Chicago Sun-Times: All posts by Stefano Esposito

Puppet Theater Festival returns to Chicago in January

2023-12-14T12:06:49.887-06:00

“Book of Mountain and Seas” by Basil Twist. The company returns to the Chicago International Puppet Theater Festival in January.

Courtesy Basil Twist

Puppeteers from Mexico, Indonesia, Africa, Europe and beyond will descend upon the city during the 6th Chicago International Puppet Theater Festival, which runs from Jan. 18-28.

The “pageant of puppet shows” is set to unfold at dozens of venues across the city in what event organizers say is the largest annual puppet festival of its kind in the North America, reaching an audience of about 14,000 each year. Many of the shows are free to the public.

The artists combine traditional and contemporary puppetry techniques with live music and dances, transporting “the audience to another world where puppets come alive and become one with the audience.”

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Chicago International Puppet Theater Festival

When: Jan. 18 – 28

Where: various locations across the city

Tickets: Free to $45

Info: chicagopuppetfest.org

Performers include Krystal Puppeteers, a Kenyan-German company that began performing in the port city of Mombasa, Kenya, in 1995.

Other performers include: Animal R.I.O.T. (Animal Resurgence In Our Time). On its website, the group describes itself as an organization that wants “to preserve and protect the remaining wild places and the not so wild places on earth, so that animals can continue to exist.” Masked members of the group include “the Fantastic Mr. Fox,” “Lady Opossum” and “Dr. Yellowfish.”

Papermoon Puppet Theatre, founded in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, in 2006, “believes that anything can come alive. Every creature, every object, every single thing in the world holds life somewhere inside of it.”

The festival was founded in 2015, with the goal of promoting peace, equality and justice on a global scale, the event organizers say.

This year’s festival will attract puppet artists “who will share more than 100 puppetry activities, including all-ages spectacle shows, intimate works on small stages, even an adults-only, late-night puppet cabaret,” according to the festival announcement.

For more information and to purchase tickets, visit chicagopuppetfest.org.

‘Home Alone’ actor Ken Hudson Campbell, from Elmhurst, recovering after cancer surgery

2023-12-14T09:20:41.84-06:00

Ken Hudson Campbell attends the premiere of his film “Wonder Park” in 2019.

Emma McIntyre/Getty Images

“Home Alone” actor Ken Hudson Campbell, a former Second City actor who grew up in Elmhurst, is recovering following surgery to remove a cancerous mouth tumor, his family told People magazine.

“It was a big tumor in his mouth. The last two years he’s gotten lots of biopsies done and they’ve tried to control it. And it was only this year that it just got very, very aggressive. So when he got his biopsy in October, that is when we got the diagnosis,” the 61-year-old actor’s daughter Michaela told People.

Last week, Campbell had surgery to have the tumor removed during a 10-hour procedure, the daughter said. Campbell’s lymph nodes and a large part of his jaw bone were also removed. Surgeons removed part of one of Campbell’s leg bones to use in reconstruction of the jaw, the daughter said.

Campbell is doing well and it expected to begin radiation treatment next month, his daughter said.

Campbell studied at Columbia College and got his comedy start at The Second City. He played a man wearing a Santa suit in the 1990 hit “Home Alone” and was a regular on the 1991-94 Fox sitcom “Herman’s Head.”

He also appeared in the films “Groundhog Day” and “Armageddon” and on numerous TV series including “Seinfeld,” “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” “The Practice” and “Mike & Molly.”

Campbell was said to have been overcome with emotion after his daughter set up a GoFundMe page to help raise money for his care, drawing more than $100,000 from donors including Steve Carell.

“The first day we posted it, every time he read something, he would just burst into tears. It was the first time he really got emotional about the whole situation. It was kind of a shock to him to feel so loved,” the daughter told People.

Berlin Nightclub welcomed all. Now, those it marked say farewell.

2023-12-04T16:57:30.069-06:00

Staff members at the Berlin Nightclub dressed up as the British pop star Annie Lennox during a previous goodbye party, this one for Shirley Mooney, who was one of the club’s original owners.

Dion Labriola

Shirley Mooney remembers a grubby mattress on the floor on which a man who repaired dentures for a living was rumored to have slept. The “before” pictures she kept have a pond-scum tint, as if mold had run riot in the space.

But she and her friend Tim Sullivan saw promise in the longtime club space on Belmont Avenue between Clark Street and Sheffield Avenue in Lake View that they agreed on the spot to lease for about $800 a month in mid-1983.

A baby-blue Formica bar went in along with glass-brick columns behind the bar and splashes of pink.

And thus Berlin Nightclub was born — a place that for 40 years celebrated its otherness with sequined body suits, sapphire-blue wigs and, as former patrons, performers and staff members recall, a we-welcome-everyone-here warmth.

“You could just go in — whether you were queer, straight, trans, a sex worker, it didn’t matter,” says Michael Shepperd, one of the original bartenders.

Berlin was closed for good last month amid a labor impasse between current owners Jim Schuman and Jo Webste and employees who said they deserved to be paid more than minimum wage. The owners cited “expenses of increased security, insurance and licensing, equipment, rent and more” for shutting down Berlin.

“The party ended at 5 a.m. November 19, 2023 — nearly forty years and more than 10,000 nights from when it all began,” the owners said on the nightclub’s website. “So the doors are locked. The music is silenced and our dreams are now memories. We hope you made some memories with us and that you smile when they visit you.”

Berlin Nightclub closes its doors after four decades: ‘The music is silenced and our dreams are now memories’

Berlin Nightclub after its closing. It was known as a nightclub that celebrated otherness.

Tyler Pasciak LaRiviere / Sun-Times

‘This crazy, propulsive energy’

Memories have filled a Berlin Facebook page on which patrons — many from the club’s earliest days — expressed sadness but also gratitude for having had a place where they could go that was like no other in the city.

Dion Labriola, now 58, was 21 when he first got hired to work there to handle the lighting. He later moved to the DJ booth, where the crush inside the tiny space and the frenzy around it inspired his musical choices.

