Journalist, Author & Syndicated Columnist
You have died and gone to heaven. You are inside the West Town factory where Fannie May and Fanny Farmer chocolates are manufactured, and you are thisclose to vats of caramel, chocolate and pecans. Never mind that there is a TV crew filming a news segment (there are no public tours), and you’ve been spotted wearing a hairnet and a white lab coat with the name “Catherine” embroidered over your pocket. Never mind that you’re not Catherine.
Need a New Year’s Eve date? Then check out the January issue of Cosmopolitan. Chicagoan Shawn McClain is featured as “Cosmo’s Single Guy” of the month.
Viggo Mortensen is relating a tale that involves Vince Vaughn, a butcher knife and the threat of bodily harm. But, oddly enough, the actor isn’t describing the shooting of his latest film, “Psycho.” He’s remembering a country music concert. “Vince and I went to see Buck Owens one night after we had finished that day’s shoot [for “Psycho”],” Mortensen said during a call from his Los Angeles home. “I had gotten one of the `Psycho’ knives to give to Buck as a present ’cause it was his birthday. They wanted us to give it to him on stage that night. “So we bumbled our way through our speech to Buck. He opened the box and saw the knife, and the fiddler started making the “eek eek eek” [noise from the shower scene]. Buck got all excited and started posing as a damsel in distress. Then he began chasing Dwight Yoakam all around the stage with the knife. I don’t think he realized it was real.”
Johnny Rzeznik has gotten used to lingerie. No, the lead singer and guitarist for the Goo Goo Dolls hasn’t gone Marilyn Manson on us. Rather, the photogenic musician finally has gotten used to the barrage of bras and panties that his female fans fling at him onstage every night.
For a band that made its debut with an album full of bluntly sexual songs, Placebo has simmered down … a little. At their show Tuesday night at Metro, the English trio debuted cuts from their current record “Without You I’m Nothing.” Musically, the album is pure post-punk genius, heavy on dissonant guitar chords and conjuring up the romantic desperation the title implies.
On a recent episode of the hit TV series “Martial Law,” hero Sammo Law inspected a packet of jewels and said, “There are rumors about this – a new type of high-quality synthetic diamond that can only be made at high pressure, under very cold temperatures.” Impressed, his colleague asked if he had acquired this knowledge in China. “No,” Sammo said. “On the Discovery Channel.”
I’m trying very hard not to put off, hold back or save anything that would add laughter and luster to our lives. And every morning when I open my eyes I tell myself that this is a special occasion.
I always had a prejudice against pre-packaged sandwiches. Somehow, they always looked like they should be in a machine, waiting for some hungry soul to plop in a few quarters and liberate them.
The three-dimensional Tyrannosaurus rex dinosaurs in “T-Rex: Back to the Cretaceous” look like they could throttle the dickens out of the ones depicted in “Jurassic Park.” The visuals in “T-Rex” are so amazing that a story line isn’t even necessary. But the screenwriters came up with a plot that – while not totally original – works as an effective tool to educate viewers as it entertains.
My mission, if I chose to accept it, was to try Seattle Sutton’s Healthy Eating program for a month. The goal wasn’t to lose weight, but to see if a fast food junkie such as myself could train herself to eat nutritious meals if they were cooked and delivered to me. It sounded good. Basically, all I had to do was chew, so I happily accepted the challenge.
Twiggy is still looking stylish and mod as the cover girl for the December issue of More. Aimed for women old enough to remember emulating the ’60s model, the mag is living up to its promise of “smart talk for smart women.”
Shot in Chicago in 18 days, “Do You Wanna Dance?” is a delightful little sleeper that captures the richness of the city as it tells the story of a dancer forced to serve community service in tightly knit Greek Town. Never mind the goofy title, which implies a giddy, mindless romp.
Most artists make their American debuts playing smoky bars or small clubs. Anggun Cipta Sasmi found herself touring alongside Sarah McLachlan, Bonnie Raitt, Queen Latifah and Natalie Merchant at this year’s Lilith Fair.
The last time Brad Pitt graced the cover of Vanity Fair, the flaxen-haired movie star was in his “Legends of the Fall” mode. This time around, in the November issue, he’s sporting a more clean-cut, well-muscled look.
Chung Goo Ho remembers of the Korean War, “When it got dark, the soldiers aimed searchlights on us. Then they began shooting at the crowd. . . . To dodge the bullets we tried to hide behind the corpses. . . . My mother was shot. At the time, she was hugging me and my younger sister to her breast to protect us from the gunfire. She was killed by four bullets to her head and her back. My sister and I could do nothing but wait. We had nothing to eat and we drank bloody water out of a nearby stream.”
The women have Lilith Fair. And if singer-songwriter Steve Poltz gets his way, the men will have Frasier Fair.
Multimedia star Oprah Winfrey can add cover-girl queen to her list of credits. A longtime fixture on TV Guide, People and women’s magazines, Winfrey graces the cover of both the October Vogue and this week’s Time magazine. Both are timed to hype the opening of her film “Beloved” next month.
“No land on Earth possesses more wonder than Egypt,” narrator Omar Sharif notes in “Mysteries of Egypt,” the latest Omnimax film to play at the Museum of Science and Industry. And the film certainly plays up some of those wonders: the ancient Pyramids, King Tutankhamen’s sacred tomb and the glorious, winding stretch of the Nile. But what the movie lacks is the excitement and splendor of previous Omnimax films such as the superb “Everest.”
There’s one thing I don’t ever want to see in a women’s room — a man. Ever since “Ally McBeal” hit it big on Fox, talk around the water cooler has centered on two things: the brevity of our heroine’s hemline and the uncomfortable concept of the coed bathrooms that the attorneys share on the show.
Imagine that the Russians took over America in 1957, nirvana is a place called Lost Vegas and the leader of the Western world is Elvis Presley. When he dies in 1997, every guitar-playing, sword-swinging maverick worth his weight in blue suede shoes heads to Vegas to become the next King of Rock ‘n’ Roll.