Chicago Reader print issue of March 27, 2025 (Vol. 54, No. 25)
The ghosts of Geneva’s ‘home for wayward girls’
by Katie Prout, p. 6
The Illinois State Training School for Girls, a youth prison, closed nearly 50 years ago but remains a cautionary lesson.
ARTS & CULTURE
A
Reader Bites | McFadden Aloo paratha at Annapurna Simply Vegetarian
06 Cover Story | Prout The Illinois State Training School for Girls was the state’s first and only girls prison. Nearly 50 years a er its closure, it remains a cautionary lesson on Progressive reform and youth justice.
15 Cra Work | Cardoza Anders Zanichkowsky’s handwoven burial blankets are meant to affirm life and honor death.
THEATER
16 Feature | Renken Newport Theater’s burlesque classes help make performing dreams come true.
17 Performance Picks Final girl tropes and queer trauma combine in it’s been ten years since everybody died at Open Space Arts; Splash Hatch on the E Going Down at Definition Theatre explores environmental racism.
MUSIC & NIGHTLIFE
18 Chicagoans of Note | Galil Taigo Onez: DJ, producer, and label head 20 City of Win South-side creative agency 3V helps independent artists build sustainable futures.
22 Shows of Note Previews of concerts including Sonido Gallo Negro, Bubble Tea and Cigarettes, and Jules Reidy
Savage Love Sex in hot tubs, and more
ON THE COVER
Cover photo and historical photos accompanying our cover story (p. 6) are courtesy of the Geneva History Museum. Cover photo was altered from original (faces in photo blurred) with permission from the museum. Design by Shira Friedman-Parks.
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Of course, my fascination with Geneva and its ghosts began with a girl. “There’s this cemetery,” my friend Logan texted me, “in the middle of a subdivision.” The Atlas Obscura article she sent me showed pictures of gray headstones stained by moss, wet with yellow autumn leaves. A chain-link fence snaked around the background of the pictures.
The cemetery had once been part of Geneva’s Illinois State Training School for Girls, which ran from the 1890s through the 1970s, but the article said that many who went there described it not as a school, “but rather as a cruel prison.” According to the article, “this cemetery is all that remains of a school for ‘wayward’ girls.”
That word got our blood up. Logan and I were Chicago journalists, and a bit wayward ourselves. Between us, we had one arrest, a history of trespassing, an enjoyment of illegal drugs, various mental disorders, and a brief but sincere love a air in our 20s that had made the friendship between us only more precious and essential.
Every year, we leave Chicago on our bikes for a day or a few, and that year, we
made the Geneva cemetery our destination. We didn’t know it then, but below the path we rode were the train tracks used to guide hundreds of runaway Geneva girls back to Chicago. Some even died there, electrocuted by third rails or hit by trains as they risked everything for their freedom.
We didn’t make it all the way to the cemetery that day, but I eventually did, and kept going back. In truth, I was afraid. Behind my ribs, I could feel the iron clicking and pulling of a story that wanted all of me. Some stories are like that: they grab me by the wrist and pull me with a cold grip deep into their forest. It takes me years to find my way out. It took almost four years to research and write this story. The more I learned about these girls, the more real they became; “The ghosts of Geneva’s ‘home for wayward girls’” is dedicated to them, and to the 187 children incarcerated in Illinois today. No one, wayward or not, should have to risk death in order to be free. v
—Katie Prout, features writer m kprout@chicagoreader.com
CORRECTIONS
The Reader has updated the online version of the March 13 print feature by contributor Noah Berlatsky, “Footwork producer DJ Elmoe takes a big step.” The print version of the story included a reference to the DJ Elmoe track “O Set” that mistakenly connected it to Atlanta rapper O set. The Reader regrets the error. v
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Archery practice at Geneva COURTESY GENEVA HISTORY MUSEUM
CITY LIFE
STREET
VIEW
Radiance despite gray weather
We could all use some sunshine, but we’ll settle for bright colors.
By ISA GIALLORENZO
The vernal equinox has happened for 2025, which means that spring has finally arrived. However, we could call it a “technical spring” so far because we’ve only had fleeting glimpses of the warmth and new growth yet to come.
Right now is the time of year when Chicagoans crave color. While nature will take its own time to dazzle us, we can always choose to wear clothes for the season we want to be living in.
“It was such a dreary day that I wanted to wear colors that cheered me up and popped out against the gray sky,” said Je rey O’Malley. O’Malley and I emailed after I ran into him at a bus stop this month. The 34-year-old candle assembler continued, “I also love nodding to Piet Mondrian in outerwear when I can by wearing primary colors.”
Photographed on his way home from work, O’Malley appeared both cozy and sophisticated in a carefully coordinated yet e ortless ensemble. His attention to detail was evident in every piece.
O’Malley was able to supply us with a detailed list of sources for his outfit. “The day you saw me, I was wearing a vintage wool flatcap by Kangol that I found a few years ago at Andersonville Antiques, a cherry-red chore coat by Le Mont Saint Michel (which I was thrilled to get on sale), a vintage indigo scarf I bought from Kopi Cafe’s boutique, NavajoChurro wool mittens made by the Weaving Mill in Humboldt Park (I really admire Emily and Kendall there and urge people to support their work!), Todd Snyder checked wool pants from eBay (which a coworker kindly hemmed), and my umbrella was left behind by an old roommate . . . as it falls apart, I continue to
repair it,” O’Malley shared.
“My style tends to be eclectic and textured and primarily influenced by what I find at thrift stores, antique shops, or the rare online find on eBay,” he added.
Despite his keen fashion sense, O’Malley admits that shopping for clothes isn’t something he particularly enjoys, and his wardrobe has been built over time. “I used to live near Unique on [Elston between] Irving Park and Addison. That place had some beautiful men’s clothes. Brown Elephant in Andersonville will have good finds. Uniqlo has pants that fit me, given how short I am. Otherwise, I browse eBay every now and then.”
When it comes to style inspiration, O’Malley credits his grandmother, Iris, and his wife, Heather, both of whom are “exceptionally stylish.” “Also watching films from the 60s and just paying attention to people [in my age range] working in co ee shops. I tend to prefer playfulness and pieces that will last [instead of] trends,” he said.
Though his bus arrived quickly, O’Malley and I got to chat for a bit while I took his photos. Before boarding, he mentioned that I couldn’t send the pics to his phone, which is as low-tech as possible. “Technology is great but only insofar as it serves human connection,” he emailed.
“Not having social media, I feel like I have to look at the world around me for inspiration. I look to my friends and my fellow Chicagoans as much as I look at styles prevalent in older films and in art history. Sometimes, my favorite color combinations come out of European medieval art. Sometimes, in reading a book, an article of clothing gets mentioned that stands out and draws my attention.”
To elevate one’s style, O’Malley suggests looking at art and observing how painters use color. “Also, it’s always refreshing to step outside the box and experiment,” he wrote. v
m letters@chicagoreader.com
Jeff rey O’Malley waits for the bus. ISA GIALLORENZO
new revolution verse
in a country that is capitalistic
The poor folks
Labeled ‘capital misfits’
Some can’t afford a cap on a lipstick
Or to pay attention
So they ask for assistance
Uncle Sam say: ‘Before we proceed, Mama gotta kick Daddy out to receive green.’
Laughing like: ‘Hee! Hee! Hee!
She thinks they’ve out of debt
‘Cause I took out the D, And left her with E-B-T.’
She said aint nothing wrong with money, that is a tool
Of use, it’s the love of money that is the root of evil
That grew into a tree producing z-quill
Gotta be asleep
To live an American dream still I be the Hypochondriac insomniac
Balancing health and wealth
‘Cause I’ve known where Daddy and Mommy at Plus I know where GOD be at And know my nose
Looks just like the one missing off the Sphinx Everybody eats, B!
You should’ve grew something
Dont just stand there, do something!
I been quit saying hello to underdressed fellows
That drink only Mello Yello
‘Cause they come plain and do nothing.
By “Real T@lk”
Real T@lk is a active MC and DJ, he has performed and taught throughout the country, produced eight albums, published two books and given several guest lectures and keynotes centered around art-integrated education
Poem curated by Frsh Waters. Frsh Waters from Chicago’s Westside is a writer, performance artist, & community outreach coordinator for Chicago youth arts non-profit John Walt Foundation and is a member of Chicago’s incomparable Pivot Gang.
Join us for an evening of poetry readings by Elise Paschen and Esther Belin plus artist talks by June Carpenter and Lydia Cheshewalla, followed by a reception. April 10, 2025 at 6:00 PM
Exhibition Opening: Escaramuza, the Poetics of Home Escaramuza, the Poetics of Home is a collaborative work by photographer Constance Jaeggi and poets Angelina Sáenz and ire’ne lara silva. The exhibition explores escaramuza, the team sport of women’s precision horse riding, addressing complex themes of identity, family, and gender with a lush combination of poetry and photography. April 17, 2025 at 6:00 PM
Learn more at PoetryFoundation.org
FOOD & DRINK
Ifirst ate at t his 43-year-old South Indian standby during an informal Devon Avenue food crawl with my friends. We started there with paratha, pani puri, and chai; shopped around Patel Brothers; nibbled on masala dosa, idli, and sambar vada at Udupi Palace, plus co ee and a long break to digest; enjoyed rose falooda and other treats at King Sweets; then ended the day overstuffed with butter paneer curry, veg thali, and more chai from Ghareeb Nawaz. To the surprise of everyone in the group, our mutually agreed upon best bite of the day was also the first. The aloo paratha at counterservice cafe Annapurna stood out against a full day’s worth of sweet and savory delectables—
and, no, I have to insist that it wasn’t just because we were hungriest in the morning.
The flaky potato-stuffed flatbread is the perfect vehicle to scoop the rich, spiced chana masala. Drizzle some cooling raita over the chickpea curry, and don’t be deterred when it drips down your hand; just shovel the bite in your mouth, use your greasy fingers to pop in a tangy piece of achar, let the layers of flavor wash over you, and go back for more.
—TARYN MCFADDEN ANNAPURNA SIMPLY VEGETARIAN 2600 W. Devon, 773-764-1858, $11.99, eatannapurna.com v
Reader Bites celebrates dishes, drinks, and atmospheres from the Chicagoland food scene. Have you had a recent food or drink experience that you can’t stop thinking about? Share it with us at fooddrink@ chicagoreader.com.
ATTENTION
If you listed Lawndale Complex or the Lawndale Community Area on your Housing Choice Survey as a place you would like to permanently live, please read the information listed below.
ATTENTION PUBLIC HOUSING RESIDENTS & HCV PROGRAM PARTICIPANTS: PUBLIC COMMENT PERIOD FOR FY2025 MTW ANNUAL PLAN AMENDMENT
The Chicago Housing Authority (CHA) is scheduling a 30-day public comment period for a proposed FY2025 MTW Annual Plan Amendment related to the ground lease or sale of land at Altgeld Gardens for the future rehabilitation and expansion of the Up Top building by the non-profit By The Hand Club for Kids to expand their after-school programming.
The 30-day public comment period begins March 20 and ends April 18, 2025. All CHA residents and the community-at-large are invited to review the proposed Plan Amendment, attend the public hearings and submit written comments. You are not required to view or attend the public comment hearings to submit comments. Your presence or absence at the hearing does not affect your housing.
The Draft Tenant Selection Plan (TSP) and Lease for Ogden Commons, a mixed-income community is available for review. The Chicago Housing Authority (CHA) has worked with its development partner to develop a Draft TSP and Lease for use at the private development known as Ogden Commons (previous site of the Lawndale Complex). The units within this development will be used as replacement public housing units for Lawndale Complex and the Lawndale Community area. If you listed Lawndale Complex/Lawndale Community area on your Housing Choice Survey as a place you want to live or maintain a right to return to new CHA replacement housing per the Relocation Rights Contract (RRC), you can comment on the Draft TSP and Lease during the 30-day public comment period.
The 30-day public comment period will be held for CHA to receive written comments starting April 7 through May 7, 2021. The Tenant Selection Plans (TSP) will be available on CHA’s website beginning April 7, 2021.
CHA will host two public comment hearings—one livestream and one in-person:
• In-person: Wed, March 26, at 6:00 pm Altgeld Gardens 951 E 132nd Pl (Sign and Spanish interpreters will be present.) Comments can be submitted in person.
Due to COVID-19, CHA has suspended all in person public meetings and instead, CHA will livestream one public comment hearing. The date and time of the public comment livestream hearing is as follows:
• Livestream: Mon, March 31, at 11:00 am www.thecha.org Live Comment Hearing (Sign interpreter will be present.) Comments can be submitted in the Livestream chat.
Tue, April 20, 10:00am: https://youtu.be/QBGG47BHXMg
A recording of the livestream session will be available following the hearing. If you require translation services, check with your property manager for more details or call the number below.
We ask that comments pertaining to the TSP & Lease be submitted electronically to commentontheplan@thecha.org at least 48-hours prior to the comment hearing. Comments will be read live during the time outlined above. Comments received after the hearing will be added to the comment grid.
The Summary and Proposed FY2025 MTW Annual Plan Amendment will be available on CHA’s website at www. thecha.org on March 20, 2025. You may also mail or fax comments for the Proposed FY2025 MTW Annual Plan Amendment All comments must be received by April 18, 2025.
If you require translation services, please read the attached notice or check with your property manager for more details. Do not mail comments to CHA.
Chicago Housing Authority
E-mail or Fax comments to: commentontheplan@thecha.org Fax 312. 913.7837
Attention: Proposed FY2025 MTW Annual Plan Amendment 60 E. Van Buren St, 12th Floor Chicago, IL 60605
A weekly series curated by the Chicago Reader and sponsored by the Poetry Foundation.
NEWS & POLITICS
The ghosts of Geneva’s ‘home for wayward girls’
The Illinois State Training School for Girls was the state’s first and only girls’ prison. Nearly 50 years a er its closure, it remains a cautionary lesson on progressive reform and youth justice.
By KATIE PROUT
“Idow and run away tonight,” one teenage girl confessed to another. It was May 20, 1903. In a collection of stone cottages 50 miles west of Chicago, approximately 500 girls, ages ten to 20, were baking bread, washing laundry, and doing what they could to avoid the cruel attention of their superintendent. After spending the last two years of her life incarcerated at the compound, one of the girls was getting ready to run for her freedom. Geneva History Museum records say she was Annie or Anna, and her last name was either When, Wren, Wehnn, or Weheen. In a news account published days later, the Geneva Republican called her “Anna Weheen, a Chicago girl.” I don’t know for certain her name or what she looked like, but I do know that beneath Anna’s window lilacs bloomed. Normally, this window—like all those of
girls—was crossed with locked iron bars, but a repairman happened to be doing some work. That morning, when she cautiously checked the bars, they were unlocked.
At 5:30 PM, according to the Republican , Anna went to her room, shut her door, and blocked it with her bed and table. When a worker who was coming by to lock the bars of all the girls’ windows couldn’t get in, she alerted superintendent Ophelia Amigh, who hurriedly demanded a carpenter take down the door. But before the carpenter could succeed, Anna opened the window, pushed the bars, and jumped.
The place from which Anna was so desperate to escape was the Illinois State Training School for Girls in Geneva, a far west suburb of Chicago. During its years of operation from 1894 to 1977, it went by many names: the State Home for Juvenile Female Offenders, the
then, during its few years as a coed institution, the Illinois Youth Center in Geneva. All these names are euphemisms for what it was: the state’s first and only girl’s prison, and then, briefly, the first coed youth prison in Illinois. Historical records and personal accounts show that the girls were incarcerated for truancy, theft, assault, or murder; running away from home or being orphans; engaging in street-based sex work; having an intellectual disability or mental illness; being sexually active with men or boys; being queer; being sexually assaulted or alleging someone sexually assaulted them; or being homeless, pregnant, single, or too poor to find shelter anywhere else. Girls were also sent to Geneva for being accused of any of the above, even falsely, or for in any other way breaking laws or social norms meant to uphold the political ideals of good, white womanhood.
history, Geneva was closed in 1977, and the property was sold to a private developer. A cul-de-sac of early-2000s McMansions now exists where the institution used to be. At its end, the prison was composed of cottages, a bakery, a beauty parlor, a solitary confinement unit, a Catholic church, a Protestant church, and a hospital. All that’s left is a cemetery, which marks the subdivision’s southernmost end. Inside its chain-link perimeter are 51 headstones for girls—and their infants— who died at Geneva. A plaque declares that in death, the girls buried there are “no longer wayward.”