“There was this crazy, propulsive energy — like nonstop,” says Labriola, who worked at the club from 1987 to 2000 and now lives in Los Angeles. “It was nuts.”

Maybe he’d be playing a song by The B-52’s, or something by the industrial band Revolting Cocks or the nightly must-play music video: Les Rita Mitsouko’s “Marcia Baïla.”

Labriola came out in the mid-1980s in Akron, Ohio — a town with little going on musically in its gay bar scene to get his pulse racing. Berlin offered an “edgy” thrill, he says.

Shepperd, who also lives in Los Angeles, was hired to tend bar in the early days despite having zero experience.

“I walked in there at 21 years old —this 6-foot-6, queer, Black man — and I was absolutely welcomed right away,” says Shepperd, whose friends quizzed him with flashcards to help him learn to mix drinks.

One of the original bartenders told Shepperd his name was too drab. So he was given a new one: Modesty Blaise.

Michael Shepperd was a bartender at Berlin beginning in 1983, the year the nightclub opened. On occasion, he dressed in drag under the name Modesty Blaise.

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“It gave me a whole other side to explore,” says Shepperd, who occasionally dressed in drag while working at Berlin.

‘Our gay bar lives began’

Paul Campeol, 57, first went to Berlin in 1985. He had to sneak in because he was 19. Someone suggested a Corona. So he ordered one and sat with his buddies.

“We’re sitting there, and our science teacher from high school walks in,” says Campeol, who lives in Norridge. “He’s looking at us, and we’re not saying anything. And he’s not saying anything because he’s not supposed to be there — because he’s a Catholic school teacher. ... Our gay bar lives began.”

But Berlin wasn’t only a gay bar.

“I would go there with my female friends, and they would always find a straight guy because it was a place to meet straight women,” Campeol says. “Straight women hang out with gay guys.”

All were welcome “as long as you didn’t tread on us,” he says.

Paul Campeol in the mid-1980s at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign — around the time he first went to Berlin at 19.

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Joseph Giannini got a job in the late 1980s as the emcee of the Sunday night drag show. He was 17 and had never done drag before, but he knew he wanted to be a performer. Sullivan loved his audition — he did Swing Out Sister’s “Breakout” — and hired him.

Giannini, who lives in Hyde Park, took his role seriously, spending hours getting ready for the show — plucking unsightly hairs, dabbing his eyelids to create a “smoky eye base,” squeezing his 6-foot-2 “big girl” frame into a sequined body suit or glamorous gown.

On stage, it was often pure silliness. One night, after the huge Loop flood of 1992, Giannini — performing as Gina Taye — came out singing Petula Clark’s “Downtown.”

“I had shopping bags full of water and goldfish, and water was flying everywhere,” Giannini says.

Joseph Giannini in the late 1980s, when he was hired at 17 as emcee of the Sunday night drag show at Berlin. He’s seen here performing as Gina Taye.

Provided

Another time, he came on stage dressed as “fat Cher,” singing her hit “If I Could Turn Back Time” while cramming donuts into his mouth.

‘Successful pretty much from the day we opened’

Mooney, now retired and living in North Carolina, owned the bar with Sullivan for just over a decade. Mooney is straight, and Sullivan was gay, she says. Before they opened Berlin, they would occasionally go to gay and straight bars together.

“Why can’t there be a place that it wouldn’t matter [about] your sexuality?” she says they wondered. “So we said, ‘Why don’t we open a bar?’ But we just knew it would be successful. Literally, it was successful pretty much from the day we opened.”

Sullivan died of complications from AIDS at 43 in 1994. Schuman and Webster took over the club later that year.

Mooney says it’s “heartbreaking” that Berlin is closed.

“But, in the same sense, it’s heartwarming,” she says. “I’m amazed at how many people have reached out to me to let me know how much Berlin changed their lives.”

Former Berlin co-owner Shirley Mooney (right) and Pete Pontiac, one of her bartenders, at the club in the mid-1990s.

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American Blues Theater gets new, permanent home

2023-11-28T15:31:39.322-06:00

The American Blues Theater has a new permanent home at 5627 N. Lincoln Ave. on the Northwest Side.

Ashlee Rezin/Sun-Times

The arm of an excavator rotated into place, before dumping a bucketload of gravel into a gaping hole in front of the building.

The distant whine of a drill from somewhere inside the building poured out into the lobby.

Things were a little frantic Monday, as American Blues Theater prepared for the unveiling Tuesday of its new space in the West Ridge neighborhood — the company’s first permanent home in its 38-year history.

“I don’t look at anything as a difficulty,” said Gwendolyn Whiteside, 49, the company’s executive artistic director. “I’m looking at it as opportunities. The fact that this is our first home, everything is a blessing. So if there is a challenge, right now we still are looking at it like this is the best thing that ever happened to us.”

Mayor Brandon Johnson, Executive Artistic Director Gwendolyn Whiteside (center, in red), 40th ward Ald. Andre Vasquez and supporters participate in a ribbon-cutting ceremony Tuesday at the American Blues Theater company’s new permanent home on Lincoln Avenue.

Ashlee Rezin/Sun-Times

You can understand Whiteside’s excitement. The building — the former site of a dollar store and a Walgreens, doesn’t look like much from the outside — it still retains its boxy, unadorned exterior. But inside is a state-of-the-art, 137-seat proscenium theater, a 40-seat flexible rehearsal studio, a bar and multiple dressing rooms — among other features.

And even though workers were still on site Monday, the stage sparkled with Christmas trees, a menorah and other stage pieces in preparation for the the company’s 22nd annual production of “It’s a Wonderful Life: Live in Chicago!” based on the Frank Capra movie and directed by Whiteside.

American Blues Theater

‘It’s a Wonderful Life: Live in Chicago!’

When: Dec. 8 – 31

Where: American Blues Theater, 5627 N. Lincoln Ave.

Tickets: $25-$65.

Info: Americanbluestheater.com

She first saw the new space — empty and with water puddled on the floors — back in fall 2021.

