BETTER RED IN BED Better Red in Bed’s publicity calls it “a look at the cold war in Chicago that’s black and white and Red all over,” and sure enough two of the major targets of the play’s satire are Marxists and investigative journalists. One of them, Jo Snide (“You’ve seen my column, ‘Snide Lines,’ every day on page two of the Daily Grind”), tells us in an expository speech that the play also contains “all the elements that make a drama compelling ....
If you stand on the sidewalk and cup your hands up to the window of Ed Woehl’s Photo Supply store, at 1800 N. Honore, it’s possible, with some concentration, to sort out recognizable objects from the stacks and piles crammed inside: metal lunch boxes, wire-screen flyswatters, camping gear, fishing rods, kitschy signs, clothes, fans, curtains, clocks. Close to 20 walking canes hang on a rope suspended from the ceiling. And there’s the album cover with John Lennon and Yoko Ono staring lovingly into each other’s eyes stashed carelessly in between roller skates, a wooden goose, a plastic turtle, and a thing that looks like a faucet....
TONY FITZPATRICK AND OBAJI NYAMBI Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The front-room show features 23 of Fitzpatrick’s recent etchings. His exhibition last fall of larger, more elaborate drawings at Carl Hammer Gallery nearly sold out; these are smaller and more affordable prints, priced between $300 and $800 unframed. The artist fills these little fields with all sorts of figural data–a buxom cartoon gal grinningly shows her stuff on an aptly shaped print called Keyhole Kutie; a larger-than-life insect with human hands and buggy eyes challenges the viewer in The Coming of Locusts; in Shoeless Joe a dejected, teary-eyed scarecrow shows his local loyalties with a prominent White Sox hat (Fitzpatrick wears a Sox cap, too)....
The Swainson’s hawks that nest in Kane County may not have fledged any young this year. Bob Montgomery, who works for the Max McGraw Wildlife Foundation in Dundee, discovered one nest, but saw no evidence that the birds that occupied it had any success. He did see some additional adults in other parts of the county, so there could have been one or two nests he did not find. There have been reports in the past week from local birders of an immature Swainson’s in Kane County, so one of those undiscovered nests could have been successful....
Gretchen Cryer, who’s in Chicago for the first time since 1981, when she starred here in her musical I’m Getting My Act Together and Taking It on the Road, offers a generously long and musically rich evening of pop story telling in her new cabaret act. The well-remembered older repertoire–songs from musicals she wrote with Nancy Ford in the 1970s, such as Shelter and the aforementioned I’m Getting My Act Togetber–is balanced with new material in veins both plain and fancy....
KIROV BALLET If companies were designer dresses, the Kirov would be a Christian Dior, with none of the fussy noise of a Christian LaCroix–the style of the flamboyant Bolshoi. And the Kirov’s clean, elegant lines have the same staying power as those of Dior’s creations. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Kirov’s sets and costumes, however, are far from pared down. The men’s vests and the women’s tutus are loaded with sequins and gemstones, adding to the fairy-tale splendor onstage....
List in the Pocket With both a year and a decade now drawing to a close, the number of lists indicating the best and the most seems greater than ever. So pronounced, in fact, is this listomania concerning the 80s that in many cases it had already moved into full gear by late October, while the decade still had a good nine or ten weeks to go. The Tribune’s Sunday arts section, for example, got its critics to come up with their ten-best lists for the 80s in time for an October 22 publication date, while the movie magazines Premiere and American Film, which plan their issues much further in advance, hit the stands with their own hit parades in early November....
To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The article entitled “Babies Wanted,” in your May 12, 1989 edition, contained much misinformation about the advantages and disadvantages of adoption through a private placement or through a licensed adoption agency. For example, regarding adoptive parents, your article stated, “all prospective adoptive parents are screened–financially, medically, and for character–by a county agency or by a private agency, and their homes must be licensed....
The far end of the waxy, hardwood basketball court is in shadows. A rock ‘n’ roll band, Paul Cebar and the Milwaukeeans, is positioned at midcourt, a few dozen revelers gyrating before them. Nearer the entrance, a couple of sections of bleachers hold most of the onlookers. With pennants of victories long gone hanging from its ceiling, the cavernous Loyola University Alumni Gym has taken on the aspect of a high school mixer gone sour....
How was it, asks Henry Regnery in his new book, Creative Chicago, that a city of such varied and remarkable accomplishments failed to become a literary center? The book is a collection of essays about several of the writers and publishers who did good work here–and then for one reason or another moved on. Beginning with an intriguing introduction by Joseph Epstein–a gifted and perceptive writer who fortunately has not moved away–Creative Chicago includes Regnery’s contemplations about the city’s first publisher, Robert Fergus; the publishing firm of Stone & Kimball; the Dial and Chap-Book (with the exception of TriQuarterly the only nationally visible literary periodicals the city has produced to date); the Chicago publishers who brought us Oz and Tarzan; Harriet Monroe and her still-extant (and highly regarded) Poetry; plus three Chicago writers: Henry Blake Fuller, Hamlin Garland, and Theodore Dreiser....
