Solitary confinement has long been the punishment of choice for prisoners who draw the ire of prison officials. Its roots are at Cherry Hill, the world’s first penitentiary, built in Pennsylvania in 1829. It was founded by Quakers who believed that locking a prisoner away for months or years would reform them. Solitary confinement is the seminal philosophy of the criminal justice system in America.

After touring American prisons in 1831, Alexis de Tocqueville wrote that solitary “devours the victim incessantly and unmercifully; it does not reform, it kills.” 

In 1890, the Supreme Court found in the case In re Medley that many prisoners “fell, after even a short confinement, into a semi-fatuous condition, from which it was next to impossible to arouse them, and others became violently insane.” More than a century later, Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote, “Years on end of near-total isolation exact a terrible price . . . common side effects of solitary confinement include anxiety, panic, withdrawal, hallucinations, self-mutilation, and suicidal thoughts and actions.” Justice Sonia Sotomayor noted in 2018 that between 80,000 to 100,000 prisoners were held in some form of solitary confinement, the terms of which can range from a few days to decades.

In 2011, the United Nations declared solitary confinement to be torture. In 2014, the Committee Against Torture (which the U.S. is a member of) expressed concerns about America’s use of solitary confinement and recommended the U.S. limit the use of solitary confinement to “a measure of last resort and for as short a time as possible.” Other organizations followed suit, including the World Health Organization, the Association of Correctional Administrators, the American Bar Association, and the American Civil Liberties Union.

But in practice, solitary is not a measure of last resort, nor is it solely used in response to violent or predatory actions by prisoners. Jailhouse lawyers and politically active or vocal prisoners are frequently targeted by staff. The retaliation often manifests in fabricated disciplinary charges and months or years of solitary confinement.

Prison policymakers claim not to use solitary confinement anymore, disguising it behind a plethora of euphemistic terms: administrative detention, close management unit, control unit, disciplinary segregation unit, intensive management unit, involuntary protective custody, punitive segregation, restricted housing unit, security housing unit, special management unit, and supermax.

In Illinois, the preferred euphemisms are restricted housing, administrative detention, and indeterminate segregation.

I spent more than five and a half years in isolation, and I know what it can do. They threw me in a steel-fronted cell that had a box on the door and a small window. When it was time to eat, they unlocked the box, put my tray inside, closed the box, then opened the slide so I could grab my tray. They always covered the window so I had no human contact at all. These cells were reserved for those they especially wanted to hurt.

In solitary, you don’t notice it, but pretty quickly you begin to unravel. You pace the small cell, back and forth, back and forth. When I was a kid, I went to the zoo a few times. I used to see the tiger, who was always pacing back and forth. I used to wonder why he did that. Now I know. I felt like that animal, pacing back and forth. It almost became a compulsion.

You also begin to count. You count everything: the holes in the door, the bricks in the wall, the cracks, your steps, everything. This becomes compulsive. Your brain doesn’t stop; it’s looking for stimulation where there is none. Counting gives your mind something to do. When there is nothing, your brain invents things. It’s sensory deprivation taken to the extreme.

I became severely depressed and very paranoid. I convinced myself that the prison administration was trying to poison me. I didn’t eat for 25 days. Finally, I was told if I didn’t eat, I would be taken to court and force-fed. I said I would eat only if a nurse brought me my tray. I didn’t trust anyone else.

I realized I had to get ahold of myself or I wouldn’t be able to come back. Isolation is full of severely mentally ill people. IDOC does not have the staff or the patience to deal with such prisoners. They usually get written disciplinary reports and are buried in isolation. Unable to understand what’s going on or why, they end up spending years or decades there. I’ve seen friends who were sane lose their minds in isolation.

I talked to myself a lot. There was no one to talk to, so I had to become both sides of the conversation. I became my own best friend. I had nobody else. I was the only one there for myself.

I was able to get hold of the paranoia but not the depression. I thought about killing myself more often than I care to admit. The loneliness was unbearable. I felt like I didn’t matter. I began to question if I was even real. Was I a figment of my own imagination? Did I even exist? I began to cut myself, reasoning that if I bled, then I must exist. I bear those scars to this day. They remind me of when I was tortured and of just how little holds our minds together.

I came out of isolation a much different person. I didn’t talk; I was afraid of social situations. The paranoia I fought so hard to control came back. I was afraid people were going to hurt me. I didn’t know how to interact with people, and I didn’t understand social cues.

It’s been many years since I got out of isolation. Over time, and with a lot of difficult work, I was able to lose the paranoia. I know that I am real. I’m still socially awkward, and I get anxious around a lot of people. I’m quiet. When I get upset or stressed out, I start counting. When I catch myself doing it, I force myself to stop. All these years later, counting is still a coping mechanism. I may have left isolation, but isolation has never left me.

