logo
Community news: Cultural celebration at Oak Park library, 50th ordination anniversary, more

Community news: Cultural celebration at Oak Park library, 50th ordination anniversary, more

Chicago Tribune03-07-2025
A Kapwa! celebration took place recently at the Oak Park library, drawing more than 100 community members.
The program observed Kapwa!, which honors Asian Pacific Islander Desei American Heritage Month. The event featured traditional clothing, literary works, delicious food, arts and crafts stations and live music.
The event was supported by Oak Park and River Forest High School's Pan-Asian Leadership Society, or PALS, local Asian Pacific Islander Desi Americans and the Village of Oak Park.
A special Mass in honor of Rev. Michael O'Keefe's 50th anniversary of ordination to the priesthood is planned for 2 p.m. July 13 at Our Lady of Mount Carmel Church, 8404 S. Cass Ave., Darien.
O'Keefe served as associate pastor at Our Lady of Mount Carmel from 1994 to 2000 and as pastor from 2006 to 2022, counseling, teaching and coaching students at Mount Carmel. After he retired, he continued to be an active presence there.
An informal reception will follow at the church. The public is invited. Information is available at 630-852-3303.
Swifties of all ages are invited to view the Laser Taylor Swift cosmic light show at 8:30 p.m. every Saturday in July at Triton College Cernan Earth and Space Center, 2000 Fifth Ave., River Grove.
The 45-minute show features thousands of stars, dazzle laser lights and stunning visual effects, all set to the music of Grammy Award winner Taylor Swift.
'It's been a long time coming, but whether you missed the Eras Tour or want to relive the excitement, this is your chance to dress up, wear your friendship bracelets and celebrate your favorite songs under the stars,' Cernan Center Director Kris McCall said via a news release.
Tickets cost $5 for children 2 to 17 years old and for those 55 and older and $10 for adults. They only are sold in the center's Star Store the day of the show starting at 6:30 p.m. Triton students, staff and faculty are admitted free with a valid ID.
The center is open from 9:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. Mondays to Thursdays, 9:30 a.m. to 4 p.m. Fridays and 6:30 to 9:30 p.m. Saturdays. Information is available at facebook.com/cernancenter.
The third annual Disability Pride Month March and Rally takes place July 12 at the Oak Park Public Library, 834 Lake St., with participants marching around the main library and plaza starting at 11 a.m.
Attendees are invited to make signs and ribbon wands from 9 a.m. to 11 a.m. before the parade.
Another program celebrating the month is Craft Corner from 6 to 7:30 p.m. July 15. Kids, families and students in sixth to 12th grade are invited to make disability pride buttons and fidgets.
Registration is required for both events. Do so online or by calling the library 708-383-8200.
Several members of the women's bowling team at Lewis University in Romeoville earned All-Academic recognition for the 2024-25 school year from the National Tenpin Coaches Association for a GPA of 3.4 or higher.
Individual winners included Ailyn Aguilar of Franklin Park and Katharine Svehla of Elmhurst. Svehla had a GPA of 4.0.
In addition, the Flyers also received the team award, which goes to all teams that earned a 3.2 GPA or better. The team had a GPA of 3.25.
The La Grange Business Association hosts its 51st annual craft fair from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. July 12 and 13 along La Grange Road in downtown La Grange.
'Recognized as one of the top 200 craft fairs in the nation, this highly anticipated event offers a treasure trove of handcrafted wonders, from intricate jewelry to stunning ceramics, textiles, woodworking, and more,' a news release notes, with 'each piece lovingly crafted by artisans from across the country.'
Information is at https://lgba.com/craft-fair/ or by calling 708-582-6510.
Fans of Ferraris will find plenty to like when the annual Festa Ferrari returns 1 to 4 p.m. July 13 at Burr Ridge Village Center, 900 Village Center Drive.
Upscale shopping, fine cuisine and plenty of the iconic cars will be featured.
Musical guest Swing Forward will perform, as well as other entertaining acts.
Food and drinks will be served from 1 to 4 p.m. at Pella Signature.
A private VIP reception takes place from 4 to 6 p.m. at Eddie Merlot's, with proceeds going to the West Suburban Humane Society. The volunteer-based, animal welfare organization that cares for up to 25 dogs and 60 cats and even more in foster homes.
Tickets are available at www.tickettailor.com/events/ferrariclubofamericacentralstatesregion/1620754. For information call 630-654-2782.
Send news to pioneerwest@tribpub.com.
Orange background

Try Our AI Features

Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:

Comments

No comments yet...

