Author Archives: Vicki Quade

As a guy who failed to make it as a stand-up comedian in Los Angeles, returned to Chicago with no job, and now lives with his mother, Mike Preston has a lot he could complain about. But he doesn’t. “Nobody owes you anything,” he likes to say. Instead the Crystal Lake native and former social […]

Fire investigator Bill Cosgrove sees it all the time: a candle, a flame, and a finger going through it. “People are curious about fire,” he says. “Children are the most curious. You don’t really get burned when you run your finger through a flame, if you go real fast. I don’t do it because I’ve […]

Chris Carter is sitting in a restaurant on Lincoln Avenue playing with our minds. He hands a book to my friend Sue and tells her to pick a word. Any word at all. Memorize it. Think about it. Now close the book. We wait while he studies Sue’s face. The book is one of those […]

Bob Pierron has never led a particularly quiet life. A jeweler for 30 years, he also ran jewelry classes, exhibited at the Art Institute of Chicago, produced sculptures in wood–including an abstract series for the Woodwork Corporation of America–and made tiny masks out of silver and gold wire, which he sold out of his gallery, […]

“Chekhov always wrote about people gazing off into the middle distance,” says Martha Webster, a Chicago actress and director. “That’s what people did with radio. They gazed off into the middle distance and used their imaginations.” In her 60s, Webster quotes the classic line from Mame: “I’m somewhere between 40 and death.” She remembers the […]

Jorianne, the coffee psychic, drops a little bit of half-and-half into Marc Silvia’s cup. She stares at it intently, moving the cup from side to side. “Do you ever dress like a woman?” she asks. “And what are you doing with your hair?” Silvia, an actor, looks surprised. Sure, he’s been known to dress up […]