The toxic combination of social isolation, sensory deprivation, and enforced idleness results in many psychiatric symptoms, including anxiety, depression, anger, impaired impulse control, paranoia, visual and auditory hallucinations, cognitive disturbances, obsessive thoughts, post-traumatic stress disorder, psychosis, self-harm, and suicide. Solitary confinement causes these things—imagine how much it exacerbates pre-existing mental illness!

Humans are naturally social beings, and the social pain that isolation inflicts can be the most torturous and damaging, affecting the brain in the same regions and manner as physical pain. This social pain can actually cause longer-term suffering than physical pain, due to the ability of humans to relive social pain months or even years later.

Multiple studies suggest that solitary confinement can fundamentally alter the brain’s structure in profound and permanent ways. The harm caused by solitary confinement can culminate in a complete breakdown of one’s identity. Even after a brief period of time, a prisoner is likely to descend into a mental fog in which alertness, attention, and concentration are all impaired.

This is a lasting trauma. This is torture. This is what is done in your name. We torture people and call it justice.

Anthony Ehlers is a writer incarcerated at Stateville Correctional Center. 

Read More

For most high schoolers, a part-time job is a way to make a little money, get out of the house, and meet people you otherwise wouldn’t connect with outside of family or school. When Janet Fischer was a Chicago teen, she never expected that she’d have the rare privilege of being able to point to the exact spot where a seed from her family tree was planted. Its fruits would take the shape of a popular, local pizza chain and the reopening of a Blue Island landmark, the place where she fell in love at a ticket booth.

Blue Island’s Lyric Theater opened in 1917, but it has been shuttered on and off for decades. Closed since 1989, the Lyric Theater was reopened last summer by the Garetto family, preserving the space where their matriarch was taking tickets in the 1940s.

“I was 16 and 17 as a cashier in a little booth outside. It was, at that time, right in the middle of the theater near the sidewalk,” Fischer says. “I met a lot of people, and they seemed to like me, so it wasn’t like a job. It was really fun. I used to have an angora sweater. Mr. Atkins was the manager [stepping in the box to count the money], and he would say, ‘You’re getting it over my coat! Everyone’s going to start talking.’ He was just teasing.”

She lived on 118th and Longwood, blocks from the Blue Island-Chicago border.

“I got to see everyone in town. They all got to see me,” Fischer remembers, adding that she met a number of guys back then, but only one really stood out.

Angelo Garetto and his brother Larry, the Garetto Twins, ran a successful Blue Island music shop, giving lessons and performing around town. Angelo played the saxophone, Larry the accordion. Angelo was seven years older than Fischer, and he had to ask permission from her family to take her out.

“They weren’t too happy at first. But they got used to it. And he was very good to my grandma, my dad’s mother. He took her down food because she was alone. So they grew to love him,” she says. “I started dating him and before I knew it, we were engaged and married with children.”

Together, they had six kids. Two of them, Larry and Peter Garetto, would open Beggars Pizza in 1976, with a little help from dad Angelo, but all the siblings worked hard to get it off the ground.

“He opened it for me and my brother because we didn’t do so well in college,” says Larry Garetto, with a laugh.

Today Beggars boasts 27 locations in Chicago, the suburbs, and northwest Indiana. Peter Garetto died ten years ago, but Larry still owns it. When his daughter Amanda Melvin, who has marketing and operational duties at Beggars, was looking for another pizza shop location, she stumbled upon the shuttered Lyric Theater.

Melvin already knew the story of how her grandparents met and was curious about the building, so she asked her realtor about its status.

“I said, ‘What’s going on with that Lyric Theater?’ He was like, ‘Well, let me find out,’” remembers Melvin, who says at the time, the owner wasn’t ready to sell. A week later, though, the Lyric was put on the market “at a more reasonable price.” 

After talking about it with her father Larry and her uncle Ray Cantelo, they decided to go for it. 

“We didn’t really know exactly what we’re going to do, but we just knew it meant a lot to my dad and my grandma,” says Melvin.

This was 2019, and Blue Island’s MetroSouth Medical Center had just closed, leaving the local economy without a hospital and without workers, many of whom either lived in or near Blue Island and regularly patronized many local businesses.

“It just seemed like everyone was starting to abandon Blue Island. And my dad was heartbroken. So this was a way for him to do his part to really, not necessarily revitalize, but stop that downward slope that he felt was happening,” Melvin says.

The Lyric Theater has had several owners since it opened more than a hundred years ago. A fire engulfed the building in 1960, but everyone inside got out safely. The theater was at the center of a bustling business district, which included venues like the Blue Island Opera House, stores like JCPenney and Kline’s, and many restaurants that kept Blue Island’s Uptown area thriving. 

Melvin didn’t know what to expect when they got the keys.

“We saw a blank shell. It was not in good shape,” remembers Melvin. But the theater, which at one time was a space for dance and theater events, still had good bones.

