At seven in the morning, with the sun still rising, Al Clark kicks open the front door of the old school. “Ladies, ladies, ladies,” he calls out in his big, booming baritone voice. “How are my three beautiful ladies today?” “This mo’ fu’,” one kid says, “started pushin’–” “What did I tell you about calling me ‘man’?” For a while there was talk of renovating the school. Former mayor Jane Byrne even recruited Chicago Bears founder George Halas as a corporate sponsor....
UNFINISHED BUSINESS: THE AIDS SHOW Something similar happened to Wayne Buidens, artistic director of Forest Park’s Circle Theatre and director of its production of Unfinished Business: The AIDS Show, currently running in Chicago at the Project. Buidens saw Unfinished Business in its Chicago premiere at Bailiwick in 1987, was taken with the work, and later contacted Leland Moss, the principal author and original director, for rights to the show. Moss, a San Franciscan, agreed....
Adman Goes Hollywood Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Joel Hochberg always loved the movies; now he’s getting a chance to make his mark in Hollywood. On January 1 Hochberg, who stepped down earlier this month as president of the Chicago office of DDB Needham Worldwide, becomes president of marketing for Twentieth Century Fox, joining the swelling ranks of ad agency execs who have taken top management jobs at major film studios....
OK, you’re sick of abortion. The mere mention of “prochoice” and “prolife” is enough to make your eyes glaze over. You’ve read too many stories, heard too much of the endless debate. You know more than you want to know. So the answer to this one little question should be easy: (b) Legal only during the first three months, and only when the mother’s life or health is threatened. Who’s asking?...
William Warmack’s biggest problem as an artist is his low supply of materials. He’s a weaver who makes garments and objets d’art, but the cigarette packages he works with are a scarce commodity. He smokes Newport cigarettes himself, which supplies him with one or two wrappers a day. But he says it takes 2,000 wrappers to do an entire vest. Even a small picture frame requires 52 wrappers. Best of Chicago voting is live now....
This festival of films and videotapes from more than 25 countries will be held at Facets Multimedia Center, 1517 W. Fullerton, from Friday, October 12, through Sunday, October 21. Single tickets are $2.50 for adults and children; a pass good for five films is $10. For more information call 281-9075. SATURDAY, OCTOBER 13 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » SIMON AND THE DREAM HUNTERS Roger Cantin’s French feature about a boy named Simon who dreams about a magic forest where extinct animals find refuge, and his secret trip to find this forest in the real world....
New jazz is alive and well in Dallas of all places, and. you can lay much of the blame on Dennis Gonzalez; as founder of the Dallas Association for Avant-Garde and Neo-Impressionist Music (aka daagnim), he acts as concert promoter, record producer, and guiding light for a surprisingly busy phalanx of innovative musicians. He also performs, and you could easily go hear him in Chicago just for the novelty of it....
Hardly anybody had heard of the Beatles. Steve Lawrence topped the Billboard charts with “Go Away Little Girl” and Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons were defying puberty while advising us to “Walk Like a Man.” John Kennedy was entering the twilight of his presidency and Lawrence of Arabia was scooping up a bunch of Academy Awards. Nick Fortuna, bass player, the Buckinghams: We were all sitting around one night. I had taken a liking to these guys....
ORCHESTRE DE PARIS But in early 1989 Barenboim was suddenly fired from his job as music director of the new Bastille Opera, an episode Barenboim would sum up as “a chapter of lies and breach of contract.” Whatever the outcome of the mounting Paris controversy, one thing was sure–his appointment as music director of the CSO would give him more power in the negotiations. So the decision was made to move up the public announcement of his Chicago appointment, which Solti, not looking forward to being a lame duck in his final years here, had wanted to keep quiet for as long as possible....
To the editors: I read the article entitled, “The Straight Dope” by Cecil Adams [May 12] and I was appalled that someone who was passing himself off as a source of information would write such outrageous lies and generalities in an obvious attempt to color his readers’ views on a particular subject. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I say this because a question was put to Mr....
At the height of his musical-theater renown, Irish-born Victor Herbert–the popular and prolific turn-of-the-century tunesmith now remembered chiefly for the MacDonald-Eddy vehicle Naughty Marietta–earned the epithet “man of mirth, music, and melody,” and his 1906 operetta The Red Mill shows why the billing might not have been mere hyperbole. It was his greatest hit–a record 274 Broadway performances in the initial run, and another 500 in revival four decades later. Musically endearing and conceived as a showcase for a famed vaudeville duo, the operetta also has a serious side....
