Editors’ Page

We spent some time this week tightening up the comment box you’ll find at the bottom of every article. It’s a small thing readers rarely notice when it’s working right, but behind the scenes we added a few quiet safeguards - filtering out the bot traffic and junk submissions that every public comment form eventually attracts - so that what lands in Judy’s inbox and mine is reliably from an actual reader with something to say.

While we were in there, we noticed something: some of you don’t leave comments so much as essays. A few sentences of reaction is one thing, but every so often a comment runs long enough that it reads less like feedback and more like the opening of a piece. So now, if your comment runs past a certain length, the site will ask whether you’d rather submit it as an article pitch instead. Say yes, add your name, email, and what you’d like to write about, and it comes straight to us as a proposal, not just a comment that scrolls away under the article.

And if you’ve got a story in you that hasn’t found its way into a comment box yet, you don’t need to wait for one. There’s a new page for it, Want to Write for Classic Chicago Magazine?, tucked into the menu at the top of every page on the site. Tell us what you’d like to write about, and Judy and I will be in touch.

We currently have about 40 writers, many of whom started as UIC journalism interns with a rough idea and a lot of enthusiasm. We’re not looking for polish - we’re looking for a real voice with something to say about the people, places, and history that make this city what it is.

Want to Write for Classic Chicago Magazine? →

It is honor to write in our July 19th issue about Francee Harrington and the Bernice Weissbourd Award she received from Family Focus, a most deserved signaling of how special she is to a wealth of organizations across Chicago. The article highlights many accomplishments, but we would like to focus here on just one:  mentoring.

Mentoring is a privilege at Classic Chicago Magazine where we work with two journalism students each semester from the University of Illinois at Chicago, a tradition started in our early years when Professor Linda Landis Andrews first suggested how useful they could be. It is the best part of the job for us.

As we have come more and more to celebrate Chicago nonprofits we try to expand our coverage beyond photos at fundraising events they host to tell about what they can share as mentors to other organizations.  Just look at what Francee had to say about the 176-year-old Family Focus in today’s piece.

Francee Harrington and I and many others learned mentoring at the Junior League of Chicago, the international training organization which supplies hands-on effective volunteering.  The beauty of mentoring is that it that mentor and mentee often change places, each one showing the other things we hadn’t considered.  Mentoring has nothing to do with age or experience, if anything, it has most to do with listening, also with being humble.

When you talk to an outstanding mentor such as Francee you will see how a conversation can be empowered by a person looking you right in the eye, smiling a bit and hearing everything you said and then perhaps asking a question or two afterwards. Believe me, it is an honor when someone asks you to be a mentor to them.

If you are considering being a mentor (and I bet you already are one), but perhaps on a more formal basis, things can begin with an informal agreement of what you want to accomplish together, what you can each learn from one another and how you go about it. How often do you meet?  What does each need to know about one another?  Trust me, it will take on a life of its own, and when the more formal part of mentoring is over, you will know.

Think of all you have to offer, all you want to share based on your experience and what you still need to learn. 

I would love to know more about your mentors or how you have mentored, please let me know at judycbross@aol.com

Sometimes people ask how Classic Chicago Magazine began, and it’s fun to recall 14 years ago. At that time there were a handful of online magazines, and it seemed an exciting opportunity to try. We liked The New York Social Diary, and thought Chicago deserved its own diary but with features, trips, social history and more.

From the beginning there was Megan McKinney who had authored The Magnificent Medills in 2011 which told the story of the Chicago newspaper dynasty from her perspective as a leading historian and tenacious researcher. Earlier Megan had worked for CBS and TV Guide in New York. More recently she edited Avenue M owned by Chicago journalist Frank Sullivan which was a breezy publication with the depth of articles that one would expect from Megan. I wrote a column called “Judy’s People” and delighted in interviewing people who made Chicago tick.

Megan asked me if I wanted to be the Publisher or the Editor. In an instant I knew that I wanted to be an Editor just like my father had been for Scripps-Howard newspapers. Megan became Publisher and always steered clearly.

The first edition would be five stories once a month. But within a month we went weekly: too many good stories we wanted to tell.

