Driving into rural Elgin, I’m thinking about something Henry Miller once said when asked to describe the art of conversation. “We do not talk,” he opined. “We bludgeon one another with facts and theories gleaned from cursory readings of newspapers, magazines, and digests.”
I add my shoes to the pile by the door and follow them past a Jim Morrison poster, through a beaded curtain into the kitchen. The ceiling is hung with large sheets resembling sails.
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Hamill and Slater met a few years ago when Hamill was still married. Her ex-husband, Roger Thompson, is here tonight. So is their son, Fletcher, a lawyer in Ottawa. I ask Thompson if the house looks much different to him. “Well,” he says, “we used to have furniture.”
By 1998, Hamill and Slater had become a couple but felt lonely. An article in the Utne Reader about the history of conversation salons, from those in 16th-century France to Gertrude Stein’s 20th-century versions, gave them an idea. They placed classified ads in the Daily Herald and the Reader: “Looking for something remarkable: suburban unconventional thinkers starving for imaginative, intelligent conversation. A salon in the making? Entertainment highly likely–community, affinity, celebratory connections possible. Fox Valley area.” They’ve held a salon every month since.
Words fly back and forth–it’s hard to know who’s saying what.
“Most of the people in the Republican Party.”
Another woman interrupts: “Should my family get reparations because back in the 60s, when they were starting affirmative-action programs and they had the mayor’s summer youth program and my brother applied, even though we were a poor Polish family, he was denied a job because he was told he was the wrong color? It didn’t matter if he was poor, he wasn’t black.”
