Full report on 'Full House' house

Vacations make strange bedfellows.

This was clear a few weeks ago when I found myself exchanging phones with a man from Australia so I could take his picture in front of the “Full House” house and he could take mine and my wife’s.

Yes, I said the “Full House” house.

It wasn’t on my list of Top Ten Things to Do in San Francisco. All I knew about “Full House” is that it starred John Stamos, Bob Saget and the Olsen twins.

But the site was on my wife’s itinerary, so I went along to get along, as the saying goes, despite signs the people who live in and around the house wanted lookie-loos to stay away. These include a literal “no trespassing” sign and a ban on tour buses on the street, located in the Lower Pacific Heights area.

So we took our photos and kept moving. Yet in the short time we were there, several other cars drove slowly by and dozens of pedestrians, cameras snapping and fingers pointing, showed up too.

A little Googling taught me that despite being set in San Francisco, “Full House” filmed only its opening credits and some exterior shots in the city. Most of the show was shot on the Warner Bros. studio lot in Los Angeles.

It reminds me of a situation much closer to home, the “Christmas Story” house in Cleveland. While the book the movie is based on takes place in Indiana and most of the movie was shot in Toronto, the Cleveland location (where exterior scenes of the home and neighborhood were filmed) has become a tourist magnet.

Unlike the “Full House” property, however, the “Christmas Story” house, purchased and restored to its original working-class splendor by a fan, welcomes visitors, especially those willing to pay to go inside or patronize the gift shop across the street.

This embrace of a modest pop-culture distinction may be the difference between the unpretentious Rust Belt and the tony west coast.

Our acquaintance from Australia seemed embarrassed by his pilgrimage to the “Full House” site. He needn’t have been. We all like what we like, after all. No apologies necessary.

It did get me thinking, however, about how certain places become popular, sometimes out of proportion with their larger cultural significance. Certain perennially popular sites speak to our values systems and to what a society considers worth commemorating. If you believe history is written by the winners, then you must concede tourist guides are, too.

The places most people find worth visiting also benefit from extensive promotion. Some of the lesser ones survive because of proximity to more-popular attractions. The “Full House” house, for example, is one mile away from the Painted Ladies, a row of Victorian homes facing Alamo Square Park, drawing thousands of visitors every day. (Those homes are also featured in the “Full House” opening, I’m told.)

So if you’re already in the park and have even a passing interest in “Full House,” you’ll likely go.

Of course, San Francisco is notable for its many hills, making a normally short trek akin to scaling the Matterhorn. Would you do that for “Full House”? Or for somebody you love who loves “Full House”?

In most cases, getting there is half the fun of vacation. But this is not a hill I’m willing to die on when climbing a hill I’m not willing to die on.

Reach Chris at chris.schillig@yahoo.com. On Twitter: @cschillig on Twitter. 

Teachers' opening salvo sets tone for students

Few topics create more angst for teachers than the First Day Lesson.

If you have educators in your life, you know they’ve been thinking about how to start the coming school year since flipping the calendar to August, if not before.

The teaching profession, for the most part, endorses the philosophy that well begun is well done, that whatever happens on the first day sets the stage for every moment of the rest of the year. So that first lesson has to be sharp like cheddar. Or an obsidian knife. Don’t just break the ice in class, slice through it.

One of the most common icebreakers is the Candy Trick, where the teacher stands at the door with a bag of sweets (shades of the witch in “Hansel and Gretel”) and tells students to take as many pieces as they’d like. Only later do students discover they must share one fact about themselves for each piece.

A variation is the Toilet-Paper Trick, where the teacher substitutes a roll of (unused) teepee for the candy and has students roll off as many squares as they want. Then they have to write something about themselves on each square.

Teachers either love to share their first-day lessons or guard them like Gollum, stroking their origami notecards or glitter-covered snowflakes and crooning, “My precious! My precious!”

The sharers post everywhere, all over Facebook and social media, during staff meetings and to complete strangers in office-supply stores. They are proud of their intricate charts to ensure that every student will speak to every other student on the first day, or that each kid will contribute a block to a quilt on the wall.

