Sen. Don Harmon … ‘D-Mayberry’?
Oak Park’s two-term state senator, Don Harmon, is a rising star in Springfield. One of nine senators who crafted the procedural rules for the impeachment trial of former governor Rod Blagojevich, Harmon is now one of four assistant senate majority leaders.
That hasn’t made him immune to ribbing from his colleagues, though.
Chicago Sun-Times columnist Mark Brown (another Oak Park resident) wrote Thursday that several Democratic state senators used a break in the Blagojevich impeachment trial last week to ponder who might play certain senators in any subsequent movie.
According to Brown, senators Rickey Hendon and Donne Trotter “determined Ron Howard would be perfect as Sen. Don Harmon, the notion of the Oak Park Democrat as a balding Opie drawing howls of laughter.”
Hendon, who’s been referred to in press accounts as “streetwise but controversial,” carries the nickname “Hollywood” because he wrote, produced, acted in and scored a 1992 movie, Butterscotch and Chocolate.
Hendon (“Chocolate”) and Tony Alcantar (“Butterscotch”) star as two incompetent newspaper reporters whose boss has given them a 24-hour deadline to break a major story or be fired. When they aren’t “looking for leads” at Big Mama’s Pork & Pea Restaurant, these two fellows are trying to get a bead on who kidnapped an African head of state’s son.
(A quick check of LocateTV.com indicates, perhaps not surprisingly, that there are no showings of Hendon’s film in the next two weeks.)
Asked about the joking on Friday, Harmon took it all in stride. “It’s not the first time I’ve been called Opie,” he said, adding, “All bald redheads look alike.”
It was suggested that turnabout might be fair play, and did he want to recommend any actors to play Hendon or Trotter on the silver screen?
“No,” Harmon demurred, “Hollywood Hendon is in charge of all casting decisions in the Illinois Senate.”
How Harmonious of him to say so.
Can you spell the name of RF’s middle school?
Spelling bees aren’t usually big news. At least they weren’t until Roosevelt Middle School seventh-grader Rose Sloan made it to the national championship in 2007. The buzz got even bigger last year, when Sloan finished seventh in the nation in her encore effort. Along the way, she found herself being interviewed on several television shows, on national television, and feted by then-Illinois Lt. Governor Patrick Quinn – not to mention being featured in the pages of Wednesday Journal .
So the attention was a little more focused last Friday when the Roosevelt school spelling club held its annual public spelling bee. Sponsored by the Roosevelt PTO, 34 students participated.
Roosevelt teacher Dan Courtney, who served as the event’s announcer, said the National Spelling Bee organization has “very specific protocols,” regarding how contestants and judges must behave. Still, it was enjoyable, he said.
“It was a lot of fun – intense, but fun.”
Proving some things run in the family, Rose Sloan’s younger sister, Emma, won the sixth-grade contest. The four grade level winners received $25 gift certificates to The Book Table in Oak Park, medals and ribbons, all courtesy of the Roosevelt PTO.
A “spell-off” was then held among the four winners. Maya Rawal won, and will go on to the Suburban Cook County regional bee on Feb. 11. The winner from the county final goes on to the suburban Chicago final, and the winner of that advances to the Scripps-Howard National Spelling Bee in Washington, D.C.
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5th grade runner-up: Valerie Lundeen
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5th grade winner: Ciera Hopkinson (spelled “petticoat”)
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6th grade runner-up: Joey Pasternak
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6th grade winner: Emma Sloan (spelled “agreeable”)
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7th grade winner: Vincent Williams
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8th grade runner-up: Gabe Seideman
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8th grade winner: Maya Rawal (spelled “disinfectant”)
Tri-racial Oak Park?
The Chicago Tribune published a “Community Profile” on Oak Park in its real estate section, Jan. 2, titled “Rich in architectural history, Oak Park shaping its future while preserving past.” After extolling the virtues of Oak Park’s diversity-architectural and otherwise-the article quotes an attorney and single mom named Sandra Blanco who says, “I’m Hispanic and my son is tri-racial.”
I’m not entirely in the loop and my cultural literacy often lags, but this is my first acquaintance with the term “tri-racial.” Oak Park has long been noted for its “bi-racial” population, and our new U.S. president has made bi-racial positively trendy, but maybe our fair village is pioneering a new diversity dimension.
Tri-racial in this case is presumably black, white and Hispanic, but however it breaks down (if Tiger Woods has a child with a white or Hispanic wife, the baby would be tri-racial-for all I know, it may already have happened), can “quadri-racial” be far off? At what point do we stop specifying and simply go with “multiracial”?
In the Trib article, Blanco said, “Diversity is a long-standing goal in Oak Park. It was consciously done. You see people in Oak Park from all walks of life and all persuasions and nobody cares.”
Most Oak Parkers care. In fact, we celebrate it. I just want to keep up with the designations. Maybe they’ll have to create an extra category on the 2010 census.