It’s November, and I’m sitting in the cozy confines of the Chicago Dramatists Workshop at Milwaukee and Chicago avenues. I’m here to review one of the first performances of Terry Abrahamson’s comedy-musical The Brat Race, but the concept, as they say in Yiddish, is nicht fur mir. Four couples, one pair each of yuppies, African Americans, WASPs, and lesbians, are struggling to get their children into prestigious private schools. Through songs and short scenes, Abrahamson’s musical delves into the angst of writing applications for a three-year-old, trying to convince the schools’ snobby arbiters that you’ve produced the next Albert Einstein. I don’t live on the Gold Coast, my last name isn’t Pritzker, I’m still very happy about the process of contraception. I can give a shit.
I suppose most people are composed of multiple levels and countless contradictions, but Terry Abrahamson seems more so. You might think he was an octopus, because whenever you think you have him pegged, you’ve got to say “on the other hand” about seven times. On one hand, he is a smooth, sharp, savvy businessman with a knack for making money in all of the sometimes bizarre careers he’s had. On the other hand, he’s a loopy wiseacre, a goofball with a taste for groan- inducing jokes. On yet another hand, he’s a serious and committed political animal with an array of idiosyncratic philosophies and conspiracy theories that he can articulate convincingly and intelligently. On one hand more, sometimes he seems just a little bit nuts.
“It’s how I liked to express myself,” he says. “I always liked to write something fun so people would laugh at it or move someone with what’s inside of me.”
During high school, Abrahamson speaks with pride about how he was one of those guys who “discovered” the blues. He got turned on to the music watching Shindig in 1965.
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Around that time, Abrahamson started going to Alice’s on Wrightwood, now the Club 950.
Abrahamson went to the University of Illinois downstate, having “no ambition to do much more than work at a bookstore all my life. But you had to go to college or you went to Vietnam.” While he was there, he started booking bands for the university’s concert committee. He says the school didn’t see much financial logic to booking blues bands so he did it on his own, and he claims that when he booked Blind Jim Brewer it was the most successful concert the U. of I. had ever had. Yeah, OK. But anyway, he went on booking acts like Brewer and Hound Dog Taylor and the HouseRockers, graduated in 1973, and returned to Chicago.
According to Abrahamson, Thorogood spent the summer of 1973 sleeping on Abrahamson’s couch.
