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HOMEWARDBOUND
Fire up the barbecue grill. Prepare the punch. Call
your aunts and uncles, nephews, nieces, cousins, and neighbors. After
spending 45 days in the Muscogee County, Ga., jail for demonstrating at a
military base, Diane Lopez Hughes got out of the joint this week. Known around Springfield for her involvement in
peace-and-justice issues, Hughes was again arrested in November during a
protest at the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security, once known as the
School of the Americas. It was her third arrest for participating in
civil-disobedience activities. Want to welcome Hughes home or get a glimpse of her
jailhouse tattoos? Friends are hosting a reception at 2 p.m. Sunday, March
16, in the Sacred Heart Convent’s De Porres Hall, 1237 W. Monroe St.
NAKEDJACKSONVILLE
Get ready, folks — the fig leaf is about to
come off. Keith Barrell’s
“Recline” (the unedited version) and more than 50 other
artworks will bare all as part of the Imagine Foundation’s first
exhibit of nudes, opening this weekend at the Asa Talcott House, 859 Grove
St. in Jacksonville. Clare Lynd-Porter, the
organization’s founder, says the members of the foundation are
excited about the start to their “Other Side” series, a new
venture into adult-themed exhibits and performances. Future events will
include adult-themed music with playful lyrics, such as Cole Porter’s “Love for
Sale” (“Appetizing young love for sale/If you want to buy my
wares/Follow me and climb the stairs”), and maybe even adult-themed
theater. “It’s all for fun,” Lynd-Porter
says. Anyone over the age of 18 may view The Human Form: A Group Exhibition of Nudes between 1 and 4 p.m. Saturday and Sunday. A public reception
begins at 7 p.m. Saturday.
VOICESOFFAMILYFARMS
Two state agencies apply for a federal grant. They
get it, and, next thing you know, they “annex” a smidgen of
Wisconsin so that the map of the project looks like Illinois with a little
square nipple on top. What’s this? Another Tony Rezko real-estate special?
Well, not exactly. “There is plenty of dirt on this
project,” admits Illinois State Museum employee Bob Warren, “because it is,
after all, about agriculture.”
Actually, Illinois Times’ own books and poetry editor, Jacqueline Jackson, is the reason
for this temporary adoption of Rock County, Wis., into Illinois. As author
of Stories from the Round Barn and its sequel, More Stories
from the Round Barn (both published by
Northwestern University Press), she has cultivated family-farm history into
an art form. So when the ISM and the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Museum
won a grant to preserve 50 oral histories of Illinois agriculture, they had
to include Jackie. The fact that her family’s dairy farm happened to
lie just across the state line didn’t stop them. “We used to deliver milk in both Beloit [Wis.]
and South Beloit [Ill.],” Jackie says. She gave the oral historians their money’s
worth. “Most interviews lasted an hour and a half to two
hours,” Warren says. “Jackie was eight hours. She filled up our
30-gigabyte hard drive twice.”
Video excerpts from their interview with Jackie and
other Illinois farmers will be shown today — Thursday, March 13
— in the rotunda of the State Capitol, 10 a.m.-2 p.m. during Museum
Day. About 50 museums will have displays; look for Jackie on the big-screen
TV near the east exit of the rotunda.
CURSES!
Sure, we’ve prognosticated on the outcomes of
political contests and were wrong. Who hasn’t? It was probably just
bad timing when, after we did a story about Todd
Smith’s plans to convert the old Esquire
Theatre site into a shopping center, the project fell through. In 2006, our
readers named a certain Springfield eatery one of the best in town. The day
the issue hit newsstands, immigration authorities raided the joint. This
fall we ran a story outlining the job history of an alleged child molester
and clown named Klutzo. He was dead within 24 hours of the paper’s hitting the
streets, after he was subdued by county jailers. Notice an eerie pattern yet? In last week’s cover story about MacArthur
Boulevard, we wrote that parties involved with another proposal for Esquire
were remaining tight-lipped, fearing that premature discussion would jinx
plans. By the next morning, Chicago developer Jim
Purinton had pulled the plug on his
year-long effort.
SAYGRACE, GIVETHANKS
At the risk of admitting to being regular readers of Grace Hughes’ blog,
www.graceuncensored.com, we just couldn’t help but notice her post on
the evening of March 6: “Barack Obama’s office has watched my video!” Grace was
writing about her choreographed video salute to the candidate, which
received a mention here last week. Obama campaign officials thanked Grace
for her “creativity and enthusiasm” in making “that
awesome video.”
This article appears in Mar 6-12, 2008.
