Headliners for 2020 include: Shemekia Copeland, Candi Staton, Eric Gales, Jimmy Johnson with Billy Branch, John Primer, Lurrie Bell and Catherine Russell

The 37^th Annual Chicago Blues Festival comes to Millennium Park (201 E. Randolph St.)Friday, June 5 to Sunday, June 7, AND at Maxwell Street Market (800 S. Desplaines St.) Sunday, June 7. 

The Blues will also be celebrated in various locations around town including Rosa’s Lounge, Chess Records  and much more.

This year’s event is part of Chicago In Tune, the NEW 18-day celebration of music at venues and organizations across the city in conjunction with the 2020 Year of Chicago Music. 

Kick off event celebrates the 70^th Anniversary of Chess Records

On Thursday, June 4, the Chicago Blues Festival will host a special kickoff event at Willie Dixon’s Blues Heaven Foundation at the Historic Chess Records (2120 S. Michigan Ave.) to celebrate their 70^th anniversary and pay homage to artists who electrified the blues and put Chicago on the map.

The special collaboration with the Blues Heaven Foundation and Chicago Blues Revival will include a Record Row walking tour, musical performances and more from 6 to 8:30 p.m.

This year’s fest features a diverse lineup celebrating the blues’ past, present, and future on six stages, the Chicago Blues Festival shares the great Chicago-born music tradition while shining a spotlight on the genre’s contributions to soul, R&B, gospel, rock, hip hop and more.

The Pritzker Pavilion in Millennium Park, at Randolph Street and Michigan Avenue, will be the main stage, with an array of Chicago and visiting headliners.

Among the Pritzker Pavilion highlights:

June 5: Nick Moss Band, 5:45 p.m.; Jimmy Johnson and Billy Branch, 7 p.m.; Shemekia Copeland, 7:50 p.m.

June 6: John Primer and Steve Bell, 7 p.m.; Candi Staton, 7:50 p.m.

June 7: Catherine Russell, 4:30 p.m.; Lil’ Ed & the Blues Imperials, 5:45 p.m.; Erwin Helfer and Katherine Davis, 7 p.m.; Eric Gales, 7:50 p.m.

All performances are free, and the park will be open from 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. each day, with attractions on several side stages. For complete schedule, visit www.chicagobluesfestival.us

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Institutions are permanent, which means that they do not end when one person is gone. 

I’m not sure if eight years is long enough to call something an institution but, if so, Found Kitchen & Social House definitely meets that definition. If not, it still feels like an institution–in a very good way.

Certainly the Morton family of which Found Kitchen proprietor Amy Morton is a member is an institution.

Through the years, generations of the Morton family have created a lineup of innovative and highly successful restaurants.

Perhaps most notable of all the Morton’s is Amy’s dad, Arnie Morton, who played a large role in making Chicago the international food destination that it is today.

Amy Morton opened Found Kitchen in Evanston in 2012–so named because as Morton says “life is a journey” and we are always finding something.

Her latest find is “Gold.” (more about that later).

Found Kitchen became an instant destination upon its 2012 opening and remains so today.

We stopped by the restaurant on Sunday for their “Brunch with the Beatles” a brainchild of Amy’s two years ago when she felt the then 6-year-old restaurant needed an update.

Found kitchen. Photo: Carole Kuhrt-Brewer

Amy’s original vision for Found was a 1920’s “salon style” restaurant serving as an inspiration for culture, art, literature and politics to be discussed over outstanding food. 

The formula was quite successful but Amy decided to move things up a few decades to what she describes as “Jackie O and the 60’s” style that is now reflected in the decor, the music and the menu.

The bar at Found. Photo: Carole Kuhrt-Brewer

Changes at the restaurant are ongoing including Amy reuniting with Debbie Gold, a James Beard Award-winning chef, who was chef at Amy’s Chicago restaurant, Mirador, until its closing in 1993.

Chef Debbie Gold, (Armando L. Sanchez / Chicago Tribune)

The two have kept in touch through the years and when Debbie decided to leave Tied House in November 2019, the time was right for the pair to reunite.

We caught up with Gold on Sunday. She is  currently working on the menus at Amy’s new restaurant Stolp Island Social in Aurora while also getting the lay of the land at Found Kitchen.

