And we had a DJ - my childhood friend from Chicago came to be the DJ at our party out in LA. It was a party, rockin' and rolling, and it was dancing and fun. For me it was different; just to have family with us.
I just thought that I had had my fill for a while and wanted to have a family. My husband was moving to Chicago for his job. And so I went along. And it was a great thing that I did.
My father was a carpenter, a very good carpenter. He also worked for the Jones boys. They were not family members, we weren't related at all. They started the policy racket in Chicago, and they had the five and dime store.
Chicago is a city of neighborhoods, and I love that. It's cool to have different foods from all over the world within a stone's throw of my house.
There's nothing like doing a show at home. When you do a show in Chicago, there's just a certain love that you don't feel anywhere else; it's like home base.
While I've lived in L.A. since 1985, I'll always consider Chicago my home town and have much affection for it. My parents and sister still live there so I try to visit as often as I'm able.
A few years ago in Chicago, I rented an office, and I went there every day. For the most part I do work at home in an ugly room.
And I come here as a daughter, raised on the South Side of Chicago - by a father who was a blue-collar city worker and a mother who stayed at home with my brother and me.
However, I was a restaurant critic at Chicago magazine before I worked at Esquire, and I've been a really enthusiastic home cook for a long time. It's just something I'm passionate about.
It was Muddy Waters who took the Delta blues north to Chicago, electrified the sound, and changed the course of popular music as we know it. That's pretty much the judgment of history, and it is mine as well.
My grandfather and dad worked at General American Transportation Corp. in Chicago, a company that made tank cars and freight cars. We had a pragmatic, Republican, manufacturing, Illinois consciousness as far as employment went.
Well, I design costumes because I started with the theater in Chicago, but somehow a few lines just sort of fell to me to do it. And I studied it in school and I always liked it.
When I moved to Chicago, I was coming from a school that didn't have any arts in Alabama. I essentially came from a town where the arts didn't exist and the desire for education didn't exist and wasn't valued.
I always thought moving to New York would mean starting over in theater, because I had great work in Chicago and didn't want to become a waitress here.
I'd been doing the Chicago theatre thing for years. The money was kinda good - thanks to a push by my old pal Capone, who, let's say, persuaded theatre owners to book me.
Every player should be accorded the privilege of at least one season with the Chicago Cubs. That's baseball as it should be played - in God's own sunshine. And that's really living.
I've spent my whole life in Chicago being asked where am I from, so that I have a sense of displacement that also is very psychologically disorienting.
I think how Chicago plays a role in my life - it had such a role in my youth and the decisions that I made as a kid and formulated who I am as an artist early on.
Pinchas Perry, the director of 'The Chicago 8,' offered me the role of the judge, and he did not know that, 35 years earlier, I'd played a judge in the theater production. So life has its own little twists and turns.
I love Chicago. I lived there briefly for three months and kept a boat under one of those space-age buildings. It was very Jetsons.
This is a broad thought, but loving yourself and having the support so that you can love yourself is the most important thing that young people in Chicago can get.
