Weekly Wilson - Blog of Author Connie C. Wilson – Welcome to WeeklyWilson.com, where author/film critic Connie (Corcoran) Wilson avoids totally losing her marbles in semi-retirement by writing about film (see the Chicago Film Festival reviews and SXS...

HollyShorts 2026 Champions Authentic LGBTQ+ Voices with Diverse Short Film Line-Up

Tanzyn Crawford and Emily Grant in Souvenir

The Oscar® and BAFTA-qualifying HollyShorts Film Festival returns for its 22nd editi...

Holly Shorts Film Festival (August 13-23), a qualifying festival for the Oscars, is gearing up with some 430 short film offerings.

“The Colisseum” is a 12 minute 19 second basketball short from France, directed by Nabil...

Birthday dinner: 2026.

For the past three years we have made a tradition of spending my birthday at the Firehouse restaurant (1401 S. Michigan Ave.), Mayor Daley’s favorite restaurant and one at which “W” once celebrated his birthday while in Chicago. It’s a 7 hour drive from the Quad Cities, but I’ve had a condo in Chicago since 2003...

I drove from 1:30 p.m. until  7:30 p.m. to come back to the Bank of America to “activate” the credit card that I signed up for on June 13th. I tried activating the card—which did not arrive by snail mail for a week— from my home in East Moline, but the bot at the special activation number immediately asked me what account I was calling about. This is confusing...

Since things have been going so well with the BoA bank accounts in Chicago, it occurred to me that I should, perhaps, get some cash from the local TBK bank for my upcoming Chicago birthday trip.

I cruised through the ATM lane to ask for some cash. The screen remained very blank.  I realized I had not really counted up to see how much cash I might need for my planned Bi...