I came to the University of Chicago on the morning of January 2, 1932. I wasn’t yet a graduate of high school for another few months. And that was about the low point of the Herbert Hoover/Andrew Mellon phase after October of 1929. That’s quite a number of years to have inaction.
Chicago is my hometown and will always have a special place in my heart.
I was a Chicago theater actress until my early 30s, so I got to do a lot of meaty stuff in theater.
That’s great advertising when you can turn Chicago into a city you’d want to spend more than three hours in.
As a young queer kid growing up, I explored my identity through the Chicago and Washington, D.C., club scene.
I love Korean food, and it’s kind of like home to me. The area that I grew up in outside Chicago, Glenview, is heavily Korean. A lot of my friends growing up were Korean and when I would eat dinner at their houses, their parents wouldn’t tell me the names of the dishes because I would butcher the language.
I grew up in Cleveland and started doing plays in high school. And I went to the University of Illinois, and I majored in drama. And after school, I went up to Chicago, because I didn’t really know anybody in New York or Los Angeles, and I knew people who were doing plays in Chicago.
Loving Chicago is like loving a woman with a broken nose.
When you think Tink, you should just think of me as that around-the-way girl – relatable and honest. Even in my lifestyle, my entire aura is real. I don’t sugarcoat anything, whether I’m on stage or home in Chicago or just behind the scenes just chilling. I’m the same person you see on stage, always.
My competition keeps me driven. My family and son and being home in Chicago keeps me humble, and my fans. They’re the reason why I’m going hard and making sure everyone knows how to say my name.
I feel like I have gotten to know Chicago pretty well, and every time I come here I have a really good response.
I remember, when we started ‘Leverage,’ we were all in Chicago, and I read the script for the pilot and thought, ‘Boy, this is just a real interesting place to begin a character.’ I had to figure out how to go about playing someone who had hit rock bottom.
As a citizen of the great city of Chicago, I find it impossible to root against the White Sox. The White Sox organization has been much more consistent, in my lifetime at least, at putting a winning ballclub on the field.
I believe the way I describe the problems in Chicago is that it’s a metropolitan area. I’ve said that everywhere. The uneducated child is not just my problem, it’s the state’s problem. It’s also the federal government’s problem.
If the national economy improves, Chicago will improve.
I think there are four or five interesting pockets where a lot of cool technology companies are getting started. Chicago is one of them. New York is certainly another. Silicon Valley really dominates. And you’re seeing some stuff out of Boston and Seattle and down South.
‘Will Grayson, Will Grayson’ is about two guys named Will Grayson who live in different Chicago suburbs who eventually meet each other.
I’m from Chicago and it’s a huge influence on me.
I am sad to leave so many friends at Manchester United. But I am grateful to the club for allowing me the chance to take up the challenge at Chicago Fire.
I think that unless you grew up in New York or Chicago or Los Angeles, you’re sheltered.
I was 16. In the middle of the night, I took a taxi to the Detroit train station – or maybe it was the Pontiac train station? – and got on a train to Chicago, then transferred to a train to San Diego where my boyfriend was living at the time.
Pinchas Perry, the director of ‘The Chicago 8,’ offered me the role of the judge, and he did not know that, 35 years earlier, I’d played a judge in the theater production. So life has its own little twists and turns.
I really don’t know the Chicago School. You see, I never walk. I always take taxis back and forth to work. I rarely see the city.
I could have easily been too afraid to say ‘yes’ to Chicago, because it requires so much I haven’t done before. If I am a flop at singing and dancing, maybe my love for it will carry me through.
L.A. can be pretty insane because there’s so much show business here, but I also know a lot of kids who grew up in Manhattan who are some of the most normal, nicest people I know. Casting directors always say Chicago people are just nicer.
My parents didn’t really understand too much about sport. At that time, we were in a Polish community in the inner city of Chicago, and I was the youngest of a bunch of cousins. Polish families are real big, with cousins and aunts and uncles.