Two hippies from the 60s (Eric Roberts and Cheech Marin) emerge from a Central American jungle, where they’ve been smoking dope and hiding from the feds, come to New York, and discover what the U.S. in 1989 is all about. Aaron Russo (Bette Midler’s former manager) and David Greenwalt codirected this comedy from a script by Neil Levy and Richard LaGravenese; Julie Hagerty and Robert Carradine play the heroes’ now-yuppified friends who are gradually inspired to return to their former values....
SID CAESAR & IMOGENE COCA TOGETHER AGAIN Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » His patter wasn’t any better. Although teamed here with his old Your Show of Shows partner, Imogene Coca, the former king of TV comedy takes a long solo turn consisting of gags he’s pleased to call “truths”–as in, “Now, if I may, I’d like to show you another truth.” What follows this introduction aren’t really truths, however, but shticklach so old they seem eternal: There’s the one about a baby who has to guide his bleary-eyed dad through the administration of an early morning bottle....
You just try to detach from the tension of the event. There’s a lot of anxiety; you just kind of try to smoke in another dimension. Once you get it lit, just puff it nice and easy. Otherwise it’ll burn right out. –Paul Board, a competitor in the ninth annual Chicago Pipe Smoking Contest, talking about his strategy Along three walls of the front room, long tables draped in white hold pipes, cigars, ashtrays, tobacco, and fancy pouches and jars....
Mike Singletary’s last home football game was one of those occasions sports fans want to explain to people who aren’t sports fans. To fully appreciate the impact and import of the game, one didn’t need to know Singletary personally–although, according to all testimony, it couldn’t have hurt–but one did need to have seen him play and perform over a number of years. One had to have a feel for the type of player he is, and for all those so-called “intangibles” he brings to a team....
Scottie Pippen, preparing to pass inbounds from just to the side of the Bulls basket, motioned for the photographer sitting at his feet to move back a little on the apron. With his back to the floor, he thanked the photographer for his cooperation by saying, “Check this out.” Then he turned, took the ball from the referee, and, right on cue, lofted an inbounds alley-oop pass to a leaping Michael Jordan....
Pocket billiards, like bird-watching, is a diversion for the entire year, but it’s only in winter that we take it up seriously as a sport. The game is endlessly engaging because its species of devotees are innumerable: each pool player is unique, with a set of mannerisms gathering to constitute a certain style of play. The game is also, in itself, unfathomable, challenging at any level. Yet it’s only in the colder months, when football games pile up like snow in a parking lot, when college basketball warms with intraconference play, when almost every pro basketball game (while almost meaningless) goes down to the final seconds, that we feel the need to drag ourselves from the television and take an active interest in a participation sport....
Three hours before the first U.S. fighter jets left central Saudi Arabia for Baghdad, Kiren Chaudhry sighed and told the 99th reporter of the week what she had just told me: that the sanctions against Iraq were working. She’d been in Iraq a week and a half before, tagging along with an eclectic contingent of U.S. peace activists, including Vietnam veterans and Grandmothers for Peace. When she’d left Baghdad, the stores were still full, but a sack of flour was selling for 260 dinars–twice a soldier’s monthly wages....
THE WINGS OF MOONY FISHBEIN Clearly Chicago playwright Ron Mark has been strongly–if not unduly–influenced by domestic heart-warmers like Neil Simon’s Brighton Beach Memoirs and Clifford Odets’s Awake and Sing. In Wings, Mark tries to pour into one very crisis-ridden Fourth of July weekend all the hopes and fears of an embattled west-side Jewish family. To do this, he contrives to unleash more slam-bang catastrophes than any play has a right to....
As soon as the weather turned cold, Chicago’s police stations and City Hall filled up every night with men who had no jobs and nowhere to go. The 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition–which announced Chicago’s arrival as a world-class city–had closed October 30, stranding workers by the hundreds and adding local desperation to the deepest nationwide depression the United States had ever seen. On the city’s teeming west side, newly arrived Italians, Greeks, Bohemians, and Polish and Russian Jews added their own bewilderment and poverty to the local and national distress....
What Happened to Zagat ’89? Nobody ever said producing a dining guide was easy. And Tim Zagat has had plenty of problems getting out a new version of the Zagat Chicago Restaurant Survey. What was to have been a 1989 survey has turned into the 1990 edition, delayed by at least six months. Now Zagat is saying the new guide should be out by Thanksgiving (keep your fingers crossed)....