First columnists came on board including Philip Vidal whose “About the Town” has curated not-to-miss monthly events mixed in with his Chicago memories since the beginning. Michelle Crowe’s keen fashion sense made “Style Endures” a must, and Lucia Adams, a highly praised author, often wrote about the English social scene. Soon Bob Glaze joined our staff and his “Weekend Road Trips” detailing trips a short distance from the Loop kept people sane during COVID. Journalist David Sweet’s sports and profiles with a Chicago twist have been continuously popular since our salad days. We currently have about 40 writers, some with monthly columns and we always welcome more writers.

From the first, the title Classic Chicago Magazine—and we went back and forth between that and Chicago Classic—was to show the elegance and determination driving our city, the glorious events, the people who created it and lead it now. Increasingly, philanthropic events that fund organizations doing crucial work give us the opportunity to write about what is best in Chicago.

Although Megan has decided to retire from writing, her articles on Chicago’s leading families will always characterize the stories that we want to share.

Since the first, under the leadership of Professor Linda Andrews, the University of Illinois at Chicago has provided interns each semester. Many of them now are our columnists, many hold excellent jobs related to communications or social service, some are in pursuit of advanced degrees. We recently congratulated former intern Deedee El Bego on her graduation from Medill School of Journalism.

What we wanted to do was create a magazine for all ages. Analytics prove it has worked: readership ranges from 20-year-olds to those in their nineties, with a large concentration right in the middle. Educated, well-traveled people who are classics in your own right: we are proud to call our readers.

We all know that rising from the ashes like the phoenix is a phrase perhaps overly used about our city post fire. In February when our old web provider crashed the site, we felt it was all over, definitely like a fire that destroys everything. Our new Managing Editor John Bartlett found our phoenix practically overnight. He has brought us a beautiful tableau and necessary modernization while continuing to bring you more about Classic Chicagoans and helping to take us to the next level all the while not forgetting the classic in Classic Chicago Magazine.

Thank you for continuing to read our magazine. We welcome your comments each week and your story ideas at judycbross@aol.com.

— Judy Carmack Bross, Editor

My Chicago began across the street from itself.

In 1978 I played with PLATO, an educational AI system developed at UIUC, at the temporary Chicago Cultural Center on Michigan Ave, back when it was still the Chicago Public Library. I was just a kid, and I didn’t know it then, but I was standing across the street from the Art Institute, the building that’s literally the surviving structure from the 1893 World’s Fair. Two classical buildings, staring at each other across Michigan Avenue, one I’d spend my career inside the logic of, and one that defined what I’d come to think of as Classic Chicago.

I came to that street corner from Rome, where I spent the first sixteen years of my life. Rome was foundational for me. But it was not the classical Rome of the 1700s or earlier, it was the Mussolini-styled Rome, EUR, the Foro Italico, Via dei Fori Imperiali cutting through the Forum, a regime appropriating and staging classicism rather than inheriting it quietly. Rome taught me that even the most ancient city is never really finished, it’s just built on top of, again and again, whatever each era needs it to mean.

Chicago doesn’t have that luxury of time, and it never pretended to. After the Great Fire, the rebuild was purposeful. It concentrated a huge swath of architects from all over the world here, and when the 1893 fair came, it imported the grandest classical ideas it could find and made sure the best of them, the Art Institute, the Museum of Science and Industry, stayed standing after everything temporary burned or came down. It took the wealth of the Midwest’s breadbasket and built a skyline, a commodities exchange, a restaurant culture that builds institutions rather than turnover. It even named its streets Schiller, Goethe, Sandburg, reminding people of classical thinking every time they read a street sign.

I’m a technologist by training, but my experience having lived in Chicago, Rome, London, and a couple of California stops besides, is that I learned what American culture actually is from Chicago. Not because it’s the oldest American city, but because it’s the one that looked at what it didn’t have and built it anyway, on purpose, and kept building it for a hundred and fifty years. If you ask me what Chicago is, I’d say Chicago is the embodiment of the American Classic.

I wish you all a wonderful 4th of July celebration.

— John Bartlett, Managing Editor

As a little girl, that was a most important question for me. Growing up in Houston, I always hoped my parents’ answer would be that we would be going to the Shamrock Hotel to watch the fireworks. If you saw “Giant” you will remember the dangerously dazzling James Dean as Jett Rink who was really the legendary bad boy wildcatter Glen McCarthy. This prospector turned oil tycoon created the hotel which seemed to be all done in emerald-green and with the highest Olympic diving board. It was where café society began in Houston. As the editor of The Houston Press, my father knew all the characters, and also that I wanted to see again more than anything the fireworks on its wide lawn. Now the lanais where we watched the fireworks in a pool garden lush with hibiscus is a surface parking lot, but oh, the memories of those days with my parents.