I’m not immune to shenanigans on the first day, but not terribly original either. For the last few years, I’ve relied on the Notecard Trick, giving one to each student and having them answer some moderately gonzo questions about themselves − least favorite food, a color they’ve always wanted to dye their hair, a song they never want to hear again, etc. The only thing they can’t put on the card is their name.

Then I collect the cards, shuffle, and hand them back out. Students must find the owner of the card I give them, have a conversation and introduce that person to the rest of the class.

One thing teachers, myself included, often don’t consider is how First Day Lessons affect introverts. Sure, outgoing kids will love to rattle off 47 fun facts about themselves on 47 sheets of toilet paper or introduce a fellow student who hates linguine, but what about those who find such classroom antics painful? Or who have been subjected to them multiple times on the same day?

Edutopia, a website from the George Lucas Educational Foundation, offers different questions for teachers to ask at the start of the year. 

They are: 

1. What helps you feel welcomed?
2. How do you like to be greeted?
3. What strengths do you bring to the classroom? The school?
4. What do you like most about school so far? What could change?

These are a great foundation, either in addition to a rousing game of Two Truths and a Lie or in place of it. They give students lots of room to navigate, so what teachers learn might be more significant than the last show they binge-watched on Netflix.

A final point about first-day activities − or first days in general − is that it’s OK if they don’t go perfectly for teachers or students. Trying to make them flawless is part of why everybody is so jittery in August.

Most school years have 180 days. While the first is important, so are the other 179. One thing all teachers can model is a willingness to admit that yesterday didn’t go so well, but they’re back at it today, learning from what went right and what went wrong, even if the latter happened on the over-hyped first day.

That’s not always something that fits on a square of toilet paper, even if you write really really small.

'Wokeness' isn't what detractors think it is

Warner Bros.’ cancellation of “Batgirl,” a movie slated for release on the HBO Max streaming service, brought a lot of trolls out from under bridges.

While most people either don’t know a Batgirl movie was in development or are disappointed they’ll never get to see it, a small but vocal group is downright gleeful.

These are people who believe Warner Bros. is getting what it deserves for forcing “wokeness,” a shorthand term of disparagement that apparently encompasses anything these folks don’t like.

Warner Bros. has said “Batgirl,” which had already finished principal photography, no longer aligns with its plans to make big-budget superhero movies for theatrical release. So the studio itself canceled it. Hardly “getting what it deserves.”

Some of the anti-woke contingent on social media don’t appreciate that the title role is played by Leslie Grace, a Dominican-American who has spoken of her special opportunity to play an Afro-Latina superhero. The original character is white.

Other anti-wokers seem angry that the character exists at all, as if Batgirl had been created for this movie when she has, in fact, played a prominent role in DC Comics for more than 50 years. They reference what they describe as a plan by the studio to replace all its mainstream superheroes with gender-swapped or minority substitutes.

Critics of “wokeness” often argue they aren’t opposed to diverse casting per se. By all means create characters who are ethnically diverse, LGBTQ+, dedicated to progressive causes, etc., they opine, but leave legacy characters and long-established franchises out of it.

That argument dismisses an essential truth: Almost all mainstream American characters of cultural significance were originally white, cis men, not because these qualities were essential to the characters’ identities, but because this was the default template for decades if not centuries. These characters also looked like and reflected the values of the overwhelmingly white, cis men who created them.

Telling contemporary creators not to diversify existing characters and franchises but instead to make their own fails to recognize that, in a media world saturated by streaming options, it’s an uphill battle for any new property to achieve the same level of public recognition as a legacy character like Superman, Batman, or Spider-Man. So this argument is just kicking the can further down the road, maintaining a hegemony of homogeneity.

But the wokeness argument goes beyond characters to plots themselves. Leave real-world problems, politics and polemics out of our fantastic fiction, the anti-wokers argue. They want their heroes punching bad guys and saving hapless citizens dangling over cliffs, not rhapsodizing about institutionalized racism or fighting climate change.

What these anti-wokers forget is that characters like Captain America punched Nazis in the 1940s. He gave up being Captain America in the 1970s (albeit temporarily) after Watergate. Contemporary issues have always influenced popular entertainment, and creators have always used the news as grist for the plot mill.

So of course Superman should fight the Ku Klux Klan and Aquaman should rail against polluted oceans. And if today’s villains espouse an ideology uncomfortably close to contemporary, real-world leaders, maybe that says something about our leaders and the insidious forces of populism they ride into office.

