Brian Hieggelke

Saturday night before Halloween, 8:30pm: A young woman waits alone at the southbound bus stop at Clark and Armitage, dressed up--perhaps for church, a wedding reception or a date--in a long coat, with fishnet stockings and patent-leather pumps. Two other women soon join the wait: a blonde Strawberry Shortcake and a brunette wearing a brick-patterned dress with protruding box "windows" strategically placed over her breasts and pelvic region. Her pelvic box shelters a stuffed cat, a frisky joke. Brickhouse is worried, though, that such subtleties might be lost on tonight's crowd, the Pimps `N Hos party at Transit nightclub. "Maybe I should go home and change," she worries. A quick bus-stop survey confirms her assessment: more cleavage is in order. She scoots away to make a quick switch to her backup: "Sweet Surprise," a pink and white ensemble, as she describes it, with a glittery tube top and a layered-cake skirt designed to look like, well, a girl jumping out of a cake. Shortcake watches her friend disappear across the street and turns her attention to the other girl, asking, "What's your costume?" Sheepishly, and clearly not church-bound, she responds by unbuttoning her coat to reveal a revealing "sexy stewardess" getup--"I bought it online"--with a cutaway in front, and a hemline that soars above a regulation-issue United Airlines number. "I'm really worried that the skirt is too short," she frets, noting that her friends all bought the same costume. Shortcake, bound for Pimps `N Hos, reassures her, but has her own costume concern--that she's not whorish enough. Apparently she's traveling in promoter Brad Altman's entourage. "If anyone questions me, I'm going to use the story that I came straight from an audition."

(2005-11-01)

Also by Brian Hieggelke

Fan fare for the Common Man
Compared to the guy with his face neatly painted--half black, half white--at Shinnick's or the woman with the creepy ventriloquist's dummy taking up a precious seat at Schaller's Pump, the World Series crowd at First Base at 32nd and Normal is fairly nondescript by tonight's standards
(2005-10-25)

Ticket-Miser
Time that tickets went on sale for single-game World Series tickets on Tuesday: Noon
(2005-10-18)

Car Free
Walking is another windfall of my car-free life; beyond the health benefits, it offers a tactile relationship with the city, a sense of place grounded in its details, its people, its millions of small patterns of daily existence adding up to a dynamic urban mosaic
(2005-07-21)

Tip of the Week
Ever since I got mesmerized by an Eddie Halliwell Mixmag covermount CD, I've cleared my decks to catch his Chicago appearances
(2005-05-10)

Tip of the Week
(2005-04-12)

Osteria via Stato
(2005-03-01)

Made in China
(2005-01-25)

Tip of the Week
(2005-01-11)

Tip of the Week
(2005-01-11)

Tip of the Week
(2005-01-04)

Tip of the Week
(2005-01-03)

Tip of the Week
(2004-12-07)

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