How Chicago is celebrating the America 250 Fourth of July has brought back that magic. What we are doing for the Fourth of July is perhaps even more thrilling than those shooting stars long ago.

Consider the pitching of George Washington’s tent in Washington Square Park so handy to rare Americana documents at the Newberry Library, with exhibits and music glowing like mosaics across the area from the Chicago Botanic Garden to the CSO to Glory Glory in Bridgeport. The Chicago History Museum offers a full day of free festivities July 4 with a ribbon-cutting of the newly restored statue of Lincoln, concerts and reflection. For fireworks lovers, the longest and largest display ever in Chicago will light up the lake front July 4.

Although I will always associate the Fourth of July with fireworks at that emerald-green hotel in Houston, I will now forever be affected by how my own City, Chicago, is celebrating America 250.

Despite my firework fascination, I most applaud a group of Gold Coast residents who are gathering today in their courtyard where along with their Alderman they will be reading The Declaration of Independence, each person taking a few lines.

As recent Revolutionary War scholars have said, the Revolution wasn’t a top-down idea, people in small towns across the colonies read newspapers and rallied on town squares to support the cry for freedom.

— Judy Carmack Bross, Editor-in-Chief

We are delighted to welcome Jean Colonomos as our newest contributor to Classic Chicago. Jean is a poet, playwright, and former Martha Graham dancer whose work reflects a lifetime immersed in movement, language, and the arts. Her poems arrive just as summer opens — and they carry that same spirit of release and possibility.

This week she offers us two poems. “The Open Road” is a meditation on letting go, on blessing the unknown, and on the particular kind of courage it takes to leave the familiar behind. “Playtime with Texts” is something altogether different — a wry, tender collage of the messages we send each other, the small negotiations of daily life that somehow, in Jean’s hands, become their own kind of poetry.

We hope you enjoy her work as much as we do, and we look forward to sharing more of Jean’s writing in the weeks ahead.

— Judy Carmack Bross, Editor-in-Chief

We asked Jean to tell us more about her fascinating life which she tells in Turning Points, perfect for a dancer. She says it was her parents that made it all possible.

My parents — both raised during the Depression, both products of a time when life was precarious and resources scarce — made choices about my upbringing that set me on a path I could never have anticipated. They gave me piano lessons, ballet lessons, and pottery classes. They did this not because they had the money easily, but because they understood, instinctively, that art and creativity were not luxuries. They were necessities.

It was ballet that took hold. I was drawn not just to the movement but to the whole world of it — the discipline, the beauty, the way the body could become a vehicle for meaning. After years of study, I auditioned for the Martha Graham Dance Company and was accepted. To dance with Martha Graham was to enter a tradition unlike any other: rigorous, mythic, rooted in the idea that the body carries what words cannot.

Dance led to theatre. Theatre led to writing. I began as a playwright, drawn to the structure of drama, to the way a stage could hold contradiction and allow an audience to sit with complexity. My plays were produced in New York, in regional theatres, in places I had never imagined when I started. Along the way I discovered poetry — or perhaps poetry discovered me. It is a form that demands the same economy a dancer knows: no wasted movement, no wasted word.

I have lived in New York, in Los Angeles, in places that shaped me in ways I am still understanding. I have taught — dance, drama, creative writing — because teaching is another form of the same thing: helping someone find what they already carry inside them.

Chicago has become home. Here I have found a community of artists and writers who take their work seriously and each other generously. It is the kind of city that rewards attention. I am still paying attention.

When I look back at the turning points, the moments that changed direction, I see my parents’ faith most clearly. They could not have known where those lessons would lead. They gave me the beginnings, and trusted that I would find my way. I am still living the dream they helped me dream.

One of the great joys of Classic Chicago Magazine has been finding the right people to help us tell Chicago’s stories - and no one has been more essential to that mission than our Managing Editor, John Bartlett.

John built Classic Chicago Magazine from the ground up. A software engineer with more than forty years of experience, he brought to our little magazine the same craftsmanship he has applied throughout a distinguished career - and the result is the elegant, seamless publication you enjoy every Sunday. Every article you read, every photograph you see, every beautifully composed page of our Sunday Edition has been shaped by John’s hand. He works quietly behind the scenes each week, turning the words and images our writers and photographers send him into the magazine you hold in your hands. His taste, his care for detail, and his dedication to getting it right are evident in every edition.

