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“Holy cow!” moans Harry Caray. “What a lousy break. Boy, the Cubbies find more ways to lose . . . “
And then the camera pans the grandstand, from the left field line to the right field line, following a row of seats. And each seat is occupied by a famous actor who’s come out of Chicago — Cusack, Mahoney, Petersen, Malkovich, Murray, Allen, Metcalf, Arkin, Sinise, Frantz, Mantegna . . . All looking more morose than surprised, for they know their Cubs. And at the far end of this procession, looking particularly unsurprised and disgusted, we see Paul Sills, and beyond Sills an empty seat. And those who understand Chicago theater will know at once that this seat represents Sills’s mother, Viola Spolin, the teacher and theoretician who wrote the basic text, Improvisation for the Theater, and was, in a sense, the mother of them all.
