Rachelle Bowden had seen the flier for the Outdoor Toasting and Gratitude Event in Kilbourn Park with the illustration of a fiddling cricket and the toad playing the viola, the legend “Here’s to the Memory of Ourselves Without Regret,” the promise of “music, art, snacks, and activity stations.” “Write a Toast to a Tree!” the flier suggested. “Make a Flower for a Friend!” Bowden had posted about the event in the Kilbourn Park Connection Facebook group. But she still wasn’t sure what to expect when she brought her grade-school-age son, Makai, on Tuesday night.

“I was like, treats and stations,” Rachelle said. “We only live a block away. It was low risk.”

Plus, it was Kilbourn Park. When you live near Kilbourn Park, there’s not much else to do but go to Kilbourn Park, an eleven-and-a-half-acre wedge of grass on the Northwest Side, whose eastern edge is defined by the Union Pacific-Northwest Metra tracks.

“We lived in Logan Square for ten years in a condo,” Bowden said. “We were half a block from the Blue Line at California and Milwaukee. We thought we could buy in Avondale, but we couldn’t, so we just kept going up Milwaukee Avenue. Now, I walk a mile to Starbucks. When we were signing the papers, they said, ‘Welcome to the suburbs in the city.’”

Once Bowden moved in, she signed Makai up for Garden Buddies, the toddler gardening class at the Kilbourn Park Greenhouse, one of the Chicago Park District’s three greenhouses. The Lincoln Park and Garfield Park conservatories are the others. Kilbourn Park’s is a lot smaller, with a few plants labeled “Tall Agave” and “Caution: Hot Peppers.”

The gardening program is “something you can’t get in any other park in the city,” Rachelle said. “They had a cocktail party with Revolution Brewing.”

Rachelle and Makai checked in for Outdoor Gratitude and Toasting at a folding table set next to a hawthorn tree. A sign hanging from the branches read “HERE’S TO THIS TREE/SALUD A ESTE ARBOL.”

Saluting a hawthorn tree in Kilbourn Park. Edward McClelland

“We’re inviting people coming today to, say, give thanks to this tree,” said Robin Cline, a member of Opera-Matic, the public art organization throwing the event. “I would give them an opportunity to look at the objects around us and say, ‘Thanks to this tree’; ‘Thanks to this water fountain.’ We want to feel grateful to the people who have helped us make it through the last two or three years.”

Rachelle and Makai each filled out a slip of paper. Rachelle gave thanks to her son Makai: “You are smart and loving and HANDSOME,” she wrote. Makai gave thanks to his dog, KC, “a small, cute, lovable doggo.” The slips were handed to two guitarists and a banjo player sitting under a tree. They were making up gratitude songs on the fly. 

“KC, it’s good to know you, doggie,” sang the lead guitarist, Mr. Nick Davio. “You’re so cute and lovable. You’re on a leash, you can’t be beat. KC, one, two, three, I love this dog, oh, can’t you see.”

“Makai, they’re singing about KC!” Rachelle called to her son. She stood in front of the musicians and recorded the song on her phone. It wasn’t going to be released in any other format. 

“I liked it!” Makai said, giving a thumbs up.

The woodchip-covered enclosure between the fieldhouse and the tennis courts was crowded with children from the neighborhood. Opera-Matic members, brightly dressed in pinks, yellows and oranges, helped them construct paper flowers, color a forest scene, and decorate plastic cups full of apple cider.

“This is a toast to somebody’s son, Makai,” said Mr. Nick Davio, introducing the next song. “A toast from your mom, Rachelle.”

Rachelle aimed her camera at the band and pressed “Video.”

“You are so smart and caring and handsome,” Mr. Nick Davio sang, off the top of his head. “You know how to dress the best. Got a dog named KC and you’re eating some Chex Mix. We’re just sittin’ around singing a song about Makai, my guy.”

Makai gave that song a thumbs up, too.

Making up songs on the spot — including about a special doggo. Edward McClelland

Makai’s friend Cooper was grateful for his favorite video games: Fortnight, Minecraft, and Grand Theft Auto 5. So the musicians sang about those.

“I was boss of the song,” Cooper bragged. “My friends were just helping me.”

The crescent moon rose over the Metra tracks. The sun set behind the houses on the western edge of the park. The few remaining children gamboled through the Tunnel of Joy — pastel-colored cloths held aloft by the Opera-Matics. The band ran out of toasts and started in on Latin jams, with the help of a late-arriving conga player.

