Hot Times at Old Town

Appearing below are selections from the hard copy Hot Times. The objective is to highlight activities at the School and in the larger community, especially those featuring or of special interest to teachers and staff. Your suggestions are welcome. Enter a comment (under any item); it will come to me rather than automatically appearing.

A Walk through the Blues

Have you heard about the city’s downloadable tours? The Explore Chicago folks have set up a new service providing adventures sitting at home or via mp3 when you’re out and about. The first of these is a Chicago Blues tour, narrated by blues legend Buddy Guy. This jiffy summary includes tasty samples of the music, visuals, and even maps. The files download amazingly fast from their site, and, of course, are free: www.downloadchicagotours.com (Sign of the times: language options include Mandarin Chinese - hen hao!)

Worth a visit is Buddy Guy’s club at 754 South Wabash. One of our own bluesmen, Eric Noden, will be playing there Friday, September 28th.

Filed under: Interesting elsewhere by Skip | September 24, 2007 | Comments (0)

Diandra Jones in Ghana

As a trained competitive Irish step dancer, turned pro, turned Old Town School teacher, I never expected at any point in my career that I would end up dancing on a latrine door – although remarkably true to tradition – in Africa. But there I was, in the middle of a remote dusty village, under an African sun, surrounded by an audience almost as unsuspecting as I was, hammering away on a nail-studded dismantled slab of wood, all in the name of AIDS. As unlikely as it seemed to be, my Irish dance skills helped to educate marginalized villagers of Ghana, West Africa, on the very likely threat of an oncoming HIV/AIDS epidemic. And though I couldn’t have predicted at the age of four, at my first Irish Dance class, that my dance shoes would have ever meant more to me than the sacrifice of a Saturday afternoon for practice, or a few fleeting blisters, I’m happy to see where they eventually took me…

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Filed under: Teacher stories by Skip | September 21, 2007 | Comments (3)