Related Articles

‘Pan' is funny, insightful and a little unhinged
‘Pan' is funny, insightful and a little unhinged

Washington Post

timea day ago

  • Washington Post

‘Pan' is funny, insightful and a little unhinged

On the face of it, Michael Clune's 'Pan' appears to traverse rather straightforward territory. At the dawn of the 1990s, a teenage boy in a Midwestern suburb is sent to live with his father after his parents' divorce. He begins to suffer panic attacks. He meets new friends, starts experimenting with drugs in a secluded hayloft he and those friends refer to as 'the barn,' and … well, to describe it any further in those terms would be a complete violation of what 'Pan' is actually about. Clune's vision here is essentially religious, and I don't mean religious in the way that Flannery O'Connor was a Catholic writer or Isaac Bashevis Singer was a Jewish one. I mean, rather, that 'Pan' is saturated with a grand, psychedelic spirit, the sort of holy mania one finds in writers like William Blake or Christopher Smart. The effect, to the extent one can refer to it as merely an 'effect,' is dazzling. Clune, a celebrated memoirist, delivers with 'Pan' a debut novel that is at once startlingly funny and radiantly — if here and there a little perplexingly — strange. The prose is colloquial and direct — Clune's narrator, Nick, is 15 and speaks the argot of an ordinary teenager — and yet somehow everywhere Nick's eye alights the world feels like it's being flayed bare. In a classroom, he notes: 'Winter in Illinois, the flesh comes off the bones, what did we need geometry for? We could look at the naked angles of the trees, the circles in the sky at night. At noon we could look at our own faces. All the basic shapes were there, in bone.' It's a mood, and a style, that could easily become exhausting if it were not so perfectly matched not just to Nick's panic attacks but to the mock-heroic register of adolescence in general. Because it is, Nick's encounters with teenage effluvia take on a revelatory intensity: Boston's 'More Than a Feeling' is 'just a quiet glitter of melody, a whisper of rhythm. Like a glass man, striding alongside the car, bones tinkling'; at his after-school job at Ace Hardware, he looks to avoid 'the three stigmata of idleness … the hanging hands, the half-open mouth, the unfocused eyes.' It's tempting to say that nothing much happens in this novel, but for the fact that everything that does happen is charged with so much fearsome grandeur that even the book's micro-movements feel operatic. Whatever 'Pan' might lack in terms of old-fashioned narrative mechanics, it more than makes up for in humor, particularity and what I am forced to refer to simply as meaning. Nick comes to believe that his panic attacks are not merely medical events but rather instances when he is being possessed by the spirit of the Greek god Pan. This rather baroque conceit is not so much a matter of plot — whether he is or isn't ultimately seems beside the point — but it thoroughly destabilizes any attempt to read 'Pan' through a modish lens of mental health or disability. 'Because a panic attack doesn't feel like a panic attack,' Nick observes at one point. 'It feels like insight.' Insight, indeed, is what 'Pan' offers in spades, and part of what makes it so delicious is the way it mulches up both the familiar materials of millennial adolescence ('Gilligan's Island' reruns, crappy after-school jobs, the video game 'Ghosts 'n Goblins') and more esoteric ones ('Ivanhoe,' Giovanni Bellini's painting 'Drunkenness of Noah,' a fantasy novel called 'Nifft the Lean') into something that feels at once semi-typically earthy and decidedly cosmic, at times very nearly unhinged. This quality of insight is what art is for, but it is so rare at this point that 'Pan' feels almost like a work of outsider art. Ultimately, it's not, but the novel's brilliant intensity is such that it grows difficult to describe or boil down to its constituent parts. When Nick's friend Ian unpacks a theory of what he calls 'Solid Mind' ('when your thoughts flow in grooves, built deep into your brain. You don't even notice them') it feels both like the hilarious, weed-addled invention of almost any suburban teenager and like an intense theory of cognitive behavior that might belong to this book alone. It's a doubleness that makes Clune's novel approachable and inviting but also wild enough to seem practically avant-garde. Perhaps that's a quality not all readers will be inclined to prize — 'Pan' might be expressionist enough to disorient a traditional reader yet formalist enough to frustrate an avant-gardist. But for those who wonder if the American novel has anything new to offer (and perhaps for those who, rather tediously, have chosen lately to litigate the question of whether novels have abandoned male experience and male readers), 'Pan' is exhilarating, a pure joy — and a sheer, nerve-curdling terror — from end to end. Matthew Specktor is the author, most recently, of 'The Golden Hour.'

