After an eccentric Monday Night Football win, it feels like the Chicago Bears have found their stride. They are pacing in the correct direction and a lot of that can be credited to not only the play on the field but the entirety of the coaching staff.

After weeks of tumultuous play, it seems as if the Bears finally got the memo that football is a team sport and in order to win, there has to be a full team effort.

The defense was remarkable. Jaquan Brisker had an amazing pick that ended Mac Jones’ night and Roquan Smith had eight of the defense’s 48 tackles. They also forced the Patriots to punt the ball away four times which is amazing.

On a wet and rainy day similar to that of opening day in Chicago, Justin Fields was trusted to throw the ball and the usage of the run game was only in opportunities where it was needed.

The Chicago Bears won a big game led by Matt Eberflus and Justin Fields.

Fields tossed for 179 yards with one touchdown. He also had one on the ground. It seemed as if his receivers had stepped up and locked in on a deeper level than they started the season on. Fields only threw seven incompletions and one interception.

Sure, Fields still took some licks but that can be expected after losing lineman Lucas Patrick early in the game.

Following the game, Matt Eberflus’ voice resonated nationwide and his postgame speech shows that he is just as in on winning, as the rest of the team, and the fanbase. The leadership that he displays is second to none in recent Bears history right now.

The Bears are on the cusp of a great end to the season, and finally firing on all cylinders. Not saying a playoff run is imminent or that the Bears are going to win the Super Bowl, but now gameday may not be as bad for Bears fans.

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On a Sunday afternoon in mid-September, Jackie Harvey stepped out of her home in Woodlawn for a breath of fresh air, only to notice flashing lights from several police vehicles and ambulances filling her street. 

She walked down the block to find out what was going on, seeing several of her neighbors amid the swelling crowd. As they looked on, one police officer attempted to resuscitate a young man using CPR. Another young man was being wheeled on a stretcher by EMTs to the open doors of an ambulance. Harvey saw blood suffusing his clothes. He had been shot. 

Harvey, an administrative assistant at Cook County Hospital with 29 years of experience, says that witnessing the aftermath of a mass shooting that left two men dead and two seriously injured was traumatic, even for her. So she understood when a relative of one of the victims arrived at the scene hysterical with grief. 

What she could not understand was why a police officer handcuffed the man. The officer took the cuffs off only after other community members explained the familial connection to one of the victims and demanded his release. 

“If I would have gotten involved, because I’m emotional and hysterical too, they probably would have handcuffed me,” Harvey said.

Harvey wondered whether the officer had never received sensitivity training, which could have prepared him to deal with a distraught relative. And why, out of the 20-some emergency responders on the scene, was there not a single person on hand who could offer counseling services after such a horrific event? 

One reason such services aren’t yet available has to do with the overall lack of mental health resources available to residents living in neighborhoods such as Woodlawn. Despite the frequent traumatic instances of violence thereabouts, the city has engaged in decades-long divestment from operating mental health centers. 

Back in 2012, Rahm Emanuel closed Woodlawn and Auburn-Gresham’s public mental health clinics as well as four others across Chicago in a continuation of the policies of his predecessor, Richard M. Daley, who had shuttered several before. In all, Emanuel and Daley closed 14 of the city’s 19 mental health clinics.

On November 8, residents of the Sixth, 20th, and 33rd Wards will vote on a nonbinding ballot initiative that asks whether they want to change course on that trajectory and reopen the city-run mental health clinics in support of a new dispatch system to send mental health professionals and EMTs instead of police officers to mental health emergency calls. 

In an impromptu interview at the Whitney Young Library in Chatham, community residents Richard Rosario and Brad Redrick indicated their support of the initiative. They said that reopening the clinics and dispatching care workers, not cops, made intuitive sense. Why send cops to deal with situations they’re not trained for?

“This should have been done so long ago it ain’t even funny,” Redrick said. “I used to work in mental health . . . and [people struggling with mental illness] are a vulnerable population that needs that kind of consideration.”

