Dollars and sense is a column about Chicago sports business and media
Harry Teinowitz had a question for me.
“Is that irony,” he said, “or a coincidence?”
When I arrived at the Greenhouse Theater in Lincoln Park last Saturday, a man in a tight leather jacket approached Teinowitz as we talked. The man used to be a bartender at P.J. Clarke’s and he remembered Teinowitz fondly, so when he heard about Teinowitz’s new play about going to rehab, he had to come to see it for himself.
“Maybe,” he said, “‘I’m the reason he wrote this play.”
If so, he had a lot of accomplices. Teinowitz said it reminded him of his wedding reception when his best man Spike Manton told the crowd that several Chicago bars were closed that night because everyone was at his party.
Teinowitz and Manton penned a play inspired by the serious after-effects of Teinowitz’s drinking life called “When Harry Met Rehab.” It opens Dec. 5 and is a fictional account of a radio host named Harry (played by Dan Butler of “Frasier” fame) who comes to grips with his drinking problem while trying to breeze through a rehab trip after a DUI arrest.
The show starts with radio hosts discussing Harry’s impending night out at the Blackhawks game. Teinowitz’s drinking was long a punchline during his career at ESPN 1000 where he was part of the successful show, “The Afternoon Saloon.”
“You have to give him a spot in the Jewish Drinking Hall of Fame,” his old partner Dan McNeil told me years ago. “It’s a small building.