Arms for No-Hostages: Is It News Yet? The rumor never died out, however, and last week a sea change occurred. On Monday a former National Security Council official named Gary Sick published a long op-ed piece in the New York Times called “The Election Story of the Decade.” Sick had been the NSC’s point man during the 1980 hostage crisis. Now he’s researching a book on American relations with Iran under Ronald Reagan....
BEATING THE SHABBY CAT Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The youthful members of Richter’s Thing, the group presenting the revue Beating the Shabby Cat Wednesday nights at the Roxy, display one impressive quality as aspiring comic performers: they are willing to make complete fools of themselves onstage. Nothing, it appears, is too low or too embarrassing for them–which makes them either really gutsy or really self-indulgent....
Benton Harbor has seen its share of well-known faces. Al Capone and his lieutenant Frank Nitti used to vacation there. Basketball star Chet Walker grew up there. And in the outlying township, minutes from downtown, Eddie Vrdolyak owns a horse farm that once belonged to the chairman of the Whirlpool Corporation. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Sarett Nature Center, off Red Arrow Highway on Benton Center Road in Benton Harbor (616-927- 4832), is a wildlife sanctuary consisting of bottomland that borders the Paw Paw River....
“My company used to be in the Sun Belt,” said one north-side business owner who was overheard by North Business and Industrial Council executive director Carl Bufalini (NORBIC Network, February 1988). “The incentives we initially received were great. But it did not take long before there were schools and roads to be built. When a waste treatment plant had to be built they counted on us as a major source of funds....
To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » My observations of the way developers and agencies of government relate to public transit lead me to conclude that there is little political will in the United States, either nationally or locally, for establishing environments conducive to transit. Public funds for maintaining and extending transit infrastructure are hard to come by, and development, even in the city, is seldom required to accommodate transit access, much less include facilities to make transit easy to provide and convenient to use....
Here’s a show whose script, packed with obscene words and indecent images, was entirely funded by the taxpayers–not through the National Endowment for the Arts, but through the Justice Department. The excerpts, drawn from a 1986 survey compiled by a commission working under Reagan-administration attorney general Edwin Meese, include a reading of 2,325 magazine titles (from A Cock Between Friends to Yummy Black); testimony by radical feminist Andrea Dworkin linking pornography to female degradation; a statement by commission member and Catholic priest Bruce Ritter (written before Ritter resigned from Covenant House, the New York runaway shelter he headed, after being accused of molesting some of his teenage wards); first-person accounts of rape victims; and the FBI’s frame-by-frame description of Deep Throat, enacted by plastic dolls as tabletop theater....
When most people think of Chicago blues guitar, they think of the aggressive, hard-driving sounds of musicians who took traditional folk concepts and updated them to fit the harsh, speeded-up realities of urban living; from the Delta-influenced followers of Muddy Waters to the young iconoclasts of the west side who laid the ground in the late 50s for the rock-and-roll rebellion of a few years later. But there’s another tradition, exemplified by the elegant musicianship of Floyd McDaniels....
The least known of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s features in this country also happens to be one of his very best. It stars Anna Magnani at her most volcanic, hyperbolic, and magnificent as a Roman prostitute trying to go straight and provide a respectable middle-class existence for her teenage son. Interestingly enough, while the slums of Rome were Pasolini’s essential turf, he dealt with them directly only in his first two films, Accattone (1961) and Mamma Roma (1962), turning mainly to period films and allegories in his subsequent movies....
CHICAGO SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA Goodspeed Hall Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Since the early 80s, however, Bolcom’s star has been rising steadily. His 1984 setting of William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience is a three-hour multimedia extravaganza that seems to connect with today’s audiences. The 1987 Twelve New Piano Etudes earned him further recognition from the east-coast establishment as well as a Pulitzer Prize....
MIRIAM’S FLOWERS For some, the simple circumstance of being Puerto Rican and living in the South Bronx in the mid-70s might be reason enough to despair. Miriam’s family is not atypical, no more dysfunctional than any other. As a matter of fact, her mother’s boyfriend, Nando Morales, is an unusually kind and devoted consort, with a steady job at the Post Office and a sensual appetite guaranteed to please Delfina, a young widow....
