DEAD ANIMALS I
RICK MOHR, “The Balloon Man,” Hoffman Estates
“I was at a kid’s 7th birthday party near Aurora, in an unincorporated area with a lot of field behind behind us, and they had a big brown horse in their back yard. There must have been 15 kids there. I was doing some balloons with the kids, and all of a sudden: Kerplop. The horse went down. It took everyone by surprise, it just collapsed and died. The boys were like, ‘Hey, cool,’ and the girls were crying. It was really weird, all of a sudden just kerplop. I got my check and got out of there.”
STORMY WEATHER I
KOKO TAYLOR, blues singer
“This is about a time I was working at a club in L.A. The night of the show, just before it started, everything was looking so dark and blue outside, and sure enough it did come a-stormin’. All the lights went out in the club. We couldn’t do the show, and I says, ‘My God, what are we gonna do? Too bad we don’t have an acoustic guitar; at least we could make some kind of noise.’ And everyone’s hands started going up, and people were saying, ‘I live down the street, I got an acoustic.’ Different people, different fans, and these people started running out the door, going to their houses to get acoustics. Sure enough, they got back and had acoustic guitars. My player took one of their guitars and he started playing, I started singing, and that was the band. We did a whole show. “
PORK PROJECT
MIKE KEMPSTER, executive vice president of Weber-Stephen Products Co., maker of Weber Grills.
“Back in the ’70s, when I was a young pup with the company, we were doing [a Hawaiian luau promotion] in St. Louis. Two of my colleagues got to St. Louis and found that you just don’t go to any meat market and find a [whole] pig. So now they’re in St. Louis pigless, on a Friday night before the Saturday promotion. . . . We had a butcher shop in Mt. Prospect that would get in whole pigs, frozen suckling pigs, 18 to 24 pounds. . . . [The plan was] on Saturday morning I’d get the pig, take it to O’Hare, check my pig on the flight, and my guys would pick it up. . . . Finally between traffic and everything, there was no way I could check this pig on the flight, so I had to accompany it. I removed the pig from the box, stuffed it in a big black canvas duffel bag, and I ran into O’Hare, ran down the concourse with my frozen buddy in the duffel bag, barely caught the flight, put the pig underneath the seat in front of me and made it to St. Louis. “
TEETH DON’T FAIL ME NOW
ROXANNE STEELE, deejay, WBBM-FM
“It was the summer of 1999 and it was the first year that we took our B96 Bash to the Route 66 Raceway in Joliet. Ricky Martin and ‘N Sync were there. . . . I was backstage broadcasting live, and I had braces at the time. I was eating a hot dog with a poppy-seed bun and without looking in the mirror I just did my little interview with ‘N Sync. So the entire time I’m interviewing them, I’ve got a poppy seed in my braces. As soon as I turn off the mike, Chris from ‘N Sync turns and says, ‘Roxanne, you’ve got a little something in your braces.’ I almost died. “
PARTY CENTRAL
JENNY MCCARTHY, actress, model
“The most fun and crazy summer I had was when I worked for the Mayor’s Office of Special Events. I was assigned to the [inflatable] Moonwalk. Every week, we pulled up to some neighborhood party and plugged it in and partied with everyone on the block. This was 1990-ish. When I look back, Chicago people are still the best people I’ve ever met in my life. Every city block was the same: warm-hearted people who just wanted to have fun and welcomed you with open arms. They just couldn’t shove enough hot dogs down our throats, we danced the polka, it was just so much fun.”
WINGS OF SONG
WELZ KAUFFMAN, president and CEO,
Ravinia Festival, Highland Park
“Last summer, we were doing one of our Lighthearted Classics concerts and the vocal soloists had to dodge a bat. Interestingly enough, the opera was called ‘Die Fledermaus’ by Johann Strauss Jr., which means bat in German. It kind of freaked out the singers, but the audience enjoyed it immensely.”
