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      Before Lockdown, This Super Fan Went to 105 Shows in One Season

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }At HomeFall in Love: With TenorsConsider: Miniature GroceriesSpend 24 Hours: With Andra DayGet: A Wildlife CameraAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyHe Went to 105 Shows in One Season. Now He Watches TV.What has this year been like for the most voracious of culture vultures? A super fan in Chicago lets us into his life without the arts.Edward T. Minieka, a 77-year-old arts enthusiast, in the doorway of the Chicago apartment where he has spent much of his time during lockdown, unable to take in live events.Credit…Evan Jenkins for The New York TimesMarch 11, 2021, 5:00 a.m. ETEdward T. Minieka was 5 years old when his parents started taking him to see shows.The Miniekas lived in Bridgeport, on Chicago’s South Side, and hopped a streetcar to get downtown. They watched “King Midas and the Golden Touch” at the Goodman Children’s Theater, plus family programs at Symphony Center and the Civic Opera House. On good days, there might be a visit to the Woolworth’s lunch counter; on really good days, the Walnut Room at Marshall Field’s.Minieka is now 77 years old. He still lives in Chicago. And he still loves the arts.In the last prepandemic season, he bought tickets for 105 live performances — symphony, opera and lots of theater.Then, thanks to the lockdown, he got a TV.With his new (to him) TV, Minieka is watching British shows and the occasional movie. But he has no use for digital theater.Credit…Evan Jenkins for The New York TimesThe performing arts depend on people like Minieka — culture vultures, often retired, who fill the seats at many a show. And that dependence is mutual. There are lots of people, many of them older, for whom the arts are a way to stay connected to the world — intellectually, emotionally and socially.This last year, when live performance before live audiences has been largely banned, has hit the most devoted especially hard.“What I miss most of all is the community,” Minieka said in one of a series of telephone interviews from the antiques-filled downtown apartment where he has been holed up for most of the year, but for the occasional walk, weather permitting, and a weekly early morning trip to the grocery.A former professor of management and statistics at the University of Illinois at Chicago, he is accustomed to solitude, having lived alone for a long time. “I tried living with boyfriends off and on,” he said, “but I’m better off having my own space.”He pauses to reflect. “It’s OK,” he added. “I have a nice apartment. I’ve got the TV set up. I just got a new phonograph — my old one died after 25 years — and I’ve been listening to some of the old opera recordings my father gave me just before he died.”Opera recordings, antique English furniture and old master paintings fill Minieka’s art-filled apartment. (Maria Callas is one of his favorite sopranos.)Credit…Evan Jenkins for The New York TimesHe’s been quite intentional about maintaining social ties. He doesn’t like video chatting, but schedules one to three phone calls a night. He makes lists of what he wants to talk about, just to jog his memory.But it’s not the same. One day, taking the bus to a doctor’s appointment, he ran into a woman he knew from the art world, and it hit him, the absence of serendipity. “A phone call is arranged,” he said. “I don’t run into chums, and get some buzz from them — that someone who has just come home from New York, and tells you about what show they saw. That’s gone, and there’s no way to replace that.”The Same Seat at the SymphonyIn the before times, Minieka would put on a coat and tie every Thursday and take a bus to the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, settling into the same seat in the back corner of the sixth floor where he’s sat for years. “I close my eyes and listen,” he says. “I just want to hear them.” During intermission, he and his gang would meet in the Symphony Center’s ballroom, saying hello and trading gossip.He’s been a regular attendee since his undergraduate days at Illinois Tech, when he’d buy $1 tickets; he still remembers seeing Fritz Reiner conduct. “They didn’t have an elevator then, but I didn’t mind walking up six floors,” he said, “and the sound in the top gallery is sublime.”More than anything, Minieka (sitting before a prized and rare 19th century piano) says he misses the community that comes with attending cultural events.Credit…Evan Jenkins for The New York TimesMinieka began grad school at Stanford, and while there he’d