Since it was sponsored by Night Out in the Parks, the Outdoor Toasting and Gratitude is coming soon to a park near you — if you live on the Northwest Side. Next Tuesday, October 11, at 4:30 p.m., it’s happening in Simons Park, 1640 N. Drake Ave., in Humboldt Park. On Tuesday, October 18, it will be in Mozart Park, 2036 N. Avers Ave., in Logan Square. We are grateful for autumn, but after that, the evenings may be too cold to toast the season.

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“Extraordinary,” muses Amanda, the heroine of Noël Coward’s Private Lives, “how potent cheap music is.” Her rueful observation, uttered while she is standing on the terrace of a hotel where she is staying, is in reference to a song playing in the ballroom below. The melody is described in Coward’s script as “a sentimental, romantic little tune,” but the song’s title is not identified. In most productions of the oft-revived classic play, the refrain is one of Coward’s own creations—usually “Someday I’ll Find You,” which Coward himself actually crooned in the original 1930 production, in which he portrayed Elyot, the ex-husband of Amanda, who was played by Gertrude Lawrence. The estranged couple have unexpectedly run into each other at a resort in Deauville, France, where they are both on their honeymoons—she with new husband Victor, he with new bride Sibyl. Their unexpected encounter rekindles the old flame, with disastrous results for their second attempts at marriage—and uproarious results for the audience.

Private Lives Through 11/13: Thu-Sat 7:30 PM, Sun 3 PM; close captioned performance Sun 10/23, 3 PM (screens are limited), touch tour Sun 10/30 1:30 PM, Raven Theatre, 6157 N. Clark, 773-338-2177, raventheatre.com, $40 (students/active military and veterans $15)

In Raven Theatre’s new production, smartly directed by Ian Frank, the song that triggers Amanda and Elyot’s nostalgia is Jennifer Rush’s 1984 hit “The Power of Love.” Cheap music indeed. But potent, too—at least for Elyot and Amanda, who break into a music-video fantasy (cleverly choreographed by Kristina Fluty) that Coward could never have imagined. Without changing a line of dialogue, Frank resets the action from the days of Jazz Age Britain’s “Bright Young Things” to an unspecified but decidedly more up-to-date era in keeping with the current cast’s own ages. It’s a canny move, and it works like a charm. Raven’s hilarious Private Lives is an excellent introduction to the classic comedy for those who have never seen it, but it’s also a fresh rethinking that viewers familiar with the material can appreciate. Even the twist ending that Frank gives his staging—a shrewd reversal of Coward’s original—is perfectly in line with Coward’s theme: the power of love.

While generally categorized as a “comedy of manners”in the tradition of Oscar Wilde and Somerset Maugham, Private Lives can actually be viewed as one of the first, and best, examples of the loopy “screwball comedy” genre that became so popular in the 1930s. It’s playful, irreverent, smart, and sexy, with crisp one-liners that simmer with sizzling emotional subtext. Its focus is not only Amanda and Elyot’s passion for each other—complicated by their recent marriages to second spouses—but the ridiculousness of love itself.

Emily Tate as Amanda and Rudy Galvan as Elyot are in the grip of an intense, explosive attraction that brings out both the best and worst in each of them in hilarious ways, as their irreverent, free-thinking amorality collides with their damnable streaks of jealousy, vanity, and pure stubbornness. They are great fun to watch as they play off each other, moment by moment. Tate is especially good with her mercurial shifts from edgy defiance to introspective vulnerability. Matthew Martinez Hannon and Alexis Green are Victor and Sibyl, the hapless second spouses. And—in another clever update—Bradley Halverson as Amanda’s French maid Louise is a nonbinary commentator on the story’s heterosexual hijinks, narrating Coward’s stage directions en français.

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“Extraordinary,” muses Amanda, the heroine of Noël Coward’s Private Lives, “how potent cheap music is.” Her rueful observation, uttered while she is standing on the terrace of a hotel where she is staying, is in reference to a song playing in the ballroom below. The melody is described in Coward’s script as “a sentimental, romantic little tune,” but the song’s title is not identified. In most productions of the oft-revived classic play, the refrain is one of Coward’s own creations—usually “Someday I’ll Find You,” which Coward himself actually crooned in the original 1930 production, in which he portrayed Elyot, the ex-husband of Amanda, who was played by Gertrude Lawrence. The estranged couple have unexpectedly run into each other at a resort in Deauville, France, where they are both on their honeymoons—she with new husband Victor, he with new bride Sibyl. Their unexpected encounter rekindles the old flame, with disastrous results for their second attempts at marriage—and uproarious results for the audience.

