Last week’s photo shoot went swimmingly. Quang Nguyen, my Jackson Street Sibyl, met me just before noon, and we made our pitch to three restaurants, two jewelry stores, one Vietnamese indoor-outdoor and one eyewear shop. Despite a cultural-level reluctance to say cheese, particularly among the older generations, every business owner save one allowed us to shoot for fifteen or twenty minutes unimpeded.
Last year, Mr. Nguyen was instrumental in organizing the local resistance to a planned development of the Goodwill site on Dearborn, which, the argument went, would have undersold every one of these places out of existence. We’ll never know how that would have panned out, but one thing is true: the man is persuasive. In one of the jewelry stores, he wanted the owner’s son to call another store to see if we could stop by; after the fourth appeal, the poor kid finally caved. As we walked the neighborhood, he also seized the opportunity to take a head count for an upcoming meet-and-greet. That’s the thing about the herding group: there’s very little in their work that you can point to or quantify, but people respond to their exhortations, and as a result things get done, sure as eggs is eggs.
The Trap Door in all this is, it has to work behind the scenes. For every Quang Nguyen, Minh-Duc Nguyen, or SCIDPDA’s incomparable Joyce Pisnanont, there’s a newspaper editor or county blowhard up front, ostensibly flying the plane, who misses the runway every time. That’s what stinks—or maybe it’s a cultural thing, a taste I haven’t yet acquired.
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