Friday 3/1 – Thursday 3/7
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
When local filmmaker Allen Ross disappeared in 1995, it was anyone’s guess where he’d gone. His life had taken some odd turns, including a sudden move to Oklahoma and a subsequent marriage to the founder of a fringe religious group. Lacking solid information, friends and family speculated: he could have run away; he could have amnesia; he could be dead. (The mystery was the subject of a 1998 Reader story titled “Where on Earth Is Allen Ross?”) In July 2000 Ross’s mutilated body was found buried under a house in Cheyenne, Wyoming, but who killed him and why remain unclear. Missing Allen, a documentary by Christian Bauer, Ross’s friend and sometime collaborator, explores his mysterious life and death, as well as the reasons Cheyenne police have stopped investigating the case. Audience members at the film’s Chicago screenings, which start tonight and continue through March 7, will be asked to sign a petition “asking the authorities in Cheyenne to put all means possible behind the investigation of the murder.” Bauer will be on hand tonight for both showings, at 6:15 and 8:15, at the Gene Siskel Film Center, 164 N. State. Tickets are $8; call 312-846-2800 or visit www.siskelfilmcenter.org.
2 SATURDAY Last year more than 1,000 people showed up for the gala opening of “Insideout,” an exhibit of work by administrators, preparators, security guards, and clerks at the Museum of Contemporary Art, who developed and curated the event themselves. Insideout: 2, which opens today and runs through March 22, was organized this year by building operations manager Duncan Anderson and assistant to the associate director Kimberly Aubuchon. It features site-specific work, video installations, sculpture, painting, photography, and collage by 50-odd staff members whose levels of artistic experience range from professional to hobbyist. There’s a free opening reception tonight from 5 to 10 at Arena Gallery, 311 N. Sangamon; call 312-421-0212 for more information.
7 THURSDAY Christina Vasa, better known as Queen Christina of Sweden, was born in 1626 to a cunning military father and a hysterical, hedonistic mother, both of whom wished they’d had a son. They raised her as a prince, and she was crowned queen at age five when her father died. By the time she was 30 she’d wooed a virtuous aristocratic woman, a cosmopolitan swashbuckler, a cousin, and a Spanish general, but she claimed it was impossible for her to marry. A disciple of Descartes, she converted to Catholicism (then illegal in Sweden) in 1654, abdicated her throne, and snuck out of the country dressed as a man. She spent the next 15 years in search of another throne, first in Naples and then in Poland. She consorted with mystics and clerics, hired live-in astronomers, sponsored an archaeological dig, opened a theater and Rome’s first public opera house, founded an academy for philosophy and literature, and became well-known as a patron of the arts. Today at 3 the Newberry Consort presents an open rehearsal of The Musical World of Christina of Sweden, a program of works by some of her majesty’s favorite composers and musicians. It’s at the Newberry Library, 60 W. Walton. Tickets are $10, $5 for students; for more information call 312-255-3700.
