Why is William Heirens still in prison? How did he get there to begin with?
Tag: Vol. 18 No. 45
Issue of Aug. 24 – 30, 1989
Posted inNews & Politics
Self-Serve
The guy behind the counter was Puerto Rican and looked like Fabian. The security guard was black. His shirt was open to reveal an undershirt and a Star of David. Two Indian kids were haggling over who would pay the lion’s share of the cost of a pack of Now & Later candy. A white […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Working for Heirens’s Parole
“Look at what he’s accomplished! He is a success of the correctional system. . . . He should be paraded as an example for others.”
Posted inArts & Culture
White Shanks
Perhaps the most neglected of all the major French directors, at least in the U.S., Jean Gremillon (1901-1959) was a figure of such versatility that it’s difficult to make generalizations about his work. (One can, however, speak about its close attention to sound and rhythm–he started out as a musician–and its frequent focus on class […]
Posted inNews & Politics
War for Kids; Turn to the Tribune; Inert Gas
War for Kids Dozens of new books pour uninvited into the Reader office each week, half of them posing formulaic solutions to the quandary of how to fill an inconsequential life with wealth and meaning. One recent oddity is something else entirely, yet it touches on the theme of mattering. It’s an adolescents’ history of […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Smut
SMUT Prop Theatre at the Garage Paul Peditto’s plays reveal a fascination with the story-telling mode. In his new one-act Smut, as in such previous efforts as A Fire Was Burning Over the Dumpling House One Chinese New Year, Scam, and Of All the Wide Torsos in All the Wild Glen, Peditto frequently uses live […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Kiku’s Komedy Workout
KIKU’S KOMEDY WORKOUT at Kiku’s Watching Kiku’s Komedy Workout, three principles of comedy occurred to me. (1) A joke is funnier when it is coherent. Here’s one that still mystifies me: “My mother always told me, “Coffee makes you black,’ but later I found out it wasn’t the coffee–it was the Bacardi she was putting […]
Posted inNews & Politics
The Straight Dope
What’s the difference between an alligator and a crocodile? –Michael J. Healey, Washington, D.C. Not much. They’re both “crocodilians,” members of the order of reptiles known as the Crocodilia. But they’re not the exact same species, as many people seem to think. In the U.S., crocs are confined to south Florida, whereas gators may be […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Young Lennon
THE LENNON PLAY: IN HIS OWN WRITE Temporary Theater Company at the Okefenokee Playhouse “I can’t remember if I cried . . .”–Don McLean, “American Pie” Yes, I cried when I heard about John Lennon’s assassination. I remember that moment very clearly, though it’s not a what-were-you-doing-when-Kennedy-was-shot sort of memory. That is, it doesn’t seem […]
Posted inNews & Politics
The City File
Ingredients of broadcast journalism. WBBM AM’s Donn Pearlman tells his story to the Naperville City Star (July 27): “In 1965, when he worked for $1.25 an hour at a 500-watt station in Lawrence, Kansas…the boss required that he tend a herd of cattle in a field right outside the control room. Right on the program […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Department of Misunderstood Playwrights
To the editors: Although no writer or performer likes to be on the butt end of an “I know what I like and I don’t like it” review, in Chicago that’s not uncommon, whether or not fair or useful. What is unfair and unconscionable is for any reviewer knowingly to misstate the factual content of […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Correctional Errors
To the editors: Thank you for your thought provoking and insightful article “A Capital Blunder” (July 28, 1989). As a psychiatrist with the Dwight Correctional Center, I unfortunately can vouch that the judicial system makes its share of blunders, where decisions are based on emotions and not on truth. I have been working for the […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Field & Street
A pair of loggerhead shrikes nested this year at Fermilab near Batavia in Kane County. Vicky Byre of the Chicago Academy of Sciences first saw them in early May. By May 18 there were eggs in their nest, and on June 8 five young birds were fledged. This is good news, because the loggerhead shrike […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Destroy Pop Music
To the editors: Why did you waste an entire page of last week’s paper on Ted Cox’s “New Order” article [August 4]. Cox would have done better had he traced the “gross, self-aggrandizing performance of Johnny Rotten and Public Image, Ltd.” to its origins. After all when Rotten gets onstage with a heavy suntan and […]