JAN. 26
“An opera singer … goes to war”
The naval reservist and Lyric Opera singer Ronald Watkins had some sand in his pipes — just as he predicted — when he got back to the United States after his 10 1/2 month tour of duty near Fallujah, where he served as bodyguard to a military chaplain.
“Literally,” he says by phone from his home in Lake Zurich. The sand “gets in everything, it’s everywhere. On television you see a few seconds of beige and sand and that’s it. But you can’t convey it on a screen … how just moving around is such a chore, with the sand and the heat. We had one day when it was 139 degrees.”
But when he got back home in October, Watkins made sure he “hit the deck running” at the Lyric. “I thought it would help with the adjustment,” he says.
“I was probably vocally at 70 percent. And I feel like I’m back to 100 percent now,” adds Watkins, who is a Petty Officer 2nd Class and a baritone in the Lyric chorus. “Right now I’m in ‘Frau’ [Richard Strauss’ ‘Die Frau ohne Schatten’], I’ve just finished “Boheme” … and that’s all for rest of the year. Next year, I’ll do ‘Traviata,’ ‘Onegin’ and ‘Falstaff.'”
Still, coming back to singing “was extremely surreal,” he says, recalling his first rehearsal. “It felt like I hadn’t done it in a million years — something I’d done for 15 years, after going away for 10 months … it just seems brand new.”
But after living with incoming mortar fire during his deployment, Watkins finds that some new instincts feel almost primal.
“The first time I drove downtown, I had to pull over,” he says. “In Fallujah, the streets were always empty. Being in Chicago with people all over the place, coming at your flank … it was overwhelming. My primary reaction was to reach for my weapon.
“It’s called warrior transition adjustment,” he says. “It’s not a steady kind of stress, like it was over there. It catches you off guard.”
Aside from being back home with his wife, Carol, and son, Jeffrey (with whom he performed in his church production of “Amahl and the Night Visitors” recently), Watkins has found relief in ways that have surprised him. Getting to sleep comes to mind first. (“You sleep over there, but you know that there’s a chance you’ll have to wake up in a minute.”) And doing chores around the house. “Whenever I had the chance to fantasize, that’s the thing I thought about the most,” he says. “I would just think about things that I’d wanted to do around my home that I never got to do.
“Yeah, and the first two weeks I got back, I grilled dinner every night.”
Emily Nunn
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APRIL 18
“Bookstore gets perilously close to final chapter”
Jhumpa Lahiri, author of “The Namesake,” will do a reading at the Women and Children First bookstore April 8, and, the next day, Chilean novelist Isabel Allende will be there.
Nothing unusual about that. The store, founded in 1979 in Lincoln Park, is known for hosting great writers and powerful personalities.
But, last April, everything about the independent feminist store — a cultural fixture in the Andersonville neighborhood since 1990 — was in question as owners Linda Bubon and Ann Christophersen, battered by a string of financial losses, were wondering whether they’d have to downsize, move or even close the business.
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They went public with their plight, and an outpouring of support and, most important, sales resulted.
The store finished its fiscal year at the end of June in the black for the first time in five years, Bubon says.
The store’s lease on its space at 5233 N. Clark St. is up again in the spring.
But there’s no talk now of closing or moving.
“We feel pretty well-supported here,” Bubon says.
— Patrick T. Reardon
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JULY 25, SEPT. 21
Ken Burns on WW II: Turning teens into killers; American racism; dropping the atomic bomb
Documenting ‘The War’: Small-town editor’s words open window into the hearts of folks back home in wartime America
‘The War” isn’t over for Ken Burns. The acclaimed documentarian continues to hear from veterans or their survivors many weeks after the national, public-television broadcast of his and Lynn Novick’s 15-hour film on World War II.
In an interview from his New Hampshire home, Burns spoke of viewers sending him emotional letters and e-mails and such war souvenirs as uniform buttons and sand from Iowa Jima. He said people have approached him to share a wartime story or a regret that they hadn’t appreciated the sacrifices of an older generation.
“It has been gut-wrenching,” Burns said. “You couldn’t have convinced me that I would have spent 90 percent of my time in the last two months responding to people who needed to talk or to talk more.”
The initial broadcast of “The War” from Sept. 23 through Oct. 2 averaged a 4.7 rating — a respectable number for a PBS show and equivalent to about 7 million viewers. Compared with other Burns epics, “The War” had a higher rating than “Jazz,” which averaged a 3.9 in its initial January 2001 broadcast, PBS said. It had a lower average rating than “Baseball,” with a 5.5 when aired in September 1994, and “The Civil War,” with an 8.8 in September 1990. In the early 1990s, however, the TV audience was far less fragmented than it is today.
“The War” has been rerun many times by individual public TV stations in the last few months, and Burns said there is a chance PBS would rebroadcast it in 2008. The companion book has been a best seller.
Burns said he and his team were so struck by the emotions the film released that they are considering a documentary on another wrenching conflict, the Vietnam War.
Meanwhile, Luverne, Minn., pop. 4,600, continues to enjoy some fame from being one of the four home-front cities featured in “The War.”
“You can certainly tell we’re on the map now,” said Lori Ehde, editor of the local weekly, the Rock County Star Herald. “People get off [Interstate Highway 90] to see us. We’re planning on putting a billboard on the interstate” directing the curious to “The War” town.
Visitors drop in at the newspaper, said Ehde, and many buy a book of wartime columns by Al McIntosh, a past owner-editor of the weekly.
Excerpts from the columns, read by Tom Hanks, provided the film with moving vignettes of small-town life. And the film gave McIntosh an audience he never enjoyed during his life.
— Charles Storch