A wine-tasting weekend in southwest Michigan

Seven women in my family were planning a girls weekend to celebrate my sister Nancy’s 60th birthday. We rented an Airbnb for three nights in St. Joseph, Michigan, the heart of southwest Michigan’s wine country. Togetherness was the point of the weekend, but as long as we’d be going to wine tastings, I figured I should learn something about wine.

Feminism hasn’t lessened the importance of looks

So many women are getting manicures that it almost feels ill-groomed to have unpolished nails. Facial treatments abound — chemical peels, dermabrasion, Botox injections, laser resurfacing, cryofacials, microneedling, the list goes on. Younger women pay for bikini waxes, and African American women for lash extensions.

You would expect the beauty practices that women perform and men don’t would be a feminist issue. Women have fought against inequality on numerous fronts. Feminism brought more women into public office. Females now outnumber males on college campuses. Yet women are spending more time, money, and effort on beauty care than ever.

End of an era for “Prison City”

My hometown could have had a reputation for its limestone, from which buildings around the country were constructed; or the nation’s first junior college; or big names like George Mikan and Mercedes McCambridge. But Joliet became best known for the Joliet and Stateville Correctional Centers long before John Belushi’s fictional “Joliet Jake” was released from the former.

The Joliet Correctional Center — better known as the Old Joliet Prison — closed in 2002. Now the state has proposed demolishing maximum-security Stateville, which is actually in next-door Crest Hill, with a facility focusing on rehabilitation and reentry, and moving downstate Logan’s women’s prison alongside it.