Andy Seifert

"Vanna's a babe," says a male reporter as the 51-year-old Vanna White teasingly walks past a room full of photographers and print journalists, as the long-running "Wheel of Fortune" is filming as Navy Pier. When Vanna enters and flashes her flawless white teeth—a perfect contrast to her tan and barely wrinkled face—the press assails the bubbly co-host with a flurry of hard-hitters: "What's your favorite letter?" (Answer: "I don't know!"); "What's your favorite puzzle?" (Answer: "I don't know!"); "How fast has the time gone?" (Answer: "SO fast."). With cameras clicking furiously away, the undeniably skinny, twenty-five-year veteran of flipping letters says, "You know I think with 'Wheel,’ I hope I'm a good role model to kids out there. I just try to be myself and I hope that people can see that and live the same way."

Pat Sajak breezes in next, a total professional who instantly pokes fun at the gallery by saying, "I'm all here to answer your probing and insightful questions." He sounds eternally grateful and simultaneously stupefied at "Wheel"’s success. "It's a very fluky business," he says. "I don't exactly know what happened. We're playing hangman is all we're doing and spinning a giant wheel and calling letters."

An hour later, the duo struts out in front of a capacity crowd, mostly consisting of what is ostensibly "Wheel of Fortune"'s key demographic—women over 65. "Welcome to the town that global warming forgot," Sajak quips.

(2008-03-25)

Also by Andy Seifert

Head Games
David Head, Jr. doesn't really know what's in all the boxes in this warehouse ("frames, maybe?"), nor has he ever seen the filmmakers who supposedly occupy the office on the third floor. Nestled near the top of this dark, damp warehouse is Screwball Press, a technical hub for Chicago's struggling freelance graphic artists, where their designs within a computerized world transpose to real ink and paper
(2008-03-18)

Rocking for Stacy
"I'd like to dedicate this to Stacy," says local guitarist Eric Mantel, before his first song, a nine-minute prog-rock jam that allows two camera crews to storm the stage. This is hour one of eight of this Stacy Peterson benefit concert, a fundraiser dedicated to raising money to pay for continued search efforts of the Bolingbrook mother who's been missing since October
(2008-03-11)

Punking Lincoln Square
"Lincoln Square Idol," a battle of the bands featuring sixteen mostly amateur bands, each adhering to slightly different genres of pop/rock.
(2008-03-05)

Trained in the Arts
For most Chicagoans, the El's dirty steel trains are just a screeching, annoying necessity of life; for an artist, it's another canvas. Some choose to draw graffiti, others like to spray fake blood all over them and write "Real Patriots take Public Transit" and "Storm the Castle!" in the windows—just like the one currently hanging inside A.Okay Official's modest gallery. Unfortunately, this conceptual train isn't life-sized (yet), but in model-sized, two-foot long form and hanging alongside thirty-five other train art creations, at least twelve of which are more peculiar and eyebrow-raising than this bloody, castle-storming artifact
(2008-02-19)

Painful Reality
(2008-02-12)

The Gates of Hell
(2008-02-06)

Bono Appetit
(2008-01-29)

As Fast As You Can
(2008-01-22)

Smoked Out
(2007-12-26)

It's All in the Surname
(2007-12-04)

Bear Barren
(2007-11-27)

Rebel Cacophony
(2007-11-19)

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