Doug Diefenbach will probably remember to his dying breath the day his ImprovOlympic team, Cinco de Bob, was dismembered. “We really enjoyed playing together,” he says. “And it seemed at several points like we were just taking off.” Still, the powers that be at ImprovOlympic didn’t agree, and Cinco de Bob was broken up, its […]
Tag: Vol. 26 No. 40
Issue of Jul. 10 – 16, 1997
Posted inNews & Politics
City File
Ssshh! Over there! I’ve almost got it cornered! Prospectus for an August poetry workshop in north-suburban Winnetka: “This workshop will focus on close scrutiny as a means to pursue a poem in hiding and coax it onto the page.” “If we would begin to make a few changes, it would be so much easier to […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Xsight! Performance Group
Xsight! Performance Group “We’ve got two sweaty nights at the Blue Rider,” Brian Jeffery told himself. “Let’s have fun.” So he and fellow Xsight! members Peter Carpenter and Marianne Kim, as well as video artist Stephan Mazurek, dancers Holly Quinn and Julia Rhoads, and actress Lauren Crawford, came together to create Kickin’ the Devil Around, […]
Posted inArts & Culture
K.
K. Alert the blue hairs and suburbanites: Theatre on the Lake just got an edge. Rather than its typical lighthearted dramas and done-to-death musicals, this year the stage hosts an eclectic mix of recent hits by adventurous off-Loop companies–for cheap. Starting Tuesday, the Neo-Futurists present five performances of K., Greg Allen’s adaptation of Franz Kafka’s […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Petty Crime
June 10, 9 PM, 3100 block of North Ashland. Robbery. Man knocked on window of pet-care store and began shouting unintelligibly. Assistant manager opened store. Once inside, man pulled gun, took $1,000 from register, and tied up manager with dog leash. After man fled, manager knocked phone off hook with head and dialed 911 with […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Zine-o-File
Anthems By Angela Bowman For weeks I had struggled under the weight of my foreignness. Now we were all foreigners, and I had the advantage of being more foreign than anyone. In twenty minutes I achieved celebrity as translator, American, and party girl. I learned the Ukrainian word for pretty; someone wanted to pay me […]
Posted inNews & Politics
The Straight Dope
I’ve bought many cigarettes in my years, but all of them have been class A cigarettes. I’ve seen third-class mail, grade B beef, and C-average math, but why no class B cigarettes? –JShaft666, via AOL We’re not big on smoking around here, Shaft, but we figure whatsoever concerns humanity should concern us. So we called […]
Posted inNews & Politics
A Reader Sting
cavallo.qxd Dear Monica Kendrick, I can respect your feelings about Motorhead and W.A.S.P. [Rock, Etc., July 4]. But you could at least get the story straight. You might not like or appreciate W.A.S.P., but if you are going to slam them, it should be with all of your facts straight. If you “understood [them] to […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Days of the Week
Friday 7/11 – Thursday 7/17 JULY By Cara Jepsen 11 FRIDAY Experts predict there will be five billion people living in cities by 2025. Forget congestion and overcrowding for a minute–what are people going to eat? Enterprising folks will plant vegetable gardens in parking lots, on rooftops, in window boxes, on back porches, and anywhere […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Dylan Sucks
lawrence.qxd Dear Reader, In his review of Greil Marcus’s new book on The Basement Tapes [Rock, Etc., June 13], Mark Swartz seems a lot more interested in championing Bob Dylan’s later work (an issue barely tangential to Marcus’s book) than in actually addressing, or even understanding, the book itself. (His misreading of the mask idea […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Field & Street
We have picked three pies worth of cherries from our two backyard trees, and more are ripening every day. The birds and the squirrels are taking their share, but so far their depredations are nowhere near as bad as I had expected them to be. I had fantasies of sitting on the back porch with […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Guys Love Their Guns
muench.qxd Dear Reader: I was impressed by Steve Hunt’s letter “Constitutional Right” in the June 6 Reader. The Constitution gives us a right to bear arms. It doesn’t say what kind of arms. If we simply allow that this means any kind of arms at all, then that means that I have the right to […]
Posted inArts & Culture
True Blues
Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom Goodman Theatre By Albert Williams Those whom God wishes to destroy, he first makes mad. –ancient Roman saying A cocksure, hotheaded young man locks horns with a flamboyant, slightly older woman as their mutual friends watch in dismay. This is the premise of a brilliant drama rich in ribald humor and […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Fad Free
solon.qxd I was disturbed to read in Michael Miner’s column “Something’s Cooking at In These Times” [June 20] that the founder of Vegetarian Times, Paul Obis, is now a born-again carnivore. Clearly Mr. Obis never embraced any of the ethical reasons that drive many to opt for a vegetarian diet. However, Obis goes too far […]