Reviving Virginia Woolf

Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre Company’s revival of Edward Albee’s “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” won three Tony Awards last Sunday, including
Best Actor for ensemble member Tracy Letts. This good news gives me an opportunity to excerpt a post I published here two years ago after seeing the play here in Chicago. Better put, when I felt and heard the play: Steppenwolf provided special programming for the blind, and that was the first time I ever participated in a  special touch tour. Here, from that 2011 post:

Touching Virginia Woolf

Two things convinced me to give this touch tour thing a try:

• We’d get to meet the actors and actresses before the play. I love meeting actors and actresses.
• Tickets for touch tour participants were half price.

Flo Finke didn’t raise no fool. I ordered two half-price tickets for the play, convinced my friend Brad to come along with me to the touch tour, and we settled into our seats two hours before the matinee started so we could hear the staff explain the set.

All of the action takes place in Martha and George’s living room, in a small college town somewhere in New England. The staff was familiar with the play, of course. They knew exactly which props were most vital to help us understand the action on stage. Doorbell chimes hanging by the entrance. A small photo of Martha’s father on the mantel. A toy gun with an umbrella that shoots out of the barrel. These explanations really helped. Example: Before the play, they pointed out an abstract 60s painting on the wall, towards the right, in George’s study. “It’s modern art,” they said. “Muddy blue swirls and brown tones. Not very interesting.” Later on in the play, when the actors are on the right side of the stage and someone asks about a painting, George says, “What it is, actually, is it’s a pictorial representation of the order of Martha’s mind.” Thanks to the presentation ahead of time, I understood how biting – and witty – George’s comment was. Which, in turn, helped me better understand the play.

The actors introduced themselves to us ahead of time, too.

Tracy Letts and Amy Morton as George and Martha in a scene from the play.

“My name is Tracy Letts, I’m 45 years old. That’s the same age as George, who I’ll be playing today.” Each actor described their physical characteristics — “I’m…well, a big guy. I’m six foot three inches tall, about 210 pounds. Stocky, I guess” – and what they’d be wearing on stage. When Amy Morton, who plays George’s wife Martha, told us she was five foot ten, I could picture her pairing up well with Tracy Letts’ George.

The actors were happy to answer any questions we had. We discovered this is the seventh time Tracy Letts and Amy Morton have played husband and wife on stage. They’ve known each other thirty years. Both won Tony awards for August: Osage County, and Tracy Letts won a Pulitzer Prize for writing that play. It was a thrill to have this private audience with them.

The Steppenwolf folks were happy to share fun facts from behind the scenes, too:

• They weren’t drinking liquor on stage. It was water. Or colored water. The ice was real, though!
• They had to learn to pace the way they sipped. That way their glass would be empty at the precise moment George asks if they want a refill.
• The glasses and bottles flung across the stage during arguments look real, but they’re special-ordered acrylic resin bottles designed to shatter realistically and safely – wouldn’t be cool to act on broken glass, or have shattered glass spray into the audience.
• Martha’s boobs weren’t entirely real, either. “Lots of cleavage,” Amy Morton said after being asked to describe her costuming. “Helped by padding.”
• The couch and comfy chair on stage were bought new, then sent to an upholsterer to cover them so they’d match, both in color and in the way they looked worn out.

These theatre–types had described the set so well that I really didn’t need to go up there and feel how books and journals had been strewn about on tables and bookshelves or fondle the glasses and bottles on the bar stand. But who could refuse a chance to stand on stage at the Steppenwolf? Harper and I stepped right up.

This was Harper’s first time attending a play, and Evan the front house manager thought my new dog would be most comfortable in the front row – plenty of room for him to stretch out. How. Cool. Steppenwolf offered headphones to wear — a narrator describes visual effects — but I don’t like those. I get a kick out of figuring it out for myself, and sitting so close made that easy to do. I felt like Harper and I were right there with George and Martha in their living room.

Congratulations on the Tony Awards, Steppenwolf. Lately you (and the Blackhawks!) are making us especially proud to live in Chicago.