MOONLIGHT SERENADE
JERRY GAVIN, Chicago Park District,
Lifeguard captain
“A couple of years ago this guy comes walking down the pier [at Loyola Beach] with three wooden piano legs. He sets them down and walks away. He comes back down with a little dolly and he’s rolling the other half, the big half, of a baby grand piano. He’s got a couple of friends with him and they set it up. He leaves again and comes back wearing a tux. He sits down at the baby grand, his friends put some flowers on it and a candelabra, and this guy starts playing songs–show tunes and God knows what else. It turned out to be just wonderful. . . . It was just a nice night at the beach, everyone who was there came over to listen. “
MAKES A NICE PLANTER
JULIE MCCAFFREY, spokeswoman, Chicago Botanic Garden
“We were resculpting the great basin of the Botanic Garden, in preparation for opening our three new gardens. When we were draining this great lake, we found a very rusted-out 1966 Impala with golf clubs and power tools in the trunk. It was incredibly rusted out, there was no way to get the VIN number or to trace it. It was probably someone who was working here and let it get stuck in the mud years ago. Everyone was calling, saying, ‘You’ve got to come see this.’ “
More Top Picks Hobby And Crafts
NUDE RECLINING IN POOL OF SPRITE
BRUNO SURDO, visual artist, founder of the School of Representational Art in Chicago
“In 1982 I was at the American Academy of Art in Chicago. I was in one of those drawing classes and there was this nude, Herculean model on the stand, wearing nothing but a sword. I did the sketch, looked down to sharpen my charcoal, and he was falling. Turns out the man fainted. First everyone was just shocked. But we knew we had to do something, so I threw my Sprite on him to revive him. Everyone else had coffee. “
SEARCHING FOR DIRECTION
CINDY BELL, teacher at Still Middle School, Aurora, winner of 2002 Golden Apple Award
“I’m a very logical, mathematical person, but I get lost in my neighborhood. I’ve always been that way. I was in 2nd grade [spending the summer in Myrtle Beach, S.C.], and my brother and I wanted to go walk around [the campground]. Then I had to go to the bathroom. My brother did too. I waited for him and waited for him, and he didn’t come out. I got worried and tried to head back. I got totally lost. I ended up finding a new friend who was in 2nd grade also. I went inside their trailer, had dinner with her parents, we talked, we roasted marshmallows, I had so much fun. I didn’t realize that four or five hours had passed. My parents had called the police. “
THINGS WE DO FOR LOVE I
DON DE GRAZIA, author
“One summer, it must have been ’89 or ’90, I was dating this college student at the Three Arts Club on Dearborn. You couldn’t go up to girls’ rooms if you were a guy, so I would dress up like a girl and she would sneak me in. There was an alley right behind there, I’d put on the full outfit: women’s clothes and wig. Usually she’d have some other girls with her, we’d go inside in a group and go to the back staircase, where all the guard had to go on was a grainy black-and-white surveillance camera. I never got caught. It was kind of a pain, to be honest, but it’s the kind of thing you do to be with your girl. “
THE GANG THAT COULDN’T CHUTE STRAIGHT
ERICA WATSON, of McHenry, West Point cadet and entering Rhodes scholar
“Last August, in Ft. Benning, Ga., we were in airborne school. Supposedly the best part of the whole summer is when you get to jump out of the plane. Well, when we were going to go, they didn’t account for the wind, or they might have accounted for the wind but they did it terribly. Unfortunately, when my turn came I hit a tree and then landed on the ground in a thorn bush.”
STUPID BAR TRICKS I
JOHN HALEY, owner of Blarney Island bar, on Grass Lake, Antioch
“This group of guys walks into my bar and one guy says to the other: ‘See that spider over there? Can you drink that?’ It starts this big thing, they even had shirts printed up that said Arachnophobia Club. There were probably 20 of them and they’d go around the lake and catch ’em, then they’d put ’em in a beer glass and just drink ’em down. Like 20 or 25 at a time.”
BUS THE CATCH
HENRY PALMISANO, owner, Henry’s Sports and Bait Shop, Chicago.
“This guy was fishing at the 31st Street pier. He caught this giant steelhead, an unbelievable catch, it was a state record. I think, at that time [mid-’80s], the state record was 17 or 18 pounds. But the kid didn’t have a car. He only had the means to take the bus. He brought it in all the way from 31st Street on the bus, wrapped in a black plastic bag. Can you imagine him on the bus with that fish? I bet the driver was pretty happy with it.”
