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If you are a woman of a certain age, perhaps you've seen this Facebook post. "To all my female friends from 40 years and up ... most of us are going through the next phase of our lives. We're at that age where we see wrinkles, gray hair and extra pounds. Menopause has already appeared or just waiting around the corner. We see the cute 25-year-olds and sigh. But we were also 25, just as they one day will be our age. What they bring to the table with their youth and zest, there...
We concluded what I have dubbed “Summer of The Beatles: Part 1” (Paul McCartney concert, two American English performances, one by the Beatelles) with a trip to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland this past weekend. I should note early on, lest she feels overlooked, that my sister and her husband live outside of Cleveland and the weekend was a wonderful chance to visit them as well. But we’ve known about the special Beatles exhibit at the Rock Hall for some time now a...
Typing up obituaries was part of my very first reporting gig in 1989. The way things were structured at the time, the new reporter in The Doings newsroom inherited the responsibility — and kept it until the next new reporter was hired. The person who preceded me, if I remember correctly, had to type up obits for about a month. I did it for a full year and was oh so happy to let the assignment go. But life in so many ways is circular, and when Jim Slonoff and I started The H...
Working remote is nothing new. I've done it while I've been sick, while my husband had COVID and the first two years my daughter went to sleep-away camp in Holland, Mich. But I've never worked remotely "on the road," so to speak, where I've stayed in a different hotel every night. That's what I did last week as I accompanied my husband, Dan, on sales calls. We dropped Ainsley off near the shores of Lake Michigan Monday and hit the road Tuesday, traveling some 558 miles to...
Signs provide us with all kinds of information. "Slow, children playing" lets us know kids reside on a particular block. (Since kids live on many blocks that don't have such signs, these warnings also might indicate worried parents live on the block as well.) Signs indicating downtown Hinsdale and the Robbins Park subdivision are on the National Register of Historic Places demonstrate the importance of the village's past to Hinsdaleans - or at least to those who are...
Sarah was about four months pregnant when she received news no mother ever wants to hear. She was told her baby had triploidy and would not survive. “She had an underdeveloped brain, underdeveloped kidneys, underdeveloped heart. I don’t think she had a spleen. It was pretty heart-wrenching when I found that out,” said Sarah, a Hinsdale resident who asked that I not use her last name. She had two choices: Wait for her baby to die and deliver her stillborn or terminate the p...
Writing an opinion column is often a challenging thing to do, especially when events leave you speechless. I was standing in front of the office Monday, just after the final entry of the village's parade had passed by, when I heard about a much different end to the parade in Highland Park from assistant village manager Brad Bloom. As the day passed, we learned more and more about the horrific events and its victims. Six killed. More than two dozen injured, either shot or hurt...
One of my favorite tasks at work is to read the submission from our contributing columnist each week. Our writers this past year were Bill Barre, John Bourjaily, Bret Conway, Kelly Abate Kallas, Mistie Lucht (until she moved out of town) Lisa Seplak, Lex Silberburg and student writer Isabella Terry. Perhaps you know one - or more -as a friend or neighbor. Perhaps you've been reading their columns all year thinking, "Hey, I'd like to do that!" Now is your chance. Every year a h...
While planning our July 1993 wedding, stressed by my full-time graduate studies and Dan's full-time job and living in two different cities and juggling family input, we briefly considered running off to Vegas and getting married by an Elvis impersonator. Both lifelong church-goers, we decided against it, agreeing that it wouldn't feel like we were really married. But we promised each other that we would go to Vegas for our 10th anniversary and renew our vows in front of an...
Maybe it's the final episodes of "This is Us" that has me thinking about the different landscapes, if you will, life offers us. Or it might be the fact that the things I thought would go "back to normal" after COVID changed in such a way during the pandemic that we can never go back. More on that later. I've been watching "This is Us" since the beginning. I knew I would be hooked from the second I saw a trailer showing Randall knocking on a door of the man he believes to be...
I'm often impressed by the young people I interview, whether they're elementary school students moderating a presentation by a NASA engineer or high school athletes recommended by their coaches for our weekly profile. I had the opportunity last week to witness the culmination of a semester's worth of work by local high school students in Community Memorial Foundation's Young Community Changemakers - or YC2 - program. Sixty teens were divided into two teams and given $15,000...
Little did I know when I was looking for a job in the spring of 1988 that one day I would write about an event that had thwarted those efforts. Thirty-four years ago last week, on May 8, 1988, the Illinois Bell switching station on Second and Lincoln streets caught fire, destroying phone lines to 35,000 homes in Hinsdale and nearby towns. The affected area included Willowbrook, where my parents had purchased a condo my senior year of college, eagerly anticipating the day I...
Around Mother’s Day, it seems reporters like to ask folks about the most important things they learned from their mothers. One day, maybe such a question will be posed to an adult Ainsley. And here’s what I hope she has to say. Read as much as you can. I will be delighted if Ainsley loves Shakespeare and Jane Austen. But I also hope she does a better job than I did of reading different authors in varied genres and discovering wonderful new voices and the amazing stories the...
