FULCRUM POINT Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Ensembles with ambitious crossover agendas have come and gone in this town, but Fulcrum Point, a new chamber group founded by conductor and ace trumpeter Stephen Burns, may outlast them all. Most of the seven members who’ll be on hand for its debut this weekend also play in the American Concerto Orchestra–another Burns brainchild–which displayed uncommon exuberance last March in its own first Chicago appearance....

FULL MOON VAUDEVILLE Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Full Moon Vaudeville” is nothing new, and neither are most of the performers in it. But what began as a benefit evening at the Lunar Cabaret several years ago to help out such organizations as the Greater Chicago Food Depository and the women’s program at the Howard Brown Health Center has moved up in the world: after being part of the Museum of Contemporary Art’s summer solstice celebration last June, this cabaret event has now been given its own one-night slot at the MCA....

GRANT PARK ORCHESTRA Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Chicago-based soprano Jonita Lattimore graduated from the Lyric Opera’s two-year apprenticeship program, the Center for American Artists, last year, but before she’d even enrolled she’d demonstrated remarkable flexibility and poise. In the early 90s she played a secondary role in Chicago Opera Theater’s astute production of Virgil Thomson’s Four Saints in Three Acts, and from ’94 to ’97 she performed with the Houston Grand Opera’s training ensemble....

By William K. But not until I was standing in rubber boots on the frozen lake, my eyes locked on a Styrofoam bobber floating in a six-inch hole punched in the ice, did the reason for that odd sequence of events finally surface. I wasn’t a whiny kid or one of the kids who arrived late and left early on the special bus. I was a pretty regular third-grader. Once the janitor caught and dragged me, and Randy, to the principal’s office for stealing cartons of chocolate milk from the cooler....

Gary Giddins caught the jazz bug the summer he was 15, when he and a dozen or so other teenagers from the northeast, riding the rails in a sort of alternative to camp, pulled into New Orleans. “It was 1963, the height of the civil rights thing,” the Long Island native recalls. “When we got to the motel the first thing we saw were three doors labeled ‘men,’ ‘women,’ and ‘colored men’–‘colored women’ must have been somewhere else....

JONATHAN RICHMAN Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Jojo’s hat trick in There’s Something About Mary–he had three tunes on the sound track, wrote the movie’s original music, and appeared on-screen as a goofy Greek chorus–is his most public accomplishment of the 90s, but it’s not necessarily his greatest. His five most recent records, including the all-Spanish Te Vas a Emocionar! from ’93 and last year’s I’m So Confused (Vapor), would be enough to earn him a place as one of rock’s great oddballs–if he hadn’t secured it decades ago....

KOOL KEITH/ROB SWIFT Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Now that Garth Brooks has tried out for the San Diego Padres and released a single as the fictional pop star Chris Gaines, Kool Keith is starting to look almost sane. But the notorious hip-hop oddball has added a few new alter egos to his repertoire since he last performed in Chicago–back when all he had was Big Willie Smith, the kinky, foulmouthed auteur of Sex Style, and Dr....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Once again, Wesley Kimler rears his shaven head in complaint, and the Reader is more than willing to offer a soapbox [January 22]. The former is no big deal: we’ve heard it all before. It’s just too bad that your editors again have been taken in by what now must surely be regarded as Kimler’s scam: if the public won’t pay sufficient attention to his art, it can be forced to pay attention to him....

Little Movie, Big Splash? Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » For Genett and Agosto, both in their late 30s, success has been a long time coming. Agosto came to Chicago from New Jersey and got his degree in filmmaking from Columbia College; since then he’s taught screenwriting at the school and slugged it out as a director of industrial films and low-budget music videos. Genett, a native of Wisconsin, has worked as a carpenter and done part-time production design....

LOW Blow Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In fact Kraus fell victim to an ideological rift that isolated him from McDonough and the board. Kraus considered LOW “a purveyor of serious art” committed to operettas no one else in Chicago would touch. “I am proud of the fact we dusted off a piece like The Duchess of Chicago,” he says, referring to the forgotten relic by Austrian expatriate Emmerich Kalman that was presented last fall....

