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A TRIBUTE TO By Robert M. Jadach In 1989 I met a sweet charming girl Jennifer Popek.
Jen went back to finish College and we still wrote and hung out together when she came in for school breaks and holidays. We became closer friends. Jen graduated and went to work being a “Nerd” from Rent-a-Nerd. She called herself “Bernice Bowers.” I went along with her on some of her jobs and found out just how talented she was. She had the people laughing. She kept this up for quite a while. She still did an occasional show with us here and there. There was more to our friendship that was more than the people from Morton College Theater knew about us. There was the outside things we did that would surprise everyone. She made recordings of a newsletter for an organization for the blind for her Father, Jay.
She bowled in a league with me and my friend Jim Brodnicki and his then fiancé, now ex-wife Kathy. She belonged with me on the St. Odilo Choir, and was a groupie for our folk group “The Headlands”. She did date Jim later on and also had a crush on David Fox. Jen was our resident Easter Bunny at the PNA Easter Egg Hunt. She did that for a number of years. She loved doing that. We did drive in nights and hung out with our theater friends out at “Waldo Peepers” and the bars in Lincoln Park. One memorable night was when we went to see “Roxette” at the Park West. One of the funniest evenings we spent was when Jeannine threw a party for her husband Jon. It was not just a regular party but a surprise vasectomy party in his honor. He was definitely surprised when he came home and found a house full of people wearing surgical masks coming at him with garden tools. The highlight of the evening is when Jen and I took “The Shoop Shoop song” and re-worded it to “The Snip-Snip Song”. Somewhere there are pictures of that night that many of us would like to see.
When I decided to write plays, I wanted to immortalize people and
situations that made me smile, she is remembered in a two of my plays.
She made me smile a lot. I can say that I am going to miss Jen, a lot,
and her wild and crazy ways. There is an empty spot in my heart now that
she is gone. |
She
was a talented and gifted actress who I met when she performed “The
Nerd” at Morton College. We met while working on the show and became
friends.
We
spent numerous hours just hanging out with each other doing things. We
were both big “Twin Peak” fans. Every week when it was on, we would
order Chinese food from Wings (mostly Mongolian Beef) and park ourselves
down in front of my television and watch the show. The day they showed
the last episode, we wanted to write David Lynch a nasty letter asking
him to air the real last episode. The one we saw just left you feel like
a cliffhanger. There was no conclusion.
Jen
organized one of the best cast parties we ever had. We did Shakepeare’s
“The Comedy of Error” and we hosted the closing night party at my
apartment in Cicero. It lasted into the wee hours. Yes, I admit it was a
fun party. I even found photos from that night. John Reynolds videotaped
it but we mailed it out to Josh and never got a copy of the tape.