THE NAKED GUN: FROM THE FILES OF POLICE SQUAD! With Leslie Nielsen, George Kennedy, Priscilla Presley, Ricardo Montalban, O.J. Simpson, and Nancy Marchand. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In 1982, the ZAZ team created an ill-fated TV series, Police Squad!, which I haven’t seen and which was taken off the air after four episodes. (Elements from this show, including its lead actor Leslie Nielsen, were later recycled in The Naked Gun....
CAT’S-PAW Extremities, for example, offers a delicious revenge fantasy: a young woman subdues her rapist and tortures him. In Nanawatai, Mastrosimone focuses on the rage aroused by war. The playwright spent several weeks in Afghanistan with Afghani rebels during the Soviet invasion. After witnessing the execution of a Russian tank crew, he wrote a play recounting the incident through the eyes of a rebel as well as the eyes of one of the crew members....
Danny Gatton was born in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., has played the club scene there for more than 20 years, and lives there to this day. He plays blues guitar, country guitar, rockabilly guitar, rock-and-roll guitar, and soul guitar; people who are supposed to know about these things–the editors of Guitar Player magazine for instance–say he may do all of these things better than anyone else. Why you’ve never heard of him and why he’s still playing clubs has a little something to do with some mysterious appeal in those suburbs–Gatton seems to care more about his family and working on guitars than he does about stardom–and something more to do with the vagaries of the record business....
To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Style Book is a compilation nobody outside the newspaper building ever sees. It would be easier to lay hands on the first edition of the Index Expurgatorius. On the sole occasion I heard an editor refer to it he did so with the reverence a junior commissar would have given to Mikhail Suslov over a knotty point in Marxist theology....
For 25 years, North Lawndale’s three- and four-year-olds have learned their ABCs at Howland Elementary, a public school at 1616 S. Spaulding. The preschool classes they took were part of the federally funded Headstart program, one of the few Great Society initiatives to survive nearly 20 years of mostly Republican rule. But come September there won’t be any sing-alongs, story times, or field trips for the children of North Lawndale. Headstart at Howland–as well as at 42 other public schools–has been eliminated, and local activists don’t even have Ronald Reagan to blame....
To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » One hundred million Blacks died–he says–in the passage to slavery. 100,000,000!!!! The World Almanac 1989 page 539 shows total population of Africa (including the very large percentage of Arabs and other racial groups as well as Blacks) at 100 million in 1650, 95 million in 1750, 95 million in 1850 and 118 million in 1900. Your letter writer seems to have wiped out more people than would back up any numbers....
Last election day, voters in Chicago and across the nation won another international civic booby prize. Only about 70 percent of registered voters and half of the voting-aged population cast ballots. Nationally, it was the worst performance since 1924, when most blacks were effectively barred from voting in the South. For all of the United States outside of the south, the turnout of eligible voters this year was the lowest since 1824....
“Pa’ la isla, broder, pa’ la isla,” shouted David Castro above the din. In front of the offices of the Puerto Rican Parade Committee at California and Division cars were passing, huge stereo speakers across the street were blasting, and the two cops were directing pedestrian traffic through a bullhorn. “Hey, it’s a little something–to say thank you,” Yuarez yelled. The stereo speakers were broadcasting pleas for funds, clothes, and canned goods being collected at the parade committee headquarters....
Sister Liz, Reader and Advisor, 1644 N. Damen: The strangest thing happened to Filberta. Most of her life she had been a reporter with a brilliant future in nightlife writing. She would stand on the sidelines interpreting the complex behavior of the clubgoers, interested yet detached–the mark of a professional! Then one day, without warning, Filberta became one of them–living only for pleasure every night of the week. She sold her computer and began wearing a small leopard skin around her hips, a rag tied on top....
SUNSHINE ON LEITH Silly Scots. It wasn’t until later that I heard the Proclaimers’ debut record, This Is the Story. The first lines of the first song went like this: “I’ve been so sad / Since you said my accent was bad.” Called “Throw the ‘R’ Away,” in one sense it’s a love song–the singer has been insulted by an English girl, and agonizes over the distance his brogue puts between them....
