Milwaukee, WI
Milwaukee woman creates free prom drive, youth foundation to support teens
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MILWAUKEE — A Milwaukee lady is taking her struggles as an adolescent and turning it right into a ardour to assist youth who could also be going via the identical issues she did.
Jessica Johnson was pressured to develop up shortly, coping with each loss and duty at a younger age.
“I used to be in foster take care of some time and I used to be adopted at 10,” mentioned Johnson. “The girl who adopted me ended up passing away in my highschool years. My mom died about two or three years earlier than that.”
Different relations sorted her for some time after her adoptive mom handed, however she says for more often than not, she was on her personal.
“How did that have an effect on you as an adolescent?” TMJ4’s Mariam Mackar requested her.
“Man, it affected me rather a lot,” she mentioned. “I used to be working generally two jobs in highschool. I used to be ready, my senior 12 months, to solely have half days, so I might go to work after college and just about deal with myself at that time.”
Her experiences rising up have impressed Johnson to provide again as an grownup. In 2016 she created the I Owe Youth Basis which focuses on workforce preparation and being a help system for teenagers.
They’re most well-known for his or her annual Promenade Drive, a free purchasing expertise to provide excessive schoolers every thing they want for the large day.
“You want a gown, you want sneakers, you want your make-up, you want your nails, all of those various things which all value cash,” defined Johnson.
Every year, via gracious group donations, the occasion hosts racks of beautiful robes, fits and raffles for nail, hair, and make-up providers.
Deja Carter, a junior at Pius XI Excessive College, picked her dream gown at this 12 months’s occasion.
“I find it irresistible, I’m 100% offered,” Carter instructed us beaming. “Promenade and issues may be very costly and one thing like this might help me and my mother out tremendously.”
Over the previous seven years, the occasion has helped a whole lot of teenagers and Johnson says extra is on the way in which for the inspiration.
“I simply assume it’s actually necessary for them to have a stage of help in all issues, whether or not it’s promenade associated, or workforce preparation associated or something of the type.”
Johnson says her subsequent aim with the inspiration is placing on a job truthful for teenagers earlier than college begins within the fall.
Johnson can also be a broadcast writer. You could find her books linked right here.
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Milwaukee, WI
How Milwaukee is bringing in the new year from final goodbyes to fireworks
MILWAUKEE — For many holidays, Tradition is key. That’s how New Year’s Eve is celebrated for Hailey Burch.
“We do this every year,” Burch told TMJ4, about ice skating at Red Arrow Park. “We’ve done it for the last five or six years at least, and it’s a lot of fun.”
Burch and her friends and family were just some of many who came out to the park to ring in 2025.
“You got hot chocolate inside, you got benches to warm up with the hot chocolate if you need to,” said Scott Cychosz, who brought his family out to the park.
With music, pretty light displays, and more fun, it’s a great alternative to late-night parties.
“It’s important because you got kids now,” Cychosz told TMJ4. “and if you want to spend time with your family you gotta find alternates than spending the whole night out and drinking whatever.”
But some parties were going on, one in particular kicked off at 4pm and will last for 24 hours.
Victor’s Nightclub on the East Side will be shutting its doors on Wednesday. But before they do so, they hosted a 24-hour bash to celebrate new beginnings and to remember closing chapters.
“It brings a tear to my eye,” said Julio Rivera, who has been going to Victor’s for decades. “but I’m appreciative that I was able to experience this whole thing. It’s just a great, great family.”
And just across the river, the deer district was packed for the fireworks show put on by We Energies.
If you need a safe way to get home there are multiple resources around the city.
RELATED | How you can ride on MCTS for free this New Year’s Eve
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Milwaukee, WI
Milwaukee fiber artist turns dive bar bathrooms into art
MILWAUKEE — I’ve done stories on tons of different artists—abstract painters, wood artists, musicians. You name it, I’ve done it. But one day, I was in the depths of the internet, and something caught my eye. I found a person who sews images of dive bar bathrooms, and I just had to learn more.
It started with the Roman Coin bathroom in Milwaukee. Then she did a Summerfest bathroom, Paddy’s Pub, High Dive, and a few others. The next thing Ella Clemons knew, her dive bar images were being featured at the Portrait Society Gallery in Milwaukee.
“I feel like everyone was kind of rocking with it here in Milwaukee,” Clemons, a fiber artist, said.
The 23-year-old, who is also a bartender, works out of a Bay View studio. It’s an old cream city brick building that has turned into artist’s workspaces.
“I couldn’t imagine myself doing a 9-to-5 or something like that. I just don’t think I’m built that way. I don’t know. I want to create,” she said.
