WINTERY TAILS (2) You pay what you can for admission, which may make this the only show we can afford during the postholiday financial slump. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » (6) Kenneth Grahame’s “Dolce Domum”–“Sweet Home,” an excerpt from The Wind in the Willows–is the story of how Rat and Mole open up one of the latter’s long-deserted houses and entertain a band of carolers....
In 1982 Dolores Kennedy’s father, an attorney, told her he had met William Heirens while visiting a client at the Vienna prison and was deeply impressed with the man. He suggested she go see him sometime. “It seemed kind of strange that he would tell me that,” says Kennedy, 52, an Oak Park realtor and former legal secretary. “He hadn’t talked much about his business activities or made requests of me before....
Recently I took a bus ride into the future of Chicagoland with 25 commercial real-estate agents–an eight-hour excursion along the path of progress (also known as Interstate 88), sponsored by the economic-development agencies of Du Page, Kane, and De Kalb counties. The real-estate people were looking for land; the development people had some to show them. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » As the bus weaved back and forth along roads intersecting the Du Page portion of the interstate, somebody said something about the “ultimate development....
CH&P Gamble on “Good Times” Call it theatrical daredeviltry. In a surprising move for this trio of commercial producers, Michael Cullen, Sheila Henaghan, and Howard Platt have stepped up to bat with a commercial transfer of The Good Times Are Killing Me, an off-off-Loop production that comes with no New York track record and no name star to move tickets. The show, written by cartoonist Lynda Barry (who’s recently become a Chicagoan, by the way), is a collection of vignettes about growing up in the 1960s....
Artists are like race car drivers–although they’re praised for their skill, their performance is largely determined by what goes on under the hood of the automobile. And for artists, this is an area almost no one understands. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Shindler, a speech pathologist, has been thinking about the brain’s role in creativity for more than a decade, ever since she began working with a 20-year-old woman named Carol Frankel, whose brain bad been badly damaged by a cerebral hemorrhage....
Two years ago, shortly after the intifada exploded in the West Bank and Gaza, five Chicago Jews and five Chicago Palestinians met for dinner. They weren’t sure they’d ever meet again, for they knew that the long, brutal conflict in the Middle East had built fear, mistrust, even hatred between their two communities here. Wheeler’s parents had fled Lithuania when they were young. When she was a child, she heard about the pogroms in Eastern Europe, including one in which most of her father’s family was killed....
The south side used to be known for its Sunday blues–at Florence’s Lounge, Louise’s South Park Lounge, and the rest of the circuit. In recent years that tradition has faded somewhat, but harpist Grady Freeman seems determined to change that situation. Freeman sings in an expressive vibrato reminiscent of Rice Miller, and his harp blowing is raucous and elemental in the postwar-Chicago mold. The Family Band, meanwhile, is an impressive mixture of south-side veterans (tenor saxophonist Little Bobby, guitarist Smiley Tillman) and impressive newcomers like altoist Fred Brooks, who contributes Sonny Stitt-like variations on traditional blues themes....
To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Sometimes perhaps a stock plot can be made into an absorbing and entertaining story through a creative treatment. I think that was not the case in Darkman. Emotion was shown by rampaging around in a lab and breaking things. The Frankenstein monster did it much better. I did not find Darkman convincing as a monster, and he did not seem particularly strong except on a few occasions....
TALES OF THE FORGOTTEN FUTURE, PARTS TWO AND THREE Almost all the imagery in this and Klahr’s other films is created by cutout animation. No large cast was engaged; no highways were closed down–the cars aren’t moving because Klahr filmed his cutout man over still photographs of highways. Eschewing the smooth, slick, transparent look that results from the use of an animation stand, Klahr might film on a table or wall in his cramped New York apartment, combining images from magazines, comics, and other pop-culture sources with cutouts of the actors taken from his own photographs....
The crowd gathers quickly: an angry, weary mob still wearing their shabby work clothes, their dirty shirts and scuffed shoes. Dog tired but mad as hell, they mill around the door. Then, following some unseen cue, they begin to chant, “Jack Cade! Jack Cade! Jack Cade!”–the name of the leader of a peasant rebellion that nearly toppled Henry VI. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This is Shakespeare’s Herd....