Are they panic attacks, or visitations from an ancient Greek God?
Are they panic attacks, or visitations from an ancient Greek God?

Boston Globe

time16-07-2025

  • Boston Globe

Are they panic attacks, or visitations from an ancient Greek God?

All of this makes Clune sound like Jonathan Franzen, a cartographer of Midwestern schools and suburbs. But if 'Pan' is a work of realism — and that's an open and interesting question — then it's interested primarily not in the realities of social existence (what it's like to live in a particular time and place) but in the realities of consciousness (what it's like to think in a particular way). Early in 'Pan,' Nick starts having what he comes to understand are panic attacks. Sitting in geometry class, he realizes that his hand is a thing, just like the textbook and eraser he sees in front of him: 'That's when I forgot how to breathe.' Soon after, he's watching 'The Godfather III' when he forgets 'how to move blood through [his] body.' He begins worrying that, if he stares at something or someone too long, his 'looking,' or his 'thinking,' or his very self (it's hard to tell them apart), will escape from his head and stick to what he's staring at. Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up How does subjectivity, the ineffable feeling of being a person, arise from the material brain and its measurable neural firings? How is it that thinking takes place within time and yet seems to remove us from time? (There's Augustine again.) Think too much about thinking and these questions, and you, start falling apart. Nick is 'a pragmatist' (there's William James again), and 'Pan' follows the strategies he develops to deal with his panic and insomnia: note the symptoms that precipitate an attack; breathe into a paper bag; meditate. Advertisement Interwoven with this rather straightforward, if effective, story of mental health and its treatment is a wilder, stronger strand. Nick hooks up with a group of cool — read: trouble-maker — friends. They start hanging out in a family barn they call, with equal parts irony and mythic seriousness, the Barn. There, they do drugs (Nick doesn't; he's read they can trigger panic attacks), listen to music, engage in rituals (dancing, more drugs, sex), and decide that Nick has been inhabited by the Greek god Pan. As Ian, the group's ringleader, declares, 'When you are aware of the panic, you are seeing the truth of ordinary life' with 'absolute clarity.' Panic isn't a condition to be managed; it's a divine possession to be embraced. It shows us the truths — the subject is an object; selves are porous to one another; 'time was part of the body after all' — that we normally refuse to see. Advertisement Nick is regularly described as being 'loose,' ready at any moment to drift from his mind and the world. 'Pan' is, in many ways, a loose novel. It refuses to be one thing or the other; its plot moves — Nick tries out new ways of controlling panic; his friends come up with wilder theories about panic's sacredness — but at its own strange pace. Is the claim that Pan is real and within Nick meant to be taken literally? Or is it a metaphor to describe how we are visited by thoughts that seem beyond us? Yes and yes. Clune doesn't choose between what we might describe as the poetic and the novelistic, the mystic and the naturalistic, explanations of Nick's experience. When it comes to time and consciousness, Clune's perennial topics, visionary perception is perhaps just a deeper form of realism. Advertisement Anthony Domestico is an associate professor of literature at Purchase College, SUNY, and the books columnist for Commonweal. His reviews have appeared in The Atlantic, The Baffler, The Washington Post, and elsewhere. PAN By Michael Clune Penguin Press, 336 pages, $29