Gold hopes to have new menus in place at Found in April–adding twists to some of the originals, creating some new dishes and retaining some of the favorites from the current menus.

Yoko’s popular housemade donuts will remain on the brunch menu and many of the “storied” drinks on the cocktail menu, including the Vera Charles and the Clover Club, will most likely remain. The menus will continue to be seasonal and local.

But until April, we’ll just have to wait to see what the James Beard award-winning chef, Gold,  has in store for Found Kitchen.

Found Kitchen
1631 Chicago Ave.
Evanston, IL 60201
847-868-8945

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This will be DINO-mite! Dive deep into the Ancient Oceans with Jurassic Quest, the largest and most realistic dinosaur exhibition in North America is coming and is BIGGER and BETTER than EVER!

With Ancient Oceans, Jurassic Quest guests will be transported back in time and under the sea into an immersive and interactive environment. This new Jurassic Quest exhibit (included with general admission) will feature gigantic, moving, water dwellers from the Jurassic, Cretaceous and Neogene Periods, including the ultimate apex predator of it’s time, the Megalodon!

Now with new animatronic water dwellers, Jurassic Quest is the only dinosaur event that has over 100, true to life-sized dinosaur replicas from the very small, to the gigantic, to those found under the sea. Guests will witness their favorite dinosaurs move, roar and roam and have the chance to interact with baby dinosaurs and adolescent dinosaurs, including the T. Rex, Spinosaurus, Triceratops and many others. With the addition of Ancient Oceans, guests will also be able to “swim” with our 50 foot long, prehistoric Megalodon!

Unique to the exhibit, and available only to be experienced in this immersive setting, new animatronic exhibits will include: the Jurassic “dolphin” Ichthyosaurus, Liopleurodon, Ammonite, Plesiosaurus, Tylosaurus, Elasmosaurus, Archelon (giant sea turtle), Xiphactinus and of course, the legendary Megalodon. Popular YouTubers, Park Ranger Aaron and Park Ranger LB of T-Rex Ranch are your virtual guides for this engaging “deep dive” into the Ancient Oceans!

Happening at Navy Pier, Jurassic Quest worked in collaboration with leading paleontologists to ensure each dinosaur was painstakingly replicated in every detail. Guests will have the chance to learn all things paleontology at the excavation station, where they can dig up fossils and by visiting the dinosaur museum to see real dinosaur fossils dating back over 60 million years, including bones that originated in North America.

In addition to the life-like dinosaur exhibits, there will be countless activities throughout the event that suit all ages, including a host of dinosaur themed rides, baby dinosaur shows, walking dinosaur shows, dinosaur themed bounce houses, science stations and a dino cinema! There will also be face painting, crafts and coloring stations and much more.  Whether they are big or small, young or old, guests of Jurassic Quest have a dino-mite time!

For more information and to buy tickets visit www.JurassicQuest.com.

Event:                 Jurassic Quest

Place:                  Navy Pier

Date:                    March 6-8, 2020

Time:                  Friday 3pm-8pm, Saturday 9am-8pm, Sunday 9am-7pm

There are Democrats praying to God

That Sanders will not get the nod.

To them he does seem

On the left too extreme;

They’d prefer someone totally mod.

Wren is a three-week-old, wiggly but fun Golden hamster baby looking for a loving guardian.

Wren is learning to appreciate attention from his people, lots of different foods and treats, spinning on his wheel and exploring his surroundings.

Golden hamsters live alone in their habitats so it’s important to give daily attention and love.

Since this is a baby, he will need patient daily handling and socialization to tame, so he will be gentle and not afraid of humans.

His adoption fee of $15 benefits the Friends of Petraits Rescue.

If you need an entire hamster habitat, aquarium, bedding, food, toys, exercise wheel, hidey hut and water bottle – everything you need including the hamster – the whole package is available for $75.

To meet and possibly adopt Wren please contact [email protected].

Wren is being fostered in Chicago’s Andersonville neighborhood.

I’ve dug deep into  20th century Europe to uproot  this postulate concerning the Ford Motor Company.