THE RICHEST DEAD MAN ALIVE! The implausible plot, which was developed by the ensemble, is a pretext for the company’s initially innocent but finally ugly buffoonery. William Walden (David Salowich), a dweebish asthma sufferer and bird fancier, is injured by Dan (Ken Colburn), a clumsy refrigerator deliverer, then accidentally buried alive. After he’s rescued, he decides to fake his death to collect on his life-insurance policy. But this time he fakes too well....
The Shot Seen Round the World De Grane, a frequent Reader contributor, has spent two years photographing inside Stateville. A grant from the Illinois Arts Council supports the project, which he hopes will lead to a Chicago Historical Society exhibition on a century of prison life in Illinois, and to another book. The University of Illinois Press just published his first one, Tuned In, an album of a nation hooked on television....
When Michael Gellman came to Chicago from Canada in the winter of 1983-’84, he noticed that despite the city’s reputation as a theater town there was little happening in the way of collaborative play development–which was what he had come here for. As resident director of the Toronto branch of Second City Theatre from 1980 to ’83, he says, “I learned about developing plays through improvisation with actors, playwrights, and directors, and I wanted to take that process beyond the comedy revue format and into more expansive work....
CLAIMING THE CAT’S EYE AND OTHER STORIES This revelation alone would be justification for Chicago writer Barbara Kensey’s story “Claiming the Cat’s Eye.” The program of one-act plays based on this and two more of Kensey’s short stories (produced by City Lit Theater Company’s Collective of African-American Artists) contains not only such startling reminders as this but poetry of a caressing beauty, as well as one of the gentlest invitations to understanding of the black experience you’ll find extended during this Black History Month....
BALLET CHICAGO Ballet Chicago seems well aware of this danger, and the fledgling company has so far avoided pandering to the lowest common denominator. In the year or so of its short life, this troupe has presented an intelligent, varied repertoire, challenging to dancers and audience alike. It has risen from the ashes of Chicago City Ballet to attain a remarkable new life of its own, in part I think because these dancers and their artistic director, Daniel Duell, are hungry....
The ideal way to learn about birding is as the pupil of a master. Sixty some years ago, the young men of the Bronx County Bird Club, a group that included Roger Tory Peterson among its members, had Ludlow Griscom as idol, teacher, and gadfly. Griscom was the first master of birding, the first ornithologist to substitute skilled eyes and ears for the shotgun that had served Audubon and his successors as the principal tool of field identification....
In the last decade, the field guide has become the most common type of book about nature. Field guides are not new, of course. In one form or other, they have been around for at least a century. Roger Tory Peterson’s A Field Guide to the Birds, originally published in 1934, played a major role in creating the sport of birding, and its success inspired not only other bird guides but a whole series of Peterson Guides that covered practically every visible aspect of nature, from stars and planets to seashells....
HR’s newest album, Singin’ in the Heart, is the culmination of his evolutionary search for the beatific reggae moment. HR (for “Human Rights”) was originally the nom de thrash of Paul Hudson, founder and lead singer of the rude and exciting reggae/hard-core band the Bad Brains. Now HR is the name of his band as well, and he also calls himself Ras Hailu Gabriel Joseph I. He was made of too fine stuff to remain with the unapologetically coarser Brains; having continued to modulate his grooves since he left, he’s now in his own territory of gorgeous pop reggae–parts of Singin’ in the Heart nod to Prince, Terence Trent D’Arby, and even Smokey Robinson–and the only trace of his rough beginnings is on the (standout) “Don’t Trust No (Shadows After Dark),” with its Aerosmithy riffs and tough solo by David Byers....
NEW DANCES ’91 Two years ago the Chicago Repertory Dance Ensemble collapsed under the weight of its own talent. This year artistic director Tara Mitton has re-formed the ensemble with dancers in their early 20s–dancers who are eager to try out their individual and collective voices. The elements they have chosen for “New Dances ’91”–theatrical dance, kinetic movement, a kind of Hollywood distillation of such themes as homelessness and corporate life, and working collaboratively to explore social issues in a full-length work–coupled with their good dancing are enough to create a critical mass....
It’s been almost two years now since Chicago’s (or at least Hyde Park’s) own cantankerous pedagogue–Allan Bloom–was the talk of the nation, his best-selling The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students the publishing phenomenon of the decade. The professor’s book was widely read and widely praised for grappling with “America’s spiritual malaise” (in the words of the publisher)–but also often damned for its snobbish elitism and antidemocratic subtext....
