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AND NOW YOU OWE IT TO YOURSELF TO TAKE CARE OF THOSE PARENTS WHO WERE SO GOOD TO YOU!on March 15, 2021 at 1:02 am

Go Do Good!

AND NOW YOU OWE IT TO YOURSELF TO TAKE CARE OF THOSE PARENTS WHO WERE SO GOOD TO YOU!

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AND NOW YOU OWE IT TO YOURSELF TO TAKE CARE OF THOSE PARENTS WHO WERE SO GOOD TO YOU!on March 15, 2021 at 1:02 am Read More »

Michael O’Brien’s Super 25 high school basketball rankings for March 14, 2021on March 14, 2021 at 11:30 pm

Super 25 new additions

St. Ignatius: It was an up and down and in and out of the rankings season for the Wolfpack, but they finished strong with wins against Curie and Bolingbrook.

Westinghouse: The Warriors are under the radar no longer. This team has size and experience. They’ve knocked off Orr, Lincoln Park, Marshall and Lane so far and only lost to Young. Coach Rafie Fields’ team has a huge week ahead with games against Farragut and Clark.

Downers Grove North: It looked a near certainty that Glenbard West would roll through the season undefeated. The Mustangs didn’t let that happen and it gives them the signature win necessary to pop back into the rankings.

Wheaton-Warrenville South: The DuKane conference champions put together a solid season.

Dropping out

Clark (5-2): A very young Farragut team knocked off the Eagles this week and Terry Head’s group just didn’t have the resume to stick around after that.

Homewood-Flossmoor (8-4): There’s certainly no shame to losing to Bolingbrook and Simeon in one week, especially without one of your lead guards. But the Vikings spent most of the season in the spotlight and several teams made a strong case to join the rankings this week.

Lake Forest (12-4): The Scouts drop out after losing to Stevenson.

Waubonsie Valley (12-4): The loss to Neuqua Valley knocks the Warriors out, but coach Jason Mead finished his stint at Waubonsie with a win against a very good Yorkville Christian team on Saturday.

With record and last week’s ranking

1. DePaul Prep (14-2) 19

Chipotle champs

2. Young (13-1) 1

Lost to DePaul Prep

3. Evanston (17-3) 11

Beat Simeon

4. Simeon (6-1) 2

Faces Corliss Saturday

5. Notre Dame (15-3) 12

Lost to Evanston in OT

6. Fenwick (13-3) 13

Bryce Hopkins finished strong

7. Mundelein (13-2) 3

Unbeaten at full strength

8. Hillcrest (13-0) 6

Class of 2021 was special

9. Rolling Meadows (15-0) 8

Mid-Suburban League champs

10. Brother Rice (13-1) 9

Unexpectedly great season

11. Glenbrook South (16-2) 5

Surpassed expectations

12. New Trier (13-2) 20

A ton to build on

13. Glenbard West (16-1) 7

Champaign bound in 2022?

14. Kenwood (9-2) 14

Young team living up to hype

15. Kankakee (12-1) 14

Consistent winning program

16. DeKalb (18-1) 10

Stumbled vs. Sycamore

17. Hersey (13-3) 16

Just couldn’t beat Meadows

18. Corliss (11-1) 18

Small school power

19. St. Ignatius (13-5) NR

Finished season strong

20. Curie (4-2) 4

Lost at St. Ignatius

21. St. Patrick (8-3) 21

Couldn’t handle Simeon

22. Lemont (12-1) 23

Future is bright

23. Westinghouse (6-1) NR

Only loss is to Young

24. Downers Grove North (13-2) NR

Beat Glenbard West

25. Wheaton-Warrenville South (16-2) NR

DuKane conference champs

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Michael O’Brien’s Super 25 high school basketball rankings for March 14, 2021on March 14, 2021 at 11:30 pm Read More »

What do the Grammy’s offer for baby boomers?on March 14, 2021 at 3:36 pm

I’ve Got The Hippy Shakes

What do the Grammy’s offer for baby boomers?

