The Tannest Man on the South Side of Chicago

Growing up Italian American on the South Side of Chicago meant always being around when the adults talked. I listened to everything – the complaints, the grudges, the stories told at the dinner table or the front porch. That listen to everything instinct, finding the absurdity in the specific and the comedy in the painful, is how I approach the stories I tell. This story started on the porch. My grandfather Sam was a dock worker, a World War Two veteran, and a trained barber. Cheap, stubborn, and someone who loved his daughters by insisting they call him every single day – feelings expressed through control rather than tenderness. He was the kind of person who made his grandson feel like they were a part of history but also made his whole family feel like they didn’t know the man they were getting that day. The old men in the neighborhood were practically history books, passing down stories and diatribes with the confidence of people who survived it. I wanted to make something that feels like that – that reminds people of their own families' complicated relationships with the neighborhood legends that will always hold a place in people’s minds.