Posts

At a party over the Fourth of July weekend, a friend of ours–who is nine years old–was entertaining us by aping the deliveries of a few notable pitchers. The identifiable characteristics of the pitching motions were all there–Dwight Gooden with his straight, over-the-top movement, Mike Bielecki with his low delivery and his lunge toward home plate–so that any committed baseball follower could have picked them out in a second even if our friend hadn’t announced each one beforehand....

The Bulls came out last Sunday afternoon and skunked the New York Knicks in the first few minutes of play. They did so in an almost unstoppable fashion; there was no way the Knicks could have altered their fortunes. Michael Jordan drove the lane and drew attention, then passed to center Bill Cartwright, who hit the wide-open shot. Jordan and Cartwright worked the same play the next time down the court....

Star Trek episodes often refer to the “star date.” What exactly is a “star date”? How does it equate to our calendar? Or is it merely sitcom disinformation? –Evan Williams, Austin, Texas Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In Star Trek: The Next Generation things are more systematic. One production staffer is “keeper of the star dates” and parcels them out to the episode writers to avoid mix-ups....

THE WILDE COWARD Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Wilde and Coward were very much part of the society they lampooned and would have wanted it no other way–the plays of both invariably end with the status quo unchanged. They were able to target the absurdities of upper-class behavior because they knew the conventions. If Fritz Dickmann, a young midwestern playwright, intended to satirize the elite of either Wilde’s or Coward’s day, he should have done a lot more research....

Ticket Too High? Look for the Union Label Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Executives at some of Chicago’s non-Equity theaters were alarmed last week by a short note about ticket prices at the end of Richard Christiansen’s generally positive review of Between Daylight and Boonville, a non-Equity show being presented by Edge Productions at the Halsted Theatre Centre. Christiansen, the Tribune’s entertainment editor, wrote that Boonville tickets priced at $18....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Perhaps if your reporter had looked into the history of Mt. Greenwood he would have been better prepared to do an article about our 22,000-25,000 residents. (We all know that census figures can be questioned.) You quoted from one letter but others have been written listing reasons that we oppose trying to make a former grade school into a high school....

A FARM UNDER A LAKE Women’s Project of City Lit Theater Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The arduous structure of the script is probably unavoidable. Bergland’s narrative is largely an internal monologue by Janet Hawn (Nespor), a private-care nurse in Green Bay, Wisconsin, who volunteers to drive an elderly patient some 500 miles to see her relatives in Quincy, Illinois. Since her passenger is only marginally aware of her immediate surroundings, the long drive gives Janet plenty of time to contemplate the people, places, and events of her life: the farm in southern Illinois, her childhood home, which had to be sold; the neighboring family that bought it; their two sons, Jack, whom she married out of acquiescence to other people’s plans, and Carl, whom she loved and continues to love with a kinship bred of their love for the land; her father’s second wife, who on the eve of Janet’s wedding instructs her how to run away from husbands (“Don’t ever let it get so bad that you have to go and leave your dishes,” she intones solemnly); the displaced farmer Janet remembers only as the Cabbage Man, whose sense of humor finally fails him, with tragic results; and Carl’s wife, Shirley, who shares with Jack a frustrated desire to belong in a white-collar world–an ambition that dooms them both to being forever out of place, like “a farm under a lake....

It seemed like a reunion of a chic college clique, the women gathered around Alicia Partnoy. Partnoy, a 32-year-old writer and bookstore manager in Washington, D.C., is one of the few miracles to emerge from Argentina’s “dirty war,” an undeclared and relentless assault by the military in the late 70s against the country’s youth. Partnoy lived to tell her story of disappearance and survival and at least a few chapters from the stories of the more than 30,000 people estimated still missing....

A lot of the invites I got from art galleries this year should have been mailed in plain brown wrappers. I guess the one that alerted me to the phenomenon was the postcard showing Mary Ellen Croteau’s underwear. At first it looked as though Artemisia Gallery was exhibiting antique girdles and early 20th-century string bikini underpants. But it turned out Croteau had made jockstraps out of old bras. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

MAY JUNE Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The first neighborhood fairs of the year start today. The Body Politic Street Festival, held along the 2200 block of North Lincoln, will feature three stages of entertainment–one of rock ‘n’ roll, one of blues (booked by the very cool Wise Fools Pub), and one of family stuff–plus the usual plethora of food and junk to buy....

