To the editor, regarding “Cat Fight,” 8/27/99: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I was sickened by the attitudes of Mr. Sarraj and Ms. Melvin. The tortured life of a terrified cat played a supporting role to political BS and whining. This story is not about any person (typical human arrogance). It is about millions of stray cats who live in terror every day because of these two people and millions like them....

All’s Fair at the Art Fair Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “This is a big party for the Chicago art world every year,” says Miller, who’s participated in five of the past six fairs. “It’s a huge disappointment for the art-ists in a gallery when you’re suddenly not invited.” Last December both Miller and Belloc Lowndes received form letters from Ilana Vardy, director of Art 1999 Chicago, telling them they’d been put on a waiting list....

Ghetto In September 1943 Bruno Kittel, the 21-year-old Nazi officer in charge of Vilna (now Vilnius), sat playing the piano as the Lithuanian Jewish ghetto there was being liquidated. When a young boy threw himself at Kittel’s feet and pleaded for his life, Kittel reportedly shot him with one hand and kept playing with the other. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This disquieting honesty has been the hallmark of Sobol’s work for more than 20 years: he’s made a career out of humanizing his enemies and demythologizing his heroes....

By Frank Melcori I don’t know why I took up the trumpet. I never had a desire to play one. Somehow, I guess, it provided my only emotional attachment during those first few years after my divorce. Like they say: Go figure. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » So there I was, standing on Halsted, when I realized that both my trumpet and my car keys had been stolen....

By Sridhar Pappu “Hey Matt,” Kittle said. “You tell that scorekeeper, you tell him that that play last night was a hit not an error.” “He’s got it out of his system,” Grossman says. “I hope.” Most lives change incrementally. There’s rarely that singular theatrical moment that allows us to say, “Chapter’s over, next chapter.” Kittle, though, has led a life full of dramatic watersheds. The first came at a tryout camp run by Dodgers’ scout Glen Van Proyen at LaPorte High School in July 1976....

Imports Fill the Empty Bottle Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Floridis is from the northern city of Thessaloniki, where Greek and Balkan cultures mingle freely–and where the clarinet plays a more prominent role in music than it does in western Europe. Floridis has also recorded rembetika (the guttural “Greek blues”) and lightning-fast Macedonian brass-band music, and brings a rough-hewn microtonality and thick, sensuous tone to collaborations with his northern counterparts....

Readers of Mark Twain will remember Cairo as the town Jim and Huck rafted toward on the Mississippi. At the southernmost tip of Illinois, it oversaw the confluence of the Mississippi and the Ohio River, which would take Jim into the free north. But they missed it during a period of heavy fog and instead found themselves drawn into the deep south. After writing this plot twist, Twain put Huckleberry Finn aside for six years, unsure where to go next....

By Michael Miner Maccarone oversees eight versions of the Weekly Readers written for children from prekindergarten through grade six, Current Events for older kids, and several other children’s magazines. The editors of each magazine are guided by an advisory board of six teachers, and the staff make frequent visits to classrooms in Stamford, Connecticut, where the Weekly Reader is based, to speak with teachers, parents, and students. She wants to hear from all these voices before she puts a word on paper....

Miguel Mancillas, cofounder of Antares Danza Contemporanea of Hermosillo, Mexico, says the piece he’s choreographed in collaboration with Mordine & Company Dance Theatre, Desert Eye, is about the effort to bring forth life from stones–whether in the desert or the city. But frankly I see little barrenness in this quartet, which is full of life from start to finish: when a dancer lifts her shirt to expose her stomach, seeming to examine herself for some injury or wound; when two dancers hold each other’s faces, or one attends another curled on the floor; when the performers whisper urgently but unintelligibly to one another in low, prayerful voices....

North Loop Takes Center Stage Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But when all the work is finished will Daley’s downtown theater district be a hit or a flop? The last few years have been a difficult time for the local theater industry, and federal studies indicate that America is on the verge of cultural change–many young people who will be middle-aged consumers in 10 or 20 years may have little or no interest in the so-called highbrow performing arts, including theater....

