The town is Franklin Park, whose 18,000 residents are blessed with two state senators, including Oak Park’s Don Harmon, and three representatives, including Oak Park’s Camille Lilly.

It’s in coverage of Harmon’s and Lilly’s town-hall-meeting tour in 2013 in my Illinois Blues: How the Ruling Party Talks to Voters.

A man asked [in a Franklin Park meeting on July 30] about legislative redistricting, by which Democrats had generously provided Franklin Park with three representatives and two senators, when one of each would have done nicely. The five, all present this night, represented some 35 towns, villages, and neighborhoods among them.

Such dividing up of communities — a by-product of ensuring Democrat dominance and a trademark of the Mike Madigan Era — neatly defuses any unified effort to pressure a legislator to oppose current policies. Divided as to legislative representation, a town is more easily ignored and has a harder time working up a head of steam to put pressure on lawmakers.

It was just such a head of steam that was to greet Harmon and Lilly in their next town hall meeting, on September 12, in the city’s Galewood neighborhood north of Oak Park, where they were to face an hour of sometimes raucous indignation from aggrieved citizens.

Coming up: The Galewood donnybrook.

Illinois Blues: How the Ruling Party Talks to Voters— is available in paperback, epub and Amazon Kindle formats.

. . . Donald Trump had another.

Some days you can’t win for losin’.

Here he is, or they are as minor characters in Our Mutual Friend:

• Mr and Mrs Veneering – a nouveaux-riches husband and wife whose main preoccupation is to advance in the social world. They invite influential people to their dinner parties where their furniture gleams with a sheen that they also put on to make themselves seem more impressive.
• They “wear” their acquaintances, their possessions, and their wealth like jewellery [sic], in an attempt to impress those around them. Veneering eventually goes bankrupt and they retire to France to live on the jewels he bought for his wife.

Met them — for the first time, alas! — in Wm. H. Pritchard’s Wyndham Lewis, Twayne, 1968, in Pritchard’s discussion of Lewis’s non-moralistic brand of satire, in which he depicts human types while standing apart, as it were, making a larger point about how people act — or so I understand it for now, in confidence that there’s more to it than that.