Fatuous Times at Clemente High “When the press grants anonymity, they don’t mean thinly disguised. They mean, unrecognizable.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I don’t know what higher standards there could have been. If we’d vetted what they said until it left no trail, there’d have been no story. I told Blanchard to go back to them and ask them point-blank if they were prepared to live with the consequences....
What I needed was a mentor. Starting my first-ever fossil hunt, I was wandering without coherent aim, staring at the muddy ground with a hopeless expression. Wanting this to be easy, certain that it would be very hard, I felt like a man looking behind the bureau for his car keys when he knows perfectly well he left them locked in the car. If you want to find fossils, I thought, attach yourself to somebody who knows how to look for them....
The assignments of a newspaper photographer are a bizarre mix. The portfolio of Sun-Times photographer Bob Ringham, for example, includes shots of Gary Dotson’s mother, a dog show in Donnelley Hall, cancer victims, baseball umpires, football players, a grain elevator deformed by a hurricane, a painting class for divorced fathers and their sons, a Mexican baseball stadium lined with corpses under dry ice, an orphanage in Saigon, a man whose job it is to turn off illegally opened fire hydrants in hot Chicago neighborhoods, and a father and daughter fishing at a suburban pool filled with goldfish....
It’s more than an hour to game time when Jerry Krause takes the floor, and the stands at the Chicago Stadium are nearly empty. “Did fans at the Stadium actually boo recently when it was announced that Bulls general manager Jerry Krause was celebrating his birthday?” This question, posed recently by Sun-Times columnist Terry Boers, appeared the same day his paper reported a Bulls victory over the Washington Bullets that “assured the Bulls of home-court advantage in the first and second rounds of the playoffs and ended the home half of their regular season on a winning note....
THE HERO Some years ago, when Leonard Bernstein was still discussing such things, I asked if he considered his West Side Story to be an opera. “No,” he said. “And for one very simple reason: the most dramatic moment in the show–where Maria delivers her indictments to all involved in the tragedy–is spoken, not sung.” If we accept Bernstein’s definition of opera as drama that is completely sung, then works such as Les Miserables and Phantom of the Opera are operas, not musicals....
Cat houses. “Most buildings will only accept cats that are neutered and declawed,” writes Kevin Knapp in Real Estate Profile (September 14). “This policy has become so widespread that the term ‘apartment ready cat’ has been developed to describe the only kind of feline highrises find acceptable.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “As a pastime, theatergoing outpaces all professional sports except baseball,” writes Lawrence Bommer in Chicago Enterprise (September 1990)....
$1,938,500: amount of money the Consortium on Chicago School Research estimates Chicago Public Schools elementary teachers spend out of their own pockets for school supplies every year. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » As others see us. Keryl McCord, executive director of the League of Chicago Theatres, in Stagebill (October): “This is known as a theater city. What frustrates me is that people here don’t know it…....
Fifteen years ago Warren Zevon was the most daring and brilliant of a crop of talented west coast singer-songwriters that included Jackson Browne and the Eagles, among others. The Zevon of those years combined a macabre, surreal comic sense (“Werewolves of London,” “Excitable Boy”) with a penchant for tender sentimentality (“Hasten Down the Wind,” “Accidentally Like a Martyr”). Borne along by the rising tide of easy rockers, and specifically by the gracious patronage of Browne and Linda Ronstadt, the Chicago-born Zevon was a rising young star, a critic’s darling, and a miserable alcoholic....
OUT OF ORDER It’s no accident that two very funny farces currently running take place in hotel suites. Hotels are perfect settings for farce: even the classiest joints have an inescapable taint of naughtiness–hotels are where you go to do things you can’t do at home. And hotels have doors. Lots of doors, leading to all kinds of places, great for slamming, running in and out of, and hiding illicit lovers and dead bodies....
THE DOCUMENTATOR The Documentator opens with a long sequence of various military parades. We see troops and tanks marching before the main title, before any characters are introduced. Just after the main title we see a video game whose object appears to be the killing of a camel; the camera then pulls back to reveal a young man playing it, who we later learn is an assistant to Raffael, the main character....