Tynisha Jointer, a former social worker at Deneen Elementary School who lives in Chatham, said that people in her neighborhood avoid calling the police because of fears that they will harm the very people they are called to assist. “Having an [alternative] outlet could definitely be helpful for families . . . supporting folks who are struggling with mental illness,” she said.

Although the referendum is nonbinding, it is part of a sustained effort by a group of community organizations known as the Collaborative for Community Wellness (CCW) to press the mayor and City Council to include funding for the development of a citywide mental health crisis response system in the city’s 2023 budget. In 2020, 33rd Ward alderperson Rossana Rodriguez Sanchez introduced a resolution that would have established such a system. 

Since September 2021, the city of Chicago began piloting a co-responder program, pairing police officers with mental health workers and paramedics in Crisis Assistance Response and Engagement (CARE) teams. CARE teams operated in a handful of neighborhoods on the southwest side during weekday hours. The teams were dispatched to over a hundred mental health crisis calls in the past year. In none of those cases was an arrest made or a use of force reported, according to Allison Arwady, Chicago’s public health commissioner.

Although Arwady has insisted police officers’ presence is essential to ensuring the safety of the other responders, in only one case out of 134 did a CARE team member sustain a minor injury. Organizers of the referendum contend that including officers on CARE teams is unnecessary at best and dangerous at worst. 

According to Cheryl Miller, a lifelong Chicagoan and former cabdriver who is now the public health organizer for Southside Together Organizing for Power (STOP), one of the groups that is a part of CCW, officers’ training teaches them to establish control over a situation, using force whenever a person is noncompliant, even if that person cannot readily comply because of their mental illness. 

“If the only tool you have is a hammer, everything you see is a nail,” Miller said. 

Debates on the 2023 budget begin soon, as does voting on candidates for all 50 aldermanic seats, so the referendum comes at a time when city officials may be more susceptible to public pressure.

And for Kennedy Bartley, the legislative director at United Working Families and who also worked on the referendum campaign, the organizers’ vision is about more than just providing essential mental health services—it is also about getting back the 125 unionized medical worker jobs, most of which were held by Black and Brown people, that Emanuel cut in 2012. 

“We believe that we don’t need to privatize our care,” Bartley said. “Governments are responsible for providing for safe and healthy communities.”

Read More

Angel Day makes freewheeling underground pop as Yesterdayneverhappened, and their new second album, The Demon at Dusk (Loveshock/Daybreak), zips around with such restless energy you might think they never sleep. The Chicago producer and vocalist has a knack for bricolage and an ear for the cutting edge, evident in the album’s effusive collision of dance music, hip-hop, and R&B; their local Daybreak parties book Black and Black trans artists working to reshape nightlife around the country. Day blends an ocean of sounds with great care, steering their songs into joyful abandon and stopping just short of unrestrained chaos. On “Brimstone Juju,” Day raps with unbothered cool over a craggy landscape built from jackhammer bass, a cyclone of drum ’n’ bass percussion, and reversed synth notes that sound like a haunted organ. It’s an impressive feat to maintain equanimity amid such pandemonium, and throughout The Demon at Dusk, Day provides a demonstration of how liberating it can be to ride out a tornado of your own creation. It’s often a great way to have fun too.

Yesterdayneverhappened This release party for The Demon at Dusk includes an interactive art installation. Ayeeyo, Swami Sound, El Brujo, and Marceline Steel open. Fri 10/28, 5 PM, Congruent Space, 1216 W. Grand, free, all ages

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Women love true-crime stories—so much so that SNL spoofed the fascination a few years ago with a song about women relaxing alone at home watching their favorite “Murder Show.” Fans of the podcast My Favorite Murder (aka “Murderinos”) are overwhelmingly female. When you’re raised from an early age to think that rape and murder are occupational hazards of your gender, maybe morbid laughter and obsessive research are two coping mechanisms—a way of saying to the world, “I’m not afraid, really. They’re just stories.”