“They had torn out all the movie theater seats. So it was a concrete floor, black walls. Upstairs was nothing. And when we looked at it, we just saw possibilities.”

What she didn’t see was a global pandemic on the horizon that would stop everything, including work on the Lyric, in early 2020.

“Beggars being my full-time job, I had to say, ‘This [theater] needs to go on the back burner.’ Because we need to survive. We need to survive this pandemic,” says Melvin. Supply chain issues also affected how they’d find a path forward.

“We saw basically the cost of every single thing that we were going to do triple,” she says. “We’re going to open a theater, which literally brings people together, when you cannot come together.”

Larry Garetto convinced his daughter to proceed, even if they couldn’t open right away. Ray Cantelo and his wife Janet are also part owners. They paid $90,000 for the building and spent another $100,000 to fix the sprinkler system, but remodeling costs, which included a new marquee, came in at around $3 million.

“They said we have to do it right. We can’t just do it half-assed,” Garetto says. “It was my commitment to invest in Blue Island.”

While still working at Beggars and the Lyric, Garetto bought the business next door, the popular Iversen’s Bakery, as Garetto says its owner was ready to close it for good after more than 60 years.

“I’m 68. I’m doing more than I want to do, but that’s OK. I’m having fun doing it,” says Garetto, who credits Amanda and her husband Pat Melvin with the vision and ideas to make the space come alive. She admits that without a designer, “every single finish, every single color, every single tile, every single door” was selected by her and her husband. 

One thing that was not going to be part of the Lyric’s future was that it would be exclusively a movie theater. Viewing habits had been shifting for years, and as the 1980s brought in multiplexes and as streaming options became more popular, the former one-screen theater space had to be reimagined.

“If we turned it into just a movie theater, we were likely to fail,” says Melvin, who gave the interior a 1940s supper club feel, with a large, sleek bar area and seating for more than 300 people, with private suites in a balcony area.

John Goldrick is thrilled the Lyric is back. He owns Big ’n Little Shoes on 111th and Kedzie and fondly remembers growing up on 118th and Hale, when he’d walk to the Lyric with his mother. Goldrick likes the new Lyric and says its presence will only attract other businesses.

“I think it’s a great idea. I would have never thought of it, but absolutely,” Goldrick says. “Life is a roller coaster. It [has] peaks and valleys. I think Blue Island right now is heading for one of those peaks, becoming vibrant again.”

Born-and-raised Blue Islander Pat Disabato also has great memories of the Lyric. The former sports columnist for the Daily Southtown says, back in the day, the 900+-seat theater made an impression.

“Growing up, I saw Rocky there. I saw Star Wars there as a kid. It was a big thing.”

After leaving the Southtown, Disabato says he wanted something different. He found it as the Lyric’s live events manager, handling everything from drag brunches to comedy shows, as well as live blues and rock concerts.

“If this was any other town, I would not have done it. But it was Blue Island, and I know what this means to the town,” says Disabato. “I love the Garetto family and the Cantelo family, so I’m like, ‘You know what, I got to see this through. I want to be a part of this.’” 

Melvin says they’re looking at “immersive” movie experiences. Over the summer, for a screening of Grease, the staff dressed up as Grease characters with a “Frosty Palace” diner pop-up inside and a classic car show outside the theater.

And in December, for a screening of It’s a Wonderful Life, each seat had a little bell and a small bag of rose petals, a nod to what Jimmy Stewart’s character finds in his pocket. The flowers came from a local florist.

“To hear the bells ring at the end of the movie, I mean, that might have been my favorite moment,” remembers Disabato.

A favorite moment for Melvin came from her five-year-old daughter Madelyn, who watches her do just about everything at the Lyric. It happened after seeing The Polar Express at a friend’s party.

“She goes, ‘Mom, give me a broom and a dustpan. There’s popcorn I gotta sweep up,’” says Melvin. “And she actually asked me, ‘Mom, when I grow up, can I work with you at the Lyric Theater?’ and I was like, of course you can!”

The Lyric Theater12952 Western, Blue Island708-972-0700lyrictheater.com

The Lyric’s mix of events includes music (a blues brunch with singer Stacy Brooks on February 4), comedy (the Vito Zatto Variety Show, a throwback to lounge shows, on February 24), drag extravaganzas (coming February 17, Lindsey Devereaux and friends with “Crazy, Sexy, Cool”), rock showcases featuring original acts (Eric Lindell on March 11), groups with retro sounds (Jonny Lyons on February 18), and, of course, more movies. 

Disabato says that like the variety of events, their audience comes from the suburbs but also from Chicago neighborhoods near and far. 

“Vernon Hills, Plainfield, Aurora. They are just finding out about us, still. So it’s been kind of organic,” Disabato says, on meeting people coming from different places. “South Loop. We had a big family here the other day from Lincoln Park and Lakeview. So it’s kind of crazy.”