Me, Harper and our gracious Steppenwolf hosts Hilary and Malcolm, on stage during the touch tour. Malcolm is holding one of the breakable prop bottles and a bouquet of the plastic snapdragons which figure prominently in the play.

Big Fish Story

Reblogged from Jalapeños in the Oatmeal:

From the “‘Round the Lake” column in The Wisconsin Daily Bugle:

As a sports fisherman, I pay attention to what comes out of the lake.  So when that big black Lab swam ashore and joined our barbeque, I got curious.

The dog’s wearing a tag that says “The Seeing Eye,” but I figure it’s his smelling nose that led him to the cookout.  

Read more… 278 more words

I just learned that I can “reblog” any posts I read that I think you Safe & Sound blog readers might appreciate as much as I do. What better way to try this out than to reblog this post by my writer friend Jeffabout his randy Seeing Eye dog..

Ebert’s number one fan

The show will go on at this year’s 15th Annual Ebertfest. Tilda Swinton, Shailene Woodley and Jack Black are among those expected to attend this year’s festival.

Hey, it’s Mike again–I promise I’ll fill you in on Montreal eventually, but the sad event  of yesterday — the death of Roger Ebert — changed my plans. My longtime and dear friend, Brand Fortner, was without question Roger Ebert’s biggest fan. FYI: I met Brand  back in 1990. He was a co-founder of Spyglass, a then tiny startup software company in Champaign, Ill., that was spun off from the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois. And he hired me. It remains the best and most fulfilling job I’ve ever had — it led to an unforgettable ride during the dot.com days, and the success of Spyglass changed my, Beth’s and our son Gus’s life for the better. Best of all,  Brand and I have remained friends.

I’m like a lot of people — I fully enjoyed Roger Ebert, even when I didn’t agree with him. But no one loved or respected Ebert more than Brand, who has also always attended and supported Ebertfest, a terrific film festival held in Champaign’s historic Virginia Theater each year.

After yesterday’s news, Brand was good enough to share a little essay his daughter Paula had written in college about what it was like to grow up with someone who worshipped at the altar of Roger. Paula—-now an accomplished adult (yikes) in her own right — was good enough to let me share it here on Beth’s blog. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did. 

Roger and Dad

My dad idolizes Roger Ebert. He has Ebert posters hanging on his walls and Ebert movie yearbooks filling his bookcases. Every year, my dad attends Roger Ebert’s Overlooked Film Festival and comes back laden with souvenir hats, bags and t-shirts. Above my dad’s desk hangs a signed, framed photo of Roger Ebert shaking his hand. “To Brand, on the occasion of HAL 9000′s birthday,” Roger wrote, adding a quote from HAL’s demise in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey… “Daisy … daisy …”.

When we were younger, my brothers and I needed my dad’s approval before going to the movie theater. My dad never cared about a movie’s rating, violence or explicit content. Rather, he needed to discuss whether Roger would approve of our choice.”You want to see that movie?” he’d ask. “Well, you know what Roger said about it, don’t you?” My brothers and I would look at each other and sigh. My dad would pull up the review and read to us from the holy word of Roger. We almost never made it to the theater by showtime.

My dad has bought nearly every film that Roger liked, and as a result, he owns hundreds of movies. Although my dad has barely seen a quarter of the movies he owns, he knows what Roger thinks of each one. For the movies my dad has seen, his opinion is intertwined with Roger’s. I remember my dad once telling me that he hadn’t enjoyed a movie that Roger rated favorably. After some consideration, my dad decided to watch the movie again to better understand Roger’s opinion.

When I was in high school, my friends would drop by to borrow movies from our massive collection. This pleased my dad to no end. He even made his own video rental cards and checkout slips to facilitate the borrowing process. And he loved spreading the gospel of Roger. If a friend wanted to borrow a particular movie, my dad would sit him down and walk him through Roger’s review. Then my dad would jump up. ”Oh, and if you like this movie, I know at least six more that you’ll love.” My friends always left with their hands full. Even now, I still turn to my dad for movie advice. Whether I’m in the mood for a mindless action flick or a foreign drama, he knows exactly what to recommend. My dad really knows his movies. Or, rather, he really knows his Roger Ebert.

