Hotshot hairdresser Dixon Tabla holds a brown nude female figurine made of Indonesian hibiscus wood and turns it in every direction. He is demonstrating that because the arms and legs are spread wide apart–and just at the right angles–the sculpture can be put down on a table in any position and still stand securely. “What […]
Author Archives: Bonnie McGrath
Posted inNews & Politics
Image Control
The place setting is one of H.D. Anderson’s specialties. She knows exactly what every conceivable component on a place mat is for, from the soupspoon to the cold salmon fork. She knows the way to project an appropriate image while eating sorbet. She tells her clients to think of a dinner plate as if it […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Aldo Goes to School
On a Tuesday Aldo DeAngelis, Republican candidate for Cook County Board president, visits DuSable High School at 4934 S. Wabash. He tells about 100 African American students who are crowded into a classroom and overflowing into the hall that by choosing to live in Cook County they pay 20 percent higher taxes than they would […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Rebirthing
I sprawl on a futon in the living room of a small, spotless apartment in Evanston, and a pretty woman in her 40s covers me with a lightweight blue blanket and tells me to breathe. “Listen to how I’m breathing,” she says, inhaling deep and loud–and then exhaling with the same force and sound. “When […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Chi Lives: Sandy Holubow, house painter
Sandy Holubow paints houses in Old Town and Lincoln Park–on canvas. “A house is really a metaphor for the self,” she says. “It can be a mask. A house is as important as a face, or the way we dress. That’s what holds my interest.” Holubow is standing on the top floor of her three-level […]
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Last One In
Gene Suuppi wandered into the Monet show at 7:46 PM Tuesday, August 14. Nobody asked him for a ticket; he didn’t know he needed one.
Posted inArts & Culture
Chicago Fun Times: camping out in the Field Museum
At 1:30 in the morning, Julie Collins, program developer at the Field Museum of Natural History, figured what the heck. She had always had the fantasy, and now she had her chance. She said to herself, “Go ahead. Do it. Do it.” First she spread her sleeping bag and two pillows on the carpet in […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Chi Lives: father and daughter, doctors and painters
When Dr. Debbie Weiss was a little girl growing up in Skokie, her father, Dr. Seymour Fishkin, painted a picture of a cat for her to hang in her bedroom. “It was a very crude painting,” says Fishkin. Weiss doesn’t remember that painting, but she does remember her father’s attempts throughout her childhood at landscapes, […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Lecture Notes: a couple of women telling fish tales
“More people are killed by bee stings every year than shark attacks,” Jessica Esslinger told a crowd of families from the northwest suburbs. “Basically, sharks have no interest in people–they don’t like the taste of people. On the rare occasions they do attack people, most of the victims survive. It’s always a case of mistaken […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Chi Lives: Manus Kraff, Dr. Cataract
On a typical weekday afternoon in the waiting rooms of Dr. Manus C. Kraff, the din is like that at a hot River North eatery on Saturday night. There are as many as 75 people, mostly older patients with their younger friends and relatives accompanying them, talking and laughing and gossiping. Some have been waiting […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Sunday Service
Two members of a Soviet theater company visit the Reverend B. Herbert Martin
Posted inArts & Culture
Chi Lives: Marian Thompson, nurturer of nursing mothers
It’s eight in the morning, Mother’s Day, and Marian Tompson finally has a chance to talk. The last few weeks have been tough for her, a widow shuffling between her Evanston apartment, the toy store she manages, and her ill mother’s home in Franklin Park. But if there’s one thing Tompson–one of the seven founders […]