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Chicago Tribune
07-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Chicago Tribune
Scott Vehill, artistic force behind Prop Thtr, dies at 68
Scott Vehill was the co-founder and longtime artistic director of Chicago's Prop Thtr, a scrappy, experimental theater company that throughout its 44-year history has staged intense, intellectually challenging plays, often on shoestring budgets, and put an emphasis on new work. 'Scott made a lot of things happen,' said Stefan Brun, Prop's co-founder with Vehill in 1980 and the group's executive director. 'He was the vision guy, and somebody else would follow up. He had vision, he really cared about the people, and … he loved the stories.' Vehill, 68, died of complications from Parkinson's disease on June 5 at his Lincoln Park home, said his wife of 30 years, Kristen. Born in Detroit, Vehill grew up in the Southwest Side's Marquette Park neighborhood and later in north suburban Wildwood. After graduating from Warren Township High School in Gurnee, Vehill attended downstate Monmouth College before transferring to Columbia College Chicago. After producing student theater together at Columbia, Vehill and Brun founded Prop in a space that formerly housed a strip joint on an off-the-beaten-track stretch of North Lincoln Avenue. With a program of nontraditional performance, European and Beat Generation theater, Prop had to fight to survive and attract audiences, Brun said. 'We started it together, but he is the one who held it,' Brun said. 'Many other people came through, including (onetime managing director) Jonathan Lavan and (onetime artistic director) Olivia Lilley, but Scott was Prop. There was no ruling aesthetic — the show we were currently doing was who we were.' Vehill kept the theater company moving forward after Brun left Chicago in 1987 for Germany. Although his title was artistic director, he was a jack-of-all-trades, directing performances, co-authoring plays and, as Tribune theater critic Chris Jones wrote in 2000, finding ways 'to pay utility bills, keep the doors open at a variety of rented spaces and produce … forms of esoteric theater in dark garages with the minimum of financial resources.' Prop put up three to four productions a year. Some pushed the boundaries — a 1986 staging of 'Biker Macbeth,' an adaptation of the Shakespeare play, drew a stinging review from the Tribune — while others, such as the 1988 staging of Vehill's adaptation of William S. Burroughs' novel 'The Last Words of Dutch Schultz,' garnered critical praise. 'Everything about him was bigger than life,' said Charles Pike, a co-star of the Burroughs adaptation. 'Scott embraced chaos. He saw that sometimes things needed to be broken, and he did not hesitate to break them. He had a heart for the outcast, for the underdog. He was a sucker for a good Chicago story. And we both embraced Beat literature and wanted to make sure that future generations saw (Lawrence) Ferlinghetti, (Jack) Kerouac and Burroughs the way he saw them.' Vehill directed plays by Neil Gray Giuntoli, who also co-starred in Prop's staging of 'The Last Words of Dutch Schultz,' and Paul Peditto, who was part of the old Igloo theater group. Vehill collaborated often with Peditto, both at Igloo and also at Chicago's bygone Live Bait Theater, where in 1991, the duo staged 'BUK,' a drama inspired by the life and work of poet Charles Bukowski. Prop's hard-hitting, commercially successful and critically acclaimed 1994 stage adaptation of Nelson Algren's 'Never Come Morning' garnered nine awards at the annual Joseph Jefferson Citation Awards for productions operating without Actors' Equity contracts — still a record for a non-Equity production. Vehill subsequently tried, without success, to raise money to turn the novel into a film. In 1995, Vehill directed Prop's spoof of former President Ronald Reagan's life before politics, in a play titled 'Reagan: Dementia in Absentia — An Unauthorized Tribute.' Two years later, Vehill staged Peditto's '1,001 Afternoons in Chicago,' a play inspired by screenwriter Ben Hecht's daily columns from the early 1920s in the Chicago Daily News. In 2000, Vehill directed a play about countercultural writer Terry Southern. In 2004, he directed 'Struggling Truths,' a fable exploring the origins of Tibet's conflicts with China. 'It's like a Brechtian parable and the audience, who will be literally divided into two sections, must decide which is the truth about Tibet,' Vehill said of 'Struggling Truths.' 