"Tony has lived only in Chicago" Stan Klein tells us. The "Tony" of whom he speaks is Tony Fitzpatrick—artist, poet, and raconteur in the tradition of Ben Hecht, Nelson Algren, Mike Royko, Studs Terkel and Rick Kogan. After 55 years, though, this son of the Big Shoulders has announced his departure from his Ukrainian Village quarters for New Orleans, where he will "be warm, draw birds and find decent food." In this coda performance to his “Nickel History” trilogy, he bids his city and its people goodbye.
Fitzpatrick has commanded a presence in Chicago since the 1980s for his Kahlo-esque paintings and collages of zoological fantasies and his frequent appearances at the then-fledgling Uptown Poetry Slam. In The Midnight City, he gives thanks to his mentors—an eclectic roster ranging from the nuns of Montini High School to the late Lou Reed ("Lou broke down the door, and people like me got to walk through it"). We hear about his boyhood fascination with birds and his disastrous attempt to join a bird-watcher society, his fond recollections of Cock Robin restaurants, and when he defiantly claims to swim 20 laps each day at his health club (with a cigarette break at half-time), we believe him.
Fitzpatrick's sidekick and sparring partner (the likewise multifaceted Klein) is on hand to recount tales of his own wild-side walks and make conversations out of what would otherwise be soliloquies—in particular, to argue the wisdom of the imminent relocation.
Also sharing the stage is one-man orchestra John Rice, assisted by Anna Fermin contributing guitar, vocals and readings from Wallace Stevens's "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird." Kristin Reeves's video montages of a Chicago landscape populated with creatures from the Fitzpatrick bestiary kaleidoscope with the startling splendor of sunshine on broken glass in contrast with Fitzpatrick and Klein's auras of sturdy home-grown pride that rejects self-aggrandizing showiness. (Commenting on Donald Trump, Fitzpatrick sneers, "We're Chicago, and we were built by better men than him!")
"I'd rather have a memory than a dream," Fitzpatrick says of his decision to move, noting that, at his age, "death has a finite shape" and invoking the inevitable call of the Midnight City train. It remains to be seen whether Gulf-coast summers will send the truculent colossus (who "takes the weather personally") migrating northward alongside his birds after a year or two, but in the meantime, Chicago will be chillier without the hard gem-like flame generated by this urban Goliath with the heart as big as the Great Lakes.