He adds that the remodeled interior, with its midcentury modern accents and supper club, sets the tone for comfort and entertainment for people who say, “‘I want a good night, to be entertained. And have a nice evening with some nice cocktails and, you know, watch a good show,’” Disabato says, noting that the Lyric is the only venue that does what it does south of downtown Chicago.

“I mean, up north, you got the Genesee [Theatre in Waukegan], you got the Arcada [Theatre in St. Charles], and Des Plaines Theatre. So there’s some places up north, and they all have their niche, but down here, particularly, there’s nothing,” says Disabato, adding that the Lyric hopes to change that.

The Cantelo-Garetto family. Credit: George Poulous

Now in her 90s, Janet Fischer Garetto is living a full-circle moment; her home is near the bright Lyric Theater marquee, not far from where her family tree began to grow, and some relatives still call Blue Island home.

“It makes me happy that it’s open and alive again,” says Garetto. “Yeah, I think it’s beautiful. And it livens up the town. It’s good for everyone.”

Read More

Solitary confinement has long been the punishment of choice for prisoners who draw the ire of prison officials. Its roots are at Cherry Hill, the world’s first penitentiary, built in Pennsylvania in 1829. It was founded by Quakers who believed that locking a prisoner away for months or years would reform them. Solitary confinement is the seminal philosophy of the criminal justice system in America.

After touring American prisons in 1831, Alexis de Tocqueville wrote that solitary “devours the victim incessantly and unmercifully; it does not reform, it kills.” 

In 1890, the Supreme Court found in the case In re Medley that many prisoners “fell, after even a short confinement, into a semi-fatuous condition, from which it was next to impossible to arouse them, and others became violently insane.” More than a century later, Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote, “Years on end of near-total isolation exact a terrible price . . . common side effects of solitary confinement include anxiety, panic, withdrawal, hallucinations, self-mutilation, and suicidal thoughts and actions.” Justice Sonia Sotomayor noted in 2018 that between 80,000 to 100,000 prisoners were held in some form of solitary confinement, the terms of which can range from a few days to decades.

In 2011, the United Nations declared solitary confinement to be torture. In 2014, the Committee Against Torture (which the U.S. is a member of) expressed concerns about America’s use of solitary confinement and recommended the U.S. limit the use of solitary confinement to “a measure of last resort and for as short a time as possible.” Other organizations followed suit, including the World Health Organization, the Association of Correctional Administrators, the American Bar Association, and the American Civil Liberties Union.

But in practice, solitary is not a measure of last resort, nor is it solely used in response to violent or predatory actions by prisoners. Jailhouse lawyers and politically active or vocal prisoners are frequently targeted by staff. The retaliation often manifests in fabricated disciplinary charges and months or years of solitary confinement.

Prison policymakers claim not to use solitary confinement anymore, disguising it behind a plethora of euphemistic terms: administrative detention, close management unit, control unit, disciplinary segregation unit, intensive management unit, involuntary protective custody, punitive segregation, restricted housing unit, security housing unit, special management unit, and supermax.

In Illinois, the preferred euphemisms are restricted housing, administrative detention, and indeterminate segregation.

I spent more than five and a half years in isolation, and I know what it can do. They threw me in a steel-fronted cell that had a box on the door and a small window. When it was time to eat, they unlocked the box, put my tray inside, closed the box, then opened the slide so I could grab my tray. They always covered the window so I had no human contact at all. These cells were reserved for those they especially wanted to hurt.

In solitary, you don’t notice it, but pretty quickly you begin to unravel. You pace the small cell, back and forth, back and forth. When I was a kid, I went to the zoo a few times. I used to see the tiger, who was always pacing back and forth. I used to wonder why he did that. Now I know. I felt like that animal, pacing back and forth. It almost became a compulsion.

You also begin to count. You count everything: the holes in the door, the bricks in the wall, the cracks, your steps, everything. This becomes compulsive. Your brain doesn’t stop; it’s looking for stimulation where there is none. Counting gives your mind something to do. When there is nothing, your brain invents things. It’s sensory deprivation taken to the extreme.

I became severely depressed and very paranoid. I convinced myself that the prison administration was trying to poison me. I didn’t eat for 25 days. Finally, I was told if I didn’t eat, I would be taken to court and force-fed. I said I would eat only if a nurse brought me my tray. I didn’t trust anyone else.

I realized I had to get ahold of myself or I wouldn’t be able to come back. Isolation is full of severely mentally ill people. IDOC does not have the staff or the patience to deal with such prisoners. They usually get written disciplinary reports and are buried in isolation. Unable to understand what’s going on or why, they end up spending years or decades there. I’ve seen friends who were sane lose their minds in isolation.

I talked to myself a lot. There was no one to talk to, so I had to become both sides of the conversation. I became my own best friend. I had nobody else. I was the only one there for myself.