'Was it a people's revolution that got rid of a feudal regime or was it an embattled Buddhist theocracy threatened by a totalitarian state? Both sides will try to stir up an audience to back their cause.' In 2006, Vehill oversaw the staging of Prop's biggest hit ever, 'Hizzoner,' a critical and popular success featuring Giuntoli playing Mayor Richard J. Daley. In a 2006 review, Jones called it a 'thoroughly gripping … bio-drama' that was not to be missed 'for students of the old man and the city he maybe hurt and maybe saved.' The production of 'Hizzoner' was in keeping with Jones' 2002 assessment in the Tribune that Prop is a theater company that is 'proudly blue-collar' and 'cheerfully intellectual,' with 'hard-working and mature creative leaders.' In the late 1990s, Vehill helped found the National New Play Network, a consortium of theaters from around the country committed to showcasing new work. Prop became the Chicago hub of the network, whose rolling world premiere program simultaneously brings new productions to partner theaters across the U.S. More than a decade ago, illness caused Vehill to pull back from Prop, his wife said. For the past two years, about 20 or so friends gathered monthly at Vehill's home to bring the homebound Vehill art in the form of songs, readings and even visual artwork, in what were affectionately called 'Scotty Salons,' his wife said. 'Kristen told me that the therapeutic benefit lasted for several days afterward,' said Keith Fort, who chair's Prop's board and organized the salons. 'That's the healing power of art.' In addition to his wife, Vehill is survived by three sisters, Julie 'Gigi' Paddock, Trisha Peck and Jaime Freiler; and a brother, Raoul. A celebration of life will take place from 5 to 11 p.m. on Friday, July 18, at Facility Theatre, 1138 N. California Ave.
Los Angeles Times
26-06-2025
- Business
- Los Angeles Times
It's time to escape to California's Gold Rush towns for postcard charms and swimming holes
You could argue that Nevada City peaked 170 years ago, along with Charles Darwin, Herman Melville and Queen Victoria. But we're still talking about them all. And Nevada City, 60 miles northeast of Sacramento in the Sierra foothills, is reachable without a séance. In the 1850s, it grew from a miners' outpost into a Gold Rush boomtown of 10,000 (heavy on the bars and brothels) before anyone got around to naming that other Nevada as a territory or a state. Today it lives on as a tiny town with a lively arts scene and a liberal bent, home to about 3,200 souls. Advertisement Perhaps because there's so much to escape from these days, Nevada City and its larger, more middle-of-the-road neighbor Grass Valley have been drawing more visitors than ever lately. Nevada County's hotel and vacation rental tax revenues have doubled in the last five years to a record high. Planning your weekend? Stay up to date on the best things to do, see and eat in L.A. 'A lot of people are coming up from the Bay Area and settling up here because Nevada City is in a lot of ways like the Bay Area,' said Ross Woodbury, owner of Nevada City's Mystic Theater. 'It's a very blue town in a very red region.' If you're from elsewhere, it's easy at first to overlook the differences among these Gold Rush towns. Once your feet are on the ground, however, the distinctions and fascinating details shine through — as do historic rivalries. 'Nevada City thinks it's a little better than Grass Valley and Grass Valley think it's a little better than Nevada City. I don't think that's ever going to change,' said restaurateur John Gemignani, standing by the grill of the Willo steakhouse in Nevada City. Advertisement 'That's never going to change,' confirmed his wife, Chris Gemignani. Nevada City's intimate size, upscale shops and throwback 19th century architecture alone are enough to win over many people. Its downtown is a 16-acre collection of more than 90 historic buildings, cheek by Victorian jowl. Say you have breakfast at Communal Cafe, lunch at Three Forks Bakery, dinner at Friar Tuck's, a drink after at the Golden Era. You haven't even hit 1,000 steps for the day yet, unless you've been dancing to the live music that often fills the area. (One night, I stepped from Spring Street into Miners Foundry — an 1856 landmark now used as a cultural center — and found about 200 locals gathered for a community sing, a chorus of Beatles-belting Boomers.) For those who seek higher step counts, forested foothills and miles of trails wait outside town, along with often-perilous springtime whitewater and summer swimming holes along the South Yuba River. And in surrounding hill country, the Empire Mine and Malakoff Diggins, once the major employers (and polluters) of the region, now serve as state historic parks. The Beat Generation poet Gary Snyder (95 years old and well represented on the shelves at Harmony Books on