I took the call in my car, made a U-turn on Santa Monica, and headed back toward Century City. It was nearly Christmas, in the midst of the coldest winter we’d had in ten years. I had the heater on, which made the car run like a diesel truck. The kid sat in front of a desk; three henchmen sat rigidly on a sofa. The wraith had a small cassette in his hand; he kept fumbling it around, like some pathetic executive-suite version of Captain Queeg....
It’s a zoo out there. “Approximately 8500 animal lovers nationwide contribute to the care and feeding of Brookfield Zoo’s animals by ‘adopting’ them,” says the zoo’s newsletter Preview (Summer). Among the “parents” and “adoptees” have been “NBC’s David Letterman (giant cockroach), former Illinois Governor Jim Thompson (timber rattlesnake), WBBM TV’s weatherman Harry Volkman (Affie Elephant)…an Illinois State University sorority (python), a Barry Manilow fan club in Country Club Hills (turtle, falconet, and guinea pigs), and the United Motorcyclists of Illinois (six animals)…....
Sunday Both the Vikings and the Bears open with convincing offensive drives. The Vikings’ Herschel Walker converts a critical third down on the drive by slowly picking his way through a hole like a man stumbling to the bathroom in the dark. After that, however, the Vikings are in the dark about how to use him, and he doesn’t have another good run until the game is out of hand. In the meantime, the Bears get a jump start from the zebras: the best play in the Bears’ playbook is the yellow flag....
A SHAYNA MAIDEL Circle Theatre Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A Shayna Maidel is Barbara Lebow’s story of the reunion of a fatefully separated family. Rayzel Weiss and her father Mordechai are Polish Jews who lived in New York during the 1930s and ’40s. But Rayzel’s mother and sister were trapped in Poland, and for years their fate has been unknown. In 1946, Rayzel’s sister Lusia comes to New York–to stay with Rayzel while she searches for her husband Duvid, whom she hasn’t seen since they were carted off to separate concentration camps....
If spaceflight were a sport, it would most resemble baseball. In both the field consists of nearly empty space, the few objects in it of surpassing importance to the game. Both involve a fascination with spheres, arcs, circles. (Baseball appears linear: the stark lines of the diamond, the ball thrown from one point to another. But look at the fly ball’s parabola, the grounder’s wild dribbling ballistics, the actual path the runners make around the bases....
To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The objectivity jig should have been up after the surreal ’88 election coverage, which was nothing but an extended, amorphous meditation on the media covering the media (covering the media) as the media, incidentally, covered the race. All that Hamlet-like hair-pulling was the biggest con job ever. Begging the only question that mattered, the media agonized over the magic formula for objectivity....
Buying Time at the Body Politic Can Clever Dick rescue the Body Politic? In yet another effort to put its financial house in order, the Lincoln Avenue theater is turning over its space to a commercial producer who hopes he has a hit on his hands. On April 26, Rosenfeld Productions Inc. and the Body Politic will open Clever Dick, a mystery spoof by author-director Charles Marowitz; it’s described as “an Agatha Christie whodunit as written by Joe Orton....
Bright Sheng’s H’un (Lacerations): In Memoriam 1966-76 and Robert Beaser’s Double Chorus are, respectively, the seventh and eighth works to be premiered by the Chicago Symphony in its still-young season–a count unprecedented in the CSO’s play-it-safe Solti era. Sheng, a Shanghai native who emigrated to this country in 1982 and is currently the Lyric Opera’s resident composer, has encapsulated in his 20-minute orchestral tour de force the turmoil and anguish of the Cultural Revolution, of which he was a victim....
Details of plans to rehab and develop Navy Pier hit the pages of the downtown dailies last May with an explosion of optimism and good cheer. Lake Point Tower residents are the most active. They’ve hired Scot Hodes, a politically well-connected downtown lawyer, to represent them. They’ve enlisted the assistance of the Streeterville Organization of Active Residents, which has a long track record of battling development plans. And they’re branching out, recruiting residents from other outer-drive high rises to their cause....
Fifteen years ago George Williams gave up a profitable business selling meat to spend his time in the street with drug addicts, ex-offenders, and the homeless. “I made plenty of money in business,” he says. “But it wasn’t giving me the nourishment I needed.” Before he went into the meat business, George was a dope fiend. It was a mixed group that met that day, all the primary colors and some of the shades in between....