‘Jaws' author's widow reveals she still visits the film's shooting location 50 years later
‘Jaws' author's widow reveals she still visits the film's shooting location 50 years later

New York Post

time09-07-2025

  • New York Post

‘Jaws' author's widow reveals she still visits the film's shooting location 50 years later

The legacy of 'Jaws' lives forever for Wendy Benchley. Benchley, the widow of 'Jaws' author Peter Benchley and an executive producer on the new documentary 'Jaws @ 50: The Definitive Inside Story,' exclusively told The Post about the special connection she still has to the iconic film. 'So my wonderful husband, John Jeppson and I, we've been married for 12, 13 years, and we've been summering in Martha's Vineyard every August,' Wendy explained of the Massachusetts island where 'Jaws' primary filmed. 9 Wendy Benchley, 'Jaws @ 50' executive producer and ocean conservationist advocate. National Geographic/Chris Johnson 9 Richard Dreyfuss, Roy Scheider in 'Jaws.' Courtesy Everett Collection 'Yeah, so Martha's Vineyard is very much dear to our hearts and part of our life,' she added. 'We see all these sites all the time.' Wendy's late husband wrote the bestselling novel about a great white shark that was turned into a thriller film by Steven Spielberg. Peter died in 2006 at age 65. 9 Peter Benchley signs a copy of his 'Jaws' novel in June 2005. Christopher Polk Being involved in 'Jaws @ 50' gave Wendy new insight into the incredible success of the 1975 film. 'Peter and I, after 'Jaws', went on to live our life,' she recalled. 'Peter went on write more novels, we did a lot of expeditions with National Geographic, and we got into working with ocean conservation issues, and I did a lot of work with non-profits, and I have not been intimately connected to all of the fan clubs of 'Jaws,' and all of that happened afterwards.' 9 Wendy Benchley in her interview with The Post. New York Post 9 Peter Benchley with a picture of a shark in 1976. Getty Images 9 Peter Benchley for the 'Jaws' 30th Anniversary Edition DVD. Christopher Polk 'So for me,' she continued, 'there was that added fun and joy of reacquainting myself with the nuances of 'Jaws' and how brilliant Spielberg was with the techniques which the movie directors talked about. But also, I thought he was brilliant the way he had the local people and gave that great depth of character and all the wonderful faces that you saw and the people you got to know. I think that is one of the most powerful aspects of the film.' 9 'Jaws @ 50' director Laurent Bouzereau with Wendy Benchley. National Geographic/Chris Johnson 9 Peter Benchley holds the 'Pan' award from Pan books in 1975. Getty Images Wendy added, 'And that's also what Peter did in his book. The book was about a great white shark, but it was also about the people who lived on this island who needed to make money to get through the winter and about how there are different approaches to this menace that they couldn't control. So that is I think very much the heart and soul of what the book and the movie is about.' The ocean conservationist advocate was 'moved' by Spielberg's retrospective comments about 'Jaws' in the documentary. 9 Wendy Benchley speaks at the 2015 Peter Benchley Ocean Awards. WireImage 'That was wonderful to listen to him talking about it and in such a personal way,' Wendy stated. 'And honestly, I had not known and I don't think anybody really knew how traumatizing it was to him to make this film and to have the shark breaking down and to have it over budget. And I'm so glad that David Brown and Richard Zanuck just stuck with him and that he was able to finish it off.' 'Jaws @ 50' premieres July 10 on National Geographic and will stream on Disney+ and Hulu.

DOWNLOAD THE APP

Get Started Now: Download the App

Ready to dive into a world of global content with local flavor? Download Daily8 app today from your preferred app store and start exploring.
app-storeplay-store