Thousands of girls, the majority from Chicago and Cook County, were incarcerated here during Geneva’s reign. I don’t know how many tried, like Anna, to run away, or how many of them successfully evaded recapture, but newspaper archives throughout the decades
are dotted with their stories. In addition to the cemetery, the Geneva institution was bound by train tracks and the Fox River, both of which served as guides out for incarcerated teens. Later, runaways hitchhiked along nearby state and county highways, taking their chances with strangers rather than stay at Geneva one day longer.
When Anna Weheen landed in the lilac bush 20 feet below her window, she broke her femur. It took her two days to die in the institution’s hospital, where she also demonstrated signs of internal injuries. But after an examination, the coroner determined Anna’s primary cause of death was pneumonia. “A Coroner’s jury . . . could only exonerate the faculty,” the Republican article assured the reader, “as the members were in no manner at fault for the girl’s injury or death.”
Having finished with Anna’s autopsy results, the rest of the article devoted itself to a postmortem of her character. Anna was “not normal, a degenerate, had a violent temper and [was] the victim of bad habits.” Her injuries weren’t caused by a publicly funded institution where mere existence was such a horror that a teenager felt the need to run away or die trying; rather, they occurred because Anna was “fleshy” and her weight broke her bones. Her mother had a “bad” reputation, and her father took little interest in his daughter. Anna was Jewish, noted the article, as were both her parents. The only quote in the story was from superintendent Amigh, who said, “This girl was the worst one to handle and the most unpromising of any ever brought to the institution.” What the writer and Amigh didn’t mention was that Anna, whatever and whoever she was, was brave: to test the bars, to confide in another girl, and to snatch some of her agency back.
Like many others, Anna was buried in the cemetery that remains on the institution’s grounds.
Aschool, a jail, an asylum, a home. For a place built to contain, study, and label the young people in it to an exact degree, Geneva was notably dependent on
euphemism. Each new name reflects an attempt at reform. When it opened its doors in December 1893 in Chicago, the State Home for Juvenile Female O enders existed because of a new belief that children should not be tried in adult courts or held in adult jails. A year later, the institution was moved to Geneva; at this time, it was also called a “home for wayward girls.” (According to a 1978 lecture given at the Geneva History Museum by former Geneva employee Nancy Vulkacic, “wayward,” when used in the late 19th century, signified a runaway, truant, orphaned, and/or promiscuous girl.) In 1901, after reports of runaways and rumors of physical punishment broke into local news coverage, Geneva was renamed the Illinois State Training School for Girls at Geneva to “emphasise its new rehabilitative focus.”
After several decades of lurid headlines about riots, suicides, queer love a airs, and murder, the institution went coed in an attempt to make youth incarceration feel more “normal” and decrease recidivism by integrating genders. From 1971 until its closure in 1977, it was known as the Illinois Youth Center in Geneva.
At its close, Geneva was run by the Juvenile Division of the Illinois Department of Corrections (now its own department, the Department of Juvenile Justice), but for about 60 years—the majority of the institution’s existence—it was housed under the Department of Public Welfare. This is not just a clue to how the girls were understood by people in power at the time—impoverished, disabled, and/or criminal—but it also underscores the belief that remanding them to the care and supervision of the state was a benefit to Illinois society as a whole, worth the cost of their incarceration.
If Geneva served as a school, it wasn’t reflected in the way the youth arrived or were identified. They were charged with crimes and went to court but were not sentenced to Geneva for a set amount of time. Instead, they were held until a parole board determined they were “rehabilitated” according to a set of standards that were dependent on the religious views, racial biases, and attitudes toward female sexuality of the board members at the time. Receiving parole could take months or
Geneva was born at the intersection of a growing call for “juvenile justice,” an emerging mental health system, and a burgeoning interest in eugenics. Illinois was the mother of all three.
years. For some, it never came. And as with the institution’s name, language shifted over the decades between “girls,” “delinquents,” and “inmates,” but in all the academic papers and newspaper archives I’ve read over the last three and a half years, never did I see the word “student.”
“I don’t know what you’d call us. I’m not sure. Technically, we were inmates, I guess,” said Steve Shikenjanski, who was incarcerated there between 1971 and 1972. Like other survivors, when recalling memories at Geneva, he referred to himself and the others there as “kids.”
An aerial view of Geneva from the 1970s; girls laboring on the institution’s grounds, names and date unknown COURTESY GENEVA HISTORY MUSEUM
NEWS & POLITICS
continued from p. 7
“I hate using ‘inmate.’ ‘Student,’ maybe?” wondered Cherie Livett Bombell, who worked as a counselor at Geneva in the 70s. “I don’t really know what to use. ‘Incarcerated youth?’ ‘Kids behind bars?’ It depends on if you want to use a shock factor. Who are we respecting? Or who are we playing to?”
There were classrooms at Geneva, as well as vocational training in accordance with jobs thought to be suitable for women at the time: laundress and cook, housekeeper and farmer’s wife. In the mid-20th century, Geneva added beautician, restaurant worker, and stenographer, and in the more liberated 1970s, the institution launched an electronics program. Each introduction was yet another attempt at rehabilitation—not only of the youth decried as delinquents but of the institution itself.
The Illinois State Training School for Girls began as it would end: a compassionate idea, a sincere and Progressive hope.
Part of the late-19th-century Progressive reform movement that, in Chicago, saw the birth of social service works like Hull House and the founding of the country’s first youth court, Geneva emerged at the intersection of a growing call for “juvenile justice,” an emerging mental health system, and a burgeoning interest in eugenics. Illinois was the mother of all three. From the beginning, Geneva was a woman-led project. In Defining Deviance: Sex, Science, and Delinquent Girls, 1890-1960, a book-length study of the institution, Michael Rembis wrote that despite gender-based academic and career limitations, “middle class [white] women created a niche for themselves in ‘maternalist medicine’ and public health. . . . In Illinois, professional maternalists were instrumental in creating the juvenile court, the juvenile psychopathic institute, and the juvenile protective association.” Their proximity to motherhood, the symbolic power they held in the home, and the actual power they held thanks to their class status, race, and relationship with white men gave these “maternalists” the force to influence social programs and change laws, even before they had the power to vote.
working outside of the home, families having a so-called “irresponsible” number of children, and other perceived threats to a stable and healthy America. They used the results of their research to support the existing beliefs of social reformers, who already considered single mothers who depended on the state a “community menace.” In this way, Rembis wrote, they worked closely with their male counterparts to “make eugenic commitment a reality in Illinois.”
In August 1894, one maternalist reform group, the Chicago Area Women’s Refuge for the Reformed, purchased 51 acres of farmland in Geneva. They did so in partnership with
girls onto the right path. In December 1894, Geneva’s first superintendent, Amigh—the woman who castigated Anna’s character to the press after the girl died under her care— moved into one of the original farmhouses on the property. With her came eight girls.
As the institution put down roots in Geneva, the number of girls incarcerated there began to climb. In 1899, the state expanded the property by 40 more acres. Ten years later, an additional 150 acres would solidify its parameters for the rest of its existence, with its population growing in kind. At its height, Geneva contained upwards of 500 youth.
About a decade into Geneva’s existence—
found in the homes of this country.”
“No one may rightfully torture the object of this school into a place of punishment,” the writer declared. “There isn’t a single feature of it that is not calculated and does not bring about the better life of a fortunate rather than unfortunate inmate.”
As in the Geneva Republican write-up about Anna’s death, Amigh is a main source for this Tribune story. At the beginning of her reign as superintendent—which, running from 1894 to 1911, would be the longest in Geneva’s history—she argued that the girls incarcerated to her care could be reformed “to become good wives and mothers and take pride in establishing good American homes.” But eventually, wrote historian Anne Meis Knupfer in an article from 2000, Amigh endorsed the sterilization of Geneva girls and others like them.
During Amigh’s career, eugenics “fit well with dominant scientific theories that rooted modern social problems in the minds and bodies of the deviant ‘other’—poor people, new immigrants, anarchists, people with disabilities— and not in social, economic, or political systems,” wrote Rembis. Like other women reformers of her time, Amigh believed that “severe poverty, delinquency, and nonnormative sexual behavior” were manifestations “of a hidden but highly heritable impairment.”
In Chicago, these women went into the city’s ethnic enclaves and slums to conduct research on the causes of poverty, disease, women
the board of trustees of the original Chicago-based State Home for Female Juvenile O enders. The two organizations had a shared goal: to transform “delinquent” urban girls, all of whom were poor and most of whom were either immigrants or from immigrant families, into women with Protestant, middle-class values. “Rehabilitated” and “reformed” were the watchwords. Perhaps farm labor, domestic chores, and discipline in the traditional, tranquil countryside, with staff meant to mimic the ideal nuclear family, could set wayward
and eight months after Anna Weheen died— the Chicago Tribune published an article titled “Orphanage Girls Make Good Wives: Training of State Institution Well Fits Them for Household Management.” The paper itself had documented desperate parents attempting to get their daughters back from Geneva, but the article repeated the myth that most girls at Geneva were orphans. The story praised institutional leaders for forcing the girls to do traditional women’s labor, which would leave them “fitted to become the best housewives
Until Geneva’s closure, every girl who entered was subjected to physical and psychological exams as well as intelligence testing. For its first few decades, Geneva produced eugenics research so substantial that the “data” collected on the girls was quoted by proponents around the country, including American eugenicist and segregationist Henry H. Goddard and Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger. If these tests determined that you had what we might identify now as a mental illness, an intellectual disability, or PTSD, you might be transferred to one of Illinois’s new facilities for “feebleminded adults” and face involuntary commitment for the rest of your life.
Impoverished mothers, writing letters to Geneva begging for their daughters to be released back to their care, caused Amigh a “great deal of annoyance,” in part because she didn’t think these women were fit mothers precisely because they were poor. A state eugenic law allowing for the confinement
A present-day approximation of Geneva’s layout in its later years, based on aerial photos, survivor accounts, and a 1912 technical drawing of the property SHIRA FRIEDMAN-PARKS
of “feebleminded girls” at Geneva through their child-bearing years until menopause, Amigh argued, was necessary “for the future good of the State” because it would “cut down on the expense of caring for paupers and criminals.” This law, the fi rst in the country allowing for indefinite and involuntary commitment of “feebleminded” individuals to state institutions, passed in Illinois in 1915. From then until 1950, according to Rembis in an earlier article, “Geneva staff committed approximately 5-10 percent [of] inmates each year to one of two state institutions for the ‘feebleminded.’”
The fertile, feebleminded girl was considered both prey and sexual predator, as well as a threat to the health of the state and country. Geneva authorities obsessed over the girls in countless ways but paid special attention to their sexualities and sexual activities. “Psychologists and psychiatrists often questioned females about their daydreams, autoerotic activities, lesbian inclinations, and heterosexual involvements,” wrote Meis Knupfer. But upon arrival at Geneva, before they even began the battery of psychological examinations, “the girls first had their bodies scrutinized for diseases, pregnancy, and proof of virginity.” These exams were used to confirm psychiatric diagnoses. The criteria for diagnoses like “dull normal” or “borderline feebleminded” included engaging in sex work, being pregnant or giving birth outside of marriage, having a sexually transmitted infection (STI), or demonstrating other “sexual disturbances” and “intractable behavioral problems.” Accusing a relative, or any man, of sexual assault was enough to get you locked up. “In many cases, experts interpreted stories of sexual abuse as either a direct sign of an inmate’s inherent inability to control both herself and the men she encountered, as the product of overactive imagination . . . or as signs of the girl’s willingness to deceive, all of which they classified as evidence of mental ‘defect,’” wrote Rembis. Other times, girls too poor and racially or ethnically marginalized to get care elsewhere ended up at Geneva for protection from assault, for care for pregnancy, or to recover from an STI.
first few years. But by 1900, records show that two newly incarcerated girls, as well as three returned parolees, were pregnant. The institution began requesting the state build a hospital so girls could deliver their babies on Geneva’s grounds in 1910, but it took until 1924 for the state to comply, Meis Knupfer wrote. “Following recommendations by Illinois clubwomen, the state eventually added an on-campus nursery, complete with its own pediatrician.”
For Geneva’s first 40 years, girls were encouraged to keep their babies with them rather than put them up for adoption, which was consistent with the institution’s em-
adoption. “Given the high number of girls who had been paroled only to return to Geneva, the administrators probably concluded that ‘fallen’ women would be ‘bad’ mothers,” Meis Knupfer wrote.
For several years in the 2010s, Livett Bombell, the former counselor at Geneva, ran a blog called Kids Behind Bars: Geneva, Illinois. The archive of her posts is a rich record of memories of Geneva and the young people there for whom she cared deeply. The posts also served as virtual beacons for survivors and their descendants, drawing them to the comments sections to reconnect, share their own memories, and ask their own questions.
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a letter to IL DOC under the F.O.I.A. requesting any and all records from that facility. I am 45 years old now and time is running out. I need some closure in my life about who my father may have been.
I to was at the Geneva home for girls. I was there some time around 1967 to1969. I also gave birth to a baby boy that died. I left in june of 1969 after the birth and death of my son who died while I was still at the school. It was a hard time for me,and father Kaiser did not have my son buried there but in a catholic cemetery where he was pastor. I am now 64yrs old, but the past still haunts me to this day. I will never forget my life at home or at Geneva. I want to know how kids got to be treated like this.
According to Meis Knupfer, Geneva did not allow pregnant girls entrance during its
phasis on domesticity in its curricula (and consistent with girls who were paroled out to cook and clean in the private homes of married couples, although they sometimes were reincarcerated at Geneva after becoming pregnant by the men who owned those homes). “We try to teach them what the three words—mother, home, and heaven—mean,” one early 20th century biannual report from Geneva proclaimed, according to Meis Knupfer. By the 1930s, Geneva administrators were directing the girls to give up their babies for
One of the most common topics came from adult children searching for mothers, who’d been Geneva girls—and Geneva girls, now old women, searching for their kids:
i was there 3 times, 63-64, 66-68…had my first son there, came in preg!! please call me i am looking for my son
I was born at the time of my mothers incarceration. My father may have come to visit my mother while she was there. I just recently sent
My mom hated to speak of that place, but she did tell me about a tiny part of it. she said that she worked in the bakery. she told me how she’d talk to me in her belly and of the responses she’d get from me after eating peach cobbler there. she said that when she went into labor, that another girl was in the infirmary in labor as well. they did not come for my mother until I was crowning. she said that it was too late to get to the hospital, so I was born there. they whisked me away from her right after birth. she told me of how she’d hear me crying and no one would pick me up or pay attention to me. she would yell and cry for them to pick me up, only to end up in the hole for yelling. I have a made up birth certificate. I have no idea if Geneva detention kept a record of my birth or not. I called there once, in about ’79-’80. I asked for the doctor listed at the bottom of my birth certificate. They put a man on the phone with me. He seemed to be very vehement about my not being born there. he said no babies were ever born there. there’s just so much I would love to find out. do you suppose they still have any records?
In total, I found records for 36 babies who died during Geneva’s existence. That number is almost certainly an undercount. I found no records of infant death before 1920, and it’s highly unrealistic that, given how many girls were pregnant at Geneva, along with the dangerous state of labor and delivery at the turn of the century, it took a quarter century for in-
Sharon Randall-Friday, incarcerated at Geneva for most of 1965 through 1969, sketched a hand-drawn map of the institution from memory. SHARON RANDALL-FRIDAY
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fant death to touch the institution. (For example, according to the earliest data compiled by the Illinois Department of Public Health, the state’s infant mortality rate in 1907 was 140 out of every 1,000 live births; by comparison, it was 5.6 in 2021.)