I was a bouncer when I was in DePaul in Chicago at the theater school. I threw drunks out of bars – unless I had a play running that weekend. But I only had two actual fights. Some were like out of old Westerns.
I am in the Chicago Carpenters Union. They are huge supporters of mine and of MMA.
It’s not a question that people have a very negative image of Chicago. They just don’t think about it.
Every year, my family and I would go visit my mom’s family in Texas. We would drive from Chicago to Texas, and once we started to get towards San Antonio, everyone looked like me! It was such a great feeling. Everyone had the same brown skin that I did.
I work for the Chicago Cubs, a team with a following so loyal and adoring and a history so forlorn that we were known nationwide as the Loveable Losers.
My first paying gig was a play called ‘The Voice of the Prairie’ at a theater that no longer exists in Chicago called Wisdom Bridge. I played a fast-talking radio huckster – a salesman of crystal sets in the 1920s – and I actually won an award. Look at that! And then promptly didn’t get hired for a year.
Before ‘This is Our Youth’, I did a week of table reading ‘Airline Highway’ at Steppenwolf in Chicago while the author, Lisa D’Amour, workshopped it.
I came into Chicago in winter – I’d never been so cold in my life! I was very homesick, and a poor student at that time. America seemed so different and so filled with amazing things – and almost all of them were out of my reach.
I was researching a different World War II story when I came across an article in the ‘Chicago Tribune’ from June 1945 that knocked me for a loop. The article explained that a military plane had crashed in an impossibly remote valley of New Guinea that had been nicknamed Shangri-La.
If I have one special memory, it was when we recreated the trial of the Chicago Seven – and I’d known about it before – but this was a pivotal moment in my life. If my father had been found guilty of conspiracy, I wouldn’t be here.
Chicago is an October sort of city even in spring.
I grew up in Chicago, so hip-hop has always been a part of my life.
It was impossible for me to believe that conditions in Europe could be worse than they were in the Polish section of Chicago, and in many Italian and Irish tenements, or that any workshops could be worse than some of those I had seen in our foreign quarters.
I’ve been an ‘Office’ fan from day one. I knew Steve Carell in Chicago back in the day, so I started watching to support a Chicago guy and immediately got hooked on that show.
A friend told me about the casting notice for ‘Queer Eye.’ I was in Chicago and I had a contract with ‘Esquire’ magazine, so had been coming to New York City regularly and thought I’d catch a cheap flight, crash on a friend’s sofa and do this hilarious audition that I had no chance of winning.
Singing is more of a hobby than really something I want to do for a career. But I love musical theater, so I’m hoping I can go back to it and do a role on Broadway for a few weeks. That would be a dream come true. My dream role would be Roxie in ‘Chicago.’
Tonight – by taking this solemn oath – I am no longer a private citizen but the Mayor of the City of Chicago.
Be assured that I did not become the Mayor of Chicago to preside over its decline.
My company, Cinema Gypsy, produced a podcast, ‘Bronzeville,’ in conjunction with Larenz Tate and his brothers that we’re developing into a television show. It deals with a very tight-knit African-American community in Chicago in 1947 and people who run a numbers wheel.
And then when I went to Chicago, that’s when I had these outer space experiences and went to the other planets.
I think of Chicago as a great entrepreneur city, a city that supports its own, that isn’t as jaded as New York and L.A.
I just wanted to see every single musical I could. The very first one I saw was ‘Beauty and the Beast,’ the only one I could get tickets for, and then ‘Les Miserables’ and then ‘Chicago.’
There are many wonderful orchestras in the world, but very few who have a character or personality of their own. The Chicago Symphony Orchestra is one of them, and I think it very important to recognize and respect that character.
When I was a kid, I attended a small Catholic school in a south suburb of Chicago.
I grew up in Batavia, Ill., a small town out in the corn fields, west of Chicago. It was boring.
My first day in Chicago, September 4, 1983. I set foot in this city, and just walking down the street, it was like roots, like the motherland. I knew I belonged here.
Being Irish was a big thing for me, particularly growing up in Chicago.