Jennifer Rumberger’s The Locusts, now in its world premiere with the Gift Theatre, blends a crime procedural with a family drama to explore generational trauma around violence against women. It has its share of mordant humor, as well as a hopeful insistence on the power of reclaiming one’s own story as a survival mechanism. But it’s also a grim reminder that patriarchy is all about controlling women, instilling terror in their daily lives, and killing them for sport or spite on occasion. Sometimes that happens through “lone wolf” men. Sometimes it’s official state policy. (If you think abortion bans aren’t a form of government-sanctioned serial killing, you haven’t been paying attention.)

The Locusts Through 11/19: Thu-Sat 7:30 PM, Sun 3 PM, Theater Wit, 1229 W. Belmont, 773-975-8150, thegifttheatre.org, $38-$45 ($35 seniors, $25 students)

Ella (Cyd Blakewell) is an FBI special agent who’s been sent back to her hometown of Vero Beach, Florida, to help the local cops catch a serial killer. Ella left home as soon as she could, in large part because she somehow survived being kidnapped and raped as a teenager. She remembers very little of the attack, but signs of her PTSD are there if you look for them underneath her let’s-get-down-to-business exterior. That standoffish demeanor initially pisses off Layla (Jennifer Glasse), the police chief, who assumes Ella just looks down on the yokels. But young officer Robbie (Patrick Weber) is fascinated—until his first visit to one of the killer’s crime scenes leaves him reeling.

Ella’s pregnant sister, Maisie (Brittany Burch), whose couch she’s crashing on, remembers to string up some Christmas lights in the living room because Ella is still afraid of the dark. By contrast, Maisie’s daughter, Olive (Mariah Sydnei Gordon), writes tales of girls seeking vengeance against their attackers and dreams of being a writer in New York, much to the delight of her senescent grandmother (Renee Lockett), who ends up having quite a story of her own to tell. But then Olive’s friends start disappearing, and just surviving seems like a formidable enough challenge.

Rumberger has noted that part of the inspiration for her play (deftly directed here by John Gawlik) was reading about the early life of Mary Shelley. The author of Frankenstein never knew her mother, feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, who died shortly after giving birth to her, and she faced ostracism for her relationship with Percy Shelley, whose first wife killed herself. She turned that personal trauma into exteriorized monsters, much as Olive does with her fiction in the play. (At one point, Robbie refers to the electric chair as a “reverse Frankenstein”—electricity used to end a “monster,” rather than animate one.)

And while the brutal murders happening in town are foregrounded, it’s clear that Ella and Maisie also have unresolved issues around the suicide of their mother and the death by cancer of their father, as well as the existential dread of living in an ever-redder state. Maisie takes it as a personal affront that MAGA people have moved into their old family home in a town that seems to be dying on the vine. (The mall is gone, for one thing.) The decay feels palpable in Chas Mathieu’s set, hung with tattered swathes of cloth and with cartoonish cutouts of orange trees in the background, and in Trey Brazeal’s sickly shadowy lighting.

So there’s a lot heaped on the dramatic plate here, and not everything feels like it gets the development it deserves. The resentments between Ella and Maisie in particular feel like they’re swept away pretty quickly. (Though in fairness, having a killer stalking the streets probably makes old sibling rivalries feel like small potatoes.) What does stick is the way that each of the sisters has chosen a different way of dealing with their early traumas. Maisie, a nurse, cares for others in a hands-on way, while Ella is more comfortable in an office, analyzing crimes from a distance in order to achieve justice. Blakewell and Burch excel as two women who love each other, but have found it easier (at least in Ella’s case) to express that love from afar.

One thread throughout the play is that our insistence on rewarding girls for being “nice” is a form of grooming them for their own abuse. That guy with the crutches you stop to help with his packages may be setting you up. (Hello, Buffalo Bill!) It’s an interesting observation—being raised with awareness of your vulnerability as a woman, yet also being expected to serve others and put their needs ahead of yours, adds up to an unwinnable dynamic for assessing risk, when even just politely turning down a stranger’s advances on the street can get you battered or killed. (That’s not even taking into account the much higher likelihood of women being beaten or murdered by men who claim to “love” them.)

