Dysfunctional families are a staple of holiday fare. But Paula Vogel’s play about a fateful car ride home from grandmother’s house goes beyond the cliches. Set first in 1970, her story of a family of five tearing itself apart is told through narration and Bunraku puppetry until it fasts-forwards to the future, when the gay Stephen dies of AIDS, his lesbian sister loses her lover to another woman, and their heterosexual sister finds herself unhappily pregnant....
Bobby Conn has a well-earned reputation for messing with journalists. He’s gone to great lengths over the years to convince them that he really is, say, a self-mutilating ex-convict or a professional business-seminar speaker or the Antichrist. So when the notoriously flamboyant singer-songwriter-provocateur answers the door of his Humboldt Park home wearing a faded button-up and glasses, invites me into a living room filled with toddlers’ toys, and proceeds to introduce the adorable silver-haired couple in the corner as his parents, I have to wonder briefly if this is another gag....
In 2003 novelist and playwright Joe Meno, like Billy Argo, the protagonist of his new novel, The Boy Detective Fails, was about to turn 30, and he recalls feeling that “everything seemed really gray, not personally, but just looking at the world.” He felt America had made progress in the 90s and it had been wiped away by the Bush administration, the September 11 attacks, and the looming war in Iraq....
friday29 LESLIE & THE LY’S Iowa native Leslie Hall, who runs a traveling RV museum of at least 165 amazingly hideous plastic-jewel-encrusted sweaters, is like a magpie with an art degree–she’s not attracted to just anything shiny. She is fond of glittery disco beats, though, and in her band Leslie & the Ly’s she raps and coos over canned dance tracks like a deep-throated diva. Crowd favorites include “Zombie Killers,” an uplifting ballad about shooting the undead, and “Gold Pants,” a dated-sounding R & B ditty about her favorite trousers....
When Frank and Malachy McCourt brought this show to CrossCurrents in 1984 it was a huge hit–and it’s lost no power to please. Delivered with dour delight, wizard timing, and expert blarney by Jarlath Conroy and Howard Platt (who also directs), the rollicking tales chart the brothers’ love/hate affair with Limerick, where poverty was the eighth deadly sin, and their doings in New York, where these ne’er-do-wells found acting a perfect outlet....
Christa Donner was a huge fan of Sassy magazine when she was growing up in Fort Wayne, Indiana. “Through them I found out about zine culture, riot grrls, and bands like Sonic Youth,” says the 29-year-old visual artist, who now edits the zine Ladyfriend. In 1993, Donner sent in some head shots and illustrations in the hopes of being included in the magazine’s reader-produced issue. The guest staff passed on her drawings but picked her as a cover girl....
Political humorist Bill Maher is less soapboxy than predecessor George Carlin and more caustic than TV peers Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert. The host of HBO’s Real Time With Bill Maher, he dispatches bullshit in accusatory tones, but his boyish grin and jolly eyebrows send a “well, I don’t really know either” message, a concession that distinguishes him from the army of media pundits who pretend to have answers. Ultimately too brash for network TV–ABC canned his Politically Incorrect after he disagreed with Bush that the 9/11 terrorists were “cowardly”–Maher fully exploits HBO’s relaxed approach to censorship....
In America, where we’ve been overrun with white-tie bands and shit like Panic! at the Disco, dance punk’s officially hit the brutal hangover stage. But in Brazil the music is still well freaky. Messy, sexy, carefree party band CSS is down there ponging loose funk up against favela bass to create sweet songs about fucking, loving music, and going to parties, all sung in accented ESL by a girl who calls herself Lovefoxxx....
I’ve seen Scott H. Biram start a couple of his live sets in Austin this way: “Hey, I’m Scott H. Biram and you can all kiss my ass!” He’ll flip the audience the bird a few times, berate them as “city folk,” and then dispense bits of sage wisdom, like this: “The only thing better than a truck stop with a titty bar is a truck stop with a whorehouse.”...
Restaurants $$$ $15-20 Is it too much to expect that a humble, prairie-locked shrimp shack land a fresh catch and sell it at working-stiff’s prices? Apparently so. At ASH the critters are overbattered in an unseasoned glop that smothers any taste of the sea and require a heavy dose of heat or cocktail sauce to get them down. But if for some reason you find the call of the sea in Logan Square irresistible, the jumbo shrimp do keep a faint memory of sweetness under their battered armor....