In museum archives, newspaper records, and on headstones, some babies are remembered by their mother’s names: Infant son of Elise Valdez, Infant of F Frerichs, Infant Wilkes, Infant Trotter. A few names are expansive and full, perhaps hinting that their mothers hoped they would have a big life: Virginia Lee Fuller, Paul Donald Dugger, Robin Lynn Spaw. The first infant death at Geneva of which I found a record, Frank Mitchell, occurred on April 16, 1920, four years before the institution’s hospital was built. The last baby in the records to die, Samuel Starks, passed on May 29, 1970. All the babies in the records, except for Frank, were buried on Geneva’s grounds.
But even within this school–jail and despite a violent eugenics movement working against them, girls at Geneva found ways to express their agency and define their own identities, often at great cost. They performed hysteria via sudden fits of blindness, they passed out, they self-mutilated— acts of intense emotional and psychological pain that also were acts of disobedience and reclamation, of regaining control over their bodies. They hypnotized themselves into trances and seemed to gain clairvoyant powers. They self-published advice in their school newspaper on how to maintain composure during exams with the psychologists they derided as the “brain-touchers.” They smoked cigarettes and stopped wearing underwear. They physically attacked the matrons and each other. They told lies. Girls masturbated, escaped to have sex with boys and men, and had sex—and fell in love with—their fellow prisoners. In 1935, a psychiatrist reported that 38 percent of the 176 girls at the institution had engaged in queer relationships with one another. “Whenever the sta discovered these affairs,” Meis Knupfer wrote, “they isolated the girls, then subjected them to a relentless schedule of conferences with the sta , vigorous physical exercise, and sublimational activities, such as sewing and reading. Their diets were also modified to exclude starchy and rich foods” for fear their consumption made the girls more self-indulgent and sexual. Through extensive review of decades of records, Rembis concluded that “inmates rarely showed
signs of being passive or powerless during their exams,” even if their examiners came to harsher conclusions because of it.
And, of course, runaways were common. According to one report, there were 85 escape attempts within three months of 1959 alone. Girls studied maps and noted the highways and the river before they ran away, using landmarks to guide them, especially the tracks of the Chicago, Aurora, and Elgin (CA&E) Railroad. These tracks and stations are mentioned
“I’m really glad this cemetery is still standing. These people deserve to stay here,” Ron Comacho said. “They had to die here.”
Visiting the Geneva cemetery with Comacho, I brought offerings for the girls: a Lake Michigan clamshell, pennies, candles, beach glass, and jewelry. I also brought a statue of a frightened, resourceful, and pregnant-out-of-wedlock teenager—the Virgin Mary. “She was the ultimate wayward girl,” I explained sheepishly to Comacho. KATIE PROUT
eight months after giving birth to a baby who “died of convulsions” and was buried in the Geneva cemetery, 20-year-old Sadie Cooksey slipped and fell onto the third rail of the CA&E in Batavia. Her body was found the next day.
A particularly haunting death occurred in September 1912. After hours of roaming through farmland trying to evade capture, three Geneva girls dressed in white climbed up to the tracks near Batavia. It was dark out, and the girls held hands as they walked down the rails. One of them, 15-year-old Zoe Priddy, stepped onto the electric third rail. She died immediately, and the other two were flung from the rail by the force of the current streaming through her hands. They were burned but survived. As they ran for help, a train operator bearing down the track mistook Zoe’s white-clad body for newspaper and ran her over.
Today, no signs memorialize these girls’ deaths. Instead, the mixed-use Illinois Prairie Path covers these tracks. Thousands of people use the path every year, ignorant of the history hidden below.
in dozens of stories about Geneva runaways. Police and administrators implored the public to keep an eye out for escapees along the train routes. Sometimes, this led to the girls’ recapture; other times, people found their bodies. In addition to Anna, at least three other girls died trying to escape Geneva. In 1919, 15-year-old Gertrude George burst from the woods of Glenwood Park and was hit by a train running on the CA&E, where her body was dragged before it fell on the third rail. In 1924,
Three of the five Geneva survivors I spoke to tried to escape at least once. When Shikenjanski ran away with two other boys, they followed train tracks and, when it started to rain, slept in a boxcar. Caught the next day, Shikenjanski and the other boys were taken to Saint Charles, a maximum security boys’ prison not far from Geneva that was well known for its brutality. The boys were held in solitary confinement for several days, until Livett Bombell arrived and “saved our asses,” as Shikenjanski recalled to me, by advocating that all three boys be returned to Geneva rather than incarcerated elsewhere.
Sharon Randall-Friday, who spent all but three months of the years between 1965 and 1969 incarcerated at Geneva, tried multiple times. “I never got very far,” she recalled. “I didn’t really do it to escape. I did it because I could. Because I wanted to be outside of that place, even if it was just for a moment.” For Randall-Friday, running away, despite its risks, was the one way she could regain auton-
omy over her body and life while at Geneva. “I’ve always been a free-spirited person, and locking me up was really hard,” she said. “I contemplated suicide a number of times when I was in Geneva. I actually sliced my wrist once, but they found me.”
Ron Camacho was at Geneva as a teenager from 1972 to 1973. Part of the first group of boys at the coed institution, Camacho was sent there for his role in beating and robbing a man on the el who propositioned him and his friends, all minors, for sex in exchange for a few bucks. Camacho was sent to Cook County’s Audy Home, a youth detention center (and another Progressive-era creation) infamous for its overcrowding and poor treatment of the young people there. (Audy Home is today called the Juvenile Temporary Detention Center [JTDC]. In 2024, almost 200 survivors filed two lawsuits alleging that sta at the center engaged in decades of systemic sexual abuse of the minors in their care.)
“Audy Home was very, very brutal,” Camacho told me. From there, he was sent to the adult prison in Joliet for “sorting,” a series of tests which aimed to measure—along with his IQ and whether he was disabled or mentally ill—the possibility of his rehabilitation.
“They would do all these psychological profiles on you to determine if you were violent,” said Shikenjanski, who was sent from Joliet to Geneva the year before Camacho. “I remember inkblots.” If o cials determined that you had violent tendencies, Shikenjanski recalled, “then you were going to go to a high-security [prison] that was more like a work camp.” While undergoing evaluation at Joliet, Shikenjanski fought off physical and sexual violence. In contrast, “Geneva was private,” he explained. “You had your own room, which was a huge safety thing.” Saint Charles was one possibility for Shikenjanski and Camacho. But both would be sent to Geneva, and even though it o ered them much more safety from physical and sexual violence than Audy Home, Joliet, or any other place they had been or could’ve been shipped to, both still ran away.
Camacho’s mother, an Ojibwe child forcibly
separated from her family, ran away from one of the U.S.’s infamous “Indian boarding schools.” Decades later, her son would flee Geneva. The night Camacho ran, he passed the cemetery full of “a lot of little unmarked graves. A lot of stillborns for some reason, rather than growing orphanages around [the institution].” He ran through the cemetery, past the headstones, over a barbed wire fence, down a lush, thicketed gulch that tumbled out to a county road, then downhill further still to the bank of the Fox River. Camacho followed the river till the highway, where he hitched a ride with two truckers back to Chicago.
“I was furious,” he told me. At 17 years old, he’d been told getting his GED would increase the possibility of his parole, but when he completed it in just three and a half months, the parole board denied him release, saying, as he recalled it, that no one ever left that soon. “I made up my mind: ‘That’s it, I’m out of here.’”
One superintendent in the early 1930s, reflecting on this common hunger for escapism, said, “Some women get a facial. When things get too bad, I usually go out and buy a hat. Geneva girls had none of that: Their only means of escape was the literal act of running away.” For the first decades of the 20th century, girls who were caught running away were sent to the disciplinary Wallace Cottage, where they underwent something called “intensive training.” According to Meis Knupfer, “the nature of such training was not disclosed.”
As the years passed, local newspapers began to publish reports of girls being beaten and sent to the “hole” for minor infractions. In 1911, the Tribune published a series of articles on Amigh’s ouster under allegations of torture. Investigators found and destroyed a “strong chair,” purportedly of Amigh’s own invention, “so constructed that a girl could be confined in it and made unable to use her limbs, hands or feet.” It wasn’t the use of the strong chair that the o cials disagreed with but the length of time that the girls were restrained. They also found two rawhide whips that bore “evidence of much use.” Geneva’s leaders, especially in the later years, tried to use positive reinforce-
Even within this school–jail and despite a violent eugenics movement working against them, girls at Geneva found ways to express their agency and define their own identities, often at great cost.
ment to control behavior—rewards, privileges, treats—but many teens were punished for infractions with solitary confinement, defined by one United Nations expert as torture, until the institution’s end.
The first time Randall-Friday was sent to solitary confinement, she was 12. The building, which she alternately called the “unit” and the “hole,” was newly built at the time and mostly subterranean. The rooms inside it were smaller than the already small bedrooms and contained a metal bed frame with no mattress and a hole in the floor to use as a toilet. Once inside, Randall-Friday was strapped to the bed with leather restraints. The metal bit into her skin. “They could never keep me in the straps,” she wrote to me over email. “I would always get out of them, and would never answer how I did it :D”
Randall-Friday was born in Oak Park, then lived in and around Chicago. Her father was violent, her mother cold, her stepfather constantly picking at her. Randall-Friday began leaving home at age ten and would live with people she met in city parks. Her favorite place to go was Humboldt Park. “The Hispanic people were so open and friendly and accepted me more than my family ever had.” When she was 12, she started dating a marine who went AWOL to be with her. “I thought I was all grown up. I wanted to grow up way too fast,” she told me during one interview. “And I really didn’t enjoy my childhood at all. I was outgoing, outspoken, angry. Mean, very mean.” Randall-Friday, sent to Geneva for truancy, quickly developed a reputation for fighting that landed her in solitary for a week or two at a stretch. “No school, no books. We didn’t go outside,” she said. “When you’re in punishment, you’re just in punishment. The only time you leave that room is to go down the hall to collect your mattress at night and then take your mattress back down the hall in the morning.”
During the day, Randall-Friday would lie on the floor of her cell and count bricks. The unit was large, and multiple girls were locked up in individual cells at any given time, but when it was time to retrieve or return their mattresses, each girl was let out individually to try to ensure their isolation from one another was complete. But in this, the sta failed. Locked up in their cells, the girls would lie on their bellies and whisper into the inch of space between their doors and the floor. “Who just came down? Who are you? I’m Sharon, who are you?” The acoustics of the unit made it hard for sta to hear these voices, but the girls
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had no trouble if they were low enough to the floor.“We weren’t supposed to—we were told to be quiet all the time,” Randall-Friday recalled, “but we talked; we sang to each other.” They told each other stories about their lives before Geneva and shared the latest gossip. But eventually, the girls would lapse into quiet. In the unending tedium of their confinement, there was only so much to say.
Sometimes, girls ran away from Geneva even before they were there. In 1912, a 16-year-old Black girl, afraid of being sent to Geneva, jumped from the threestory window of a Chicago police station. She fractured her arm and dislocated her knee but survived. “She cited not wanting to be taken to Geneva as the reason for her escape attempt,” wrote DePaul University history professor Tera Agyepong. “She stated that she just wanted to ‘get out of there to show them that they could not keep me locked up like a criminal.’ There is no evidence that her e orts succeeded in preventing her from being sent to Geneva.”
Growing up 40 years later in Altgeld Gardens Homes, a public housing project on Chicago’s south side, Cathy Loving heard stories about Geneva and Saint Charles that scared her. The rumors, passed from kid to kid as they played, took on the shape of neighborhood myth. “They put people there if they skipped school,” she told me. “They said the bad kids got sent there.” But one day, Loving learned one of her friends had been incarcerated at Geneva. “She isn’t bad,” Loving thought. Then another friend of hers, a “real pretty girl,” suddenly began wearing men’s clothes before she, too, disappeared to Geneva. It turned out that she had been sexually assaulted by her boyfriend’s father. “Here she was, a rape victim, and she got sent there,” Loving recalled. All around her, it felt like children were vanishing. Then, as now, the majority of the residents of Altgeld Gardens were Black. Also then, as now, Black girls were overrepresented in Illinois youth courts and centers. According to Agyepong, 17 percent of the 59 girls incarcerated at Geneva when it opened were Black, even though Black people made up only 1.5 percent of the state’s population. In the 1920s, that percentage rose further: Black people still made up only 1 to 2 percent of Illinois’s population, but at Geneva they were about one-fifth of the population in 1920 and more than onethird in 1928.
When Loving arrived there in 1961, she was 14 years old. She had ended up in court after
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twice running away from home to escape beatings and rapes from her stepfather, a detective with the Chicago Police Department. The second time she ran away, the police station she fled to for help transferred her to a jail cell, where she was held overnight. Shortly after, Loving was sent to Audy Home. While at Audy, Loving, like Camacho, was examined by psychiatrists. As she underwent testing and awaited court, Loving taught other girls how to type, cajoled them into getting up and taking baths, and combed and fixed their hair. In court, Loving’s stepfather—her abuser— and her mother testified against her. Loving had no legal representation, and no one else was allowed in the courtroom. On the stand, her parents swore Loving was unmanageable; she did sex work, they claimed, and used drugs. “I’m a juvenile,” she recalled to me. “And that’s my birth mother. These are my parents. And both of them lied on me.” After listening to their testimony, the judge remanded her to Geneva. The next thing Loving knew, her wrists and ankles were handcuffed and connected by a chain. A police o cer escorted her out of court. “I couldn’t talk. All I could do was cry,” she said. “I just couldn’t believe that that was happening to me.”
The institution treated its Black youth worse than white youth on the whole. I’ve read multiple papers by historians describing how Black girls at Geneva were segregated and considered to be more dangerous, more sexually deviant, and less likely to be capable of “rehabilitation” than the white girls. Through the middle of the 20th century, “many experts and reformers focused on poor and immigrant girls of European descent because they believed there was in fact a ‘problem’—a deviation from a normal and ideal standard of behaviour that could be addressed through legal reforms and institutions,” wrote Agyepong. “Antisocial conduct, promiscuity and illegitimacy were not seen as behaviours that were outside the norm for African American girls, however.”
Higher rates of pregnancy and STIs among Black girls entering Geneva were used as proof of their moral and racial defectiveness, but in fact these numbers reflected their lack of access to health care and social resources, even compared to poor white girls. They had fewer options for private or public places to give birth or recover from infections, so they were sent to Geneva. “As a result of the lack of resources for Black children in Chicago, Black girls who arrived from there at Geneva tended
to be younger than their white counterparts,” Agyepong wrote. And, as in Loving’s case, the majority of girls who were incarcerated through the courts were there because a judge found them to be either “sex delinquents” or truants.
At Geneva, staff members masculinized their Black charges. In surveys, reports, and recommendations, Geneva doctors and psychiatrists portrayed them as “the most violent and aggressive residents at the institution,” wrote Agyepong, though they were at Geneva for the same o enses as white girls. In particular, Agyepong detailed how two white women o cials’ “depictions of African American girls as desperately crazed, aggressive, oversexed beings who resorted to violence as a result of their desire to have sexual relationships with white girls bore an uncanny relationship to the propaganda used to justify the lynching of Black men who were charged with raping white women.”
Geneva leaders were so disturbed by the possibility of interracial friendship and love— and the potential of either to build resistance to their power—that they kept the girls segregated in work, housing, and play. It was not uncommon for the number of Black girls in a cottage to be more than twice its occupancy limit. In 1928, a cottage matron told visitors that 104 Black girls were forced to stay in two cottages, each with a maximum capacity of 32. According to Agyepong, there were vacancies in the white cottages at the time.
