This Is Chicago

It’s fitting that this new weekly podcast begins each episode with the rumble of the L and the ding-dong of its arrival. After all, the show, produced by Stephen Pate and Ashlie Stevens of Supraphonic Studios, feels a bit like eavesdropping on a train. Each seven-minute episode drops you without introduction into a monologue by a resident of a different Chicago neighborhood: a puppeteer in Uptown, a priest in Hegewisch, a musician in Little Village. I’d always wondered about the confluence of leather subculture spots near my Rogers Park apartment — in a two-block radius, there’s the leather bar Touché, the kink hotel Ashland Arms, and the Leather Archives & Museum. Luckily for me, episode 3 features acclaimed bootblack Leslie Anderson, who describes how shining his mom’s shoes as a young child prepared him to prep hundreds of boots for International Mr. Leather contestants decades later. Yes, seven minutes isn’t enough to learn everything about leather or Rogers Park, but I sure did discover a lot about one of my neighbors.