visit the San Francisco Opera; he finished up at Yale, where he learned to love plays at the drama school, and where he organized a car pool to New York to see productions at the Metropolitan Opera.He’s not interested in Broadway in Chicago or the big nonprofits — too commercial. But he subscribed to the Court and TimeLine and Steep and Redtwist and A Red Orchid, key pieces of the city’s thriving small and storefront theater scene, as well as to the Lyric Opera.He’s a pensioner, and money is tight, so he bargain hunts — balcony seats, discounts, last-minute tickets. “It’s my own fault, buying antiques,” he shrugs. “There were smarter things to buy.”There are so many memories — just last season, there was the Pride Films and Plays production of the musical “A Man of No Importance,” which Minieka attended with 20 friends, and the series of short plays by women at the Broken Nose Theater’s summer Bechdel Fest.During the live performance shutdown, he has visited one museum. “I went once during the last year, to see the El Greco show,” he said, “but the problem was people were congregating around the captions. It was just too risky.”He’s also stopped, after 40 years, going in person to the solemn high Mass at the Church of the Ascension, known for its music. “Now they have reservations, but I don’t want to do it,” he said. “It’s not going to be the same.”Will Minieka return to live performance? “I’ve kind of gotten used to sitting at home, and not paying for tickets, or spending a couple of nickels to have things streamed,” he said.Credit…Evan Jenkins for The New York TimesArt fills his life, literally. He lives in a vintage apartment filled with his collection of English furniture and old master paintings, plus, of course, shelves of opera on vinyl. “I like to pull out some of the old ones,” he said. “You come to a new level of understanding.”Before the pandemic, he enjoyed playing host. Every winter since 1978, he had convened a series of Wednesday night salons, inviting curators, collectors, artists and art lovers to gather at his apartment. “It’s amazing the conversations that happen around midnight,” he said.His final night out was March 9, 2020, when he went with friends to Petterino’s Monday Night Live, a cabaret showcase. “It was full throttle,” he said, “as if everyone knew the lockdown was coming.”A few days later, he dressed up and boarded the bus to watch the symphony perform “Rhapsody in Blue” and “Boléro.” He arrived, found out the performance had been canceled, and went back home. That was March 12.Late to Binge WatchingMinieka never had much use for television. For years he had a hand-me-down black-and-white he used to watch the Oscars and the elections, but when the tubes started leaking, he threw it out. At the start of the pandemic, a friend offered him her old TV — she was upgrading — and he decided it was time to hook up cable and figure out streaming.He’s bingeing “Downton Abbey,” “The Crown” and “Brideshead Revisited.” He watches the occasional movie. But he has no patience for digital theater. “I just don’t enjoy it,” he says. “I’ve been to the real thing.”Now he’s had both vaccine doses, and he’s planning to celebrate by seeing a Monet exhibit at the Art Institute. But will he go back to live performance? He’s not sure.“I’ve kind of gotten used to sitting at home, and not paying for tickets, or spending a couple of nickels to have things streamed,” he said. “And it used to be you had an 8 o’clock curtain, and if I wasn’t there they’d close the doors. Now I can start whenever I want, and I don’t have to wear a matching tux.”“I was running at full steam, going out every night,” Minieka said. “Suddenly it all stops, and I adjust.”Credit…Evan Jenkins for The New York TimesHe describes this period as a “sabbatical,” and ponders what he would want to see next; at other times, he says he thinks of this as a second retirement, and that he might just move into a retirement community and stop going out. After all, he has a heart condition, he takes 16 pills a day, he uses a cane for balance, so maybe it’s time?“I was running at full steam, going out every night,” he said. “Suddenly it all stops, and I adjust. In a way, it puts a coda on that part of my life.”As for his annual salons? “March 4, 2020 was the last one,” Minieka said. “I’m too old to do it. It’s a lot of work. And it’s nice to end something when you don’t know it’s the closing night.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Erica Faye Watson, Comedic ‘Hidden Gem of Chicago,’ Dies at 48

