Big Talk

She’s the “Fearless Ringleader” of the Hudsucker Posse and a tireless advocate for all forms of dance in Bloomington. A self-described “flow arts mama” and “am-bad-assador” for hoop arts, Chambers and her spinning, gyrating cohorts have hosted nearly 1000 twice-weekly jams in Bryan Park since 2008. A born performer, she fell in love with the stage as a child and …

As she closes out her star-turn run in the Cardinal Stage’s Company’s musical production, “Fun Home,” Amanda talks of her childhood in the tiny Illinois town of Bridgeport, the discovery of her own sexuality, and her deep passion for opera on this week’s Big Talk. Amanda is re-committing to the stage after a bitter-sweet dalliance with the New York opera …

Author of two books about the gifted but erratic World War II Life magazine photo-essayist Gene Smith, Sam Stephenson has dedicated much of his life to tracing the artist’s career. Smith ran away from his high-paying job, his family, and his comfortable upstate New York home to settle into a bare Manhattan loft from the mid-1950s and into the ’60s. …

He started out in radio at WFHB and now serves as the jazz director for WFIU. Like many young people, David Brent Johnson stumbled and fumbled through life upon reaching adulthood. He discovered jazz in his twenties, what he calls his “light on the road to Damascus” moment. Then, he and a partner produced an Americana music show for WFHB, …

She taught herself how to make wood furniture as a young expatriate in England and then went to furniture- and cabinet-maker school on a dare. Now in Bloomington she’s a nationally-renowned creator of built-in and stand-alone wooden household furnishings. She has authored several books, including The Hoosier Cabinet in Kitchen History, A Home of Her Own, Making Things Work: Tales from a …

A scene has stuck in Michael Koryta’s mind since he was 17 years old — that of missing IU student Jill Behrman’s father, gazing into a creek where his daughter was thought to be found. Behrman’s body later was found elsewhere. Now Koryta has written a new book, How It Happened, inspired by that heart-wrenching scene. Koryta has written 13 …

It started out as a fun project for the family. Soon, Derek Richey’s photographic remembrances of bygone Bloomington became a full-fledged obsession. The co-founder of Bloomington Fading, co-author of Bloomington: Then and Now, and board president of Bloomington Restorations Inc., Richey talks about finding pavement where historic buildings once stood when he arrived in town in 1991. As a member …

She became entranced with Russia just as then-President Ronald Reagan was labeling it an “evil empire.” Novelist and Russophile Tristra Newyear visited the vast nation as a teenager and later worked there as an editor for the Moscow Times. In the meantime, she did her PhD work on the Buryat people, ethnic Russians nestled between Siberia and Mongolia. Now, she …

Since becoming part-owner of The Back Door, Nicci Boroski, familiarly known as Nicci B, has become a local leader in the colorful, diverse community known by the five initials: LBGTQ. But, as Nicci would be the first to acknowledge, those five initials hardly begin to cover the the entirety of the wide number of choices and identities people are feeling …

The first female firefighter in the history of the Bloomington Fire Department, Jean Magrane retired in 2013 after breaking the gender barrier in 1987. She passed the department’s physical agility test after several previous women had failed, then she was promoted to sergeant and eventually captain in charge of her own crew. It wasn’t easy being the lone woman in …