After Loving was handcu ed and chained,
how to fix our hair.” Eventually, as they spoke, Lyle looked in the back mirror and gave Loving his handkerchief. He told her to dry her face. “I don’t know, but I believe ya,” Loving recalled he said as they pulled up to the institution. “I’m gonna get anybody I can contact.” But Loving didn’t have any hope.
Once inside Geneva, Loving was forced to strip naked and shower, then was fingerprinted and photographed with a number around her neck. She was still crying. “This lady said, ‘Bitch, you belong to us now. You need to stop that crying. You shouldn’t have done what you did.’” Then the woman hit her with a billy cub. That first night, a strong storm swept through Geneva. Loving wasn’t given a blanket, but she couldn’t get the window in her room to shut. Outside, lightning flashed. Inside, cold rain pelted her skin. “I just begged God to just take me away,” she said.
with Black girls and defying staff members’ rules in order to do so,” wrote Agyepong. At one dance at the institution, white girls insisted on dancing with Black girls, to the intense frustration of the sta .
Sometimes, white girls vocalized the same racist understandings of their romantic and sexual behaviors as their elders. According to Meis Knupfer, “Given the absence of men at Geneva, one white girl admitted, ‘All we can do here is to take some Negro girl . . . at the Chapel or somewhere else. Kiss them for all we are worth. That is all the thrill we get.’” Other times, the girls unified. “A white matron, upon observing the friendly behavior of white girls with a group of African American girls, called them ‘white trash’ and ‘n----r lovers,’” wrote Meis Knupfer. “In protest, the white girls moved into the cottage with the African American girls, causing a ‘minor scandal.’”
“I didn’t really do it to escape. I did it because I could. Because I wanted to be outside of that place, even if it was just for a moment.”
she was placed in the back of a paddy wagon with two other girls sentenced to Geneva. Already mothers, they were even younger than her. The driver of the paddy wagon, a man she learned much later was a Cook County deputy sheri named Frederick Douglas Lyle, told her to stop crying. “You shouldn’t have done what you did,” she recalled him saying. Through tears, Loving stuck up for herself. “I didn’t do anything!” she said, describing the abuse she’d endured. The other girls chimed in. “That’s a goody two-shoes,” Loving recalled them saying. “All she did was help us, and showed us
Meanwhile, back in Chicago, Lyle began to advocate on her behalf. Loving’s friends signed affidavits corroborating her story of abuse. A social worker invited Loving to his downtown Chicago o ce for an interview. “He said, ‘You got a raw deal,’” she told me. “‘You gonna get out of there.’” The social worker also told her to keep to herself and “don’t get involved with anybody out there.” This wasn’t the only time an adult on Loving’s side warned her to not act friendly with the girls at Geneva, lest it be perceived as, or lead to, queerness. “They told me, ‘Do not make friends with anybody, because they pass notes.’ There was a homosexual thing going around. I was warned about that.”
The physicians and matrons often viewed queer behavior through a heterosexual frame: One girl became the male, the other the female. Race and racism were integral. Black girls were considered more sexually aggressive and more masculine, but reports made by researchers and sta that described Black girls’ “violent” efforts to make romantic or sexual relationships with white girls also, unwittingly, revealed white girls’ agency in these relationships. “Several offered examples of white inmates actively seeking relationships
“They didn’t have to worry about me. I didn’t want to have anything to do with sex any kind of way,” Loving said to me. At Geneva, she kept to herself and made no friends. A few years later, Randall-Friday, who is white, had a di erent experience. “I actually made love to one of the girls out there,” Randall-Friday recalled. “Evelyn—she was a very pretty Black girl, really sweet on me. Snuck into her room.” Later, she dated a shy Native American teen who went by Tony and later transitioned. Tony was one of the very few people Randall-Friday stayed in touch with from her Geneva years. In 1935, a Geneva social worker reported that “groups of African American and white girls formed their own families of nephews, uncles, and so forth,” wrote Meis Knupfer. “Ironically, the girls had subverted the school’s and court’s visions of familial cottage life with their own.”
Tensions at Geneva often erupted along color lines. While Loving was able to keep to herself during the approximate month she spent at Geneva, Randall-Friday was there for nearly four years. Shortly after her arrival to Geneva, she lost two front teeth in a fight with a Black girl she’d never seen before. RandallFriday was small for her age but earned a reputation among students and sta alike for fighting “like a Tasmanian devil.” If a Black girl was bullying a white girl, Randall-Friday wrote me over email, the white girl would come to her and she’d fight on their behalf. But the queer, interracial family structures the girls developed helped them build trust and maintain peace. “Most of the girls participated whether they really wanted to or not,” said Randall-Friday. Shortly after she lost her teeth, she was inducted into the
Chandler family. Randall-Friday was sitting in her cottage window when a teen who called themselves Gene Chandler approached her. “Are you Sharon Randall?” they asked. “I need to talk to you.” Keeping a watchful eye out for the guards, Chandler offered Randall-Friday their protection.
“I don’t need your protection!” RandallFriday snapped. According to her, Chandler replied, “Well, I know. That’s why I’m asking you to be my wife.” When Randall-Friday asked Chandler if they needed her protection, they both started to laugh. “She was very pretty, slightly taller than me,” said Randall-Friday. “Her hair was short, a tiny Afro. They told me to pick a name for myself, and I picked Estella. This was how we would refer to each other when we wrote each other jots [notes], so sta never knew who the jots were from.”
Chandler resided in a di erent cottage than Randall-Friday. A teenager, they worked in laundry, while Randall-Friday, who was only 12, was still required to attend classes. “It was a status thing” to be a wife, Randall-Friday recalled. “You belong to the Chandler family. I only ever saw her a handful of times.”
Loving joined no families. One day, the phone in her cottage rang. It would be a few more years before Loving was free from the abuse of her parents, but she was officially freed from Geneva. “I ran across the campus to the o ce and they said, ‘Whatever you have, do you want to take it with you?’ But nothing I had I wanted to take with me, because nothing never belonged to me.”
This year, Loving turns 78. As an adult, she intervened to stop one of her sisters from also being sent to Geneva. Later, Loving moved to Georgia, where she started an incest survivors group and still mentors young girls. Before retiring, Loving had careers as a historian, archivist, and museum curator. “I opened up the first school museum in Georgia, and I was honored by the Archivist of the United States of America,” she told me proudly.
In 1992, Loving appeared on an episode of Unsolved Mysteries titled “Lost Savior,” in which she retold her harrowing story and asked the public for help reconnecting to Lyle, the deputy sheri who had transported Loving to Geneva, whose name she did not know. The night the episode aired, Lyle, who had since retired, was watching. He called the number that flashed across the screen and was connected to Loving after more than 30 years. They met up in person two months later. Six months after that, Loving spoke at his funeral. After his death, the Illinois House passed
a resolution offering condolences to Lyle’s family and remembering that he once “helped a young woman gain her innocence.” No resolution has ever been passed acknowledging Geneva’s existence.
Decades after that terrible first night at Geneva, Loving is still afraid of storms. “Whenever it’s thundering and lightning like that, it just leaves me with a bad feeling. Being locked in a room where I couldn’t go get any help, and I was told not to say anything?” That feeling, she said, defined her fundamental experience of Geneva.
“It’s a story that needs to be told,” she said. “I don’t know where they send girls now.”
Fifty years after Camacho ran away, he came back to Geneva with me to visit the cemetery. “My god, this is it,” he said as we pulled into the subdivision. “I mean, I know where I’m at.” We got out of the car and walked to a tall, black iron fence. On the other side, among stalks of overgrown grass and thick wet autumn leaves, headstones glimmered in the late afternoon light. Although we were within visiting hours, the cemetery gate was locked. Camacho walked the cemetery’s perimeter, found a gap in the fence, and slipped easily through.
We moved as we talked, peering down and reading names and dates out loud. Some parts
of the cemetery were the same from Camacho’s time: The chain-link fence in the back was there when he ran through the cemetery during his bid for escape. The same line of rusted barbed wire still ran along the top. But from the patch of infant headstones, we could see flower beds and two-story play sets in well-designed backyards. Camacho gestured to some other graves. “I think these headstones are newer,” he said. “It didn’t used to be lined up like this. I don’t think there is a body under each one.”
In front of the cemetery, a memorial plaque asked for God’s mercy on the “51 souls” buried here. Camacho shook his head. “Fifty-one in nearly a hundred years?” he said. “There has to be more.” Later, I’d find out he was right. While researching this story, I found records confirming that at least 70 people died on the grounds of Geneva during its 84-year run: 31 girls, 36 infants, two workers, and one worker’s child. Notes on the cemetery from the Geneva archives reveal that while the cemetery contains 51 headstones, it holds at least 55 graves. I couldn’t find any official source containing the total number of deaths that occurred at Geneva.
I followed Camacho as he traced a path I couldn’t see. “There were sidewalks and lanes,” he said, gesticulating around. Confidently, he walked across the private lawn
of a large house to its undeveloped side lot, where chunks of old yellow brick popped up through the dirt.
The garage door of the house opened. A white man in a zip-up fleece came out, his brow politely furrowed, and asked if he could help us with something. “Ah,” said Camacho with a broad smile. “Just reminiscing.”
I explained that Camacho was a former student at the school that used to be here. “Got it,” the man replied, clearly still confused. “I’m sorry, where are you from?” he said. I introduced Camacho and myself, and again mentioned the Geneva institution. “Ron was here the last decade it went coed,” I explained.
“Oh!” the man said, brightening. He turned to Camacho and gestured around his lawn. “What was here?”
“Wallace Cottage,” Comacho answered. He explained that before it was a coed cottage, Wallace housed the most aggressive girls and served medical needs. Across from the driveway where we were standing, there had been academic buildings. “The central command guard station was right on this side. This,” Camacho said, pointing to the broken yellow brick, “was still a street. After the graveyard was where they built the new unit for segregation, but that’s completely gone now.” It was a lot of information, and the man had trouble following. “So this was . . . the
News coverage of Geneva o en emphasized eugenics and other Progressive sentiments that villainized the incarcerated youth. SHIRA FRIEDMAN-PARKS
NEWS & POLITICS
continued from p. 13
pharmacy?” he said hopefully.
“No, this was the hospital,” Comacho said cheerfully, “as big as your house! And at one point, they would have a nursery. But by the time I got here in ’72, it was converted into a regular building.”
The man’s face fell slightly, but he seemed genuinely interested. He didn’t know much about Geneva, but his wife was on the board of the museum, he offered. She helped take care of the cemetery, which he admitted “still needs more work.”
As we talked, a blond child came out of the garage on a bike and wheeled between us. We said our goodbyes. “Thank you for sharing all that,” said the man to Ron. “I really appreciate it.” He disappeared back into the garage.
From the railroad tracks a half mile to our north—one of the longtime escape lines of desperate incarcerated children—a train whistle began to blow.
In February 2025, a third lawsuit alleging prolific sexual and physical abuse of youth by juvenile detention center sta in Illinois was filed against Illinois, Cook County, and several state agencies. This latest complaint spans 1997 until 2023 and brings the total number of people alleging abuse to 800.
So far, Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker and attorney general Kwame Raoul have declined to comment on these cases. Pritzker, who promised to close the remaining five state-run youth detention centers in Illinois early in his tenure, has instead made plans to build a sixth. Continuing the tradition of Geneva, the state hides these child jails behind euphemism— they are now called “Illinois Youth Centers”—and the formal announcement of the sixth is dressed in 21st-century progressive language and values. “The new Illinois Youth Center Lincoln will be a bright, life a rming, trauma-informed, and restorative place,” said Lieutenant Governor Juliana Stratton in a 2021 press release, made with “love, careful consideration, and improved practices.”
In November 2023, Injustice Watch published a report revealing that only five of the 16 county-run youth detention centers in Illinois were in compliance with state standards of care. Inspectors found numerous problems, “including detention centers improperly confining kids to their rooms, failing to provide proper clothing or bedding, conducting unnecessary strip searches, and providing insu cient mental health services and school instruction for youths.” In May 2024, Injustice
Watch reporter Kelly Garcia detailed Cook County plans to replace the deeply troubled JTDC with smaller “centers of care.” This plan was announced in the wake of a blistering report accusing JTDC o cials of using euphemism to cover up the harm they were inflicting on the children they were responsible for. “Semantics do not diminish the harsh reality that JTDC youth are locked in their cells for most of the day, every day,” the committee wrote, according to Jonah Newman and Carlos Ballesteros of Injustice Watch. “No parent would
“My memories of Geneva have never left me for a moment in my life.”
be allowed to do this to their child.”
“My memories of Geneva have never left me for a moment in my life,” Randall-Friday wrote to me over email. She’s 71 years old now. Randall-Friday has lived in England and in other people’s Illinois basements, and now she’s in Marengo, just 32 miles northwest of Geneva. For a while, she ran a blog about Korean food and dramas. (“I make my own kimchi. I make my own bibimbap. My first husband was Korean. I watch K-dramas and all kinds of good stu .”)
Like Camacho, Randall-Friday also went back to Geneva long after it closed, only to find the cottages leveled and well-appointed homes built in their place. Disturbed, she went into town, “to the police station, to the township, to the library. Nobody ever heard of the Geneva girls’ school. I said, ‘You people—you are hiding something!’ I was talking to people older than me; they should have known.” After all, she said to me, the cemetery was right there. Instead, Geneva felt like it had been wiped o the literal map and from the town’s collective memory.
“It’s wrong for them to just erase what they did to so many girls, just locked them up for an indefinite amount of time because they didn’t want to be home for whatever reason,” Randall-Friday said to me. “The system didn’t work right. This shouldn’t be kept secret. There was hundreds and hundreds of girls, thousands of girls, in my time there. People should know about this!”
She paused, then repeated herself, firmly. “People should know.” v
m kprout@chicagoreader.com
FILM
What does a week without moviegoing look like for a moviegoer?
Well, for one, bleak. And frustrating. It wasn’t by choice that last week was void of any moviegoing. (Though, of course, I did watch movies at home.) During the week, I was busy preparing for a big meeting at work—I’m at the point in my life and in my career (at least the one I foster during the day) that I sometimes have to prioritize my day-to-day over my night-to-night, so to speak. I had still intended to write up some things for Cine-File, one of which was Collective Messages: Short Films of Grupo Chaski, screening at Northwestern University’s Block Cinema last Friday; I watched them but was unable to write anything due to work obligations.
I loved the films, though. Grupo Chaski is a Peruvian filmmaking collective whose goal was, and still is, to produce and disseminate films in marginalized areas of Peru. The program consisted of two films: the short Caminos de Liberación (Pathways of Liberation) (1985) and the longer Miss Universo en el Perú (Miss Universe in Peru) (1982). Both are rooted in juxtaposition, the former between social unrest and liberation theology, grounded in the same ideology but realized differently (one more tactically, the other philosophically, but still working toward the same goals), and the latter between social unrest and the capitalist fantasy propagated by the Miss Universe pageant, which was held that year in Lima. I appreciate how the group used filmmaking itself to highlight these distinctions, cutting abruptly between the discrete worlds, emphasizing similarities and di erences within them with equal impact.
Then, on Friday, my husband and I went to the Steppenwolf Theatre to see one of the final performances of Sam Shepard’s Fool for Love. It was amazing, and immediately upon getting home, I wanted to watch Robert Altman’s 1985
A still from Fool for Love (1985) SAM SHEPARD
film adaptation starring Kim Basinger and the playwright himself as the leads. The movie is double the length of the play but contains no more and certainly no less. Altman extends it solely through dialogue-free interludes, especially ironic because his defining motif as a filmmaker might be the overlapping sound and dialogue that makes his films so immersive. Yet this was equally so despite a lack of this technique. (It’s something I realized is the case with another of his play adaptations as well, Come Back to the 5 & Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean [1982]; in general, it’s also ironic that there was a period of Altman’s career where he gravitated toward such projects.)
