“If I had a superpower, I would love to see into people’s homes and know the history of their stuff and who has lived there,” Laura Moeller says. As an art conservator at the Chicago History Museum, she’s actually pretty close to attaining that power.
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“I’ve been able to research all the people who have lived in this place,” she tells me about her Ukrainian Village apartment, which she shares with musician/boyfriend Todd Hembrook (Deal’s Gone Bad, Todd Hembrook & the Hemispheres). “The professions reflect the neighborhood. People were tailors, clerks, drivers. In the 1917 census, a stenographer was here.”
Laura explains that in Hawaiian culture, aloha shirts aren’t kitschy or ironic: “Locals embrace it. It’s our shirt.” As a mainlander, though, Todd fought the urge to wear an aloha shirt while on vacation. By day two, he was rocking a loud pink-and-green print. A local approached him and said very seriously, “That’s a great aloha shirt!” The dude happened to be Garrett McNamara, Guinness world record holder for the largest wave ever surfed. The aloha shirt: when you wear it, mean it.
