Jenniffer Weigel Looks for Her Dad in "Stay Tuned"

By Victoria Scott

She made a YouTube video for her upcoming 20th Evanston Township High School reunion, lives on the north Evanston street where she grew up - and was by chance assigned her childhood phone number.

But while she chose to root in familiar ground, Jenniffer Weigel has traveled afar in pursuit of her passion and inner peace. Along the way she pondered life and death, found a new career path, had a baby - and forged a relationship with her father from beyond his grave.

Ms. Weigel's spiritual quest, accompanied by frustrated attempts to talk with her father, is the subject of her recently published book, "Stay Tuned: Conversations With Dad From the Other Side."

A radio and television broadcaster with a lifelong curiosity about the afterlife, Ms. Weigel began collecting stories about psychics a dozen years ago, interviewing some of the most famous author/mediums of our era.

Observing their skills, her initial skepticism faded - but not at the expense of her sense of humor. "I remember ... wondering what a man who sees dead people would want for a snack. 'I wonder if he likes donuts,'" she writes. And, "I wanted to climb the mountain of enlightenment, but I didn't want to take off my heels or ditch my martini to do it."

No publishers bought her idea for a book - a humorous take on the interviews she called a "'Cliffs Notes' of spirituality literature." The interviews languished in her computer until a savvy agent suggested she personalize the material, intertwining it with her own struggle to find a fulfilling career and sense of validation by her father.

From a skinny, chain-smoking psychic in a Rockford farmhouse to a huffing, puffing energy reader in a Chicago café, Ms. Weigel found guides along her path.

The lessons they taught her are the ones she says she hopes readers take from the book: Take care of yourself first; follow your gut; and remember, "There's more out there than we know - we don't die, we just go to another channel."

Ms. Weigel first saw a different side of her famous father, sportscaster Tim Weigel, when he surprised her by agreeing to consult a psychic. The intermediary succeeded, Ms. Weigel says, in contacting Mr. Weigel's late mother, and the father Jenniffer knew as competitive and stoic asked just one question: "Is she proud of me?"

That desire to "make your parents proud" is at the heart of her story.

Because she felt left behind in her father's pursuit of professional glory, Ms. Weigel had different intentions. In her family, "you were someone based on your resumé," she says. "I wanted to find a way to fill the void, to be okay with just being, rather than doing."

For years the journalist's daughter was locked into broadcasting jobs that looked glamorous but felt empty. She longed "to tell stories that made a difference," she says, and remembers always thinking, "There has to be more than this."

A wise author helped her realize she had given up her dream of acting to prove to her dad she could succeed as a reporter. "I wound up disappointing myself," she writes.

Still, she followed her dad's advice and stuck with a job she hated. Then her father was diagnosed with a malignant brain tumor - the same disease that had killed his Yale roommate, Gene Siskel, several years earlier. Through his illness Ms. Weigel saw her father lose his faculties but not his spirit. Before his death, on Father's Day, June 17, 2001, he told her, "You have so many gifts. You can pick any of them, and you'll be fine."

In mourning, she took steps to change her life. She walked away from a steady paycheck, opening herself to myriad possibilities that were slow to materialize.

She intended to film a documentary - and contact her father - in an isolated town where mediums gathered. But the footage was unusable. "...The majority of it showed me crying into the camera about the fact that my dad was nowhere to be found," she says. Perhaps, said a counselor, she was not listening.

The birth of her son made her feel "the most complete I have ever felt in my life," she says. With new focus, she committed to the book, finishing seven chapters in just two and a half months after her husband advised her to check into Hotel Orrington to write uninterrupted. He and their baby son met her for meals at the Flat Top Grill.

The path to enlightenment brought her home. "We don't need to sit on a mountain to connect with messages from the other side," she says. "I have changed. I take a breath and try to be there, to experience things."

Pursuing her passion, she will appear at the Viaduct Theatre Aug. 15-Sept. 14 in a one-woman show based on "Stay Tuned." A new book applying spiritual principles to cooking is in the works, as is www.staytunedwithjen.com, a forum for news stories of "things going right."

Above all, she says, "I want my son to read the book and know how much I love him. I want to be present for him."

