ACLU Benefit Message: Use It or Lose It

Teaming up at Public House Theater to raise dollars for ACLU Illinois, ThirdCoastReview (3CR) and Kill Your Darlings (KYD) Live Lit hosted a kinetic benefit celebrating the first amendment by reading from formerly censored books.  Dry and boring it was not.  Orchestrated to coincide with an annual revel sponsored by the American Library Association to support “the freedom to seek and express ideas”, the October 2^nd event also marked the start of the Supreme Court’s new term.                  

With the theater’s relaxed vintage décor and an air of the provocative pervading the space, the evening took on a pleasantly subversive air as ten local authors read from some of the best literature this and a few other countries have produced.  All of it, once banned.

The range of selected books included the expected and the unexpected; from the Tropic of Cancer to Shel Silverstein’s Dreadful.  And despite the varying levels of reading proficiency, the power of the words retained the heat of potency and power.

To sweeten the pot, even formerly banned songs made it into the show and sagely included the timeless and timely Strange Fruit, Billie Holiday’s masterwork exposing the savagery of lynching written by poet, Abel Meeropol.

The benefit’s high-energy smack talking emcee, writer and actress Karin McKie, kept the flow moving at a slick clip with her pithy intros and irreverent commentary; always reminding the audience that democracy abhors complacency.

Nancy Bishop, 3CR’s editor led off with her reading from a book written in 1934 and rebuked for its “notoriously candid sexuality”, The Tropic of Cancer.  With its thoroughly unbridled language and explicit depictions, the book was also one of the first to test the mettle of this country’s right to free expression.

Storyteller and performing artist, Ada Cheng, has a quietly magnetic stage presence that telegraphs simmering depth.  Selecting a book banned for its depiction of bullying, alcohol abuse, violence and homosexuality, The Absolute True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie is the story of a 14-year-old reservation kid who’s encouraged and agrees to attend an all-white school.  Her excerpts from the book, written in 2007, reflect the realities of our blossoming millennium with all of its hard edges and abrasive expressions.  Things get rough.  Cheng ended her reading with a question.  “Why do we ban people’s lives”.

Northwestern professor Bill Savage still reacts viscerally to his selection even after 30 years of teaching it to college students.  As he noted in his introduction, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn has been controversial since Twain wrote it in the late 1800’s.  Back then it was just considered tawdry and common, not worth reading by anyone respectable.  Now its pilloried because the language it uses rings as profoundly racist to modern ears.  The passage he read however drilled down to the essence of human character and the capacity to do what’s right despite the expectations of convention.

Books get banned for lots of reasons but there seems to be recurrent themes that invite intense scrutiny and eventual censorship in the United States.  Sex that does not conform to established norms, matters of race that challenge the status quo and coming of age stories that question or examine too intently the established order; as does Lolita in the first case, To Kill a Mockingbird in the second and Persepolis in the third.

All of the benefit’s readings packed a wallop and made one wonder what price one would pay to keep the freedoms we enjoy vibrant and pliant.   And they reminded all those in attendance that such a question is not simply an intellectual one.

We Read Banned Books:  An ACLU Benefit

October 2, 2017

7:00 PM

Public House Theater

3914 N. Clark