Gourmet Gossip: Ann Gerber Eats Her Words The five commandments of column writing: (1) Don’t miss a deadline. (2) Don’t offend more readers than you attract. (3) Don’t make mistakes you can’t get away with. (4) Know when to keep your mouth shut. Remember the magic words, “My column speaks for itself.” (5) Don’t expect […]
Tag: Vol. 18 No. 34
Issue of Jun. 8 – 14, 1989
Posted inNews & Politics
The Sports Section
The turning point–irreversible, as it turned out–in the play-off series between the Bulls and the Detroit Pistons came here at the Chicago Stadium, in game four, on Memorial Day. The Pistons emerged looking shaken and frazzled following their amazing loss in game three, two days before, in which they had blown a 14-point lead in […]
Posted inNews & Politics
The Prison Run
What connects a man in prison with his woman in Chicago? Hope, promises, collect calls, and a 16-hour bus trip.
Posted inNews & Politics
Is Nothing Sacred?
What’s the Episcopal Church doing to the Book of Common Prayer?
Posted inNews & Politics
Lake Stories
One thing you can say about Florence Brown’s older sister is that she is mighty secretive. Another is that she is a very fortunate woman. She has been since at least July 24, 1915. That was the day she fell off the Eastland into the Chicago River and was saved by unknown rescuers. Eight hundred […]
Posted inNews & Politics
The Straight Dope
Where did the Grateful Dead get their name? What does it mean? I’ve heard a lot of tales, but I’ll believe only you. –S. Seidman, Stevenson, Maryland I am a rock of comfort, ain’t I? The official story on the Grateful Dead, as related by Jerry Garcia in the book Playing in the Band, is […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Cubans Against Castro
To the editors: Although the controversy over the invitation to a Cuban band to perform at the Viva Chicago Festival ended with the U.S. denial of visas to the band, the letter recently published in the Chicago Reader Newspaper by DePaul Law School professor Debra Evenson on this issue [April 28] still merits a response. […]
Posted inNews & Politics
The City File
Ideas that may take some getting used to, from the Animals’ Agenda (June 1989): “If we could set aside species stereotypes and see chickens as they really are, we’d discover a sensitive and courageous bird.” Helping mummy unwind. The Oriental Institute Museum on East 58th Street reports that it has removed three mummies from display […]
Posted inArts & Culture
After Mountains, More Mountains: The Haiti Stories
The most marvelous thing about the theater is also the most obvious: the actual presence of the performer in the room. No film can imitate the peculiar sense of privilege that comes with watching a creator create in real time in a particular space that is not simultaneously in Los Angeles or New York or […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Wanted: W/M, Lo Miles, Exc. Cond Only
To the editors: In response to your May 12 lead article, “Babies Wanted,” I feel that a very serious point is being missed. The couples involved want babies, and claim to have always wanted families. They want babies to care for and show “love.” A few years ago, these aging yuppies would have said that […]
Posted inArts & Culture
The Day Room
THE DAY ROOM Profiles Performance Ensemble at the Chicago Cooperative Stage Although rampant in everyday life, absurdity is tough to achieve in the theater. It may look easy. In fact, the plays of Beckett and Ionesco sometimes evoke the philistine’s response to abstract painting–“my kid could do that!” But absurdist literature is diabolically difficult to […]
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Tomfoolery/That Jazz
TOMFOOLERY Different Drummer Music Theatre at Urbus Orbis If Tom Lehrer hadn’t existed we would have had to invent him. The songs he wrote and sang in the 1950s and early 60s were just what was needed: tart, witty musical antidotes to the apple-pie sanctimoniousness of the time. With a wry, nasal vocal style that […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Drexel Barney
To the editors: Regarding your Straight Dope column on April 14: Hanna-Barbera may be loathe to admit it, but Barney Rubble spent most of his career as the Cro-Magnon Michael Milken. He was the junk bond/LBO king of his era. He helped finance the Slate Rock and Gravel Co.’s buyout of Bedrock Quarry and Gravel. […]
Posted inArts & Culture
The Night of the Tribades
THE NIGHT OF THE TRIBADES Center Theater August Strindberg is the genius you would least want living in the apartment upstairs. First the genius part: he was playwright, poet, novelist, essayist, musician, painter, and alchemist; he held virtually every political, philosophical, and religious position available to a 19th-century intellectual, moving from social radical to Rousseauean […]