Features

Summer Pleasures
Our appreciation of this most contradictory of seasons, featuring guides to city beaches, outdoor music, free events, garden cafes, and summer reading. Also, celebrity swimsuits, waterside heroes, summer houses, beach gear, and the Kelsons’ favorite hot dogs

Fear and Loathing in Papa Bear’s Den
by Robert McClory
After one nonchampionship season, the wrath of Bears fans has focused on team president Mike McCaskey. Is he the rightful heir to a Grabowski legacy?

My Father’s Life
by Stanley Elkin
Phil was a traveling salesman, a rhinestone merchant, a master at sizing people up – and cutting them down to size.

A Night to Forget
by Nancy Coons
Prom is a dance with little dancing, a dizzy teen-age march toward dawn.

Departments

Letters

Journal: No Excuses
by Hillel Levin, editor
Let me explain the methods behind our madness.

Metro
by David Jackson
Halting an immigration “expert”; factory owners hot under the blue collar

Artworks
by Henry Hanson
Sondheim’s Sunday parks at the Goodman; Lollobrigida provokes lust in Chicago; Warhol goes to heaven in New York.

Theatre: When Bad Theatre Is Good
by Bob Daily
A good-bad play is redeemable; a bad-bad play is unforgivable.
Space: Getting Malled
by M.W. Newman
Suburban-style parking in the city leaves us longing for the days of horses and carriages.
Movies: Avoiding the Shore
by Penelope Mesic
In Swimming to Cambodia, Spalding Gray is like a cross between Robin Williams and Mark Twain.

Books: A Man and Three Women
Michael Dorris’s A Yellow Raft in Blue Water: Is this cross writing? From a transauthor?

Execs: Sailing to the Top
by Jan Parr
With the wind at his sales, a reclusive adman is turning Lands’ End into a mail-order phenomenon.

Last Call: Going to the Country
by Joanne Trestrail
Summers on the Fox River – a childhood setting for a lifetime of dreams

Chicago Guides
Events

Dining

On WFMT