Once a week for the past two years, Mark Struzynski and about 13 friends have gotten together to play a little poker. Before this, Struzynski, a painter who runs an art space called the Green Room Gallery in the front of his Milwaukee Avenue loft, wasn’t much of a gambler. But his friends Samantha Peale and John Welter had caught the bug in James McManus’s class on the literature and science of poker at the School of the Art Institute, and they passed it on to him.
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Last month Farrar, Straus and Giroux published McManus’s latest book, Positively Fifth Street. A novelist and journalist who teaches creative writing at SAIC, McManus is an avid poker player; the book chronicles his journey to the 2000 World Series of Poker in Las Vegas, where–on assignment for Harper’s–he came in fifth, taking home almost $240,000. A “middle-aged married guy” with shin splints, McManus isn’t shy about the appeal the game holds for him: poker makes him feel like a man.
Struzynski’s rationale is a bit tamer. “I find it incredibly interesting to sit at a table with a bunch of people and try to figure out what they’re doing,” he says. “It’s not really a macho thing for me, though it becomes macho for a lot of people….[I like to] read other people; to try and tell what they’re doing and try and get a grasp of their personality and things like that. I’ve always been a kind of observant person. I think that’s why I became an artist–because I see things that I don’t think other people do.”
Green Room Gallery is at 1375 N. Milwaukee, third floor. Friday’s game starts at 6 PM, as does Saturday’s party. Play at the final table will be accompanied by an audio piece Adam Fitz made by sampling casino sounds. Breaks in the game will feature cabaret music by Amanda Beaudin and Eddy Dixon. And before the action starts, Jake Austen, Rob Elder, James Porter, and John Battles will read selections from A Friendly Game of Poker: 52 Takes on the Neighborhood Game, an anthology of poker writing edited by Austen and due in October from Chicago Review Press. Call 773-227-6512 or see www.greenroomgallery.com for more information.