Private Lives Through 11/13: Thu-Sat 7:30 PM, Sun 3 PM; close captioned performance Sun 10/23, 3 PM (screens are limited), touch tour Sun 10/30 1:30 PM, Raven Theatre, 6157 N. Clark, 773-338-2177, raventheatre.com, $40 (students/active military and veterans $15)

In Raven Theatre’s new production, smartly directed by Ian Frank, the song that triggers Amanda and Elyot’s nostalgia is Jennifer Rush’s 1984 hit “The Power of Love.” Cheap music indeed. But potent, too—at least for Elyot and Amanda, who break into a music-video fantasy (cleverly choreographed by Kristina Fluty) that Coward could never have imagined. Without changing a line of dialogue, Frank resets the action from the days of Jazz Age Britain’s “Bright Young Things” to an unspecified but decidedly more up-to-date era in keeping with the current cast’s own ages. It’s a canny move, and it works like a charm. Raven’s hilarious Private Lives is an excellent introduction to the classic comedy for those who have never seen it, but it’s also a fresh rethinking that viewers familiar with the material can appreciate. Even the twist ending that Frank gives his staging—a shrewd reversal of Coward’s original—is perfectly in line with Coward’s theme: the power of love.

While generally categorized as a “comedy of manners”in the tradition of Oscar Wilde and Somerset Maugham, Private Lives can actually be viewed as one of the first, and best, examples of the loopy “screwball comedy” genre that became so popular in the 1930s. It’s playful, irreverent, smart, and sexy, with crisp one-liners that simmer with sizzling emotional subtext. Its focus is not only Amanda and Elyot’s passion for each other—complicated by their recent marriages to second spouses—but the ridiculousness of love itself.

Emily Tate as Amanda and Rudy Galvan as Elyot are in the grip of an intense, explosive attraction that brings out both the best and worst in each of them in hilarious ways, as their irreverent, free-thinking amorality collides with their damnable streaks of jealousy, vanity, and pure stubbornness. They are great fun to watch as they play off each other, moment by moment. Tate is especially good with her mercurial shifts from edgy defiance to introspective vulnerability. Matthew Martinez Hannon and Alexis Green are Victor and Sibyl, the hapless second spouses. And—in another clever update—Bradley Halverson as Amanda’s French maid Louise is a nonbinary commentator on the story’s heterosexual hijinks, narrating Coward’s stage directions en français.

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Since 2004 Plastic Crimewave (aka Steve Krakow) has used the Secret History of Chicago Music to shine a light on worthy artists with Chicago ties who’ve been forgotten, underrated, or never noticed in the first place.

Once again, Chicago has lost a legendary musician, and in this author’s opinion there haven’t been nearly enough public tributes. Jim Post was a crucial part of the Old Town folk scene in the 1970s, but compared to John Prine, one of his contemporaries on that scene, he’s barely been memorialized. Both men had long, productive careers, and I’d argue that Post took more interesting twists and turns on his path—he even had a hippie-era hit song with the duo Friend and Lover. But there’s no need for comparisons. Post was very much his own man, and a real character too.

Jimmie David Post was born in Houston on October 28, 1939, and grew up outside the city in southeast Texas. In the liner notes to a 2005 reissue of Friend and Lover’s sole LP, Post explained his upbringing to author Richie Unterberger: “I lived in 100,000 acres of forest,” he said, “about five to ten miles up the river from the San Jacinto Battleground where Texas won its freedom.” He started out by singing gospel at Baptist revival meetings, and at age six he won a broadcast radio competition. At that point, the die was cast, and Post was a performer for life. 

As a young man Post joined Houston folk group the Rum Runners. “Our first tour was the Playboy tour, so I went from singing church music revivals to the Playboy tour,” he told Unterberger. A 1964 Rum Runners gig at a fair in Alberta, Canada, would alter the course of Post’s life. He met dancer Cathy Conn, who was performing at the same event, and was instantly smitten. She lived in Chicago Ridge, just southwest of the city, and in short order Post packed up and moved here. 

The couple threw caution to the wind and married within a few months. As the musical duo Jim & Cathy, they started playing the north-side folk scene, though the term “folk” never sat quite right with Post. “I didn’t know I was a folk musician until I went to Chicago, and some people at the Old Town School of Folk Music said, ‘Well, you’re a folk singer,’” he told Unterberger. “But there’s a difference between a folk singer who grew up in Chicago and decided to be a folk singer, and someone who grew up in the deep woods, going to those revival meetings and those dances and stuff, and coming straight out of it. We didn’t think of it as folk music.” 