This might explain why my tips weren’t so great

I was a very happy six-year-old any time Flo (that’s my mom) dropped me off at the library so she could run errands, and I was an absolutely elated six-year-old the night she dropped me off at the library, headed to the grocery store, drove straight home, pulled the car into the garage, put the groceries away and sat down with her feet up for a while before noticing how quiet it was.

Flo found me outside the library’s locked doors, smiling, sitting next to my pile of books, flipping through pages, anticipating which new book I’d start first. I was in seventh heaven.

That’s me in the middle, flanked by my sisters Bev and Marilee – they must not have gone to the library with me that night!

I met my dear friend Colleen ten years later. We were both waitressing at Marshall Field’s, saving our money for college. She says she knew I was cool right away when she saw me hide my paperback copy of Great Expectations in a pile of folded cloth napkins so I could sneak in a page or two between customers. Goes without saying. Colleen was a bookworm, too.

I lost my sight ten years later, in 1985. No iPhones, no digital recorders, no mp3 players, no laptop computers. Unabridged books on tape were hard to come by back then, and Braille was difficult to learn. How would I survive without being able to read? The National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped (NLS) came to my rescue. NLS mailed books and magazines on audio cassettes directly to our house at no cost, and now their books are available online for download.

The Daily Post reports that ebook sales recently trumped those of hardcover books. “The ease of digital books can’t be beat,” the post says. “How else can you hold hundreds of books in your hand so easily?” The post went on to admit that the sensation of reading a book by machine is undeniably different than cracking open a brand new book in print, and I have to agree. I’m grateful for technology for allowing me to keep up with my fellow bookworms, but if you want to know the truth, I do still miss cozying up in the corner of the couch to read words. In print. On paper. In a good, old-fashioned…book.

A triathlete in more ways than one

Remember my last post, the one where I wrote about all the young people in my 2010 Seeing Eye class using talking iPhones? Eliza Cooper was one of those young Seeing Eye classmates, and the very day I published that post last week she was featured in a story on Marketplace from American Public Media. The story was all about, guess what? Smartphones for blind users.

The story opened with reporter Meg Kramer explaining the many ways blind users find standard smartphones so helpful. “A phone’s camera can identify money and read text, and GPS navigation tells blind users where they are and what’s nearby,” she said. “Screen readers are second nature for someone like Eliza Cooper, Who has been using the technology since elementary school.” The reporter goes to expert Eliza for details about mobile accessibility, and then listeners follow along to observe how Eliza uses her iPhone as she packs for a trip with her Seeing Eye dog Harris.

This guy look familiar? He’s my retired dog Harper’s bro!

I liked Eliza Cooper from the minute we met at the Seeing Eye. She’s a talented drummer, an we had a ball jamming together at weekend parties during class. When we discovered her dog Harris is Harper’s brother, we knew it was destiny. We had to continue working together after graduation.

Eliza is a social media consultant, and I hired her for a few months back in 2011 to learn new ways to use my Twitter feed and my Facebook fan page. She’s come a long way, baby, since then. She picked up three new consulting clients last year and completed a number of short-term projects in social media and web consulting in 2012 as well. And get this–after completing her first two triathlons (you read that right, two triathalons) last summer, she began blogging for the Huffington Post about her experiences as a blind triathlete. Eliza also appeared in a profile in Triathlete Magazine last year and was featured as a triathlete in an ad for Volkswagen, too.

And now, she’s started 2013 with a bang, too. Her Marketplace story is called “Building a Better Smart Phone for Blind Users” and you can still hear it online. It aired in time for the annual Consumer Electronics show this past week and was heard on public radio stations nationwide. Go to Eliza’s blog to find out more about the Marketplace interview and learn more about her interest in social media strategy and management. Go, Eliza, go!

Pulling together after the storm

The Lindenhurst first-graders loved Whitney .

