Friday 5/10 – Thursday 5/16
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11 SATURDAY I remember my first time on a plane. It was 1978, I was four years old, and my family and I were about halfway to Disney World when the 747 hit heavy turbulence and suddenly dropped 100 feet. The plane leveled off, but for the next 20 minutes it felt like we were bumping over mountaintops at 400 miles an hour. “Dad,” I cried, “are we gonna crash into the mountains?” “There aren’t any mountains,” he replied, and slammed the rest of his beer. Since 1992, the Experimental Aircraft Association has sponsored Young Eagles, a program that gives free plane rides to kids in hopes that a good first flight will instill an aviation-positive attitude. More than 780,000 kids have taken part internationally; 6,000 of them have flown out of Meigs Field, where this month’s Young Eagles Rally begins today at 9 AM and continues until everybody’s had a turn. Kids must be between 7 and 17 years old and accompanied by an adult, with a parent’s written permission to fly. Call 312-409-5621 for more info and to register; walk-ins are welcome, but they’ll fly last.
After a 1997 trip to Hong Kong, Macau, and southern China, ghost hunter Richard Crowe started offering Supernatural Chinatown, a walking tour of the south-side neighborhood’s haunts. Many Chinese, says Crowe, take a “holistic approach to the supernatural–everything pertains to it.” For instance, at the Emperor’s Choice restaurant on Wentworth, next door to a funeral home, “Local patrons almost always sit on the left–south–side of the dining room, leaving tourists and nonlocals to sit on the right–north–side. This is due to a widely held belief in the neighborhood that the wall next to the funeral home is cold–not physically, but psychically–because of the dead bodies next door.” Today’s tour begins at 11:30 AM with a lecture and slide show at the Triple Crown Restaurant, 211 W. 22nd Pl., and runs till around 3. Tickets are $30, which includes lunch. Call 708-499-0300 to register.
15 WEDNESDAY Last December, Theresa Kubasak and Gabe Huck went to Iraq as part of a delegation from Voices in the Wilderness, an organization working to end UN sanctions against that country. The group donated blood in Baghdad, crossed the no-fly zone in a converted Russian cargo plane, and were joined by Muslims at midnight mass in Basra. Tonight at 7 Kubasak and Huck will talk about the trip and screen the 2001 documentary Hidden Wars of Desert Storm at the main branch of the Evanston Public Library, 1703 Orrington (847-866-0300). It’s free.
