Bill Savage

Up next in our series of weekend plans from notable, in-the-know locals—a.k.a. people we like: Bill Savage, the nearly lifelong Rogers Park resident (“My mother went into labor with me in Rogers Park, but I was born in Evanston—but maybe this gets into too-much-information territory”) and Northwestern University’s hometown lit expert who, it turns out, also knows a thing or two about encased meats.

“On Friday, I’m going to the Hopleaf around happy hour to help celebrate my friend Brian Azzarello’s book 100 Bullets. A deluxe edition is being published by DC Comics’ Vertigo, so we’ll have a couple beers to celebrate that. And I’m going to see Seven Sicknesses, The Hypocrites’ take on Sophocles, at the Chopin Theatre. In my opinion, four hours of anything Sean Graney does is a great way to start the weekend.

“Saturday morning, I’ll ride my bike from Rogers Park to the Art Institute to see Windows on the War: Soviet TASS Posters at Home and Abroad before it closes. I’ve been meaning to go since the exhibit opened in July. That’s one of the things that people who live in Chicago always do: We say, ‘Oh, I’ll get to it, I’ll get to it,’ and then—bang—it’s closed. I’m interested in Soviet art and architecture from an urban studies angle, but I’m also a fan of posters as propaganda. It’s fascinating: We’re used to seeing the other side of this—Norman Rockwell’s Four Freedoms and that kind of stuff we put out—but when it comes to propaganda posters, the Soviets really did win that war.

“I’m house sitting for my girlfriend on the South Side, so I’m going to spend Saturday night rereading Aleksandar Hemon’s The Lazarus Project, pen in hand. It won’t be the first time I’ve read it, but it will be the first time I’ve taught it—this winter, for my first-year seminar Mysteries of Chicago and Los Angeles. That’s my wild Saturday night. We’ll leave out the part about playing with the cats.

“Sunday morning, rain or shine, I’ll ride the Major Taylor Trail from 83rd and Western down to the Cook County Forest Preserve, south of the river at Eggleston. I’ll cut over to Blue Island for breakfast—there are so many diners there—and then I’ll watch the Bears game at Bleeker’s Bowling Lanes, in Evergreen Park at 95th and Trumbull. It’s the perfect place to watch because it’s two-third Sox fans, one-third Cubs fans, and all Bears fans.

“After the game, I’ll go back to the girlfriend’s house and rake the leaves, read whatever’s left of papers, maybe do the New York Times crossword. When the girlfriend gets in from out of town, we’ll grill some sausages from AJ Meats, a butcher at 3541 West 99th Street. They’ve got the best Lithuanian sausage I’ve ever had. It’s sort of like Polish sausage, but more fennel and less garlic. We’ll have Lithuanian and Italian, maybe some Polish. All the sausages are housemade. My secret is to precook the sausage in beer—good beer. For Polish sausage, I use Zywiec: Use the beer that goes with the ethnicity. The key is to not cook the sausage all the way through before you put it on the grill.”

Bonus: Read more about Savage in a recent post by Chicagomag.com’s current writer-in-residence, Dmitry Samarov.