©2021 CTMG – A Chicago Tribune website –
Crafted by the News Apps team

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What do the Grammy’s offer for baby boomers?on March 14, 2021 at 3:36 pm Read More »

Reward Yourselfon March 14, 2021 at 9:33 pm

Spiritual and Physical Wellness

Reward Yourself

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Reward Yourselfon March 14, 2021 at 9:33 pm Read More »

‘The theater is a place for healing’on March 14, 2021 at 4:27 pm

For a solid year, the ghost light on the stage of the Goodman Theatre has shone in lonely silence on a classroom at the Aburi Girls’ Secondary School, the set for Jocelyn Bioh’s “School Girls; Or, the African Mean Girls Play,” nipped in the bud last spring.

“Just a wonderful play,” said Robert Falls, the artistic director of the Goodman. “We were in previews, and the audience was loving it. We were three days from opening.”

I called Falls because I was wondering, with vaccine being pumped into arms and hope of a returned world flickering, how the Chicago theater community might incorporate the past year. He’s the guy who put on Henrik Ibsen’s “Enemy of the People” right after Donald Trump’s election, so if anyone would be folding the COVID nightmare into his theatrical batter, it would be Bob Falls. But how?

“A lot of theaters our size, they’re in a complete tizzy about how to open their seasons from scratch, having to choose a play,” he said. At the Goodman, they’ll dust off the set, get the actors back and pick up where they left off … We can have this production up by summer.”

That’s one approach.

“You’ve got theaters across the country in mid-production, theaters that literally have a ghost light sitting on the stage,” said Michael Weber, at Porchlight Music Theatre. “They’re going to start up right where they were. Others, like us, have decided to shelve the season that we planned, and we’re rethinking an entirely new seasons, assuming we can get back. We’re hoping for the fall.”

A “ghost light,” by the way, is the single bulb kept burning on a stage in a darkened theater, to keep people from blundering into the orchestra pit. In plague darkened 2020, it’s become somewhat symbolic, the spark of life in the heart of a comatose patient.

A white bearded man at a restaurant table.
“What does an audience want to see when they come back? That’s something facing all artistic directors,” said Robert Falls, artistic director at the Goodman Theatre. “Do they want something upbeat, joyous, celebratory, fun? They are going to want to celebrate, but they’ll also want to cry.”
Photo by Neil Steinberg

That said, the theater is always a mix of the artistic and the practical.

“For us, we do music theater. Musicals tend to be large in scale, large in expense,” Weber said. “We’ll probably think of smaller projects a little more economically feasible with such a big unknown: where the audience will be, how ready will people be to come back into a room with strangers and spend two hours sitting next to them.”

So you’d rather fail with “The Fantasticks” (tiny cast, no set to speak of) I said, than with “The Music Man”?

“Yes, there’s a bit of that,” Weber admitted. But something else is going on.

“We are having a moment of great reckoning,” he said. COVID was only one jolt theater companies felt in 2020.

“I’m looking at the future in two ways: some narratives to process what we’ve been through without hitting it on the nose,” said Michael Halberstam, artistic director at the Writers Theatre in Glencoe. “And every institution worth anything is also looking through a lens of social justice.”

In theater, like everywhere else, the racial disparities exacerbated by COVID have loomed large. They’re struggling to react to the George Floyd killing in May, followed by the BIPOC — for “Black, Indigenous and People of Color” — statement of June, demanding a sea change in American theater from hiring practices to what plays get produced.

“The most influential BIPOC artists are asking for a reckoning,” Halberstam said. “There’s a chasm between the composition of the country and the kind of tokenizing that many of us were doing prior to really waking up and recognizing much of the work that needs to be accomplished … a more equitable distribution of narratives.”

Doesn’t that put him in a bind, trying to appeal to largely white audiences in Glencoe?

“What I have found at Writers Theatre is, our audiences are very excited to experience narratives outside of their own demographic,” Halberstam said. “One of the reasons we go to the theater, experience empathic connections, to stories we might not necessarily come in contact with on a regular basis. I cannot think of a more important narrative when we are bifurcated by systemic racism, for art to be creating vehicles to bridge that gap.”

Aeschylus, the great Greek playwright, said: “We suffer into knowledge,” and looking ahead in Chicago theater, that is the hope.

