Happy Birthday Ana Belaval...and Call Us

Chicagoist would like to open our day by wishing a very Happy Birthday to the woman who makes getting out of bed seem worth it: Ana Belaval, the Around Town feature reporter for WGN Morning News.

Though we used to tune in to WGN for the comic stylings of Paul Konrad, we now find ourselves counting down the minutes until they dispense with all the fires, bombings and indictments in the first hour and get to the Around Town segments featuring its fearless reporter, usually in at least one silly, but fantasy-inducing, outfit sometime during the week.

Her devil-may-care reporting style and our initial confusion as to how to pronounce her last name had us marveling over exactly who this dynamo of feature work was when she joined WGN last year. Belaval was born in Puerto Rico and spent a decade at Univision, both locally and later as a network correspondent for its own morning show based out of New York. She’s also married to a guy who seems like a really decent fella, but we’re trying not to think about that.

Chicagoist plans on celebrating Ms. Belaval’s birthday by playing all the Tivo’ed clips we have of her during the Friday Dance segment. In slow motion. Repeatedly.