By Kari Lydersen
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Over the years the PhD-to-be has worked as a stand-up comedian, a political organizer (a poster he shows me for a fund-raiser he put together in Vancouver is basically a picture of him sitting naked on the toilet with waist-length hair covering his torso), a bartender, a cantor, a Sunday school teacher, and “every other oddball job you can imagine.” And, not surprisingly, he loves a good round of karaoke. Several nights a week, patrons of bars like the Hidden Cove in Ravenswood, the Morseland in Rogers Park, and Zak’s in Wicker Park are treated to his rousing renditions of “The Candy Man” and “Just a Gigolo.”
In his first year at Northwestern, Joffe was studying radio astronomy. But when he got an offer for an assignment in particle physics that would take him back to his beloved New York, he changed course. From June 1998 through January of this year, he lived in the cinder-block barracks at Brookhaven National Laboratory, on the site of a World War II-era army base on Long Island, spending long hours looking for exotic mesons–newly discovered subatomic particles whose existence, according to Brookhaven’s Web site, helps validate the central theory of modern physics.
Chuss has never led a karaoke session before, but at Joffe’s behest he has performed several times, his personal best being a rendering of “Cat’s in the Cradle” at the Morseland. The more experienced Joffe picked out a standard 200-song package for him, including plenty of tracks from what he calls the “big four” of karaoke: Madonna, Elvis, Frank Sinatra, and the Beatles. He also armed Chuss with a video camera–the two have decided to make a documentary about the project. “Where we show it will depend on how good it ends up being,” Joffe says. His brother, who’s in TV back in Calgary, and friends from Northwestern and IIT have volunteered to help edit it.
