Short stories and photos shared with humor and love
With hip swings so enthusiastic they frequently landed her in detention at Our Lady of Angels High School, my mother loved playing her trumpet in the marching band. She passed on her trumpet loving genes to my sister Jenny, who, dressed in her bridesmaid gown, blew her horn at my long-ago wedding, and to my [...]
With a simple, stapled songbook and some old campfire songs, retired choral director Mr. Jim Heiks and his merry band of rock star carolers told the story of music. We found them loosely grouped under a shade tree on a sunny Saturday afternoon, Cory Chisel, Langhorne Slim, and Hillary Reynolds, cheerfully singing children's songs as [...]
Navigating the 50+ venues hosting 220 bands and solo artists at this year's Mile of Music Festival required the kind of preparation and organization that tends to elude Molly B and Me. Fortunately, for this year's festival, we had Katherine Biskupic, who sent us pre-festival playlists at regular intervals in the weeks leading up to [...]
If you want to know about a classic rock band, ask a guy who has seen them perform more than 20 times. Our friend Mike discovered Chicago 40 years ago. Son of a band leader himself, Mike identified with the classically trained musicians. "They're educated musicians," he said. "They mostly met in college in Chicago [...]
It seemed particularly fitting to those of us who had hosted Fundamentally Sound, an acappella group from the University of Wisconsin, that the all-male performers chose "brotherhood" as the theme of their competitive set for the International Championship of Collegiate A Cappella Midwest Tournament. The young men recently completed a low-budget tour that included home [...]