It takes Clemons about 10 hours to sew a bathroom. She does commissions. Prices start around $200. That got me thinking – what bathroom would I want? I’m thinking of Hosed on Brady or the bathrooms at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center in Sheboygan which are super artistic.
So you may be thinking: dive bar bathrooms? It’s a little strange. It’s a little dirty. But there’s a beauty in the mundane. Clemons is forcing us to look at something we’ve seen before but in a new way.
“I like people to see something and be like, ‘I definitely know what that is.’ And I think people think it’s kind of funny to see it in fabric form, and I like it too. And it brings—I don’t know—it brings a whimsy to it, I guess,” she said.
She also made a series on highway billboards—you know, personal injury lawyers, religious billboards, fireworks advertisements, and adult store signs. Clemons is inspired by, “mundane day-to-day things that I feel I want to create.”
The UW-Milwaukee graduate has been featured in two galleries. She has a good idea for her next series too – sewing strange Facebook Marketplace listings. Beyond that, she has big dreams.
“I would love to make art full-time. That’s a huge goal of mine.”
That is why in 2025, you can find her at her studio sewing dive bar bathrooms, highway signs, Facebook Marketplace listings, or something else just as fun and weird.
“It’s something I could be happy doing, like, forever. I could keep doing it. There’s always going to be more stuff to create,” Clemons said.
To see more of her work or request a commission, send her a message on Instagram.
Watch Ella Clemons’ story here…
Milwaukee fiber artist turns dive bar bathrooms into art
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Milwaukee, WI
Writer Elaine Schmidt was an evangelist for music in Milwaukee
An elbow injury disrupted the career that Elaine Schmidt might have had as a high-level flutist. Undaunted, Schmidt channeled her mellifluousness into writing about music.
For more than three decades, Schmidt wrote about classical music and the performing arts for Milwaukeeans in many contexts: freelance reviews for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, scripts for Milwaukee Public Television broadcasts, books for Hal Leonard and, in recent years, program notes for the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra.
Schmidt died Dec. 19 after a short illness, according to her family. She was 66. Her death caught many who knew her here by surprise.
“Her passing is a loss for me personally, yes, and I’m heartbroken,” wrote MSO Communications Director Erin Kogler in a Facebook post. “But more important than my personal sadness, the arts community in Milwaukee needs people like Elaine — arts evangelists. People who truly understand how important the arts are in a community and will use whatever wonderful talent they have to keep the arts strong and thriving. Fellow Milwaukee arts lovers, we all have some big shoes to fill.”
Born June 18, 1958, Schmidt was raised in Milwaukee and graduated from Milwaukee Lutheran High School in 1976. After earlier study at the Wisconsin Conservatory of Music and Concordia University, Schmidt moved to New York to study flute and voice at The Julliard School, according to an obituary prepared by her friend Karen Herzog, a former Journal Sentinel reporter.
Schmidt worked as a musician and singer in New York until her elbow injury. She then earned a master’s degree in music criticism from McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada.
Returning to Milwaukee in 1993, she plunged into life as a freelancer or, as she wryly put it, “a gig pig,” teaching flute and voice and also writing for many customers. Her first review for the Milwaukee Sentinel, of a Master Singers Quartet concert, was published on Aug. 16, 1993. Her final review for the Journal Sentinel, of Florentine Opera’s “Maria de Buenos Aires,” was posted nearly 31 years later, on May 17, 2024.
Full disclosure: For many of those years, I was Schmidt’s assigning editor at the Journal Sentinel, commissioning and editing her reviews and articles. During hundreds of phone conversations (rarely short ones, because she liked to gab), I heard Elaine’s warm, cultured voice, often tinged with mock seriousness before unleashing a joke that could lead to boisterous laughter.
On her LinkedIn page, the proudly erudite and eclectic Schmidt wrote: “I am frighteningly well-versed in the trivial and arcane.” Here’s one example: She did a spot-on hilarious imitation of the nasal voice of Fran Drescher (star of “The Nanny”).
Schmidt revealed another facet of her creativity in 2013 when she published “The Travelers: Present in the Past,” a time-travel novel for young readers in which touching an antique quilt sent someone back in time. She followed that up a year later with “The Travelers Companion: Sharing Timeless Handwork Projects With a New Generation,” a guidebook in which she shared her passion for quilting.
Schmidt, who lived in Grafton, is survived by her husband, Mark Hoelscher; her sister Paula Schmidt, and her cat, Junior. Her family plans a celebration of her life in the spring. Memorials can be made to Lutheran Counseling and Family Services of Wisconsin and the Wisconsin Conservatory of Music.
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