The duo drew good crowds at the Earl of Old Town, the epicenter of the local folk scene, and soon signed with Chess Records subsidiary Cadet. They released one single as Jim & Cathy, 1966’s “Santa’s Got a Brand New Bag” b/w “People Stand Back” (both written by Post), and neither exactly set the charts on fire.

In an attempt to keep up with changing trends, the couple renamed themselves Friend and Lover—Post was the friend, Conn the lover. They released one single on ABC Records (“A Town Called Love” b/w “If Tomorrow”), then went to New York to audition for Verve Records executive Jerry Schoenbaum. “He said, ‘You have to send me a tape, ’cause I never listen to people in person, because I’m affected by the way they look,’ which is kind of strange when you think about it,” Post told Unterberger. “I said to him, ‘Well, why don’t you turn and look out the window, and we’ll sing for you?’” When Schoenbaum turned back around, there was a big smile on his face. The duo ended up getting signed. 

Released in fall 1967, “Reach Out of the Darkness” didn’t become an anthem for a generation until months and months later, in summer 1968. A great deal of dubious lore surrounds the timing of the song’s success. One of my favorite stories, which I can’t verify, concerns a manager or promo man who cranked it from a sound truck near a sit-in to protest the draft at Golden Gate Park (or outside the park’s Kezar Stadium, where thousands of students who’d been arrested at the sit-in were being held). Supposedly this savvy operator also plied Bay Area radio stations with copies of the infectious flower-power tune. 

The song fell off the charts quickly, but it’s had a long life: in the late 80s and early 90s, it was famously sampled by Biz Markie and by the trio Krush, and it’s been used in a long list of movies, commercials, and TV shows, including the original Beverly Hills, 90210 in the 90s and the sixth season of Mad Men in 2013.

On the strength of that hit, Friend and Lover recorded their only album, also called Reach Out of the Darkness, but the sessions suffered from session-drummer snafus and South’s declining interest. Post himself wasn’t a fan of the record, but I enjoy a lot of it—“Ode to a Dandelion,” also released as a B side in 1968, is primo acid folk (long before the genre had a name). I also like some of the Friend and Lover singles that followed, like the driving, psychedelic “Circus” from 1969. Their last release was the soulful “Hard Lovin’” b/w “Colorado Exile,” which came out in 1970, the same year the couple broke up and took the band with them.

This led to other such productions in the early 90s, such as The Best Damn Songs (Most People Never Heard), a memorial of sorts to his departed folk pals Steve Goodman and Stan Rogers. An Evening in Old Town also paid tribute to Chicago’s bygone folk scene: “Between songs Post reminisces about the early days,” wrote Reader critic Mary Shen Barnidge in 1994, “performing in Old Town clubs in the company of artists whose concert posters and album covers decorate the wall behind him—Steve Goodman, Fred Holstein, John Prine, Thom Bishop, Bryan Bowers, Tom Dundee, humble sideman Stephen Wade, and Bonnie Koloc.”

For his next act, Post created a beloved portrayal of Mark Twain (in Twain’s day, Galena was served by a busy steamboat port on the Mississippi). He wrote Mark Twain and the Laughing River and debuted it with a backing band in 1996; later in its long run, it was usually a one-man show, with just Post’s guitar or banjo and his goose-bump-raising voice. 

Jim Post performs a song in character as part of Mark Twain and the Laughing River.

“The tunes, belted out in Post’s clarion country-gospel tenor, are catchy and charming,” wrote Reader critic Albert Williams at the time. “The hilarious, insightful stories and aphorisms convey Twain’s amusement at the foibles of human nature. . . . Post’s mischievous, slightly show-offy foxy-grandpa persona is irresistible.” He traveled widely to appear as Twain, and the role won him an American Library Association Award in 1997.

That same decade, Post got involved in children’s entertainment. Maureen O’Donnell shared his thoughts on the subject in her excellent Sun-Times obituary: “Performing for kids,” Post said in 1990, “is like performing for happy drunks.”

Post is gone, but his rich body of work and outsize personality live on in his fans’ hearts and record collections. O’Donnell recalls that Post used to end his gigs by reminding the crowd, “If you keep coming to see me, I’ll never get a real job.” He never did—and we were all better off for it.

Special thanks to Ken Voss and Richard Friedman for sharing their knowledge.

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Aleshea Harris’s 2018 performance piece, What to Send Up When It Goes Down, had its local premiere this past spring with Congo Square Theatre Company in a production that played both in West Town (at GRAY Chicago) and the south side (Rebuild Foundation Stony Island Arts Bank). It’s back now in a short residency with Lookingglass Theatre, which means that this show, which is written explicitly for Black audiences, is onstage in the heart of the Gold Coast’s historically white and wealthy populace. 

