Roamin’ Catholics Welcome to the Church of the Holy Family, which attracts anywhere from two to twenty worshipers for 1 PM Sunday mass in a second-floor loft shared with Lutheran, Episcopal, and Jewish congregations at Grace Place, 637 S. Dearborn. If the vestments and liturgy don’t seem much different from what you’d find at Old Saint Mary’s a few blocks east, that’s as it should be, says Reverend James Alan Wilkowski, bishop of the northwest diocese....

I am a 46-year-old straight male who decided to check out the escort scene after ending a long-term relationship. I went up to Vancouver, B.C., on vacation and met a 23-year-old escort and fell madly in, well, something. She is my picture of a perfect woman, very romantic and a good conversationalist. I was totally smitten. I haven’t been able to get her out of my mind and can think of nothing else....

I do HIV testing and counseling and recently had a client come in for testing who had sores all over his body. He said he wanted to rule out AIDS but acknowledged that it was the least of his concerns right now. Said he has bugs crawling in his skin and nobody believes him. I wrote him off as a lunatic. What do you think? –Norm Fones, Portland, Oregon Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Spice Girls The Fat of the Land This is probably why the music press has handled the Spice Girls and the Prodigy with kid gloves. Few critics want to come across as curmudgeons dumping on the kiddies’ new fave raves or clueless old farts who are out of step with the latest trends, especially when it’s just as easy to condone them with a sly wink. Those who have lashed out have resorted to the same tired arguments about authenticity: The Prodigy isn’t really a band, it’s a front for Liam Howlett, a programming whiz with a knack for punching in high-octane drum grooves and pecking out extremely memorable synth riffs....

Friday Featuring Billy Branch 5:00 PM Fruteland Jackson 4:00 PM Chico Banks Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Guitarist Lockwood learned the basics from his mother’s boyfriend–none other than the immortal Robert Johnson–then made his own mark on the blues with a swinging, jazzy style that served him well in hundreds of classic sessions for Chess and other local labels in the 50s. Though until recently he hadn’t made a lot of records under his own name, he’s backed Little Walter, Sunnyland Slim, Eddie Boyd, and others....

Bringing ‘Em Back Alive Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Airplay, heard every Saturday between 4 and 7 PM, started in 1981 as a showcase for local bands. Most college stations have similar programs, but when St. Clair and Johnson, with engineers Paul Dryer and Kevan Harris, took over the show in February 1996, a six-figure grant from NU alum Arthur McCoy’s foundation had recently provided the means to convert the station’s grungy, smoky basement digs into a clean, bright studio with a separate facility for broadcasting and recording live music....

By J.R. Jones Gradually the crowds are returning. “Last week we showed [Andre de Toth’s] Pitfall,” says Marks. “Who ever heard of Pitfall? That was a pure vanity booking. I had never seen the film. I’d always wanted to. So I threw myself a bone. And we had almost 200 people for it!” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » At three dollars a head–two for seniors–the series draws serious cineasts but still fulfills its original mission of giving families an inexpensive night out....

Before Ray Panice goes out and about, he makes sure to don a hat, usually a gray or brown fedora. “A hat makes you look like something,” he says. “It has style and character, and it identifies you. People can see you from a mile away, and they know it’s you. My wife always knows that it’s me across the way. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » New World Hatters occupies a busy stretch of West Madison dominated by Korean-run shoe and clothing stores....

Ursula von Rydingsvard The titles of von Rydingsvard’s 14 works at the Chicago Cultural Center–the show surveys her two-decade career–are similarly allusive, referring to individuals, man-made objects, and natural features, sometimes within a single work, such as Lace Mountains (1989). This eight-foot-square, three-foot-deep wall of wood has seven thin vertical ridges in its upper portion jutting out toward the viewer. If these are mountains, they form a rather repetitive range, and the landscape they “rise” from has been rotated 90 degrees....

Fireworks Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In this complex flashback narrative that fuses danger, sorrow, and loveliness, detective Nishi (writer-director Takeshi Kitano) is a quiet yet volatile man who takes a road trip with his dying wife, while his partner Horibe (Ren Osugi) trains himself to be an artist after being paralyzed on the job. Intercutting between the lonely, productive Horibe and Nishi, whose time with his wife is periodically interrupted by violent face-offs with organized criminals, the movie is as full of shocking, staccato brutality as meditative calm....