MONSTERS II–VISITING HOURS “Monsters II–Visiting Hours” is an ambitious cabaret-style revue of songs, sketches, and monologues that examine the monsters inside us. Showcasing the works of nine Chicago playwrights, it’s an eclectic mix of styles and moods reminiscent of one of those CD samplers put out to promote new releases. Maybe not everything on the CD is to your taste, and you wonder how Weird Al Yankovic and Meat Loaf found their way onto the same album, but you wind up thinking the whole thing is pretty cool....
Lead Story In November in a courtroom in West Palm Beach, Florida, Judge Walter Colbath told accused rapist Byron Bryant, 23, that he would not reduce his bail, thus making it likely that Bryant would have to stay in jail pending trial. Incredulous, Bryant threw a nearby book (a paperback copy of Presumed Innocent) at Colbath, who then cited him for contempt of court (worth five more months in jail). Bryant let out a stream of obscenities at Colbath, and the exchanges continued until Bryant was led from the courtroom with four more contempt citations....
Lead Story Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In March the new superintendent of the Statue of Liberty banned gum chewing by visitors, reporting that about 1,000 chewed pieces a day get left behind, requiring five full-time cleanup people. An environmental advocacy group called the National Toxic Campaign Fund revealed in March that according to its study of Pentagon documents, U.S. military installations are responsible for more than 14,000 toxic dumps in the country and 100 installations are among “the most polluted pieces of real estate in America....
Sigfrido Aguilar is a contradiction in terms: a mime who likes to talk. Aguilar, founder of the internationally known Estudio Busqueda de Pantomima Teatro in Guanajuato, Mexico, speaks with an intense, concentrated air, always looking as if he is about to pause to think of some precise word, but never actually pausing. Ask him a question and he’ll reply with a torrent of words in jumbled, heavily accented English. Best of Chicago voting is live now....
OUT OF GAS ON LOVERS LEAP Griffin Theatre Company Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The two are best friends, but each wants more. Grouper wants to be Myst’s boyfriend and live with her. Myst wants to get laid. In the process of sorting out their priorities, secrets get revealed and heavy bonding occurs. They role-play with each other, each acting as the other’s parent....
SECOND BIRD ONE STONE Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The program for Second Bird One Stone describes Audrey, its focal character, as a copywriter and “poetess.” Audrey wears her hair in a fountain of frizz and speaks in a soft nasal twitter punctuated by glass-shattering shrieks of “Oh, my God! I don’t believe it!” She answers the phone to talk business in the middle of making love, and has to be reminded to put her clothes back on before leaving the house....
SISTER MARY IGNATIUS EXPLAINS IT ALL FOR YOU Vampires in Chicago has all the faults of a first play. Its plot never comes to life. Confusing, cluttered, and unfocused, it sags under the weight of its exposition. It seems like a weak Anne Rice rip-off or an extended episode of Tales From the Darkside. And, as revealed by the audience’s premature applause, it doesn’t know how to end. Best of Chicago voting is live now....
To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » While HB 4013 does contain some positive source reduction and recycling provisions, the thrust of the bill is to expedite the siting process for regional waste management facilities. If passed, this bill would change the local approval process for the siting of municipal waste facilities such as landfills, incinerators and transfer stations. HB 4013 would make local siting review OPTIONAL and take the teeth out of any community’s ability to stop the state from siting a new landfill or incinerator....
Henry Hauser wasn’t looking for a fight. The 67-year-old former school principal says that being retired has been good for him and his wife, Esther. Hauser, who lives in a north-side high rise a few blocks from Irving Park and the lake, is an avid golfer. “Every day–rain or shine–I’m out here at the Waveland course playing golf. I love golf, and in my opinion this course is the nicest in the city....
U2 has a charismatic leader without portfolio for a singer, an idiot savant for a guitarist, and about the strongest rhythm section you can imagine. Distinctive and impressive today, they started out scruffy and rather anonymous. On the release of their first album, Boy, in 1980 they seemed like just another vaguely new-wave British aggregation of the Simple Minds sort. Bono, the likeable if somewhat self-important lead singer, the Edge, the guitarist who’s parlayed the simple trick of running his instrument through a delay into one of the most distinctive guitar sounds of the last decade, and the big combo of drummer Larry Mullen and bassist Adam Clayton have over the years gotten not just better but smarter and morally responsible as well....