Postcards on the Edge Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Johnson and McCabe first saw postcard advertising in Europe, where the practice became popular in the early 90s: create a catchy visual image, reproduce it on thousands of cards with contact information on the back, put 20 different cards in a rack, and place the racks where people will take the cards. Voila–advertising. Johnson and McCabe helped introduce the cards in Chicago when they started On the House in 1994, offering artists, small businesses, cultural institutions, and national clients a relatively inexpensive way to advertise....

Skatalites Nowadays musicians tend to take for granted their ability to raise political awareness; for some it’s all in a day’s work. But popular music hasn’t always reflected the politics of the populace, and in the heady atmosphere of postcolonial Jamaica, the practice was still practically unheard of. Though they existed for just 14 months, from 1964 to ’65, the early Jamaican ska band the Skatalites heralded not only future incarnations of reggae but political pop from Curtis Mayfield to the Sex Pistols to Public Enemy....

The Jack Kerouac revival, which began several years ago with the publication of The Portable Jack Kerouac and Jack Kerouac: Selected Letters, 1940-1956, and continued in 1997 with the 40th-anniversary edition of On the Road, shows no signs of coming to an end. Nearly 30 years after his death in Saint Petersburg, Florida, at the age of 47, there’s more Kerouac in print than ever before, more information available about him than in all the books about Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs combined, and still more books by and about him on the way....

Tweedy’s Woody Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Guthrie, who died in 1967 of Huntington’s disease, spent most of his last 17 years in hospitals, but he continued to write songs; Tweedy says there may be as many as 3,000 unpublished song lyrics in Guthrie’s New York archives. Over the years plenty of artists have tried unsuccessfully to convince Woody’s youngest daughter, Nora, to let them put the words to music....

The Iphigenia Cycle And the chorus? What can any director do to make a contemporary audience care about a crowd of people who speak largely in unison, for the most part providing the theatrical equivalent of cinematic background shots? In Euripides’ Iphigenia plays–Iphigenia at Aulis and Iphigenia in Taurus, here performed as Iphigenia parts one and two, although they were written in reverse chronological order several years apart–the problem of the chorus is a particularly thorny one, as they are present almost constantly....

powell.qxd Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I feel that I am qualified to make the above evaluation, as I spent almost four years in the U.S. Army as an infantryman (1st gunner on a caliber 30 light machine gun). I was with the 66th Infantry Regiment, assigned to Patton’s Army, as infantry support to one of his tank units. We fought through France, Germany, and halfway through Austria before the war ended....

By Robert Heuer Two years ago, while watching the Florida Marlins win the World Series on television at a friend’s condo in suburban Miami, Sosa met Mexican-American attorney Art Sandoval. He mentioned his troubles managing the building in San Pedro de Macoris. And at the ballplayers’ request, Sandoval visited the city; he saw there weren’t many businesses that could afford the $250 monthly rent. “There wasn’t a market for the Plaza,” Sosa says....

Friday 8 October A quiet, attractive 30ish woman quits her job as an ophthalmologist and places an ad for a mate in a Taipei paper. She receives more than 100 responses and meets a series of men for conversation, tea, and occasional sympathy. Some prospective hubbies are studied in long single takes, some are revealed in quid pro quo interactions with the heroine, while the remaining interviewees are glimpsed only in rapid montages....

FASTBACKS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » If you wanted to get cynical about it, you could say the Fastbacks’ career has been a not terribly lucrative two-decade quest to make the great lost Buzzcocks album. But the thing that separates the Seattle quartet from the gazillion other bands trying to squeeze down that particular bottleneck is that they’ve succeeded–many times. There’s not much to say about their new The Day That Didn’t Exist (Spinart) except that they’ve done it again....

Hall of Fame Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Hall is best known for writing “Harper Valley P.T.A.,” probably the only country song to inspire a movie and a sitcom. But in his nearly four-decade career he has also worked as a radio jingle writer and DJ, written four novels, and toured college campuses lecturing on literature with old pals like Alex Haley, accumulating a diverse but rabid fan base along the way....