I wavered for about two weeks. I’m so wishy-washy that I couldn’t make up my mind if I should go see Hamlet or not. Well, I decided, very firmly, to see Hamlet about fifteen minutes before the show started. I mean, the play was at the UIC Theater and I was on campus anyway.

Recently, I had watched a movie from Spain on the Internet and a young woman says that she’s an aspiring actress. Then, she starts performing Hamlet’s soliloquoy in Spanish: “Ser o no ser.” That helped me decide to see Hamlet. However, I almost didn’t get in because the show sold out moments after I bought my ticket. I’m really glad I saw the play because it was a very different inerpretation by director Luigi Salerni. (I took a playwriting class with him quite a few years ago while I was still a graduate student and I must admit that he taught me a lot about playwriting.)

So in his interpretation of the play, Hamlet kisses Horatio on the lips. I really wasn’t expecting this. When I think of Hamlet, I always think of the movie version with Lawrence Olivier. Of course, the play was updated a little to represent our times, but the dialogue was the original dialogue as Shakespeare wrote it. This combination reminded me of the movie version of Romeo and Juliet with Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes set in California, which I happen to love because of this incongruous combination. I love unexpected and unusual juxtapositions. I guess because my whole life is like that.

I’ve seen a few plays before at the UIC Theater and it’s a shame more people don’t know about it. Now that I have more time on my hands, I plan to see many more plays there. Next week, I plan to see Tom Stoppard’s “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.” Unless, of course, I change my mind.

When I was a boy, for as long as I could remember, my mother always cut my hair. She cut everyone’s hair in the family because it was cheaper than going to the barber.

The only reason I remembered this is because I was looking at some of our old family pictures and my brothers and I all had bad haircuts for every single class picture. The only one who had a good haircut was my father, but that’s because he used to cut his own hair. He wouldn’t let my mother cut his hair.

Anyway, my mother bought her own electric hair clipper with all the attachments and bragged about how it paid for itself after the first four haircuts. But my brothers and I were always unhappy with our haircuts. My sister lucked out because she got to grow her long since birth.

But for my brothers and I, my mother would make us sit in a kitchen chair and clip our hair. If we moved, she would pull an ear or pull our hair. If necessary, she would also pinch us or give us a coscorrón to the head. Corporal punishment was my mother’s most effective way of controlling us. However, the ultimate threat was, “If you keep moving, abuelita will cut your hair!” And we surely didn’t want that because abuelita was blind.

Occasionally, we had bald spots on our head from flinching because we anticipated our mother’s phantom pinch or coscorrón that never materialized. We dreaded whenever our hair reached our ears because we feared that impending haircut.

When I became an altar boy, Sister Eva said I could only serve mass if I went to a professional barber for a haircut. My mother was offended when I told her. But she gave in because she thought that if I was an altar boy, it would be easier for her to get to heaven.

Well, wouldn’t you know it. I married a Mexican beautician. So she always used to cut my hair. I liked the fact that I could get a haircut at home for free. When I started looking at the pictures from when I was married, I noticed that I always had a bad haircut. In fact, my wife had given me very many bad haircuts judging by all the pictures. And she was a professional, unlike my mother. But then I remembered how she was always the jealous type, so she probably cut my hair that way on purpose!

I haven’t had my haircut in six months now and I’ve been feeling kind of free. I feel my inner hippie coming out. I actually enjoy not getting haircuts! Especially when I think about all the bad haircuts and torture that I had to endure under my mother.

I plan on holding off on my next haircut for as long as possible. My tía Jovita in Mexico suggested to me that I let my hair grow. And so I haven’t had a haircut since then. I enjoy the stares I get when people see me with my full head of disheveled, graying hair!

North Avenue Beach has always been my favorite beach in Chicago. As a boy, I loved going there because of the beach and the swimming. Then, as I grew up a little, the field house that resembled a ship caught my attention. I loved riding my bike all around it. Finally, as a teenager, I disovered the Chess Pavilion. I rode my bike past it many times before, but I never noticed the chessboards embedded in the concrete there until I started playing chess in high school.

Usually, when we went to the beach, no one was playing chess anyway. The Chess Pavilion was made entirely of concrete with a concrete canopy where we went when it rained. Once I started playing chess, I would bring my chess set to the beach with me. When I was in high school, I rode my bike all the way from the south side to the Chess Pavilion several times just to play chess.

When I got my first car, I used to love driving up and down Lake Shore Drive just for the fun of it. My favorite part of LSD was near North Avenue Beach because I could see the Chess Pavilion as I drove by.

Once I was on a first date and I took her on my favorite drive up and down LSD. Finally, she asked to stop somewhere on the lakefront. I was sure she wanted to see the world famous Lake Michigan submarine races. Anyway, I immediately thought of going to the Chess Pavilion with her. Too bad that I didn’t have a chess set with me so I could test her intelligence as long as I was sizing her up as a prospective prospect.

So we park and we start walking. “Where are you taking me?” she asked. “I know the perfect place to watch the submarine races,” I said. We walked to the Chess Pavilion and sat on the chessboards. The night was clear but very cool and damp, however, we had a beautiful view of the Chicago skyline. After a while, she was cold from sitting on the concrete, so she sat on my lap. Well, I couldn’t have planned the evening any better!