Stories about Young Evanston (PDF) > >

Cultural Fund Grant Recipients Announced

Fifteen Cultural Fund grants totaling $36,000 have been awarded by the City of Evanston's Cultural Arts Division and the Evanston Arts Council. The grants are designed to encourage and support arts projects that serve Evanston residents.

The 15 recipients include not-for-profit arts organizations and individual artists.
Amos Aaron Gillespie
Art Encounter
Block Museum
Evanston Art Center
Evanston Dance Ensemble
Evanston In-School Music Association
Evanston Symphony Orchestra
Kathy Berger
Light Opera Works
Literature for All of Us
Margaret Lewis
Music Institute of Chicago
Musical Offering
Next Theatre
Shanti Foundation for Peace

Introducing the Cottonwood Tree

Around Memorial Day, the fluffy white "cotton" of the female cottonwood tree begins wafting toward my friend Carol's boat, gluing itself to the newly varnished trim. The tree gets its common name from this cotton.

The ubiquitous cotton may mislead hay-fever sufferers in June into thinking it must be the obvious cause of their discomfort.
The true culprit, however, is the pollen from grasses and other plants that disperses at the same time. The female cottonwood is messy but innocent.

Cottonwoods are dioecious, meaning their flowers grow on separate male and female trees. Their tiny flowers hang from branches in long, thin clusters called catkins. In very early spring, usually March, the colorful red male catkins produce pollen, which floats on the wind and lands on the stigmas of the female catkins on the female tree. Cottonwood pollen is known to be highly allergenic, but like most pollen, it is invisible to the naked eye.

The fertilized female parts develop into light brown seeds enclosed within egg-shaped capsules. Each capsule may contain 30 to 60 seeds. When the capsules open, the seeds, with their numerous white, hair-like structures, are dispersed by the wind or water, eventually to land and germinate on a stream bank or beach, or, alas, to create "snowdrifts" in air conditioners, screens and other human contrivances.

The ubiquitous cotton may mislead hay-fever sufferers in June into thinking it must be the obvious cause of their discomfort. The true culprit, however, is the pollen from grasses and other plants that disperses at the same time. The female cottonwood is messy but innocent.

Eastern cottonwood, Populus deltoitis, is in the willow (Salicaceae) family and is native from Quebec west to North Dakota and southern Manitoba, south to central Texas, and east to northwestern Florida. In the plains, it intermingles with the plains cottonwood, Populus occidentalis, meaning "of the west."

According to some sources, their genus name, Populus, derives from "arbor populi," the Latin for "people's tree," because poplars were widely planted in Rome. "Deltoides" means triangular and describes the leaf, which resembles the Greek letter delta. There are numerous cottonwood species throughout the northern hemisphere.

Cottonwood leaves are toothed, with a broad, straight base and a distinctive pointed tip. They average 3 inches across and 4 inches long. Bright, glossy green all summer, they turn yellow in fall. Being poplar leaves, they grow on long stalks and are attached in a manner that allows them to spin in the slightest breeze.

A National Parks and Conservation journal article from spring 2007 states that some Western Native American tribes believed the gods whispered to them through the "rustle of the wind through the quaking leaves." Donald Culross Peattie, poetic nature writer and author of "A Natural History of Trees," wrote that "even on the hottest, driest day [they] reminded you, by the sound of their rustling leaves, of lake waters coolly lapping."

Cottonwood is a pioneer tree, being the first to move in on bare land such as new dunes and laying the groundwork for a succession of trees and shrubs. At the Indiana lakeshore, cottonwoods grow out of the dunes, their lower branches having been smothered in sand. To survive, the tree develops "adventitious" roots higher up on its trunk, at the same time helping to stabilize the dunes. To look at most dunes cottonwoods is to see, so to speak, the tip of the iceberg.

The average visible height of cottonwoods is 75-100 feet. They make their growth spurt in the first 40 years and typically live to be around 125. They are often double-trunked, and trunks average 12 feet in circumference. As they age, their bark becomes thick and furrowed. They begin producing seed around age five.

