In 1919, when I was five years old, I got whooping cough and almost died. I remember my mother sleeping with me every night. We lived in–well, we called it an English basement. Now they’d call it a garden apartment. And my mother used to go to the window in the pitch dark and lift up the window to take the milk in, and the milkman would say, “How is she today?...
RENE MARIE Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The demands of motherhood have created an intriguing subgenre of female jazz singers: having put their careers on hold to raise their families, they reemerge fully formed in their late 30s or 40s, their music deepened by a host of life lessons. Shirley Horn, for instance, made a handful of records that attracted the attention of mentors like Miles Davis and Quincy Jones, then dropped out of sight in the mid-1960s; some 15 years later she had a second “debut” at the North Sea Jazz Festival, which led to an ongoing series of critically acclaimed albums for Verve....
What’s your take on circumcision? My sister is about to have her first baby–a boy–and is leaning toward cutting. I think it’s genital mutilation, and I have yet to hear a medical argument that makes any sense. If someone wants to be circumcised, I say let him decide for himself when he’s old enough. What do you think? –Concerned Uncle Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » We did an open adoption, which means we met our son’s bio-mom shortly before he was born, and she told us the baby was going to be a boy....
By Michael Miner That was life in Beijing. “I had the best job I’ve ever had,” she says. “I loved jumping on my bike every day. I loved that work. There are 13 million people in that city, and they all want to know what movie’s playing.” Except that a couple months after she took over, those officials showed up. They pulled up in a black Mercedes and trooped into the Beijing Scene office....
Steve McMichael used to talk with dread about having to play the Lions “on that damn carpet up there” at the Pontiac Silverdome outside Detroit. He knew that Barry Sanders ran that rug like a windup mouse–turning, twisting, spinning, and forever finding one way or another to race toward the goal line. That was several years ago, however. The frightening thing about Sanders now is that he runs that rug better than ever....
What Does That Mean? It might be tempting to dismiss John Corwin as just one more solipsistic off-Loop playwright so short on ideas he’s penned yet another play about self-absorbed actors. But unlike the flood of true-to-life navel gazers in Chicago, Corwin uses the theater as a metaphor for something larger–the human propensity to turn real-life romance into drama and other people into fictional characters. He seems fascinated by the way people cast and recast their friends and lovers to satisfy their own warped ideals of love....
Profiles Performance Ensemble has wisely decided to reopen its quietly successful production of Jane Anderson’s The Baby Dance, an emotionally rich examination of the wide and ever-widening gap between social classes in America. Last fall the subtle staging and honest acting well served Anderson’s wonderfully tight script, about a wealthy Los Angeles couple seeking to adopt a baby and a poor couple living in a Louisiana trailer park who simply can’t afford to feed another mouth....
By Michael Miner Prejean means to bend the river. The river is her church’s centuries of tolerance of capital punishment. “Rivers do not bend in one fell swoop,” she said the other day in a speech in Chicago. “It’s a long, long history, going back to Thomas Aquinas and before him even Augustine, who was saying evil people could be coerced with the sword. Probably we could trace it back to Constantine, where the church became aligned in some ways with empire and the force of the empire and the right of the state to use the sword for whatever purposes....
YUNGCHEN LHAMO Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The brutal repression of Tibetan culture by the Chinese is well-known to us now thanks to Hollywood, but Yungchen Lhamo suffered from it directly. Although her name means “Goddess of Melody and Song” and her grandmother always encouraged her to live up to it, at the age of 11 she was forced to begin working in a carpet-weaving factory, where she spent the next eight years toiling away from home....
Ray L. Birdwhistell’s extraordinarily weird Microcultural Incidents in Ten Zoos (1969, 34 min.) provides the stunning centerpiece for this Chicago Filmmakers program of experimental science films. Not made as an art film, this record of Birdwhistell’s lecture-demonstration at an anthropology convention has a long-standing underground reputation for its obvious affinities with the structural and participatory cinema then emerging. Birdwhistell analyzes footage of visitors in ten zoos around the world, often slowing it down, to reveal the cultural differences in body language: an English father tries to communicate with the animals by talking while an Italian boy makes contact with expressive gestures....
