As told to Carrie Golus, AB’91, AM’93, adapted from Ford’s lecture at a Divinity School's Wednesday Community Luncheon in February.  “When I was a student here, I used to cook at Wednesday lunch. Those were the dark days of Wednesday lunch. We had a kitchen fire and our stove was out of commission for six months. We served gazpacho a lot. “I took a class on Colonial women’s religion. I did a project on Deborah Sampson, a woman who disguised herself as a man and fought in the Revolutionary War. She fought for something like 17 months before she was discovered. And I realized, I wasn’t that interested in what people think about Deborah Sampson. I was interested in how she got away with it. Like the fact that she was 5’7”, which was very tall for a woman at the time. And people hit puberty later in life, so she didn’t have to make excuses for the fact that she didn’t shave. It hit me that I wasn’t really interested in ideas. Perhaps that’s a hint that you shouldn’t be in graduate school. “I’m much more interested in people than ideas. I’m not interested in what people think. I’m interested in what they do. I’m not even that interested in why they do it. “I went into publishing and eventually became a freelance writer. In 2010, I convinced the Chicago Reader to let me launch this oral history series called Chicagoans. “In the words of the British writer Quentin Crisp, I believe that no one is boring who is willing to tell the truth about themselves. The truth is interesting. If you’re talking to someone and they’re not interesting, there’s some kind of bullshit going on. “I try to avoid at all costs people who have something to sell and people who have something to lose. Not because I have moral qualms, but because that means you’re not honest, and I’m not interested if you’re not honest. “I’m going to read you one of the early ones I did, about a woman who is a distant acquaintance of mine. I knew she had been a matchmaker. When I called her, it turned out she was an ex-matchmaker.

April Abbott, ex-matchmaker

“That’s probably my favorite one ever. I probably shouldn’t have led with it. “I met the next one when I was getting married, and we hired her as a wedding coordinator. I knew it was a part-time job for her, but then she gave me her e-mail address—and it ended in ‘fbi.gov.’

Jennifer French, FBI special agent/wedding coordinator

“About a year ago, a photographer friend of mine who wanted to get into video approached me with the idea of doing short films based on the Chicagoans series. “I’ve gotten a few Chicagoans this way: the next guy wrote an essay all about what he thought and sent it to the Reader. They didn’t want to publish the essay, but he sounded like a really interesting guy, so they sent it to me. I don’t want to tell you anything more about him because it’s more fun to watch if you don’t have the background.

Gary Arnold, Chicago cyclist

“Isn’t he the awesomest? I love that guy so much. And yet he had written this essay that didn’t have any of that in there. It just wasn’t interesting. It was all about what he thought.”