After Whitney and I visited Daniel Street School in Lindenhurst, NY last may, first-grade teacher Erica Bohrer published a post about us on her blog. What fun it was to see (okay, hear about) one of our school visits from a teacher’s point of view.

That’s Erica with me and Whitney at Daniel Street School in Lindenhurst last May.

Fast forward to October. Lindenhurst was one of the Long Island towns hardest hit by last month’s storm, and an email from Erica this month assured me that she and the sweet students we met there are okay. “I am so lucky that my family, my friends, and my students are safe,” she wrote. “Many lost their homes, but they still have their health. We are all pulling together.” Erica’s email also explained a fundraiser she is sponsoring: she offers lesson plans, teaching resources and other related materials for teachers on TeachersPayTeachers.com (an open marketplace where teachers buy and sell original teaching materials from each other) and she is donating proceeds from a Hurricane Unit she developed to help with Hurricane Sandy victims in Lindenhurst. Whether you’re a teacher or not, I encourage you to check out Erica’s unit on hurricanes — it’s interesting stuff!

And the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree: Erica’s mother, Maria, is a reading teacher in the Lindenhurst school district as well. My Seeing Eye dogs and I have enjoyed visits to Maria’s special readers over the years, and we’ve been to her beautiful home a few times, too. Maria is collecting new children’s books to replenish school libraries devastated by flooding, and you may send new (or almost new) books to her at:

Maria Bohrer
Harding Ave. Elementary School
2 Harding Ave.
Lindenhurst, NY 11757

For more information, you may email Erica’s mom Maria at mbohrer@lindenhurstschools.org

Does Whitney know I can’t see her?

Mike took this photo of us when we were in sunny Denver. I betcha Whitney is staring right at him, right?

When my Seeing Eye dog wants my husband Mike’s attention, she sits down, looks his way, and bats her big beautiful brown eyes. To get my attention, she butts her head against my computer chair. If I’m standing up, she nudges my hand. Whitney drops the ball at Mike’s feet when they play catch. When she’s playing catch with me,Whitney places the ball right in my palm. That way she doesn’t have to sit there waiting while I grope around trying to find the dang thing.

Does Whitney know I can’t see her? A post on the Psychology Today blog refers to a French researcher who did some experiments to try and find this out. Well, not just about Whitney. About guide dogs in general. Do they look toward their blind user’s face less often than dogs with sighted companions do when they need help finding a hidden piece of food? Or when they want to play? The researcher’s answer was clear: “Guide dogs do not understand that their owners cannot see them.”

A bunch of cognitive and animal scientists with opinions of their own left comments to the Psychology Todayblog post, and one of them explained that dogs have what psychologists call a “Theory of Mind.” That’s why they look to the human they’re with when trying to solve a problem: they’re trying to get clues or information from us that might help them with the task. Most of the experts who commented agreed that a guide dog does not know that his human is blind, though. “This would imply that the dog understood vision as a sense, and blindness as a loss of that sense,” one of them wrote. “I don’t think we have evidence in hand to support this.” Many of them agreed that a guide dog can figure out that hey, this human I’m with isn’t responding the same way I am to all this stuff I’m seeing around us! As a result, a guide dog learns ways to compensate and help by giving us the information we need to get around safely.

Whatever the answer, I sure am grateful to this energetic two-year-old copper-colored companion of mine. In less than a year with me, she’s already determined that I don’t function the same way others do, and she alters her behavior towards me in response. I don’t need any more evidence than that. Whether she knows I’m blind or not, I do know this about her:she is one smart dog.

Special friends

What a great trip to Denver! In-between a baseball game with a puppy-in-training, a one-on-one tour of the 16th Street Mall with the head security cop there (don’t ask!), a nature walk

Waiting for our ride to the airport in sunny Denver.

with an old friend from my days working at the Kane County Cougars and the discovery of a new favorite beer afterwards (90 Shillings Scottish Ale from Odell’s Brewery in Fort Collins), I somehow managed to find enough quiet time at the hotel to make progress on a new book I’m writing, too.

More on that book later.