We are delighted to introduce John formally to our readers, and to give him the title he has so thoroughly earned. And we have more to come - watch for an interview with John, to be featured in these pages in the near future. In the meantime, you are welcome to reach him at john@classicchicagomag.com - he is as approachable as he is talented.

Classic Chicago Magazine is fortunate in its writers, but we are particularly proud to announce a new title for one who has distinguished herself from the very first word she wrote for us. Sigalit Zetouni is now our Arts Editor.

Sigalit’s work is splendid - there is no other word for it. She sets a tone of sophistication and depth that elevates every edition in which she appears. Her articles take our readers inside the world’s great museums and galleries, illuminating not just what is on the walls but why it matters, and why Chicago belongs in that conversation. She has an eye for the extraordinary and the gift of making you feel that you were there beside her.

We are also delighted to announce that Arts will be the first dedicated section of Classic Chicago Magazine - a home for the coverage that Sigalit has made so essential to who we are. It is a fitting tribute to the standard she has set, and we look forward to growing it with her at the helm.

Every Sunday, Classic Chicago Magazine brings you the stories, people, and places that make this city so endlessly worth celebrating. But until now, we have never had a place to simply talk to you - to step out from behind the articles and say hello.

That changes today.

This is our Editors’ Page: a space where we will introduce the remarkable people who contribute to these pages, share a thought or two about what we are working on, and occasionally say something we could not quite fit anywhere else. Think of it as a letter from us to you - informal, personal, and always with Chicago at heart.

We begin this week with some wonderful news: two introductions we are very proud to make. We hope you will visit this page each Sunday, and we welcome your thoughts at any time. Classic Chicago has always been a conversation, and we are glad to finally have a proper place for our part of it.

Every so often, Classic Chicago Magazine has the good fortune to welcome a contributor who reminds us of what language can do when it is truly in the hands of an artist. Jean Colonomos is such a contributor.

Jean is a poet and playwright whose work has found its way across the country and onto stages both large and intimate. She is also a former Martha Graham dancer — which is to say she understands something essential about discipline, presence, and the precise moment when movement becomes meaning. That sensibility is everywhere in her writing.

This week we publish two of her poems: A Meditation on Balance and Playtime with Texts. They are brief, but they are not small. We hope you will read them slowly, and perhaps more than once.

We are grateful to Jean for sharing her work with our readers, and we look forward to more.

We asked Jean to tell us more about her fascinating life which she tells in Turning Points, perfect for a dancer. She says it was her parents that made it all possible.

Turning point 1: I am six years old and studying ballet at Mary Morris’ Toe, Tap and Ballet School in Far Rockaway, Long Island. The first few lines of this poem is from my book, Living the Dream, available on Amazon.com. We are rehearsing for the year end recital.

I got my first break when I’m five. /I’m a watering can…/I bend over each girl curled/
on the floor and pour imaginary H20..

Turning point 2: At eight-years-old, my mother enrolls me at Ballet Arts in New York City’s Carnegie Hall, a serious ballet school offering children’s classes and for professional ballerinas. A year later I’m a student at the Metropolitan Opera Ballet School. It’s a flourishing time as children are needed as walk-ons in operas. Lohengrin, Manon Lescaut and Cavalieri Rusticana are the operas I was in. The reason is to train hopeful young dancers that the stage is our home.

Turning points 3, 4, 5. Training daily as a ballerina and some days twice, I live in the city with my grandparents. Mom and Dad live in Woodmere, Long Island and it’s too far away from my daily life and nighttime performances.

4: But ballerina-hood is not going to happen. When kids become adolescents, their bodies change. I grew hyperextended knees. My legs bow back, a no-no. Ballet requires straight angles.

5: At sixteen, suffering an identity crisis, Mom insists I finish senior year in the burbs. I refuse. I’m not leaving Professional Children’s School where I have great friends also in the “biz.” And for the first time, I’ve flourished academically.

6: I graduate and marry at nineteen. We live on Long Island and I commute to Hofstra College.

I’m in a Hofstra dance gym class. The teacher instructs, please be seated, put the souls of the feet together and bounce for sixteen counts. This is how a Martha Graham technique class begins, Martha Graham who’s called the Picasso of Modern Dance. We move to New York. I become a member of the Martha Graham Dance company performing Primitive Mysteries, Clytemnestra, unique and inspiring Martha heroines based on the female point of view.

