Dick Clark in a Skirt

During a recent conversation I had with another Chicago theater critic, talk turned, as it will when I'm involved, to Hedy Weiss. My interlocutor pointed out that La Weiss has held her post as theater and dance critic for the Chicago Sun-Times for approximately three eons and that she therefore must be a lot older than she looks. "So she's in her mid-to-late forties?" I said, and he laughed at me. "She has to be in her sixties," he said, "maybe even approaching 70!"

Ladies and gentlemen, as someone who spends hours studying Hedy Weiss's face as if it contained the secret to happiness, I am prepared to declare this man a lunatic. I will concede the possibility that her birdlike features have held up remarkably well, but there's no way on earth you could convince me that she was born before the end of World War II, even if you told me she had had Heidi Montagian amounts of plastic surgery and bought Oil of Olay by the truckload. There's just no effin' way.

According to her bio at the Sun-Times Web site, Weiss has had her current job since 1984. Before that, she taught at DePaul, having moved to Chicago from New York in 1980. Between graduating from Hunter College and decamping for our big shoulders, the bio says she "pursued a career as a dancer and choreographer," but since this is rather vague, I'm guessing she only kept at it for two or three years, which would mean she received her degree around 1977 and started classes around 1973. Assuming she was 18 at the time, that puts her year of birth at 1955 and her current age at around 55. Which means she does indeed look younger than she is but remains quite a ways from drawing Social Security checks.

QED

ELSEWHERE:
My short review of Writers' Theatre's She Loves Me is in this week's Chicago Reader.

Comments

[Monica Reida]

I'd like to suggest that Hedy Weiss is ageless.