Music, Puppetry, and Self-Help Warm Up Audiences at Davenport's Piano Bar & Cabaret
The tinkle of ice as bartenders create cocktails while Cole Porter’s music plays over the sound system soon make the snow and cold of another Chicago winter a distant memory as people entered the doors of Davenport’s Piano Bar & Cabaret. The occasion was the return of singer, actor, comedian, and writer, Jackie Smook, and her pianist, Joey Chimes, for a six-month engagement of The Jackie Smook Program of De-Dumbification . Drink orders are placed (“a Bombay gin martini, please…shaken hard, not stirred”) as audience members and performers alike look forward to a night of live music, puppetry, and self-help. Smook and Chimes take the audience on a magical, puppet-filled, comedic (yet moving) ride into the Jackie Smook self-help cabaret. It’s a roller coaster through her personal journey from a “dingy dongy dumb dumb” to the hard-working, go getting, ambitious woman she is today. Told through four stages and 12 musical acts, audiences will be moved by this true story of gr