To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Forcing parents to send their children on a potentially dangerous school bus to a potentially dangerous school in an area which removes the parent from close contact with their child’s school is an idea most caring people would find repugnant. Obviously, most parents who could avoid this situation did, they either sent their children to private schools or moved out of the city, making the problem of segregation worse....
If the Fleischer Brothers had created a bookish, boho older sister for Betty Boop, she would have looked a lot like Jenny Magnus–black-haired, dark-eyed, fair-skinned, with a thin, rubbery, Chaplinesque body and arching inked-in eyebrows capable of communicating every emotion from skepticism to surprise to delight. In performance Magnus moves with a cartoonlike grace, her arms sweeping out to mimic the expanding circles on a pool of water, or pulled into her chest as she giggles hysterically and tries to ward off some invisible tickler....
Chief Lilac Kenny Kurson says Paul K.’s a genius, and he’s bringing the little-known but respected Kentucky songwriter and bandleader to town to prove it. K.’s supposedly released as many as 20 cassettes of his work over the past six years, and a 90-minute precis I’ve been listening to demonstrates two things: a rushing, early U2-ish alternative rock and an almost whimsical (by contrast) acoustically flavored folk. On the noisy stuff, with a full band, his voice sounds so exaggerated and portentous you sometimes feel like you’re listening to the Call....
Altoist Mike Smith has been largely shaped by the music of Cannonball Adderley, and he remains dedicated to that model–both the music and the commentary on his two Delmark recordings leave no doubt of the lineage. But while Smith hardly could have chosen a more inspired influence, his new album (On a Cool Night) moves beyond the limitations of that categorization. Long regarded as among the most fluent and electrifying saxophonists in town, Smith almost makes it sound easy; and as he strips away the few remaining cliches and strives for purer and purer melody, his fluency becomes the tool for a new level of artistic discourse (a progression that’s also marked the careers of Art Pepper and Lee Konitz)....
“It’s the only opera I know of that has a mummy as one of its romantic leads,” jokes Lawrence Rapchak about his new opera, The Lifework of Juan Diaz. Indeed, the unusual story, which is based on the Ray Bradbury short story and his 1964 Alfred Hitchcock Presents teleplay of the same name, is hardly typical fare for the opera house, but Rapchak, who is also music director of Chamber Opera Chicago, had a particular interest in the subject....
GOLUB While there are a handful of interesting and respectable art documentaries in the history of film, such as Alain Resnais’ Van Gogh (1948) and Gauguin (1950), and Sergei Paradjanov’s recent Arabesques Around a Pirosmani Theme–all three of which significantly happen to be shorts–the overall failure of film to record a painter’s work without recourse to a gliding Cook’s tour or a mincemeat dissection of the work in question has been far from encouraging....
PROSPECT Back at Vince and Elena’s place the stench of government-issue medicinal reefer lingers in the air, and a most unpleasant evening ensues, in which Elena’s moods switch from a quiet, contemplative acceptance of her imminent death to a bile-spewing fury to a wheezing, death-rattle desperation. As the play progresses, characters reveal hidden elements of their lives. Liza tells about the young daughter she left home tonight. Elena reveals her passion for X-rated movies, which, along with reefer, is the only sensual pleasure she has left in life....
When he was sentenced to death for the murder of an Uptown boy prostitute, police and prosecutors thought they had brought an end to a long series of gruesome homosexual murders. But the killing hasn’t stopped, and now Eyler is returning to court with a s In a Rogers Park alley on August 21, 1984, Joe Balla, a building janitor, made a horrible discovery. Balla, a native of Hungary, arrived at his building at 6 AM intending to take the garbage out to the alley in time for the usual Tuesday morning pickup....
Our two baseball teams have not been playing very artistically lately–not even when they win, which they’ve been doing about equally often. Nevertheless it has been a fine season for baseball art in the city. “Diamonds are Forever,” the baseball art exhibit put together by the New York State Museum and the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service, came to the library Cultural Center in July for a two-month run. Before that, the play Bleacher Bums became a Chicago classic with its revival in late May at the Organic Theater under the direction of its original coauthor, Joe Mantegna....
How did the myth that cats sometimes steal people’s breath when they sleep get started? –Rick Weaver, North Bay, California Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » To many people, “cats may still presage evil, particularly if they are black; they may still, as has been widely held throughout the world, cause the death of a child by creeping upon it and sucking its breath,” one of my cat books notes....