Like a script before it’s fleshed out with actors, lights and props, Whiteside said she could imagine the possibilities. She also liked the building’s gritty past.

“American Blues is founded on the principles of working people. It’s a working-class theater. So the ethos of being in a building that was a working building like that — it makes perfect sense,” she said.

The Tony Award-winning company (the second-oldest Equity ensemble theater in the city) is dedicated to “producing new and classic American stories.”

Gwendolyn Whiteside, executive artistic director at the American Blues Theater, speaks during a news conference on Tuesday before the ribbon-cutting ceremony at the company’s new Northwest Side home.

Ashlee Rezin/Sun-Times

Funding for the $7.8 million project, designed by Morris Architects Planners, came through the theater’s new Our First Home capital campaign, which included $6 million for the building purchase and construction within the existing footprint, and a $500,000 building reserve fund. To date, $4.2 million has been raised from individual donors.

Nick Santarelli, project executive, said it was tricky building a theater inside a structure that wasn’t designed for the arts.

“It looks like a square box, and then you come in here and not only do you have curves for the seating and shapes in the lobby that take you away from that square box, but having to coordinate all of that with an existing building that you have to live within the structure of is absolutely a challenge,” Santarelli said.

American Blues Theater’s new main stage space features a 137-seat proscenium theater, now set for the company’s production of “It’s a Wonderful Life: Live in Chicago!”

Anthony Vazquez/Sun-Times

Since its founding in 1985, American Blues Theater has leased space in more than a dozen venues across the city.

“Every time you go into a new venue, you have to learn their operating system, you have learn their equipment, … their footprint of the stage, plus you have to learn their leadership,” Whiteside said.

And sometimes, you might have to cart your belongings out of the rented space in the middle of winter — during an ice storm, as has happened in the past, Whiteside said.

But on the plus side: “Because we have been in over 15 venues, we have a really good swath of institutional knowledge of what works for us. We were able to customize this [new space] exactly for our needs,” Whiteside said.

The lobby bar at American Blues Theater, 5627 N. Lincoln Ave. For the first time in its 38-year history, the company now has a permanent home.

Anthony Vazquez/Sun-Times

The theater is set open just weeks after Chicago’s Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events (DCASE) released a devastating report, detailing a cultural arts scene in crisis due to dwindling audiences and subscriptions, increased operating costs coupled with shrinking budgets, declines in private funding and sponsorships, the end of government funding, as well as inflation, among other factors.

“Gosh, I don’t want to sound Pollyanna, but if you build it they will come. Isn’t it the whole idea that everyone needs story?” Whiteside said. “Certainly patrons might have different patterns than they had before the pandemic. But we’ve found that people are coming out to our programs.”

The new 137-seat house inside American Blues Theater on the Northwest Side.

Michael Brosilow

Joffrey Ballet costume crew ready to fix any rips in ‘The Nutcracker’

2023-11-27T18:00:00-06:00

Ellie Cotey, costume manager at the Joffrey Ballet, says it’s a “super, super busy time” leading up to the opening of “The Nutcracker” on Dec. 2

Pat Nabong/Sun-Times

The crotch in your pants tears open — wide.

You’re not at home or in a bathroom stall at work. You’re on stage in front of an audience of thousands, including lots of children — a few of whom have started snickering.

In the darkness of the wings, a tiny light, a beacon of hope. You leap off into the shadows, and within seconds — literally, because you have to be back on stage again almost instantaneously — a woman in black, wearing a headlamp, produces a needle and thread and she sews you up.

It ain’t pretty, but it will do until the next costume change.

Joffrey Nutcracker

Joffrey Ballet — ‘The Nutcracker’

When: Dec. 2–27

Where: Lyric Opera House, 20 N. Wacker

Tickets: $40-$208.

Info: Joffrey.org

“I’ve had to fix that at least twice — once was the first show I ran for the Joffrey,” explained Jerica Hucke, the draper for Chicago’s Joffrey Ballet, of said costume incident.

It turns out, the costume folks at the Joffrey thrive on such drama, but they’d just rather you didn’t see it.

“It’s kind of fun. The adrenaline of it — that’s why we do live theater,” said Ellie Cotey, the costume manager at Joffrey.

There are nearly 260 costumes in Joffrey Ballet’s annual production of “The Nutcracker.”

In the Joffrey’s costume shop at 10 E. Randolph, it’s a “super, super busy time,” says Cotey, adding some finishing touches to the bodice of the sugar plum fairy costume on a recent afternoon. Joffrey’s annual “Nutcracker” — the company show that sells the most tickets each year (in part because it has the longest run of any of its presentations) — opens Dec. 2 at the Lyric Opera House.

If it’s a chaotic time, it’s a controlled chaos. Three stitchers sit near a large window, working mostly in silence as they apply finishing touches to various costumes. Cotey’s team of six, including herself, has a combined 120 years of experience in the trade.

Alyssa Piertrzyk (back), a stitcher at Joffrey Ballet, works on a costume for “The Nutcracker” at the company’s costume shop in the Loop.

Pat Nabong/Sun-Times

Beside the stitchers is a wall of thread spools, colors so bright they’d make a rainbow jealous. Another wall is lined with plastic tubs with all sorts of labels: “Fur,” “horse hair,” “pearls,” “gold metallic trim” and something called “braid and gimp.”

There are about 260 costumes in total for “The Nutcracker,” most of them on hangers on racks, waiting to be packed into road boxes that will be loaded into a truck and taken to the Lyric.

Cotey stands at a cutting table arranging the gold leaves on the sugar plum fairy costume. The piece is intended to glitter and dazzle beneath the stage lights, but not so the audience will say, “Oh that’s a different costume from last year.”

Ellie Cotey, costume manager at Joffrey Ballet, works on the sugar plum fairy costume in the company’s Loop costume shop.

Pat Nabong/Sun-Times

“We hope it doesn’t look jarringly different,” says Cotey, pointing out the old fairy costume, which she says had become a bit “dingy.” “The goal is to have it look sparkly and new.”