Mariotti Finally Gets His BAT Now it’s 2004, a year when justice deferred becomes justice delivered. BATless no more, the new BAT champion is Mariotti. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Actually, the latest BAT race confirms the thinking of Hot Type predecessor Neil Tesser. The predictions of the scribes at the close of spring training are as eternal a ritual as spring training itself, and Tesser launched the BAT in 1981 to test his theory that these crack prognosticators are no better at seeing into the future than the average jamoke in the bleachers....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I know I’m not the only person whose mother clipped the article and sent it. Or–for those not on the receiving end of such old-fashioned activities–the only one who’s been watching it spread faster than the sleeping kitties on YouTube. Mark Bittman’s article about no-knead bread has been tearing through the food world for the last month, leaving terms like “phenomenon,” “revolution,” and “takes over world” in its wake....
I’m a 28-year-old guy. When I make out with a girl, I produce lots of precome. It is often so much that my pants get wet. And it’s tons worse if there’s petting involved. This can be very embarrassing, especially if we’re in public. I’ve gotten to the point where I’ll wear a pair of shorts in addition to my boxers under a pair of jeans (heaven forbid this happens when I’m wearing khakis!...
When Gretta Yore left Galway as a young woman to emigrate with her mother and five younger sisters to Chicago, she never thought the brown bread her mother baked from scratch every day would come to be considered a delicacy. Her grandmother had been known to make it in a three-legged cast-iron oven over an open fire, and “baking was nothing special to us,” she says. “We just did it. We didn’t have shop bread, as we called it....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » For the second year in a row, my ladyfriend’s mom sent back a gigantic jar of homemade kimchi after Thanksgiving. Last year she sent the regular cut cabbage variety (tongbaechu) which she ever so lightly sweetens with asian pear (another excellent use for this most versatile of fruits, one that the Pear Lady declared “fancy.”) This year I’m in possession of about six year’s worth of whole-radish kimchi, aka chongak kimchi, aka “bachelor’s kimchi,” named for the long strand of greenery left dangling at tip of the white stubby radish....
Though this show doesn’t embrace burlesque’s legacy of satire, it does alternate strippers and comics. Michelle L’amour, who’s been teaching and performing burlesque in Chicago for years, directs and dances with a cast of six former students who look like actual girls next door. Some have just one or two “sexy” faces, and their dancing is a bit stiff at times, but all deliver charming, playful performances to a surprisingly eclectic sound track, which can range from Nina Simone to Weezer....
In more than 20 years of watching dance I can’t remember a single work devoted to sexual abuse. Plenty skirted the issue, often in a titillating way. But none focused full bore on the victims. That’s odd, since abuse is a violation of the body so overwhelming and fundamental it seems only a bodily representation could communicate it. Instead we talk about the subject in a seemingly endless series of books, plays, and made-for-TV movies....
What happened to Hitler’s family? I know he had no siblings, but surely there must have been others with the unfortunate surname. Were they persecuted or driven out of Germany/Austria? –Marc Ghafoor, via e-mail Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » What this tells you I don’t know, but the rest of the world has shown a lot more interest in Adolf’s relatives than Americans have....
Give us the real scoop. Did the Venona Project establish beyond a doubt that Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were executed as spies in 1953 but proclaimed their innocence, were Soviet agents? –Jim D., Medford, Massachusetts Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The trial of the Rosenbergs, the only U.S. civilians ever executed for espionage, was one of the most notorious episodes of the cold war....
Logan Boulevard Skate Park is much closer to completion than the Bloomingdale Trail, but was omitted in the Reader’s wonderful review of Logan Square [August 10]. Chicago’s first “covered skate park” is scheduled for construction in late 2007 by the Chicago Park District underneath the Kennedy Expressway overpass at 2400 W. Logan Blvd. Proposed by local park advocates with support from Friends of the Parks, Logan Boulevard Skate Park is a new activity jewel on Chicago’s famous boulevard system “emerald necklace” conceived by John S....