SOUND EFFECTS
CURT COLUMBUS, artistic director for Theater on the Lake
“We were doing Thornton Wilder’s ‘Our Town’ about five years ago. It was the third act, set in the graveyard. It’s really quiet; it’s all about this young woman coming to terms with her own death. It’s supposed to be silent. Well, in the middle of it, the Life Flight helicopter starts landing on the beach. Suddenly, it’s ‘Our Town’ meets the opening credits of ‘M.A.S.H.’ “
SPLASH AND RUN
DAVID TERRELL, wide receiver, Chicago Bears
“My friend from California had this Dodge Ram truck, all jacked up with big monster wheels. One summer in Ann Arbor, before my junior year at Michigan, it started raining and didn’t stop for a day. We woke up the next morning and we got in his car. [Students] were going to summer class and we’re just cruising down the streets, but it’s flooded so we’re kicking up water everywhere we go. We’re splashing kids at 25, 30 m.p.h. We’d get somebody, they’d chase us, stop and dry off, and we’d go back and get them again. When it was all over, we couldn’t drive the car for about a week, people were so mad. “
DEAD ANIMALS II
EMIL ESPOSITO, director of golf at Kemper Lakes Golf Course, president of the Illinois PGA
“When I first got here, we had a lot of swans, about 25 or 30, and one was a little crazy. This swan used to chase the riding mower around the 16th green. So one day the guy is cutting the fairway, and he’s being chased by the swan. That swan chased him for a while before finally catching up with the mower. The swan ran right into the mower, and let’s just say the mower won. “
DRIVEN TO THE DRINK
ESPOSITO again:
“I’m playing in the Illinois PGA section championship and we’re on the fourth hole at Kemper Lakes, 496 yards, par 5. One of the pros hits his drive right in the water. I hit mine down the middle. So he takes his ball, tries to clear the water again and does the same thing. He took another, hit that in the water too. He proceeded to hit about six in the water. Splash, hit another, splash, he hit another, over and over. He finally said, ‘See ya later, I’m going to the Cubs game.’ And he did. “
STUPID BAR TRICKS II
JACK BINYON, owner of Melvin B’s, 1114 N. State St.
“This guy was an Australian, and he was a practical joker. He went in the bathroom, wadded up a whole wad of toilet paper, braided it into a thick rope. He must have dropped his pants around his ankles and then wedged the toilet paper between his legs. He lit the tail on fire and went running through the place and across the street with this thing burning behind him. Apparently it’s a trick they do in Australia.”
SUNSET STRIP
JASON ERKES, president of Chicago Sport and Social Club
“We were having this big two-day [volleyball] tournament and we were supposed to have a security guard who was going to watch our equipment overnight. Our guy coordinating the tournament was about to go out that night when he got a call from the beach saying that the security guy didn’t show up. Our guy shows up in his clubbing clothes. They had a truck there at North Avenue so they decide to put all the stuff in the truck, and he doesn’t want to get his clothes dirty, so he strips down to his boxers. Now picture a guy, in the middle of the night, in his boxers and shoes, hauling equipment around. The cops showed up pretty fast, shining their flashlights on him. It was quite fun watching him explain what he was doing. “
STORMY WEATHER II
CASSANDRA KLATZCO, co-owner, Novelty Golf and Games, Lincolnwood
“In the early ’70s, there was a tornado. One of our obstacles on the course was a barn. Well, this foursome must have run under there and the tornado just completely lifted it up. It threw the barn about 30 feet and it landed on the other side of the course, it totally destroyed it. Luckily not a single person was hurt. The tornado just picked up the barn and left them standing there. “
HOSPITALITY SUITE
JOHN O’CONNOR, director of the North Pier Athletic Club, co-producer of the Wild Onion Urban Adventure Race
“My partner, John Hamill, and I were doing a run on the course before the 2000 race, out on the [Chicago] river near Pulaski. We were running on the banks in the middle of the night and we came to an underpass, and all of sudden there’s a commotion. We see that we’ve run into a cardboard box city. Two homeless guys see us running through and they’re not too happy about it. Their house was part of our course. They kind of rustled around and grumbled and it scared the hell out of me. But on our return, they were ready for us. They were clapping, cheering and actually offered us some beer, which I thought was very neighborly. “
BUY ME SOME PEANUTS AND A HAIRCUT
PETE JONES, Deerfield native, director of the Project Greenlight production “Stolen Summer”
“One of my first and weirdest summer memories was this Sox game at the old Comiskey Park. I was probably 7 years old, and we sat in the bleachers. Back then at old Comiskey they had a shower and I couldn’t believe there was a shower at a game and how much fun people were having. I didn’t understand what people were drinking, either, but it was creating such happiness. . . . Then I saw Bill Veeck, and my brother says, ‘There’s the owner of the Sox,’ and he had one leg. His other leg was wooden and it was sitting on the chair. I was so scared. They were also giving haircuts. All I could think about was how baseball was more than just baseball.”
SWOOP, THERE IT IS
MISSY NELSON, competitive skydiver, Ottawa, Ill.
“We have this thing called swooping. It’s with these high-performance parachutes, and you jump out of the plane from a low altitude and land [parallel] to the ground. It’s an expert-only type of flying and you can reach speeds of up to 60 m.p.h. Last August, for my birthday, they had an Impress Missy Swooping Contest at Skydive Chicago [in Ottawa]. There was prize money and there were five girls judging with scorecards and the contestants were landing over a pond. . . . The best one came from this male friend of mine who swooped naked. He struck a pose right before he splashed in the water, kind of like in the pike position.”
