Rick Kogan – Page 57 –

Matthew Owens, who was recently laid off from his job making toys for animals at the Brookfield Zoo, performs a puppet show for neighbors from the balcony of his home in the Lakeview neighborhood Sunday June 21, 2020 in Chicago.

When the circus puppets come out to play in Lakeview a neighborhood gathers in joy and wonder

June 24, 2020 at 12:40 p.m.

The puppets live on a quiet, tree-lined street in often-frenetic Lakeview, and late on Saturday afternoons they have been coming out to play. The city, crawling slowly out of its...

Author, Jodee Blanco at her home in Miller Beach, Indiana, Tuesday, June 9, 2020. (Antonio Perez/ baiduhai)

Miller Beach author gives new life to the man behind ‘A Confederacy of Dunces’

June 15, 2020 at 5:59 p.m.

Miller Beach is a small but spirited community in Indiana. Technically it is a neighborhood of that once thriving steel city of Gary and close as it is to Chicago,...

Shadows along North Wabash Avenue in the Loop on Wednesday, June 10, 2020.

Column: Walking on Wabash, with its memories and shadows of the ‘L’ tracks, I found an unexpected kind of therapy

June 13, 2020 at 6:10 a.m.

I have had many walks in this city but none as weirdly wonderful as one last week. I could have walked any number of city streets but chose one that...

Radio's WBBM-AM780 morning anchor Felicia Middlebrooks in 2002. Her last show at the station was Friday morning.

WBBM radio anchor Felicia Middlebrooks says goodbye after 35 years on air

May 29, 2020 at 2:35 p.m.

It ended at 10 a.m. Friday, the lengthy career of WBBM-AM780 morning anchor Felicia Middlebrooks, but not before listeners heard from some of her colleagues and audio clips from her...

Pam Zekman has lost her job at Chicago's WBBM-Ch. 2, part of companywide layoffs at CBS.

Pam Zekman, felled for now by CBS layoffs, is a giant of Chicago journalism

May 29, 2020 at 7:29 a.m.

They do not make them like Pam Zekman anymore. Actually they never did and never will. In the lengthy and storied history of Chicago journalism, a business battered by the...

Phil Donahue and Marlo Thomas have compiled the stories of dozens of other couples for ‘What Makes a Marriage Last’

May 27, 2020 at 1:00 a.m.

When Phil met Marlo, they were so famous that last names were superfluous. Maybe they still are, more than 40 years later, as this pair of octogenarians sit in their...

Dick Rosenzweig dies at 84. As much as anyone, he was an architect of Playboy, and a lover of jazz.

May 26, 2020 at 11:55 a.m.

He may not have been there at the beginning in 1953, when 27-year-old Hugh Hefner published the first issue of Playboy, but Richard S. Rosenzweig was on board soon enough...

Comedian and podcaster Ron Funches spent his childhood in Chicago.

Bob Odenkirk, Michael Shannon, Beck Bennett, Ron Funches, Lili Trifilio and 19 other Chicago celebrities offer advice, congrats to 2020 high school graduates

May 22, 2020 at 12:19 p.m.

A pandemic is underway, but that won't stop the class of 2020. As high school seniors across Chicagoland prepare to celebrate under the strangest of circumstances, we asked 24 notable...

Songwriter Dennis DeYoung with his piano at his west suburban home in 2014. He also has a recording studio in the basement.

Dennis DeYoung, formerly of Styx, has a new album and YouTube stardom: ‘I must have hit a chord with people’

May 21, 2020 at 1:00 a.m.

The first time I saw Dennis DeYoung on stage was in Long Beach, Calif.. He was with other members of the band he had formed in a South Side basement...

Rhymefest performs at the Chicago Blues Fest in Millennium Park in 2017.

Music video for ‘Sweet Home Chicago’ starring everyone from Rhymefest to Jim Belushi to Julia Louis-Dreyfus is a Chicago producer’s fundraising idea

May 18, 2020 at 1:49 p.m.

The best of us are trying to help and this current crisis has reawakened in many the impulse toward altruism, that admirable behavior that expresses concern for the well-being of...

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