Forces of Nature With Sandra Bullock, Ben Affleck, Maura Tierney, Steve Zahn, and Blythe Danner. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » If screwball comedy was in fact “a special kind of women’s game, nearly always favoring the heroine to win,” as critic James Harvey has written, It Happened One Night is the female sex’s first and biggest screwball victory. The film begins with Ellie Andrews, the heiress played by Colbert, taking a flying leap off the side of her father’s yacht, and it ends with her dashing joyously across the lawn of her father’s estate in a white satin wedding dress....

FOUNTAINS OF WAYNE/OWSLEY Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “A man’s gotta eat,” Will Owsley recently told Rolling Stone, explaining why he’d played guitar for country diva Shania Twain. Both he and Fountains of Wayne’s Adam Schlesinger, 60s popsters at heart, have done their share of industry hackwork: Owsley spent a year and a half backing Amy Grant after his band, the Semantics, was dropped by Geffen and its album shelved; Schlesinger, who cranked out “That Thing You Do!...

Coming Forth by Day What Nana decides to do, Nana does. That much is plain in her resolute musculature and the fact that she’s still dancing, though she’s past 60 and requires surgery on one knee. It’s plain in her intense, monolithic presence when performing: her conviction runs like a current through her arms, torso, and sturdily planted feet. She’s described herself as more a dancer than a choreographer, and dancers need willpower, a whole lot of it–they must understand that the soul makes the body....

JOHNNIE BASSETT Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Guitarist and singer Johnnie Bassett built his reputation in Detroit, where in the 1950s and ’60s he led local bands that accompanied visiting artists like Little Willie John and Ruth Brown. Eventually he ended up in the studio band at Fortune Records, where he cut sides with Andre Williams, Nolan Strong, and other early soul vocalists. He also did some work at Motown–that’s his choppy guitar comping on the Miracles’ “Shop Around” from 1960....

Heroic Painting By Fred Camper Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Bo Bartlett in Civil War (1995) attempts to create new kinds of heroes, showing two women mourning fallen soldiers. The wife of a Confederate soldier is in the background, while the center is occupied by a white woman cradling a bare-chested black Union soldier in a pieta pose. Her body rises centered against the sky, and together with her reflection in some water and a large patch of snow, her head and torso make a crucifix shape....

devise.qxd Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Orfield is praised for producing “stunning,” easily readable maps of suburban fiscal and economic disparities in the Chicago area. But he is faulted for failing to come up with map patterns consistent with his contention that fiscal disparities cause neighborhood and school decline. MacArthur Foundation comes up short because of excessive political correctness and timidity and reliance on consensus rather than confrontational politics in drawing policy implications from the report findings....

Debbie Tideman used to sell lingerie at parties in the southwest suburbs. Giggling over oils and frilly things, the women asked her questions about sex. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » So she told the women about what she calls the X-spot, which she says she and her husband of almost 20 years discovered by accident when she had an orgasm that shook her from “the knees to the midriff....

More than 60 years ago, in high school, my best friend was an athlete. I developed the habit of sniffing his sweaty gym clothing and/or his jockstraps, which sexually aroused me. The practice was very shameful, and not once in the many years since have I done anything similar. As my life nears its end, I want to have the opportunity to engage in this activity one more time. Is there an athlete anywhere from whom I might purchase appropriate pieces of clothing?...

I’m stuck in a mentally and sometimes physically abusive relationship with a total cunt. She’s whaled on me before in drunken rages; however, I’ve never hit her back because I just can’t hit a chick. But she’s only a cunt when she’s drunk, and that’s only some of the time. The rest of the time she’s a totally cool, sweet, funny, great person to be around who’s extremely hot looking and hot in bed....

I’m a straight white 21-year-old college student dating a 19-year-old straight white girl. She has rich white parents, and I have rich white parents, and we both live in big white houses. Her parents love my parents, my parents love her, her parents love me. You’re bright, you’re white, and you’re in college–you don’t need me to tell you what you have to do. To salvage your sex life and your sanity, you’re gonna have to look that bright white girl straight in the eye, open your big white pie hole, and say the words that’ll break her heart....