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Local TV Notes: Mandy Patinkin’s Chicago Upbringing, Our Extreme Cougar Wife & Being Pregnant Behind The Bars Of Cook County Jail

From People’s Iron and Metal Company To Division 17

1. Mandy Patinkin’s Abominable Behavior.
This New York Times Magazine article about Chicago native and Chicago Hope star Mandy Patinkin is getting a lot of attention for how awful he’s behaved on the sets of his jobs, but the family background that seemed in part to have led to his “abominable” behavior is the really fascinating part.

[Patinkin’s father] Lester ran People’s Iron and Metal Company, a Chicago-based junk business, founded by his father, Max.
The defining event in his life was a diving accident he suffered at 20, breaking his neck in Lake Michigan.

“A few years later during World War II, he was in San Antonio,” Patinkin said, “and the tube that brings the spinal fluid to the brain was closing from this neck injury. He was having these tremendous headaches, and they were going to have to insert a fake tube. It was a primitive operation, and during the surgery, they touched the wrong thing, so my father was paralyzed for three years. He teaches himself how to walk and talk. He comes home, and days later the girl he was engaged to, who he was in love with, her mother said: ‘He’s damaged goods. Let him go.’ ”
Eventually, Lester married Doralee Sinton, and they had a daughter, Marsha, then Mandy. In spite of his efforts at rehabilitation, Lester was physically compromised for the rest of his life. “If you’d say, ‘What was your father’s greatest pain?’ it’s that he couldn’t play catch with me because he couldn’t control his right hand,” Patinkin recalled. “He was worried that he would throw the ball too hard and too fast and he’d hurt me. I remember when my aunts and uncles would say, ‘You don’t know your father,’ meaning before the brain accident. My little kid-ness was going, ‘What do you mean I didn’t know my father?’ He was a great man. He taught himself how to walk again, to write with his left hand. My father was a hero.”
When Lester became ill with cancer, his wife and his relatives decided to tell him he had hepatitis instead. “Cancer was a death sentence then,” Patinkin said. “I’m instructed to follow these orders, so I’m never able to talk the truth to my father at the end.” Patinkin grew teary. “He did his own research and was clearly cognizant of the fact that none of the pieces fit,” he went on. “It just destroyed me. I was forced to lie to my father by doctors and relatives. I made that choice and agreed with them, and I will never, ever get over it. If I hear a lie in my life with my children, with my wife, my work, my audiences, I want to annihilate myself, vaporize myself and wipe myself off the face of the Earth.” He mopped the sweat from his face. “Never again will I subject myself to not trying my damnedest to tell the truth. That’s my gift and my curse.”
Now that Patinkin’s mother is 88, the two are able to discuss that period. “We talk about the struggles we went through, the mistakes we made as parents,” he said. “Because with all love toward my mother, I heard her being critical of my father, relatives, friends. My father was the quiet one in the family, he was passive, whether it was his nature or what happened with his injury, I will never know. But my mother was the voice, she had to run the show. I have the strength from my mother, the survivability. I have wonderful qualities from my mother – but please, Mother, forgive me – I heard judgment constantly about my father. She questioned him enjoying investing in the stock market, little investing, he wasn’t rich, buying the kids AT&T. I just heard the voice saying, ‘Not good enough, not good enough, not good enough.'”
Even though Patinkin stresses that his mother always supported his career choice, he still had trouble hearing direction as something other than criticism. “I struggled with letting in other people’s opinions,” he said. “During Chicago Hope, I never let directors talk to me, because I was so spoiled. I started off with people like Milos Forman, Sidney Lumet, James Lapine, unbelievably gifted people. So there I was saying, ‘Don’t talk to me, I don’t want your opinion.’ I behaved abominably. I don’t care if my work was good or if I got an award for it. I’m not proud of how I was then, and it pained me.”

From Patinkin’s Wikipedia page:
“He attended South Shore High School, Harvard St. George School, Kenwood High School (later renamed Kenwood Academy), the University of Kansas, and Juilliard School.”
2. Extreme Chicago Cougar Wife.
“Chicagoan couple, Desmond Huey, 26, and Sheri Winkelmann, 50, are multi-generational soul mates on a mission to break barriers and help others live life to the fullest regardless of gender, age, or heritage,” according to a press release apparently put out by the couple themselves.
“They opened up about their modern relationship on TLC’s Extreme Cougar Wives.
A Headline News interview with the couple:

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“Winkelmann, who grew up in Mount Prospect, said she’s dated younger men before but found a soul connection with Huey, despite their age difference,” the Daily Herald reports.
“The two met at a self development workshop by Tony Robbins called ‘Date with Destiny.'”
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FYI: “A British study analyzing the age preferences of 22,000 men and women on dating websites in 14 countries claims the phenomenon of the ‘cougar’ – older women on the prowl for younger men – does not actually exist in the real world,” Maclean’s notes.
That is to say, it does not exist in the real world as a trend or new phenomenon – just as a media creation.
3. Pregnant Behind Bars: Cook County.
“Selling cocaine on the city’s streets is what eventually landed Tanya Head in jail when she was about 12 weeks pregnant,” Darryl Holliday writes for DNAinfo Chicago.
“The 30-year-old, who said she had a ‘history of trauma,’ grew up in and out of group homes. She was arrested as a juvenile, and later as an adult for carjackings and robberies. Despite her past, it was getting busted for a drug deal at 79th and Bishop that put her behind bars for the first time.
“Head is one of the inmates featured in a new Discovery Fit & Health show, Pregnant Behind Bars, which focuses on Cook County Jail’s Division 17 – where pregnant inmates are held, along with women dealing with addictions and mental health issues.”
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Division 17.
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Clip:

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For more video and resources, see the Pregnant Behind Bars website.

Comments welcome.

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Posted on August 22, 2013