Movie Reviews
Bend It Like Beckham Fox Searchlight Pictures has gone out of its way to tout the British import Bend it Like Beckham as the next My Big Fat Greek Wedding. It’s easy to see why. Both feature repressed female heroines in the unenviable position of having to reject rigid cultural conventions and familial traditions. Both…
Aldermania
You’d think a reporter would remember the night he covered a City Council meeting that lasted so long he left in the middle of it to file his story, waited until the newspaper rolled off the presses, then returned to the council chambers to deliver the next day’s news to the aldermen, whose meeting still…
It can’t happen here
The smell of fresh-baked cinnamon rolls wafts enticingly inside Dagwood’s Deli. Leaning against the restaurant’s counter, owner Tim Spengler smiles and says, “Just by standing here I can tell you who smokes and who doesn’t when they walk through that door.” Outside that door is where all the cigarettes are left. Spengler won’t allow customers…
Backstage Pass
The Springfield Muni Opera opens this weekend with the Broadway show Titanic: the Musical (June 6-8 and 11-15). With a score by Maury Yeston (Phantom), Titanic won five Tony Awards six years ago, including Best Musical. The tragic story was turned into a stage musical almost a year before the release of the 1997 blockbuster…
Why teens still smoke
“The last cigarette smokers in America were located in a box canyon south of Donner Pass in the High Sierra by two federal tobacco agents in a helicopter who spotted the little smoke puffs just before noon.” –Garrison Keillor, “End of the Trail” I tell my students that when Garrison Keillor wrote this satire in…
“What’s the rush?”
The engagement has been announced and a wedding date set, but the proposed union of the city and county health departments may not pan out to be the quickie Vegas ceremony Mayor Karen Hasara wants it to be. For starters, the mayor’s main selling point–the claim that a merger with Sangamon County’s health department would…
Berried treasure
When I was growing up, as soon as school was out for the summer, my mother and I would head for our neighbor’s farm to pick strawberries in the early morning hours. I remember scouting for the reddest, juiciest berries, like prize jewels hidden among the dainty white flowers and green leaves of the plants.…
Fashion statement
Some enterprising relative of a Springfield Police Department officer designed this T-shirt to express popular sentiment on the force toward Chief John Harris. The bullet-pocked states indicate places Harris has worked or applied to work. This relative has sold one shipment of about 20 to sworn personnel and taken orders for another two dozen.
Your Turn . . . 1-30-03
City Council to act on Iraq resolution Dear Editor: I would like to alert your readers to the fact that at this Tuesday’s City Council meeting on February 4th a resolution will be presented that “supports UN actions to find and destroy weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and opposes any U.S. military action against…
Bards of the Sangamo 6-5-03
Holiday at Normandy This June morning my skiff rides toward shore, grinds bottom; I hit the beach in my father’s steps– twenty seven, twenty eight, twenty nine . . . thirty yards the letter said. This morning a pale regiment patrols, white gulls drive the tide, falling back without casualties. Then one more wave attacks…
Movie Reviews
Confessions of a Dangerous Mind You can tell that veteran actor George Clooney has wanted to direct for a long time. In Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, his directorial debut, he uses elaborate camera moves, meticulously choreographed scenes, various film stock and video footage, and a non-linear narrative line to adapt game show producer Chuck…
“Smoking should be made very inconvenient”
His name was Johnny. He had dark auburn hair and was good-looking in a rugged way. A former military man, Johnny was 42 and married. He had two sons, ages 10 and 12. In 1968, one week after Dr. Glennon Paul arrived at the VA hospital in Seattle, Johnny died of lung cancer. Paul was…
The highway side
ONE Shelly Michalowski’s eyes were a shimmering, contact-lens blue. Her hair was bleach blond, and she could flip it with near perfect control, wink, go from a smile to a leer–and never once stop talking. She was a five-foot-two-inch perpetual-motion machine, and every bit of it was fake. I wasn’t sure whether she knew this,…
Your Turn . . . 6-5-03
Correction The Auburn sewage treatment plant exceeded the EPA’s limit on suspended solids by 229 percent in October 2001–not September 2001, as stated in Karen Fitzgerald’s May 22 article on Lake Springfield and the leptospirosis outbreak of 1998, “Troubled Waters.” Still working for your trust and respect Dear Editor, Your sympathetic piece on Marc Sanson…
Now Playing 1-30-03
Hey it’s cold. Get used to it, get on with it, and get over it. And get out to see some music this week at one of our fine establishments serving the best in grooves, grub, and grain (fermented, that is). Reggae continues in the capital city unabated by the chilly temperatures. High atop the…
Knoepfle 6-5-03
late tax return sharks everywhere the feeding frenzy
Capital City Chilli
It’s a frigid January day, but inside Big Mike’s Prize Winning Chili the air is warm and filled with the aroma of spices. Owner Mike Butchek is behind the stove, stirring a large pot of his secret recipe, taking an occasional break to sit down and chat with customers and enjoy a cigarette. The place…
The Soul of wit
What are numbers, anyway? John Knoepfle, one of Illinois’ most esteemed poets, has a big birthday coming up Tuesday. Not that big. His age is still well inside the two-digit range. But it is the kind of birthday that sounds a bit better on a bottle of scotch than on a writer of poetry. The…
Now Playing 6-5-03
Enter, if you dare, the often wonderful, somewhat terrifying, but usually satisfying world of Springfield nightlife. Austin’s Grand Champeen has truly experienced the exotic life of a traveling American band. The driven musicians willingly squeeze themselves–plus guitars, amps, drums, and other (ahem) necessities of rock ‘n’ roll–into an old conversion van and travel around the…
Bombay Invasion
I saw the most popular Indian film of 1997 in an art-deco movie palace in Calcutta. The actors spoke Hindi, and the film wasn’t subtitled, but I could still figure out what was going on. That’s because the movie Judaai lifted its plot from the Hollywood tearjerker Indecent Proposal. In Indecent Proposal a billionaire playboy…
Skin deep
Last weekend the first Springfield Tattoo Expo took place at the Hilton Hotel. Two dozen tattoo artists from Minnesota, Iowa, and Illinois showed up for the three-day event. I already have eight tattoos, including one of a vampire bite on my neck, another of a coffee cup on my left shoulder, and a tattoo of…
Up in Smoke
Tobacco companies have paid Illinois more than $930 million so far to settle a lawsuit the state brought to recoup expenses it incurred to treat smoking-related illnesses. But instead of using that money to fund health care or to help citizens to stop smoking, Illinois has filtered the money into a multitude of unrelated projects.…
Five Grads
Gloria Donaldson-Sampson came to Springfield in the 1980s as an inmate of the Department of Corrections assigned to a work-release program at the Sojourn Shelter. She enrolled in classes at what was then Sangamon State University and was hired as a student worker at Illinois Issues magazine before her drug addiction seduced her into violating…
Easy credit, hard times
A dozen people showed up for a three-hour class on money management last Saturday at the 11th Street office of the Springfield Housing Authority. Leading the class was Tami Rechner, whose goal is to get these people out of debt. She told the class about one client who was 13 months behind on her $200…