So though this piece—which uses a variety of theatrical narrative techniques and rituals to excavate the pain of Black communities devastated by police violence—is not created for white audiences, we are welcome to attend. And we should.

What to Send Up When It Goes Down Through 10/16: Wed-Fri 7 PM, Sat 2 and 7 PM, Sun 2 PM, Lookingglass Theatre, 821 N. Michigan, 312-337-0665, lookingglasstheatre.org, $40

Codirected by Congo Square artistic director Ericka Ratcliff and ensemble member Daniel Bryant, and featuring an indelible and hypnotic seven-member ensemble, the show opens with a group exercise (though that’s really far too clinical a word for what happens) where the audience, directed by Alexandria Moorman, stands in a circle listening to and sharing our names, our experiences with racism, our reactions to the effects of white supremacy on Black people and communities. Then, through a series of scenes—sometimes satirical, sometimes sorrowful, and often an interweaving of both—the strategies of survival and resistance that Black people must learn to negotiate the toxicity of white supremacy come through clearly. (A gospel-inflected song led by Jos N. Banks rocks the rafters of the theater, and reminds us of the role of faith and music as part of the historical resistance of Black Americans to racism.)

In one scene, a young woman (Chanell Bell) is criticized by a friend for the way she walks, and told that it’s too provocative, too likely to attract unwanted attention in white neighborhoods. Yet to our eyes, there’s absolutely nothing unusual about it. 

But that’s quite obviously Harris’s point: all Black people are judged and pinned down by assumptions made by white people that can never be overcome, no matter who they are. Last week’s episode of Real Time with Bill Maher, where Atlantic writer Caitlin Flanagan declared that Vice President Kamala Harris is “for some reason, an off-putting person,” perfectly illustrates that there aren’t just double standards for Black people; there are invisible and ever-shifting standards that white people don’t ever have to justify. (There are just reasons, OK?!) 

Last week is also when NPR reported on the pressures facing Nataki Garrett, the Black artistic director at the prestigious Oregon Shakespeare Festival. The headline (“Oregon Shakespeare Festival focuses on expansion—but is not without its critics”) managed to gloss over the fact that some of the “criticism” Garrett faces in her professional role has come in the form of death threats, so she now travels with a security detail. Seeing Willie “Prince Roc” Round as a young Black man taking what seem to our white eyes as desperate measures to avoid being seen by those who might take his life, after reading about what Garrett has had to endure, was a real gut punch.

In another series of scenes, Penelope Walker plays a Miss Ann-type, bleating about how “wealthy, white, and liberated” she is, while ordering around her driver (Joey Stone) and questioning her maid (who is actually Made, as in a self-made woman, played with simmering rage and panache by McKenzie Chinn). Chinn’s character builds up an arsenal of housekeeping tools that are actually weapons, while deflecting questions about whether or not she has children—until the truth bursts forth in a sorrowful righteous revelation.

The names of so many (too many) lost to racialized violence line the walls of the Lookingglass lobby, alongside poems by Chicagoans like Eve Ewing. The show I attended was dedicated to the memory of Tamir Rice, a little boy killed by police for being a kid and playing with a toy gun in a park, as kids have done for generations. We said his name a dozen times—once for every year of his too-short life. “It happened yesterday. It will happen tomorrow,” we hear over and over as Harris’s singular and compelling piece unfolds. Repetition is a key device in What to Send Up When It Comes Down, reminding us of the numbing regularity with which we hear stories of Black people killed by police and other agents of white supremacy.

At the end of the show, the non-Black audience members are asked to gather in the lobby while the Black audience members stay behind in the stark theater, which is lit by banks of electric candles and with more names of the murdered hanging down from a large fixture at one end of the otherwise bare stage. This separation is not about “division,” as we keep hearing is what happens if we ever talk honestly about racism. It’s about accountability. Black people deserve room to heal and experience joy and hope as well as rage. It’s up to white people to do the work to tear down our own biases and harmful institutions.

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The UrbanTheater Company’s performing space on Division Street is not small—I have seen them stage plays there just packed with actors—but it is really not large enough to contain all that Flaco Navaja brings to it in this tight little solo show. For 80 minutes, the New York-based chameleon poet, actor, and singer fills the space with characters and scenes, friends, family, and total strangers (an intense mother, a hapless school friend, a wise but emotionally wounded Vietnam vet uncle, an ex-wife giving birth in an Uber). Lecturing, shouting, dancing, singing, crying out in pain, he recounts key moments from his life growing up in the Bronx (where he was born and raised) and other boroughs of New York City. Navaja was for a while the host of the open-mike showcase, “All That! Hip Hop Poetry & Jazz,” at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe in Manhattan, and his experience creating worlds with just a microphone and a room full of observers shows.

