Nearly everyone who was of TV-viewing age in 1963, it seems, remembers where they were on the day President John F. Kennedy was shot. For writer/performer/instructor Arlene Malinowski, that day is especially memorable, because as she recalls, it was one of the first times that this hearing child of Deaf parents had to act as her parents' translator.

"I'm six, I'm in the first grade," says the Chicago-based Malinowski, "and I remember coming home from school, and they're in a dark living room watching the television, and they're crying. And my father says, 'Tell me what's on the TV,' and my mother says to my father, 'No, no, no, leave her alone - she's a kid.' But I'm like, 'No, I can do this!'

"So I'm listening," she continues, "and the man on TV is using a lot of big words. Words I don't understand, like 'assassinate' and 'motorcade' and 'depository.' I figured out that 'assassinate' was 'killed,' but I couldn't figure out what 'depository' meant. And then I remembered that Daddy deposits money into the bank, so it must mean 'the bank.' So I told my father, 'The president man has been shot, he's dead in his car, and a bank robber killed him.'

"And here's the coda to it: They never [definitively] figured out who shot the president. So I am not necessarily wrong."

EXHIBIT 

Celebrating Ideas: Bridging Communities with Augustana's Liberal Arts through the AGES

Figge Art Museum

Saturday, March 19, through Sunday, May 29

The Figge Art Museum's latest exhibition is Celebrating Ideas: Bridging Communities with Augustana's Liberal Arts Through the AGES, and the accompanying image is of one of the displayed ceramic pieces, created circa 340-330 B.C.E. Its ascribed title? Red-Figure Dish with Running Female Figure with Wreath & Ivy-Garnished Phiale.

Man, these highfalutin B.C.E. artists with their cryptic titles ... .

BATTLE: LOS ANGELES

My number-one, hands-down, love-it-to-death favorite scene in the science-fiction action spectacle Battle: Los Angeles occurs roughly 40 minutes into the film. Hundreds of meteors have fallen to earth in urban centers around the globe, and are revealed to be teeming with aliens, who waste no time in annihilating everything and everyone in their paths. After engaging in long sequences of L.A.-based retaliation, a stalwart band of Marines is helicoptered into Santa Monica to fend off one of these attacks, and a frightened lieutenant ducks into in an apartment complex's laundry room, where he watches the horrific destruction through a window. Suddenly hearing a noise behind him, the man whips around, expecting to come face-to-face with one of the monstrous invaders from another world. Yet instead of terror, the lieutenant's face quickly registers relief, as the sound he heard was just that of the washing machine's spin cycle.

You know what that means, right? That in the midst of this apocalyptic showdown that, as we've witnessed on TV newscasts, has been going on for several hours now, someone in that apartment complex decided it was a good time to throw in a load of laundry.

Here you'll find different ways to explore the River Cities' Reader Spring Guide, which features more than 1,500 events over the next three months. Below are event highlights for the next two weeks and the entire spring, drawn from our What's Happenin' pages and calendar. The Scribd version of the issue allows you peruse it online. And you can always keep up-to-date with what's going on in the Quad Cities area with our comprehensive online calendar. Of course, you can also pick up the River Cities' Reader at more than 700 locations throughout the Quad Cities.