Friday 12/6 – Thursday 12/12
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7 SATURDAY “Johnny Maier, my enamorata of last night, is a character in truth. Soon after he got up ‘to get a drink of water,’ I followed, and found him playing billiards and going on a [spree]. Went to-bed at the Aveline, forfeiting my $2.” So wrote polyamorous cub reporter and avid book collector John “Hapless Jack” Wing in his diary on October 5, 1865. Wing lived in Chicago from 1865 to 1866 and returned in 1870 to make his fortune publishing trade magazines. In 1917 he left his extensive collection of books and scrapbooks, as well as those diaries not destroyed in the Great Fire, to the Newberry Library, thus seeding what became the first American collection devoted to the history of printing. Bibliophile and printmaking enthusiast Robert Williams found the journals he transcribed and edited for The Chicago Diaries of John M. Wing, 1865-1866 in the Newberry’s collection. He’ll give a free talk about Wing today at 11 at the library, 60 W. Walton; call 312-255-3700.
California congresswoman Barbara Lee got death threats after she cast the only House vote against using “all necessary and appropriate force” against those associated with the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Actor Danny Glover was taken to task for his stance against the death penalty when he said he would never support it, even for Osama bin Laden. And Aaron McGruder’s comic strip The Boondocks was pulled from several newspapers because of its critique of post-September 11 America. That these public figures, all of whom are black, were harassed for speaking out is indicative of a national clampdown on dissent, say the editors of The Paradox of Loyalty: An African-American Response to the War on Terrorism (Third World Press), an essay collection featuring Lee, Glover, McGruder, and many others. Coeditor Julianne Malveaux and publisher Haki R. Madhubuti will discuss the book today at 2 at the DuSable Museum of African American History, 740 E. 56th Pl. It’s free; call 773-947-0600.
11 WEDNESDAY Nearly one mil-lion people have seen a Goodman Theatre production of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol since its debut as an annual event 25 years ago. This year’s Scrooge–the Goodman’s fifth–is William Brown, who played the ghost of Jacob Marley last year. (That role’s now filled, in a circular bit of casting, by former Scrooge William J. Norris.) Brown “wisely restrains both the sneering before Scrooge’s salvation and the cheering afterward,” says Reader critic Lawrence Bommer. “This Christmas Carol comes closer to the wake-up call Dickens intended than Goodman has ever dared to deliver before.” Performances are today at noon and tonight at 7:30 at the Goodman, 170 N. Dearborn. The show runs through December 28 and tickets range from $20 to $50; call 312-443-3800.