Main Street) still lives on a ridge outside town. Meanwhile, four miles down the road from Nevada City in Grass Valley, changes are afoot. The Holbrooke Hotel (statelier sibling to Nevada's City's National Exchange Hotel) reopened after a dramatic renovation in 2020. Soon after, spurred by the pandemic, the city closed busy Mill Street to cars, making it a permanent two-block pedestrian promenade full of restaurants, bars and shops. About This Guide Our journalists independently visited every spot recommended in this guide. We do not accept free meals or experiences. What should we check out next? Send ideas to guides@ Still, if Los Angeles moves at 100 miles per hour, Foggy Mountain Music store clerk Pete Tavera told me, 'Grass Valley is like 60.' Advertisement Both towns preserve their mining heritage, and when you stroll through them, you can just about hear echoes of those raucous Gold Rush days. Here's a little more of what I learned during a three-day visit: In the early days of the Gold Rush, most of the area's mine workers lived in Grass Valley while the owners, bosses and other white-collar people built their upscale Victorian homes in Nevada City, the county seat. The Great Depression of the 1930s never really reached this corner of Gold Country, because the big hard-rock mines kept on producing gold. In 2024, when a company tried to restart gold mining at the nearby old Idaho-Maryland Mine, residents of Nevada County, which includes Nevada City and Grass Valley, rose up and the county board of supervisors shut down the idea, citing environmental risks. These days, it seems, Nevada County wants to remember gold mining, not live with it. Because everybody needs a break now and then, here is a closer look at 15 essential spots, starting in Nevada City, continuing with Grass Valley.
Time of India
19-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Time of India
Madonna and the Pope are distant cousins? The internet can't get enough of it
In a plot twist that feels straight out of a Dan Brown novel (minus the murder and secret codes), it turns out that Madonna—the Queen of Pop, is actually related to the new head of the Catholic Church. According to none other than renowned historian and genealogy expert Henry Louis Gates Jr., Madonna and Pope Leo XIV (aka Robert Prevost) are ninth cousins, several times removed. This revelation comes from Finding Your Roots, the long-running PBS documentary series hosted by Gates. The show, which has previously connected celebrities like Oprah Winfrey and Anderson Cooper to historical surprises, took a deep dive into the new Pope's lineage. And what do you know? Tucked somewhere in the tangled family tree is a 16th-century Québécois man named Louis Boucher de Grandpré, born in the 1590s. He's the common ancestor linking the 66-year-old pop icon and the 69-year-old pontiff. As Gates explained—and as The New York Times confirmed—this unexpected bloodline connection doesn't stop with Madonna. Pope Leo XIV is also distant cousins with Justin Bieber, Angelina Jolie, Hillary Clinton, Canadian PM Justin Trudeau, and even Beat Generation author Jack Kerouac. by Taboola by Taboola Sponsored Links Sponsored Links Promoted Links Promoted Links You May Like Esse novo alarme com câmera é quase gratuito em Ilha Comprida (consulte o preço) Alarmes Undo That's one serious crossover between the Vatican and the Vanity Fair party guest list. And let's be clear: this isn't just a fun celebrity trivia nugget. It actually tells us something bigger about the world we live in. Genealogy—especially in this digital, DNA-testing age—is starting to reveal just how interconnected our stories are. It's a reminder that lineage doesn't care about public personas or controversies. Families are messy. History is messier. It also speaks to how celebrity narratives have evolved. This isn't just tabloid material. It's part of a larger conversation about heritage, identity, and the complicated legacies we inherit—even when we have no idea they exist. We probably won't see a family reunion anytime soon (though the internet would absolutely lose its mind if they appeared in a selfie together). Still, it's kind of comforting to know that even the most unlikely people might be connected in some small way. And maybe, just maybe, it's proof that the past has a wild sense of humor. So there you have it: Madonna and Pope Leo XIV are ninth cousins, several times removed. One changed pop culture. The other leads a billion Catholics worldwide. And somewhere, their shared ancestor from 400 years ago is probably watching this unfold and thinking, 'I did not see this coming.' Welcome to 2025—where Madonna and the Pope are family. Literally.