Rounding out my no-moviegoing week was a memorial in Milwaukee for the dear Carl Bogner, teaching professor emeritus at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, who passed away in December. There may have been no moviegoing involved, but for me, it was the essence of cinema and what it means to really love movies—which is to be part of a community who yearns to be alone together in its hallowed halls and then maybe from that, together together, something that Carl embodied wholeheartedly. (Though he lived in Milwaukee, Carl was a common presence here in Chicago, remembered dearly in both cities as a pure soul whose love for film and books was boundless.) During the first day of the celebration, at the service where people spoke for more than three hours about how great Carl was, one speaker mentioned that “Experimental cinema is community,” this being the mode about which he was most passionate. And it’s true, as is evidenced by all those who came, many from out of state, to celebrate that which Carl fostered so beautifully.
It may have been a week with no moviegoing, but there’ll never be one without movies, as they’re such a part of my life that whether I’m working, enjoying another cultural outlet, or even mourning a friend, they’re still flickering on the big screen in my mind.
Until next time, moviegoers. —KAT SACHS
P.S. I’ll be in discussion with Marya E. Gates about her new book Cinema Her Way: Visionary Female Directors in Their Own Words at the Music Box Theatre on Saturday, March 29, after an 11 AM screening of Jane Campion’s Bright Star (2009). We’d love to see you there! v
The Moviegoer is the diary of a local film bu , collecting the best of what Chicago’s independent and underground film scene has to o er.
RBURIAL BLANKETS
burialblankets.net instagram.com/burialblankets
CRAFT WORK
R“GUARDIAN THREADS” Through 5/17: Mon–Tue, Thu–Fri 10 AM–4 PM, by appointment, art@epiphanychi.com, Epiphany Center for the Arts, 201 S. Ashland, epiphanychi.com
ARTS & CULTURE
Demystifying death
Artist Anders Zanichkowsky wants us to approach our own mortality with care and acceptance.
By KERRY CARDOZA
“This is a computer. It’s a wooden computer made of wood and metal.”
I’m at the cozy home studio of artist Anders Zanichkowsky, who is explaining the complicated basics of their canopy-bed-sized, 24-harness AVL mechanical dobby production loom, on which they weave gorgeous, luxurious blankets by hand—most of which are intended for burial.
Zanichkowsky launched Burial Blankets, as his business is known, in the fall of 2021. It was the perfect melding of several longtime interests. “I was always a death kid,” he said. “I wrote a will when I was a teenager. And I’ve also always been very, very drawn to really deep craft study and technique.”
In high school, Zanichkowsky immersed themself in ceramics, specifically wheel-throwing, taking classes each semester and working on projects before and after school, and even on the weekends. As an undergrad, at Hampshire College, they focused on printmaking, another hands-on, timeintensive medium.
Nearly a decade later, Zanichkowsky began an MFA at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, again intending to concentrate on printmaking. “I was making all of these very beautiful things to hang on your wall,” Zanichkowsky said. He was also getting into performance and video, but he wanted to make art with more practical, real-world applications. “I was really hungry for art that would have a real life in the world,” they said. “I don’t know that I could have articulated this at the time, but I can certainly say now, burial blankets— they’re not about death. They’re not about the sacred. They are the sacred. They are sacred objects. They’re for death itself.” That realization, along with a few unexpected events, changed his course of study and, by extension, his life.
“The very first semester, the first week of that semester, I found out that my first love, my teenage boyfriend, had died,” Zanichkowsky said. “That really cracked me open in a way I was not expecting.”
Also around that time, Zanichkowsky happened upon the British Museum’s collection of ancient Egyptian death and afterlife artifacts. “I was, like, awestruck and horrified at the same time because of the funeral art and the burial art that was stolen and put on display,” they said. Being in the presence of such powerful artwork felt wrong on every level— spiritually, artistically, and politically. But the pieces were still incredibly moving. “It was this mixed feeling of, yes, this is really wrong, and also this is the best art I’ve ever seen in my life, and I’m inspired by it.”
In thinking about how to take that inspiration in an ethical direction, Zanichkowsky landed on textiles. “I felt very strongly that I needed to find my own way of making contemporary burial art that would be meaningful and important to the people I know right now,” he said. “Every culture on earth has its textiles tradition. So you can find your way back to your own cultural heritage through weaving.”
Zanichkowsky took a weaving class with professor Marianne Fairbanks. One of his first big projects was making a cloth for his late boyfriend, which was used in a performance piece called for G
That piece was made in 2018, but it wasn’t until the end of 2020 that the full idea for Burial Blankets took hold. The artist’s work as a weaver, desire to honor death, and long-held interest in green burial (an earlier idea was to open a green funeral home) coalesced one day while they were weaving. Within months, Zanichkowsky bought a loom; they spent the summer of 2021 prototyping blankets, doing time trials of the process, and developing a business plan. Burial Blankets launched that fall.
Burial blankets can be used in any kind of funeral service. They’re made solely from natural fibers chosen by the client so they can be used in a green, or natural, burial, which involves no embalming fluid or vault, allowing the body to decompose into the earth. It’s much more environmentally sound than embalming or cremation. (Regulations on green burial vary by region; you can find green burial providers at greenburialcouncil.org.) But the blankets don’t need to be used in a green burial—they could also be draped over a casket or used following other religious or cultural traditions.
Crucially, the blankets are typically commissioned for a client during life; they are meant to be enjoyed while living, becoming a cherished part of one’s life, before being used as a burial object. Yet, Zanichkowsky does have a new partnership with Inclusive Funeral Care—located along the borders of Uptown, Andersonville, and Ravenswood—which will stock ready-made burial blankets. While commissioned blankets are meant to be deeply personal, the ready-made ones will be traditional and elegant. The ready-made he was working on when I visited his studio was composed of bleached white and cream tones, which will result in a tasteful, almost iridescent cloth.
The typical, full-size blanket is about 80 by 110 inches and typically takes the artist about 40 hours to make. The most time-consuming
pays “a basic living wage in Chicago,” and the work is skillful and painstaking, resulting in an heirloom-quality product. The final price will run a few thousand dollars, which might seem like a lot unless you’ve ever had to pay for more traditional funeral services (or have read Jessica Mitford’s The American Way of Death). If you’d like a firsthand look at Zanichkowsky’s handmade blankets, you’ll have the
process is setting up the loom—measuring out the correct lengths of thread, loading them onto a rod, and threading each strand individually onto the loom, all while keeping the tension exactly right.
Each commission starts with a consultation—free of charge. Otherwise, the artist uses a sliding scale, encouraging customers to pay what they can. The low end, $40 an hour,
opportunity at “Guardian Threads,” an exhibition opening March 28 at Epiphany Center for the Arts, where visitors are encouraged to touch and engage with the cloth. “They can wrap themselves in it if they want to,” Zanichkowsky said.
Commissions for burial blankets are always open. “The process just starts with a conversation,” Zanichkowsky said. “I really emphasize that with people. Yes, we get to a point where I give you an estimate and you make installments and you come visit and see the looms and you weave part of your cloth. But . . . that whole part can feel a little abstract to people. The whole process of a custom commission really just begins with a relationship. And that moves at the pace of someone else’s relationship to their own mortality, really.” v
m kcardoza@chicagoreader.com
Above: Living model in a Burial Blankets shroud ANDERS
Le : Artist Anders Zanichkowsky
THEATER
RN EWPORT THEATER
956 W. Newport, 773 -270 - 3440 ; for information on classes and performances, visit newporttheater.com. The author’s class performs as part of the weekly Peek-Easy Sat 4/ 12 7 PM; $20 general admission, $ 30 VIP seating
CAMP LESSONS
Making burlesque dreams come true
By CHARLI RENKEN
Last year, my friend Katie invited me to a burlesque student showcase she was in at the Newport Theater. I’d only been to the Wrigleyville fringe theater a handful of times, but I knew it was a big deal because of the kind of talent they host. So, of course, I said yes. Her beginner class of teasing dancers killed it and threw me back to being a teenager in my bedroom, watching YouTube videos of burlesque acts after catching the bug from the (admittedly inaccurate) 2010 film Burlesque Fifteen-year-old Charli wanted to shimmy and shake and toss their bra into an audience, but, for obvious legal reasons, wasn’t going to do that any time soon. Now, 30-year-old Charli could absolutely bump and grind half naked for 100 strangers. So, I signed up for a class a few weeks later: Newport’s winter mixed-level burlesque class, which turned my 15-year-old
dream into a reality.
Our teacher was Tila Von Twirl, an award-winning dancer and choreographer (and two-time inductee into the Burlesque Hall of Fame as part of the Amazing, Bendable, Posable Dolls of Doom) who has performed for stars like Fleetwood Mac, Elton John, and Billy Joel. They’re also just seriously fun to be around.
It was quickly apparent that we were learning from the best, which is a stellar deal at just $160 for eight classes (or $20 per class). While already more a ordable than a lot of creative classes in the city (I’m looking at you, Second City), they also have scholarships available.
At our first meeting, Tila had us go around and say what we were hoping to get out of the class. As a mixed-level course, it was interesting to hear why people signed up. Some were there to get in touch with their sexuality, oth-
ers to grow as performers. And I discovered throughout the class that it’s built to give everyone what they need from it, whether that’s improving confidence, getting some exercise, or fine-tuning skills as a professional artist. I was there both for that delayed teenage dream and because I was (and still am) producing a show with burlesque in it and wanted to get some experience under my belt to better understand the art I’m showcasing. (More on that later.)
We hit the ground running the first day, learning choreography and getting comfortable together. I think most of us were a little nervous at first, navigating something pretty intimate with strangers (though none of us took our clothes off until week five or six). Some of us were new to dancing, and while ten years of interdisciplinary dance and a recent drag debut meant I wasn’t, I still felt timid about interacting with new people in a consensually sultry way. Tila’s approach to the class helped that quickly disappear. Each class, we would split into groups and
do a little improv, with one group dancing and the other whooping and hollering as an impromptu audience. Improv doesn’t mesh well with my type A personality. But with others cheering me on, I began to take myself a little less seriously—something I needed a lesson in both as a person and performer.
While burlesque is certainly a sexy medium, the art form first became popular during the Victorian era, when it was primarily a parodic performance. In fact, the term “burlesque” comes from the Italian word “burlesco,” meaning “joke” or “mockery. (Considering my stage name is Vicious Mockery, it felt like a good choice for a new skill.)
The most important thing I took away from the class is that, yes, burlesque is hot, and it’s also an art that requires a lot of dedication. There’s a ton of nuance to the craft, but it’s also really fun and doesn’t always have to be so serious. We’re cheekily taking our clothes off and telling a story for people to enjoy. Even the worst, most unsexy fumbles can be turned into a comedic moment—a good lesson for life. Bit by bit, we all grew more confident using clothes as props and moving our bodies in ways equal parts tantalizing and silly. Early on, multiple people expressed not feeling comfortable stripping down into pasties for our upcoming showcase. While Tila made it very clear that whatever form of undress we were willing to do was completely fine, most of those performers ended up ripping their underclothes o to reveal glittery nipple covers by the time we started practicing in costume. I think the weeks of gassing each other up during improv gave us all the safety and confidence to do so.
While I was taking the class, I found out the venue I had planned for my producing debut no longer worked. So, with some networking help from my drag friend Bubba Boom, I timidly approached Newport artistic curator Eva la Feva about moving my show to their space. She told me to email her a pitch.
I was doing karaoke with some friends and
The Camp Cabaret performance at Newport Theater; the author is third from le in center. KIRK WILLIAMSON
The Newport Theater commits to everyone who walks through the doors.
cast members (Katie, who took me to that first showcase, included) when I glanced down at my phone and saw the email that Eva accepted our pitch. I hurried them out of the busy bar into the quiet night air to break the good news—my head spinning from the idea that my first-ever show would be at such an iconic venue, somewhere I felt embraced and that was helping me grow as an artist.
It’s incredible to me how much Newport really commits to everyone who walks through its doors. You can start as a student and put up a show of your own just a few months later. They are willing to take a chance on a wild
with all the lighting cues, and something electric went through our group. We were on fire! Something was notably di erent from class; we’d arrived in our burlesque personas. At that moment, it didn’t matter if we messed up in the actual show; we’d already accomplished what we came there to do.
Each class had something phenomenal to bring to the stage. The crowd, filled with our loved ones, was the kind a performer dreams of, the cheers deafening. Much of that was thanks to our host, Aunt Nance, who, in an over-thetop midwest accent and camp counselor persona, got the crowd riled up for each number.
Burlesque is hot, and it’s also an art that requires a lot of dedication.
OPENING
Trauma and terror
Final girl tropes mix with queer lives in it’s been ten years since everybody died.
If you’re frustrated by the current season of Yellowjackets (I get it!), but still want to get a fix on dark final girl energy and queer trauma, then it’s been ten years since everybody died by Cesario Tirado-Ortiz at Open Space Arts may scratch that itch for you. In a world premiere under Teri Talo’s direction, the production is rough and not entirely ready. But Tirado-Ortiz’s story of people who all experienced separate kinds of violence coming together a decade later (as the title indicates) to process (at least one against their will) shows a playwright with promise and moxie.
Maude (Julia Toney), who is nonbinary, had to kill their brother a er he, like Michael Myers, turned out to be a psychotic killer. Betsy (Alexis Queen), Maude’s cheerleader high school love interest, apparently dabbled in cannibalism a er the rest of the squad was killed. Allison (Noah Hinton), a trans woman, managed to run away from the person who killed everyone else at a sleepaway camp. And Sam? Nobody’s quite sure what happened to Sam, but they (or at least Maude, who initially appears to be the most damaged of the group and
the stage. Still, a basement feels appropriate for a story of unspeakable trauma—a half-submerged room filled with dark mysteries and horrible memories. —KERRY REID IT’S BEEN TEN YEARS SINCE EVERYBODY DIED Through 4/6: Fri–Sat 7:30 PM, Sun 2 PM; Open Space Arts, 1411 W. Wilson, openspacearts.org, $25 ($20 seniors and students, $15 Open Space Arts members)
RPregnant with
possibilities
Splash Hatch on the E Going Down tackles a ra of issues.
Kia Corthron’s 1997 play, Splash Hatch on the E Going Down, packs a lot into its story, and not all of it lands effectively. But it’s undeniably depressing to realize how many entwined issues Corthron illustrates here—environmental racism, high infant and maternal death rates for Black babies and women, the effects of gentrification—have only become more urgent in the last 28 years. Directed with a sensitive hand in its Chicago premiere at Definition Theatre by Cheryl Lynn Bruce, this production should be celebrated for doing what most of society doesn’t: it centers the voices of young Black women. Thyme (Jada Jackson) is a pregnant married teenager in Harlem and a budding environmental activist. She and her husband, Erry (Jabari Khaliq), live with her parents—Ollie (Stetson Pierre), who works as a long-haul trucker, and Marjorie (Quenna Lené Barrett), who provides childcare for a wealthy white family. Thyme’s best friend, Shaneequa (Rita Wicks), has one baby and another on the way, which has cut short her previous dreams of being a track star.
idea, on a new artist. That’s a kind of support and investment that I’ve never experienced before.
I found myself hanging out at the theater more often, first attending more shows, then sticking around after shows or coming in the next day to help clean up. Soon, I was volunteering to work the door. It slowly became a place I just wanted to spend time in, soaking up all the talent and love there. Looking at the long wall of photos of performers, I was inspired. “I want to get up on that wall someday,” I told myself.
When the student showcase (called Camp Cabaret) arrived, I was nervous but excited; we all were. We’d worked so hard and bonded as a group. Katie and I had also grown closer, getting together after each class for “gab sessions” Sex in the City style and to practice the routine.
