Four years ago I had a dream where I was drinking at
one of my “seedy Rick Baker writer bars” in the Southside of Peoria (bars with
names like Duffy’s and Boa’s and Dave’s on Shelly. Bars where you can still smoke
in and all of the female patrons have big boobs and bad teeth. Bars where it
behooves you to take an insurance liability out on your liver before entering.
Bars that I have to go in to by myself b/c all my friends get scared shitless
to even go down the social-economic slope of Western hill even though I went to
gradeschool just down the street at Christ Lutheran). In the hazy den of the dream-bar
I was imbibing draught beer (Schlitz) with a young Roger Ebert. He had ruffled,
unkempt grainy-hair the color of fresh kitty-litter. He was pudgy, ashen
countenance that drooped from the lower hemisphere of his neck like a
bespectacled Pillsbury dough boy. He
looked like the kind of kid who spent much of junior high adapting to the ill-time
hazing of a locker room wedgie. The type of kid who spent much of the day
mulling over Dungeon and Dragon manuals while fantasying about girls he would
never date.
The type of kid who would one day be a writer.
In the dream I invited Roger to belly up next to me
at the bar and we drank heavily. There were tufts of cigarette smoke, sawdust
cumulus morels sprouting as if from the earth between intermittent sudsy swigs
of beer and intermittent journalistic banter. In the dream we talked about the
loneliness of the literary lifestyle, the critic who cavils vs. the critic who
creates, but in the end of the dream I remember sitting next to Roger Ebert and
looking around the room and all he would say to me is, “This is a great bar.
It’s a great bar.”
Two days after I waded through this
nocturnal-splotch of sifting images I stumbled upon the article linked b’low.
For all the accumulative prizes he rightfully garnered throughout his four plus
decades as a movie critic I guarantee the thirty year medallion mentioned below
was his most valuable because (like the addled protagonist of any cinematic
inflection) Mr. Ebert was willing to change while graciously goad such change
via instilling hope in others.
So here’s to you Roger Ebert. It’s a great bar but
it’s also a great life. Two thumbs up, Gene. The greatest review awaits you…