The highly skilled documentarist Marcel Ophuls (The Sorrow and the Pity, Hotel Terminus) turns his sights on the reunification of Germany in this 1990 BBC program, 129 minutes long, to be shown on video. Much of this becomes in effect a critical reassessment of East Germany, with Ophuls skeptically interviewing such former officials as Communist Party chief Egon Krenz and secret police strategist Markus Wolf, and such figureheads as Bertolt Brecht’s daughter Barbara, as well as ordinary East Germans who have crossed into West Germany for the first time....
The Polish Film Festival, which is being presented by the Film Center and the Polish Museum of America, runs from Saturday, September 19, through Monday, September 28. Screenings will be at the Copernicus Cultural & Civic Center, 5216 W. Lawrence, and at the Film Center, Art Institute, Columbus Drive at Jackson. Tickets are $5; festival passes are available for $40 (for Film Center screenings) and $45 (for Copernicus Center screenings). For more information call 384-3352 or 443-3737....
In Rogers Park, one man tried to make a difference. But before this guy had a chance to feel good about his philanthropy, his seemingly simple act of charity got very complicated. Sam had two conditions. He wanted the signs posted at Gale Academy, 1631 W. Jonquil Terrace, and at Kiwanis Playground, 7631 N. Ashland–both north of Howard Street and both among Juneway Jungle’s most popular open-air drug markets. He also wanted to remain anonymous, in part because he didn’t want to become a target....
The DePaul University School of Music welcomes home composer George Perle, its most famous alumnus, for a special 75th birthday celebration. Perle remains one of the most distinctive composers of our time, despite his usual misclassification as a serialist. This designation stems in part from the fact that he wrote the standard textbook on the 12-tone compositional methods pioneered by Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern, but Perle’s own music has only been 12-tone in the sense that he incorporates all notes equally in his works; he does not, nor has he ever, incorporated 12-tone rows in strict sequence....
One of the many pleasures of Madonna’s erotically charged video for “Justify My Love” was attempting to figure out who in the video was what, biologically speaking. The video itself provided some helpful clues: if I remember correctly, most of the women (besides Madonna) were sporting mustaches. But for a moment at least the video held out the possibility not only of misidentification but of misdirected desire. Putatively normal heterosexuals might find themselves lusting after a person of the wrong sex–a possibility that undoubtedly underlay much of the public anxiety the video provoked....
To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In just three months of having my foster daughter at this school, I learned of the following: (1) violation of a Federal Desegregation Order, (2) a cover-up of reports of an abusive teacher, and (3) extensive discouragement and “tracking” of underachieving students that goes so far as telling concerned parents–including myself–to go to another school....
Isn’t it ironic that of the city of Chicago’s two biggest rock ‘n’ roll claims to fame–the most successful American band of the 70s and one of the best–one left town before cutting its first record and the other is really from Rockford? The first group, of course, is Chicago, whose string of singles and consecutively numbered albums (Chicago II, III, ad infinitum) made it one of the largest-selling groups of all time; the other was the fiery and funny hard-rock foursome Cheap Trick, whose bruisingly clearheaded first couple of records are among the best and most influential of the 70s....
THE LITTLE PRINCE Because grown-ups are always in danger of forgetting who they once were, Antoine de Saint-Exupery remains a delight and a solace. No one has better explained to children the ways of grown-ups, or reawakened in ex-children that old sense of wonder. Saint-Exupery was an aviator as well as a writer, and when he landed, he used his ethereal prose to record his sky-born epiphanies–discoveries that, once read, seem to have always been inside us, we were just too near the ground to see them....
THE QUANDO SI SPOSA FUND This walk-on bit pretty much sets the maturity level for the other characters as well. The main action of the play takes place in the ladies’ lounge off the reception hall, where Toni, her mother Louisa, and her grandmother Nonna squabble through what seems to be the entire reception over Toni’s request to spend her dowry money–the quando si sposa (“when you marry”) fund. Toni wants to use the money for a security deposit on a new apartment instead of her wedding, a nonimminent event despite enthusiastic promotion by both mother and grandmother....