May, the fifth month of the year, is named after Maia, the Greek goddess of fertility, spring and growth. Its attributes have been noted by a variety of poets over the years. Like Stephen Foster - "We roamed the fields and river sides, When we were young and gay; We chased the bees and plucked the flowers, In the merry, merry month of May." and John Burroughs - "When purple finches sing and soar ... With vernal gladness running o'er - When joys like these salute the sense ......
The first time I saw the film "Shakespeare in Love," I was fascinated by the inaugural performance of "Romeo and Juliet" at the fictional Rose Theatre. The audience knows Juliet has concocted a plan with the friar to fake her own death so she can avoid marrying Paris and reunite with Romeo. The friar will write to Romeo of the plan. The love story will have a happy ending. Instead, the message goes astray. Juliet wakes up to find Romeo has poisoned himself after finding her...
The alarm went off at 4 a.m. I hadn’t slept all that well in the AC Marriott in Fort Lauderdale, but I woke up quickly. We needed to get the 4:30 a.m. shuttle to the airport for our flight. But even before I had the chance to get out of bed, Dan delivered the bad news. “Our flight’s canceled,” he said. We were stunned. A day earlier it had seemed like a good idea to change our Saturday flight — originally scheduled for 4:30 p.m. but delayed to 8:30 p.m. — to a Sunday morn...
Almost four years ago I wrote a column detailing how a trip about Royal Caribbean's Symphony of the Seas - at that time the largest cruise ship ever built - was not my cup of tea. "The thought of spending my vacation on a floating skyscraper (OK, OK, it's only 18 decks) with 6,679 other passengers and a 2,200-person crew leaves me feeling a little jittery," I wrote. What an idiot. Last week over spring break I spent six nights on a cruise to Mexico and Honduras aboard Royal Ca...
Thirty-one years ago on a Thursday afternoon in late March, I finished my English senior seminar essay (with about 30 seconds to spare before the 4 p.m. deadline), walked back to my sorority house and was greeted with four words: “Get in the car.” Seven of us were driving to Florida for spring break. My suitcase was already in the trunk, and I barely had time for a bathroom stop before we left. Some 18 hours of driving later, we reached our destination, Bonita Springs. The...
I celebrated my 55th birthday on Monday. I remember distinctly when my mom turned 55. At that time, drivers were not allowed to travel 65 mph on the highway, and we joked how she was turning the speed limit. That year — 1996 — I was a college graduate who had been working for eight years and married for three. This year, my daughter is in seventh grade and won’t graduate from college for another nine years. In some ways, having a kid late in life allows you to remain in denia...
We stood in the green room Saturday night before our final performance of "Hinsdale Unmasked" and talked about all that's happened since our last Community Revue in 2020. We've lost three longtime cast members - Dick Johnson, BJ Chimenti and Ly Hotchkin. We've dealt with individual losses and unwelcome diagnoses and other challenges. Oh, and there's been that other little thing: the global pandemic. It was the most emotional pre-show gathering I've experienced in the eight...
Tomorrow night is opening night. I am certain I can speak for all of the cast of "Hinsdale Unmasked" - the 2022 Community Revue - when I say we can't wait to perform for an audience. We've had our fill of applauding for each other and laughing at our own jokes and are ready to share this hilarious show with you, dear residents of Hinsdale. Before I proceed, I should let you know that all of us have been SWORN TO SECRECY about the show's contents. I wrote a column 18 years ago...
I first discovered Charles Mackesy in November 2020 when CBS Sunday Morning was doing a piece on him and his book, "The Boy, The Mole, The Fox and The Horse." We were enjoying our annual Thanksgiving weekend getaway in Saugatuck, so I had time to sit down with my coffee and enjoy the show. "In a quaint barn in the English countryside, there's a man, with a dog, documenting the human condition in its simplest form, through sketches about kindness and empathy, as we all...
I have been so inspired by the athletes competing in the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing. Here are a few of my favorites: • Colby Stevenson, the silver medalist in the men's big air competition, who almost died in a 2016 car accident that left him with a broken skull in 30 places. He had been driving from Oregon to Utah to see a friend who broke his leg when Stevenson fell asleep at the wheel and rolled his car six times. Doctors weren't sure he'd walk again - or even live -...
On Valentine’s Day, most people are thinking about romantic love. I always think about Valentine’s Day my sophomore year in college. My boyfriend made me a homemade card and asked me to wear his lavaliere (a step before getting pinned). He was smart enough not to buy it in advance, as I had rejected this idea previously. But once I said yes, he walked a mile and a half in the snow to buy me one. He’s now my husband and has done many nice things for me on Valentine’s Days over...
Growing up, I didn't know a soul who was adopted. As an adult, I find the opposite is true. Adopted people are everywhere. At a 2020 Community Revue cast party, I learned that two of my castmates were also adopted and that all of us either had met or hoped to meet our birth parents. A fellow cast member came up and asked us what we were discussing so intently. "Finding our birth parents," one of us offered. She promptly turned around and headed back to the bar. One of the folk...
