1. Adventure Stage Chicago has gotten a $120,000 Continuing Innovation Stage II grant from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation. This is the second that they’ve gotten from Doris Duke; in February, they got a $39,000 EmcARTS Innovation Lab Grant. With that money, the “philanthropy dollars were used to help engage fellow West Town neighborhood residents in a theater-making process centered on storytelling”, which created content for their piece Neighborhood Perspectives. ASC will use this new money to continue simliar work, and have hired one of their ensemble members, Allison Latta Lashford, to be Associate Artistic Director while the grant is in play.

2. Victoria Zielinski and Paul Barrosse of The Vic and Paul Show have the best holiday ritual ever, we learn through the Reader‘s Culture Vulture series. They suggest watching White Christmas — but this is an event that you can’t exactly replicate in your own home. “Every yuletide since the mid-1980s, our dear friend, former Chicago actress Linda Emond, has organized a screening of this classic 1954 film,” they say. “When we moved to different cities our annual gathering morphed into an event we call Cyber White Christmas. At the appointed hour, we get together in an Internet chat room, start our DVDs simultaneously, and type a running, inevitably tipsy commentary as Bing and Danny scheme to save old General Waverly’s snowless ski lodge in Vermont.” That actually sounds like the best time ever had.

3. Elizabeth Rex is not mean to be “a documentary”,  says castmember Diane D’Aquila. More details on the complex history behind the production, and the connection to Shakespeare, in Scott C. Morgan’s profile.

Questions? Tips? Email kdries@wbez.org.