Journalist, Author & Syndicated Columnist
What’re you doing New Year’s Eve? Let’s take a guess. You don’t have a date for the big night. Or, if you do, the two of you are dreading the thought of dealing with booked restaurants, inebriated revelers and couples trying just a little too hard to prove they’re having the best night of their lives. Then again, who wants to spend $300 for a night on the town when the economy is so iffy?
As the star of “The Pretender,” Michael T. Weiss grew accustomed to wearing natty designer clothes. For his role as a corrupt, corpulent cop in the film “Bones”–which opens Wednesday–Weiss wore a different kind of suit: a fat suit. “People who haven’t seen me since ‘The Pretender’ are going to think, ‘Boy, he really let himself go,'” says the ordinarily lean 6-foot-3 actor.
You’ve got to feel a little bad for the Chicago cast of “The Real World.” The seven young ‘uns probably thought they’d get to live rent-free for the summer in a way-cool house in way-cool Wicker Park, hang with a Pumpkin or two and use the MTV soap opera-style documentary to launch their 15 minutes of fame.
Six years ago, I fell in love. Hard. Not with a man, but with a television sitcom called “Friends.” I loved it so much that in 1995, I wrote a book about the series called Best of Friends (HarperPerennial). For the record, I never wrote a book about any of my ex-boyfriends.
I narrate the show and it’s a very sexually oriented series. And I do start the show saying, “It’s all about sex.” But it’s also very relationship driven. We deal with a lot of other issues besides sex. I guess what I’m trying to say is that we’re not just a gay show. I think it’d be funny if we were a gay version of the “Sopranos.” We bring a guy in who thinks he’s going to get a makeover and instead, we whack him!
It’s time to finalize phone-a-friend lifelines. We get to name up to five people, and may use one if we get to the hot seat and are stuck on a question. On the day I qualified, I’d asked Phil Blanchard, the Sun-Times telegraph editor on whom I plan to lean for geography, current events and general arcane knowledge. My others will be Darel Jevens and Jae-Ha Kim from the Sun-Times features staff, John Lavalie, a librarian friend in Des Plaines, and George Vass, an author and retired sportswriter and copy editor who is my backup on classical music, literature and history.
Richard Hatch walked around naked, caught a lot of fish and got on a lot of people’s nerves before winning the million-dollar prize on “Survivor.” And Chicago’s gay community is loving all of the attention being lavished on a man one of his cast mates referred to as “Darth Gaydar.”
A decade of despair, the heroes of “Beverly Hills, 90210” have endured every kind of trauma possible.
Directing Gary Hobson wasn’t difficult for Kyle Chandler. After all, Chandler has played Hobson on the CBS series “Early Edition” for four years. What did present a challenge for Chandler was shooting scenes that centered on Gary, without being able to view himself in action as it happened.
Former Chicagoan Bob Bass lost his chance to become a millionaire. And he wants a second shot at it. As a contestant on last week’s highly popular game show “Who Wants to be a Millionaire,” Bass was asked which U.S. president was the youngest at his inauguration. He answered John F. Kennedy. The show maintains that the correct answer is Theodore Roosevelt.