Neil Simon's The Dinner Party, written in 2000 and currently being staged at Black Hawk College, concerns three formerly married couples who meet for a très sophistiqué evening at a Paris restaurant: Claude (played here by Bryan Woods) and Mariette (Elizabeth Cook, alternating performances with Cayla Freeman), whose shared passion for literature outweighed their passion for each other; Andre (Paul Workman) and Gabrielle (Elizabeth Paxton, alternating with Kristen Lynn Raccone), whose sexual rapport wasn't enough to keep Andre faithful; and Albert (Thomas Riley Ratkiewicz) and Yvonne (Kaeleigh Esparza, alternating with Lynn Aaronson), whose obsessive devotion to one another eventually resulted in them getting divorced - twice.

St. Ambrose University instructor Michael Kennedy, who has directed more than 75 collegiate theatre productions over the past 40 years, remembers the first - and, to his recollection, only - public complaint lodged against one of his shows, which appeared in the Diocese of Davenport's weekly newspaper The Catholic Messenger.

Upon entering the Circa '21 Dinner Playhouse for Friday's evening presentation of Church Basement Ladies, I handed my ticket to longtime lobby host Ed Jones, who greeted me with a knock-knock joke (one of his better ones, I must say) and some happy news: The audience for that day's matinée performance included seven busloads of guests making their first-ever treks to the Rock Island venue, with one tour group traveling all the way from Champaign, Illinois, to see the show.

FAST & FURIOUS

I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that the viewers who are really, really dying to see Fast & Furious - like the guy ahead of me in line for tickets, who said to his buddy, "I want to sit as close to the screen as humanly possible" - will already have seen it by the time this review is published. So there's probably little harm in telling you that while the original stars of 2001's The Fast & the Furious do return for this fourth (if you can believe it) installment in the fossil-fueled franchise, Michelle Rodriguez's character gets killed off before the end of the first reel. Lucky lady.