Jessica Baker tries to peel her three-year-old brother’s fingers from their viselike grip on the plastic handcuffs, but each little digit snaps back into place as soon as it’s removed. “You can get in lots of fights with people at shelters. I mean, this girl, she wanted to fight me. I just stayed away from people after that. Only reason I talk to people in here is because we have our own apartment and stuff,” she says....

Sharon Solwitz wrote her first piece of fiction at age 12–a long adventure story about a girl who masquerades as a boy and stows away on what she later discovers is a pirate ship. Her teachers loved it, but their praise made Solwitz uncomfortable. “It wasn’t very good, but it was good for a 12-year-old,” she says. “I’d made it up, based on all the best parts of my favorite stories....

By Bonnie C. McGrath A lawyer with a big smile walked in. “Oh no. Not you,” Scotti said, rolling her eyes. “We don’t have your case anymore. I threw it in the garbage. I don’t ever want to see you again. And I’m not being mean.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A month ago a guy named Jim Kielty had jury duty. What he saw he didn’t like....

The Young Girls of Rochefort By Jonathan Rosenbaum Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Most musicals shift back and forth between story (spoken dialogue) and song-and-dance numbers–sometimes creating queasy transitions just before or after these shifts, when we’re uncertain where we are stylistically. But The Young Girls of Rochefort often daringly places story and musical numbers on the screen simultaneously, mixing them in various ways and in different proportions....

Sagittarius Cold and Bouncy Not long after its release, former Wilson collaborator Gary Usher tried, with a studio project he dubbed Sagittarius. And in recent years the London-based High Llamas have become contenders, making several albums in a style explicitly reminiscent of Wilson’s. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Gary Usher first hooked up with Brian Wilson, who was then only 19, in early 1962....

Secret Stories: Recent Films From the Avant-Garde Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The best of these elusive narratives use images to evoke emotional states but never resolve into linear stories. In Elise Hurwitz’s cryptic I Raise My Arm (1993), text and image fragments appear on moving strips of film seen within the image; this seems pretty abstract at first but soon becomes powerfully moving....

BALLYDOWSE 2/19, big Horse Here’s one more reason to keep opening the mail: The Land, the Bread, and the People (Grrr), a great and totally unheralded record by Ballydowse, a band whose nine members belong to the Jesus People USA commune in Uptown. They wear their anticorporate, antifascist politics on their sleeves, though their message can be hard to decipher without the lyric sheet, since their sleeves move so fast when they play their shit-kicking Celtic crunch punk....

SUPERPUSSYVIXEN, GO FASTER, KILL, Sweetback Productions, at National Pastime Theater. When the Sweetback folks opened their send-up of Ed Wood’s famously bad Plan Nine From Outer Space two years ago, they set a new standard for shows based on appropriated material. Unfortunately, nothing Sweetback has done since has been as inspired or well done. Their last show, Female Trouble, was a misguided attempt to parody a parody. And their current show isn’t much better....

The Invention of Love He may keep that will and can; And how am I to face the odds Ask most people to name a homosexual British poet of the late Victorian era and they’ll almost certainly say Oscar Wilde: actually an Irishman, Wilde has come to epitomize the perils and pleasures of gay English life in the late 1800s, especially to Americans. Many are familiar with the sexual subtexts of The Importance of Being Earnest and The Picture of Dorian Gray as well as with De Profundis, the heart-wrenching missive Wilde wrote to his beloved Alfred Douglas in Reading Gaol, where he was imprisoned for “gross indecency” after his homosexuality was exposed....

By Michael Miner Maybe, maybe not. Jim Ryan’s pledge last month made headlines across Illinois, but not in the Tribune or Sun-Times. He was reacting to an extraordinary investigation that saw 14 Illinois newspapers–though none based in downtown Chicago–test the willingness of public officials to turn over public documents. Reporters visited public offices in every one of the state’s 102 counties, and the results, published in late July, were appalling....

