Home » Vol. 17 No. 5

Tag: Vol. 17 No. 5

Issue of Nov. 19 – 25, 1987
Posted inNews & Politics

Omnipotent Eddie

by unsigned

To the editors: Read your most informative article [“The Blacks and the Browns,” November 6]. After 3000 or so words of what appears to be telling it like it be, got to the real crux. It’s all Vrdolyak’s doing. God, that dumb Croatian is omnipotent. Now I know I made the right choice in voting […]

Posted inArts & Culture

Ladysmith Black Mambazo

by Roger Moore

If there’s an a cappella singing group anywhere on the planet performing popular music with more gorgeous harmonies, shimmering arrangements, or soulful swing than Ladysmith Black Mambazo, I wish somebody would send me a tape. Best known in this country as the vocalists that put much of the grace in Paul Simon’s Graceland album, this […]

Posted inArts & Culture

A Different Moon

by Tom Valeo

A DIFFERENT MOON Stage Left Theatre Company I might as well admit it up front: this is going to be an unfair review of the Stage Left Theatre’s production of A Different Moon, by Ara Watson. I’ve seen the play before. About five years ago the Next Theatre Company in Evanston did a memorable, to […]

Posted inArts & Culture

Nuts

by Jonathan Rosenbaum

Before he was blacklisted in 1951, director Martin Ritt received much of his training in live television, and the virtues as well as limitations of 50s TV drama at its best are still reflected in his movies. This all-star courtroom drama, adapted by Tom Topor, Darryl Ponicsan, and Alvin Sargent from Topor’s play, centers on […]

Posted inArts & Culture

Rough Crossing

by Tom Boeker

ROUGH CROSSING Body Politic Theatre Rough Crossing is a hoot, a good time, as pure an escape as when the bell rang and you ran out of school for recess. We all need that recess from time to time. Sure, you’ll have to leave the theater and confront again all of life’s problems; Rough Crossing […]

Posted inNews & Politics

Controversy on Clybourn: Attack of the Amazing Expanding Seven-Screen Theater

by Ben Joravsky

By one o’clock on Saturday afternoon, traffic is backed up for blocks at several intersections in Lincoln Park. The cars belong to shoppers, diners, and prospective home owners, mostly, driving round and round looking for someplace to park, so they can get out of their cars and peruse the boutiques, restaurants, and newly constructed homes […]

Posted inArts & Culture

Strange Snow

by Tom Valeo

STRANGE SNOW The Immediate Theatre Company We tend to think of a coward as someone who shrinks from external danger, but a more pernicious type of coward shrinks from self-knowledge, from internal danger. This coward always tries to blame his troubles on others. If he loses his job because he drinks, his boss is a […]

Posted inNews & Politics

The Straight Dope

by Cecil Adams

I’ve read that a respectable number of disrespectable popes in the early Roman Catholic Church had illegitimate children. I understand that many of these children became cardinals in the church, some eventually ascending to the papal throne with infallibility. Does the Catholic Church officially acknowledge these transgressions, and, if so, how does it rationalize them? […]

Posted inArts & Culture

Two Portraits and Universal Hotel/Universal Citizen

by Jonathan Rosenbaum

The four films to date of independent Chicago filmmaker Peter Thompson form two diptychs: not films to be shown simultaneously side-by-side, but successive works whose meanings partially arise out of their intricate inner rhymes and interactions. Two Portraits (1982), which has already had limited exposure in Chicago, describes the filmmaker’s parents: Anything Else, devoted to […]

Posted inNews & Politics

The City File

by Harold Henderson

Gift least likely to be appreciated, from Hammacher Schlemmer’s 1987 Gift Supplement: “The Talking Scale With Memory,” which “automatically announces your weight (pounds or kilograms) in a clear, digitally synthesized voice, and then (if you wish) tells you how much you have gained or lost since your last weighing, automatically shutting itself off after saying […]

Posted inNews & Politics

Postcards

by Chris Petrakos

At the Postcard Show recently, I picked up a brochure that contained the following question and answer: Q: “How many postcard collectors are there?” A: “Everybody who has ever saved a postcard is a postcard collector.” The gathering was held on an overcast Sunday afternoon in a senior citizens center; there were streamers still on […]