On Halloween, Redmoon Theater set up a 476-foot table made of doors on Kedzie Boulevard and invited the neighborhood over for a potluck dinner. Only half the chairs were designated for the living, however; the rest were laden with memories and objects of the dead. An array of spoons, lace, and an iron was a tribute to two grandmothers; a chair commemorating a fireman was bound with rope.
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From 1996 to ’98 Foster was a community coordinator with the West Humboldt Park Development Council, starting anticrime programs and block clubs and getting people to attend CAPS meetings in the 11th District, which reports more shootings than any other district in the city. In August at Pulaski and Augusta, for example, “there was a gunfight like the OK Corral,” she says. “Four people got killed.” One of the victims had been picked up the night before on a minor charge and spent the night in county jail. He was arraigned the following day, given bus fare home, then killed as he crossed from the bus stop to his house. “Sixteen years old, and just caught a bullet,” she says.
During her tenure Foster started the 11th District’s Men’s Club and helped initiate the SODA (Stay Out of Drug Area) Project. But something was still missing. “I kept seeing children on the street. And in the summertime we would always have one or two gang wars, no matter what.” Every summer local police would ask her to develop children’s programming, but she was up against a few obstacles. Expense, for one: Foster knew that Park District programs like those at Garfield or Orr were inaccessible to kids in her district. “At Garfield, it’s like $150 for the first child and $50 for every child after that.” And many families feared programs that required a substantial bus trip or a walk that crossed into unfamiliar terrain, which ruled out the Youth Services Project up on North Avenue or the National Guard armory in East Humboldt Park. “That’s a whole nother gang, a whole nother territory, and too far for kids to go,” says Foster.
Meanwhile, in the summer of ’98, she’d noticed some strange new neighbors operating at the corner of Chicago and Ayers. In an open lot littered with needles and broken glass, people were manipulating huge mechanical towers and 20-foot puppets. Foster, who makes it her business to know who’s in the neighborhood, went to investigate. It was Redmoon Theater, which had recently relocated its shop operations. “I was thinking they had lost their minds, ’cause I look at all the drug dealers hanging all over the place, and here we got this group of young, white people with their puppet heads,” says Foster. That day she introduced herself to Frank Maugeri, the shop’s technical director, and tried to explain the need for police protection in the event of outdoor rehearsals. “Frank said, ‘Oh no, we’re fine! We don’t have any problems at all.’” Foster called the police anyway and asked to have a car drive by occasionally.
This year Foster’s kids were chosen to perform the welcoming dance at All Hallows’ Eve; they donned masks and led audiences through a tunnel made of tree branches at the start of the show. But it was the feast that turned on a lightbulb for Foster, who would like to organize a similar celebration next year. “What better way for people to get along than to sit at a table over some food? What would happen if I got 20 tables lined up outside on the 3800 block of Chicago Avenue, and everybody got a chance to break bread together, sit across from a stranger and just talk?”