In an adjoining room, objects that bring to mind the leathery eggs from the 1979 movie “Alien” sit scattered about the costume shop’s laundry room. They’re actually the ballet’s giant walnuts, and child actors will be enclosed in them from head to waist during the World’s Fair scene in the show. When this version of the show opened in 2016, they were made of papier-mâché.

Walnut costumes for “The Nutcracker” sit in the laundry room of Joffrey Ballet’s costume shop. They’re made from a “thermo plastic” mesh, which allows the child dancers to see out from inside the shells.

Pat Nabong/Sun-Times

“They were beautiful, but they were heavy, ... they had wood frames in them and they kept getting really, really banged up every year because the kids couldn’t see out of them, so on stage, they’d bang into each other,” Hucke said.

So Hucke came up with the idea of using a “thermo plastic” mesh, which is lightweight, can be painted and, most importantly, allows the kids to see out.

“They do bump, but it bounces a little bit better and they can see [out] so they do a little less bumping, which is kind of sad because it was very funny,” Hucke said.

A pouch with a tiny flashlight, needles, thread, safety pins, buttons — an indispensable kit for the costume folks when they must make emergency repairs during a show.

Ellie Cotey

Cotey, Hucke and the rest of the team will all be somewhere backstage — and out of sight — during the run of the show. They’ll each carry a little pouch, containing needles, scissors, thread, safety pins. They can’t do repairs in the dark. Some used to have what’s called a “bite lamp,” which is clamped between the teeth and leaves the hands free, but COVID changed all of that. Now folks use tiny head lamps or lights that dangle around their necks.

And like a pit crew, Cotey’s team is ready to sprint into action at a moment’s — maybe a fraction of a moment’s — notice.

“It’s fine if your heart is pounding as long as your hands aren’t shaking,” Hucke said. “You have to be really confident in that moment that the thing you’re doing — that you can get it done in the time you need to do it. ... Anything could happen backstage and you have to always be prepared,” Hucke said.

Costumes for “The Nutcracker” are stored in Joffrey Ballet’s costume department office in the Loop.

Pat Nabong/Sun-Times

‘Clue: A Walking Mystery’: Block 37 poses as a mansion for fun interactive whodunit

2023-11-27T05:30:00-06:00

Reporter Stefano Esposito and his son, Lucca, work to figure out who killed Boddy Black in “Clue: A Walking Mystery,” a game located mostly in downtown’s Block 37 complex.

Victor Hilitski/For the Sun-Times

I suppose that if Col. Mustard held a revolver to my head or if Miss Scarlett threatened me with a lead pipe in the conservatory, I’d figure out whodunit — but on the whole, games requiring a lot of detective work hurt my brain.

I grew up less than two miles from where Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the brains behind Sherlock Holmes, lived in London during the 1890s ... but that’s where the similarities end.

Thankfully, my 12-year-old son, Lucca, has a far more nimble mind than his dad and rather fancied the idea of traipsing around downtown Chicago on a recent Friday evening in search of clues to the fictional mystery: Who killed Boddy Black, with what murder weapon and where within the walls of his Tudor mansion?

“Anyone here solve a mystery before?” asked a young man wearing a black bowtie and matching vest who introduced himself as Butler Barnaby Bunberry, aka actor Matt Keeley. “Anyone commit murder? Nothing quite like that to get you in the holiday spirit!”

Matt Keeley (center), an actor hired as a butler, gives instructions at the ground level of Block 37, prior to the start of the interactive murder mystery game, “Clue: A Walking Mystery.”

Victor Hilitski/For the Sun-Times

“What do you think of his accent?” I whispered to Lucca.

“Kind of English —ish,” he said.

There is no board in this game. No dice either. It’s called “Clue: A Walking Mystery.” The participants, or “detectives,” are handed an “auction catalog” of the deceased’s mansion and, going from “room” to “room,” they are supposed to uncover the clues to his grisly death.

Clue walking mystery

‘Clue: A Walking Mystery’

When: To Dec. 31

Where: Begins in the basement of Block 37, 108 N. State St.

Tickets: $35 (or $27.50 per person for a group of 10 or more)

Info: cluewalkingexperience.com

Sound simple? It ain’t. Particularly when you’ve a week’s worth of workaday clutter in your head and you’d really rather have a beer and put your feet up.

“The puzzles are challenging — they are not simple,” explained Kevin Hammonds, the game’s producer and a New Yorker whose regular gig is designing escape rooms. Best to go with a group so you can combine brain power, Hammonds says.

“Clue: A Walking Mystery” producer Kevin Hammonds advises playing with a group for maximum brain power.

Victor Hilitski/For the Sun-Times

But Hammonds and his crew are so darn friendly and encouraging that I felt guilty at not being a little more game. Besides, Lucca was champing at the bit.

“I come from a place called really far away,” said Butler Bunberry, when I quizzed him about his accent.

And with that, we headed up an escalator in search of the first clue. Here’s the weird thing: There is no mansion — not even a house dressed up to look like one. You’re searching for clues in Block 37, a glistening, multi-story shopping mall. On this particular evening, it was swarming with teens doing what teens do: clutching each other, giggling, gawking — blissfully unaware of the crime that had been committed in their midst.

“My word, have some imagination!” said Lisa Marsh, a fellow gamer in from California, after I groused out loud about how the mall didn’t look anything like a British stately home.

“He does,” she said, pointing at my kid.

Spouses Lisa Watson (right) and Lisa Marsh, from Los Angeles, study a bit of information while playing “Clue: A Walking Mystery.”

Victor Hilitski/For the Sun-Times

Finding the “rooms” was simple enough — mostly in stores within the mall, as well as a few housed in nearby shops. In each location, you find a piece of furniture: an armoire, a bookcase, a grandfather clock. Trying to decipher the clues inside twisted my brain in knots.

But what’s not to love about a bookshelf where, by tugging on certain books, a clue in the form of a word is spelled out? Or a wardrobe in which one of the coats — just one — has an oddly familiar (potentially incriminating) tear?

