September is testimony to baseball’s resiliency, to its inexhaustible capacity for regeneration. The sport follows the seasons through spring and summer, as the pennant races develop, and it comes to a wonderful, full flowering in October, with the play-offs and the World Series. Yet just as the chances of 22 of the 26 big-league teams begin to wither, in the last month of the regular season, suddenly there is new hope for growth and improvement....
To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I have never read a more mean spirited cruel article. What was the point of the article? Let’s see how mean a neighbor can be to two senior citizens who have moved away? The author made cruel, unjustified remarks. The two women were not classy enough for her snobbish taste. The block party so maliciously described in the article is one of my fondest memories of all the past ten years of block parties on the 1700 block of Cleveland....
WHO’S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF?–THE DANCE When Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? was first presented, in 1962, it was exciting theater. But time has not treated it well. Topics that were shocking in 1962–adultery, alcoholism, abortion, and marital game playing–may be greeted with a bit of a yawn these days. George and Martha’s wild manipulations of each other today seem an entirely theatrical construction, with no relationship to any conceivable heterosexual couple....
A Dark Day for Cabaret Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Boombala’s closing was a particularly strong jolt to Mary Ann Johnson, who with son Phil opened the club with a $77,000 investment of their own money. “We constructed it ourselves in six months,” notes Johnson, who’s lost most of her savings and now is living in borrowed housing. She says the closing was prompted in large part by her inability to collect approximately $20,000 of a $60,000 fee she says was due the club for a lavish party she organized for an outside client....
THE LAST SONG ANGUISHED LOVE ** (Worth seeing) Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » From Thailand come The Last Song (1986) and its sequel, Anguished Love (1987), directed and written by Pisan Akarasainee. This soap-opera saga tells of a hunky young hick, nicely named Boontherm Long Stem, who leaves his rural home to seek his fortune in the big city. The city-country dichotomy is expressed right at the film’s beginning, when shots of a female impersonator, Somying, lip- synching disco tunes in a nightclub are intercut with scenes of Boontherm plowing his farm....
The first thing you notice as you trundle your way up the stairs is the collection of autographed record albums on the walls. “To Jay, the Best, Pops Staples”; “To JB Ross and Co. From the Chi-Lites, All the Best.” Signatures are scrawled across albums by Charlie Musselwhite, Albert King, and Ricky Nelson; there’s even a “To Big Jay” from Jello Biafra. “Take a message.” “Tell him to hold on a second....
DO YOU SEE WHAT I’M SAYING? But for all this research and communing with the homeless, for all the attempts to include the voices of real homeless women, this new script is more a curiosity than a triumph. More than anything it’s an uneasy and unfortunate blend of old and new stereotypes. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Though these three are so stereotypical and safe, we care about them a great deal more than the two characters I suspect Terry is using to “update” her script: Mychelle, an accountant suddenly homeless because her coke habit got the better of her, and Himilce, the tough-as-nails babe who has rationalized her being on the street as a choice, a way to higher consciousness....
South Carolina guitarist Drink Small–raconteur, songster, and showman–looks and sounds as if he just stepped off the stage of an old-time traveling medicine show. He bills himself as “The Blues Doctor,” and his persona is a combination of avuncular warmth, carefully crafted musical expression, and flimflam (he boasts of using 14–count ’em!–different blues-guitar techniques in an eccentric stylistic gumbo he calls “Drinkism”). However, Small is more than a quaint relic: he’s a master at improvising lyrics in live performance, and his gifts as a storyteller are nearly as impressive as his musicianship....
Wayland Rogers wants to make the past speak to the late 20th century. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “The words, of course, are ancient,” Rogers says. “The Sanctus goes back to the Judaic tradition, and the Agnus Dei dates from the fourth century. For me as a composer, it’s hard to look at those texts in a new light. We’ve got everything, from gregorian chant up through Stravinsky, using those words, and you can’t help but have some of those ideals in mind....
I was walking through Walgreens when I first heard the voice coming from the next aisle, and I didn’t like it. It was hoarse and demanding, and every sentence seemed like it was meant as a punishment or an insult to whoever had to listen. But when I turned the corner I was surprised to see that the voice belonged to a little boy. He couldn’t have been more than nine or ten years old, but there was something in his manner that made him seem much older, like a tiny, brutish adult....
