Leeds hosting 30th annual Creek Bank Festival next weekend
The much-anticipated, free community event promises to be a day full of fun, food, music, and family-friendly entertainment.
This year's gathering will feature dozens of vendors, offering everything from handcrafted items and fun gifts to festival food and frozen treats, perfect for a warm spring day.
There will also be all sorts of family activities during the event including balloon art, face painting, hot dog eating and hula hooping contests, and the ever-cute Creek Bark Dog Pageant.
The always-popular Cruising the Creek Bank Car Show will also return this year with proceeds benefiting two local nonprofits–Backpack Buddies and Leeds Outreach.
The festival will kick off its live entertainment for the day with Heath Green and Adam Guthrie, two talented musicians who are new to Creek Bank and ready to bring energy to the stage.
Additional performances will include singer/songwriter Lynnox Poe plus the return of crowd-favorite Terry Padgett with his popular Elvis tribute.
Festival-goers can also enjoy a lively performance from the Cash Domino Killers, known for their entertaining 50s and 60s rock and roll show.
Miss Leeds Area Samantha Hennings will also be part of the festival lineup.
There will also be a limited supply of commemorative 30th Anniversary Creek Bank Festival shirts at the Leeds Chamber booth.
For more information, email amy@leedsareachamber.com or visit creekbankfestival.com.
In case of inclement weather, a rain date has been set for May 24.
Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
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Chicago Tribune
2 days ago
- Chicago Tribune
Column: The Tribune's film critic Michael Phillips says so long for now
Well. Goodbye for now. The Tribune has eliminated the position of film critic, as part of a newsroom reorganization. This leaves me with two options: stick around for reassignment or take a buyout. I'm voting buyout. I'm opting in for opting out. After six newspapers in Minneapolis; Dallas; San Diego; St. Paul, Minneapolis; Los Angeles and Chicago, and 41 fulltime years in this beautiful, vanishing subset of journalism, it feels right. Forty-one years, plus six years of freelancing my way through college. Call it 47. Forty-seven years of writing, editing, gobbling research like the grad student I never was; 47 years of making my peace at the keyboard (or waging another micro-war against cliches) when faced with one more deadline. Nearly a half-century of putting work ahead of everything else, too often at everything else's expense. So now, for me, it's time for the shock of the new. The new to be named later. Through fat and lean and thick and thin and, to quote Mel Brooks, through thin, the Tribune has been good to me. They took a chance on me back in 2002 and I'm grateful. The place has brought me so much to love in this city. Plus the paper underwrote 10 trips to the Cannes Film Festival, with my name on the festival badge, once upon a time. I arrived from the Los Angeles Times as the Tribune's new theater critic. This was the result of a lengthy interview process for the finalists for the post vacated by the irreplaceable Richard Christiansen. Bizarrely, all the other finalists turned the job down, with regrets. Perhaps none of us could get our heads around the workload established so selflessly by Christiansen, and in my case I wanted enough life in my life to be there for my son, then one year old. And then Tribune editors did something sort of amazing. 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I wrote about movies, plays, performers and artists like a combination of critics I admired. Young actors often do the same; they learn by doing, and by borrowing, and in time by letting the false front fall away. Every text, email, letter and phone call the Tribune readers have sent my way, be it out of agreement, frustration or just plain kindness — nothing I ever wrote meant as much as what you sent, and I mean it. The good fortune so many of us fell into back then, editing or generating arts coverage, is a dream now, a dream of a less precarious era of journalism. My first fulltime job was arts editor of the Twin Cities weekly City Pages. What was I doing? I didn't know what I was doing. I just did as much of everything as I could see and hear and watch. In the Twin Cities in the '80s, you could catch Ella Fitzgerald one night and The Replacements the next. 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I used to say it as a joke, though now it's truer than I realized: TCM may be the one entity in American culture holding this damn country together. From here, I'll continue to show up on the long-running 'Filmspotting' podcast, broadcast on WBEZ-FM, whenever the hosts Adam Kempenaar and Josh Larsen see fit. Over on Classical WFMT, I'll continue my weekly segments for the film music program 'Soundtrack,' which I adore. Next month I plan to begin my 11th year as advisor and mentor of the University of Illinois College of Media Roger Ebert Fellowship, which is the grad school I never knew but now I know. It has the added benefit of keeping Roger's spirit in my heart and in my work as an editor and a colleague. If my luck holds out, the unknown unknowns ahead include new colleagues I value as much as I do my fellow Tribune screens chronicler Nina Metz and my editor Doug George. They care, and they're pros, at a time when devaluing expertise is national political policy. 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2 days ago
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Axios
2 days ago
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Chicago Tribune film critic Michael Phillips takes buyout
Chicago Tribune film critic Michael Phillips has accepted a buyout from the paper, ending his 24-year run reviewing film and theater. Why it matters: For the first time since the 1950s, the Chicago Tribune no longer has a chief film critic. Phillips follows Richard Roeper, who left the Sun-Times earlier this year. What they're saying:"My options were to stick around for a newsroom reassignment to be named later, or take the buyout. I went with the buyout," Phillips wrote on social media. "I've had a ball in a great city working with people who care, and writing about a Platonic ideal of a great city's devotion to cinema, and to every artistic realm imaginable," Phillips wrote. Flashback: Phillips started as a theater critic at the paper. He gradually moved over to reviewing films, replacing Michael Wilmington, who had replaced Gene Siskel. Between the lines: The move to eliminate Phillips' position follows the industry trend to cut back on arts and culture reporting, specifically film reviews. While Phillips and Roeper are hardly the only cuts at local newspapers, their departures hit home in Chicago because of the national success of film critics Siskel and Roger Ebert. The two paired up to create the television program "At the Movies," which ran for several years. In 2009, Phillips was tapped to co-host "At the Movies." The syndicated show ended in 2010. The intrigue: Phillips said Tribune management was eliminating his position as critic, but the company did not respond to Axios' request for confirmation.