Cottonwoods love water. Settlers traveling west found that the necessities of timber, water and shade were scarce on the plains. Beacons to these resources were the nearest row of large trees, invariably cottonwoods, growing along a low-lying watercourse. Because of high water content and fast growth, cottonwood timber tends to be weak and brittle and to warp when dried. In the absence of alternatives, however, it became the tree of many uses, including fence posts, wind breaks, shade, houses, ox yokes, wagon wheels and coffins. Lewis and Clark and the Corps of Discovery used the plains cottonwood for their North Dakota winter shelters and turned six sizeable trunks into six canoes. Early French trappers shipped beaver pelts in cottonwood dugouts.

Remember the Golden Spike, the symbol that concluded the race to finish the Transcontinental Railroad? The spike was gold, but in the Great Plains, the Union Pacific's crossties were primarily made from the only available lumber, cottonwood.

The wood was so wet it could only last two or three years, and a process that replaced the water with zinc oxide was expensive and did not work. The motto, according to Stephen Ambrose, was "Nail it down! Get the thing built! We can fix it up later." Shortly after the railroad's completion 300,000 cottonwood ties had to be replaced.

Male cottonwood clones have been planted to stabilize the banks along streams and ditches, to improve water quality and to reduce flooding. Because they are fast-growing, in the future they may be grown for biomass to produce energy.

They may also make suitable cattle feed because of their high protein and mineral content. As a precedent, Native Americans fed the bark to their horses when other food was covered by snow. Finally, research has shown that cottonwoods are vitally important feeding, resting and nesting corridors for neotropical (new world) migrating birds.

A "Big Tree" of exceptional girth, also known as "The Potawatomi Tree," once grew at the intersection of Glenview Road and Edens Expressway. It has been gone now for over a century. While it was alive, local tales grew up, some almost as tall as the tree. In "A Natural History of the Chicago Region," Joel Greenberg writes that it was said to be "130 feet tall with a circumference of 41 feet," and was judged to be at least 500 years old. Its enormous hollow trunk might have sheltered 30 people simultaneously. Thieves hid their loot inside. It was once home to a black bear and two cubs. Probably only the age is exaggerated, for in photographs this tree is truly impressive.

A stately eastern cottonwood grows at the northeast corner of Lincoln Street and Sherman Avenue. In 2007 its circumference measured 15 feet. It is currently 222 years old and is still going strong.

ETHS Students Sell Reusable Water Bottles

Three members of the ETHS Environmental Club, Anastasia Hildner, Colette Kinsella, and Chloe Fitzpatrick, are selling reusable water bottles as part of an effort to cut down on the use of throw-away plastic water bottles. Ms. Hildner, shown in the accompanying picture with one of the bottles sporting the ETHS Wildkit paw-print, told the RoundTable that they received a grant from the Evanston Community Foundation to buy 140 reusable bottles, which they are selling for $5 each. They plan to reinvest the proceeds to purchase additional bottles for sale.

A flyer distributed with each bottle says 2.7 million tons of plastic are used each year to produce throw-away water bottles, and that in the United States, less than 20 percent are recycled. The amount of energy it takes to make, transport and dispose of four throw-away water bottles is equivalent to about one bottle of oil.

For information on how to purchase a reusable water bottle, e-mail anastasiax3@yahoo.com.

4th of July Parade - Viewing Reminders

The City reminds residents as they are planning festivities for the 4th of July to keep in mind the ordinance regulating parkway use on Central Street for the 4th of July Parade.

The parade will begin at 2 p.m. on July 4. In order to reserve a spot to view the event, community members can set up chairs and blankets only on the parkways of Central Street from the west side of Bent Park to Asbury Avenue no earlier than 6 a.m. on July 1.

BOOK REVIEW

'Peace'

A Book Review By Sue Brooke

"Peace," by Richard Bausch, may be the novel that at long last brings this author to national attention. Beautifully written, sparely and with much depth, each sentence delivers a strong story.

The book opens as the Americans are starting to rout the Germans from Italy during the closing days of World War II. They are tired and battle-worn, yet their assignment is to move on. There has been freezing rain for four days and the terrain is mountainous. Mr. Bausch's words evoke the cold and the terror of these soldiers as they continue their nighttime mission.

