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Every time I interview Tony Kerasotes, he presents me
with the exact same problem: How do I ask a follow-up question when my chin
is on the floor?
We first talked in January, just
after he had exercised his extraordinary powers as the CEO of Kerasotes
Showplace Theaters — which owns every indoor movie screen in
Springfield — to postpone the opening of the wholesome black frat
flick Stomp the Yard. His rationale — a fear that Stomp would attract the same young toughs who had fired gunshots
in the lobby of his Parkway Pointe theater during a horror flick on
Christmas night — brought scorn from as far away as LA Weekly and AllHipHop.com
and as close as the hometown daily, the State
Journal-Register.
But
did Tony Kerasotes care? Is the pope Jewish?
“I did have a little kernel of doubt as to whether I had done
the right thing, but when the SJ-R came out editorially against what I did, I knew I had
done the right thing,” he told me then. “I think there’s
a lot of people who just want to stick their heads up their politically
correct anuses.”
That’s a partial
quote. I’m leaving out the part where he referred to my colleagues at
the daily by using a word we can’t print unless we’re talking
about cute little furry felines.
After I lifted my
jaw off my desk, I managed to stammer out something brilliant like
“Is that on the record?”
Ha. Is the
pope Catholic?
We talked this week, and Kerasotes
did that whole jaw-dropping thing again. This time, I called him because I had heard that he
had invited several leaders of Springfield’s African-American
community over to his office for a chat. Roy Williams, head of the Illinois Association of
Minorities in Government, and Ken Page, president of the Springfield branch
of the NAACP, both said they assumed that Kerasotes wanted to discuss how
to handle future films that might attract the same saggy-pants set. “I had no idea what it would be about. I
thought it was going to be what to do when certain movies come out,”
Williams says. “I didn’t even ask,” Page says.
“I thought it was just going to be ‘How do we not let this
happen again?’ ”
It was a lucky thing they were all sitting down when
Kerasotes revealed the real purpose of the meeting: He wanted to know what
he could do to help. Not what he could do to help repair his reputation on
AllHipHop.com, not to help smooth things over with the Alpha Phi Alphas,
not what he could do to help white patrons feel safer in hislobbies. No,
Kerasotes wanted to know what he could do to help with the real root of the
problem. “He wanted to know what he could do to help out
with the kids before they get to the point where they behave the way they
did the night of that shooting,” Williams says. “He wanted to know what he could do to make an
impact on a child’s life,” Page says. Of course, Kerasotes has a more colorful way to
phrase it. “I wanted to get together not to rehash the Stomp the Yard brouhaha but to see what
we could do down the road to help some of these lost children who are
polluting the atmosphere with lead,” he says. “It is a social
problem, and I’m willing to devote some resources to it.”
Williams and Page suggested that Kerasotes meet with
leaders of programs already addressing at-risk youth, such as the Urban
League and the Springfield Housing Authority. Another participant in the
meeting, attorney and Black Chamber of Commerce president Thomas Dorsey,
goaded Kerasotes to get his rich-white-guy buddies involved. Kerasotes told me he plans to take all that advice.
“I’m going to meet with some more people
and come up with a plan. It won’t be a final plan, but it will be
some initial steps,” he says. “I’m going to do a little
something, then a little more, then see how it works.”
Initially reluctant to allow me to write about this
meeting, Kerasotes made me pledge not to raise unrealistic expectations.
“The disadvantaged portions of the community have had all sorts of
promises unfulfilled. I’m not about to get in that bed,” he
says. But, as a card-carrying cynic, I can’t let this
event go undocumented. Here’s a guy in the throes of a magnanimous
impulse, a guy who has the power and the means to make Springfield a better
place and a guy who has an uncanny knack for surprising us. After he’s had all his meetings and formulated
his plan, I hope Tony Kerasotes stuns me speechless again — by doing
something shockingly good.
Contact Dusty Rhodes at drhodes@illinoistimes.com.
This article appears in Feb 22-28, 2007.
