Lonna Saunders

What is the purpose of destroying John Edwards?

Why are his prosecutors acting as if they're in Star Trek: Voyager? Title them episode eight, "Ex Post Facto."

They're twisting the meaning of campaign finance law into something never before seen. Then applying this new legal twist to...

It should come as no surprise when 52-year-old World Bank Group President-Elect Jim Yong Kim, a former high school quarterback, talks of tackling the world's troubles in his new position.

Addressing the Chicago Dartmouth Club at a luncheon at the Intercontinental Hotel on May 9th, Dartmouth College's 17th...

Happy Birthday, Betty Daniels! As she now asks us to call her. But back in the day, it was always "Dean Daniels." Elizabeth Adams Daniels celebrated her 92nd birthday on May 8th, coincidentally "National Teachers Day," and has worked for Vassar College for 65 years, nearly half the existence of...

The Rev. Addie Wyatt, the woman who rolled up her sleeves to help others and worked shoulder-to-shoulder with the likes of former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt and President John F. Kennedy and was a mentor to President Barack Obama in his community organizing as a young man, will be laid...

The Good Wife's Julianna Margulies came to Chicago as the guest of honor at the third annual Steppenwolf Salutes Women in the Arts luncheon.

Coincidentally, the two television series she's best known for -- ER and The Good Wife -- are both set in Chicago.

But she's never...

The Good Wife's Julianna Margulies is not a lawyer, she just plays one on TV. But her grandmother was an attorney at a time when very few women were, she told a sold-out crowd at the third annual "Steppenwolf Salutes Women in the Arts" luncheon held in March as part...

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi slammed Republicans at the Saturday Morning Forum of the Rainbow PUSH Coalition in Chicago for not living up to the Gospel of Matthew.

Pelosi said President Barack Obama, in providing food through the food stamp program, is doing what the Gospel of Matthew 25:35-40...

My friend Rev. Jesse Jackson sent me this note after the death of Whitney Houston:

There is a hole in the sky and void in the music world. Like the rest of the world I am terribly shocked and saddened by the passing of Ms. Whitney Houston. I watched...

To stick with family or to fly away. Lydia Diamond's Stick Fly is what Broadway is all about. Writing regionally produced plays for 20 years including The Bluest Eye, an adaptation of Nobel Prize winning Toni Morrison's novel, Diamond, is making her Broadway debut with Stick Fly.

She teaches playwriting...

Meryl Streep's Iron Lady is for those who have "been properly in love," as Piers Morgan is wont to put it to guests on his CNN show. It's for those who have loved so much they have ached when their loved one isn't around. Meryl Streep gives the...

Fourteen-time Grammy winner Alicia Keys scores with Stick Fly in her debut as a Broadway producer. Stick Fly may be best described as television's The Cosby Show meets Academy Award-winner Crash (2005).

The Stick Fly cast list reads like a Who's Who of...

"My first directing effort, Salvador (1986), was at times a cauldron, and I thought it might be my last", said Oliver Stone at the New York Film Festival (NYFF) commemorating Salvador's 25th anniversary starring James Woods as photojournalist Richard Boyle upon whose memoirs the film is based. Woods got an...

Why doesn't everyone involved -- Republican presidential hopeful Herman Cain and his half-dozen or so accusers -- all take polygraph examinations, and let the chips fall where they may?

Cain has already publicly agreed to take one. Have his accusers take one, too.

Although the test results...

Ellen Barkin says the film that made her a household name, Sea of Love, was not her best performance, and she doesn't really like her work in it. She may be the only one on the planet who thinks this way.

Barkin told a rapt New Yorker magazine audience...

Katori Hall's new play Mountaintop, winner of the Laurence Olivier Award for its London run, burst upon Broadway in its October 13th opening. This is playwright Hall's Broadway debut along with veteran film actor, Samuel L. Jackson's. It's directed by Kenny Leon who also directed Denzel Washington and Viola...

At just 30 years old making her Broadway debut, playwright Katori Hall was not around to experience Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in real time, but she became immersed in his legacy growing up in Memphis where he spent the last days of his life.

Her new...

The new Broadway show Relatively Speaking is about the relatives -- your relatives. Hence, the title. The three one-act comedies are penned by Woody Allen, Second City alumna Elaine May, and Ethan Coen of the moviemaking Coen Brothers.

It's a laugh riot. We laugh so hard because we know these...

Rarely does an audience laugh and cry during the same movie. It's either a tearjerker or a comedy, but not both. Yet that's what happened at a Chicago International Film Festival prescreening of Martin Sheen's and son Emilio Estevez's The Way. And I wasn't the only one.
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"Didn't you notice a powerful and obnoxious odor of mendacity in this room?... There ain't nothin' more powerful than the odor of mendacity...", so says Big Daddy played by Burl Ives in the Tennessee Williams' classic, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, starring Paul Newman and Elizabeth Taylor. I couldn't...

I'm still scratching my head over the retrial of former Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich now that it's over as we all await the jury's verdict on some 20 counts.

The prosecution got its do-over with the retrial of the disgraced Blagojevich. Not many times in life do you get...