I was able to get hold of the paranoia but not the depression. I thought about killing myself more often than I care to admit. The loneliness was unbearable. I felt like I didn’t matter. I began to question if I was even real. Was I a figment of my own imagination? Did I even exist? I began to cut myself, reasoning that if I bled, then I must exist. I bear those scars to this day. They remind me of when I was tortured and of just how little holds our minds together.

I came out of isolation a much different person. I didn’t talk; I was afraid of social situations. The paranoia I fought so hard to control came back. I was afraid people were going to hurt me. I didn’t know how to interact with people, and I didn’t understand social cues.

It’s been many years since I got out of isolation. Over time, and with a lot of difficult work, I was able to lose the paranoia. I know that I am real. I’m still socially awkward, and I get anxious around a lot of people. I’m quiet. When I get upset or stressed out, I start counting. When I catch myself doing it, I force myself to stop. All these years later, counting is still a coping mechanism. I may have left isolation, but isolation has never left me.

The toxic combination of social isolation, sensory deprivation, and enforced idleness results in many psychiatric symptoms, including anxiety, depression, anger, impaired impulse control, paranoia, visual and auditory hallucinations, cognitive disturbances, obsessive thoughts, post-traumatic stress disorder, psychosis, self-harm, and suicide. Solitary confinement causes these things—imagine how much it exacerbates pre-existing mental illness!

Humans are naturally social beings, and the social pain that isolation inflicts can be the most torturous and damaging, affecting the brain in the same regions and manner as physical pain. This social pain can actually cause longer-term suffering than physical pain, due to the ability of humans to relive social pain months or even years later.

Multiple studies suggest that solitary confinement can fundamentally alter the brain’s structure in profound and permanent ways. The harm caused by solitary confinement can culminate in a complete breakdown of one’s identity. Even after a brief period of time, a prisoner is likely to descend into a mental fog in which alertness, attention, and concentration are all impaired.

This is a lasting trauma. This is torture. This is what is done in your name. We torture people and call it justice.

Anthony Ehlers is a writer incarcerated at Stateville Correctional Center. 

Read More

For most high schoolers, a part-time job is a way to make a little money, get out of the house, and meet people you otherwise wouldn’t connect with outside of family or school. When Janet Fischer was a Chicago teen, she never expected that she’d have the rare privilege of being able to point to the exact spot where a seed from her family tree was planted. Its fruits would take the shape of a popular, local pizza chain and the reopening of a Blue Island landmark, the place where she fell in love at a ticket booth.

Blue Island’s Lyric Theater opened in 1917, but it has been shuttered on and off for decades. Closed since 1989, the Lyric Theater was reopened last summer by the Garetto family, preserving the space where their matriarch was taking tickets in the 1940s.

“I was 16 and 17 as a cashier in a little booth outside. It was, at that time, right in the middle of the theater near the sidewalk,” Fischer says. “I met a lot of people, and they seemed to like me, so it wasn’t like a job. It was really fun. I used to have an angora sweater. Mr. Atkins was the manager [stepping in the box to count the money], and he would say, ‘You’re getting it over my coat! Everyone’s going to start talking.’ He was just teasing.”

She lived on 118th and Longwood, blocks from the Blue Island-Chicago border.

“I got to see everyone in town. They all got to see me,” Fischer remembers, adding that she met a number of guys back then, but only one really stood out.

Angelo Garetto and his brother Larry, the Garetto Twins, ran a successful Blue Island music shop, giving lessons and performing around town. Angelo played the saxophone, Larry the accordion. Angelo was seven years older than Fischer, and he had to ask permission from her family to take her out.

“They weren’t too happy at first. But they got used to it. And he was very good to my grandma, my dad’s mother. He took her down food because she was alone. So they grew to love him,” she says. “I started dating him and before I knew it, we were engaged and married with children.”

Together, they had six kids. Two of them, Larry and Peter Garetto, would open Beggars Pizza in 1976, with a little help from dad Angelo, but all the siblings worked hard to get it off the ground.

“He opened it for me and my brother because we didn’t do so well in college,” says Larry Garetto, with a laugh.

Today Beggars boasts 27 locations in Chicago, the suburbs, and northwest Indiana. Peter Garetto died ten years ago, but Larry still owns it. When his daughter Amanda Melvin, who has marketing and operational duties at Beggars, was looking for another pizza shop location, she stumbled upon the shuttered Lyric Theater.

Melvin already knew the story of how her grandparents met and was curious about the building, so she asked her realtor about its status.

“I said, ‘What’s going on with that Lyric Theater?’ He was like, ‘Well, let me find out,’” remembers Melvin, who says at the time, the owner wasn’t ready to sell. A week later, though, the Lyric was put on the market “at a more reasonable price.” 

After talking about it with her father Larry and her uncle Ray Cantelo, they decided to go for it. 

“We didn’t really know exactly what we’re going to do, but we just knew it meant a lot to my dad and my grandma,” says Melvin.