Again, this is nothing new. J.R.R. Tolkien may have disliked allegorical readings of his work, but the hobbits and elves and the problems they face in “The Lord of the Rings” can nonetheless be credibly read as a reaction to the two world wars the author lived through. Frank Herbert’s “Dune” has environmental consciousness writ large on every page. “Star Trek” may have been set in the twenty-third century, but it pushed boundaries in the twentieth, including the interracial kiss between Captain Kirk (William Shatner) and Lt. Uhura (the late, great Nichelle Nichols).

So whatever “wokeness” today’s critics decry is just the normal creative process at work. Changing up existing characters gives them a new set of challenges to overcome, and having them fight real-world problems provides them with the continued relevance.

As Pearl Jam sings, “It’s evolution, baby.”

American Gods and The Seven-Per-Cent Solution

I knocked two books off my reading list this summer. 

The first is American Gods by Neil Gaiman. I bought it new back in — gulp! — 2001 and have been trying to read it ever since. I've probably started it three or four times over the years. Each time, I've enjoyed it, but something has kept me from finishing. This summer, I vowed to read it all. 

That makes it sound like reading Gaiman's book was a chore. It really wasn't. The epic tale of gods who hitched a ride to North America via the people who immigrated here and subsequently withered as people's beliefs faltered is wonderfully rich and thoughtful. I'm pretty well versed in Greek and Roman mythology and not so much in other cultures' pantheons, so many of the gods in play here were unfamiliar, but that did not keep me from enjoying the characters and their story. 

A critic (I forget which one) once noted that Gaiman is a poet who happens to work in prose. I found myself coming back to that description many times while reading. The book tells the episodic adventures of an ex-prisoner named Shadow whose life becomes intertwined with various deities.  While Shadow and his dilemmas are always interesting, each one does not necessarily compel the reader to move on to the next. This might explain why it took me twenty-one years of starting and stopping before I finally read the novel straight through. 

Gaiman is to be commended for resisting what had to be an urge to spread this story across multiple books. Extra subplots could have padded the main narrative into a trilogy, but the author sticks with a refreshing done-in-one approach, instead. 

By the end of the novel, the various pieces and parts of the narrative congeal into a not-unpleasant whole, and Gaiman successfully hides what, in retrospect, should have been an obvious plot point. 

I liked this book very much, but I can also see why it has polarized readers, something the author alludes to in a new introduction for an annotated edition a few years ago. Recommended, but with reservations. 

Another book scratched from my summer reading list is The Seven-Per-Cent Solution by Nicholas Meyer. This is a book I first read decades ago and became interested in revisiting. 

Meyer writes an excellent pastiche of Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes, here in the thralls of cocaine addiction. His loyal assistant, Dr. John Watson, arranges for Holmes to receive help from the real-life Sigmond Freud, which necessitates a visit to Austria. Watson employs various machinations, including a hound dog and Holmes' own brother, to trick the great detective into making the journey. 

The first half of the novel details Holmes' treatment and recovery and is probably the part that most readers remember most vividly. I know that I did. 

The second half deals with Holmes and Watson partnering with the psychotherapist to solve a high-stakes mystery. It climaxes with an exciting chase by rail, with the trio racing against time to avert an all-out war. 

Meyer gets the voices and mannerisms of Holmes and Watson just right, and he sticks to the familiar stance among Holmes fans and critics that the detective is a real person. Hence, a longish introduction explains how an unpublished manuscript by Watson comes into Meyer's possession. Some may find this part tedious, but it's all part of the fun. 

Holmes is a character I like to encounter periodically. A friend and I once concluded that reading too many of the stories at once dulls the enjoyment, so I have been picking my way through the canon for even longer than I have been trying to read American Gods. One day, I'll get to them all. 

In the meantime, I have Meyer's second pastiche, The West End Horror, ready to go. This is one I haven't read, so I'm looking forward to it. 

 

Mega Millions winner, where are you?

My wife and I caught lottery fever last week.

It’s probably more accurate to say my wife caught lottery fever while I soothed her overheated brow with a cold compress. Figuratively speaking, that is.