“We’re not out of the woods yet,” Falls said. “There’s still a great deal to mourn, deep tragedy and loss. I think that’s a process. That takes healing, What I’ve always felt is, the theater is a place for healing a place for reflection, a place to come together for community. The Greeks knew that. Shakespeare knew that. There’s going to be room for joy, laughter, tears, pain, examination, anger.”

It might take a while.

“During the Vietnam war, there was not a great number of plays addressing Vietnam,” he said. “Those great plays came afterward. During the AIDS crisis, it took a while for great plays, plays of anger, plays of despair.”

So the plays we need to see now haven’t been written yet?

” I can tell you there are going to be a lot of lousy COVID plays: my boyfriend and I stuck in isolation in the Hamptons for a year,” Falls said. “Also plays have the depth of Camus looking at the plague, plays have the depth trying to analyze what happened,. I have this great optimism of art emerging out of this.

“The cliche is that Shakespeare wrote ‘King Lear’ during one of the plague shutdowns of the theater in London,” he said. “I’m sure he didn’t know ‘King Lear’ was ‘King Lear.‘ He had to write a play and had to get it up and get money coming into the theater and get employment for actors.

“We don’t know what kind of ‘King Lear’ comes out of this time. The social justice movement is transformative and certainly has shaken the theater to its core. That is part of the possibility of a golden age of playwriting — new voices, voices that haven’t been heard. We are going to see that. That’s what’s literally happening right now.”

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‘The theater is a place for healing’on March 14, 2021 at 4:27 pm Read More »

Chicago Bears: Ten missions to accomplish this offseasonon March 14, 2021 at 11:00 am

Chicago Bears (Photo by Stacy Revere/Getty Images)
Chicago Bears (Photo by Stacy Revere/Getty Images)
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Chicago Bears, Ryan Pace

Chicago Bears (Photo by Nuccio DiNuzzo/Getty Images)

The Chicago Bears have a lot at stake this offseason. They need to improve their team otherwise the coach and the general manager are going to be gone. There are some serious issues with this franchise that have been going on for a long time. If they are ever going to win, they need to get it together. There are ten big things for them to accomplish this offseason otherwise 2021 will be more of the same. If they want to get better, these tasks must be completed:

1. The Chicago Bears desperately need to figure out the quarterback situation.

The Chicago Bears haven’t had an elite quarterback in the history of their franchise. Some of the slightly above-average quarterbacks across the current National Football League are players who would have a chance to be the best quarterbacks in the history of the Bears. If the Bears made a big splash for someone like Russell Wilson or Deshaun Watson, they could legit be a favorite in the NFC.

For some reason, they always miss the position and it has to get fixed. Everyone who misses the position needs to start being held accountable. Clearly, Ryan Pace is getting one more chance and he better not miss.

2. The Chicago Bears need to figure out a replacement for Buster Skrine.

The Chicago Bears made the financial decision to cut Buster Skrine. They are going to need to replace him now which isn’t necessarilly going to be easy. They might look within the organization and they might look at someone on the outside. It is going to be interesting to see what they do in this situation but it is certainly a task to accomplish this offseason.

Next: 3-4 (offense)

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2 shot, 1 fatally, in Humboldt Park: policeSun-Times Wireon March 14, 2021 at 5:23 am

A man was shot dead Feb. 22, 2021, in Grand Crossing.
Two people were shot, one fatally, March 13, 2021, in the 4100 block of West Potomac Avenue. | Sun-Times file photo

About 9:35 p.m., a 47-year-old woman and 51-year-old man were sitting on the front porch of a home in the 4100 block of West Potomac Avenue, when two males walked up and opened fire.

Two people were shot, one fatally, Saturday night in Humboldt Park on the Northwest Side.

About 9:35 p.m., a 47-year-old woman and 51-year-old man were sitting on the front porch of a home in the 4100 block of West Potomac Avenue, when two males walked up and opened fire, Chicago police said.

The woman was struck in the torso and was pronounced dead at the scene, police said. The Cook County medical examiner’s office has not yet identified her.

The man was struck in the right leg and brought to Mt. Sinai Hospital in fair condition, police said.

Area Five detectives are investigating.

Read more on crime, and track the city’s homicides.