This was 2019, and Blue Island’s MetroSouth Medical Center had just closed, leaving the local economy without a hospital and without workers, many of whom either lived in or near Blue Island and regularly patronized many local businesses.

“It just seemed like everyone was starting to abandon Blue Island. And my dad was heartbroken. So this was a way for him to do his part to really, not necessarily revitalize, but stop that downward slope that he felt was happening,” Melvin says.

The Lyric Theater has had several owners since it opened more than a hundred years ago. A fire engulfed the building in 1960, but everyone inside got out safely. The theater was at the center of a bustling business district, which included venues like the Blue Island Opera House, stores like JCPenney and Kline’s, and many restaurants that kept Blue Island’s Uptown area thriving. 

Melvin didn’t know what to expect when they got the keys.

“We saw a blank shell. It was not in good shape,” remembers Melvin. But the theater, which at one time was a space for dance and theater events, still had good bones.

“They had torn out all the movie theater seats. So it was a concrete floor, black walls. Upstairs was nothing. And when we looked at it, we just saw possibilities.”

What she didn’t see was a global pandemic on the horizon that would stop everything, including work on the Lyric, in early 2020.

“Beggars being my full-time job, I had to say, ‘This [theater] needs to go on the back burner.’ Because we need to survive. We need to survive this pandemic,” says Melvin. Supply chain issues also affected how they’d find a path forward.

“We saw basically the cost of every single thing that we were going to do triple,” she says. “We’re going to open a theater, which literally brings people together, when you cannot come together.”

Larry Garetto convinced his daughter to proceed, even if they couldn’t open right away. Ray Cantelo and his wife Janet are also part owners. They paid $90,000 for the building and spent another $100,000 to fix the sprinkler system, but remodeling costs, which included a new marquee, came in at around $3 million.

“They said we have to do it right. We can’t just do it half-assed,” Garetto says. “It was my commitment to invest in Blue Island.”

While still working at Beggars and the Lyric, Garetto bought the business next door, the popular Iversen’s Bakery, as Garetto says its owner was ready to close it for good after more than 60 years.

“I’m 68. I’m doing more than I want to do, but that’s OK. I’m having fun doing it,” says Garetto, who credits Amanda and her husband Pat Melvin with the vision and ideas to make the space come alive. She admits that without a designer, “every single finish, every single color, every single tile, every single door” was selected by her and her husband. 

One thing that was not going to be part of the Lyric’s future was that it would be exclusively a movie theater. Viewing habits had been shifting for years, and as the 1980s brought in multiplexes and as streaming options became more popular, the former one-screen theater space had to be reimagined.

“If we turned it into just a movie theater, we were likely to fail,” says Melvin, who gave the interior a 1940s supper club feel, with a large, sleek bar area and seating for more than 300 people, with private suites in a balcony area.

John Goldrick is thrilled the Lyric is back. He owns Big ’n Little Shoes on 111th and Kedzie and fondly remembers growing up on 118th and Hale, when he’d walk to the Lyric with his mother. Goldrick likes the new Lyric and says its presence will only attract other businesses.

“I think it’s a great idea. I would have never thought of it, but absolutely,” Goldrick says. “Life is a roller coaster. It [has] peaks and valleys. I think Blue Island right now is heading for one of those peaks, becoming vibrant again.”

Born-and-raised Blue Islander Pat Disabato also has great memories of the Lyric. The former sports columnist for the Daily Southtown says, back in the day, the 900+-seat theater made an impression.

“Growing up, I saw Rocky there. I saw Star Wars there as a kid. It was a big thing.”

After leaving the Southtown, Disabato says he wanted something different. He found it as the Lyric’s live events manager, handling everything from drag brunches to comedy shows, as well as live blues and rock concerts.

“If this was any other town, I would not have done it. But it was Blue Island, and I know what this means to the town,” says Disabato. “I love the Garetto family and the Cantelo family, so I’m like, ‘You know what, I got to see this through. I want to be a part of this.’” 

Melvin says they’re looking at “immersive” movie experiences. Over the summer, for a screening of Grease, the staff dressed up as Grease characters with a “Frosty Palace” diner pop-up inside and a classic car show outside the theater.

And in December, for a screening of It’s a Wonderful Life, each seat had a little bell and a small bag of rose petals, a nod to what Jimmy Stewart’s character finds in his pocket. The flowers came from a local florist.

“To hear the bells ring at the end of the movie, I mean, that might have been my favorite moment,” remembers Disabato.

A favorite moment for Melvin came from her five-year-old daughter Madelyn, who watches her do just about everything at the Lyric. It happened after seeing The Polar Express at a friend’s party.

“She goes, ‘Mom, give me a broom and a dustpan. There’s popcorn I gotta sweep up,’” says Melvin. “And she actually asked me, ‘Mom, when I grow up, can I work with you at the Lyric Theater?’ and I was like, of course you can!”