Evolution of a Sonero Through 10/23: Thu-Sat 8 PM, Sun 4 PM, UrbanTheater Company, 2620 W. Division, urbantheaterchicago.org or clata.org, $42.50

What makes this show (presented as part of the fifth annual Destinos: Chicago International Latino Theater Festival) remarkable, though, is that Navaja is not content to just tell us his life stories. He adds a second layer to the evening. Backed by a small but powerful band, the Razor Blades (an homage, perhaps, to salsa and Latin jazz singer, composer, and actor Rubén Blades), Navaja also delivers a lecture-demonstration on popular music, specifically Latin music, and the structure of salsa songs. The two aspects of the show—the personal and the cultural—are tightly woven together; much of the musical lecture also concerns Navaja’s still-only-partly-fulfilled yearning to become a great sonero (the singer in salsa bands). The result is an intense, entertaining, thoroughly satisfying, intimate show that still somehow stretches the seams of UrbanTheater Company’s spacious performing space.

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Since 2004 Plastic Crimewave (aka Steve Krakow) has used the Secret History of Chicago Music to shine a light on worthy artists with Chicago ties who’ve been forgotten, underrated, or never noticed in the first place.

Once again, Chicago has lost a legendary musician, and in this author’s opinion there haven’t been nearly enough public tributes. Jim Post was a crucial part of the Old Town folk scene in the 1970s, but compared to John Prine, one of his contemporaries on that scene, he’s barely been memorialized. Both men had long, productive careers, and I’d argue that Post took more interesting twists and turns on his path—he even had a hippie-era hit song with the duo Friend and Lover. But there’s no need for comparisons. Post was very much his own man, and a real character too.

Jimmie David Post was born in Houston on October 28, 1939, and grew up outside the city in southeast Texas. In the liner notes to a 2005 reissue of Friend and Lover’s sole LP, Post explained his upbringing to author Richie Unterberger: “I lived in 100,000 acres of forest,” he said, “about five to ten miles up the river from the San Jacinto Battleground where Texas won its freedom.” He started out by singing gospel at Baptist revival meetings, and at age six he won a broadcast radio competition. At that point, the die was cast, and Post was a performer for life. 

As a young man Post joined Houston folk group the Rum Runners. “Our first tour was the Playboy tour, so I went from singing church music revivals to the Playboy tour,” he told Unterberger. A 1964 Rum Runners gig at a fair in Alberta, Canada, would alter the course of Post’s life. He met dancer Cathy Conn, who was performing at the same event, and was instantly smitten. She lived in Chicago Ridge, just southwest of the city, and in short order Post packed up and moved here. 

The couple threw caution to the wind and married within a few months. As the musical duo Jim & Cathy, they started playing the north-side folk scene, though the term “folk” never sat quite right with Post. “I didn’t know I was a folk musician until I went to Chicago, and some people at the Old Town School of Folk Music said, ‘Well, you’re a folk singer,’” he told Unterberger. “But there’s a difference between a folk singer who grew up in Chicago and decided to be a folk singer, and someone who grew up in the deep woods, going to those revival meetings and those dances and stuff, and coming straight out of it. We didn’t think of it as folk music.” 

The duo drew good crowds at the Earl of Old Town, the epicenter of the local folk scene, and soon signed with Chess Records subsidiary Cadet. They released one single as Jim & Cathy, 1966’s “Santa’s Got a Brand New Bag” b/w “People Stand Back” (both written by Post), and neither exactly set the charts on fire.

In an attempt to keep up with changing trends, the couple renamed themselves Friend and Lover—Post was the friend, Conn the lover. They released one single on ABC Records (“A Town Called Love” b/w “If Tomorrow”), then went to New York to audition for Verve Records executive Jerry Schoenbaum. “He said, ‘You have to send me a tape, ’cause I never listen to people in person, because I’m affected by the way they look,’ which is kind of strange when you think about it,” Post told Unterberger. “I said to him, ‘Well, why don’t you turn and look out the window, and we’ll sing for you?’” When Schoenbaum turned back around, there was a big smile on his face. The duo ended up getting signed. 

Released in fall 1967, “Reach Out of the Darkness” didn’t become an anthem for a generation until months and months later, in summer 1968. A great deal of dubious lore surrounds the timing of the song’s success. One of my favorite stories, which I can’t verify, concerns a manager or promo man who cranked it from a sound truck near a sit-in to protest the draft at Golden Gate Park (or outside the park’s Kezar Stadium, where thousands of students who’d been arrested at the sit-in were being held). Supposedly this savvy operator also plied Bay Area radio stations with copies of the infectious flower-power tune. 

