My friends and I were discussing the great horror movies when someone claimed that The Texas Chainsaw Massacre was based on a true story. I went to the video store, and sure enough on the back of the box it said the movie was based on real events. I rented it, and after my friends and I watched it we got to wondering just how true this story is. Cecil, help us out here....

By Jordan Marsh The lawsuit was filed because of Rita Gonzalez, a working-class mother of three who never finished high school. In 1987 she and her family had moved from their small apartment on 19th Street near Damen to northwest-suburban Addison so that she could be closer to her new job, which would pay her almost as much as the two full-time jobs she was working in Chicago. Dismayed by such incidents, Gonzalez began to wonder if there was something she could do....

THE LIVING, Famous Door Theatre Company. With ten strong, meticulous actors reliving the bewildering horror of London’s great black plague, this production is as smart, entertaining, and compelling as I can imagine Anthony Clarvoe’s schematic term paper of a play to be. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But The Living is theater for people who want to be served a big, steaming plate of irrelevance with a side order of reassuring half-truths....

THE PLAYBOY OF THE WESTERN WORLD and LOVE’S LABOUR’S LOST, Yugen Theatre, at Footsteps Theatre. When it comes to ambitious rotating repertory, Court Theatre has a plucky north-side rival in Yugen. The 15 company members double up in two plays about the deceptions that can foster or kill love, enacting Shakespeare’s second-rate comedy indifferently and John Millington Synge’s inexhaustible 1907 delight superbly. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Playboy of the Western World is perhaps the most gorgeous play in our language, and in Lynn Ann Bernatowicz’s pitch-perfect revival it’s a two-hour, four-star joy....

Is it possible to have eyes of two different colors? I scoffed when I heard this at work recently, but others said it happens all the time, and one guy even claimed to know a woman who was “bi” (colored, that is). Are these people imagining things, or is it just that I’m a wuss who never looks people in the eye? –John O’Keefe, Westchester, Illinois Best of Chicago voting is live now....

By Michael Miner Shaw said that though Tribune editors called the article a coincidence and though the reporter claimed he’d written it on his own initiative and hadn’t even known about the marketing partnership, “skeptical eyebrows were raised.” Shaw commented, “Where integrity is concerned, appearances can often be as important as reality, and many reporters worry about their credibility being undermined by just such inter-jurisdictional ventures.” Best of Chicago voting is live now....

From the pages of The Realist ¥ Number 137, Autumn 1997 (P.O. Box 1230, Venice, CA 90294; $2) Wes Cross, in the newsletter of South Carolina’s “United Militias,” has described McVeigh and his army buddies as “Great Americans” and “Heroes to all patriotic Americans” for their role in the bombing murders of innocent men, women, and children. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Former president George Bush has also spoken up on national television to congratulate Timothy McVeigh and his accomplices, describing the bombing as “just and necessary....

By Michael Miner Chew on that if you will. But I’m going to push on to what was most interesting about the issue–its pictures, and not a one of them more provocative than the cover. To sell the magazine, the New Art Examiner picked a print by Inez van Lamsweerde of a pink, rouged, crimson-lipped, shirtless prepubescent girl fingering a pale blue guitar. “Kick Ass!” asserts the instrument’s gleaming shell....

Poetry slams have come a long way since November 1985, when Marc Smith and a handful of others–calling themselves the Chicago Poetry Ensemble–began reading their poetry at the old Get Me High Lounge in Bucktown. A year later Smith moved the readings to the Green Mill on Sunday nights, and the newly dubbed Uptown Poetry Slam took off. Today there are poetry slams across the country, in every city large enough to support a coffeehouse or two....

NOVEMBER “We used to get a lot of people who were outraged and would say ‘How dare you!’” when Fur-Free Friday started 15 years ago, says Kay Sievers, director of Animal Rights Mobilization of Chicago, the local sponsor of the annual multicity antifur protest. These days, passersby occasionally join the leafleteers. “Fur has become an issue that has sunk into the public conscience. Sales are way down, but nowadays they’re selling a lot of things with fur trim....