Before tech rehearsal, we all got into our costumes—lovingly made by Sky Cubacub of Rebirth Garments, whose mother was in the show—and put on our faces. We ran the dance
We took to the stage, dancing to a mix of “Laisse Tomber Les Filles” by Fabienne DelSol and “Come on-a My House” by Della Reese. We started in psychedelic shift dresses with fake martini glasses. As we danced, we “spilled” our “drinks” on each other. “Oops! Guess we need to take our clothes o now!” our impish faces said, and we stripped down. By the time we hit our final pose, the audience members were losing their minds. There’s no high like a crowd like that. Fifteen-year-old Charli was screaming along with them.
I found myself sobbing because of the support I felt—from my friends, my partner, and from Newport itself. As Katie and I walked to my car, I explained what I was feeling and how grateful I was for the whole experience.
In the cheeky, unhinged way only Katie can manage, she nodded and said, “It’s like a recital when you’re a kid where everyone comes out and sees you, except there’s more titties than that.” v m crenken@chicagoreader.com
the most resistant to being at the retreat) suspect Sam (who doesn’t appear at first) did something nefarious in order to survive the tornado cluster of death that ripped their worlds apart.
The retreat is run by Alex Marusich’s inept therapist, who can’t seem to get a grasp on pronouns, let alone deep-seated psychological damage. As the play unfolds, we see that the characters’ struggles with being trans, queer, and nonbinary are entwined with the deep pain unleashed by the murderous events. And when a storm takes out the power, you may be able to guess where things are headed.
The production uses some evocative video segments (produced by Shane Hogan) to suggest the past lives of the characters. The small basement theater of Open Space Arts lends itself well to a clammy tale like this one. But, at least on opening night, the pacing felt uneven, as the energy from scenes dissipated during the scene change blackouts, and some lines were delivered too so ly to be fully heard, even while sitting close to
Corthron’s characters have a tendency to talk past or at each other rather than directly connecting. At times, it works: Jackson’s Thyme, who is a voracious reader, particularly on pregnancy and environmental issues, can rattle off stats but occasionally seems to have difficulty communicating with those closest to her. It’s as if the information she’s meticulously collected is a kind of shield from the day-to-day reality, especially as a health crisis caused by lead paint begins to dominate her family’s life. I think it’s also a way of reminding us that, as smart as she is, Thyme is still a teenager trying to come to terms with emotional maturity.
The relationship between Shaneequa and Thyme resonates most closely as the two friends wrestle (at one point literally) with their complicated feelings about each other and their own choices. There are parts of Corthron’s play that feel a little inchoate, but Definition’s production ultimately makes us care about Thyme and her family and see in them the harm done by systemic racism and the hope embodied in defiantly choosing to keep dreams alive. —KERRY REID SPLASH HATCH ON THE E GOING DOWN Through 4/13: Thu–Fri 7:30 PM, Sat 3 and 7:30 PM, Sun 3 PM; Sat 3/29 3 PM only, Sat 4/12 7:30 PM only; Definition Theatre, 1160 E. 55th St., definitiontheatre.org, $25-$35 v
Splash Hatch on the E Going Down
JOE MAZZA/BRAVE LUX
KIRK WILLIAMSON
MUSIC
CHICAGOANS OF NOTE
Taigo Onez, DJ, producer, and label head
“My goal with Bang Le’ Dex was to make it about DJ culture and not just electronic music. I want it to encompass production, I want it to encompass DJ battling, discussions about vintage gear, audio, painting, fashion.”
As told to LEOR GALIL
In the 1980s, when he was still a teenager, Englewood native Taigo Onez got involved in Chicago music by joining what’s now the city’s oldest hip-hop community group, ChiROCK Nation. He dabbled in every hip-hop element—breaking, DJing, MCing, and graffiti writing—but he’d adopt music as his calling card. He made beats for emerging local MCs in the late 1980s and early 1990s, during which time he also had a foot in Chicago house—and back then, those two scenes saw each other as rivals. As a DJ, producer, and engineer, Taigo has continued to straddle multiple musical worlds. These days he runs a label he calls Bang Le’ Dex Recordings and serves as the electronic format chief for WHPK 88.5 FM.
My whole family, everybody is musical. My grandmother sang jazz. My aunt used to pop-lock when I was a kid. I was heavily o into being a B-boy in the early 80s. My uncle happens to be one of the godfathers of house music . . . Larry Heard, Mr. Fingers. Originally it was several di erent crews that I was interested in early on. But Chi-ROCK, if you were from the south side, they were just grabbing the crème de la crème of hip-hop
I got picked up—I think I was 14. Around 2017, 2018, I was vice president.
[Joining Chi-ROCK] gave me a work ethic— quite a bit of it, ’cause I was doing a whole lot of production. At the time, the underground was the mainstream. A lot of us were trying to get deals—in high school, out of high school. It was a competitive edge. You had to be dope; product had to be top-notch. Me working on Record Row at 17 helped catapult my name through
“You had to be dope; product had to be top-notch. Me working on Record Row at 17 helped catapult my name through things—not just in Chi-ROCK, but in the city and then throughout the industry.”
artists in Chicago. You practiced all elements in the 80s. If you were a B-boy, you became a gra ti writer . . . an MC or DJ. I did all the elements. I would guess I was good at it, ’cause
things—not just in Chi-ROCK, but in the city and then throughout the industry, eventually. From what I heard, I was the youngest producer to ever work on Record Row.
I worked at Smooth Sounds Recording Studio [at] 1900 South Michigan [in 1991]. Within the year of me working there, [it relocated to a space] across the street at the former One-derful Records building. We ended up taking the whole top floor.
My uncle would engineer all of my demos. But he had this busy career. “Mystery of Love” had taken off. He relicensed it to DJ International, and then all the stu with Trax. At some point, I couldn’t constantly bother him to do my demos. The last few sessions, he’s like, “OK, you gotta pay attention, ’cause you’re gonna have to start doing this for yourself.”
I had these wonderfully mixed demos. One night, I was at the studio, and I gave the owner one, and he was like, “I need you to come and work here. I need an engineer quick, fast, and in a hurry. I’ll pay you $10 an hour.” Which was a lot of money for a kid in ’91. So I took the piece of equipment in the room, and it was a crash course—headfirst, feet deep in, and learn everything quick.
A lot of times you [couldn’t] get on these concert lineups in the 90s. Unless you had huge records out, it was next to impossible to get in bed with Jam [Productions] to get yourself on one of their stages at the time. So we started throwing our own concerts.
Then the industry shifted. I got into a level of stress with it and got disheartened by the change. I backed up for a little while. I would take a job here and there, doing production or engineering at certain studios. I focused more on DJing and less on being an artist or producer anymore. I stopped producing around ’95. In ’99, I started working for [the label] Foxes and Hounds, which was [owned by] Nature Love—she went by Kacie Nemesis. She was a house music artist. She was in the old recording studio space that I was working in at Smooth Sounds, at 1900.
A friend of mine named Bruce always wanted to show o to his uncle: “I have a producer, he’s dope. I am an artist—you gonna believe in me.” We went by [his uncle’s place] one night, and I just happened to have my DAT. His uncle was like, “Oh, so this is the guy you’ve been talking about? Whatchu got?” He pops the DAT in, and then he gets on the phone, and he calls Nature. She’s this beautiful burst of energy, probably one of the best singers I’ve ever known; you can hear her coming through the landline. He’s like, “Nature, I got this boy over here, and he’s playing these tracks, and they fuunkaaay.” She was like, “Put him on the phone.” I get on the phone—she was like,
COURTESY TAIGO ONEZ
“You better come see me right now.” So me and Bruce drive to 1900, and she gave me a key again, said, “Come on back to work.”
A lot of the artists that I worked with [early
ativity. Same thing from the hip-hop people, like, “OK, Mr. ‘Jack My Body.’” It was always this issue. We just did a documentary on that, actually: It’s Different in Chicago , [directed
“I was producing this group called the Ultimate Posse, which was these two kids from Prosser High School; one of them became DaWreck from Triple Darkness, and the other was Neva from Crucial Conflict.”
on] kinda catapulted from there. So with that, my name goes with them. You would hear our names at industry functions, and we were at every industry function as well. [In high school] I was producing this group called the Ultimate Posse, which was these two kids from Prosser High School; one of them became DaWreck from Triple Darkness, and the other was Neva from Crucial Conflict.
I hadn’t seen them since we were all in high school. They ended up having some commercial success, and I hadn’t seen them for years. We were doing an open mike on 69th and Winchester, of all places. Kingdom Rock [is] a close friend of mine—he runs the Chicago Hip Hop Heritage Museum with Artistic and Brian Gorman. I’m doing sound for this open mike, and [Kingdom’s] like, “Yo, T, I want to introduce you to DaWreck from Triple Darkness.” I look him in the face, and he looks at Kingdom, and he tells Kingdom, “This is my first producer.” I hugged him, ’cause I hadn’t seen him in so many years. I asked him how Neva was doing. Crucial Conflict sold 3.5 million records—it was a great, great, great thing to see that coming to fruition, ’cause this is an extension of myself as well.
At the time, [in the late 80s and early 90s,] a lot of us had to hide the fact that we loved hip-hop and house at the same time. There were some uncomfortable moments for me, because I’m a kid; Mr. Fingers is my uncle. Some people might come by and, “Oh, you do hip-hop”—here comes the neg-
vintage gear, audio, painting, fashion. I want it to be this imprint that was what you saw on Beat Street or Breakin’. Or the whole era from Dapper Dan, or what was happening in Chicago with Barbara Bates and Jay Boogie—all of these fashion imprints that were here that were rockin’ out all this stu . I wanted Bang Le’ Dex to represent that part of Chicago that I knew, where it was fly. Music was dope, it was conscious with a hood edge, but it didn’t cross the line into programming behaviors. Like, I wanna be a part of the quality that represents the heart and soul of honorable Chicago.
I’ve been going to WHPK since I was 12 years old. I’ve known JP [Chill, former WHPK DJ and founder of hip-hop show The Essence,] since I was a kid; all of us used to take our demos to WHPK when we were children. My progression over the years, whatever stage I was in my career, I have to go, “This is what I’m doing now, JP. Let’s play this.”
closing the format.” I picked up the responsibility, and that was 2009.
Now we have [hip-hop shows] Industry Shakedown and CTA Radio . Buddy Finch. Mario Gage took over for me on The Essence when I left—it became the longest-running rap-radio format in the world, according to the FCC, still to this day.
The rap format is thriving. We have a wonderful electronic format. We have some things that we are taking care of. There are some ups and downs, but we’re getting things back on track. Our signal is strong. We’ve got a great lineup, a great roster of DJs, a whole lot of talent there that is budding. We’re ironing out the technical di culties, so to speak.
by] David Weathersby. I’ve got a bunch of tracks on the soundtrack as well. It was tough to navigate, but it eventually panned out. This is where the Internet helped that bridge, because hip-hop and house music both share a marriage with disco. Same thing with electro and techno. Bang Le’ Dex, I have a myriad of artists from around the world on the label. Techno, what we knew of it, coming from out of Detroit, was the electro we were breakdancing to—all of this proper electro would just be the gateway for me with techno as well. In Chicago, we had what we called “tracks”—we thought it was house, and eventually those started getting thrown into a techno category as well. It was this whole marriage of electronic music all coming from the same place, because hip-hop was electronic at one time too. It panned out, but it was di cult for a long time.
Hip-hop taught me ownership. My uncle would always say, “You need to send me something.” He led by example as well and launched his own label. He was always like, “You need to send me something, Taigo. We can put it out.”
But I felt like I wouldn’t be doing him a service either if I piggybacked him. I had to do my own label. I’ve had several, but Bang Le’ Dex is the one that I’ve put my heart and soul into. We’ve only had one hip-hop release on there so far, but I plan to do more in the very near future.
My goal with Bang Le’ Dex was to make it about DJ culture and not just electronic music. I want it to encompass production, I want it to encompass DJ battling, discussions about
Then ’08, I had been trying to find him, ’cause I did this remix on a Royce da 5’9” song. He finally called, and he was like, “Taigo, I’m leaving, and if you don’t take the show, I’m
What keeps me motivated is the inspiration that I’m getting from the younger generations—there are some really talented kids out here. I was that kid who knew my avenues were limited, so I want to make sure I have an outlet for them—and an outlet for people of all ages, creeds, colors, shapes, sizes, everything, who are just dope. Let’s be dope together. v
Two south-side women of color lead a creative agency that’s redefining what success looks like in the Chicago music scene.
By JOSHUA EFERIGHE
City of Win is a series curated by Isiah “ThoughtPoet” Veney and written by Joshua Eferighe that uses prose and photography to create portraits of Chicago musicians and cultural innovators working to create positive change in their communities.
Iwas lucky to catch Dayneeia Thrash and Cat Sanchez, cofounders of Chicago-based creative agency 3V, for an interview. They only had a short window for a Zoom sit-down, between the February 28 installment of TheGr8Cypher at Never Have I Ever Bar and their trip to South by Southwest in Texas. Their agency oversees the former—a community hip-hop event hosted by one of its clients, local collective TheGr8Thinkaz—and at the latter, 3V represented four artists who were performing.
Not that Day and Cat, as they’re usually called, were having an especially busy time, at least by their own standards. Their agency is involved in ten to 15 events per month on average, and that doesn’t factor in services they o er such as brand management, Web design, and show booking. Since 3V took on its first client in 2015, it’s grown its artists’ careers and created a business model that gives them a more sustainable path to success.
“We’ve had managers tell us that we do
way more than an average manager,” say Cat and Day. They tend to finish each other’s sentences—and when they do, they laugh. They’re both 29 years old and both from the south side: Cat hails from 96th Street, and Day (who DJs as Love Day) is from 87th Street. Their agency currently claims eight artists as clients, including TheGr8Thinkaz (who’ve performed as far afield as Amsterdam), rap duo Mother Nature (who’ve opened for Killer Mike and shared the stage with Rapsody), and DJ Cymba of TheGr8Thinkaz (who’s been booked by a Chicago Apple Store and by Navy Pier). Other affiliated artists, among them J Bambii and Freddie Old Soul, consult with 3V for show booking, business development, and release rollouts.
A 2018 survey by the Music Industry Research Association and Princeton University found that 61 percent of musicians cannot meet their living expenses with music-related income alone. And since COVID, the situation has only gotten worse. That’s why Day and Cat go the extra mile—and why 3V prioritizes financial sustainability for its clients.
Day explains that 3V makes sure to provide artists with a foundation, a step that often gets skipped. “We’re providing you with the things that you need to set up, even if you feel like they don’t matter now,” she says. “We have
the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. They were both working at an Urbana music venue called the Canopy Club. Day, who majored in business management, graduated in 2017, while Cat graduated in 2018 with a major in advertising and minors in public relations and sociology. “Originally, we both just had a shared passion for Chicago music, and specifically, we wanted to have our own music venue on the south side,” Cat says. “So we literally just had a moment of like, ‘Oh, that’s why you’re working here.’ And like, ‘That’s where you’re from?’ And we just became best friends.”
While employed at the Canopy Club, Cat and Day were also part of a student organization that helped promote shows at the venue—they wanted to book more hip-hop and increase student engagement. They began using the 3V name for that organization in 2014, attaching it to events at the club much as an outside promoter would. “We changed Canopy Club to 3V because we were trying to make it something that was not directly connected to the Canopy Club—undercover almost,” Cat says.
hands in everything. We’re getting your LLC together; we’re getting your finances together; we’re getting your personal finances together. We’re getting your branding, your press, your music, your touring, your events, your team, publishing—everything.”
The more difficult it gets to make money with music, the more important it is for musicians to diversify their potential sources of revenue. Many of 3V’s clients already embody this philosophy, pursuing ventures outside music: Gr8Sky sells Gr8Juice, his Gr8Thinkaz comrade Jeff K%nz runs the Think & Paint community art gatherings, Mother Nature teach the educational curriculum the Miseducation of Hip-Hop, and DJ Cymba organizes an event series called the Cymba Sessionz.