Rumberger, who has previously written pieces for Chicago’s horror-centered WildClaw Theatre (her Night in Alachua County from 2017 has some narrative similarities to what she’s doing here) doesn’t sugarcoat much. Blakewell’s monologues as Ella, particularly an absolutely searing cri de coeur near the end, sometimes feel as much like the playwright’s own anguished observations as they do the character’s. But Rumberger remains refreshingly unsentimental and steely-eyed in her vision of a world where women have to save themselves and their stories from everyone who reduces them to objects. 

At one point, Ella tells Robbie about the women whose murders she’s investigated, and how she mourns for all the things they could have done. Their killers get famous. The women stay dead. So we laugh to scare away the shadows, knowing that the monsters are real. And we wonder if watching one more true-crime documentary will give us the key to survival, or numb us to the point of apathy.

Read More

On a Sunday afternoon in mid-September, Jackie Harvey stepped out of her home in Woodlawn for a breath of fresh air, only to notice flashing lights from several police vehicles and ambulances filling her street. 

She walked down the block to find out what was going on, seeing several of her neighbors amid the swelling crowd. As they looked on, one police officer attempted to resuscitate a young man using CPR. Another young man was being wheeled on a stretcher by EMTs to the open doors of an ambulance. Harvey saw blood suffusing his clothes. He had been shot. 

Harvey, an administrative assistant at Cook County Hospital with 29 years of experience, says that witnessing the aftermath of a mass shooting that left two men dead and two seriously injured was traumatic, even for her. So she understood when a relative of one of the victims arrived at the scene hysterical with grief. 

What she could not understand was why a police officer handcuffed the man. The officer took the cuffs off only after other community members explained the familial connection to one of the victims and demanded his release. 

“If I would have gotten involved, because I’m emotional and hysterical too, they probably would have handcuffed me,” Harvey said.

Harvey wondered whether the officer had never received sensitivity training, which could have prepared him to deal with a distraught relative. And why, out of the 20-some emergency responders on the scene, was there not a single person on hand who could offer counseling services after such a horrific event? 

One reason such services aren’t yet available has to do with the overall lack of mental health resources available to residents living in neighborhoods such as Woodlawn. Despite the frequent traumatic instances of violence thereabouts, the city has engaged in decades-long divestment from operating mental health centers. 

Back in 2012, Rahm Emanuel closed Woodlawn and Auburn-Gresham’s public mental health clinics as well as four others across Chicago in a continuation of the policies of his predecessor, Richard M. Daley, who had shuttered several before. In all, Emanuel and Daley closed 14 of the city’s 19 mental health clinics.

On November 8, residents of the Sixth, 20th, and 33rd Wards will vote on a nonbinding ballot initiative that asks whether they want to change course on that trajectory and reopen the city-run mental health clinics in support of a new dispatch system to send mental health professionals and EMTs instead of police officers to mental health emergency calls. 

In an impromptu interview at the Whitney Young Library in Chatham, community residents Richard Rosario and Brad Redrick indicated their support of the initiative. They said that reopening the clinics and dispatching care workers, not cops, made intuitive sense. Why send cops to deal with situations they’re not trained for?

“This should have been done so long ago it ain’t even funny,” Redrick said. “I used to work in mental health . . . and [people struggling with mental illness] are a vulnerable population that needs that kind of consideration.”

Tynisha Jointer, a former social worker at Deneen Elementary School who lives in Chatham, said that people in her neighborhood avoid calling the police because of fears that they will harm the very people they are called to assist. “Having an [alternative] outlet could definitely be helpful for families . . . supporting folks who are struggling with mental illness,” she said.

Although the referendum is nonbinding, it is part of a sustained effort by a group of community organizations known as the Collaborative for Community Wellness (CCW) to press the mayor and City Council to include funding for the development of a citywide mental health crisis response system in the city’s 2023 budget. In 2020, 33rd Ward alderperson Rossana Rodriguez Sanchez introduced a resolution that would have established such a system. 