The song fell off the charts quickly, but it’s had a long life: in the late 80s and early 90s, it was famously sampled by Biz Markie and by the trio Krush, and it’s been used in a long list of movies, commercials, and TV shows, including the original Beverly Hills, 90210 in the 90s and the sixth season of Mad Men in 2013.

On the strength of that hit, Friend and Lover recorded their only album, also called Reach Out of the Darkness, but the sessions suffered from session-drummer snafus and South’s declining interest. Post himself wasn’t a fan of the record, but I enjoy a lot of it—“Ode to a Dandelion,” also released as a B side in 1968, is primo acid folk (long before the genre had a name). I also like some of the Friend and Lover singles that followed, like the driving, psychedelic “Circus” from 1969. Their last release was the soulful “Hard Lovin’” b/w “Colorado Exile,” which came out in 1970, the same year the couple broke up and took the band with them.

This led to other such productions in the early 90s, such as The Best Damn Songs (Most People Never Heard), a memorial of sorts to his departed folk pals Steve Goodman and Stan Rogers. An Evening in Old Town also paid tribute to Chicago’s bygone folk scene: “Between songs Post reminisces about the early days,” wrote Reader critic Mary Shen Barnidge in 1994, “performing in Old Town clubs in the company of artists whose concert posters and album covers decorate the wall behind him—Steve Goodman, Fred Holstein, John Prine, Thom Bishop, Bryan Bowers, Tom Dundee, humble sideman Stephen Wade, and Bonnie Koloc.”

For his next act, Post created a beloved portrayal of Mark Twain (in Twain’s day, Galena was served by a busy steamboat port on the Mississippi). He wrote Mark Twain and the Laughing River and debuted it with a backing band in 1996; later in its long run, it was usually a one-man show, with just Post’s guitar or banjo and his goose-bump-raising voice. 

Jim Post performs a song in character as part of Mark Twain and the Laughing River.

“The tunes, belted out in Post’s clarion country-gospel tenor, are catchy and charming,” wrote Reader critic Albert Williams at the time. “The hilarious, insightful stories and aphorisms convey Twain’s amusement at the foibles of human nature. . . . Post’s mischievous, slightly show-offy foxy-grandpa persona is irresistible.” He traveled widely to appear as Twain, and the role won him an American Library Association Award in 1997.

That same decade, Post got involved in children’s entertainment. Maureen O’Donnell shared his thoughts on the subject in her excellent Sun-Times obituary: “Performing for kids,” Post said in 1990, “is like performing for happy drunks.”

Post is gone, but his rich body of work and outsize personality live on in his fans’ hearts and record collections. O’Donnell recalls that Post used to end his gigs by reminding the crowd, “If you keep coming to see me, I’ll never get a real job.” He never did—and we were all better off for it.

Special thanks to Ken Voss and Richard Friedman for sharing their knowledge.

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Aleshea Harris’s 2018 performance piece, What to Send Up When It Goes Down, had its local premiere this past spring with Congo Square Theatre Company in a production that played both in West Town (at GRAY Chicago) and the south side (Rebuild Foundation Stony Island Arts Bank). It’s back now in a short residency with Lookingglass Theatre, which means that this show, which is written explicitly for Black audiences, is onstage in the heart of the Gold Coast’s historically white and wealthy populace. 

So though this piece—which uses a variety of theatrical narrative techniques and rituals to excavate the pain of Black communities devastated by police violence—is not created for white audiences, we are welcome to attend. And we should.

What to Send Up When It Goes Down Through 10/16: Wed-Fri 7 PM, Sat 2 and 7 PM, Sun 2 PM, Lookingglass Theatre, 821 N. Michigan, 312-337-0665, lookingglasstheatre.org, $40

Codirected by Congo Square artistic director Ericka Ratcliff and ensemble member Daniel Bryant, and featuring an indelible and hypnotic seven-member ensemble, the show opens with a group exercise (though that’s really far too clinical a word for what happens) where the audience, directed by Alexandria Moorman, stands in a circle listening to and sharing our names, our experiences with racism, our reactions to the effects of white supremacy on Black people and communities. Then, through a series of scenes—sometimes satirical, sometimes sorrowful, and often an interweaving of both—the strategies of survival and resistance that Black people must learn to negotiate the toxicity of white supremacy come through clearly. (A gospel-inflected song led by Jos N. Banks rocks the rafters of the theater, and reminds us of the role of faith and music as part of the historical resistance of Black Americans to racism.)

