The Corona Diaries Vol 46: Doctor Who and Italian Beef. Fortunately, I am blessed with both!

(mid-December 2021)

(Watch the introduction to this entry.)

Thanksgiving weekend is when the Frau and I make our annual pilgrimage to lovely Lombard, Illinois where we spend the weekend indulging in nerdy goodness at Chicago TARDIS, an annual convention dedicated to the British TV show Doctor Who. We've been attending since 2009, I think, although last year's edition went virtual due to Covid and I passed on spending more of my life in front of my computer while wearing a headset.

Over the years we've developed and honed a Chicago TARDIS routine: we arrive at the hotel on Friday some time in the late morning. After getting our badges and stylish lanyards, we each attend a panel or interview to get into the spirit of things and to see a coterie of fellow con goers that we run into every year. The actors playing the Doctor and companions come and go, new fans are made every day, empires crumble and fall, but that guy with the 4th Doctor scarf who golf claps at panels is at Chicago TARDIS every year and his presence offers a welcome sense of continuity and familiarity.

Having gotten into the swing of things, we head out for lunch to the local Portillo's as we have been since we started attending the convention. When we began going to the con, it was a Sisyphean task to be able to find a better than decent Italian beef here in Madison. However, since 2019, Portillo's has opened two locations here so the novelty is gone. I asked my Frau if she wanted to go somewhere else for lunch (the other option I presented was probably Buona Beef, truth be known) but she didn't and so our tradition lives on.

I consider it one of the crowning achievements in my relationship with my Frau to have helped her develop a taste for the delicacy that is the Italian beef. Despite not having lived in Chicago for some time, I have never been able to shake my cravings for the iconic Chicago sandwich (nor for the Chicago dog) just as ex-smokers never entirely lose that lust for nicotine. There are simply times when I need to have shaved beef that has been lovingly seasoned with basil, oregano, pepper, etc. and roasted just right.

 

Eating one of these luscious sandwiches, my au jus-stained arms flecked with basil and my mouth sporting a moderate burn from the generous hot giardiniera, always brings back happy memories of my brother who was your archetypal Italian beef aficionado. He maintained that Jay's Beef was the best in Chicago and I always looked forward to our trips out to the one at Montrose and Narragansett where large saucepans full of celery and chilies simmered in beef au jus in lieu of giardiniera.

The Italian beef is a gustatory pleasure everyone should have at least once in their life.

The con was fun. Many people were to be seen in costume. There are always a lot of Fourth Doctors with 13' scarves such as this fellow.

(Photo by Chicago TARDIS)

 

When I am not listening to actors regale us with tales of making Doctor Who and from their careers more generally, I am usually found at a panel discussion. Here's one I attended. Can you spot your humble narrator?

(Photo by Taylor Deatherage)

 

Topics range from individual TV stories to books & audio dramas to LBGT representation (as with the discussion pictured above) in the series over the years and all sort of other things. Some panel discussions aren't Doctor Who-related. They may be about Star Wars or the latest Marvel comic book movies, for example. Since I have seen only one of the newer Star Wars movies and would be overjoyed if all Marvel and DC comic book superhero media were ejected into the sun never to be heard from again, these panels largely hold no interest for me. But the occasional off-topic one piques my interest.

A highlight of every CT is Mysterious Theater 337 which is a take on Mystery Science Theater 3000 featuring a group of fans riffing on a particular episode of the show we all know and love.

This year Colin Baker, who played the sixth incarnation of the Doctor, attended so there were lots of people dressed up in his gaudy, multi-colored costume.

(Photo by Chicago TARDIS)

 

I watched Baker's stories back when I was c.13-15 years old so I have a real affection for his time on the show. His final series with Doctor Who was a season-spanning story arc called "The Trial of a Time Lord" and I have a particular fondness for it. If the internet is right, I first watched it in November 1987. At the time, I hadn't seen Doctor Who in a while and I had moved from Chicago to rural Wisconsin less than six months earlier. The move meant not only dislocation from friends and family, but also the end of my parents' marriage. As my brother prepared to move back to Chicago, I was amid alien corn - a lonely, struggling teenager. 

I recall sitting before the television that November night as the new theme song played. This was followed by a model/special effects shot that looked quite expensive. Very odd for Doctor Who, notorious for its low budgets. The changes kept coming. Exterior shots were on videotape now instead of film and so the show had a uniform look. And the Doctor was much friendlier to Peri, his traveling companion, than he had been the previous season. I enjoyed the first part, "The Mysterious Planet", wondering if it was set on Earth and, if so, what had happened to our fair planet. "Mindwarp" followed and it starred Brian Blessed and Christopher Ryan (from The Young Ones), which was a treat. But was Peri really dead? I adored the Agatha Christie-laced "Terror of the Vervoids" as well as the concluding story, "The Ultimate Foe", with the Doctor's trippy venture into the Matrix and the vaguely Phildickian revelation of the identity of his foe, the Valeyard.