The Germans are thought to be retreating, but snipers are still taking their toll on the American lines. Out on patrol, one group encounters a couple of gypsies carting hay. But when the cart is overturned, a German officer and an Italian prostitute are exposed. The German kills two Americans, and in turn is shot by the American Corporal Marson. The woman begins to scream, and the sergeant calmly shoots her just to shut her up. Then the patrol is ordered out on reconnaissance.

The small patrol - three Americans and an Italian guide - are tired and do not like each other much. This incident with the German officer and his whore adds to their pain. Joyner, a Catholic boy from Michigan, just wants to forget all about it. He concludes that she was with the Nazis and got what she deserved. Asch, a Jewish kid from Boston, wants to make a report on the Sergeant.
The two soldiers bicker as they trudge up the mountain in the freezing night. Corporal Marson, a slightly older man from Washington, D.C., just wants them to be quiet so he can listen for snipers. And it is unclear whether their Italian guide is leading them into a trap or taking them to the ridge so they can observe the German retreat.

This spare novel is best read in one sitting. The plot is compelling and could be about any war. As the author writes, "Between 1600 and 1865, you know how many years of collective peace there were? - Eleven. Eleven little years."

All any of them wants is peace.

FILM REVIEW

'The Strangers'

A Film Review By Brian Murphy

Newbie writer/director Bryan Bertino's "The Strangers" can be viewed as a one-trick pony or as a minimalist experiment in horror, alluding to the likes of Alfred Hitchcock and early John Carpenter. The film is both, a fact which simultaneously adds and subtracts from its overall effectiveness. Above all, Mr. Bertino's film is a tense and frightening product, though it sputters as it splatters toward the end.

Stripping the horror genre down to the bone, Mr. Bertino places a faltering couple (Scott Speedman and Liv Tyler) in a rural farmhouse, late at night, disables their phones and car, adds three masked murderers, and mines as much suspense as possible before the formula begins to lose steam.

The film suffers a near-fatal, self-inflicted wound at the outset, by repeating the clichéd claim of too many other horror films: that it was "inspired by true events."

Despite a dubious beginning, "The Strangers" is a genuinely scary film. Rather than substitute gore for content, as do most horror films today, there is plenty to scream at here.

Mr. Bertino's script is taut and refreshingly absent of standard plot contrivances. He traps us in an old farmhouse and, except for a brief flashback near the film's beginning, keeps us there for the duration.

Horror movie vet Mr. Speedman (the "Underworld" series) and experienced actress Ms. Tyler ("Armageddon" and 90s Aerosmith videos) are game, ratcheting each point of tension into moments that are frightening and real.

The story takes us back to what brought us to the countryside - a failed proposal at a friend's wedding has left the couple in limbo. A night of would-be romance has left these two at odds, and things are about to get much worse.

Three psychopaths (one male with a bag on his head and two young women with baby-doll masks a la Michael Caine in Brian De Palma's "Dressed to Kill") inexplicably begin to terrorize the couple. As in John Carpenter's "Halloween," their motives are never explained. We are simply left in the dark, a device both maddening and effective.

A prolonged cat-and-mouse game ensues. Director Bertino maximizes the simple techniques to give us the willies, utilizing silence, shadows and the creepiest use of music (a scratchy, skipping record player) in quite some time, transforming winsome tunes "Sprout and the Bean" (Joanna Newsom) and "At My Window Sad and Lonely" (Billy Bragg and Wilco) into a soundtrack for terror.

Mr. Bertino uses a handheld camera for a docudrama effect. When he expertly frames the heroes with a masked killer skulking in the background shadows, the viewer's skin crawls -- it is as if one has accidentally come across this stalking.

The film suffers from a lack of momentum towards the end; the killers can release their cornered prey only a couple of times before it seems ridiculous. Further, the tension built up throughout the film leads to an anticlimactic ending.

Rated R for violence/terror and language. Running time: 90 minutes.

GREEN NEWS

NU Student Group Works to Make Sustainability a Reality

By Kari Nigorizawa and Daniel Paschall

Northwestern University students in the group Engineers for a Sustainable World test water in Panama. Photo courtesy of NU-ESW

Northwestern University's chapter of Engineers for a Sustainable World is not new to green. In fact, these students have been promoting sustainability for nearly five years. It is one of several environmental student groups on campus, but its emphasis on developing and following through with real-world applications of sustainable engineering is what truly sets it apart.

