Two enthusiastic thumbs up, Gene..

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…