OppLoans • 6th October 2021

Millennials Love Using Uber, But Seniors are the Ones Driving

Turns out that driving for a ride-hailing and rideshare app can be a great way for retirees to earn some extra income — and fill their spare time. When Uber started in San Francisco in 2009, you could be forgiven for thinking they would burn bright and then flame out. Going up against the taxicab industry was not a fight that any sensible person would want to pick. Of course, as we now know, Uber founder and ex-CEO Travis Kalanick was not a sensible guy—for better and for worse. Nine years lat

Time Out Chicago • 29th June 2018

The Cher Show

The Cher Show delivers what it promises and nothing more. The Cher Show’s blunt, unassuming title is a fair proxy. It’s a show. It’s a show about Cher. It’s The Cher Show. Covering the singer/actress/icon’s early years in its first act and the next 48 years in a shorter second act, The Cher Show is too convoluted to be anything artful but has learned enough razzle-dazzle from its subject to be generally entertaining. If that sounds like damning with faint praise, it is, but it ain’t got nothin

OppLoans • 6th October 2021

Found Yourself On The ChexSystems Blacklist? Here's What You Can Do

A poor score from ChexSystems will affect your ability to open up a checking account. Here are some steps you can take to fix your score, plus a helpful alternative to traditional checking. People with bad credit get turned away from banks when they apply for a personal loan, but a poor credit score doesn’t mean they can’t open a checking account. For people who get scored poorly by Chexsystems, however, that is precisely the fate that awaits them. If you’re one of these folks, don’t panic. Th

Hyperallergic • 20th February 2017

When Great Art Makes You LOL

If you heard peals of laughter ringing out through the quiet, reverent halls of an art museum, what would your reaction be? Would you “tut-tut” in their general direction, maybe shoot them a glare or offer them a pointed “shhh”? If so, can we be totally sure that you, and not they, are in the right? For contemporary artists who love to insert a little bit of humor in their work, the situation above begs the question: Can art be funny? Yes, of course — but it doesn’t have to be, whereas comedy

OppLoans • 14th February 2018

Is Valentine's Day a Fake Holiday?

Last year, Americans spent almost 20 billion dollars on Valentine’s Day. And sure, a lot of them got in good with their respective partners and boos. But was that really money well spent? After all, isn’t Valentine’s Day a fake holiday invented by Big Greeting Card to sell, well, cards and also chocolates and candy and stuffed teddy bears and restaurant reservations and carriage rides? (Don’t even get us started on Big Carriage Ride.) Actually, no. Valentine’s Day wasn’t “invented by the greet

Chicago Sun-Times • 19th June 2018

The hopeful music and tragic facts of 'Haymarket' make for a moving musical

One of the sneakiest strengths of “Haymarket,” a new folk musical from composer David Kornfeld and writer Alex Higgin-Houser, is that it knows to keep current events out of it. While the play contains numerous parallels to the nation’s current political strife, it makes sure the two lines never converge. The parallels stay parallel. We’re constantly bombarded by modern life as it is; the last thing we need is for it to crash Kool-Aid-man-style into the story at hand and reiterate (but louder) w

OppLoans • 6th October 2021

Horror Films Cost Very Little to Make and They Make a LOT of Money

People love horror movies, and rubber masks are cheap. Producer Jason Blum has turned that formula into a money-printing movie empire. With a new sequel to Halloween opening this Friday, courtesy of director David Gordon Green and, um, Danny McBride, it’s hard to ignore that horror has made a huge comeback over the past decade. And a great deal of that comeback has come courtesy of man: Halloween producer Jason Blum, the wildly successful force behind Blumhouse Productions.

Newcity Stage • 18th March 2015

Beginning of Days: Windy City Playhouse Aims to Be A New Theater for New Audiences - FEATURE

Normally when a new theater company opens in Chicago it is cause for little fanfare. Small storefront companies come and go with the transience of a celebrity parody twitter account. However when the Windy City Playhouse announced its inaugural season last summer, the theater community took notice. Unlike the usual bands of scrappy, broke college grads hoarding pennies and launching kickstarters, The Windy City Playhouse announced that they would be opening with a full four-show season cast with

Time Out Chicago • 29th September 2017

Building the Wall

Robert Schenkkan’s rapid response to last year’s presidential election proves wearying to scale. With the recent Broadway and HBO success of All The Way, his play about Lyndon Johnson, playwright Robert Schenkkan might seem like an ideal candidate to write a future-tense play about the Trump administration. And Schenkkan’s new play, written in under a week soon after last November’s election, is anti-Trump both in style and in content, but it’s done in by its utter, plodding dullness. While it’

Time Out Chicago • 13th October 2017

Evening at the Talk House

A Red Orchid Theatre mounts the Chicago premiere of Wallace Shawn’s dystopian cocktail-party comedy. (This is comedy, right?) Wallace Shawn seems to have a particular interest in how intellectuals and artists respond to totalitarianism. And if his new play Evening at the Talk House were to be lined up alongside his older works Aunt Dan and Lemon and The Designated Mourner, you wouldn’t come away with a heart swollen full of hope. Now receiving its Chicago premiere at A Red Orchid Theatre under