FRIDAY 8/11 – THURSDAY 8/17 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » 11 FRIDAY As director, producer, and Felix, you’re quite excited about the off-Loop, sold-out, opening night performance of the canine version of The Odd Couple. But ten minutes before curtain, when city building inspectors show up at your storefront theater complaining of orthodontist bills, do you know what percentage of the box office will make them disappear?...
I will mediate you to death! “It is sad to say that my prediction of almost 10 years ago, that ADR [alternative dispute resolution] processes would be ‘co-opted’ by traditional adversarial processes…has come true,” writes Carrie Menkel-Meadow in the Chicago-based Dispute Resolution Magazine (Winter). “In recent years I have watched lawyers write letters ‘filing an ADR proceeding against’ another party and threatening to ‘change their mediation strategy’ if a particular demand or proposal is not adhered to....
Holy cannoli and sh-boom! This long-running revue, now in its fourth year, still sparkles with well-timed humor and fine-tuned vocalizing as it simultaneously lampoons and luxuriates in the sweet sounds of pre-Beatles pop. Evoking an era when the epitome of cool was the Lettermen, not Letterman, a male vocal group–the Four Plaids–makes the ultimate comeback: killed en route to a 1964 gig (their station wagon collided with a busful of Fab Four fans), the boys return from heaven for a onetime reunion concert....
By Neal Pollack “Mah-lee Mah-lee Mah-lee Mah-lee!” “I need to talk to you,” Mario said. “But I just worked out this payment plan…” “I don’t think that,” she said, “but I don’t understand why you’d be approaching me with this now.” “Why?” she said. “Do you think I have anything up there of value? I have nothing up there!” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » RPCAN was caught up in a difficult struggle that summer....
By Ben Joravsky Constructed in 1894 by Judge Lambert Tree and his wife Anna, the daughter of Marshall Field, it runs along the east side of State Street between Ohio and Ontario, just behind the Medinah Temple. The 50 studio apartments along a quiet courtyard were designed with stained glass windows, elaborate light fixtures, intricate carvings, and lovely bay windows. “If its walls could talk the secrets they would share,” says Barton Faist, a painter and art dealer who lives there....
Local Release Roundup Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » CATH CARROLL Cath Carroll (Lilypad/Heart & Soul) A gorgeous collection of smoky, very adult ballads written and performed by low-profile chanteuse Cath Carroll and her husband, Kerry Kelekovich (formerly of the Wildroots and Michael McDermott’s band). Carroll remains best known in indie-rock circles as the object of a long-standing fixation of Teenbeat Records honcho Mark Robinson, who covered a tune by her old British band, Miaow, wrote a song about her, and even released her last album....
Lead Stories Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In November a travel agency in Kiev announced a new package: a daylong visit to the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, which has been closed to the public since 1986. The company said the government, in need of tax revenue, had given it permission for the tours, claiming the radiation count is “not dangerous.” The journal Animal Reproduction Science reported in October that Purdue University researchers had grown an elephant egg inside a specially bred mouse....
By Jack Clark Chandler would later become one of my favorite writers. But I wouldn’t read any of his books until after I’d moved away from the west side. The afternoon after Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, in April 1968, an announcement came over the loudspeaker at Austin asking all black students to immediately leave the building through the south exits. Moments later the white students were asked to leave through the north exits....
Roberts.qxd First of all, the ISO has no secret agenda. We will tell anybody who cares to listen (or who bothers to ask us, which Mr. Pollack did not) that we believe decent, cheap, and extensive mass transportation should be a right for all working people in this city, and we’re willing to organize towards that end. Rather than latching on to a cause as Mr. Pollack accuses us of doing, we are actively fighting to stop the CTA cuts which will adversely impact so many Chicagoans’ lives....
knoy.qxd Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Ms. Lydersen’s article “Living Room or Work Space” [November 20] about community controversy surrounding the development of the Wilson Yard site is inaccurate in many respects. The Organization of the NorthEast (ONE) has not taken a position for affordable housing on the site nor have we taken a position against the site being used to train or employ area residents....