For now, all you need to know is that we arrived home in Chicago just in time to unpack and re-pack our bags for this Thursday, when Whitney and I head to the Youth Literature Festival put on by the College of Education at the University of Illinois. This year the Youth Literature Festival is partnering with Special Friends (a federally funded project promoting social acceptance and friendships among kindergarteners with and without disabilities)to sponsor our visit to Mrs. Coash’s kindergarten class at Westview School in Champaign.

I’ve known Mary Coash for years – her son Joey had severe and profound disabilities, and he was in self-contained special education classes with our son Gus. Like many other kids Gus introduced us to in his early years, Joey died too young. Joey’s short life inspired his mother to get a degree in education, and the kindergarten class Mary Coash teaches now mixes children with and without disabilities. After Whitney and I visit Mrs. Coash’s kindergartners on Friday, we’ll meet one-on-one with a girl who is blind and graduated from Mrs. Coash’s kindergarten a couple years ago. She’s a big second grader now and enrolled in a class with friends she made in kindergarten.

Whitney and I will be part of the festival’s Community Day on Saturday, October 6, too. Our sessions there are free and open to the public, and the Youth Literature Festival also sent special invitations encouraging parents, caregivers and participants involved in the Special Friends Project to come. I hope they do – I’d love to meet them!

Community Day takes place at the I-Hotel at 1900 S. First Street in Champaign, and our first presentation goes from 10:45 a.m. to 11:15 a.m. Our second session goes from 11:30 a.m. to 12:15 p.m. Both of our sessions meet in the “Excellence Room,” and I gotta admit: that makes me a little nervous. Talk about pressure! If you live anywhere near Champaign, I welcome you to come and see if Whitney and I can live up to our billing…

They’d be fools not to hire her

Erin Lukacovic lives in Colorado and has been volunteering as a puppy-raiser for Guide Dogs for the Blind (GDB) since she was 16 years old. She has applied for an apprenticeship to become a guide dog mobility instructor, and if anyone from GDB is reading this, hey: you’d be fools not to hire her! She not only loves the dogs, but she studies, researches, and reads everything she can get her hands on about guide dogs and the work that goes into training them. That’s how she found my book, my blog, and now… me! Whitney and I had a ball with Oscar, Erin and Erin’s family at Coors Field Tuesday night, and I was so pleased when Erin agreed to write this guest post about our Rockies rendezvous.

Laughter in the rain

by Erin Lukacovic

When I read on Beth Finke’s blog that she was coming to Denver I had hoped we might meet, carrying along the realistic expectation that nothing would probably come of it. But what

Beth, Erin, Whitney and Oscar at Coors Field

started as an idle comment on a blog post and a vague hope turned into a wonderful night at a baseball game filled with enthusiastic conversation.

Less than a week after leaving that comment to Beth’s post, I was on my way downtown to meet a fellow blogger and the author of a book I had found by chance at my college library a few years previous.

My last puppy-in-training, Matilda, has returned to campus in San Rafael, so I borrowed Oscar from someone else in our puppy raising club so he could get some socialization. We met Beth at her hotel and after a brief introduction, began the short walk to Coors Field.

Although Oscar was a little distracted, Whitney was composed as she led the way in a strange city. The only break in conversation was a short “you have the green” or “let’s go” as we crossed intersections. We entered Coors Field and found our seats. They were perfect for our purposes: just under the roof and protected from rain. We had a perfect aerial view of the field and even better acoustics: we could hear the strike of ball on bat as if it was yards away.

Our conversation continued throughout the game, touching on topics of puppy raising, family, writing, books, and training with a guide dog. We had a traditional baseball meal of a foot long dog, although the green pepper instead of the more common pickle relish was a little odd.

The game sadly ended in the middle of the 7th inning due to rain. Luckily however, the Rockies broke their losing streak to win against the Chicago Cubs 10-5, despite a lack in fan base. The walk back to the hotel was slightly less pleasant than the walk there. As you can see from the picture, the rain caused both people and dogs to become pretty drenched by the time we had completed our route. We said our goodbyes with a promise of meeting again in the future.