Or my favorite: a safe that self-destructs if you twitch the dial in the wrong direction. I’m kidding, but it’s not easy getting inside.

Reporter Stefano Esposito and his son Lucca after finally figuring out how to open the safe, in which was hidden yet another clue. | Victor Hilitski, for the Chicago Sun-Times

“Uh oh, it says the safe will lock you out after six attempts. I did it seven times!” said a panicked Lucca.

Twenty minutes later, we managed to open the safe and retrieve the clue — sort of.

“We have the clues, but it feels like we’re not going anywhere,” Lucca said at one point.

About two hours in, after going up and down and up the escalator, weaving through the Christmas shopping crowds, I wondered if we were ever going to finish.

The game is self-guided and the Clue team sticks around until 9 p.m. If you wish to stay later, you can enter your findings online and check to see if you’re right. The game has no time limit — so you can grab dinner or a drink (or three) along the way.

Cameron Brenson (right) and Lucca Esposito discuss clues as Lucca’s dad, Stefano, observes.

Victor Hilitski/For the Sun-Times

But that felt like cheating — and besides, the Chicago Sun-Times was paying me to play the game. Many years ago, I went on what was supposed to be a 24-hour stakeout for a story. After 22 hours, the photographer and I, figuring we weren’t going to see anything interesting, went home. My editor was furious: “You want us to lie to the readers and say you were on a 24-hour stakeout when you weren’t?!”

So Lucca and I stuck it out. We limped over the finish line, kinda sorta thinking we might know who done it, with what and where.

We were wrong.

Thankfully, we encountered Lizzie Bourne, another of the game’s butlers. She hails from Guildford, a town about an hour’s drive southwest of London.

Christine Duke of Chicago celebrates with Matt Keeley, an actor who’s part of “Clue: A Walking Mystery, after successfully completing the game.

Victor Hilitski/For the Sun-Times

When your spirits are flagging, she says all the right things.

“Oh smart cookie!” she told Lucca. “Tell me more about secret passages!”

Or: “You know a lot of things. Most people, I have to really drag this out of!”

Then: “They’re solving it, they’re solving it!”

I can’t tell you who whacked Boddy Black; if I did, I’d have to ... well, you know.

Lucca and I walked out into the night and headed for the parking garage and then home.

“I didn’t think it would be this exciting,” said Lucca, who is usually very hard to please. “I thought it would be kind of stupid.”

Betty Boop, subject of world-premiere musical in Chicago, tells a tale of cartoon character Max Fleischer created in 1930s

2023-11-24T12:05:00-06:00

Animator Max Fleischer and his creation Betty Boop in the early 1930s.

Fleischer Studios, Inc.

One was the creator of a squeaky-clean mouse named Mickey, the other the brains behind a squeaky-voiced flirt with the catchphrase “Boop-oop-a-doop.”

But the two great American animators — Walt Disney and Max Fleischer — didn’t meet for the first time until 1956, more than a quarter of a century after the introduction of each of their hugely famous creations.

Fleischer stood 5-feet-5-inches tall and had a paunch. Disney was almost 6-feet, slender and had a full head of dark, slicked-back hair.

Veteran Broadway team crafts ‘Boop! The Musical’ as a love story for a new age

“Walt was a charming, flattering host,” Fleischer’s son Richard Fleischer wrote in “Out of the Inkwell,” a 2005 biography of his father. “My father seemed to be enjoying himself, but in Walt’s presence, he seemed diminished, and my heart broke for him. I had the feeling that Goliath had defeated David.”

Defeated? Click on eBay, and you’ll find 140,000-plus Betty Boop-themed items for sale — everything from a $600 silver spoon to figurines, T-shirts and even a “hooded tank shirt 4 unisex bearded dragons” listed for $24.99. There are countless Boop-related Facebook pages, including one that boasts it has 1.4 million followers.

Maison Monroe, 21, a Columbia College Chicago student and Betty Boop superfan, shows off a vintage Betty Boop apron she says she wears while cleaning her Wicker Park apartment. As a child, Monroe says watched Boop cartoons on her grandmother’s VCR.

Ashlee Rezin / Sun-Times

And now comes “Boop! The Musical,” which is in its world-premiere, pre-Broadway run at Chicago’s CIBC Theatre, 18 W. Monroe St.

In case you’re wondering, Boop’s signature spit curls are not framing a giant prosthetic head.

Jasmine Amy Rogers — whose credits include playing Gretchen Wieners in the national touring production of “Mean Girls,” Melody Green in “The Wanderer” at Paper Mill Playhouse and a TV appearance on the Paramount+ series “Evil” — stars as the pop culture icon.

What accounts for the tiny-waisted, sexually provocative cartoon character’s enduring appeal 90-some years after she first sashayed across American movie screens?

Ask Maison Monroe, a 21-year-old Columbia College student whose Goth look is part-Elvira, part-Boop.

“She is this very cool character,” says Monroe, who grew up watching Boop cartoons on her grandmother’s VHS player. “In the 1930s, she was this sexually promiscuous character. Women were not really seen like that. It was kind of badass and rebel of her.”

Bob Martin, the musical’s writer, says part of what intrigued him about Betty Boop is that most people living today haven’t seen the crackly cartoon shorts. They know Boop perhaps only as an image on a T-shirt or keychain.

Betty Boop became a pop culture icon for the ages. This special-edition Monopoly game celebrated the cartoon darling.

Max Fleischer Studios, Inc./Hasbro

Mark Fleischer, the animator’s grandson, calls that the “miracle of Betty Boop.”

Interest in Boop merchandise took off in the 1970s, a time you could only watch the cartoons as reruns on TV. That interest has grown “vastly, exponentially,” he says.

So have her many incarnations. Boop has appeared as a cowboy, a zombie, part of the zodiac.

She was ahead of her time, and she’s hard to pigeonhole. She was portrayed as lion tamer, a pilot and a successful presidential candidate, says Mark Fleischer, chairman of the board and chief executive officer of Fleischer Studios Inc., which licenses Boop and other Max Fleischer creations.