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Coronavirus OutbreakliveLatest UpdatesMaps and CasesRisk Near YouVaccine RolloutNew Variants TrackerAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyThose We’ve LostErica Faye Watson, Comedic ‘Hidden Gem of Chicago,’ Dies at 48Best known as a regular on a local morning talk show, she also wrote plays and acted in movies. She died of complications of Covid-19.Erica Watson  was a regular on “Windy City Live,” a morning TV talk show in Chicago. She also did stand-up comedy and acted in movies.Credit…Patti K. GillMarch 4, 2021, 6:23 p.m. ETThis obituary is part of a series about people who have died in the coronavirus pandemic. Read about others here.When a candidate for state’s attorney in Cook County, Ill., held a lunchtime fund-raiser in downtown Chicago in 2016, the campaign hired a local comedian and television personality named Erica Faye Watson to warm up the crowd.Ms. Watson had never met the candidate, Kim Foxx, but that didn’t keep her from diving into an extended riff about Ms. Foxx’s hair. “I had never been publicly roasted before,” Ms. Foxx said in an interview. “I was like, who is this woman?”But the jokes were just a setup for Ms. Watson’s real point: what it would mean to have a Black woman as the county’s chief prosecutor, and how proud she would be to see Ms. Foxx in that role. The two became fast friends.“She was very much about empowering Black women,” said Ms. Foxx, who is now in her second term. “She was fighting not just for herself but for people like her.”Ms. Watson was a Chicagoland celebrity, best known as a regular on “Windy City Live,” a morning talk show on WLS-TV, Chicago’s ABC affiliate. She also performed stand-up comedy, wrote and directed plays and acted in movies.Ms. Watson died on Saturday in Montego Bay, Jamaica. She was 48. The cause was Covid-19, Patti Gill, her former agent, said.“Erica was a hidden gem of Chicago and a voice for overlooked businesses and causes,” said Ms. Gill, who cast her in “BlacKorea,” a short film she wrote, in 2017.Erica Faye Watson was born on Feb. 26, 1973, in Chicago, to Henry Watson, a postal worker, and Willie Mae Watson, a homemaker.Her survivors include her parents and her brother, Eric.Ms. Watson attended the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where she was a fixture on the school’s Black arts scene.The Coronavirus Outbreak More

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      ‘Judas and the Black Messiah’: What to Know About the HBO Max Film

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }What to WatchBest Movies on NetflixBest of Disney PlusBest of Amazon PrimeBest Netflix DocumentariesNew on NetflixAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main story‘Judas and the Black Messiah’: What to Know About the HBO Max FilmThe Shaka King movie dramatizes the life and death of Fred Hampton, chairman of the Illinois Black Panther Party. Here’s a guide to the people and the issues of the day.Daniel Kaluuya, top, as Fred Hampton, and below him Lakeith Steinfeld as the informant William O’Neal  in “Judas and the Black Messiah.”Credit…Glen Wilson/Warner BrosFeb. 12, 2021, 12:18 p.m. ETTo Black Americans in the 1960s who were targeted and harassed by the police, 21-year-old Fred Hampton was an empowering figure.To the F.B.I. and its director, J. Edgar Hoover, Hampton, the chairman of the Illinois Black Panther Party, was a radical threat.Hampton was killed by Chicago police officers early on the morning of Dec. 4, 1969, during a raid on his West Side apartment, which was a block south of the Black Panther Party’s Chicago headquarters. The ambush, and the months of F.B.I. surveillance of Hampton and the Panthers that preceded it, are dramatized in Shaka King’s film “Judas and the Black Messiah,” which begins streaming Friday on HBO Max.At the time of Hampton’s death, Chicago was the site of political protests and violent clashes with law enforcement. The infamous trial of the Chicago 7, a court battle that involved seven Vietnam War protesters charged with conspiring to incite riots during the 1968 Democratic National Convention (a saga chronicled in Aaron Sorkin’s recent film “The Trial of the Chicago 7”), had been underway for a little over two months.King, who co-wrote the script with Will Berson, drew mostly from fact while taking viewers inside the Black Panther Party in the months leading up to Hampton’s death, though they took a few dramatic liberties. For instance, the film’s star, Daniel Kaluuya, is a decade older than the 21-year-old Hampton was when he was killed.Here is a guide to the real-life people, groups and events that feature in “Judas and the Black Messiah.” Be warned, there are