The Guardian
29-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
The Acid Queen by Susannah Cahalan review – Timothy Leary's right hand woman
Of Timothy Leary, we know plenty. How, in the early 1960s, he gave LSD to his psychology students at Harvard, to the inmates of a maximum-security jail to see whether it would stop them reoffending, to artists such as Charlie Mingus and Allen Ginsberg to map how it expanded their creativity. The Beatles' song Tomorrow Never Knows was based on his writings. Mick Jagger flew to Altamont in a helicopter with him. He had perma-smile good looks, evangelical patter and likened himself to Socrates and Galileo. He even had a Pied Piper invitation: 'Turn on, tune in, drop out'. No wonder Richard Nixon believed he was 'the most dangerous man in America'. What of Rosemary Woodruff? She was the fourth of his five wives, helping take care of his children in the long wake of their mother's suicide. She buffed the branding of the self-styled 'wisest man of the 20th century'. She fitted him with a hearing aid and sewed his clothing. She helped write speeches and the books that made him a must-read for any would-be prankster or beatnik. In 1970, she aided his escape from prison after he had been landed with a 30-year sentence for possessing drugs. She herself was forced underground for two decades. So much has been written about Leary, observes Susannah Cahalan: why so little about Woodruff? Her life had been eventful long before she met the US's most notorious trip adviser. She was born in 1935 in St Louis, Missouri to a father – Victor the Magician – who performed card tricks at local taverns, and a mother who was an amateur cryptologist. Early on, Woodruff wanted out. She needed, she said, 'things to be grander than they were in my little neighbourhood, in my little home'. She decamped to New York, took amphetamines to ensure she was skinny enough to be hired as a stewardess for the Israeli airline El Al, and landed an uncredited role in a naval comedy called Operation Petticoat. Woodruff was looking for otherness. She read Antonin Artaud and science fiction, explored theosophy, smoked cannabis and hung out at jazz clubs. She married a Dutch accordionist who yelled at and cheated on her; then a tenor saxophonist who, when he wasn't shooting up, beat her and cheated, too. 'I subscribed to 'the genius and the goddess paradigm',' she later reflected. 'I wanted genius men.' She met Leary at a gallery and was taken by his talk of 'audio-olfactory-visual alternations of consciousness'. They shared a ride to a psychedelic commune he'd established in upstate New York. What did she hope to find there, he asked. 'Sensual enjoyment and mental excitement.' 'What else?' 'To love. You, I suppose.' The following years are the stuff of legend. Leary titillated and horrified the US in equal measure, telling Playboy readers that women would have hundreds of orgasms during sex on LSD, and claiming that the drug would 'blacken' white people so that they could pursue 'a pagan life of natural fleshly pleasure'. When he ran for the governorship of California against an actor called Ronald Reagan, Woodruff devised the campaign slogan: 'Come together, join the party'. Lauded for her cheekbones and elegance, she fed the press zingy one-liners, and was, says Cahalan, 'a natural high priestess'. Does this add up to the greatness that Cahalan believes Woodruff sublimated during her life with Leary? Cahalan describes him as a 'so-called psychedelic guru' and 'a sweet-talking snake charmer'. Does that make her heroine a gull? Cahalan astutely observes that, for much of the 1960s, 'women were confidantes, calming tethers for the men to embark on frightening journeys into the psychic unknown'. In practice this meant, even when they were on the run, Woodruff ensured Leary never lacked for smoked oysters and fine wines. Like the children of many LSD proselytisers, Leary's son, Jack, got high at a young age. Home life was chaotic. He was so hungry and tired by the time he got to school that he could barely read the blackboard. Meanwhile, Leary's daughter, Susan, taunted Woodruff for being 'frigid and barren', and played Donovan's Season of the Witch at maximum volume for hours on end. Diagnosed with schizophrenia, she later killed herself in jail while awaiting trial on charges of shooting her sleeping boyfriend in the head. This is what Yippies co-founder Abbie Hoffman meant when he told Leary: 'Your peace-and-love bullshit is leading youth down the garden path of fascism … ripe for annihilation.' Biographies of lesser-known figures often end up high on their own supply. Their subjects are reappraised as radical, transformative, historical missing links. Cahalan is pleasingly sharp and satiric. She characterises some of Leary's extended circle as 'people who belittled their maids, fed their tiny dogs with silverware, and complained of the cost of shipping priceless art overseas'. Was Leary a visionary who foresaw today's boom in microdosing? 'Psychedelics have become too big not to fail,' Cahalan writes. 'The twin issues that helped curtail the study of these substances in the 1960s are back: evangelism and hubris.' Woodruff and Leary divorced in 1976, but her later life was far from boring. Travelling on a 'World Passport', a document created by peace activists, she zigzagged through Afghanistan where she used a burqa to hide contraband; travelled to Catania where she met a count and 'made love in a secret grotto by a waterfall, drank grape brandy, and helped raise chickens'; to Colombia where she had encounters with venomous spiders and drug cartels. For many years she lay low in the US, lacking social security or health insurance, 'an exile in her native land'. Only in 1994 was she able to emerge from hiding. While she never did publish the memoir she'd been working on for many years, The Acid Queen is a fond, imaginatively researched tribute to her free, forever-seeking spirit. The Acid Queen: The Psychedelic Life and Counterculture Rebellion of Rosemary Woodruff Leary by Susannah Cahalan is published by Canongate (£22). To support the Guardian, order your copy at Delivery charges may apply.