“We’ve seen a lot of people who ask to have her image put with their loved ones in their final resting places,” he says.

“Part of what really interested me is that Betty herself has become a kind of representative for strong, sexy, smart women,” Martin says. “In our story, she comes from her cartoon world into the real world and is very surprised to learn that she is an icon and that people have applied meaning to who she is. It kind of freaks her out a bit.”

Betty Boop’s image has appeared on countless products, including these Zombie earbuds.

Fleischer Studios, Inc.

Max Fleischer, the son of Polish Jews settling in New York at the turn of the 20th century, loved to draw from a young age. His artwork had a grittier, more urban feel than Disney’s — probably because he lived in Brooklyn and then Manhattan.

He had an inventor’s mind, developing a machine he called the “Rotoscope,” which allowed him to hand-trace, frame by frame, motion-picture footage to be used in animation — making it less crude and stuttery than was common when Fleischer was getting started.

Betty Boop started out as a half-dog, half-female creation, appearing for the first time in the 1930 short “Dizzy Dishes.”

She soon morphed into the flirty girl next door, debuting with the name Betty Boop in 1931’s “Minding the Baby.” She was an instant hit for Paramount Pictures, according to Richard Fleischer, who died in 2006.

“Several squeaky female voices were tried out in the early Betty Boops, but none seemed exactly right,” he wrote in his book. “The voice needed to be squeaky, but it also needed to be cute and sexy, to sing, to do good line readings and to be able to say and sing ‘Boop-oop-a-doop’ in exactly the right way.”

Max Fleischer settled on the American actress Mae Questel, who was Boop’s voice for all 118 animated shorts.

Actress Mae Questel, the voice of Betty Boop, with the character’s creator Max Fleischer in the early 1930s.

Fleischer Studios, Inc.

But just who provided the inspiration for the voice is up for debate.

Helen Kane, a popular singer in the 1930s, said Max Fleischer stole her singing style to create Boop, and she sued for $250,000 in a case that made front-page news in New York. A judge ruled against Kane after it came to light that the Black, Chicago-born singer and dancer Esther Lee Jones was singing in that style long before Kane.

Betty Boop “was born of that age,” according to Mark Fleischer. “She embodies the collective creativity and energy and the many artists” of the day.

In the beginning, Boop’s skirt was so short you could see her garter. A few years later, her hemline dropped drastically in response to self-imposed movie industry guidelines.

“Betty had to change her style,” says Peter Benjaminson, author of the recently released “The Life and Times of Betty Boop: The 100-Year History of an Animated Icon.” “She became a housewife — pretty, but she had a few more pounds. She had a dog. She cleaned the house.”

Even with the makeover, Boop never lost that odd blend of infant and fully developed woman.

The CIBC Theatre marquee heralds “Boop! The Musical.”

Pat Nabong / Sun-Times

Grace Kessler Overbeke, an assistant theater professor at Columbia College Chicago, says that explains part of Boop’s appeal.

“Setting aside the more sinister implications of sexualizing women through infantilization, women may see a seductive quality in the fantasy of being able to reconcile your adult body with your childhood,” Overbeke says. “The idea that you can be both a girl and a woman at once? That is fantastic.”

The old Boop cartoons were seven or eight minutes long. Will today’s audiences sit in a theater for two-plus hours to see the musical?

Ivan Brunetti — who teaches courses on illustration, cartooning and graphic novels at Columbia — doesn’t see why not. After all, Boop cartoons were essentially 10-minute-long musicals, he says.

“They made a two-hour Barbie movie,” Brunetti says. “So, if you can spin it out of a Barbie doll, you can certainly spin two hours out of Betty Boop.”

Making CTA holiday trains involves decking the L’s at Santa’s Skokie workshop

2023-11-17T06:00:00-06:00

Anthony Vazquez/Sun-Times

Beneath the chilly strip lighting of the vast warehouse and just to the south of the oil drums, hydraulic lifts and gunk-smeared train wheels, a magical thing twinkles and sparkles.

It hums every so slightly — almost like it’s purring.

It’s almost time.

The Allstate CTA holiday train is smothered with 62,500 lights, all working as they should. The sleigh and reindeer are in place. And Santa Claus is on his way, journeying from his home in the faraway north.

A red-nosed Rudolph helms the reindeer leading Santa’s sleigh that sits atop a special flatbed car on the CTA Holiday Train at the CTA Skokie hub on Thursday morning.

Anthony Vazquez/Sun-Times

“The holiday train can be stressful as far as getting it together because you want everything to be perfect, but it all pays off when you turn around and see the smiles on those kids’ faces,” said Enrique Rosa, the Chicago Transit Authority rail maintenance worker who oversees the agency’s holiday train preparations.

The train — six cars and a flatbed car for Santa and his sleigh — sits in a giant CTA warehouse in Skokie. Late Thursday, the towering garagelike doors were expected to be lifted and the train wheeled out in preparation for its Nov. 24 first run of the season.

It isn’t simply a matter of flipping the power switch. It takes about three months of prep work.

Enrique Rosa, the Chicago Transit Authority rail maintenance worker who oversees the agency’s holiday train preparations, stands in front of the trains at the CTA’s Skokie hub.

Anthony Vazquez/Sun-Times

“A lot of different trades have to get involved,” Rosa said. “We basically strip the train of all of its exterior lights and wraps. So every year, we have to reapply all the lights, the wraps. Before we do any of that, we run the trains through their exercises to make sure there are no mechanical or electrical faults.”

The Santa train will screech, grind and rumble along all eight of the CTA’s rail lines.

“Elves,” a much-coveted job title, will greet passengers with tiny candy canes — about 150,000 are handed out each season during the train’s run, according to the CTA.

Anthony Vazquez/Sun-Times

It’s the 32nd season for the Santa train, in case you were wondering.

“We see the same elves year after year. They are very excited to be back when the season starts,” said Maddie Kilgannon, a CTA spokesperson.