“We genuinely empower our artists to understand the business and branding, to be an entrepreneur on their own, because the music industry fluctuates so much,” Day says. “It’s not ideal for an artist to try to live o solely their music or their art, which is why the brands that they have are important. So we try to figure out ways to expand the artists’ brands and ideally get them to a point where they’re investing in something greater than just music and art, whether that be property or a franchise.”
Cat and Day met in 2014, while students at
“Most of the people that were part of our org were artists,” Day adds. “We gave a lot of the artists their first opportunity to perform on the stage and talk about their projects.”
The Canopy Club is deeply entrenched in 3V lore. It’s where Cat and Day met Klevah of Mother Nature, who’d introduce them to TRUTH, the duo’s other half. The two of them became 3V’s first clients in 2015, kicking off Cat and Day’s careers in artist management. Klevah also introduced them to Nova, who worked as part of 3V till 2021.
After graduating, Cat and Day took the 3V name with them, bringing their booking and event expertise back to Chicago. “When we created the organization, we were doing school stu , but we always worked in music,” Day says. “We both started working at a major festival doing admin stu . And then when we came back to Chicago, we worked at di erent venues. Like, I worked at Concord [Music Hall]; she worked at Metro. Chop Shop was post-graduation [for Cat]. So we were already hella in the music scene and freelancing festivals and stu .”
In March 2020, 3V filed paperwork to organize itself as an L3C, also known as a low-profit limited liability company. They merged the artist-management work they were already doing with event and booking services. “As an L3C, you have to have some element of social good,” Day says. “Our InnerG program is the educational and wellness portion of 3V. That program is what makes us an L3C.”
Cat Sanchez and Dayneeia Thrash, founders of 3V THOUGHTPOET FOR CHICAGO READER
InnerG aims to teach 3V clients how to maintain healthy careers, with or without the agency, and it stresses the importance of mental and physical wellness in a business that can be corrosive to both. It also has a public-facing side, with workshops, speaking engagements, and more. “That bridge between education and culture—Vessels, Visions, Vibes—those three things are what makes us different,” adds Cat, unpacking the Vs in the agency’s name.
Today, 3V operates in large part through partnerships and collaborations that expand its reach, rooting its business model in community. Gabby Alston from Acid Houzze helps with marketing for 3V clients, including newsletters and social media; Tiler “Tea Murda” Thompson of Qualitea Pubz Music Group works with publishing and uploads; Beleshia “Lyrical” McCulley of Lyrical Eyes Management and 323 Music assists with talent management. Depending on who’s pitching in, the 3V team can consist of ten to 15 people on any given day.
As much as Day and Cat trust their collaborators, they’d love to bring more services in-
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house. They also want to own a physical space. At this point, they don’t own or even rent; they do their 3V work out of various south-side cafes. Both founders also have day jobs in the field—Day is a booking coordinator for Live Nation, and Cat is a manager with marketing agency Groundswell Experiential—but they hope to build up 3V until it’s all they do. They run the agency almost like a full-service record label (except for the part where they don’t release music), and they plan to maintain that approach.
“I don’t know if we’ve ever seen ourselves as a label, but we are passionate about Chicago,” Day says. “So if there’s ever a point where that may come into play, it would be because we have so much passion and love for Chicago being a global leader of music.”
“Our vision is to have a brick-and-mortar venue, creative space, like a whole building on the south side,” Cat adds. “That is what brought us together—to have a physical space where we do all of the work and even further impact Chicago.” v
m letters@chicagoreader.com
Recommended and notable shows with critics’ insights for the week of March 27
b ALL AGES F
Mexico City’s Sonido Gallo Negro make cosmic cumbia for the people
FRIDAY28
Sonido Gallo Negro See Pick of the Week at le . Rudy De Anda opens. 10 PM, Empty Bottle, 1035 N. Western, $20. 21+
SATURDAY29
Donzii Riki headlines; Donzii and Cool Heat open. 8 PM, Schubas, 3159 N. Southport, $20, $15 in advance. 18+
Los Angeles is producing plenty of reverb-drenched postpunk projects these days, but where other artists veer toward synth pop, Donzii lean into no wave and Italo disco. Founded in Miami and recently relocated to LA, Donzii are led by multidisciplinary artist Jenna Balfe and multi-instrumentalist Daniel Fuller, and they’ve hinted at this musical lineage by naming themselves for a brand of Italian speedboats—modified with an extra “i” for punk effect. Donzii promise zip and chintz, bootleg style.
Goth artists can be very self-serious—even the ones who cake on black-and-white makeup, don vampire fangs, and stage music videos with the production aesthetics of a 1984 cable-access show. Donzii’s music is definitely goth adjacent, but they depart from the pack by using playfulness to invite listeners in. On the cover of their latest EP, 2023’s Penetrate, Balfe and Fuller wear patchy green body paint and green wigs while posing and making strange faces amid hand-painted green lawn furniture. The only thing that isn’t some shade of green is the fluff y white whipped cream that Balfe eagerly and angrily licks from her hands and Fuller drips onto his head in quiet ecstasy.
MEXICAN-ARGENTINEAN GROUP Sonido Gallo Negro make largely instrumental music steeped in 70s Peruvian cumbia and refracted through a psychedelic lens colored by whatever catches their fancy. With each of the studio albums they’ve released since forming in 2010, the Mexico City–based band have added more sounds to their sound—you’re as likely to catch nods to spaghetti-western film scores and space-age kitsch as you are to hear fuzzed-out desert grooves, surfy guitar, and traditional rhythms from across South America and the Caribbean. They don’t limit themselves to one hemisphere, either: On 2018’s Mambo Cósmico, they incorporate elements from the Middle East and Africa. Sonido Gallo Negro expertly synthesize these disparate influences into alluring, cosmic tunes that make perfect dance-floor fuel. As eclectic and quirky as their original material can get, they’re
first and foremost a good-time band, and they’ve also covered the B-52s’ “Planet Claire” and the theme song from The X-Files. That said, much of the joy in Sonido Gallo Negro’s music comes from embracing their heritage of resistance and resilience, which helps empower others to carry on the good fight. On the 2022 album Paganismo, the song “Yanga” (with gorgeous guest vocals from Sylvie Henry) pays tribute to 16th-century revolutionary Gaspar Yanga, who led a group of enslaved Africans out of captivity to establish their own community. Last year, Sonido Gallo Negro hit it out of the park again with the theremin-draped single “Pañuelo de Seda” (“Silk Scarf”), whose slinky, rock-solid groove sometimes sounds like the score to a clandestine desert rendezvous and sometimes sounds like carnival music for the crew of a flying saucer. —JAMIE LUDWIG
Donzii’s video for “Rightway Highway,” from the 2022 full-length Fishbowl, edits together camcorder footage of the band spending a day at a carnival. While they pose like circus strongmen and eat so serve, the video meditates on the joyful choreography of rides and the errant wonders of the midway—one shot lingers on a stranger’s T-shirt emblazoned with two bunnies feasting on each other and the words “Live Fast Eat Ass.” Like many of Donzii’s songs, “Rightway Highway” is driven by full- bodied bass and colored with busy, bristling, rollicking layers of fretwork. In this case, the excited tickles of guitar are complicated and ever so slightly imprecise, as if guitarist Danny Heinze were having too much fun to be exacting—an exciting contrast to the track’s otherwise rigid rhythms and moody atmosphere. Even as Donzii face down dystopia, despondency, and other dark themes, they never lose sight of ways to amuse and be amused.
—MICCO CAPORALE
Forever Deaf Fest Integrity headline; Flesh & Blood Robot, Lair of the Minotaur, Huntsmen, Black Cross Hotel, and We Weren’t Invited open. 6:30 PM, Sleeping Village, 3734 W. Belmont, $40, $33 in advance. 21+
Forever Deaf Fest launched in 2018 to get people to come out for heavy music during the year’s coldest months. Though the mini festival has featured bands from near and far, it’s consistently focused
SONIDO GALLO NEGRO, RUDY DE ANDA Fri 3/28, 10 PM, Empty Bottle, 1035 N. Western, $20. 21+
DAVID BARAJAS
on homegrown talent, and subgenre matters less than whether an artist is doing something original and can bring it live. Forever Deaf VI takes place at Sleeping Village, with pre- and postfest shows a few blocks away at Live Wire Lounge. The night kicks off with Chicago iconoclasts We Weren’t Invited, who springboard from punk and hardcore into a wild mix of sounds (caustic funk- metal, lo-fi grunge, melodic postpunk) that could seem at odds if they didn’t all come from the same band. Black Cross Hotel are a local supergroup (with members of the Atlas Moth and Stabbing Westward as well as musician and producer Sanford Parker), and their self- assured blend of postpunk, goth, and alternative rock feels ready for a stadium show. Their spooky 2022 album, Hex, is steeped in horror-movie worship. Earthy, folky Chicago doom band Huntsmen take the stage next, followed by yet another local group, thrashy sludge trio Lair of the Minotaur. Mid-Michigan’s Flesh & Blood Robot, who combine death metal, hardcore, and grind, go on just before
the headliners: hardcore punk legends Integrity. Formed in Ohio in the late 80s and based in Belgium since 2003, they’ve launched generations of punk and metalcore bands with their dark, aggressive music and obsessions with esoteric spiritual-
ism, and last year they released All Death Is Mine: Total Domination, a collection of rarities, covers, and unissued material from the past seven years. Its sinister rock ’n’ roll highlights the talents of blistering guitarist Domenic Romeo (owner of the A389 label), who played with the band from 2014 till 2023. Integrity have gone through a dizzying number of lineups over the years—front man Dwid Hellion is the only constant member—but they remain an absolutely crushing powerhouse. —JAMIE LUDWIG
Donzii DANI BOOTS
Bubble Tea and Cigarettes ANA CHEN
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Find more music listings at chicagoreader.com/musicreviews
SUNDAY30
Bubble Tea and Cigarettes Precocious Neophyte open. 9 PM, Sleeping Village, 3734 W. Belmont, $18. 21+
Bubble Tea and Cigarettes make music for pumpkin- spice girlies on mood stabilizers. This gauzy pop project is the Seattle–based duo of Andi Wang and Kat Zhang, both Asian immigrants from conservative families who began writing songs to funnel the dark, heavy emotions they couldn’t keep contained in their day-to-day lives. Their sound mixes Nouvelle Vague’s chic dance pop with Mazzy Star’s dreamy indie rock, and it’s accessorized with the so glamour of City Pop. But while Bubble Tea and Cigarettes aren’t groundbreaking, they succeed in capturing an interesting tension between hypersweet and extremely numb. On “Plane Crash,” from their second album, November’s We Should Have Killed Each Other (Lauren), Zhang’s voice is a so but claustrophobic whisper, and she sings over subtle flourishes of pop guitar that would feel at home in an early-aughts teen-movie montage about heartbreak and longing: “I like when you kiss / The scars across my wrist.”
The cover art of We Should Have Killed Each Other depicts a girl dressed in a school uniform standing at the top of a concrete structure at dusk with her arms open and her face skyward. She looks like she could let herself fall forward, declare herself to the universe, or scream at the heavens. This profound sense of romanticized precarity echoes in song titles such as “Dead Flowers” and “French Movie.” Zhang sings like she’s only got so much breath left to describe her many hurts and infrequent joys. This is the music of someone who drinks more bubble tea than water and smokes half a pack a day.
—MICCO CAPORALE
Shemekia Copeland 8 PM, SPACE, 1245 Chicago, Evanston, sold out. b
Shemekia Copeland has deep roots in the blues: Her father was legendary Texas guitarist Johnny Copeland, and she began performing around age ten, starting with a gig at Harlem’s legendary Cotton Club. She puts a personal spin on tradition, and whether she’s singing the blues, soul, or Americana, she has a gi for swinging it toward her own destinations.
Copeland’s talents are on full display on her 12th and most recent album, 2024’s Blame It on Eve (Alligator). Most of the material is from her longtime songwriting team: guitarist Will Kimbrough, who produced the record, and John Hahn, who’s also Copeland’s manager. As on previous releases, the confessional subject matter is informed by Copeland’s input. “Tough Mother” lays down a fierce, hypnotic groove as Copeland mourns the too-early deaths of her father and mother and describes her own struggle with cancer. “Cadillac Blue,” by Hahn and guitarist Kevin Gordon, is an openhearted, humorously defiant Americana boogie about interracial relationships, and “Is There Anybody Up There?” is an antifascist garage-rock anthem featuring Austin singer-songwriter Alejandro Escov-
edo, who provides rangy duet vocals (“Lord save me from the righteous / The ones who never sin”). Additional highlights include an ode to Hank Williams’s little-known Black mentor (“Tee Tot Payne”), a devastating bayou tale of illness and heartbreak performed with Pascal Danaë of French bluesrock trio Delgres (“Belle Sorciere,” by Danaë and Hahn), and a towering version of Johnny Copeland’s “Down on Bended Knee.” Throughout Blame It on Eve, the blues is a cosmopolitan traveler, able to stroll just about anywhere without losing its way or its soul. Copeland is an exciting and innovative artist, and the intimate atmosphere at SPACE should provide an excellent setting to see her live.
—NOAH BERLATSKY
Jules Reidy Kari Watson opens. 8:30 PM, Constellation, 3111 N. Western, $20. 18+
Jules Reidy makes intimate songs fraught with dissonance and tension. They sing through Auto-Tune,
digitally mapping their gentle voice onto the familiar intervals of equal temperament, while their customized electric guitar plays in just intonation. The instrument’s frets are scattered around its neck in bits, like holes in an antique computer’s punch card, and its nonstandard tuning means that two not-quite-equivalent scales overlap disruptively in this music, creating rippling interference patterns. Reidy’s lush, disorienting songs also juxtapose serene melodies with unpredictable and o en unmetered rhythms—stumbling collages of twinkling electronics, crumpling unpitched concussions, pixelated scribbles that sound like modem handshakes—so that the listener can find no firm ground, either in pitch or in time.
On the new Ghost/Spirit (Thrill Jockey), the Berlin- based guitarist’s playing sometimes seems to belong to a recognizable genre, with cycling arpeggiated patterns a la John Fahey, but at other times it’s pointillistic, minimal, and cryptic. (This seems to depend largely on whether they’re using a 12-string acoustic or their custom microtonal elec-
tric.) Reidy has equipped their microtonal guitar with a hexaphonic pickup system that allows each string to be processed as a separate output, and on Ghost/Spirit every note from that instrument seems to gleam from a different point in space. The effect is as immersive as it is strange—it’s as though you’re sitting in a tree draped with fairy lights next to a sentimental cyborg who’s singing just to you.
Reidy’s previous song-based album, 2022’s World in World, centers their guitar, but on Ghost/ Spirit they’ve pushed their voice further forward in the mix and added a kaleidoscope of samples, synth tones, and other electronics—including bowed strings, pattering xylophone, clustered trombones, reedy accordion, and tumbling throbs of percussion. (Some of the samples come from Reidy’s friends and collaborators—bassist Andreas Dzialocha, cellist Judith Hamann, sound artist Weston Olencki, drummers Morten Joh and Sara Neidorf—but good luck figuring out which.) Even when the vocal melody moves along with synth chords or drones that reinforce its position as the backbone of the song, Reidy might still drop in sudden blurts of bass, untethered ribbons of feedback, or stochastic flourishes of hi-hat that prevent the music from settling into a single frame. When one element is steady, another will be unstable, and when one is harmonious, another will be wildly discordant—and elements switch roles from song to song.
Reidy’s lyrics on Ghost/Spirit address the ego death of love, whether divine or earthly. The surrender, transformation, and transcendence that accompany such an experience find their mirror in the songs, which suspend the listener between states of being in a kind of ecstatic liminality that could resolve itself in any direction. As Reidy sings on “Spirit”: “All I have for you / All the love and fear / Too close they overlap / Too loud for me to hear.” In a live setting, Reidy runs their voice and guitar through a laptop, a 14-channel mixer, and several effects pedals, including a looper. They augment those inputs with an eight-pad electronic percussion trigger, played with a drumstick in their pick hand. Close your eyes, though, and you can see the prismatic multitudes of Ghost/Spirit hanging in the air.