ESW-NU is currently working to power the University's shuttle buses with recycled biofuels instead of conventional gasoline. The biofuels are to be extracted from the waste vegetable oil generated by the school's dining halls. Currently, Northwestern's dining services pay for off-site disposal of the oil.

The project, headed by Northwestern graduate student Aaron Greco, has earned the approval of the University, and talks have begun among representatives of the administration, dining services and the shuttle company. With the help of a Walter P. Murphy Grant, ESW-NU is funded to begin building and testing an oil filtration system. The project has even expanded to include plans for construction of an on-campus bus stop made of recycled materials, complete with a solar-powered light and an innovative GPS bus-tracking system that will estimate the time until the next bus.

While ESW-NU has been active locally, some of ESW-NU's greatest accomplishments have been outside the United States. The group has done considerable work in Panama, where the students helped a community without grid electricity install solar-powered lights at their school. This summer, ESW-NU will return to install solar-generated electricity on individual houses. There are also plans to replace an aging water treatment facility in Portobelo, Panama, with a more sustainable design.

ESW-NU has begun working in developing communities outside Panama as well. The focus of the newest project is to provide a health center in Ho, Ghana, with reliable solar energy for the center's vaccine refrigerator.

The main event that ESW-NU organizes to raise environmental awareness locally is Energy Day, the group's day-long conference. Last spring, ESW-NU brought experts on green technology and climate change to speak at the annual event, which includes lectures, breakout sessions and a poster fair, to spark dialogue about and nurture awareness of what is being done about sustainability and why it is so important. This year's Energy Day took place on April 26.

Outside of weekly meetings, the group has used other means of getting the word out about sustainable theory and practice. Its members have produced an educational video and tend their own garden plot in Evanston.

Engineers for a Sustainable World - Northwestern is also active in teaching the concept of sustainability to middle school students as part of the group's education and outreach. The group presented a program to students at Chute Middle School last spring and plans to return for another session this year. They hope to engage other middle schools in the area as well.

One of ESW-NU's primary goals is connected to all of its projects, domestic and international: to stay in contact with each community to ensure that the beneficial changes the group makes are sustained. This is especially true for projects outside the United States.

Northwestern's chapter of ESW is constantly expanding the ways in which it pursues its mission to make this world more sustainable.

The group is open to new project ideas, whether local or global, and any general feedback or interest from the community would be most welcome. For more information about the group or how to get involved with ESW-NU, contact external relations chair Steven Pals or visit http://msgroups.tech.northwestern.edu/esw.

Garden Walk Set for June 29

Keep Evanston Beautiful's 19th annual Garden Walk will be held from noon to 5 p.m. on June 29. Seven private gardens and two public gardens in Evanston will be featured. Visitors can get ideas for bed design, hardscape, and plants that do well in our climate, and enjoy the opportunity to meet the gardeners. All proceeds go to support KEB's environmental education programs.

Advance-purchase tickets are $10 for KEB members and $15 for nonmembers. They are available weekdays at the Evanston Ecology Center, 2024 McCormick Blvd.

Tickets can also be purchased at the Ecology Center from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. on June 28, the day before the walk. For more information:
Keep Evanston Beautiful, 847-448-8256, ext. 105 or www.evanstonkeb.org.

On the day of the walk, tickets are $20 for KEB members and $25 for nonmembers at the Evanston Ecology Center from 11 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. The Dawes Elementary School garden, pictured, will be a stop on this year's KEB Garden Walk.

Workshop on Managing Energy Costs

CNT Energy, a nonprofit organization dedicated to helping people save energy and reduce energy costs, will present a workshop on how to manage summer electricity costs with the ComEd Residential Real-Time Pricing Program.

There will be information about low-cost and no-cost strategies for managing household electricity costs during the warm weather months, including tips
specifically for ComEd Residential Real-Time Pricing Program participants.

The workshop will be held at 6:30 p.m. on June 25 at the Evanston Ecology Center, 2024 McCormick Blvd.

The workshop is free of charge and refreshments will be provided. Space is limited; RSVP by calling 1-866-WATTSPOT or CNT Energy at 773-269-4037.