We visited a local convenience store Friday night to buy Mega Millions tickets. We should have apologized to anybody in line behind us — and there were a few dozen — because Holly had lots of questions and she wasn’t shy about asking. Or about telling the cashier, and later, our server at a restaurant, how she was going to be the sole winner and how she planned to spend the money.

We ended up “investing” $15 into five tickets. We also set a new record by not matching even one winning number on any of them. The old Schillig luck running true to form.

In all honesty, that’s OK. I’m not sure I would know what to do with $780.5 million, which was the cash payout, anyway. Which isn’t to say that I wouldn’t be willing to find out.

What I’m less OK with is never finding out who really won. But since the winning ticket was sold in Illinois, that might be the case.

Illinois allows lottery winners of prizes larger than $250,000 to shield their identities from the public. Several other states have similar policies, including Ohio.

This makes sense, I guess. It’s a ridiculous amount of money to receive all at once, or in installments. Having the winner or winners announced publicly could open them to unwanted attention from unscrupulous people.

It sounds like the plot of a movie: A recent lottery winner’s family is kidnapped, and the kidnappers demand umpty-million, unaware that the figure is impossible because the winner has opted for a small percentage of the money every year.

I vaguely recall a Mel Gibson movie called “Ransom” with a kinda/sorta similar story, except Gibson’s character wasn’t a lottery winner. He became fantastically wealthy the old-fashioned way, which I assume was either through inherited wealth or taking advantage of corporate welfare … er, tax breaks.

A less outlandish problem for lottery winners would be the arrival of long-lost relatives and childhood friends. Or random strangers hitting up winners with sad stories, real or imaginary, or with can’t-lose investment opportunities.

So, yeah, Annono Lotto makes sense from that perspective.

Still, though, this means that taxpayers and lottery players have only the lottery’s word about who won and how it’s all paid out. Transparency with public dollars, this is not.

In New York, then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo vetoed an anonymity proposal in 2019. Instead, he advised potential winners to form a limited liability company (LLC) to keep their names private. According to the New York Post, the tactic worked for 23 Long Island coworkers who took a lump-sum payout of around $262.2 million after winning Mega Millions three years ago. They called their LLC New Life 2019. If there’s a better name, I can’t think of one.

With an LLC, the public, including lottery players, can still birddog that the payout went somewhere other than back into the lottery coffers, and the winner or winners can still maintain privacy.

With last week’s drawing, all the public knows, at least for now, is that the winning ticket was sold at a Speedway gas station in Des Plaines.

And all I know is that a lottery winner in Illinois owes me $15. Plus the $99 it will cost for me to set up an LLC.

You know, to protect my privacy.

Reach Chris at chris.schillig@yahoo.com. On Twitter: @cschillig.

Ain't that tough enuff?

Originally published in March 2014.

Sometimes I’m amazed that I survived my childhood.

I didn’t grow up in the golden age of home remedies, but just slightly thereafter, perhaps in the slow sunset of that era. It was long before this current age, certainly, when running to the doctor for every hangnail and cough is the default setting for most parents. I bet I survived any number of horrible diseases — diphtheria, whooping cough and dengue fever among them — without anybody making formal diagnoses. This is probably true for anybody over the age of 35.

Back in the dark ages when Jimmy Carter was president and Elvis had morphed from a pelvis-rattling rebel into a fat, sad man in a sequined jumper, parents didn’t have access to WebMD, 24-hour hotlines, and fancy phone apps to pinpoint a child’s illness the way smart bombs hone in on Middle Eastern targets today. Instead, they had to work with the tools at hand.

For my mother, these tools consisted of McNess Mentholated Ointment, an old sock, and sticks of butter. Any sore throat or respiratory problem could be cured with a combination of these elements, and often with all three.

I don’t know if you can still buy McNess. My guess is that the government banned it around the same time as DDT, but that Mom squirreled away a lifetime supply in the basement, next to the strychnine-laced rat traps. McNess came in circular, red-and-gold tins, one of which could last for approximately seven years, no matter how often it was used. The ointment was a thick, viscous, yellow, like phlegm in an old man’s handkerchief.

As kids, my sister and I would go to ridiculous lengths to disguise a sore throat. I can remember practically turning blue at the dinner table to avoid coughing, for fear that the dry hack would be occasion for Mom to break open a tin of torture the way a boxer opens a can of whoopass on his weaker rival.