The Lyric Theater12952 Western, Blue Island708-972-0700lyrictheater.com

The Lyric’s mix of events includes music (a blues brunch with singer Stacy Brooks on February 4), comedy (the Vito Zatto Variety Show, a throwback to lounge shows, on February 24), drag extravaganzas (coming February 17, Lindsey Devereaux and friends with “Crazy, Sexy, Cool”), rock showcases featuring original acts (Eric Lindell on March 11), groups with retro sounds (Jonny Lyons on February 18), and, of course, more movies. 

Disabato says that like the variety of events, their audience comes from the suburbs but also from Chicago neighborhoods near and far. 

“Vernon Hills, Plainfield, Aurora. They are just finding out about us, still. So it’s been kind of organic,” Disabato says, on meeting people coming from different places. “South Loop. We had a big family here the other day from Lincoln Park and Lakeview. So it’s kind of crazy.”

He adds that the remodeled interior, with its midcentury modern accents and supper club, sets the tone for comfort and entertainment for people who say, “‘I want a good night, to be entertained. And have a nice evening with some nice cocktails and, you know, watch a good show,’” Disabato says, noting that the Lyric is the only venue that does what it does south of downtown Chicago.

“I mean, up north, you got the Genesee [Theatre in Waukegan], you got the Arcada [Theatre in St. Charles], and Des Plaines Theatre. So there’s some places up north, and they all have their niche, but down here, particularly, there’s nothing,” says Disabato, adding that the Lyric hopes to change that.

The Cantelo-Garetto family. Credit: George Poulous

Now in her 90s, Janet Fischer Garetto is living a full-circle moment; her home is near the bright Lyric Theater marquee, not far from where her family tree began to grow, and some relatives still call Blue Island home.

“It makes me happy that it’s open and alive again,” says Garetto. “Yeah, I think it’s beautiful. And it livens up the town. It’s good for everyone.”

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Lots of bands emerged from the lockdown era writing material with a darker tone than their pre-pandemic work. Local thrashers Oozing Wound take that to a new level with their brand-new LP, We Cater to Cowards (Thrill Jockey). Granted, they’ve never been purveyors of positivity—their catalog includes song titled “Everyone I Hate Should Be Killed,” “Surrounded by Fucking Idiots,” and “Everything Sucks and My Life Is a Lie”—but the vibe shift this time around is palpable. Gone are the snappy Dave Lombardo-style beats, the speedy solos, and the catchy scream-along choruses. Instead we get ten smeared, sludgy, grungy tracks of muddily rhythmic sonic misery. 

The last thing I expected from Oozing Wound was a slow record, but reinvention feels good from a band more than a decade into their career. The way they throw things back to behind-the-beat In Utero and Tad worship feels completely fresh and surprising. Even the boomy, natural reverb of Electrical Audio, where they tracked the record, recalls the sound of early-90s Steve Albini-recorded noise-rock classics. 

By the time the epic horn arrangement barges in on “Crypto Fash,” you’ll be completely engrossed with the band’s updated bag of tricks. And despite the unexpected turns and throwbacks, Oozing Wound weave elements of their classic sound into every track: Kyle Reynolds’s unrelenting drum fury, Kevin Cribbin’s monstrous fuzz bass, and Zack Weil’s dissonant shredding and ear-piercing shrieking. On We Cater to Cowards, Oozing Wound work out the pain and confusion of a hard few years with a new approach, and we’re lucky to have it. It’s complex, dirgy, and dark, and its twists and layers will keep you coming back for repeat listens.

Oozing Wound’s We Cater To Cowards is available through Bandcamp.

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Benjamin Britten’s 1947 opera Albert Herring (set in 1900) has been a perennial production for Chicago Opera Theater. But the new mounting opening tonight at the Athenaeum, helmed by director Stephen Sposito, promises to infuse Britten’s story with what the company is calling an “indie-film vibe.”

Sposito—who was associate director for The Book of Mormon, resident director for the Broadway and touring productions of Wicked, anddirector of the national tour of Shrek the Musical—explains, “We’re still setting it at the turn of the century . . . but, visually, I tried to make it a little kooky.”

Dame Jane Glover, head of Chicago’s Music of the Baroque ensemble and a frequent interpreter of Britten, conducts, while the titular role is sung by Miles Mykkanen, who is performing in his fifth Britten opera. 

Albert Herring1/26-1/29: Thu 7:30 PM, Sat-Sun 3 PM, Athenaeum Center for Thought and Culture, 2936 N. Southport, chicagooperatheater.org, $25-$165

“He’s a composer I feel at home with,” Mykkanen said. “I’ve lived with his music since I was 17 or 18 and starting my training. The opportunity to sing Albert Herring has been at the back of my mind, and I’ve just been waiting for the chance to sing it.”   

Sposito was attracted to both Albert Herring’s “youthful, energetic story” and its “amazing” music.” 

