Every year, Chicago hosts the Air and Water Show, a weekend of modern and vintage airplanes performing aerobatics, skydiving, all played out in front of a gazillion spectators along Chicago’s North Avenue Beach. In truth, it’s a lot more air than water, though lots and lots of people watch it from their boats. A standing […]

Roughly one in five Americans lives with a disability. So where is our pride movement? That’s the subhead to an op-ed piece called Becoming Disabled in the New York Times Sunday Review this week. The piece was written by Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, an academic who has a disability. The piece is well-written and looooooooooong — Professor Garland-Thomson […]

I published my quick review of our Too Much Light performance earlier this week, and then it dawned on me. Some of you might like a description of what the show actually looked like. Reveca Torres to the rescue! I played a toilet paper roll dispenser Saturday in Reveca’s play called The Anti-Toilet. Reveca was […]

I wasn’t particularly looking forward to this year’s Summer Olympics. A lot of factors conspired against them. To start, way back when, Chicago pushed to get this year’s games. I’ve read a lot of pretty solid stuff on the economic impact of getting the Olympics—not to mention using public money for pro sports—nothing I’ve seen […]

A huge thank you to the neighbors, friends and writers from my memoir classes who made it to Victory Gardens yesterday afternoon for my Chicago stage debut. Your enthusiasm and laughter was very reassuring, and performing on stage ended up being a lot of fun – especially for Whitney the Seeing Eye dog. She stole […]