Since September 2021, the city of Chicago began piloting a co-responder program, pairing police officers with mental health workers and paramedics in Crisis Assistance Response and Engagement (CARE) teams. CARE teams operated in a handful of neighborhoods on the southwest side during weekday hours. The teams were dispatched to over a hundred mental health crisis calls in the past year. In none of those cases was an arrest made or a use of force reported, according to Allison Arwady, Chicago’s public health commissioner.

Although Arwady has insisted police officers’ presence is essential to ensuring the safety of the other responders, in only one case out of 134 did a CARE team member sustain a minor injury. Organizers of the referendum contend that including officers on CARE teams is unnecessary at best and dangerous at worst. 

According to Cheryl Miller, a lifelong Chicagoan and former cabdriver who is now the public health organizer for Southside Together Organizing for Power (STOP), one of the groups that is a part of CCW, officers’ training teaches them to establish control over a situation, using force whenever a person is noncompliant, even if that person cannot readily comply because of their mental illness. 

“If the only tool you have is a hammer, everything you see is a nail,” Miller said. 

Debates on the 2023 budget begin soon, as does voting on candidates for all 50 aldermanic seats, so the referendum comes at a time when city officials may be more susceptible to public pressure.

And for Kennedy Bartley, the legislative director at United Working Families and who also worked on the referendum campaign, the organizers’ vision is about more than just providing essential mental health services—it is also about getting back the 125 unionized medical worker jobs, most of which were held by Black and Brown people, that Emanuel cut in 2012. 

“We believe that we don’t need to privatize our care,” Bartley said. “Governments are responsible for providing for safe and healthy communities.”

Read More

Angel Day makes freewheeling underground pop as Yesterdayneverhappened, and their new second album, The Demon at Dusk (Loveshock/Daybreak), zips around with such restless energy you might think they never sleep. The Chicago producer and vocalist has a knack for bricolage and an ear for the cutting edge, evident in the album’s effusive collision of dance music, hip-hop, and R&B; their local Daybreak parties book Black and Black trans artists working to reshape nightlife around the country. Day blends an ocean of sounds with great care, steering their songs into joyful abandon and stopping just short of unrestrained chaos. On “Brimstone Juju,” Day raps with unbothered cool over a craggy landscape built from jackhammer bass, a cyclone of drum ’n’ bass percussion, and reversed synth notes that sound like a haunted organ. It’s an impressive feat to maintain equanimity amid such pandemonium, and throughout The Demon at Dusk, Day provides a demonstration of how liberating it can be to ride out a tornado of your own creation. It’s often a great way to have fun too.

Yesterdayneverhappened This release party for The Demon at Dusk includes an interactive art installation. Ayeeyo, Swami Sound, El Brujo, and Marceline Steel open. Fri 10/28, 5 PM, Congruent Space, 1216 W. Grand, free, all ages

Read More

Women love true-crime stories—so much so that SNL spoofed the fascination a few years ago with a song about women relaxing alone at home watching their favorite “Murder Show.” Fans of the podcast My Favorite Murder (aka “Murderinos”) are overwhelmingly female. When you’re raised from an early age to think that rape and murder are occupational hazards of your gender, maybe morbid laughter and obsessive research are two coping mechanisms—a way of saying to the world, “I’m not afraid, really. They’re just stories.”

Jennifer Rumberger’s The Locusts, now in its world premiere with the Gift Theatre, blends a crime procedural with a family drama to explore generational trauma around violence against women. It has its share of mordant humor, as well as a hopeful insistence on the power of reclaiming one’s own story as a survival mechanism. But it’s also a grim reminder that patriarchy is all about controlling women, instilling terror in their daily lives, and killing them for sport or spite on occasion. Sometimes that happens through “lone wolf” men. Sometimes it’s official state policy. (If you think abortion bans aren’t a form of government-sanctioned serial killing, you haven’t been paying attention.)