“It’s highly complicated,” he explains. “It’s sort of like a play more than anything. There’s one big aria. It’s all this sort of interwoven, highly complicated music that feels almost like people talking.”

Based on a short story by Guy de Maupassant, it’s a slight tale on the surface. Albert, a shy and malleable young man in a small, English market town, is selected as the May King for the festival when none of the local young ladies are deemed morally upstanding enough to be queen for a day. A local prankster slips alcohol into Albert’s lemonade, causing him to humiliate himself at the ceremony and then run off in search of adventure elsewhere. Eventually, however, he returns—but with a little more starch in his spine.

Once Sposito set to work planning the opera, he was surprised at how complex Britten’s ideas and characters were. 

He says, “I’ve never directed an opera before. I mainly do musical theater and some plays. What a great challenge, and that’s kind of what the play is about: You don’t do one thing. You scare yourself a bit, break out of your box a bit, and try something that’s challenging.”

Sposito, at one point, told Mykkanen that Albert Herring’s evolution in the story “was maybe just 10 percent to the left or the right” from where he was when the story begins.

Mykkanen called Sposito’s idea “so beautiful to me. It’s not like this character has to go through this huge heartbreak or kill somebody like what normally happens in opera. This is just a guy in his late 20s trying to figure out his life, and he realizes he’s not happy, and he asks, ‘What can I do to take control of my own destiny?’” 

Singing a comic role, he notes, is sometimes not as easy as singing a tragic one, because “the way forward is not that obvious. At the end of the scene, when you have to get to the murder or get to the heartbreak, you have to know where you’re going and what you need to build up to emotionally. In comedy, when you don’t have to get to the [tragic] end goal, it’s oftentimes only in your head. You have to figure out the narratives of the scene. It’s trickier.”

Mykkanen nevertheless appreciates that those comic roles often give more leeway for interpretation.

“That’s where, as a singer or actor, you rely on your conductor or your director to help craft the performance,” he says. “Every Albert Herring I do will be different. I’ve done 13 productions of Candide, and they’re kind of similar in that way, where each production is a very different journey and a very different character.  

The youthfulness reflected at the core of Albert Herring inspired Sposito and his collaborators to aim for that independent film aesthetic, exaggerating some stylistic elements or inserting the occasional visual anachronism, all the while making sure the audience won’t be jarred from the story and music. 

“The Grand Budapest Hotel was kind of a visual cue for me,” Sposito explains. “How do we treat style and time so that it’s accurate, but it’s not a museum piece either? We have elements of the period—these big, mutton-sleeve shoulders, for example, which we exaggerated and had fun with. Or high collars—what do they say about the characters, or what do they do to them while wearing them?”

The cast of Chicago Opera Theater’s Albert Herring Credit Michael Brosilow

Sposito, currently based in New York, thought when he was younger that he’d one day move to Chicago and work in the theater here, which alas never happened. He’s worked in the Windy City on touring shows, but this is his first Chicago production “from the ground up,” he says.

Directors of musicals usually collaborate closest with their choreographers, but operas require that same level of collaboration between directors and conductors, so Sposito’s relationship with Glover was an important one. The conductor knew Britten and Peter Pears, his partner (who sang the role of Albert in the first production), and Sposito praised both her vast knowledge of Britten’s repertoire and her work ethic.

The conductor’s responsibilities “are not just the music,” Sposito says. “They’re part of the staging of the show and the design of the show. She’s in on all of that. . . . It was such a beautiful relationship, to have someone who knows the piece so well but was also so fun, naughty, cool, and playful. That surprised me.”

Mykkanen calls Albert Herring “the quintessential ensemble piece. There’s 13 of us on stage. There’s no chorus. There aren’t dancers. There aren’t the extra auxiliary forces in opera that we rely on and allow us to frankly take a break.”

Even if Sposito’s setting playfully reinterprets some of Albert Herring’s thematic elements, the precise nature of Britten’s music nevertheless calls for commitment from the cast, Mykkanen suggests. 

He explains, “The rhythms and the brilliant text—when you get it right, it makes sense. When you start screwing around with it too much, that’s when it doesn’t. So the 13 of us have been focusing on the score and working on our accuracy.”

Singing Britten requires “keeping your brain active over the course of an evening,” Mykkanen adds. “There are times when there are two-time signatures happening at the same time—one person is in four, one person is in six, and somehow, every eight bars, we line up. As singers, especially with Jane [conducting], that’s a particular challenge with Britten.” 

Even so, Albert Herring has been a relatively relaxed experience for Sposito, who’s used to the faster pace of directing musicals.

“With commercial theater, it’s about efficiency,” he explains. “‘Cut those bars.’ ‘Get them out sooner.’ With this, we give you the whole score—there are no trims or cuts. It’s almost calmer.  There’s something about doing an opera that you [as a director] just luxuriate in a bit. It can really be about the music, and you can just sit back and listen sometimes.”

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