Was discrimination the problem? Percentage of adults with disabilities holding jobs in 1986: 33. Percentage holding jobs in 1998, eight years after passage of the Americans With Disabilities Act: 29 (Washington Post, July 23). Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » As others see us. Architecture critic Paul Goldberger, writing in the New Yorker (August 10), condemns a proposed New York development as “another example of the North Michigan Avenue school of urbanism–the school that specializes in fifty-story vacuum cleaners that suck the energy off the streets and exhaust it into private atriums....

boos.qxd Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I have been listening to Dick Buckley since 1955, except for the few years in the 60s when jazz was doing so poorly on radio that he was forced to announce “the world’s most beautiful music” on WAIT. Buckley plays artists from Armstrong and Morton to Coltrane and Mingus, and knows how to program so that the music connects....

GRAWE-REIJSEGER-HEMINGWAY TRIO Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » By the time German pianist Georg Grawe made himself an honorary member of the Chicago scene with a six-month residency in 1997, his remarkable trio with Dutch cellist Ernst Reijseger and New York drummer Gerry Hemingway had already gone dormant. And lately he’s been concentrating on solo work and larger groups, like his quintet on the recent Concert in Berlin 1996 (Wobbly Rail), featuring saxist Mats Gustafsson and trombonist Sebi Tramontana....

Havana: Walker Evans and Andrew Moore By Fred Camper Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Yet several of Evans’s apparently candid shots are among the most powerful images I’ve ever seen. They may have an offhand look, but their forms collide with a peculiar intensity and energy. Each photo is animated by a tension between Evans’s formal arrangements and the uncontrollable chaos of life. In number 12 on the checklist, three men stand in front of a newsstand wearing panama hats, vertical forms that repeat like columns....

Disappeared A mystery lurks at the heart of Disappeared, but it’s not the one the playwright intended. Phyllis Nagy’s 1995 play is a kind of philosophical thriller-cum-murder mystery. One night a curious man in an ill-fitting suit appears in a Hell’s Kitchen bar, ready to chat with anyone about anything. The only other customer that night is the perpetually pickled Sarah Casey, lip-synching to the Turtles and dancing about in an attempt to forget her miserable life....

ROSCOE MITCHELL & THE NOTE FACTORY Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Now that the Art Ensemble of Chicago is pretty much on autopilot, restless reedist and composer Roscoe Mitchell is doing his most exciting work with his outside projects. Last year he presented his monstrous mid-70s percussion-heavy sound study “The Maze” as part of a historical concert at the Museum of Contemporary Art, and Delmark Records recently issued In Walked Buckner, a quartet outing with pianist Jodie Christian, bassist Reggie Workman, and drummer Albert “Tootie” Heath that glides effortlessly between tricky postbop and pin-drop textural explorations....

SPIDER SALOFF Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Spider Saloff likes to dip a toe in jazz, keeping her rhythms relatively limber and indulging in an occasional scat chorus. But she remains primarily a cabaret singer–in fact, the best cabaret singer gigging regularly in Chicago. In mid-September she warmed up for her current three-week engagement–and closed out the first century AG (after Gershwin)–with a pair of supper-and-stage shows devoted entirely to George Gershwin’s music....

By Ben Joravsky That’s right. Molaro’s proposing to take away a right most Chicagoans hold sacred: the right to park in front of one’s home. More exactly, the right to keep outsiders from parking there first. Some zones make more sense than others. There are Lincoln Parkers, for instance, who can talk for hours about the frustrations of looking for a spot in which to cram their cars on a bustling Saturday night....

Being One Being Living Gertrude Stein believed that plays should be landscapes, visual journeys for audiences with the curiosity and detachment of tourists, attentive to the alien details of another culture. Only then, she felt, could she keep up with the complexities of the playwright’s story, creating in essence her own snapshot of a place distant from the familiar world. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The combination of the abstract and the specific is what makes these performances so evocative....

Team Player He’s never given an interview. Sportswriter Jerome Holtzman says Yosh is the story he’s been chasing for 35 years. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Pitchers dust their hands with rosin to dry them on the mound. Ryne Sandberg says, “Yosh has always had his way of doing things. He still makes his own pine tar rags. He might still make his own rosin bags....