PARTING GESTURES Live Theatre Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The story concerns a mother and her estranged adult son who are reunited for a few hours to attend the funeral of his father, her ex-husband. Told from the point of view of the son, the play at first seems to be about reconciliation but quickly degenerates into a 90-minute argument between parent and child about which parent abandoned the other and whether or not the deceased was a good father or husband....
Ever since his childhood in Park Ridge, Greg Glienna has pictured himself as a director of comedies. At age eight he, with the help of his best friend, Jim Vincent, made his first film in Super-8. In the early 80s and several shorts later, he and Vincent enrolled in the undergraduate film program at Columbia College, where they stayed long enough for Glienna to finish The Vase, about a guy meeting his fiancee’s family....
RUMPELSTILTSKIN Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Well, the folks at the Hystopolis Puppet Theater will have none of this. They adapt fairy tales for only one reason–to provide fun for children. Their current production of Rumpelstiltskin is a delightful three-dimensional cartoon full of foolish characters and genuine slapstick. (In fact, the puppeteers actually use a slapstick for sound effects.) Any attempt to find psychological insight in this production will earn you a trip through the spanking machine....
Carrie Barnett never met the person who first helped her accept her homosexuality. It wasnt a lover, or a friend. It was an author. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Brett Shingledecker, growing up in Lima, Ohio, around the same time, had similar experiences. “The first gay book I ever read was Faggots [Larry Kramer’s novel about New York gay life], when it came out in the late 70s....
A man wearing a dark plaid shirt and a black, peaked stevedore’s cap sticks his head out the little window of the hot dog stand and shouts across the street to a construction worker, “Hey, buddy! How about knocking off for lunch? How about a bowl of chili?” All day the man in the cap pokes his head out the little window near the comer of Clark and Cornelia and calls out to passersby:...
STEPHEN PETRONIO COMPANY The dances’ actual movement images, even the most mundane and gestural ones, affect the viewer without his consciously perceiving them. Petronio alternately collapses and explodes our sense of time: clear and emphatic unison sections may last only five or six counts; a solo passage featuring the movement of one finger on one raised hand may take several minutes. Petronio’s movement vocabulary is entirely idiosyncratic: these steps, jumps, lifts, and turns aren’t in any of our dance lexicons–not in ballet, not in modern, not in social-dance forms, not even in the multitude of postmodern vocabularies derived from pedestrian and natural movement....
To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » If Peter Dominowski thinks having one’s radio dial permanently tuned to WFMT is extremely rare, then he apparently doesn’t have much of a handle on the listeners [June 22]. Nearly everyone I knew that listened to WFMT did so just about all the time, and none of us thought it the least bit unusual that nobody ever changed the station....
STUFF AS DREAMS ARE MADE ON Both wear trademark costumes, for example. Avner wears a round red nose, baggy pants, and a derby; Curchack wears a battered top hat, coveralls, and a latex mask free of details–sort of a full-faced Phantom of the Opera mask. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Curchack pretends to be a burned-out actor who’s tired of doing his shtick for tiny audiences in midwestern studio theaters, but his show proves that he’s still beguiled by the magic of stagecraft....
When inviting guests, emphasize that you’re not throwing a Super Bowl party. You’re celebrating a day when millions of people watch a TV show that traditionally has been so boring, the only way to assure viewership is through exciting commercials, including a series that pits Anheuser-Busch bottles and cans against each other in a computer-simulated game that unfolds during the course of the so-called “real” game. Bud Bowl parties are not a vehicle for mass TV watching; they are intended as a vehicle for talking about mass TV watching....
To the editors Because we both have been in the Chicago news business for 20 years, you may understand what I am going to say here somewhat better than many who have not made their living in the news business or in related businesses such as law enforcement or social work. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Sex is John Gacy strangling 33 young boys and men and having intercourse with some of the corpses....