Sometimes, I’d pretend to whisper to hide impending laryngitis, or practice flexing my throat muscles to tamp down the urge to sneeze, or quickly dart my tongue up into my nostrils to wipe away the telltale drainage, lest sickness be discerned there.

Despite my best efforts, though, illness was always found out, in which case came the trifecta of terror. First, Mom would rub McNess all over my chest and throat, massaging it in with broad, firm strokes. Next, she would wrap an old sock around my neck, secured with a safety pin, the better to seal the salve, which announced itself through a pungent odor that sent the dog scurrying from the vicinity.

Then it was off to bed, even if it were 7 p.m., with the door closed, copious covers piled atop me, and a vaporizer — Mom’s only concession to 20th century medicine — running at full blast. If I survived until morning, that meant school.

But school could only be faced with the help of the third item on the list, the aforementioned butter stick, melted into liquid on the stove and fed one spoonful at a time to the complaining victim. The objective, she said, was to coat the throat — a piece of rhyming doggerel that she no doubt learned from a voodoo medicine man who practiced near her childhood farm in Maximo — and prevent future coughing.

If I was lucky, I’d be given a few Smith Brothers cough drops to carry in my pocket to class, in case the all-night McNess treatment, respiratory-choking sock and butter didn’t do the trick. The goal was always to keep me healthy enough to face another day of elementary drudgery.

Smith Brothers, you may note, is not even considered medicine today. Instead, it is shelved with the candy. In other words, my entire war against pneumonia, strep throat, raging sinus infections and any number of other medical woes was fought with a variation of motor oil, a tube sock, a dairy product, and some sugar-laced placebos.

Amazingly, I lived. More amazingly, I tried some of these remedies on my own child. But the first time I melted a stick of butter in the microwave and tried to feed it to my daughter, my wife threatened to call Child Protective Services.

Instead, we went to the doctor.

I suppose that was for the best. My childhood toughened me considerably, but it’s an entirely different century and millennium these days. Although part of me wishes I could enter “sore throat” and “hacking cough” into Google and see the words “McNess” and “white sock” pop up as treatments.

For one thing, it would be a heck of a lot cheaper.



Chris Schillig, who can be reached at chris.schillig@yahoo.com and on Twitter at cschillig, actually had a very good childhood, as long as he stayed healthy.

Afternoon-shift workers, I salute you

This one's from waaaaay back in July 2008. I've worked a few more afternoon shifts since then, and they still suck.

To those who work afternoons, I salute you.

For the last two weeks, I’ve been among your ranks, working my summer gig at The Review behind-the-scenes, putting stories and photos on pages. Because it’s a morning paper, we work afternoons and evenings packaging news for your next day’s edification and enjoyment.

I haven’t worked a steady afternoon shift for years. In college, I attended classes in the day and worked afternoons, evenings and weekends. It was easier then. The body was more prone to snap back quickly.

The problem with afternoons, as readers who work the shift know, is you’re always waiting to go to work.

Whether shopping, mowing the lawn, reading a book or running an errand, you have one eye on the clock, and a little voice inside your head is counting down.

You pretend it’s not so, but it is. If somebody asks you to go out of town, you accept only on days you have off. Otherwise, you’re running a mission with military precision, departing at 0900 hours to return home at 1400 hours to get ready for work. God forbid a friend wants to break for lunch or dawdle an extra 10 minutes. Move soldier, move, move, move.

You don’t get that gotta-be-back stress working days. Day workers come home from the job and go somewhere else without worrying what time they get back. Coming home late just means a little less shut-eye that night.

In sleep-deprived America, where everybody looks like an extra from Night of the Living Dead until noon or a fourth cup of coffee (whichever comes first), wandering around bleary-eyed is part of the dress code.

Midnight shifts are also better than afternoons because you have a longer stretch of time, psychologically speaking, to be off duty. Yes, you sleep during the day, which I’m convinced is not normal, but the trade-off is you wake up when all the zombies get off work, so you can spend time with them before your job begins.

As a Review colleague endlessly delights in pointing out, I am an up-before-dawn freak who finds greatest productivity between 5 and 9 a.m. The rest of the day is all downhill, and by 3 p.m., I’m ready for a nap.