AND, STARRING AS RALPH . . .
JEREMY PIVEN, actor
“I wanted to be a lifeguard on the Evanston lakefront, and I was the only non-collegiate swimmer or high school swimmer who passed the test. I just wanted to have a job where I could go to the beach every day. I went and did the test and I got crushed in the 200 [yard swimming test]. Everyone had Speedos on, their heads were shaved, and they all had goggles and I’m wearing Hawaiian shorts down to my knees. After finishing last, I got out of the water, stumbled into the locker room and threw up so hard it was things I’d never even eaten. But I did pass. I got the job. “
THINGS WE DO FOR LOVE II
LYNN SAPP, owner of Rainbow Cone, 9233 S. Western Ave.
More Top Picks Microscopes
“Two years ago, my mother, Jean, was behind the register helping out. There’s this man standing there, kind of holding up the line, with two rainbow cones. She sees something shining in one of them and he’s not moving, just shaking. My mom asks if there’s a problem. He says, ‘There’s no problem, lady, just wish me luck.’ He says he’s got an engagement ring in the cone. My mom says, ‘It’s OK, you can do it,’ and next thing she knows he comes running in the store yelling, ‘She said yes! She said yes!’ and he’s skipping all over the place. Everyone in line was going, ‘Huh?’ “
SHELL STATION
LEE STEPHENSON, Chicago Park District operations supervisor
“It might have been about 15 years ago, right behind the Museum of Science and Industry in the Jackson Park lagoon. This great big turtle came out of the lagoon; he looked to be between 100 and a couple hundred pounds. I’d never seen anything that big except on TV and that was some turtle swimming in the ocean. We wanted to keep him as a pet, [but] then it looked like he was getting kind of tired or sick. We turned him loose and he went back into the water. Still haven’t seen anything like it since. “
Tribune critics kick back with ways to create your own crazy (or at least offbeat) summer memories
MUSIC CRITIC
JOHN VON RHEIN
THE ROMEO AND JULIET PROJECT
If summer is the season for lovers, summer may be the ideal time to celebrate literature’s most famous pair of lovers, Romeo and Juliet. Ravinia will do just that in one of the season’s most offbeat and highly anticipated events, “The Romeo and Juliet Project.” This special concert will recount the tale of the star-crossed lovers through readings from Shakespeare’s play along with great music inspired by the tragedy. Actor-director John de Lancie (who devised last season’s “Midsummer Night’s Dream” extravaganza at Ravinia) conceived the program along with conductor Andrew Litton and Ravinia CEO Welz Kauffman. De Lancie and other actors will bring scenes from Shakespeare to life while Litton and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra perform works by Berlioz, Gounod, Bellini, Tchaikovsky and Bernstein. 8 p.m. July 27, Ravinia Festival, Highland Park; $10-40; 847-266-5100.
TELEVISION CRITIC
STEVE JOHNSON
CRANK YANKERS
Summer TV is often a bit of a crapshoot, and one of the bigger rolls of the dice might be Comedy Central’s upcoming prank-phone-call show, “Crank Yankers.” This 10-episode series puts good comics –David Alan Grier, Denis Leary and Sarah Silverman among them–on the phone, in a persona, and has them toy with the unsuspecting answerers. Could be funny, but definitely on the mean side, right? Yes, but here’s the potential for genius–or disaster. The show somehow takes these taped conversations and turns them into (quoting from the press release) “the basis for a twisted town inhabited solely by puppets.”
The fun starts at 9:30 p.m. June 2 on the cable channel.
THEATER CRITIC
MICHAEL PHILLIPS
GALILEO GALILEI
For Galileo Galilei (1564-1642), life was not all sunshine and vino. Yet despite being branded as a heretic by the Church, despite people finding his thinking a little “advanced” or “bizarre,” his discoveries in the fields of mathematics, physics and astronomy (he perfected the telescope) have made ours a better and better-informed universe. They have also inspired a world premiere opera called “Galileo Galilei,” with music by Philip Glass, a libretto by Mary Zimmerman (with Glass and Arnold Weinstein), and staging by Zimmerman. The director’s “Metamorphoses,” currently on Broadway, ensures a certain amount of national attention. June 14-July 21, Goodman Theatre, 170 N. Dearborn St.; $35-$50; 312-443-3800.