If musicians can do it, why not poets? That thought inspired Chicago poet Dwight Okita to create “Crossing With the Light,” his–and perhaps the city’s–first poetry video. At a time when the audience for serious poetry is getting smaller, Okita is one of a small group of poets and poetry lovers who feel video can give poetry a broader appeal. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Crossing With the Light” is a video adaptation of one of Okita’s poems, produced with the help of the Chicago Access Corporation....
“This reminds me of a story,” said Dorothy Truscott. “There were these two bridge players, and you know what these bridge players do all the time–they sit around and talk about how bad their wives are at bridge.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » And underneath that room there was yet another room filled with bridge tables. For nearly 12 hours a day for nearly two weeks, all of these rooms were filled with bridge players, four to a table, all playing in the North American Contract Bridge Tournament, one of three sponsored each year by the American Contract Bridge League....
Listening to the caller on the other end of the line, Alan Cahn looks distinctly surprised. “Houston! How did you get my name? Uh-huh. Really? Houston?” AZT he’s selling right now for $1.30 a capsule. The average is around $1.60. Since patients must take about 400 capsules a month, Cahn is underselling his competition by $120 a month. The savings are substantial. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Since this caller is from out of town, Cahn gives him the 800 number of Project Informed, in California, for information about AIDS....
Larry Fishburne plays a cop who poses as a Hollywood drug dealer in order to infiltrate and destroy a cocaine cartel, but gradually discovers that the U.S. State Department has other political priorities and agendas in mind. Amply fulfilling the promise recently shown in A Rage in Harlem, director Bill Duke does a terrific job in spelling out the grim implications of this exceptionally violent picture, scripted by Henry Bean and Michael Tolkin (The Rapture)....
DESIRE UNDER THE ELMS Just as the two brothers are leaving, Ephraim, their father, returns with his third wife, a lovely young woman named Abbie. She’s married the old man because she wants to inherit the farm herself and achieve some financial security. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Payne’s lack of direction remains apparent, however. For example, the townspeople who attend the party celebrating the birth of Abbie’s baby all know that Eben is the father; their function is to laugh at Ephraim behind his back....
MACAO, OR BEYOND THE SEA With Max Ruedlinger, Christine Lauterburg, Hans-Dieter Jendreyko, Shirley Wong, and Che Tin Hong. At a time when U.S. distribution of foreign-language films has shrunk to a paltry fraction of what it used to be, making this country a backwater and last stop for many of the most important and challenging features that are currently being made, Lidell has come up with one of the few solutions around for beating the system....
This year marks the official beginning of the Poplar Creek prairie and savanna restoration. This was the year the first brush was cut, the first weed patches plowed up, the first wild seeds gathered for planting on the site. Throughout the history of the preserve system various supplicants have come before the county board, which governs the preserves, asking for a piece of this land–often for laudable purposes. The University of Illinois once asked for forest-preserve land to build a branch campus....
Twice a week I sit in the back of a fifth-grade classroom and read with one child at a time until we finish a story, which seldom happens, or until the child is tired. Then I work with another. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The reading material available to us is limited. There’s a cute story about a cute raccoon who visits an exemplary, two-dimensional family with a father and mother and brother and sister who live in a house that has a separate bedroom for each child....
HISTORY LOVES COMPANY Drummond: Listen to this: Genesis 4-16. “And Cain went out from the presence of the Lord, and dwelt in the land of Nod, on the East of Eden. And Cain knew his wife”! Where the hell did she come from? Avi aside, History Loves Company is about the anonymous nobodies who never got their names in the Bible. “We’re not the movers and the shakers of the world,” says one....
Labor Strife? At ‘In These Times’? “It’s a funny kind of situation,” Weinstein told us. “This is a paper that has always based itself on support for the unions. When they came to try to organize us, it was probably the easiest organizing job that any union’s ever had. But the writers are the only people you can screw without getting the paper shut down. So regardless of our intentions, that’s what happens to them....
