Chicagoans is a first-person account from off the beaten track, as told to Anne Ford. This week’s Chicagoan is . . . Anne Ford, who after 190 columns is bidding the project farewell. I was going to write a profile of this guy whose name I can’t remember who was and possibly still is a private tutor. He was a very colorful guy. For some reason, I got really stuck. He was a great talker. But I couldn’t get myself to write this profile. In desperation, I thought, what if I edited all together his wonderful quotes, would my editor be interested in a Studs Terkel approach? From there, I floated the idea of it being a regular thing.
There was a really early one with this woman who was a burned-out matchmaker. Her name is April Abbott. I knew her because when I was in graduate school, she taught German to grad students. I knew she had a side gig, but I hadn’t talked to her in ten years. I called her up. She said, “I can’t talk to you, I’m burned out.” At first I thought, bummer, but then I thought, this is way better. She was really jaded and bitter. I still remember, she had this line, “Women would come in and say, ‘Oh, I’m so attractive, I spend so much time on myself, I’m so well-read, and I work out every day,’ and I would want to say, ‘Go fuck yourself.’” She didn’t have a single shit to give. It was amazing. This may have been the peak of Chicagoans.
And there was this guy, Roger Billhardt, he’s a nude model. It turned out afterward his father’s name is also Roger Billhardt and I think he’s a lawyer. So if people were searching for his father, they found nude pictures of his son. So I think we did something with the Google algorithm.