Catching up

Some updates on the people you read about this past summer here at the Safe & Sound blog:

• Let’s start with my husband Mike’s guest post about White Sox pitcher Chris Sale. Last night Mike and I took the El down and got cheap tickets at the last minute to see Sale face Detroit’s Cy Young winning Justin Verlander. Alas. A rain delay. We were left to enjoy our beers and polish sausage while watching the Bears game on the JumboTron at White Sox Park instead. In the end, the game was postponed altogether. We still have Love for Sale, though.
• A cousin in Ohio read the post I wrote about my brother Doug bringing his trombone along on a visit to Chicago and sitting in with some jazz bands here. He forwarded the post to his son and daughter-in-law in Chicago, and Jason and Keely surprised us at one of Doug’s gigs. Friends from the neighborhood came, too, and I had great fun showing off my big brother.
• When Chicago trombonist Tim Coffman taught at that Jazz Camp for adults that I attended in July, I had no idea he knew my brother Doug. The post I wrote about jazz camp described the difficult time I had keeping up with the other jazz campers, and Tim’s reaction when he ran into me at one of Doug’s gigs confirms I was not exaggerating. “You’re Doug Finke’s sister?”
• If you read Sandra Murillo’s guest post about her friend who competed in the 2012 London Paralympics, well, Anjali Forber-Pratt’s races did not go as well as she’d hoped. “I proudly wore my Team USA jerseys,” she said when asked about returning home without a medal. “And I had the experience of a lifetime racing in front of sold out crowds of 80,000 in the stadium.”
• After I mentioned in a post here that Molly Ringwald’s father is blind, her proud dad (and fantastic jazz pianist) Bob Ringwald sent me a link to another Interview she had regarding her new book. Molly is currently on a 15-day book tour, and my brother Doug may be playing with her dad in San Francisco later this month.
• After a guest post by Sue Martin was published here, another guest post she wrote was published on the blog of the Veterans Health Administration’s Office of Health Information during National Suicide Prevention Week.
• If you were intrigued by my post about the essay I recorded for Race: Out Loud, they’ve archived the content created for the series. You can hear all of it now by linking to the WBEZ web site.
• I had such fun with the six-year-old great niece I blogged about in July that we invited her back. On her second visit, “Baby Flo” went on a field trip to the Old Town Aquarium store with her Great Uncle Mike. And I mean that word “Great” in every sense of the word.
• And lastly, speaking of great, a blog reader forwarded my post about chef Laura Martinez to an executive chef at a downtown Chicago restaurant. The chef had Laura in for an interview right away. From all accounts, her interview went well — she especially nailed it when asked how she handles challenges in the kitchen. The executive chef is looking to find a spot for Laura on his staff, and in the meantime, she is teaching a cooking class!

I’ll leave you here with the information about Chef Laura Martinez’s class. Sure wish I were 21 again so I could sign up. I could stand to learn from her knife skills!

Chef Laura Martinez is still hoping for a full-time gig. In the meantime, she’ll teach a cooking class for young adults.

The Chicago Lighthouse Vision Rehabilitation Center proudly presents cooking classes with
Chef Laura Martinez
Mondays, 5:00pm-7:00pm, September 24 – December 12
222 Waukegan Road, Glenview, IL 60025
Ages 13-21

Learn to cook: Chinese fried rice; pizza; brioche; couscous; “not your boxed” macaroni and cheese; Grandma’s recipes, and student requests.
Explore: the history and culture of the food of the week; menu planning; seasonal fruits and vegetables and budgetary factors.
Laura Martinez is a graduate of the prestigious Le Cordon Bleu culinary program at the Cooking and Hospitality Institute of Chicago. She is totally blind, and excels in knife skills and in her use of herbs and spices, through her senses of touch and smell. Her finished product is as accomplished as any young chef, although Laura had the prestigious honor of being a chef at one of Chicago’s highest rated restaurants, Charlie Trotters.
To register contact:
Pam Stern, Manager of Youth/Senior Programs
847.510.2054 or pam.stern@chicagolighthouse.org