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2 shot, 1 fatally, in Humboldt Park: policeSun-Times Wireon March 14, 2021 at 5:23 am Read More »

Who’s in: NCAA tournament bidsAssociated Presson March 14, 2021 at 3:57 am

Loyola players and coaches celebrate after winning the Missouri Valley Conference championship.
Loyola players and coaches celebrate after winning the Missouri Valley Conference championship. | Jeff Roberson/AP

Here’s the current lineup for the men’s and women’s NCAA basketball tournaments.

Here are the teams that have earned berths in the NCAA basketball tournaments:

NCAA men’s tournament automatic bids

Loyola, Missouri Valley Conference

Morehead St., Ohio Valley Conference

Winthrop, Big South Conference

Liberty, Atlantic Sun Conference

Appalachian St., Sun Belt Conference

UNC-Greensboro, Southern Conference

Drexel, Colonial Athletic Conference

Cleveland St., Horizon League

Mt. St. Mary’s, Northeast Conference

Gonzaga, West Coast Conference

Oral Roberts, Summit League

Hartford, America East Conference

Norfolk St., Mid-Eastern Athletic Conference

Iona, Metro Atlantic Athletic Conference

San Diego St., Mountain West Conference

Texas Southern, Southwest Athletic Conference

Texas, Big 12 Conference

Georgetown, Big East Conference

Ohio, Mid-American Conference

E. Washington, Big Sky Conference

Georgia Tech, Atlantic Coast Conference

NCAA women’s tournament automatic bids

Belmont, Ohio Valley Conference

NC State, Atlantic Coast Conference

South Carolina, Southeastern Conference

Stanford, Pac-12 Conference

Troy, Sun Belt Conference

Mercer, Southern Conference

UConn, Big East Conference

Wright St., Horizon League

South Dakota, Summit League

Gonzaga, West Coast Conference

Wyoming, Mountain West Conference

South Florida, American Athletic Conference

Idaho St., Big Sky Conference

Stony Brook, America East Conference

Marist, Metro Atlantic Athletic Conference

Central Michigan, Mid-American Conference

Maryland, Big Ten Conference

Jackson St., Southwestern Athletic Conference

NC A&T, Mid-Eastern Athletic Conference

Drexel, Colonial Athletic Association

Cal Baptist, Western Athletic Conference

Middle Tennessee, Conference USA

UC Davis, Big West Conference

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Who’s in: NCAA tournament bidsAssociated Presson March 14, 2021 at 3:57 am Read More »

2 killed, multiple people hurt in Park Manor shootingSun-Times Wireon March 14, 2021 at 10:38 am

Multiple people were shot March 14, 2021 in Park Manor.
Multiple people were shot March 14, 2021 in Park Manor. | Chicago Fire Department

The shooting happened in the 6700 block of South Chicago Avenue.

At least two people were killed and several others wounded in a shooting Sunday morning in Park Manor on the South Side.

The shooting happened about 4:40 a.m. in the 6700 block of South South Chicago Avenue, according to preliminary information from Chicago police.

Two peoples were killed and several others were wounded, according to Chicago fire officials.

The exact number of people shot was not immediately known, according to police.

This is a developing story. Check back for updates.

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2 killed, multiple people hurt in Park Manor shootingSun-Times Wireon March 14, 2021 at 10:38 am Read More »

Teen charged with carjacking 60-year-old woman at gunpointSun-Times Wireon March 14, 2021 at 6:39 am

Chicago Public Safety Headquarters.
A man, 18, was charged with carjacking a woman at gunpoint Feb. 22, 2021 in Scottsdale. | Getty Images

Edwin Arroyo allegedly took a 60-year-old woman’s belongings and vehicle at gunpoint in the 8300 block of South Kostner Avenue.

An 18-year-old man faces felony charges after allegedly carjacking a 60-year-old woman at gunpoint last month in Scottsdale on the Southwest Side.

Edwin Arroyo was charged with one felony count of aggravated vehicular hijacking with a firearm, according to Chicago police.

Arroyo allegedly took the woman’s belongings and vehicle at gunpoint about 3:50 p.m. Feb. 22 in the 8300 block of South Kostner Avenue, police said.

He is scheduled to appear in bond court Sunday.

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Teen charged with carjacking 60-year-old woman at gunpointSun-Times Wireon March 14, 2021 at 6:39 am Read More »