A Rare Talent
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This being real life, he didn’t. Instead his friend and collaborator, jazz bassist Tatsu Aoki, played a mournful tribute; scriptures were read in English and Cantonese; and his grieving brothers, Allen and Philip, did their best to celebrate his life. They talked about his childhood in Skokie and Evanston. The plump, shy fourth child of immigrants, he took up athletics to overcome physical and social shortcomings and then surprised everyone by growing into a six-foot, one-inch varsity football player, the only Asian on the Evanston Township High School team, and handsome enough to make a cheerleader swoon. (“Your brother is cute” was a line Philip Wong got accustomed to hearing from women, followed by “No, really cute.”) Also a gifted and fanatic lifelong softball player, Wong became a chemical engineer with a degree from Northwestern and a corporate job. But in the early 1980s he landed a role in Organic Theater’s Yellow Fever and was hooked. In the late 80s he left the corporate world to try his luck as a full-time actor, writer, and model. He became a top Asian-American model, appearing in hundreds of print ads and broadcast commercials. He landed some dramatic roles on network television and a principal part in the 1992 feature film Mo’ Money, and he acted on local stages, including Steppenwolf’s, where he was part of the recent production of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. But good roles for Asian actors were nearly as scarce as the Asian role models he had searched U.S. culture for as a kid. The absence of both became a major theme of his work.
The extraordinary performance of Hot Tix in the fiscal year that ended June 30 was mostly due to the relocation of two of its seven facilities, according to League of Chicago Theatres director Marj Halperin. The league’s discount-ticket operation sold just over $2.1 million in half-price tickets last year, about 50 percent more than the previous year. The hot moves? State Street to Randolph and Evanston to Skokie. Another possible factor: a Web site launched in summer 2000, www.hottix.org, which lists shows with available tickets. The site, hosted by the Reader (which also sponsors the Randolph Street location), has been getting 80,000 hits a month.