GREYBOY ALLSTARS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Welcome to Fat City–or at least the white ghetto therein. The Greyboy Allstars, five guys from San Diego who kick the living daylights out of bristling vintage jazz-funk, aren’t the least bit embarrassed by their mostly Caucasian heritage. Quite the opposite: it’s spotlighted in the band’s name and in the liner notes by Fred Wesley, the trombonist from James Brown’s horn section....

By Ben Joravsky Davidson was born and raised in Aliquippa, Pennsylvania (the steel-making town that produced Mike Ditka). His father was an auto mechanic, his mother a beautician (and both, incidentally, champion bowlers enshrined in the Pennsylvania Bowlers Hall of Fame). Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Throughout the 60s and 70s he was at the forefront of antiwar and civil rights protests, driving from town to town for several years as a Students for a Democratic Society campus organizer....

Other Voices, Other Rooms With Lothaire Bluteau, Anna Thomson, David Speck, April Turner, and Frank Taylor. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This is appropriate, because Capote’s strength in Other Voices, Other Rooms is above all stylistic and atmospheric–a capacity to evoke a fever dream in exploring a fanciful and allegorical version of his own past. A third-person southern gothic narrative about a 13-year-old boy, Joel, sent from New Orleans after the death of his mother to a crumbling, isolated plantation house to live with his father, whom he’s never met, the novel was described by Capote as “a poetic explosion in highly suppressed emotion....

Back in the early 70s, when Dan Troiani’s wife, Kathy, was still just his girlfriend, she dragged him to Adler Planetarium. Troiani had lived in Chicago all his life but had never been to Adler, or to a sky show anywhere else. A science-shy film major at Columbia College, his interest in space was limited to episodes of Star Trek. But that day, when the dome went dark and the sky turned on, Troiani turned on too–sparked by talk of quasars and black holes and Voyager missions....

By Cara Jepsen One fan told how Manilow got her through breast cancer and depression. Another was considering suicide after a series of setbacks. Then she read his book Sweet Life and received a box set of his music for Christmas. “Nancy listened to every word of every song, and miraculously nearly every song sounded like it was meant for her alone,” Strunk writes. Nancy wrote Manilow a 25-page letter, which was never answered....

By Ben Joravsky Developers are already circling the property, ready to swoop down with million-dollar proposals for town houses and condos. “I can’t believe all the changes in the community this issue represents,” says Father Joseph Morin, the priest in charge of Saint Alphonsus. “I had a developer offer me $1.5 million for the convent. That’s unbelievable. I never thought it would come to this.” Best of Chicago voting is live now....

PUFF DADDY & THE FAMILY Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Producer, label owner, and recording artist Sean “Puffy” Combs (aka Puff Daddy) has practically owned the pop charts for the last year or two–longer if you consider that he found new-jack superstars Mary J. Blige and Jodeci as an A and R agent for the Uptown label. The best-known artist on his own Bad Boy Records remains the late Notorious B....

Same Old Story Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I really was disappointed to read the sad story of the anonymous man who as an anonymous boy was molested by an anonymous priest (now dead). I really have to ask, what’s the point of this? If this were a new and unique story it would be one thing, but we have heard and read this so many times....

Approximately 2,000 medical studies were conducted in the year 2000–and there’s still no cure for cancer. But who’s complaining? The news out of medical science this year was often encouraging. Then again it was often worrisome, frequently baffling, or sometimes all of the above. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The graph below shows a year’s worth of highs and lows from the world of medicine....

True West De-Jah Vou Productions By Jack Helbig Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Shepard approaches each work with a fresh eye, an open heart, and a willingness to try anything if it helps him find his play. The result is that even his most conventional work retains a wild eccentricity at its heart that keeps it from becoming just another kitchen-sink drama about fighting lovers or unhappy families or bickering brothers....