Chicago`s bon vivants and party press were out in full force at a recent Marshall Field`s department store bash that featured poets, cookies, photographers, fashion designers and Vanity Fair magazine editor Tina Brown.
The party was a combination Vanity Fair art retrospective and cookie launch. Field`s is the exclusive distributor of Divine Cookies–chocolate-dipped fortune cookies that feature pithy words by Chicago poets and writers. The more than 300 fortunes were compiled by Chicago Business Volunteers for the Arts, which gets 5 percent of all the cookies sales.
The cookies were by far the ”safest” party food, which included all sorts of strange concoctions offered on trays by waiters moving among the crowded room on the State Street store`s third floor.
The party was considered a hot one–300 people got in–and, depending on whom you talked with, there were 100, 200 or even 300 more on the ”waiting list.”
Among the notables there were photographer Annie Leibovitz and London fashion designer Zandra Rhodes, who added considerable color to the party with her hot-pink hair. Rhodes was in town for a few days to meet with Chicago customers who she said were among her ”best because they have a real appreciation for art.”
However, perhaps the best entertainment was provided by the poets who were gathered around the cookie basket like children, hoping to come across their own fortunes.
SCHOOL TURNS TINSEL TOWN
SOURCE: Margaret Carroll.
Lights. Camera. Action. Dinner. Dancing.
Roll `em: Oak Park`s Julian Junior High School`s benefit planners are
”going Hollywood.”
Because Columbia Pictures has selected Julian as a shooting site for a film early in March, the school`s Parent-Teacher Organization will use a moviemaking theme for its Saturday buffet dinner and dance party in the vacant Marshall Field`s building in the Oak Park Mall.
It`s appropriate. The party will raise funds for the school`s cultural arts program, which is entirely underwritten–at a cost of $20,000 or more annually–by the P-TO.
Directing the arts program is Jill Slaten-Poehlman, an acting coach on leave from Actor`s Studio in New York. Activities have included a dinner-theater production, with home arts students preparing the food and producing the play; a debate; and a newspaper.
Actor Judge Reinhold and others in the cast of the film (tentatively titled ”Vice Versa”) are expected to attend the $50-a-person fundraiser. For more information, call 524-8625. It should be a star-spangled evening for actors and suburbanites.
A FAIRY TALE COMES TO LIFE
SOURCE: Margaret Carroll.
American Ballet Theatre`s ”Sleeping Beauty” benefit premiere in the Auditorium Theatre carried a doubly happy ending. Not only did Princess Aurora and Prince Desire join hands in marriage, but after the curtain fell ballet guests sipped Moet & Chandon and mingled on the theater`s mezzanine with members of the company.
The center of attention as they arrived were Susan Jaffe, the ballet`s Princess Aurora, and Leslie Browne, who played the Lilac Fairy, softener of the villainous fairy`s curse of death to a 100-year nap. Jaffe was accompanied by her husband, Paul Connelly, a conductor, and her father, Daniel Jaffe, an aerospace engineer who came in from his home in Bethesda, Md.
”I`m glad it`s over,” said the evening`s prima ballerina. ”I think everything went smoothly for an opening night. There didn`t seem to be any major disasters backstage.” (Nobody`s counting a few little special-effects items that seemed slightly off cue and a hanging lamp in the wedding scene that suffered so from stage fright that it refused to go on.)
Mikhail Baryshnikov, ABT`s artistic director, viewed the premiere from a main floor seat, ducking in and out at intermissions. He didn`t attend the post-performance party, so he missed seeing British designer Zandra Rhodes, resplendent in a bright red Mongolian lamb coat. The hot-pink-haired Rhodes, in Chicago for a Marshall Field`s promotion, complimented set and costume designer Nicholas Georgiadis, who did attend the party: ”I love the colors. But I wish the costume of Carabosse (the wicked fairy) were shorter so that we could have seen him do a twirl or two.” (Victor Barbee`s Carabosse gown was black, voluminous and Elizabethan.)
The gala ABT fundraiser began with dinner (underwritten by the Movado Watch Corp.) on the mezzanine, the tables adorned with silver candelabra and orchids, the inspiration of Geraldine Freund. The benefit committee, with Eleanor Wood Prince as honorary chairman, Alison de Frise as chairman and Martha Hunt as vice-chairman, gathered more than 300 guests for stuffed medallions of capon. Those throwing caution and ballerina-figure aspirations to the winds partook of chocolate, hot brie and pastries at the midnight soiree.
STARS JAZZ IT UP FOR DU SABLE
SOURCE: Marla Donato.
What an all-star lineup! Joe Williams, Nancy Wilson, Ramsey Lewis and the Jazz Members Big Band. It was a real jazz lovers delight night.
The event at Orchestra Hall also happened to be a benefit for the Du Sable Museum of African American History.
Between acts, State Sen. Howard Brookins presented Du Sable founder and director emeritus Dr. Margaret Burroughs with a $500,000 check from the State of Illinois to begin construction on Burroughs` ”dream–a new $5 million wing for the museum.”
Burroughs gladly accepted the money and vowed to ”go back for more” and turned the check over to Du Sable`s board chairman, Erwin France.
But she wasn`t the only one making vows.
Mayor Washington led off the event with a speech in which he proclaimed himself the ”now and future” mayor of the City of Chicago.
The well-heeled crowd, clad in plenty of tuxes, furs, gowns and glitter, responded with a loud cheer and, once the music began, started clapping in time to some songs.
Nancy Wilson also declared herself to be having ”an incredible time”
onstage and said, ”I can`t believe what I`m seeing,” as she pointed to the very young and very female acoustic bass player in the Jazz Members Big Band. Afterwards Wilson and Williams mingled with the crowd, or as much of it as was possible in the shoulder-to-shoulder reception room. Both said they had donated their time and performances–flying in for one night only–to appear at the benefit.
SARGENT PARTY A WORK OF ART
SOURCE: Margaret Carroll.
John Singer Sargent would have been in his element the other night at the Art Institute Auxiliary Board`s dinner-dance honoring the museum`s exhibition of his art.
The crowd of 450 men in tuxedos and women in ball gowns moved attentively through the exhibition of Sargent`s portraits of late 19th- and early 20th-Century elegant folk, as well as his watercolors and drawings, before heading in to dine in two of the newly remodeled European Painting Galleries.
The party was a preview of the Sargent exhibition, open to the public through April 19, and of the European galleries, which will reopen to the public in May.
”I understand people danced (to the music of Bob Hardwick`s Orchestra)
until 2:30 a.m.,” said Christina Gidwitz after the fundraiser for various museum projects. Gidwitz, among the Auxiliary Board committee members who planned the dinner setting amid topiary trees, white roses and tulips and gold and black table coverings, had departed a little earlier. After hours of pre- party arranging, she couldn`t have danced all night.