If you want to have a photo taken with Santa, bring a device. A CTA employee will take a picture for you on a first-come, first-served basis on select dates at select stops (check the schedule at the CTA’s holiday train website) according to the transit agency.

To catch a ride on the train or just take a picture of it, go to transitchicago.com/traintracker.

The interior of the CTA’s Holiday Train.

Anthony Vazquez/Sun-Times

The crew that maintains the Holiday Train and helps customers board it is shown at the rail hub in Skokie.

Anthony Vazquez/Sun-Times

Check out the view from Santa’s sleigh.

Anthony Vazquez/Sun-Times

The interior of the rail cars on the CTA Holiday Train.

Anthony Vazquez/Sun-Times

The driver’s seat in Santa’s sleigh atop the CTA Holiday Train

Anthony Vazquez/Sun-Times

Victory Auto Wreckers closing

2023-11-13T14:30:00-06:00

Kyle Weisner stands in front of a stack of crushed vehicles at Victory Auto Wreckers at 710 E. Green Street in Bensenville. His family has owned the business since 1967.

Anthony Vazquez/Sun-Times

The passenger jet roars off the end of the runway, climbing steeply, its white fuselage gleaming in the late-morning sunlight.

A couple of minutes later, another jet takes off, then another.

It’s a spectacle that could entertain a kid for hours.

Much like what’s happening just to the south of that O’Hare Airport runway, where a wheel loader rumbles toward a junked car, its giant steel prongs spearing the doomed automobile. The car, still vaguely recognizable as a Chevy, is lowered onto the floor of an OverBuilt “High Speed Car Crusher” at Victory Auto Wreckers.

Victory Auto Wreckers at 710 E. Green Street in Bensenville, is shutting down at the end of the month after nearly 80 years in business.

Anthony Vazquez/Sun-Times

Like some medieval torture device, the crusher’s flat steel top comes down on the car; the sheet metal creaks, groans and pops — before the car is smashed, pancake-flat.

Kyle Weisner used to bring his twin boys here a couple of decades ago to take it all in. One of them liked to ride, fireman-style, on the side of one of the shop’s many tow trucks.

“Obviously, my guy drove very slowly. He didn’t want to kill the boss’ kid,” joked Weisner, the owner of the area’s most famous wrecking yard, opened in 1945 after the end of World War II by a pair of veterans.

Plenty of time for jokes now that he’s no longer working 80-hour weeks and preparing to close the Bensenville institution his family has owned since 1967 — perhaps best known for the 1980s TV ad featuring a guy with a shag hairdo who opens the door to a turquoise Chevy Impala, only to have the door fall off its hinges onto the street at his feet.

“That old car is worth money,” says the TV spot’s voiceover announcer.

The last day vehicles will be accepted at the yard is Nov. 18; Nov. 30 is the last day it will be open to the public for parts purchases.

Cars — at least the kind that end up in Weisner’s yard — aren’t worth as much as they once were.

Crushed cars are stacked at Victory Auto Wreckers in Bensenville.

Anthony Vazquez/Sun-Times

“What cuts into the business is that there are less and less of the people who are do-it-yourselfers. Kids, for the most part, they want instant gratification,” Weisner, 54, explains, walking past row upon row of cars and trucks propped up on blocks, hoods open. “They are going to order something online; it’s going to be at their door in an hour. ... There aren’t a ton of people who want to walk around a yard.”

Weisner’s twins — both in the entertainment business out west — aren’t interested in the junkyard life.

It’s not for everyone. The main lot is a vast, coal-black automobile graveyard. When the wind is blowing the wrong way, an unmistakable odor drifts from a nearby waste-water treatment plant, Weisner says.

Rows of vehicles await customers seeking an assortment of auto parts at Victory Auto Wreckers in Bensenville.

Anthony Vazquez/Sun-Times

Hired junkyard dogs — Doberman pinschers and German shepherds — used to prowl the 8.8-acre lot. They’ve been replaced by surveillance cameras. Two cats — “George” and “Spidey” — deal with other unwelcome guests.

Victory Auto Wreckers, like its commercial, will always be a Chicago classic

“We don’t have any rats or mice or rabbits eating away at cables or fibers,” Weisner says.

That’s important because the money is in the recycling of parts and materials.

When Victory picks up your vehicle — paying anywhere from $200 to $500 depending on its weight, not the model — it’s towed to the yard and basically stripped.

So pay attention to parking signs, Weisner cautions.

“We start on it right away: We cut the hoses, drain the gas tank,” Weisner said.

A employee at Victory Auto Wreckers loads crushed vehicles onto a trailer for transport to a recycling facility.

Anthony Vazquez/Sun-Times

The battery and the catalytic converter are removed.

Visitors have about a week to pick over the new arrivals. You can pick up an engine for $146, but you have to hoist it up and cart it away yourself.

“It’s a lot of work — that’s why you’re getting the motor for $146,” Weisner said.

Much of what customers don’t take gets sold to re-build or re-sale companies: transmissions, AC compressors, copper wiring, on-board computers.

What’s left — basically the shell, with the seats, steering column and sometimes the engine— gets crushed.

In a typical week, Victory used to strip and crush about 400 vehicles, Weisner said.

A “diamond in the rough” occasionally shows up — like the 1975 baby blue Cadillac Eldorado convertible towed onto the lot about 15 years back.

“It needed very, very minor [repairs],” Weisner said. “Somebody had spent a lot of money on that.”

Weisner rarely learns a vehicle’s backstory and didn’t in this case, he said. He didn’t crush the car; he sold it for $5,000.

A few years ago, a Victory worker found an AK-47 in the trunk of a car. A call came in from someone saying he had an item he needed to quickly retrieve from the car.

“The minute he shows up, police cars came and they grabbed him,” Weisner said.

Villa Park resident Bob Zajdel, now 63, was in his 20s when he was asked to film a commercial for his then-employer, Victory Auto Wreckers. The ad ran for almost four decades.

