“Just what kind of garbage are the periodicals we most often read best equipped to wrap?” wonder the editors at Chicago’s Catholic bimonthly Call to Action News (June 1989). “The Wall Street Journal, we found, is best used for lamb chop bones, bits of parsley, and olive pits from two-martini power lunches. The National Enquirer, on the other hand, is better suited for fruit loops, limburger cheese, and (strangely enough) a variety of foods that are absolutely tasteless....
Nature imitates art. In the recent contest to choose the official state prairie grass, according to the state Department of Conservation, one Bolingbrook second-grader voted for northern dropseed “because it smells good…like popcorn…and it looks like a punk-rock hairdo.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Far fewer suburbanites will be able to go through school with the impression the world is, for all practical purposes, white,” according to the Chicago Reporter (April 1989)....
I have a problem that has aggravated me TO THE MAX! A guy gave it to me to solve because it’s (erroneously) speculated in my neighborhood that I’m a genius. So far I’m getting nowhere. Here’s the problem: Fear not, Norm. To solve this one we must throw off the shackles of bourgeois reality. In other words, we cheat. First we avail ourselves of a Mobius strip, the tricky loop of paper with a half twist in it so beloved of math teachers....
The guy in the panama hat paced in front of the Park West, hunching down to get a good look at the passengers in every cab that turned in from Clark Street. He sucked on a cigarette, squinting his eyes as he exhaled a ghost of smoke. Just a few yards from Pedro, looking considerably more relaxed, Wayne Haider leaned back in his chair, which was perched on a flat trailer, which was hooked to a station wagon....
Many young Chicago theater companies hope to compensate for deficiencies in acting and directing with brash, experimental styles. But Pentimento Pictures is not one of them. The members of this spin-off of Theatre of the Reconstruction have the wisdom and maturity to avoid all that. Their deft rendition of Tennessee Williams’s perfectly constructed short play, A Perfect Analysis Given by a Parrot, cuts deep into the hearts of Flora (Patricia Duff) and Bessie (Jenifer Gwenne Weber), two soon-to-be old maids (circa 1930) as they desperately search for laughs–and men at the annual convention of the Loyal Order of the Sons of Mars....
SHY PEOPLE With Jill Clayburgh, Barbara Hershey, Martha Plimpton, Merritt Butrick, John Philbin, and Mare Winningham. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Reportedly because of his second marriage to a French translator in Moscow–Konchalovsky has the rare good fortune to be able to live and travel abroad without renouncing his Soviet citizenship, so he can’t be viewed as a melancholy exile like the late Andrei Tarkovsky....
Until recently, I thought channeling was what my five-year-old did to the TV on Saturday mornings looking for the Smurfs. But I was wrong. Really wrong. As wrong as the guy who listened to the Beatles’ “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds” and heard “the girl with colitis goes by.” “Look, I don’t talk to you people. I never got anything positive from a newspaper and if you want to know more, go talk to Shirley and all the rest of them who like publicity....
To the editors. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I’m sure a lot of people were upset when Duchamp put a mustache and goatee on a Mona Lisa reproduction, along with an inscription at the bottom that means “She has a hot ass.” But nobody stopped it. And did anybody suggest that Jasper Johns’ painting in abstract expressionist style, with a real broom mounted on it, should be slashed, say in front of de Kooning and Pollock because it was an insult to the seriousness of their style?...
While Lyric Opera gears up for its 35th anniversary with one of the most shamelessly conservative seasons ever offered by a major opera house, turn to Chamber Opera Chicago for the only 20th-century opera to be heard this fall, and a Chicago premiere at that. Gian Carlo Menotti is probably best known for his tuneful Christmas opera Amahl and the Night Visitors, but the old pun that “if you’ve heard Menotti, you’ve heard Amahl” is unfair to the Italian-born master’s other operas, which are no less engaging, entertaining, and musical....
CLOSE-AT-HAND When I went to see Marcia Wilkie, I thought she was going to do stand-up comedy. I hate stand-up comics. They always seem to be insulting their audiences or their mothers or themselves–anything to be funny, because funny is what stand-up is all about. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Because more than anything Wilkie is a storyteller. She tells tales that could happen to you, or me, or the woman next to you....