Korea Herald
22-05-2025
- Business
- Korea Herald
OpenAI recruits iPhone designer Jony Ive to work on AI hardware
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) -- OpenAI has recruited Jony Ive, the designer behind Apple's iPhone, to lead a new hardware project for the artificial intelligence company that makes ChatGPT. OpenAI said it is acquiring io Products, a product and engineering company co-founded by Ive, in a deal valued at nearly $6.5 billion. Ive became renowned for a meticulous design aesthetic that shaped the cultural zeitgeist during a 27-year career at Apple, which he left in 2019. He did his most influential work after Apple co-founder Steve Jobs returned to run the company in 1997. There, the two forged a partnership that would hatch a succession of game-changing products like the iPhone. The new OpenAI deal now thrusts Ive at the vanguard of AI -- a technology driving the biggest industry shift since the iPhone's arrival. The company hasn't said exactly what product they will be making but expect 'physical AI embodiments' that bring generative AI chatbot technology out of computer screens into another form, such as through a car, humanoid robot or the AI-powered glasses being developed by competitors Google and Meta, said Gartner analyst Chirag Dekate, adding that it is too early to know for sure. OpenAI said its CEO Sam Altman had been 'quietly' collaborating since 2023 with Ive and his design firm, LoveFrom. In a joint letter posted on OpenAI's website Wednesday, Ive and Altman said it 'became clear that our ambitions to develop, engineer and manufacture a new family of products demanded an entirely new company.' That's when Ive co-founded io, which was incorporated in Delaware in September 2023 and registered in California in April 2024, according to state records. OpenAI said it already owns a 23 percent stake in io from a prior collaborative agreement signed late last year. It says it will now pay $5 billion in equity for the acquisition. OpenAI said Ive will not become an OpenAI employee and LoveFrom will remain independent but 'will assume deep design and creative responsibilities across OpenAI and io.' Both OpenAI and Ive's design firm are based in San Francisco. Leading the new io division for OpenAI will be longtime executive Peter Welinder, who led robotics research in the startup's early years and more recently has been vice president of its 'new product explorations' team that delves into hardware, robotics and other early stage research. Altman, 40, can only hope his still-blossoming partnership with the 58-year-old designer works out as well as the mind-meld between Jobs and Ive. When he started his own firm, Ive derived the LoveFrom name from Jobs' observation that one way to hail humanity is by 'making something with a great deal of care and love.' Ive also chose to base LoveFrom in a historic part of San Francisco, located just near bars and cafes that were once frequented by such Beat Generation luminaries as 'On The Road' author Jack Kerouac and 'Howl' author Allen Ginsberg. OpenAI is headquartered about two miles away. Founded nearly a decade ago as a nonprofit research laboratory dedicated to safely building better-than-human AI for humanity's benefit, it remains controlled by a nonprofit board of directors even as Altman, its co-founder, has increasingly pushed it toward commercializing ChatGPT and its other inventions. It's not clear if Altman's collaboration with Ive began before or after Altman's short-lived ouster in November 2023, months after io's Delaware incorporation but before the new business was set up in San Francisco. Altman earlier this month said OpenAI was abandoning plans to drop its nonprofit governance structure but is pursuing a plan to make changes that would make it easier to access capital and pursue mergers and acquisitions 'and other normal things companies would do.'