Anthony Vazquez/Sun-Times

Most people who know the name Victory probably haven’t been to the junkyard — but they’ve seen the famous TV ad, which ran from 1985 to just a few weeks ago. It made Victory a lot of money, and its star, Bob Zajdel, a local celebrity. He was in his 20s when Weisner’s dad, Kenneth Weisner, picked him for the on-camera role.

At the time, Zajdel worked for Victory as a tow truck driver. Now, 63, he drives an 18-wheeler, hauling freight.

Folks still tease him about the ad, he said.

But he never made a dime from the ad — except for two hours’ pay.

“I’ll walk into a bar — one of the neighborhood bars — and someone will say, ‘You were on the TV the other day,’” said Zajdel, who lives in Villa Park. “I get free drinks every now and then.”

As for Weisner, he’s looking forward, finally, to some free time in Arizona, where he and his wife now live.

“I’m looking forward to just puttering around,” he said.

Chicago romance novel bookstore is off to a happy beginning

2023-11-13T05:30:00-06:00

Amanda Anderson, founder of The Last Chapter Book Shop in Chicago’s Roscoe Village neighborhood, holds a copy of “Free Fall” by Sara Cate.

Pat Nabong/Sun-Times

Little paper hearts — hundreds of them — plaster the walls, like wet fallen leaves swept up in a sudden gust.

Candles with Taylor Swift song titles — “Evermore,” “Cruel Summer” and “Lover” —perfume the air.

A rose-colored sofa offers a place for visitors to relax, perhaps to swoon.

But don’t be fooled, there’s something dark going on inside The Last Chapter Book Shop in Roscoe Village, which opened in early September.

The Last Chapter Book Shop is located at 2013 W. Roscoe Ave. in Roscoe Village in Chicago.

Pat Nabong/Sun-Times

Something like this: “I’d been kidnapped by a certifiably insane bastard who thought he was the devil.”

Or this: “My mother used to say beautiful things were wrought from the most unimaginable pain. Then she’d put her cigarette out on my stomach, in case I needed a reminder that whatever beauty I possessed was still a work in progress.”

Last Chapter isn’t your grandmother’s romance bookstore — well, not just your grandmother’s. For those who find the traditional bodice ripper a bit anti-climactic, there’s romance of the contemporary, fantasy, sports, LGBTQ+ variety and, as in the samples above, there’s dark romance, too.

Dark romance for dark times?

Perhaps, but it’s still a romance novel, in which the unbreakable rule of happily ever after still applies.

Amanda Anderson, founder of The Last Chapter Book Shop, rings up a customer at the Roscoe Village emporium.

Pat Nabong/Sun-Times

“This person was abused, but they can still find love, they can still learn to re-love themselves,” explains Amanda Anderson, the bookstore owner. “In books, you get to see people go through so much and still find happiness at the end of the day.”

Romance in its myriad varieties sells. When Anderson, 28, first opened her doors in September, the wait to get in was upwards of three hours for some. She estimates she’s drawing about 2,500 customers a week. She also sells books online.

Anderson’s is the only bookstore in the city devoted to romance novels, she says. The next nearest is Love’s Sweet Arrow, in Tinley Park, which opened in 2019 and has seen annual sales grow about 35% since that time, said part-owner Roseann Backlin.

“The world is still a s - - - show right now,” Backlin said. “So anything we as people can do to just block it out and just have some enjoyment in our lives — that’s what we’re looking for.”

Ki Collins takes advantage of one of several selfie spots inside The Last Chapter Book Shop.

Pat Nabong/Sun-Times

Anderson’s store woos customers with something online merchants can’t: comfy sofas, scented candles and three “selfie booths,” one of which encourages customers to write the names of their crushes [“Captain America,” “Taylor Swift” and “Peter Pan,” among them] on paper hearts and stick them on the walls. Another booth offers a tub of colored chalks and a chalkboard with an ever-changing theme. Last week, it read: “He’s a ten but ...”

To which, one person responded: “He needs a mom, not a girlfriend.”

Anderson, a lifelong fan of romance novels, said the genre literally saved her life after she lost her godmother to cancer a few years ago.

“It made me come to terms with and put a name to the face of the emotions I was feeling and that I will be OK one day,” Anderson said.

Jen Vihon, 32, of Wicker Park is a painter and a graduate of the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business. She’s also unashamedly “dipping” her toes into the romance genre.

Vihon said her partner, a bookseller, broke her of a “snobbishness about genre fiction.”

Jen Vihon browses one of the many titles at The Last Chapter Book Shop in Roscoe Village.

Pat Nabong/Sun-Times

“The context of the story in a romance novel makes the sex of the story so much more interesting than what you get in conventional porn,” she said. Porn “works for some people, but I find it uninspired and often quite problematic in terms of the way women are treated.”

Vihon was one of several dozen people who browsed the shelves in Anderson’s store on a recent weekday afternoon — almost all of them young women.

Sara Bastian, 26, came with her boyfriend, Randy Santiago, both of Lake View. He was there to keep her company — nothing more.

Bastian, a writer herself, said she’s fond of a number of romance sub-genres, including something called “fake dating.”

Sara Bastian and her boyfriend Randy Santiago browse a book at The Last Chapter Book Shop.

Pat Nabong/Sun-Times

“I also like ‘friends to lovers’ because that can be endearing and sweet, and not as stressful as something like ‘enemies to lovers,’ but I also do like ‘enemies to lovers,’ ” she said.

Anderson is herself single and dating casually, she said.

But she’s looking for true love.

And what might that look like?

There’s a novel, she says, in which the heroine develops amnesia — not even recognizing the man she loves. He’s so selfless he doesn’t tell her about their relationship, not wanting to disrupt her healing.

“He says that if she finds happiness without me, I’m still going to love her from afar,” Anderson explained. “Oh my gosh, I was crying. It was so beautiful ... The act of true love.”

A customer touches one of the many heart-shaped Post-It notes on which the names of customers’ fictional crushes are written at The Last Chapter Book Shop.

Pat Nabong/Sun-Times