Friday 17 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » If you’ve ever wondered just how much fun the life-style of your typical rock critic really is, tonight you can bid for a night out on the town with Dave Hoekstra, the Sun-Times pop critic, and help out Guild Books in the process. The bookstore–the north side’s leading purveyor of good writing and good politics–says it needs 50 grand by the end of January to stay open, and funds from tonight’s auction at the World Tattoo Gallery, 1255 S....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » She brands the CANF a “right wing” and “extremist” organization. Would she then brand 81% of the American people “right-wing” and “extremist”? Because public polls from May 1960 to spring 1988 reveal that’s the percentage of Americans who have a negative view of Fidel Castro. The CANF counts among its many supporters a broad range of citizens from all walks of life, and all mainstream political tendencies....

“In the water! In the water!” young Scottie Walker chants quietly to himself as a golfer tees off on the 173-yard par-three hole five at the South Shore Golf Course. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “When the ball goes in the drink, I’m makin’ money,” Walker explains. He’s been coming out to the golf course at 71st Street and Lake Michigan all summer, following a tip from a friend who said he could make as much as $5 a day fetching golf balls out of the hole-five pond and then selling them to wayward-hitting golfers....

The first ever Cook County Owl Census will be taking place this weekend. We already have a breeding-bird survey that takes place in June, but that survey tends to miss owls both because the surveyors usually work in the daytime and because owls nest very early in the year; by June the peak of the season is past, and the animals are much less conspicuous. Great horned owls tend to prefer woodlands, but they have the sort of flexibility you might expect from a bird whose breeding range extends from the Arctic Ocean to the Strait of Magellan....

Thursday evening, 8 PM, the phone rings. “Karen Hoffman?” a woman asks in a throaty voice. “I’m Barbara, and I’ll be the coordinator this Saturday morning. I’ll meet you in front of Concord at 6 AM. Do you need a wake-up call?” No, I tell her, I’ll be there. I hang up, and wish I hadn’t committed myself to another Saturday of clinic escort. We were not to engage in discussions, arguments, or prochoice rhetoric with the antichoice demonstrators....

Last Dance at MoMing Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » At a meeting last Saturday, MoMing’s small board of directors reluctantly chose to close the center rather than try to overcome the seemingly insurmountable hurdles confronting it. Said board president Catherine Pines: “It is painful to let go of something that has meant so much to so many people, but the money just wasn’t there....

In 1987, with funding from Focus Infinity for a project called “Changing Chicago,” I began photographing in the Polish neighborhoods along Milwaukee Avenue. Initially I shot in commercial places–a bakery, a barbershop–but ultimately the churches and their parishioners captured my interest and held it long past the term of the one-year grant. At church the many groups I had photographed separately came together, often in traditional garb. The people seemed comfortable there, interacting freely and sometimes passionately before and after the service, whether they were socializing or soliciting for a political cause....

With her husky voice, her voluptuous interpretations, and her extraordinary skill at scat improvisation, Rhiannon might have stormed the jazz world years ago. (She’s the Ella Fitzgerald of the Aquarian Age.) But Rhiannon doesn’t restrict herself to the jazz world, so most people don’t know quite what to make of her. Like Bobby McFerrin (with whom she sings in his innovative Voicestra) she can’t help grabbing at other sources: folk music, pop, and a brand of inspirational balladry that allows her to fully ventilate a style that whoops, soars, and often seems to absolutely possess her....

When Tony LaBarbera saw that the Illinois Entertainer was starting a new heavy metal magazine, he kept his own counsel. He saw what was happening–the four-color covers, the paucity of local coverage, even the potshots that those in the know could see were directed at Tony and his friends–but kept quiet. “I guess freedom of the press is so much easier when you own it,” the essay concludes. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Sam Magad is a familiar figure at Chicago Symphony’s subscription concerts: he’s the gent wearing dark shades in the first chair of the violin section–near the edge of the stage, only a few steps left of the podium. A CSO concertmaster since 1972, the Chicago native–whose affiliation with the orchestra started when he was 11–has on numerous occasions demonstrated his considerable prowess as a concerto soloist. As longtime head of the Northbrook Symphony, he’s also shown a flair as conductor....