In October the Tribune ran a story about Jesse and Debra Selvy–a near-west-side couple with children whose blood is contaminated by lead. Since then not much has been done for the Selvys: chunks of lead paint still fall from the walls of their dilapidated nine-room apartment and 5 of their 11 children still have high levels of lead in their blood. The issue goes back to the early 1970s, when federal health officials publicized the link between lead contamination and kidney, liver, and brain damage....
I COVER THE LOCKERROOM Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The problem here is not just that the play is so airy, or that Randolph’s narrator is ultimately grating and patronizing. Light fare is fine, but not when its vacuousness is delivered with this much condescension. The biggest joke in Lockerroom was that the audience was tricked into actually paying to see it. Intended as a screwball sports comedy salted with Chicagoese, Lockerroom shows Hagedorn disdainfully dishing out something that looks like a play but that barely shows any love for his craft or for the people who come to hear and see his efforts....
STRAIGHT ARROWS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Unfortunately, in her one-woman show Straight Arrows, Dodson the actress has tied her fortunes to Dodson the writer, whose talents are considerably less developed. And so Straight Arrows, which strives to be a complex tapestry of characters and stories, becomes an aimless collection of quick sketches. Dodson does quite well creating instant stage characters merely by changing her posture and facial expression, and by repeating one or two habits of speech, but she is not as good at creating characters who remain interesting the third or fourth time you see them....
The “L” WORD Both of Doug Reed’s plays use a similar story-within-a-story structure. In Antigone Lost a professor, attempting to win back his estranged wife, unveils what he claims is a long-lost play by Sophocles, “Antigone Lost,” in which Sophocles appears as a character and attempts to win back his estranged wife by continuing the story of Antigone. Sophocles quickly becomes sidetracked, however, and tells instead about Creon’s attempts to win back his estranged (and very dead) wife, Eurydice....
“Less than a third of Illinois’ eighth graders are being taught math by teachers who have even an undergraduate major in the subject,” notes James Krohe Jr. in Illinois Times (August 1-7). “Parents wouldn’t dream of sending their children to a plumber to have their teeth filled but they willingly send them to English majors to learn their fractions.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Now they tell us....
Rules of the game. “Contestants must spit their pit within 60 seconds of the time they are called to the line by the tournament judge. Three spits are allowed. The longest of three is recorded as the official score. If a pit is swallowed or lost, that spit is forfeited.” That’s rule six of the Annual International Cherry Pit Spit World Championship, held July 7 at the Tree-Mendus Fruit farm in southwest Michigan....
War’s unlikely beginning–Eric Burdon basically picked the band members out of an LA bar to back him after he left the Animals–was followed by an unlikely continuation: after Burdon split, the band turned into a 70s-hit-making machine assaulting the Top 40 over and over again with an irresistible amalgam of Latin beats, funky playing, and pop smarts. I wouldn’t recommend their albums at this point, and even what should be a great Rhino compilation, The Best of War…and More, is indifferently programmed and disappointingly unannotated; but merely to remember some of the more memorable hits–the growly blues of “The Cisco Kid,” the glowing “All Day Music,” the groovy “Low Rider,” the outlandish “Spill the Wine,” and the absurd, delightful “Why Can’t We Be Friends?...
THE LENNON PLAY: IN HIS OWN WRITE Yes, I cried when I heard about John Lennon’s assassination. I remember that moment very clearly, though it’s not a what-were-you-doing-when-Kennedy-was-shot sort of memory. That is, it doesn’t seem especially historical to me: my way of sharing in yet another McLuhanite mass trauma. To the contrary, it seems like a personal memory of a personal loss. As incredibly, snivelingly hokey as it sounds, I feel as if Lennon was a friend of mine....
Last March 29, the evening of Good Friday, Sister Teresita Weind presided over the services at Saint Catherine-Saint Lucy Catholic Church in Oak Park. She wore a long red cassock with a corded belt around her waist and a pendant around her neck. To her right and left and slightly to her rear, also garbed in vestments, stood the pastor of the parish and another priest who lives at the rectory....
To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Michael Walsh’s bent diatribe against the peace movement (Letters 9/20) can’t go unanswered. In the guise of a sharp-eyed attack on the movement, he gives us the same old right-wing bait-and-switch: the peace movement equals communism. That makes Dr. King a red, and anyone who opposes Pentagon power is un-American. Once again the same old stereotypes, dressed up 90s-style as neoconservative iconoclasm....