In one scene, a young woman (Chanell Bell) is criticized by a friend for the way she walks, and told that it’s too provocative, too likely to attract unwanted attention in white neighborhoods. Yet to our eyes, there’s absolutely nothing unusual about it. 

But that’s quite obviously Harris’s point: all Black people are judged and pinned down by assumptions made by white people that can never be overcome, no matter who they are. Last week’s episode of Real Time with Bill Maher, where Atlantic writer Caitlin Flanagan declared that Vice President Kamala Harris is “for some reason, an off-putting person,” perfectly illustrates that there aren’t just double standards for Black people; there are invisible and ever-shifting standards that white people don’t ever have to justify. (There are just reasons, OK?!) 

Last week is also when NPR reported on the pressures facing Nataki Garrett, the Black artistic director at the prestigious Oregon Shakespeare Festival. The headline (“Oregon Shakespeare Festival focuses on expansion—but is not without its critics”) managed to gloss over the fact that some of the “criticism” Garrett faces in her professional role has come in the form of death threats, so she now travels with a security detail. Seeing Willie “Prince Roc” Round as a young Black man taking what seem to our white eyes as desperate measures to avoid being seen by those who might take his life, after reading about what Garrett has had to endure, was a real gut punch.

In another series of scenes, Penelope Walker plays a Miss Ann-type, bleating about how “wealthy, white, and liberated” she is, while ordering around her driver (Joey Stone) and questioning her maid (who is actually Made, as in a self-made woman, played with simmering rage and panache by McKenzie Chinn). Chinn’s character builds up an arsenal of housekeeping tools that are actually weapons, while deflecting questions about whether or not she has children—until the truth bursts forth in a sorrowful righteous revelation.

The names of so many (too many) lost to racialized violence line the walls of the Lookingglass lobby, alongside poems by Chicagoans like Eve Ewing. The show I attended was dedicated to the memory of Tamir Rice, a little boy killed by police for being a kid and playing with a toy gun in a park, as kids have done for generations. We said his name a dozen times—once for every year of his too-short life. “It happened yesterday. It will happen tomorrow,” we hear over and over as Harris’s singular and compelling piece unfolds. Repetition is a key device in What to Send Up When It Comes Down, reminding us of the numbing regularity with which we hear stories of Black people killed by police and other agents of white supremacy.

At the end of the show, the non-Black audience members are asked to gather in the lobby while the Black audience members stay behind in the stark theater, which is lit by banks of electric candles and with more names of the murdered hanging down from a large fixture at one end of the otherwise bare stage. This separation is not about “division,” as we keep hearing is what happens if we ever talk honestly about racism. It’s about accountability. Black people deserve room to heal and experience joy and hope as well as rage. It’s up to white people to do the work to tear down our own biases and harmful institutions.

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The UrbanTheater Company’s performing space on Division Street is not small—I have seen them stage plays there just packed with actors—but it is really not large enough to contain all that Flaco Navaja brings to it in this tight little solo show. For 80 minutes, the New York-based chameleon poet, actor, and singer fills the space with characters and scenes, friends, family, and total strangers (an intense mother, a hapless school friend, a wise but emotionally wounded Vietnam vet uncle, an ex-wife giving birth in an Uber). Lecturing, shouting, dancing, singing, crying out in pain, he recounts key moments from his life growing up in the Bronx (where he was born and raised) and other boroughs of New York City. Navaja was for a while the host of the open-mike showcase, “All That! Hip Hop Poetry & Jazz,” at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe in Manhattan, and his experience creating worlds with just a microphone and a room full of observers shows.

Evolution of a Sonero Through 10/23: Thu-Sat 8 PM, Sun 4 PM, UrbanTheater Company, 2620 W. Division, urbantheaterchicago.org or clata.org, $42.50

What makes this show (presented as part of the fifth annual Destinos: Chicago International Latino Theater Festival) remarkable, though, is that Navaja is not content to just tell us his life stories. He adds a second layer to the evening. Backed by a small but powerful band, the Razor Blades (an homage, perhaps, to salsa and Latin jazz singer, composer, and actor Rubén Blades), Navaja also delivers a lecture-demonstration on popular music, specifically Latin music, and the structure of salsa songs. The two aspects of the show—the personal and the cultural—are tightly woven together; much of the musical lecture also concerns Navaja’s still-only-partly-fulfilled yearning to become a great sonero (the singer in salsa bands). The result is an intense, entertaining, thoroughly satisfying, intimate show that still somehow stretches the seams of UrbanTheater Company’s spacious performing space.

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