|  Arts
& Letters
Welcome home
Comedian Bernie Sahlins, AB’43,
takes in a show at the Second City, a Chicago improv institution
he helped launch 45 years ago.
In 1959 Bernie Sahlins, AB’43, sold
his share of a tape-recorder factory and joined a couple of other
young men, the director Paul Sills, AB’51, and the talented
factotum Howard Alk (who defined a Freudian slip as “meaning
to say one thing and saying a mother”), to found the Second
City, a Chicago cabaret theater that now has touring companies and
branches in several cities and has spawned an antic army of talent.
To name all the former players who became famous in Hollywood and
on Saturday Night Live would leave no space here for anything else,
but they include John Candy, Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, Martin Short,
Gilda Radner, John Belushi, Chris Farley, and Tina Fey.
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| Peer
Review
Arts & Letters
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The only good hero
Why comic creator Peter B. Gillis, AB’73,
AM’80, killed his champions.
In the early 21st century, Earth is beset
by the Horde, a technologically advanced alien race intent on plundering
the planet. The world government, in a desperate attempt at defense,
engineers an elite group of superheroes. The catch? Their new powers
kill them within a year.
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Who likes poker? A show of
hands.
An alumnus hits the jackpot with cable
television’s latest moneymaker.
Steve Lipscomb, JD’88, has played
his cards right. The 43-year-old founder and CEO of the World
Poker Tour, a televised, no-limit Texas hold ’em tournament
on the Travel Channel, bet big before the flop and helped spur a
poker fever that in the past year and a half has made lingo like
“flop” familiar in households across the country.
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Cultural Studies
Model Students
Before Chicago scholars don cap and gown,
they proclaim their affliliation with alma mater more casually,
broadcasting the University spirit in all its iterations—from
wry puffery to sly contempt. This fall photographer Lloyd DeGrane
found pret-a-porter propaganda gracing the shoulders of several
Chicago students. In fact, unsanctioned slogans are so popular among
quads fashionistas that the classic, “Where fun comes to die,”
has spawned its own knockoffs.—A.L.M.
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| Bed
as Battlefield, 2002, oil on canvas, by John Ransom
Phillips, AB'60, PhD'66. From Bed as Autobiography
(U of C Press, 2004). See Open
Mike. |
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