Friday 23
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Last year at this time you could have seen a surreal sight–more than 7,000 people standing on the banks of the Chicago River, cheering on a flotilla of rubber ducks. Mass infantile regression? No, just the first annual Greater Chicago Duck Race, designed to raise cash for CAUSES (the acronym for Illinois Masonic Medical Center’s child abuse unit), the WGN Children’s Fund, and the Hull House Association. You buy as many contestants as you want at five bucks a duck; the organizers will dump the rubber quackers off the Michigan Avenue Bridge at 12:30. The finish line is outside the Sun-Times Building; winning ducks earn their sponsors a variety of ultra-fabulous prizes, among them trips to Italy, Puerto Rico, and D.C. and tickets to Bozo. Prerace fun starts at 10:30 in Wrigley Plaza; you can adopt ducks up until the starting gun. Call 348-3825 for details.
Time again for the Newberry Library Book Fair; zillions of books donated over the year are up for grabs at the sale, which runs 10 to 5 today and noon to 5 tomorrow. The library’s at 60 W. Walton; admission is free. Call 943-9090 for more info.
“On ne nait pas femme; on le devient,” said Simone de Beauvoir. Women’s Equality Day celebrates neither being born nor becoming a woman but women’s achieving the right to vote 71 years ago today. At noon in the State of Illinois Building’s assembly hall–one floor down from street level at 100 W. Randolph–the 26th Amendment will be celebrated in a program hosted by WBBM’s Linda MacLennan. Guests include Les Miz’s Cindi Page, financial analyst Terry Savage, jazz singer Geraldine de Haas, Today’s Chicago Woman publisher Sherren Leigh, and Carole Gutierrez and Denise La Grassa from the musical Sylvia’s Real Good Advice. There’s also a raffle of some cellular phones and tix to the plays. It’s all free. Call 814-6660 for details.
The Chicago Academy of Sciences’s Dino-rama exhibit is closed, but you can see a genuine prehistoric beast at the Fairmont Hotel today as former Reagan national security adviser and free-lance nut Jeane Kirkpatrick explains how the collapse of the Warsaw Pact squares with her theories about intractable “totalitarian” governments (i.e., Russia and its allies) that the U.S. must oppose and, by way of contrast, tractable authoritarian regimes (Chile, the Shah’s Iran, Iraq) that we should coddle. Kirkpatrick speaks at Marshall Field’s “Challenging the Future” banquet, where she’ll share the Imperial Ballroom stage with the debut of a new Estee Lauder fragrance and a fashion show. It’s a $25 ticket for talk, dinner, and show; the event starts at 5. (You can use your ticket as a voucher toward a purchase at Field’s career department.) The Fairmont is at 200 N. Columbus. Call 781-4777 for ticket info.