spoilers, if such a thing is possible when speaking of history.Who were the Black Panthers?Bobby Seale, left, and Huey P. Newton at the Black Panther Party headquarters in San Francisco.Credit…Ted Streshinsky/Corbis via Getty ImagesThe Black Panther Party was founded in 1966 in Oakland, Calif., by a pair of Black college students, Bobby Seale and Huey P. Newton, to oppose police brutality and racism in local neighborhoods. The Panthers, who were known for their military-style black berets, leather jackets and raised-fist salute, believed in removing abusive officers from communities by any means necessary, including armed resistance.The F.B.I. viewed the Panthers as a radical group capable of galvanizing a militant Black nationalist movement. (Hoover, the bureau’s first director, called the Black Panther Party “the greatest threat to the internal security of the country”). But the Panthers also launched a number of social initiatives: Members ran medical clinics, provided free transportation to prisons for family members of inmates, and started a free breakfast program that fed thousands of schoolchildren.Who was Fred Hampton?Fred Hampton at the “Days of Rage” rally in Chicago, less than two months before he was killed.Credit…David Fenton/Getty ImagesThe charismatic community organizer enjoyed a meteoric rise that took him from campaigning for an integrated community pool and recreational center in his hometown, Maywood, Ill., to preaching to thousands as the chairman of the Illinois Black Panther Party.In 1969, a few months after helping to found the party’s Illinois chapter, the 20-year-old Hampton brokered an alliance he called the Rainbow Coalition, which united the Black Panthers, the Young Patriots (Southern white leftists) and the Young Lords (a Puerto Rican civil and human rights organization) in an effort to combat poverty and racism in their Chicago communities.Hampton’s rapid ascent through the ranks of the Black Panther Party landed him in the cross hairs of a secret F.B.I. counterintelligence program, known as Cointelpro, that Hoover formed to “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit or otherwise neutralize the activities of Black nationalist, hate-type organizations.” Targets included both the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the Ku Klux Klan. Hoover declared in an internal memo that he sought to prevent the “rise of a ‘messiah’ who could unify and electrify the militant Black nationalist movement.”Under Cointelpro, the F.B.I. tried a number of tactics to sow discord within the Black Panther Party at the national and local levels, including sending bogus letters to two of its leaders, Eldridge Cleaver and Huey P. Newton, which claimed that each sought to depose the other. Authorities also arrested Hampton and several other Panthers in an effort to publicly discredit the group. In the months before the raid on Hampton’s apartment, the Panthers and the police also faced off in two gun battles: One in July 1969 at the party’s West Side headquarters in which five police officers and three Panthers were injured, and a South Side fight that November that left two officers and one Panther dead.Who was William O’Neal?At 17, O’Neal (Lakeith Stanfield) already had a criminal record when the F.B.I. agent Roy Mitchell (Jesse Plemons) tracked him down after he stole a car in 1966. But O’Neal soon took on a new role: F.B.I. informant. Given the choice between facing felony charges or agreeing to infiltrate the Panthers, he opted for the latter: as a security captain in the Illinois Black Panther Party, he infiltrated Hampton’s inner circle.In 1969, O’Neal sketched a floor plan of Hampton’s West Side apartment, including where everyone slept, which the F.B.I. then shared with the Chicago Police Department, the agency that conducted the fatal raid. But unlike the character in “Judas and the Black Messiah,” the real O’Neal did not see his actions as a betrayal of Hampton or the Panthers. “I had no allegiance to the Panthers,” he recalled in an interview for the PBS docuseries “Eyes on the Prize,” which chronicled the history of the civil rights movement in the United States.What happened the morning Fred Hampton was killed?Demonstrators in Boston in 1970 protested the killing of Fred Hampton. Credit…Spencer Grant/Getty ImagesFourteen Chicago police officers showed up before dawn on Dec. 4, 1969, at Hampton’s apartment, acting on the orders of Edward V. Hanrahan, the Cook County state’s attorney. Over the course of about 10 minutes, more than 80 shots were fired. When the smoke cleared, Hampton, 21, and another party leader, Mark Clark, 