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player ready...Last time we tagged along with choirboy Jonathan Brooks, then a mere lad of 11 about to take to the stage of Orchestra Hall for the farewell concert of Sir Georg Solti-along with 27 other high-voiced boys from the Chicago Children’s Choir-he was belting out Italian arias over a plate of after-school french fries in the back corner of a Hyde Park diner and coaxing ketchup blobs out of the bottle, imploring: “Shimmy, shimmy. Come on out. There you are. Took you long enough.”
And with that alone he stole our heart. In fact, we’ll never see a ketchup bottle quite the same.
That was back on April 8, 1991. Now it seems the boy is on the verge of manhood, and he has the cracking voice to prove it-and the faintest hint of peach fuzz too. (“I’m not shaving yet. You can see it’s coming, though,” he says with more than a little hope, then adds longingly: “I wish.”)
But the biggest news Brooks has to report (besides his forthcoming fuzz) is what he did over his summer vacation, again along with 41 other boys and girls from the multiracial, tuition-free Chicago Children’s Choir, which after nearly four decades in Hyde Park is now nested in the Chicago Cultural Center on Michigan Avenue.
“I haven’t been doing anything much, except I’ve been going places on vacation. First we went to Russia with the choir, then me and my mom, we went down to Mississippi,” reports Brooks, who just started his sophomore year at Gurdon S. Hubbard High School on the Southwest Side. He skips over the Russia part as though it were a trip to Gary. Pretty nonchalant for a kid who thought only “presidents and people with big jobs could ever go across seas.”
“I can say that I didn’t have a boring life before, but when I joined the choir it took me to places I never thought I’d go.” For 16 days, Brooks and friends toured Moscow and St. Petersburg in Russia, and Warsaw and Ekaterinburg in Poland. They performed 11 concerts that included works ranging from Bach to Hebrew folk songs to an Irish blessing.
But for Brooks, at least, the music wasn’t what stole the show.
“The coolest part, probably the best part,” Brooks says of the whole trip, “was when we got to play soccer against the Russian boys.” He pauses. “Even though we lost.” How bad did they lose? “Ewwww,” he warbles, “it must have been like 5-0.”
So much for American supremacy.
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The Chicago Children’s Choir will hold an open house from 2 to 5 p.m. Oct. 29 to show off its new digs at the Chicago Cultural Center, 78 E. Washington St.