Home from Prison - A Bleak Picture at the Victory Gardens Theater

There’s something about traveling that every trip has in common. At some point, you have to come home. What happens when you have nothing positive to come home to? What if there is no one to welcome you back? How do you get back in the swing of things?

Living in the Chicago area this is not a problem for us. One great thing about coming back is being able to enjoy Chicago’s phenomenal theater scene. With more than 100 theaters of every variety, we get to pick and choose from a great wealth of plays. This week we saw Lettie at the Victory Gardens Theater. It will be playing through May 6^th. If you live in the Chicago area, I strongly recommend that you see it.

Lettie, the title character, has just been released from prison after having been incarcerated for seven years. Sent to a halfway house to live, she starts a welding training program. Uninterested in becoming a welder but going along with the program as well as she can, all she wants is to see her children again. Her sister, who has been taking care of them in Lettie’s absence, has other plans and thus, the drama begins. As the story unfolds, we learn that Lettie has little to return to with few prospects on the horizon. Will she succumb to past influences or stay straight? With community support for ex-prisoners weak at best, staying straight is even more difficult than you’d think. I don’t want to give away the ending in case anyone has the opportunity to see Lettie. It is a very powerful, poignant drama.

Boo Killebrew, the playwright, did an excellent job of depicting the problems that returning prisoners have re-integrating into the outside world especially if their lives prior to imprisonment had no healthy connections or relationships with which to reconnect. The play was skillfully directed by Chay Yew and the acting was excellent. Prior to staging the play, Ms. Killebrew and the cast visited Grace House, a halfway house similar to the one depicted in Lettie, where they visited with women who had pasts similar to Lettie’s. The afternoon they spent there gave them extra insight to skillfully present this play.

With America having five per cent of the world’s population and twenty-five per cent of the world’s prison population, Lettie addresses an important issue. What kind of treatment are we giving to people who are released from prison? How can they avoid returning to prison when it is so difficult finding employment for those with prison records? Where do they live if they have no family to take them in? Most people don’t realize that people with prison records are ineligible for government subsidized housing. Some private agencies are addressing these issues but so much more needs to be done. Go see Lettie at the Victory Garden Theater. It will give you a lot to think about.

Still Desperately Seeking Manatees

Although I’ve been visiting South Florida nearly all my life, one animal I’ve yet to see there in the wild is the manatee. I’ve see signs along the Intercoastal waters warning boaters to reduce their speed in order to protect them. We’ve visited The Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge near the Space Center and the Turkey Creek Sanctuary in Palm Bay where they’ve often been sighted, but to no avail.

I’ve often wondered what makes these sea creatures even more elusive than mermaids. They are generally slow-moving, gentle creatures most closely related to the elephant and often called sea cows. They seek warm – no colder than 68 degrees Fahrenheit - brackish water and feed on water plants.

Thus, when we arrived in Tampa, Florida, I was delighted to find out that they have a Manatee Viewing Center run by TECO, Tampa Electric Company. www.tampaelectric.com/manatee. The heat generated by the electric plant heats the water around it to temperatures comfortable for manatees. 

Since these animals tend to migrate to warmer waters, they often congregate near the power plant when the rest of the water around Tampa Bay is too cold for them.

Eager to finally see manatees in a somewhat natural habitat, we headed to the Manatee Viewing Center which was established thirty years ago. They have built several boardwalks and trails out to the viewing areas as well as a nature center and they have videos about these gentle creatures. It is quite an impressive site.

With camera ready, we walked all the trails. I saw a ripple in the water. Could it have been the tail of a manatee? Alas, that was all I was able to see so we’ll never know. Apparently, with the warm winter that Tampa had been having, the manatees had no need to swim all the way to the power plant. As their brochure states, the best time to see them is when the temperature in Tampa Bay is about 68 degrees Fahrenheit. When we were there, the temperature in and around Tampa Bay was about 85.

Nevertheless, the Viewing Area was worth seeing. We were impressed to see the efforts made by TECO to utilize solar power to generate electricity as well as their efforts to protect manatees in Florida. We were able to see various birds and schools of fish near the power plant as well.

When we went to the Turkey Creek Sanctuary and to Merritt Island, Florida had been having a cool winter and the manatees hadn’t come back there yet. In Tampa, we were there when the waters were too hot. Hopefully, someday we’ll return to one of those sites when the water is just right. In the meantime, our next stop is the Cincinnati Zoo. They have manatees there and you’re guaranteed to see them all the time.

Remembering History in Memphis On the Eve of Dr. King's Assassination

I was in a campaign meeting on the campus of SUNY Binghamton for Gene McCarthy when another student ran into the room with bloodshot eyes and ragged hair. "Martin Luther King was just shot!" he yelled. It was 1968, before the days of 24/7 news cycles. Someone turned on a radio to hear what was happening. After that, our meeting and in fact our lives, were never the same again.

Fifty years have passed and I've often reflected on how that killing changed America. I'm glad that we had the opportunity to visit the Brooks Museum in Memphis,Tennessee www.brooksmuseum.org. because they have an exhibit which lends pictures to those memories. A temporary exhibit, there until August 19th, highlights photographs of events leading up to that tragic day. 

There are two special temporary exhibitions going on at the Brooks Museum now and in a sense, their themes are related highlighting the need for the movement that Dr. King led. Both exhibits will be there through the middle of August, 2018 so there’s time to plan a trip there. We started by touring the exhibition “Black Resistance: Ernest C. Withers and the Civil Rights Movement” This exhibition is a trove of photographs that memorializes the Civil Rights Movement especially in respect to events that took place in Memphis. These were events that affected the course of history throughout the United States and at the risk of showing my age, I have to say that I remember them too well.

The most iconic of the photographs shows the sanitation workers marching with their famous placards I AM A MAN. Dr. King had just before that talked about the confluence of race and poverty and had begun to address issues of economic justice. It was soon after that march that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was shot by James Earl Ray and the rest of our history morphed into the present. Other photographs are of other events that took place during the Civil Rights Movement. It was an emotional moment seeing them especially knowing that we have to advocate for all the rights won at that time all over again in light of our current regime in Washington.

I Am A Man taken at the Sanitation Workers' Strike

On the way to the next exhibit, we saw some paintings and prints by Carrol Cloar. The dignity that he is able to portray in his subjects underlines the yearnings seen in the photographs of Ernest C. Withers. My favorite was this one “Wedding Party” that was painted in 1971.

Wedding Party by Carrol Cloar

After this emotional exhibition, it was good to move on to the next one “African-Print Fashion Now! A Story of Taste, Globalization, and Style.” This exhibition shows the development of fashion, fabrics, and patterns in Africa. Although on the surface, the subject seemed more light hearted, it actually depicts an aspect of the history of colonialism in Africa. It shows how the Europeans exploited their knowledge of African preferences to start the fabric and fashion industry from which they profited.

In a sense, it is a forerunner to the exhibition of photographs from the Civil Rights Movement showing once again how the issues of race and economics are connected. As such, you need to see both of these exhibitions. They’ll be there until August 19^th and August 12^th   respectively. 

Besides that the Brooks Museum is well worth seeing. 

The Brooks Museum

It is probably one of the more under-rated museums that we had been to. Located within Overton Park, the building itself is something to see. You won't be sorry that you made the trip.