Popular Culture
Silent Night: A Reprise
Earlier this month, My Own True Love and I began the holiday season with one of our favorite events: Songs of Good Cheer at Chicago’s Old Town School of Folk Music. For the last 25 years, a band of musicians and (now former) Tribune columnists Eric Zorn and Mary Schmich have led the audience in…
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From the Archives: Orson Welles’ The War of the Worlds and the History of Radio Broadcasting
You’ve probably heard this story before: On October 30, 1938, a 23-year-old theatrical boy-wonder named Orson Welles caused panic among radio listeners with the Halloween episode of his Mercury Theatre on the Air: an adaptation of H.G. Well’s The War of the Worlds.(1) Actors played the roles of correspondents who broke into an on-going [fake]…
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Around the World in Eleven Years
And speaking of memoirs about living in Nazi Germany, as I believe we were, allow me to introduce you to Around the World in Eleven Years, possibly the most unusual memoir of the period. Published in 1936, the book was purportedly written by eleven-year-old Patience Abbe with occasional input her younger brothers Richard, and John.…
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