—PHILIP MONTORO
v
continued from p. 23
Integrity headline Forever Deaf Fest on Saturday. COURTESY THE ARTIST
Shemekia Copeland DAVE SPECTER
Jules Reidy CAMILLE BLAKE
Let’s Play!
Make time to learn something new with music and dance classes at Old Town School! We offer flexible schedules for all skill levels both in-person and online.
FOODBALL MONDAY NIGHT
The Reader’s weekly chef popup series, now at Frank and Mary’s Tavern, 2905 N. Elston, Avondale
Follow the chefs, @chicago_reader, and @mikesula on Instagram for weekly menu drops, ordering info, updates, and the stories behind Chicago’s most exciting foodlums.
THE LINEUP
March 31
Coming soon: NEMANJA by Nemanja Milunovic @nemanja_milunovic_011
April 7 Sicilian-style bakery by the Focaccia Mama @thefocacciamama
April 14 The Temptation by Gilda @gildachicago
April 21 A midwestern flower rises from the ashes with Las Flores @lasfloreschicago
April 28 Cocinero Verde is risen! @cocinero.verde
May 5 Cinco de Mayo with Tacos Las Manitas @tacos_lasmanitas
May 12 The revenge of Logan Oyster Socials @loganoystersocials
May 19 The long-awaited return of Links Taproom @linkstaproom
Sign up for classes today at
May 26 Memorial Day West African barbecue with Dozzy’s Grill @dozzysgrill
June 2 Indigenous-inspired fermentation freaks Piñatta Chicago @pinattachicago
Head to chicagoreader.com/foodball for weekly menus and ordering info!
SAVAGE LOVE
SEX AND RELATIONSHIPS
Come and go
The
risks of hot tub sex, getting pleasure from a Trumper, and more
By DAN SAVAGE
artificial urinary sphincters have been available for more than 50 years, the doctors you saw back in 1998 might not have been aware of them. (According to the Mayo Clinic, many doctors today aren’t aware of them.) It’s also possible you weren’t a good candidate for the artificial urinary sphincters available in 1998, CUMS, but these
Q : I’m a single gay man who hasn’t touched anybody for 16 years. Yes, you read that right: I haven’t touched another person for 16 years. Sit with that for a couple of moments. Most people don’t believe me. I did something stupid in 1998 and had sex in a hot tub. I ended up having surgery because of an infection. Since then, whenever I ejaculate, what comes out is a combination of sperm and urine because an internal flap no longer closes to stop the urine. The urologist and my surgeon said there was nothing they could do to fix the problem. I did not realize that sex in a hot tub was an extremely risky sexual activity. (You should warn people.)
Men find this absolutely disgusting. I can’t repeat some of the things I have been told when I’m trying to be honest with a partner. What advice or suggestions do you have to explain this to potential partners even though I’ve said I want to please them only. Please
give me some help as to what to say. Any advice helps. —CANADIAN URGENTLY MISSING SEX
a : Having penetrative sex in a hot tub is riskier than having sex on dry land, damp mattress, or hard countertop. Heavily chlorinated water dries out sensitive tissues, making abrasions and STI transmission more likely. Water containing potentially harmful bacteria can be forced into the urethra during intercourse, heightening the risk of urinary tract infections in both men and women. (Best practice: get horny in a hot tub, get out to fuck, get back in when you’re done.)
With that warning out of the way, CUMS, can I ask when you last spoke to a doctor about your condition?
The “little flap” that contracts during ejaculation (preventing semen from shooting into the bladder and/or urine from exiting the body with semen) is called the internal urethral sphincter. While
your condition not as a tragic defect, but as an exciting superpower. Leading with this fact about yourself on kink or kink-friendly hookup sites might attract so much positive attention, CUMS, that you don’t wanna get an artificial urinary sphincter after all.
whether they’re Trump 2016, 2020, 2024, or 2028 flags, the effect will be the same: a postnut yuck powerful enough to ruin whatever yum came first.
devices have gotten smaller (and the surgery has gotten less invasive) over the last three decades. You might be a good candidate for a new model. You should make an appointment to see a specialist and talk about your condition.
While you wait for that appointment, CUMS, you also might wanna seek out different kinds of gay and bi men, online and off. There are lots of queer men out there into “no recip” oral. If you were to meet up with a guy who just wanted to get serviced (a guy who wanted to get head without having to reciprocate), you wouldn’t have to mention your condition in advance of your first meeting since you won’t be coming on, in, or near him. He wouldn’t need to know at that point that your ejaculate comes mixed with piss. There are also plenty of guys out there who are into piss. If I were to biohazard a guess, CUMS, I’d say a statistically significant percentage of those guys would view
Q : I am a pansexual nonbinary FTM. I am able to have two types of orgasms. One is a squirty, juicy, wet orgasm and the other is a full-body orgasm that makes my clit throb. Squirty orgasms come easy and o en, but I’ve only experienced the clit throbbers during solo play with two exceptions. Only my ex-wife could give me this kind of climax until I met a guy on Grindr. I update my Grindr profile depending on what I’m looking for on any particular night, and on the night I met this Grindr guy, I was only looking to be eaten out. I arrived at his place and he got down to business immediately. He was patient, he was deliberate, he was rough, and it was . . . WOW! I had a rare, full-body, clitthrobbing orgasm! It was amazing. Then, as I was leaving, I saw the Trump flag hanging in his room. It was hanging on the wall directly behind me and I did not see it (I couldn’t see it) while I was being eaten out. It was a Trump 2016 flag—not that it matters. (A Trump flag is a Trump flag.) So what do I do? I suppose I can do nothing and just never meet up with the guy again, but what do I do about my conscience?
P.S. We exchanged phone numbers before I saw the flag. —FEELING LOW ABOUT GRINDR SITUATION
a : You may have accidentally discovered a new way for people into ruined orgasms to get their kink on, FLAGS: strategically positioned Trump flags. I don’t think it matters
For the sake of your conscience, FLAGS, send a text to the Trump supporter that says something like this: “None of that would have happened—I would never have let you go down on me— if I’d seen that Trump flag on your wall before we got started.” Then take a screenshot of his Grindr profile, if you can still see it, and share it privately with other trans men you know personally, FLAGS, so they don’t wind up having the same jump scare you did. Then block his phone number and block him on Grindr.
P.S. Next time you show up in a strange man’s apartment for no-recip oral, FLAGS, do a quick 360-degree turn (a pirouette) before he drops to his knees.
P.P.S. There’s no need to steal Trump flags to ruin orgasms. There are plenty in the trash already, deposited there by Americans—not our best—who already regret voting for Trump.
Q : My husband’s best friend turned into one of my best friends. This best friend of ours recently started dating a woman. We were supportive of their relationship at first, even though he was joining as the third guy in a polyamorous relationship. A er a few months, their relationship went from polyamorous to monogamous. Our friend met his new girlfriend’s kid very early in the relationship, even spending the night a er only knowing this woman for a couple of months. Within six months of dating, they shared the kid’s toothbrush on a vacation. They didn’t say they boiled the toothbrush or took any measures to clean the toothbrush until weeks later
when they were pressed on it. This is when we started to distance ourselves because we felt this behavior showed a lack of respect for this child. We had a severe falling out due to this. Now they are engaged, and it raises even more concerns for us. How do we proceed? Should we stop even wanting to reconcile? Should we try to be the voice of reason about oral hygiene?
—UNHYGIENIC GROSS
HUMANS
a : While I got letters about grosser things this week, yours was the most surprising letter that came in the mail for two reasons: first, that your friend would tell you about using this child’s toothbrush on vacation and, second, that you would write to me—a sex-advice columnist—about your friend using this child’s toothbrush. For the record, UGH, I agree that introducing a child to a new partner after two months is inadvisable (which is why I’ve always advised against it). Using someone else’s toothbrush on vacation because you forgot your own is equal parts gross and unnecessary. Most hotels make disposable toothbrushes available to guests who forgot their own, UGH. Even if your friend and his girlfriend weren’t at a hotel that offered toothbrushes, they could’ve gone without brushing their teeth for a single night and gotten new toothbrushes for themselves at the nearest pharmacy or truck stop in the morning. To be perfectly honest, UGH, I don’t really care whether you reconcile with your friend or not, just please spare me from any and all updates about your friend’s oral hygiene going forward. v
Read the rest of this column, listen to the Savage Lovecast , and more at the URL savage.love. m mailbox@savage.love
I did not realize that sex in a hot tub was an extremely risky sexual activity. KEI/UNSPLASH
CLASSIFIEDS
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Assoc Cnsltnt, Sustnblty Enrgy & Clmate Chng(Chicago, IL), WSP USA, Inc.: Devlp entty-wide sustnblty data invntries &/or life cycl assmnts for energy, GHG, wtr, waste, & other resrcs. Reqs: Bach’s (or frgn equiv) in Envrnmntl Scnc, Sustnblty Clmate Chng or a rltd fld; 1 yr exp as Sustnblty/Envrnmntl Cnsltnt, Commnty Engmt Offcr or rltd role. Salary $89,128. Stndrd corp benfts. Email resume to jobs@wsp.com, Ref: 1400.
Cheetah Express, Inc seeks Operations Manager. Mail resume to 835 Greenleaf Ave, Elk Grove Village IL
Ella’s Bubbles (Chicago, IL) seeks International Sales Representative to promote & sell acrylic walk-in bathtubs & accessible showers/identify sales opportunities & ensure customers satisfaction. Must be willing to travel 25% of the time to visit retail customers w/in the U.S. & participate in intl. shows abroad. Remote work option 50% of the time in the U.S. Salary: $78,998/yr. Apply at ellasbubbles. com/careers/, Job ID: International Sales Representative
Family Care Physicians Inc seeks an Accountant. Mail resume to 4001 N Cicero Ave, Chicago, IL
Investment Banking Associate (Chicago, Il): Financial Analysis: Perform in-depth financial modeling, valuation, and analysis of companies to assess their financial health, growth potential, and
market position. Ability to model financing scenarios involving multiple debt and equity scenarios.
Deal Execution: Assist in managing the end-to-end deal execution process, including preparing offering memoranda, conducting buyer research, and coordinating due diligence efforts.
Client Communication: Build and maintain strong relationships with clients, providing regular updates, addressing inquiries, and ensuring their needs are met throughout the transaction process. Requirements include: Master’s degree in finance or a related field or a related field. Knowledge of accounting principles, financial markets, mergers and acquisitions, and corporate finance required. Strong financial modeling and valuation skills with proficiency in Excel, PowerPoint, financial databases, and financial analysis tools required.
To apply with Dresner Investment Services, Inc., send resume to Brian Ytterberg, Chief Operating Officer, at 10 South LaSalle St, Suite 2170, Chicago, IL 60603
MDC Architects P.C. seeks an Architectural Designer. Mail resume to 200 Jefferson Ln, Streamwood IL
Medline Industries, LP in Northfield, IL is seek’g multiple openings for:
A.) Manager, IS Application (B2B Ecommerce Delivery) to grow the dgtl commerce space by building apps that are critical to the success of the organization. No trvl req. WFH benefit avail; must be avail to come in office at least once /wk. Salary: $196,123 /yr. Apply at: https://tinyurl.com/jf93srtf
B.)Sr. IS Business Intelligence Analyst(s) to anlyz science, engg, bus, & other data processing problems. Salary: $138,715 /yr. No trvl req. Hybrid work envrnmnt with WFH benefit avail some
days. Apply at: https:// tinyurl.com/552n7yz4
C.) Sr. IS Systems Analyst(s) (BI Reporting/ Apps) to perform sys’s mgmt & integration functions along with improving existing computer sys’s & reviewing computer sys capabilities. No trvl req. Hybrid work envrnmnt with WFH benefit avail; must be able to come in to the Northfield office for mtgs when req. Salary: $126,755 / yr. Apply at: https:// tinyurl.com/ywthzpfn
Morningstar, Inc. seeks Lead Software Engineer in Chicago, IL to conduct code review, conduct training sessions, product development, & apply design patterns & OOP principles. BS deg in Soft Engg, or rltd field or foreign equiv & 5 yrs of rlvnt s/w dvlpmnt exp req’d. In alt, we will accept MS deg in Soft Engg or rltd field or foreign equiv & 3 yrs of rlvnt s/w dvlpmnt exp. We will accept any suitable combination of education, training, and experience. Add’l specific skills req’d. Base salary: $148,949/ year. For position details & to apply, visit: https://www. morningstar.com/careers; ref. job ID REQ-049305.
Morningstar Investment Management LLC seeks a Senior QA Automation Engineer (multiple positions) in Chicago, IL to build test automation framework. BS in IT or rltd STEM field & 5 yrs of Quality Assurance and Automation exp req’d. Add’l specific skills req’d. Base salary: $116,085/ year. For position details & to apply, visit: https://www. morningstar.com/careers; ref. job ID REQ-049622.
Prod Engg. Mgr. in Des Plaines, IL. Imprv mfg proc to enhnc effcy, rdc wst & min prod costs. Anlyz exst proc, idntfy bttlncks & implm sols. Mng manpwr, mach & mats effctly. Dev prod schs, alloc res & mntr prod otpt. Mng rltnshps w/spplrs & vndrs. Nego
cntrcts, mntr spplr perf & addss iss r/t qual/del/cost. Collb w/depts to ensr algn of prod actvt w/buss objs & cust reqs. Sch, train & comm to prod team. Ensr prdts meet qlty. Ovrs QC procs, dvlp QA prtcls & implmnt corrct actns to mntn qlty. Keep accrt recs & gnrt repts on prod mtrcs. Ensr safe work envirn. Implmnt & enfrc safe prtcls, cndct safe insp & prmt safe awrnss. Collb w/ prod dev tms to ensr new prods mnfctrd effcly. Prvd inpt on dsgn for mnfctring, proto test & prod scale-up actvts. Use Solidworks CAD SW to prod mech drwgs & accrt assy models w/cal dmnsns & tlrncs. Rev & alt mech. drawings to confirm to engg chng. MS in Mech/Manufacturing/ Mech & Aerospace Engg reqd. Resumes to HR, Job Code 001, La Marche Manufacturing Co., 106 Bradrock Drive Des Plaines, Il 60018.
Product Managers sought by Annata Dynamics USA Inc., Chicago, IL to prfrm heavy equip OEM intgratn, implmtn & roadmap planning, etc. $130K-$200K/yr. 10% US &/or Int’l travel. Deg’d applicants exp’d w/use of Dynamics 365 ERP platform, Azure Dev Ops, etc. Send resume to i.makarenko@annata. net & must refer to “PM”.
Robert W. Baird & Co. Incorporated seeks Investment BankerAnalyst in Chicago, IL to prvde anlytcl spprt on mrgrs & acqstns, pblc offrgs & othr fnncl advsry srvcs fr clnts. Reqs. dmstc & int’l trvl up to 10% of time. Reqs. SIE Certification & Series 63 Certification. Apply at jobpostingtoday. com/ Ref # 10689.
Staff Accountant-NDH Advisors LLC d/b/a Prosperity Partners has F/T permanent opening. Req’ts: Mstr’s/equiv in Busn Admin/Acctg/or rltd + 6 mnths exp as Jr Accountant/or Accountant.
Job locn:Chicago, IL & various unanticipat’d locns across U.S. For salary & benefits, refer to: https:// www.prosperityllc.com/ careers/?gh_jid= 4580480008. Mail resumes: Kristen Schrader, 225 W. Washington St, Suite #2600, Chicago, IL 60606 or email to: resume@prosperityllc. com
Touch of Beauty Supply, Inc. seeks a Product Manager. Mail resume to 4183 167th St, Country Club Hills IL Yunak, Corp. seeks a Sales Manager. Mail resume to 1320 S 6th Ave, Des Plaines IL
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