Anderson Bell has just begun his third career, after an out-of-the-gate phase on the floor at the Chicago Board of Trade and a stint in the nightclub business he’d rather forget. Last September, he launched an online ticketing and marketing company, FanFueled, with a platform that works something like Foursquare but is for concerts and events... Read more
March 2011
“Speech pathology is my passion,” says Nicole Butler of her occupation, which she pursued as an undergraduate at Purdue University and then at New York University, where she earned a master’s degree. Today Butler works at Bell, a Chicago public elementary school in Roscoe Village, where she is a speech therapist and teaches deaf students... Read more
Bearing a striking resemblance to a popular television actor is not Nick Campion’s idea of a good time. “It’s been the bane of my existence,” he says of people informing him that he could be the long-lost brother of Adrian Grenier, the star of HBO’s Entourage. (The dark wavy hair and soulful eyes come courtesy of an Italian father and a Lebanese mother.) A classically trained pianist... Read more
As a company member and resident choreographer with Hubbard Street Dance Chicago, Alejandro Cerrudo keeps his slim, wiry body on the move eight hours a day. Does he give much thought to pumping iron or counting calories? “Not me, not at all,” he says. “Sometimes I think I should be eating even more.” Dance is a career for the young, and at 30, Cerrudo says, “it’s starting to hurt... Read more
Jess De Guzman didn’t exactly try to become a sushi chef; the job kept falling into his lap. In the mid-1990s, he was slinging cocktails at Tsunami in the Gold Coast when, one night, the sushi chef asked him to give maki-making a try. De Guzman proved a natural, and the chef offered to train him, but De Guzman went to Hawaii for a year instead. When he returned to Chicago, he went for a bartending tryout... Read more
As the soccer preseason started earlier this year, Dykstra learned that he had been released from his contract with the Chicago Fire. Stunned but not bowed, the goalkeeper immediately explored his options, including the possibility of playing in Germany. Until he lands his next gig, the Roscoe Village resident plans to stay in Chicago and train in Palatine, where guys from another league work out... Read more
Caitlainne Gurreri is a fixture on Chicago stages from Porchlight Music Theatre to the Drury Lane in Oak Brook. The actress—who eats peanut butter from jars and knows she’ll own a Doberman someday because the breed is “badass, tough, and a little rockerish, but with a sweet side, like me”—can also be spotted in... Read more
The longtime girlfriend of the Chicago restaurateur Jerry Kleiner, Marisa Molinaro is a familiar face on the city’s social circuit. Last fall, she entered a competition to get a show on Oprah Winfrey’s OWN network and displayed an array of talents in her video submission, including playing the violin and boxing... Read more
As a Midwest representative for the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising, a design school in Los Angeles, Mel Muoio is charged with persuading talented young people to apply. She also works as a freelance fashion stylist and is an assistant editor for the Chicago edition of UrbanDaddy.com, an urban lifestyle website for men... Read more
As host of HGTV’s Designed to Sell, Monica Pedersen knocked out more than 90 episodes in neighborhoods all over Chicago before the show stopped filming last year. “The nicest homeowners are firemen, cops, and teachers,” she says... Read more