The faces of the village board members are frozen. No one has ever before suggested to them that they should have a minority contractor. This is not Chicago, after all, this is Northfield, an affluent North Shore suburb where blacks have made no inroads. And here sits Phil Krone, not only offering the board the name of a minority contractor, but also baldly telling them that they can’t expect any state subsidies to help them with their project....
ADOPTION. ATTORNEY AND teacher wife desperately seek to adopt infant. Please help us, All expenses paid, Call . . . Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Catholic Charities expects a minimum “donation” of $5,000; with legal fees and other expenses, it comes to about the same cost as a private adoption. An adoption through Easter House, which is probably the most expensive private agency in the area, costs about $23,000; $2,000 of that is a non-refundable “initial service fee....
We live on a quiet, somewhat raggedy-looking street at the southern end of Lincoln Park, not quite in Old Town, not quite in De Paul. In other words, not quite expensive–yet. On our block six buildings are under construction. That’s 18 percent of the block. Ripped up, empty, so at night the moon shines through holes that once were windows. It’s not as though construction in this neighborhood is new, it’s been going on, slowly, for the past 15 years....
DOCUMENTING THE DIRECTOR It’s no secret that over the past few years, while “entertainment news,” bite-size reviews, and other forms of promotion in all the media have been steadily expanding, serious film criticism in print become an increasingly scarce. (I’m not including academic film interpretation, a burgeoning if relatively sealed-off field that has by now developed a rhetoric and a tradition of its own–the principal focus of David Bordwell’s fascinating book Making Meaning, published last year....
Gamblers Unanimous The Sun-Times sounded actually contemptuous of morality: “We also don’t see much room for making a case against casino gambling (not so long ago opposed by Daley himself) on so-called ‘moral’ grounds. What makes it different from horse race betting, Lotto, riverboat gambling, ‘casino nights’ for charity and other forms of gambling already legal in Illinois?” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » At any rate, before dismissing morality the papers could at least make a hard assessment of moral reality....
Aimee is the famous international love reporter who has appeared in the Reader calendar’s fabulous “Search for Nightlife” column interviewing lovers at Chicago hideaways like the AA Meat Market. As she is an expert on love, I wanted to ask her opinions of the year’s romantic trends. She travels so often, she is impossible to reach! For months I left messages everywhere!–at her condominium in Hong Kong, at her suite at the Cipriani in Venice, at her equestrian Edwardian waterfront in the Hamptons....
To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Jane Addams was still alive in 1933 when I became associated with the Hull House Players. In the glory days of the “Little Theatre” movement, the Players enjoyed a national and even international reputation, sometimes taking their productions on tour to Boston, Philadelphia, New York, and a score of other cities. The first community theater in the United States, Hull House traces its thespian roots back to 1889 when it began enriching the lives of neighborhood audiences under the inspired leadership of Jane Addams and the extraordinary Laura Dainty Pelham, the group’s first director....
Pianist Jimmy Walker tends to get overlooked in his hometown, probably because of his low-key musical and personal style. But the 87-year-old is Chicago’s oldest active bluesman, a dexterous musican with roots in the earliest days of Chicago blues. Born in Memphis in 1905, Walker arrived here three years later; by the time he was 20, he’d broken ito the city’s burgeoning black popular music scene. His style evokes those early days: he’s proficient in the pumping boogie-woogie that became popular during the 20s and 30s, but he also specializes in the more introspective, melodious styles that characterozed popular jazz and blues piano in those years....
“Lambert Greendyke’s experience has taught him it is always darkest just before dawn, and now that the sun is beginning to shine on his business, this Hollander is wearing a happy smile,” effused the writer of a feature article in a Portage, Michigan, newspaper. In an accompanying photo, Greendyke in coveralls and high rubber boots posed proudly between robust rows of celery plants. The year was 1926, five years after Greendyke had quit his job at a nearby paper mill, plowed his savings into four-and-a-half acres of “muck lands,” and moved his large family from a house in the city to a one-room wooden shack....
One of the most exciting events of this season has been Remains Theatre’s importation of writer-director Raymond J. Barry, an LA-based veteran of such seminal avant-garde companies of the 60s and 70s as the Living Theatre and the Open Theatre. Barry practices theater at its most personal and revealing, and his presence has pushed the Remains company to new levels of risk in their own work. Barry’s autobiographical Once in Doubt, an alternately harrowing and hilarious study of the obsessive relationship between an artist and his live-in lover, showcases Remainstays William Petersen and Amy Morton in their best performances in years....