 

There are many fans for whom the Sixth Doctor and/or "The Trial of a Time Lord" are not their cup of tea. Fair enough. But, for me, this story was not only fun to watch, but a piece of home as well. Something familiar, something comforting to a boy whose life had been mercilessly uprooted. Watching "The Trial of a Time Lord" was an escape from the misery and the loneliess. It may not be the perfect Doctor Who story but it will always be special to this fan.

Also in attendance this year was Michael Jayston who played the aforementioned Valeyard in "The Trial of a Time Lord". There is always something weird for me about seeing the people whom I watched on TV as a kid in real life that I cannot get over. When Jayston was last at the convention four years ago, I had an extended conversation with him which meandered from his love for traditional English ales to his other acting roles, past, present, and future. He was extremely friendly and quite charming. I am still amazed that I had this wonderful, informal chat with the Valeyard! Such an encounter would have been unthinkable to 15 year-old me.

We have other convention-related traditions that all have to do with food. Every Saturday afternoon we meet my mother for lunch. And then Sunday mornings we get together with a friend and his wife for breakfast. Sadly, we missed them this year as my friend stayed up too late and left his phone downstairs where it ran out of battery. Oops. Next year!

We had fun, as always, and I am looking forward to returning again in 2022.

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In my mind, the end of Chicago TARDIS signals the beginning of the Christmas season. Yeah, Yorktown Center, where the convention is held, is an enormous mall complex that is overrun by hordes of Black Friday shoppers jockeying for parking spots upon our arrival but my brain doesn't shift gears until we get home. One of the first things I did to celebrate the impending holiday was to buy Stollen.

Stollen is a German Christmas bread made with candied and/or rum-soaked dried fruits and covered in powdered sugar. I know of a couple bakeries here in Madison that make it, Batch Bakehouse and Clasen's, and I endeavor to try a sample from each every year. Both are excellent. My expert opinion is that the Stollen from Batch has the lighter texture of the two but Clasen's puts dollops of marzipan in their whereas Batch does not. And I just love marzipan.

You can't go wrong with either and it's best to eat both.

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With the cold weather, my bike rides are becoming few and far between so I am once again spending more time catching up on movies. I recently watched The Phantom Carriage, a Swedish film from 1921.

I watched it under somewhat false pretenses as I was under the impression that it was a horror movie. But it turned out to be something far different.

 

At the beginning of the film, we meet Edit, a Salvation Army Sister who is on her deathbed. Her dying wish is to speak with a David Holm one last time. The movie is in no hurry to introduce us to Holm and, when we do, we discover that he's a drunken lout. Holm is in a graveyard drinking his sorrows away with his friends. At one point a fight breaks out amongst the drunkards and he is knocked unconscious from a bottle to the head. Holm's spirit emerges from his body to meet the driver of the titular carriage. We learn that the last person to die every year becomes the Reaper who drives the carriage and harvests the souls the following year.

The Reaper takes Holm's soul on a trip back to when he wasn't the horrible person who coughs in people's faces despite having tuberculosis. Through flashbacks, we learn of what happened to poor George Helm. In one scene, his wife locks him in a closet or pantry and readies to leave with their children. This pantry just happened to have an axe in it so Holm takes it to the door.

I felt like I was watching The Shining during this scene and someone out there has produced a visual aid to explain why.

So, while it was more of a morality tale a la A Christmas Carol than supernatural horror story, I still thoroughly enjoyed it. The special effects were, well, effective, and I adored the tinting.

 

The final silent film on my to-watch list at the moment is the restored version of Metropolis.

Another movie I watched recently is Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, Ukrainian film from 1964.

It concerns a gentleman named Ivan who marries his childhood sweetheart, Marichka, despite the fact that their families are a-feudin' as Marichka's father killed Ivan's father. Marichka dies in a tragic accident and Ivan eventually gets married again to a woman named Palahna. Ivan isn't the most attentive husband and she strays into the arms of another man. Let's just say there's plenty of tragedy in this story.

There are some wonderfully colorful costumes here plus the cinematography is great with lots of camera movement and canted angles.

The characters are Hutsuls and the movie was filmed in the Subcarpathian Rus, a.k.a. – Subcarpathian Ruthenia. I think we're talking a land not too far from the one that a wing of my family hails from, though I'd have to ask a genealogically-inclined cousin for more info. From what I've read, it seems that most of the folk customs portrayed in the film are made up or exaggerated but it was shot on location and the Hutsuls did raise sheep as they do in the film. I think the town church is Greek Catholic and not Eastern Orthodox to which that side of my family belonged.

Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors was a lot of fun and I found it really neat to see the general area where some of my ancestors came from in a movie. There was also a kind of magical realism to the story as well which I liked a lot as it added a slightly odd folk tale feel to it.

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Bonus photo! It's not easy working when you get back from lunch to find that there's a cat on your chair.