My only regret in life is that I wasn’t born in Chicago. That’s right! I was born in a place far, far away from Chicago. Chicago is merely my adopted city. I love my fair city so much that I wonder how it is at all possible that I could have been born anywhere else. Mexicans place great importance on their place of birth, for obvious reasons. Many Mexicans proudly claim to have been born in Chicago regardless of the truth! However, whenever I meet other Mexicans, I feebly state, “I wasn’t born in Chicago.” Then, they say, “You were born in Mexico?” This is when I have to break the bad news to them: “I was born in Perth Amboy, New Jersey.” I always get the same look of disbelief from Mexicans and non-Mexicans alike. I mean, how many Mexicans do you know who have been born in Perth Amboy, New Jersey? I mean, other than me, how many? In fact, other than me, I never met another Mexican who was born in Perth Amboy, New Jersey. People often wonder why, so I tell them, “When my parents came to the United States, they took a wrong turn at the Rio Grande!” However, even though I was born in the USA, I was conceived in Mexico. I wanted my children to be not only American, but also born in Chicago. I remember having arguments with my wife about her choice of hospitals. I insisted that my sons would be born in Chicago. Luckily, I found a doctor that my wife liked and so my sons were born at Mercy Hospital in Chicago. Why was this so important to me? Well, I’ll tell you why. I really don’t know! I just thought it would be easier for my sons to say they were born in Chicago. And since I loved Chicago so much, this would be my way of giving a little something back to Chicago. Now whenever we drive on I-55 to the lakefront and we drive past Mercy Hospital, I tell them to wave to their hospital. This is always the highlight of our outing for me!

D, as in my first initial, because I was David Diego, then came my brother Daniel, then came my brother Diego Gerardo, and then my mother needed another name that began with D when she was pregnant for the fourth time. My father Diego had little influence over my mother when it came to naming us.

My mother Maria del Carmen was always the boss in our family. She only let on that my father ruled when we were in public, but not always. My mother had already decided that her fourth baby would be born in our apartment at 4545 S. Hermitage Avenue, and no one could talk her out of it.

Of course, my mother was still hoping for the daughter that I should have been. I would have been Debbie if my mother had her way. Even then she wanted names that began with D. So she thought of many names that began with D while pregnant. All of them girl names! No one could convince her of the possibility that she might be carrying a son. Everyone asked her if she had any boy names in mind, but she was so sure that this time she would have the daughter that she always wanted.

The morning of my brother’s birth arrived and a doctor I had never seen before woke us up in our bedroom. He told us to hurry up and get ready for school. There was another doctor with him who would assist in the birth. My father was there, too, but he was too weak from the labor pains to help us get ready for school. My mother claims that my father had morning sickness when she was pregnant with me. Knowing my father, I have a feeling that my mother couldn’t make up such a story.

Anyway, when we came home from school for lunch to watch Bozo’s Circus that May 14, 1962, I had a new little brother, much to my mother’s disappointment. Can you guess his name? That’s right! It began with a D! However, no one was ready for the name my mother had chosen: Dick Martin Rodriguez. Martin was fine because it can be pronounced in Englsih and Spanish. But Dick? Back then, as now, Dick was a nickname derived from Richard, but more importantly, it also referred to the male anatomy more often than not. Even Mexicans knew that.

Everyone questioned my mother’s judgment in her choice of names. Well, she was disappointed not to have the daughter that she wanted, so she didn’t actually have any boy’s names picked. Just by chance, the doctor who delivered my brother was named Dick Martin. And that’s how my brother got his name. I was already feeling embarrassed when I imagined how I would announce that I had a new little brother named Dick Martin in school the next day.

Since he was the youngest brother, he was called Dicky, which made the name a little easier to swallow. I mean, a little more palatable. From then on, everyone called him Dicky. That’s how he printed his name on his school papers.

When we went to Mexico, everyone called him Dicky. After a while, the name Dicky just referred to my brother and no one thought of any body parts. When I went to Mexico last December, everyone asked me about Dicky, as they affectionately remembered him. Well, as he grew older and traveled outside the neighborhood, his name became problematic, for the obvious reasons. He started calling himself Richard or Rick. Most family members had a hard time not calling him Dicky because we had grown so used to calling him Dicky.

Eventually, he legally changed his name to something else. I didn’t know it until one day I saw a hole in the hallway wall of our house at 2509 W. Marquette Road. I asked my mother how the hole got there. She told me that she had pushed and kicked Dicky down the stairs because he had legally changed his name and she was very angry with him because of that. Somehow, as he fell down the stairs, he made a hole in the wall. I couldn’t believe my mother could get that upset because of the name change. Well, Dicky had changed his name to Richard Martin. He was no longer a Rodriguez. I was surprised by my mother’s reaction because, during and after her divorce, she hated my father and everyone in his family. She even hated the Rodriguez surname, even though after her divorce she remained Carmen M. Rodriguez.

I, too, was shocked that Dicky was no longer a Rodriguez. We were always the Rodriguez family no matter what. Nobody in the neighborhood wanted to start any trouble with the Rodriguez brothers. I asked him why he changed his last name and he said he did it because he was a musician, and it was a better stage name. Plus, he got tired of all the insults he received for having a Spanish last name. Well, I had gone through the same situations, but I never even thought of changing my name just for that. In fact, I would toss out my surname like an in-your-face challenge to people whom I knew would be bothered by Mexicans and say my full name: David Diego Rodríguez.

Anyway, he changed his name to Richard Martin and we began calling him Rick slowly but surely. That is, when we didn’t slip into old habits and call him Dicky. As far as his musical career, the name didn’t exactly work out for him because soon there was another certain famous Ricky Martin of Latino pop music who upstaged my brother!