The Locusts Through 11/19: Thu-Sat 7:30 PM, Sun 3 PM, Theater Wit, 1229 W. Belmont, 773-975-8150, thegifttheatre.org, $38-$45 ($35 seniors, $25 students)

Ella (Cyd Blakewell) is an FBI special agent who’s been sent back to her hometown of Vero Beach, Florida, to help the local cops catch a serial killer. Ella left home as soon as she could, in large part because she somehow survived being kidnapped and raped as a teenager. She remembers very little of the attack, but signs of her PTSD are there if you look for them underneath her let’s-get-down-to-business exterior. That standoffish demeanor initially pisses off Layla (Jennifer Glasse), the police chief, who assumes Ella just looks down on the yokels. But young officer Robbie (Patrick Weber) is fascinated—until his first visit to one of the killer’s crime scenes leaves him reeling.

Ella’s pregnant sister, Maisie (Brittany Burch), whose couch she’s crashing on, remembers to string up some Christmas lights in the living room because Ella is still afraid of the dark. By contrast, Maisie’s daughter, Olive (Mariah Sydnei Gordon), writes tales of girls seeking vengeance against their attackers and dreams of being a writer in New York, much to the delight of her senescent grandmother (Renee Lockett), who ends up having quite a story of her own to tell. But then Olive’s friends start disappearing, and just surviving seems like a formidable enough challenge.

Rumberger has noted that part of the inspiration for her play (deftly directed here by John Gawlik) was reading about the early life of Mary Shelley. The author of Frankenstein never knew her mother, feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, who died shortly after giving birth to her, and she faced ostracism for her relationship with Percy Shelley, whose first wife killed herself. She turned that personal trauma into exteriorized monsters, much as Olive does with her fiction in the play. (At one point, Robbie refers to the electric chair as a “reverse Frankenstein”—electricity used to end a “monster,” rather than animate one.)

And while the brutal murders happening in town are foregrounded, it’s clear that Ella and Maisie also have unresolved issues around the suicide of their mother and the death by cancer of their father, as well as the existential dread of living in an ever-redder state. Maisie takes it as a personal affront that MAGA people have moved into their old family home in a town that seems to be dying on the vine. (The mall is gone, for one thing.) The decay feels palpable in Chas Mathieu’s set, hung with tattered swathes of cloth and with cartoonish cutouts of orange trees in the background, and in Trey Brazeal’s sickly shadowy lighting.

So there’s a lot heaped on the dramatic plate here, and not everything feels like it gets the development it deserves. The resentments between Ella and Maisie in particular feel like they’re swept away pretty quickly. (Though in fairness, having a killer stalking the streets probably makes old sibling rivalries feel like small potatoes.) What does stick is the way that each of the sisters has chosen a different way of dealing with their early traumas. Maisie, a nurse, cares for others in a hands-on way, while Ella is more comfortable in an office, analyzing crimes from a distance in order to achieve justice. Blakewell and Burch excel as two women who love each other, but have found it easier (at least in Ella’s case) to express that love from afar.

One thread throughout the play is that our insistence on rewarding girls for being “nice” is a form of grooming them for their own abuse. That guy with the crutches you stop to help with his packages may be setting you up. (Hello, Buffalo Bill!) It’s an interesting observation—being raised with awareness of your vulnerability as a woman, yet also being expected to serve others and put their needs ahead of yours, adds up to an unwinnable dynamic for assessing risk, when even just politely turning down a stranger’s advances on the street can get you battered or killed. (That’s not even taking into account the much higher likelihood of women being beaten or murdered by men who claim to “love” them.)

Rumberger, who has previously written pieces for Chicago’s horror-centered WildClaw Theatre (her Night in Alachua County from 2017 has some narrative similarities to what she’s doing here) doesn’t sugarcoat much. Blakewell’s monologues as Ella, particularly an absolutely searing cri de coeur near the end, sometimes feel as much like the playwright’s own anguished observations as they do the character’s. But Rumberger remains refreshingly unsentimental and steely-eyed in her vision of a world where women have to save themselves and their stories from everyone who reduces them to objects. 

At one point, Ella tells Robbie about the women whose murders she’s investigated, and how she mourns for all the things they could have done. Their killers get famous. The women stay dead. So we laugh to scare away the shadows, knowing that the monsters are real. And we wonder if watching one more true-crime documentary will give us the key to survival, or numb us to the point of apathy.

Read More