TWO PEOPLE CAME OVER–WE DIDN’T KNOW WHAT TO SAY SO WE PLAYED WITH THE DOG AND OUR MINDS WANDERED Einstein made one great mistake, according to Dr. Sherman Susman. (Susman appears as himself–a solid-state physicist with the Argonne National Laboratory–in Michael K. Meyers’s new performance piece.) Einstein wanted to order chaos according to classical periodic formulas. Such an effort misapprehends the very nature of chaos, which defies formulaic description. Rather, says Dr....
ETTA JENKS “You have to like to travel. People you call friends become strangers. You can’t keep anything, because everything disappears.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » So concludes the title character of Marlane Meyer’s Etta Jenks, a young woman who arrives in Los Angeles seeking a career as a film actress and ends up a rich and successful businesswoman in the pornographic-movie industry. Along the way she meets a variety of physically and/or psychologically deformed types indigenous to the trade, some clinging to a semblance of civilization and some honest enough to admit that they have none....
HANSEL AND GRETEL Unless you own one, you might want to consider renting or borrowing a little person so you can infiltrate Hystopolis Puppet Theatre’s ingenious 40-minute version of Hansel and Gretel. As retold by writer/composer John Gegenhuber, this version remains remarkably true to the spirit of the original Brothers Grimm tale, especially to the sense of abandonment that lies at its heart; it even adds an earlier betrayal. Best of Chicago voting is live now....
Johnny Heartsman is a member of the post-World War II generation of bluesmen who developed a music of deep emotional intensity fused with soulful tenderness and a working knowledge of both jazz and sophisticated pop. Heartsman’s guitar style–mercurial treble runs accented by powerful lower-register accompaniment and featuring his patented “moaning” effect–is one of the most immediately recognizable in blues. His versatility is unparalleled: He excels on keyboards and flute as well as guitar, and is highly respected as a songwriter, arranger, and bandleader....
Marsh Gets a Message Marsh told us, “I asked Duke, ‘Do you want me to retire? Is that the point of this? Do you want me to step down?’ He said, ‘Well, that’s your decision.’ It’s not my decision entirely. Taking my job away from me is a message of a kind, isn’t it?” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » He said, “Steve’s model appears to be [Tribune critic] John von Rhein....
Museum of Science and Industry Meets the Music Video Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » David Hennage, the museum’s vice president for administration and chief operating officer, says his statistics indicate that half the audiences who have seen the Stones film since it was released last fall have never been to an Imax theater. Sixty of the 80 existing Imax facilities around the world are currently housed in science museums....
OFF OFF LOOP THEATER FESTIVAL LA PETENERA Playwrights’ Center Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But it’s hard not to be a little disappointed with the offerings in the 1991 Off Off Loop Theater Festival. For one thing, many of Chicago’s most creative and daring non-Equity theater companies–Theater Oobleck, the Curious Theatre Branch, the Big Game Theater, the Prop Theatre, Cardiff Giant–are entirely unrepresented. And too many of the entries lack the passion and edgy energy that typify great non-Equity shows–as if the companies had to sacrifice what made their work interesting to satisfy both the technical requirements of the festival (entries must be less than an hour in length and involve minimal use of props and lighting cues) and the limitations of the Theatre Building’s high-school-auditorium-ish south theater....
I think every American city has at least one vocalist of a certain age who is a unique stylist, a collector of grand and forgotten songs, and who has come to represent that city by talent and reputation. In San Francisco, for instance, there’s a woman named Weslia Whitfield; I’d pick Audrey Morris for my Chicago entry; and Boston has Rebecca Parris, who uses her husky lower range to special advantage on modern Brazilian ballads and jazz standards....
There are two kinds of standing ovation. One is the obligatory kind audiences give, say, a national touring production of Fiddler on the Roof. It’s our way of acknowledging the institutional character of the experience, the fact that were seeing a show that thousands have seen before us and ratified as “classic.” We’re applauding the sweet familiarity of the thing. The other kind is the more raggedy kind Spalding Gray got last night, Tuesday night, after performing his evening-length monologue, Monster in a Box....
MICHAEL SINGLETON Back home, the parish priest, Father Dan Malette, called us over and tried to get us to talk people out of rioting. He tried to get us to put controls on the people, but we refused. We felt people had to vent their anger in any way they chose. The rioting began soon after on Madison and Kedzie, Roosevelt and Kedzie, and the four blocks in between. Later, after the National Guard came in, lots of people were picked up, innocent and guilty–indiscriminate arrests....
