A young couple was browsing at Judy Maxwell Home, a gift shop on Chicago’s North Side, when they noticed a middle-aged, red-haired woman perched on a stool, palpating the sternum of a life-size red Power Ranger. The couple didn’t recognize her, but it was the store’s owner, the actress Joan Cusack. She had on a beige apron over a blue-flowered dress. On the back of the apron, she’d sewn a tiny vintage Barbie outfit.

“He’s kind of gone through some hard times,” Cusack said, addressing the shopping couple, as she pressed down on the Power Ranger’s chest. A strangled pleasantry emitted from a speaker inside him. “Very encouraging,” she said, stepping off the stool.

The couple left without buying anything, but Cusack considered the transaction a success. She seems concerned with more than just selling things: when she opened the shop, in 2011, she hadn’t yet put price tags on the merchandise.

“My kids were young, and I didn’t really want to take acting work, because I always had to go away,” she said. “I was trying to think of something to do, because I’m not really a big cooking person.” Raised outside Chicago, Cusack never felt drawn to Los Angeles. She was cast in the Showtime series “Shameless,” which was shot in Chicago, playing a randy agoraphobic named Sheila, and set up shop in Old Town. She’s moved the shop down the street since then, to what was formerly the Bijou, a gay-porn theatre. Her brother John rents the building’s second floor, using it as an art studio.

In the shop’s back room, Cusack took a seat beneath a crumbling portrait of a woman in a blue dress. “Virginia Woolf says you have to have a room of your own,” she said. “I also think, if you’re a woman now, it’s so fun to have a shop of your own. You hone your instincts in the world, versus at home. This is a little lab of my own instincts about being in the world.”

She gestured at the opposite wall, where an enormous, water-damaged painted backdrop of Venice hung behind a puppet theatre housing a vigorously loved Teddy bear and two miniature squirrels—one plastic and cute, one wrought iron and terrifying.

Cusack admires the Japanese concept of wabi-sabi—a reverence for the imperfect. It is the shop’s unifying principle, and perhaps Cusack’s as well. (Hollywood, she said, can be “everything not wabi-sabi.”) A crevice in a wood shelf had been filled in with a triangle of white doily and clear tape—a bootleg approximation of the Japanese art of kintsugi, whereby cracks in pottery are repaired with seams of gold. On one wall, oversized Scrabble tiles spelled out “CHICAGO,” except that the “A” had been carefully drawn on an index card in Sharpie. “We kind of had a run on Scrabble tiles,” Cusack said. “Vowels. People like vowels.”

When Cusack isn’t manning the store, it is run by Danny Roenna, whom she met three years ago, when he was working as a pharmacy technician at CVS. Roenna and Cusack spend their days drinking cherry-flavored coffee and doing bits in loud mid-Atlantic accents.

Judy Maxwell Home carries miniature fishing rods that are actually lighters, rubber horse hooves to be worn over the hands, and rolls of toilet paper bearing the President’s face. Among the gag gifts are also some unironically beautiful things; Cusack doesn’t distinguish between the two. One shopper bought six coasters printed with famous mug shots, a “public toilet survival kit,” a book of Cy Twombly paintings, and a pack of Dubble Bubble.

Cusack is coy about publicizing her ownership. Judy Maxwell is the name of the character Barbra Streisand plays in “What’s Up, Doc?”—“Joan Cusack’s favorite movie,” the shop’s Web site proclaims. Many visitors wander in after seeing a duct-taped sign out front, on which Cusack has written, in Sharpie, “Whats in that store.”

When patrons recognize her, Cusack enjoys being able to redirect their interest to something more tactile and, she feels, more personal, such as her hand-bound, hand-markered book about Tootsie Rolls. “Being a celebrity actress isn’t that fun, over and over,” she said. “It’s just not that great of a world, except for being exposed to cool sets and talented, interesting people. But this is so fun.”

“She looks like an actress,” an older man in a Cubs hat told Roenna, as he purchased a pack of Chicago Bears playing cards. “I wish I could remember the lady’s name.”

“Katharine Hepburn,” Roenna suggested.

“The calla lilies are in bloom again. Such a sweet flower,” Cusack said, in a Hepburn drawl. The man looked stumped. “It is me. Joan Cusack,” she said. “This is my little store.” She obliged the man with a photo, and he stood at the register for a long time, typing on his phone with one finger. “What’s your name again?” he asked.

“J-O-A-N—” ♦