Art21 Magazine • 13th October 2015

Long Live Catharsis

I haven’t cried since the summer before I went to college and broke up with my high-school girlfriend. And by cried, I mean like when your face starts uncontrollably heaving and your throat tries to climb out of your mouth and your eyes don’t so much shed tears as they vomit them. It’s been ten years since then, but I remember that it felt good. It felt right. It felt cathartic. The idea of catharsis in art goes back to Aristotle’s Poetics, wherein he defines formal tragedy as, in part, contain

OppLoans • 6th October 2021

Love and Money: A Brief History of Dowries

After a strong 3,000 year run dating back to Ancient Babylon, the practice of wedding dowries is finally going out of fashion ... for the most part. Figuring out money stuff when you’re married—or getting married—can be tough. You and your partner could be bringing two entirely different mindsets to the table, not to mention all your bank accounts, debts, and various assets—and yes, those mint condition Pokemon cards do count as assets, thank you very much.

OppLoans • 25th April 2018

Money at the Movies: Which Avenger Gives Marvel the Most Bang for Its Buck?

Over the past ten years, the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) has completely rewritten the rules for how Hollywood makes movies. Heck, remember when the phrase “cinematic universe” wasn’t even a thing? All of that comes to a head this weekend with the release of Avengers: Infinity War, the first of two Avengers team-up movies that will bring the current incarnation of the MCU to a close—with a pretty big bang. This got us thinking: As the MCU moves into a new phase, what can Marvel Studios lear

OppLoans • 19th July 2018

You Can Get Charge-Offs Removed from Your Credit Report, But It Ain't Easy

Imagine if you took a test, and then your grade on that test followed you around for years and years afterward. You’re applying for an apartment, and your landlord looks at your grade. You almost have that great job offer in-hand, but first, your new boss has to check your results. Before you can get approved for a mortgage, guess what, the bank needs to double-check that you didn’t totally flunk. Have you imagined all that? Great. Well, it turns out that you don’t need to imagine anything. Tha

Time Out Chicago • 27th October 2016

Octagon

When these seven slam poets battle it out, Chicago audiences are the real winners. For some time now, the vaunted “we say it to their faces” Chicago style of theatre has really been shorthand for “middle-aged white people yelling at each other.” And while that might have seemed pretty radical 30 years ago, in 2016 the “Chicago style” either has to evolve, or it has to die. Here’s the good news: That evolution is well under way. If you want proof, just head up to the Broadway Armory and sit you

Time Out Chicago • 21st May 2018

Refrigerator

Lucas Baisch’s prickly technodystopia is like Philip K. Dick, emphasis on the dick. It’s the future, and 82 percent of the world’s population has uploaded its minds into a digital paradise. One of the companies that performs this procedure is IceBox, whose employees live and work in a state of semi-chaos, earning “points” that can be used in an employee lottery to gain ascension themselves. Welcome to playwright Lucas Baisch’s Refrigerator, a piercingly surreal—and surprisingly thirsty—trip dow

Time Out Chicago • 12th December 2017

Wicked

An undeniably “Popular” Broadway hit, Stephen Schwartz and Winnie Holzman’s Oz prequel returns to the Oriental Theatre. Have you heard of this musical called Wicked? It’s very good. I’ve been reviewing plays semi-professionally (meaning I get paid to do it, I just don’t get paid that much) for going on six years now, so it might come as a surprise that I’d never seen Wicked, one of the most popular musicals of the new millennium, until now. I was familiar with the show’s premise, and I could h

Newcity Stage • 26th August 2014

Review: Stupid Fucking Bird/Sideshow Theatre

In a way Chekhov is a lot like Nirvana, in that it’s really easy to forget how great he was when you’ve been inundated with a century of increasingly pale imitations. If Chekhov’s “The Seagull” were considered his “Nevermind,” then Donald Margulies’ “Dinner With Friends” would be Creed’s “HumanClay.” Yet in “The Seagull,” Chekhov’s tragic/comic/foolish/wise/heroic/cowardly (alright, alright Chekhovian) protagonist Konstantin fantasizes about new forms of theater, ones that will shake off the dus

OppLoans • 14th June 2018

Yes, You Might Need a Credit Check to Rent a Car

If you have a bad credit score, there are tons of ways that you’ll feel its effects in your everyday life. It will mean higher interest rates on your loans and credit cards, which cuts into your monthly budget. It might also mean paying more for utilities or at least needing to put down a deposit in order to secure them. It can even mean getting turned down for an apartment or a new job. In short, having bad credit sucks. Luckily, there are things that you can do to help your score improve, lik

Time Out Chicago • 18th October 2017

Two Mile Hollow

Playwright Leah Nanako Winkler tweaks the privileged-Caucasian-family-secrets genre in this biting satire. The opening image of Leah Nanako Winkler’s Two Mile Hollow is a sad white woman sitting on her porch swing, sadly clutching a pillow with an air of, oh what’s the word, let’s just go with “sadness.” Now, if you’re the kind of person who reads that sentence and promptly throws your phone across the room then hold on a second, because, surprisingly, Two Mile Hollow is exactly the show for yo