PRAYERS FOR THE UNDOING OF SPELLS Here’s some free advice, Beau. Call it a work in progress, tell us you still haven’t gotten all the glitches out. Otherwise Prayers wastes a great title on a mess. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Prayers offers a complex look at three haunted lives. It is often surreal and kind of manic. It’s violent and graphic and definitely not for the weak of stomach....
RERUN PLANET: THE ABDUCTION OF LINDA ZONEHAIR TO THE PLANET VIDEO SPONGO AND THE SHOCKINGLY DEAD AFTERMATH Griffin Theatre Company Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Which may explain why I was so taken with Dan Ursini’s one-person one-act, a satirical fantasy comedy called Rerun Planet: The Abduction of Linda Zonehair to the Planet Video Spongo and the Shockingly Dead Aftermath: the title character discovers that the aliens lead lives every bit as mundane as our own–if not more so, since these creatures have patterned their civilization exclusively on the more vulgar aspects of American popular culture....
In the last few years, groups led by Pancho Sanchez, Jerry Gonzalez, and Hilton Ruiz have modernized (some would say diluted) the salsa tradition, making mainstream jazz–bebop and beyond–a more important part of the recipe; but it’s that original salsa tradition that gets a simultaneous pat on the back and boot in the pants from Samuel del Real’s crew. A lively pianist, who uses the instrument in much the way a conductor uses his baton, del Real heads up a crackerjack outfit ripe with percussion and redolent with the sweet harmonies of two trumpets....
ISRAEL PHILHARMONIC ORCHESTRA The Israel Philharmonic was a very popular attraction during its debut appearance at Ravinia two years ago, a stop on its 50th anniversary tour with music director Zubin Mehta, but unfortunately the playing of the ensemble didn’t live up to the event itself. Given the extraordinary quality of the Philharmonic’s performances last weekend under Masur, it is now obvious that the problems two years ago emanated from Mehta, not the Philharmonic....
It was a great idea when Contemporary Records began reissuing the recordings of Terry Gibbs’s “Dream Band,” recordings made in concert in Hollywood in 1959; it’s another great idea for Gibbs to bring the music from that band to town this weekend and line up a dozen of Chicago’s best horn players to whirl through some of the finer charts ever to grace a bandstand. Make no mistake: despite the presence of some great west-coasters in the Gibbs groups of 30 years ago, it was the book that made this band....
Ex-Lax for the mind. From a new-age diet book quoted in Conscious Choice (Summer): “Holding onto thoughts is mental constipation. It usually is accompanied by intestinal constipation, because an excess of energy is in the brain. This creates a deficiency in the colon, so there is less activity taking place in the colon.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “You may ask why the business community fights family leave [legislation] with such intensity,” writes Grace Kaminkowitz in Today’s Chicago Woman (May)....
My uncle told me that once when he was cutting chickens’ heads off on his farm, one chicken didn’t die, but rather lived headless for two weeks. He told me he put it on display and charged admission to see it. He fed it through the rectum and gave it water from an eyedropper. Evidently he made a great deal of money from this chicken. Is this possible? –Jack Saltzberg, Montreal, Quebec...
THE WALL OF WATER The Wall of Water, something of a postmodernist sitcom, is a fast-paced barrage of one-line jokes, mistaken identities, slammed doors, sexual high jinks and the occasional philosophical revelation. It’s set, as most of these things are, in a “huge apartment on the upper west side” of Manhattan, an abode inhabited by four roommates, each one battier than the next. Judy, an allergist and researcher, works herself into an orgasmic frenzy while reading the New York Times food section; Denise, the so-called party girl, delights in designer dresses and keeps a file of her sexual conquests; Wendi is a pill-popping loony who’s driving herself and everyone around her to the brink of a nervous breakdown; and Meg seems to think of only one thing–killing Wendi....
Albert King’s smooth, string-bending guitar passion complements a voice that’s one of the most expressive in modern blues, capable of bringing equal conviction and skill to dusky balladry and barrel-chested macho. His fretwork, though not as technically amazing as that of nonrelatives Freddie and B.B. King, is as polished and stylized as any on the current scene. Sometimes, in fact, one wishes he’d take a few chances and insert some audacity or raw edges into his solos, which can sound as if they’re coming off his own personal assembly line....
Jerry Smith does junkyards. “Not landfills,” he says, “but working junkyards–cranes dropping big chunks of metal, planes flying overhead, a real loud and violent atmosphere. I’m intrigued by this part of the urban environment.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A weirdly cartoonish couple make love fervently in a heap of crumpled beer cans, old tires, a television set with a smashed-in screen. The oil colors are deep, stormy....
