are the reason why there aren’t many financial opportunities afforded to social equity businesses in this market.”

Craft growers currently can only grow a maximum of 5,000 square feet of cannabis; the association is asking for that maximum to be upped to 14,000 square feet. Jordan Melendez, an organizer with the Southwest Side Coalition for Change, said canopy limitations force small business owners to give a large percentage of ownership to financiers. 

Debt financing options in the cannabis industry are often punitively priced, Melendez said. 

Willie “J.R.” Fleming, representing the Southwest Side of Chicago Couriers, spoke on behalf of those with transportation license grievances. He urged the governor to delay the release of new transportation licenses until the current licensees can find business. “The existing multistate operators in Illinois have not produced opportunities in the contract for transporters to be successful,” Fleming said in an interview with the Reader. “It is imperative that legislation include a requirement for existing cultivators to contract with a transportation licensee for at least 75 percent of their business.”

At the press conference, speakers also said  that the Department of Commerce & Economic Opportunity loan program created to assist small businesses has yet to release any of the funds. One speaker noted that there are too many stipulations on the money regardless. The funds can only be used to be “operational,” but many businesses need the money for construction or for acquisition.

Former state senator Rickey Hendon and State representative La Shawn Ford spoke last. 

“The governor, who I love, needs to know what we’re going through,” Hendon said. “We wouldn’t be out here freezing our ass off if this wasn’t serious. We’re asking for an additional 180 days for true social equity. . . . Because if you don’t open in 180 days, you’ll lose your license. They set us up for failure, and they don’t even know it.”

“These are not nonprofit entities,” said Ford, who was in his shirtsleeves despite the bracing cold. “These are business people that have put their life savings on the line in order to help the state, reduce unemployment, and rebuild communities.”

Fleming co-owns several cannabis equity companies in Illinois, including Public Square LLC and South and West Side Carriers LLC. 

Fleming said he strategically partnered with different cannabis companies and teams to submit multiple applications. He won a dispensary license with Justice Grown, run by two civil rights law partners in Chicago.

He sold weed in his younger days in the Chicago “legacy,” or underground, market. He said he’s been arrested and charged with multiple counts of possession with intent to deliver cannabis, but never convicted. “That’s the legal way to say I was selling weed,” he laughed. When he heard the state was legalizing medical marijuana in 2013, he started organizing to prepare his people to participate in the market.

Fleming and his teammates were awarded transportation, cultivation, and infusion licenses in Illinois, but he spoke on behalf of transportation because it’s the license he hasn’t been able to monetize. Ironically, these licenses have the lowest application fees and need the least additional infrastructure and partners to monetize.

But Fleming said they’re the least valuable licenses right now because you must transport marijuana from a legal Illinois entity, and the big MSOs will not give anyone a contract to begin. “You’d be a fool to believe that they’re gonna give you a contract,” he chuckled, “You really think these white people gonna let you move they drugs?”

As a social equity business owner, he said that it’s hard to find locations on the southwest side because those facilities don’t exist there already, and his team doesn’t have the capital to build them. The only people in this industry who would lend money to cannabis start-ups are hedge funds and other financial interests, he said. To try to lessen the widespread dependence on white investors, Fleming has reached out to Black athletes and Black entertainers to invest. 

“There should be more opportunities and resources put forth by the government to support social equity winners,” he said. “We feel like the city [and] the state, they should be providing the same resources that they do for big corporations coming to Illinois, to social equity winners.”

Elijah Hamilton is the CEO and Founder of Chummy’s Organix, a Chicago-based cannabidiol (CBD, a legal, nonpsychoactive by-product of cannabis) brand. “That’s the one that’s actually functioning, up and running right now,” Hamilton said. “And then I have Chummy’s Edibles, which was the brand that we attempted to get into the mainstream cannabis market . . . we went through that whole tumultuous process back in 2020. You know, going through the rush of trying to get into the game, so to speak.”

Long before being a business owner, Hamilton worked in the consumer packaged goods industry for a decade as a district manager of PepsiCo and Frito-Lay. “That’s pretty much where I got most of my skills from . . . market strategy, direct store delivery, how to IRI data, Nelson statistics planograms, how to structure route delivery.” By the time he considered making a dime off the cannabis industry, he was nearly bankrupt. A former friend showed him how to make edibles, and he started selling those casually to help him get back on his feet.

“I got pretty good at it. And then when I found Illinois was about to become recreational, we had decided, ‘Hey, let’s go ahead, start out.’”

Hamilton vertically integrated his company with seven others, and Chummy’s was the flagship brand because it already had recognition due to its success in the legacy market. But he said that once he saw how the state was dealing with the first round of dispensary licenses, he decided to pivot and start a CBD brand just in case it didn’t happen. 

“Turns out I was right.”

Hamilton ultimately left the dispensary license application process because Illinois kept adding stipulations. He found the cost of writing and submitting a social equity application—which he said could be more than $100,000—unreasonably high.

He added that commercial property owners have raised rents by thousands of dollars after learning spaces would be used as a cannabis kitchen or for a craft grower. And businesses require aldermanic approval before they can set up a dispensary. As he watched people around him go bankrupt in hopes of creating generational wealth, Hamilton pivoted to developing his CBD brand. 

“I didn’t want to throw all my eggs in one basket,” he said, “and then just kind of be left holding nothing.”

Since applying, both Robinson and Hamilton have become advocates with the Social Equity Empowerment Network (SEEN), which serves the Black community nationally by helping cannabis sellers move from the legacy to the legal market. Robinson has also worked to change state laws to prevent their experiences from being replicated. Hamilton uses his business as a model for other legacy businesses to move into the mainstream market. “The goal is to get [them] above ground,” he said. 

Robinson lives in Virginia now. She joined a few fruitless class-action lawsuits against the state of Illinois before moving there. She says the Illinois market is too unstable for her to encourage anyone to get involved now. “They’ve been guessing this whole process,” she said. “They’ve been putting pieces in place in real time instead of having these things in place prior” to opening the application process. 

Sometimes she regrets that she wasn’t able to afford more applications, but she comes back to the fact that her business may not have gotten the necessary governmental support to succeed regardless. “These people still out here having press conferences with the governor, that’s like the fifth press conference that they done had, to petition the governor to do something to continue to fix our open wounds with a Band-Aid.”

The process caused friction between her and her family members, and one of her family members who invested $20,000 while close to retirement won’t speak to her anymore. 

“To not even have a relationship with truly one of my favorite [family members] in the world is hurtful,” Robinson said. “They don’t understand the devastation that they brought to just not only individuals, but families.”

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