In 1903, a piece of short fiction entitled “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” was initially published in Russia. As time crept by, somehow the fiction–with rampant anti-Semitism as its injection–morphed into counterfeit fact. A  vicious  hard-bound treatise  under the same title was published and widely circulated on the continent, then spread  like bubonic plague.  In a nutshell, this virulent canard-posing-as-reality held that a cabal of Jewish Elders gathered at a Prague cemetery  in order to hatch an elaborately devious plan  to seed a plot whose  goal was  Jewish hegemony of the world.  Moreover, two separate nets were woven, one for Jewish control of Capitalism, the other for the stewardship of Communism.  This preposterous fake-history tale took such deep and wide root that it eventually landed in the lap  of Henry Ford, who swallowed whole its content and became  a zealous advocate. Not satisfied with merely mass producing automobiles, he tried to mass produce mass anti-Semitic  hysteria by having half a million copies printed and distributed  freely ( it was literally free-of-charge) to any and all.. Owing to this legacy of toxic enmity, many Jews for many years  unofficially boycotted Ford dealerships.

Fast forward to the present:  The Henry Ford stain  has faded  to mere palimpsest. But  Ford marketing–with the introduction of the electric Mach E– may have unwittingly  placed the stain under threat of resurfacing.. Seems that in Henry’s day, when anti-semitism was more openly expressed, three derogatory epithets were being  maliciously flung at American Jewry.  The two most popular were “Kike” and “Sheenie”, both in pale currency these days.  The third, more obscure, slur is  near extinction, but nonetheless still exists, if only as a vague memory.  The name of this mock, is  “Mockey.”

Its oral similarity of  “Mockey” an ” Mach E” is, well, startling at least.  So here’s some free advise to Ford Marketing from an old Jew, retired from a career in marketing and advertising.  Scrap the Mach E monicker into the Edsel dumpster and rename it.  With anything else.  If–owing to the brand- equity you’ve already baked into the name, you find abandonment unwise enough to keep the branding alive , at least remember this: When the TV voiceover announcer intones the brand name, make sure he or she is directed to pump some oxygen between “Mach” and “E”, as in “Mach…E.”

Bear in mind, though,  that you have missed a blind spot in the corporate rear-view mirror, and that if you don’t re-call the name “Mach E”,  that some old Jews like me may recall the name “Mockey.”

NOTE:  The preceding isn’t  the first account of gaffes committed by our captains of industry. Not very long ago, bumping over our rutted roads was  a monument to unintentional cognitive dissonance, a model of Jeep named after two of populations that  history records as lethal enemies of each other.  The model’s name?   The Cherokee Pioneer.  They may as well  have named it the Jeep Contradiction. Who knows? Maybe I was the only one who noticed.

 Quite a while ago the GE Marketing Department was flummoxed over the drooping sale of a Chevrolet model across Latin America.The name? The  NOVA.  Apparently, in the ears of Hispanics, the  designation “Nova”suggested the car couldn’t go very fast.

My third example made its way around the marketing  community  for decades and may be apocryphal.  But I, for one, am buying it.   In the era when short, punchy detergent brand names (e.g. Duz, Biz, Tide, etc.) were born,  one of the Proctor &Gamble’s few Jewish employees was ambling through the plant when he noticed  that–racing down a printing press–were  boxes of a new detergent bearing the name, “Dreck.” Immediately he dashed up to the Marketing Department and explained that the word “dreck” in Yiddish meant “shit”.  Stop the presses!!!! Immediately!!! And thusly  ‘Dreck” was renamed “Dreft.”

In this week’s podcast there was one section where I literally couldn’t stop laughing. So, I think this is probably one of our more entertaining episodes.

We start off talking about Nissan’s foray into vehicle subscriptions with the Nissan Switch program, then have a great discussion about the Ford Escape, which is all-new for 2020 and has a hybrid version. The bulk of our discussion, however, is about the cool Toyota Motor Manufacturing Assembly Plant in Princeton, Indiana, with our guest Larry Nutson, the executive producer and Chicago Bureau Chief at The Auto Channel.

This week’s quiz was about fake trim levels. Spoiler alert: I did not win. And, we also talk about whether or not we’d “subscribe” to a vehicle program. Interesting concept, but you’ll have to listen to the podcast for my answer and my reasoning.

Be sure to let us know if you have questions or if there are any topics you’d like us to cover on future podcasts.

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