As cult figures go in popular music, Andy and the Bey Sisters rank with the cultiest. The trio of singing siblings from Newark, New Jersey–Andy Bey, who also plays piano, and his older sisters Geraldine and Salome–started out in the mid-1950s as an east coast lounge act. But their first European tour–a two-month gig that stretched into two years–made them a favorite of the cognoscenti who heard them at such venues as Paris’s famed Blue Note nightclub....

By Ben Joravsky The decision to close Jones has more to do with the changing demographics of the South Loop than with anything happening at the school. Even a casual one-day visit demonstrates that it’s living up to its reputation. It’s a two-year school for juniors and seniors, who transfer in from all over the city. There are no academic requirements or entrance exams–it’s open to all. The curriculum has few liberal arts courses beyond the basics like history and English; students concentrate on such subjects as marketing and banking....

RALPH STANLEY & the CLINCH MOUNTAIN BOYS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » They don’t come much more legendary than Ralph Stanley, the banjo master who for two decades led one of the greatest bluegrass bands of all time with his brother, Carter. If he’d thrown in the towel when Carter died, in 1966, he’d still be revered for his post-Earl Scruggs instrumental fluency and his soaring, soulful tenor....

Your answer to Wanna Get Off Before We’re Legal, those two young girls who want to get their hands on vibrators, was inadequate. Why didn’t you advise them to order something out of a catalog? The Good Vibrations catalog has everything they’re looking for. Surely they can’t card over the phone. –Mail Order Fan Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Other than committing fraud, what does Good Vibrations recommend youngsters in need of vibrators do?...

Shut Up and Laugh! Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Let me make a New Year’s resolution for you: take some bigger risks with your theatrical dollars in 1998. Lord knows Chicago is full of dicey, hole-in-the-wall performance spaces–which often provide a hefty artistic return on a meager admission charge. You can start your year with one of the biggest, most promising gambles in town, the Factory Theater’s “Shut Up and Laugh!...

gerard.qxd Mr. Langer suggests that we should “follow the money” on each of these films. It would be good if he did the same. For example, his chart implies that Sony Pictures Classics paid the producers of In the Company of Men to make the film. They did not. The five-figure (not “seven-figure”) budget of this film was raised through the family and friends of the director Neil LaBute. The answer print was loaned to them by the film laboratory....

By Jon Fine Guitarists who create heaviness all by themselves, through strategic riffing and thick tone, are more rare. Black Sabbath’s Tony Iommi is one of them. Jimmy Page is not, but with Bonham and bassist John Paul Jones behind him he may have recognized that he could concentrate on expanding Led Zeppelin’s tonal colors without costing the band a single ounce of weight. AC/DC is heavy, and Angus Young’s lead guitar accentuates the band’s raw physical thrust–but his lines are not heavy without Phil Rudd behind the drums....

Stupid Kids Stage Left Theatre Stupid Kids, the latest effort by the ever adventurous Roadworks Productions, dramatizes teen identity crises by focusing on four contemporary 17-year-old outcasts trapped in the suburban sterility of one Joseph McCarthy High School. Struggling to create authentic personalities, they find themselves turning into mere reflections of earlier generations’ rebellious role models–specifically, 50s icons James Dean, Natalie Wood, and Sal Mineo in the film Rebel Without a Cause....

Painter Anthony Izzo never cared much for the traditional art-market system, where the gallery owner is God, the artist is powerless, and the art is presented in arid little white-wine-and-attitude openings. That system is all about exclusivity, while Izzo’s impulses, rising from the meat grinder of a southwest-side Catholic gay boyhood, are definitely in the opposite direction. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Even as an artist, when I used to go in those galleries I’d feel so uncomfortable,” Izzo says....

Lots of performers claim to be multicultural, but few straddle as many different cultures as gracefully and powerfully as writer, actor, and spoken-word performer Miles Merrill. Born and raised in Chicago, he’s the product of a very 60s-style mixed marriage: his father was a Black Panther, and his mother could trace her ancestry back to the Mayflower. Then, when Merrill moved to Australia three years ago, he began performing hip, hilarious monologues that explored the myriad differences between Australian and American life....