Author Archives: Deanna Isaacs

I was looking for Theater of the Awkward founder Max Alper at the Evanston Barnes & Noble coffee shop one day last week when, out of the corner of my eye, I saw a pleasant young woman with wavy red hair smiling at me. I flashed a cordial smile back, continuing to cast about for […]

Any drive to Wauconda can be scary, if you ask me: the desolate cornfields, the roadside graveyards, the mysterious traffic (there’s nothing here, where does it come from?). By the time you creak into the parking lot at Terror Through Time, Annoyance Theatre’s haunted house on the west side of town, you’re primed for a […]

Let’s say you’re finally through with the jerk. You’ve had enough of his oh-so-sincere lies, his hairsplitting excuses, his worthless, blubbering promises that it’ll never happen again. Enough of putting on a smile and pretending not to notice while the whole world wonders why you’re sticking with him. It’s done. You’ve made a decision. You […]

The entrance to Elmhurst’s American Movie Palace Museum is the opposite of grand. Blink and you’re likely to walk right by the narrow doorway just north of the art deco facade of the York Theatre. But open that door, climb the steep staircase with its dizzily patterned theater-aisle carpet, and you’ll surface among the artifacts […]

It could be a scene from an Emmerich Kalman operetta: the year is 1928; the place, Vienna, where music is king. The characters: a famous Hungarian composer with a new show in production and a ravishing Russian starlet half his age. They meet at the checkroom of a cafe he’s known to frequent. He helps […]

If you’re looking for the world headquarters of Ostriches On Line, which calls itself “the world’s largest international ostrich company,” you’ll find yourself at the door of Steve Warrington’s modest home in Elmwood Park. There’s no big bird there, and no staff either, just a small living room jammed with boxes of feathers and other […]

Sometime after his mother died Richard Olderman cut himself off from the world. It might have happened in the foster home, when he was three–or the next year, when he was sent to live at an orphanage. He grew into a silent kid, waiting for the nightly punishment: a fist in the back, administered by […]

This Saturday, when the parades are stepping off across America and the cherry bombs start to pop, Ron Haring will be exercising his independence at the Kane County Flea Market, setting out his phonographs, cylinder records, and busts of Thomas Edison, awaiting the buyers who storm the grounds at the stroke of noon. Two months […]

In 1927, when Melville Jean Herskovits became Northwestern University’s first anthropologist, there wasn’t much scholarly interest in the African roots of black American culture. The few people thinking about it assumed those roots had been lost when Africans were ripped from their homelands and sold into slavery. As W.E.B. DuBois noted, the prevailing opinion early […]

Jazz bassist Milt Hinton was born in Vicksburg, Mississippi, in 1910 to Hilda Gertrude Robinson, the woman he called Titter. When he was three months old his father split, leaving Hinton to be raised by Titter and her family in a rented shack on stilts in the town’s impoverished black ghetto. By 1919, when the […]

Lloyd Levin might seem an unlikely guide to the pristine realm of the Sisters of Christian Charity, Daughters of the Blessed Virgin Mary of the Immaculate Conception. In the 1970s he appeared in these pages as an alternative-lifestyle guru, a silver-tongued champion of gays, swingers, and recreational drug users who was spearheading a scheme he […]

This much seems certain: on the fateful day four or five years ago when New Yorker writer Lawrence Weschler ventured to the prosaic environs of Culver City on the west side of Los Angeles and pressed his finger to the door buzzer of the Museum of Jurassic Technology, he was ripe for the spore that […]