My colleague is the opposite. He’s up at times when I believe sensible folks ought not be, listening to music or reading when the only people prowling about are vampires, grave robbers and Dumpster divers. He even takes naps at 11 p.m. so he’s not too tired to stay up even later.

He wonders how I’m holding up on afternoons, when my creativity is at its lowest.

Surprisingly, I’m doing OK, despite still waking up between 5 and 6 a.m. each day. I’ve never needed a lot of sleep anyway, and a few extra bags under my eyes just make it look like I’m packed for a longer trip.

The biggest change is coming home to a house where things have happened while I’ve been away. Not major things, mind you, but little signs that life continues without me. Food has been eaten, television watched, clothes washed and dried.

During the day, it’s just me and the pets. They sleep and I putter about doing little solitary things.

Not admitting it, of course, but watching the clock. It’s the curse of afternoons. I’m happy to have them, but I’ll be just as happy to be finished. Afternoon workers have my sympathy and respect.

How funky is Bob Dylan, anyway?

This was originally published in May 2014. I no longer have students write the assignment mentioned in the next paragraph. Maybe I should bring it back. 

Every year, my Advanced Placement Language students write and share “This I Believe” essays, modeled on the long-running National Public Radio series, as their final exam. This is my contribution to the cause.

***

I believe in the right of people to interpret certain phenomena however they best see fit.

For example, I was driving last weekend, thinking about a comedian who recently said that folksinger Bob Dylan was overrated. The gist of the comedian’s argument was that Dylan can’t sing or play the guitar and harmonica very well, and that he writes lyrics that are inscrutable.

As I pondered this opinion, I was reminded of the song by the Counting Crows, “Mr. Jones,” with lyrics that run, “I want to be Bob Dylan/ Mr. Jones wishes he was someone just a little more funky/ When everybody loves you, son, that’s just about as funky as you can be.”

A few seconds later, that very song came on the radio. It made me arch an eyebrow, I confess.

One can interpret this phenomenon a variety of ways. Some people might see it as a little tip of the hat from the Big Man Upstairs, God’s way of sending a sign that Dylan is either A-OK or really is overrated. Or maybe God guided the radio programmer’s hand at that instant to make the song jibe with my thoughts. Or maybe God guided my thoughts to Dylan at that moment to make me arch my eyebrow as I did, creating a minor miracle to convince a nonbeliever.

A second interpretation is that the confluence of Dylan-related thoughts and Dylan-related song is a mere coincidence, one of many that occur throughout a normal day. According to this line of reasoning, hearing “Mr. Jones” on the radio a moment after I thought of it has more to do with the format of the station (it plays only '90s alternative and grunge, and “Mr. Jones” is an example of the former) than divine intervention.

A third interpretation is to shrug one’s shoulders, say “Who cares?” and just enjoy the damn song.

The beauty of being creatures of consciousness is that we can choose any of these options, and many other explanations besides, to fit our own belief system — and not just about Bob Dylan.

The second interpretation above is my own, but I recognize that many people would choose what’s behind door number one. And that’s cool.

Personally, I have a hard time buying the concept that we should be thankful to a higher power when He/She/It cures cancer or lets three out of five people survive a tornado without also being angry that He/She/It gave us the cancer or caused the tornado. It’s easier not to believe.

But I recognize that many people have reconciled these conundrums in ways that I have not, and I’m fascinated by this, just as I know that some people are fascinated by the way I think and the way that I have reconciled my non-belief.

None of which, of course, will stop people who interpret phenomena through a religious lens from praying for me, damning me, or ignoring me; just as I doubt that I will stop believing that these same people are squandering parts of their lives that could be spent more productively elsewhere.

And you know what? It’s a big, wide world out there, and it’s much more interesting with a wide diversity of people and opinions in it. If I’m fortunate to live long enough, maybe some of these opinions will change my mind about what made the Counting Crows blare through my radio that morning. But if not, the conversations will have been worth having, and the exposure to alternate points of view illuminating.

One thing’s for sure, however. Whether songs are divinely programmed or subject to chance, Bob Dylan really is just about as funky as he can be. This I believe.


chris.schillig@yahoo.com