22, were dead, and four other Panthers and two police officers were wounded.At first, the police claimed they killed Hampton in self-defense after people in the apartment began firing shotguns at them as they tried to execute a search warrant for illegal weapons. But ballistics experts determined that only one of the bullets was probably discharged from a weapon belonging to an occupant of the apartment. A federal grand jury investigation also revealed that the “bullet holes” in the apartment’s front door, which officers had cited as evidence that the Panthers had shot at them, were in fact nail holes created by police.Though the Chicago Police Department had led the raid, the grand jury concluded that it had been coordinated by the F.B.I. as part of Hoover’s mission to cripple the Black Panther Party — and an F.B.I. memo later revealed that the bureau had authorized a bonus payment to O’Neal.The first federal grand jury declined to indict anyone involved in the raid, and though a subsequent grand jury indicted Hanrahan and the police officers who participated in the shootings, all the charges were dismissed. In 1982, without admitting any wrongdoing, the federal government, the City of Chicago and Cook County agreed to pay $1.85 million to the families of Hampton and Clark and to survivors of the raid.Clarence M. Kelley, who succeeded Hoover as head of the F.B.I. in 1973, issued a public apology three years later for the bureau’s abuse of power in the “twilight” of Hoover’s career. “Some of those activities were clearly wrong and quite indefensible,” Kelley said. “We most certainly must never allow them to be repeated.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      R. Kelly Is Set to Face Trial in Chicago in September

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Coronavirus OutbreakliveLatest UpdatesMaps and CasesThe Stimulus DealThe Latest Vaccine InformationF.A.Q.AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyR. Kelly Is Set to Face Trial in Chicago in SeptemberA judge acknowledged that the date for the singer’s federal trial on child pornography and obstruction charges could change because of pandemic-related delays.R. Kelly and two associates have been accused by federal prosecutors in Chicago of paying witnesses and victims in a previous child pornography trial to change their stories.Credit…Pool photo by E. Jason WambsgansDec. 22, 2020, 6:55 p.m. ETA date was set on Tuesday for the singer R. Kelly’s federal trial in Chicago on child pornography and obstruction charges, but even the judge said the date was “not set in stone” given the pandemic-related delays that continue to bog down the court.Judge Harry Leinenweber of U.S. District Court set Kelly’s trial for Sept. 13, five months after another federal trial Kelly faces in New York.Prosecutors in the Northern District of Illinois told Leinenweber they would need three weeks to present evidence against Kelly, who is facing charges that he and two former employees conspired to fix his 2008 state trial in Cook County on child pornography charges by paying off witnesses and victims to get them to change their stories.Mr. Kelly is also scheduled to face trial on April 7 in New York on racketeering charges. In that case, an indictment filed in U.S. District Court in Brooklyn alleges that Kelly, whose full name is Robert Sylvester Kelly, and his associates ran a criminal enterprise that recruited women and underage girls for illegal sexual contact and then isolated and threatened them to keep them under control and prevent them from going to the authorities.If convicted in the New York case, Mr. Kelly faces up to 20 years in prison. The federal charges in Chicago have the potential to add decades more in prison, and Kelly is also facing state charges of criminal sexual abuse that were filed in Chicago in February 2019.Kelly, 53, has been held in the federal Metropolitan Correctional Center in Chicago since his arrest in July 2019. Since then, his lawyer, Steven Greenberg, has unsuccessfully made at least six arguments for Kelly’s release, citing the danger of the coronavirus and an attack on Kelly over the summer by another prisoner, a member of the Latin Kings street gang who was later sentenced to life in prison on an unrelated racketeering conviction.Most cases in federal court in Chicago were halted in the spring, but jury trials resumed in August with new safety protocols. Even so, Leinenweber has said that Chicago’s federal courthouse would not be able to accommodate a trial with three defendants with those protocols in place.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More