MOVIE CRITIC
MICHAEL WILMINGTON
OUTDOOR FILM FEST
There’s no better place to get crazy in the summer than Grant Park among thousands of people–and that’s what you can do, for free, at 8 p.m. seven Tuesdays in a row at the third annual Chicago Outdoor Film Festival. The schedule is super. July 16: The late, great Billy Wilder’s 1959 masterpiece “Some Like It Hot.” July 23: Stanley Kubrick’s dark end-of-the-world comedy “Dr. Strangelove.” July 30: The 1964 Beatles classic “A Hard Day’s Night.” Aug 6: Dorothy Dandridge and Harry Belafonte in the 1955 pop Bizet musical “Carmen Jones.” Aug. 13: prime Marx Brothers in 1932’s “Horse Feathers.” Aug 20: the supreme Hitchcock-Jimmy Stewart romantic thriller “Vertigo” (1958). Aug. 27: the knockout 1961 film of Leonard Bernstein, Stephen Sondheim and Jerome Robbins’ “West Side Story.” Pray for no rain!
CULTURAL CRITIC
JULIA KELLER
PRINTERS ROW BOOK FAIR
“Words, words, words — I’m so sick of words!” Eliza Doolittle hollers in “My Fair Lady.” But Eliza never visited the Printers Row Book Fair, or else she’d never have gotten sick of sentences. The fair, now in its 18th year, is Chicago’s coolest and hippest literary event, a combination street carnival and graduate school seminar. On June 1 and 2 you can buy that ancient volume of Trollope that you’ve been searching for–and watch a magic act. You can unearth that tattered copy of “As You Like It”–and scarf junk food. More than 170 vendors will be spread across five tented blocks on Dearborn from Congress to Polk. Typically some 75,000 people drop in over the two-day fair, and it’s safe to say that few leave empty-handed or empty-headed. Are you listening, Eliza?
ROCK CRITIC
GREG KOT
N.E.R.D.
For those brainiacs, oddballs and eccentrics who never quite fit into the social scene in high school, this band is for you. N.E.R.D. is the latest pseudonym for the production team Neptunes, which has had a string of hits with artists ranging from Mystikal and Jay-Z to Britney Spears and ‘N Sync. Though technically not classified as “nerds” at their Virginia high school, Pharrell Williams and Chad Hugo never quite fit with any prevailing social clique. Instead, they made up their own sense of visual and sonic style, and now find themselves at the cutting edge of the latest MTV generation. Embracing everything from the music of Steely Dan to A Tribe Called Quest, the duo has forged a sound that off-handedly blends rock, rap, soul and psychedelia. Their debut album, “In Search of . . . ,” both embraces hip-hop’s outrageousness and sardonically critiques it. N.E.R.D. performs June 7 at Metro, 3730 N. Clark St., $15; 773-549-4140.
ART CRITIC
ALAN ARTNER
PACHYDERM PAINTERS
Four years ago, celebrated Russian emigre artists Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid–who are crazy like a fox–learned the government in Thailand had banned loggers from forests, putting countless elephants essential to the business out of work. To save them, Komar and Melamid proposed that the elephants be trained to make paintings, which might be sold to hotels and tourists. The effort went so well that the Thai Elephant Conservation Center continues such training and, long after Komar and Melamid’s involvement, paintings are still being sold. From May 23 to June 22, the Golden Triangle, 441 N. Clark St., will exhibit more than 40 works by elephants, each accompanied by a photograph of the artist, the date the painting was made and the executant’s age and sex. Originally, there was interest in how such canvases wryly reflected back on the art world and artistic creation in general. The issues still apply. As further method behind the madness, half of the gallery’s opening-night revenue will be donated to aid poor pachyderms in Thailand.
ARCHITECTURE CRITIC
BLAIR KAMIN
CALDWELL LILY POOL
One of the best places to escape summer madness is, ironically, right next to the busy Lincoln Park intersection of Fullerton Parkway and Cannon Drive. There, you find the magnificent Alfred Caldwell Lily Pool, which formally reopened Saturday after a $2.4 million restoration. Previously known as the Zoo Rookery because it was a bird sanctuary, this is one of Chicago’s most intimate refuges. The original designer of the 65-year-old space, Alfred Caldwell, who died in 1998, used stratified stonework, native plants and a wood pavilion to evoke the Midwest prairie as well as the Japanese architecture that inspired Frank Lloyd Wright. Now, with overgrown trees removed and its lagoon dredged, the lily pool is no longer a cluttered warren and is again true to Caldwell’s vision. Its landscape still needs time to mature, as all new landscapes do, but the restoration has been handled with skill and sensitivity by the Chicago firm of Wolff Clements and Associates Ltd.