Turning point 8: After 4 years with the company and for various reasons, I leave but continue to understand from my poem, Dear Martha:

Martha,
You are the experience of a lifetime.
To dance one of your dances to live in the divine.

Turning points become streams of change. Divorced, I spend 3 years working at Design Research. I’m in furniture selling Marcel Breur’s Bauhaus chair, the Eames Chair and beautiful rugs. We’re the only store in America carrying Norwegian designer, Marimekko’s fabrics and clothing.

Time to get back to dance? I’ve never written but the editor hires me as a critic. They’ve never had a professional dancer on staff. My first assignment is Disney on Ice. Since I’m Disney dumb, I invite my friend’s eight-year-old and write a review from his point of view. My editor loves it. I also freelance for The Soho Weekly News and The Village Voice. Dance in the 1970s shifts from Graham’s dramas to being plain in front of an audience. (Choreographer, Trisha Brown.) How to write about dance? Instead of criticizing, describe the vibe.

1996, I receive a Citation from the City of Los Angeles for Black Dawn, a play about Cambodian women who have psychogenic blindness from the tortures they suffered. In 9/09/2008 I receive a glowing review in the New York Times for The Third from the Left, about the 1964 reconstruction of Graham’s masterpiece, Primitive Mysteries. (1931)

Poems and plays still come to me: The Hold-Up, my first one act about two petty criminals holding up a ghost in Central Park, Carrie, a play in verse about the loss of my marriage and 7 full length dramas as Cupid’s arrows sling art’s beauty in words that still possess me.

A stroke in California sends me to the Admiral by the Lake in Chicago. I’m happily close to my daughter, Sarah, and my family living in Lincoln Park.

After Jackson LeJeune’s thoughtful review of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off ran in our pages, a reader wrote in with a response we could not set aside. We don’t typically run anonymous letters, but this one earned its exception. The argument was too good, the feeling too genuine. We were unable to reach the author for confirmation, but the words stood entirely on their own merits. We share it here with our thanks - so many of us share this reader’s love of Ferris and this iconic film on its 40th anniversary.

While I appreciate Jackson LeJeune’s thoughtful review of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, I think his perspective illustrates exactly why some films can be difficult to fully understand when viewed outside the cultural context in which they were created. Ferris Bueller was never intended to be a moral role model. That’s where I believe younger viewers often miss the point. In 1986, Ferris represented something far larger than a teenager skipping school. He embodied freedom, spontaneity, and a rebellion against the increasingly structured, achievement-driven culture that many young people felt trapped in. Ferris wasn’t admired because he was perfect; he was admired because he dared to live in the moment.

The criticism that Ferris is selfish, privileged, and never faces consequences is certainly valid if viewed through a modern lens. But audiences in the 1980s weren’t watching a cautionary tale. They were watching a fantasy. Ferris was the kid who got away with what everyone else only dreamed about. Just as Bugs Bunny isn’t judged by modern workplace ethics, Ferris wasn’t intended to be evaluated by contemporary standards of accountability.

What also gets overlooked is that Ferris’s influence on Cameron is the emotional heart of the film. Jackson correctly identifies Cameron as the character who experiences the true arc, but Ferris’s role is to serve as the catalyst. Cameron begins the film paralyzed by fear, anxiety, and his father’s expectations. By the end, he is finally willing to confront his reality. Without Ferris, that transformation never happens.

The article also criticizes the adults as cartoonish caricatures. Again, that’s by design. John Hughes deliberately tells the story from the perspective of teenagers. To many teenagers, adults often seem oblivious, disconnected, and obsessed with rules. The exaggerated portrayal isn’t a flaw; it’s part of the film’s comedic language.

Most importantly, Ferris Bueller captured the spirit of an era. For those of us who actually lived through the 1970s and 1980s, life wasn’t filtered through smartphones, social media, GPS tracking, and constant connectivity. A teenager could disappear for a day, explore a city, make memories with friends, and return home with nothing but stories. That sense of freedom is almost impossible to explain to someone who didn’t experience it firsthand.

The film’s famous message — “Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.” — isn’t an endorsement of irresponsibility. It’s a reminder not to become so consumed by obligations, schedules, and expectations that you forget to actually live.

Forty years later, that’s exactly why Ferris Bueller’s Day Off remains beloved. It isn’t because Ferris is perfect. It’s because, for one glorious day, he reminds us what freedom feels like.