Nick sits at the rolltop, flipping once more through the book. Last year he won the Stern Prize for Sculpture from the School of the Art Institute. This year, he’s a stock boy for a famous Chicago department store that has been dying a slow death for a quarter of a century. Granted, he has earned a degree that licenses him to make peculiar artifacts capable of embarrassing his friends and angering strangers. There’s a U-Stor-It in Oak Park crammed with papier-mâché costumes for street masques and surreal sets for a show that ran in a little theater near Andersonville and closed three nights
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