To the editor: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Last week’s piece by Lewis Lazare about the Joffrey Ballet of Chicago and the Auditorium Theatre was terribly misleading [October 8]. The Auditorium Theatre Council’s mission and obligation to the public is the stewardship of the Adler and Sullivan jewel, the Auditorium Theatre. In July 1998 we increased the historic-restoration fee to $2 per ticket to bring us in line with the fees charged at other historic theaters across the country....

KRUDER & DORFMEISTER Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Probably because it’s even easier to muck around with a turntable than it is to bang out three chords on a guitar, the electronica craze has inspired a bevy of indistinguishable hacks. But the glut just makes the talented DJs stand out that much more. Vienna’s Peter Kruder and Richard Dorfmeister have been tinkering with decks and knobs together since 1993, several years before this music was recognized by the mainstream, and along the way they’ve carved a goodly niche for themselves....

There have been solo performers since at least the ancient Greeks: it’s likely Homer delivered his epics himself. But today no one has done more to popularize the form than Spalding Gray. His autobiographical narratives–about growing up in a Christian Science family, living in boho New York in the early 80s, or killing time on the set of The Killing Fields–have inspired hundreds of imitators, all anxious to tell the stories of their lives for fun and profit....

Lead Story Smooth Reactions Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Recent rages: Donovan Moore, 43, was cited for disorderly conduct in April in Janesville, Wisconsin, after he cut into a line of cars in a funeral procession and then made obscene gestures at the mourners. And in May, Ohio’s Barberton Herald ran an item that read: “A 33-year-old West Virginia man drove his vehicle into a 30-year-old Barberton woman’s fence, then tore her gate off its hinges....

Reputation Is a Fragile Thing: The Story of Cheap Trick Cheap Trick, you might have noticed, is in the midst of a rather unusual revival. Earlier this year Sony’s archival label Legacy issued At Budokan: The Complete Concert, and on Tuesday it will release “expanded editions” of the three albums that preceded the original Budokan: Cheap Trick (1977), In Color (1977), and Heaven Tonight (1978). Four shows at Metro this spring, each of which celebrated one of Cheap Trick’s first four albums, all sold out....

ORPHANS, Wing & Groove Theatre. With its small cast, uncomplicated set requirements, ample opportunities for stage combat, and ever popular theme–the dissolution of the American nuclear family–Lyle Kessler’s play is a favorite among small fledgling theater companies, revived nearly as often as its cousin, Sam Shepard’s True West. Kessler’s dark comedy features orphaned brothers Treat and Phillip, who essentially become surrogate sons to Harold, the shady businessman Treat had sought to rob; the play provides an excellent snapshot of the gritty, visceral Chicago style of theater made popular 15 to 20 years ago....

Dear editors, Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I well understand the impatience of your 7/16/99 cover story’s subjects with less than brilliant translations. In my 20s I was introduced to the French The Song of Roland and the Norwegian novel Pan by Knut Hamsun. The latter translation (by James W. McFarlane) I have read three times and have memorized his first paragraph along with chapter eight....

RICHARD GOODE Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It’s taken a long time for Richard Goode to truly answer his calling. He made his debut in 1962, but when I first paid serious attention to him, in the early 80s, he was still a timid, studious musician, a pianist with a lot of the right moves but no clue how to communicate emotions and ideas to an audience....

Letters to the editor: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Peter, Paul, and Mary are fine popular artists. I respect them and their work. I don’t share the view Peter, Paul, and Mary have watered down anything but have contributed to the popular music scene by offering quality entertainment. I have nothing but the highest reverence for my friend and source of inspiration Pete Seeger....

These Canadian popsters are yet another talented act–like Eleventh Dream Day or They Might Be Giants–that’s thriving in the ruins of a major-label deal. DGC released Sloan’s noisy debut album, Smeared, in ’93, but lost interest after a second release, Twice Removed, that sounded more like the Beach Boys than Soundgarden. The group disbanded briefly in 1995 but then came roaring back on their own Murderecords label: both One Chord to Another (1996) and the masterful Navy Blues (1998) seamlessly fuse 90s hard rock with the giant harmonies, moody keyboards, and superstar flash of early-70s power-pop idols like Wings, Utopia, Badfinger, and Big Star....

White Sox chairman Jerry Reinsdorf would like to rewrite history. On July 31, 1997, he gave up three of his best pitchers for six prospects, even though the White Sox were just 3 1/2 games out of first place. At the time he was reviled for calling it quits with more than two months left to go in the season. In his famous insult to fans, he said, “Anyone who thinks this White Sox team will catch Cleveland is crazy....

How would I go about putting a curse on someone? With voodoo, preferably? Is there someone I would have to contact, or could I do it all at home? Thanks in advance. –A quiet loner in northern California Our source here is ethnobotanist Wade Davis. In 1982 he visited Haiti to see if he could learn the secret of the “zombie powder” that local sorcerers, known as bokors, allegedly used to reanimate the dead....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But The Tipping Point doesn’t merely embody social climbing any more than it merely describes it. It contains a sub-rosa promise to make it possible. It’s the kind of book that’s bound to be a success as long as people like to think they’re important. Gladwell even provides a test that readers can take to see whether they themselves might be Connectors....

The Lynns The Lynns (Reprise) Patsy (named after her mom’s pal Patsy Cline) and Peggy go out of their way not to mention their mother by name in the liner notes, in which they thank her for sharing “the blessed gift of music.” Maybe they’re just modest; maybe they just want to stand on their own four feet. But if I were in their pointy little boots, I’d definitely worry about being swallowed up in Loretta’s massive shadow....

By John Greenfield Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » At the Cyclists Annual Messenger Picnic last Saturday bike messengers from Houston, Minneapolis, San Francisco, and New York City joined Chicago couriers in a series of contests. The 50 people who showed up sprinted from “Mishwack,” courier-speak for the intersection of Michigan and Wacker, to Chinatown and back. They scrambled in the “alleycat” race to find the most efficient route between the Sears Tower, the Amoco Building, the Board of Trade, the Hancock Building, and other landmarks, picking up envelopes and mailing tubes along the way....

When Alex Wald appeared on the Japanese game show Naruhodo, Za Warudo in 1993 he answered only one question: Ultraman’s father once appeared disguised as which character from European folklore? Wald slapped his buzzer and, for the first and only time during the taping, it worked. The answer: Santa Claus. The show, which was taped on the roof of a Holiday Inn in San Francisco’s Chinatown, pits the cultural literacy of its Japanese contestants against Americans who are Japanese culture aficionados....

FRIDAY 6/23 – THURSDAY 6/29 As part of a “cybersolstice out of control” a marching band of costumed mutants will shamble out of the MCA tonight into a “lab” situated in front of the museum, where a toxic spill will birth a giant, spewing, dancing blob that’ll threaten to engulf the audience. EE/Environmental Encroachment’s Third Summer Solstice performance begins at 8 and is just one of dozens of activities crammed into the fest that runs from 5:30 today until 5 PM tomorrow at the museum 220 E....

The trouble with writing about experimental films is that you can’t compare them with each other very usefully,” wrote Roger Ebert in 1967, back when Chicago’s alternative film scene received regular atten-tion in the daily newspapers. “Commercial films all exist in more or less the same universe. They want to communicate, and they may also want to inform, entertain, influence, or sell soap. Not so with experimental films, where the makers have to please only themselves....

HACKBERRY RAMBLERS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » When a band dates back to 1933, it can’t help but go through some phases. Shortly after Cajuns Luderin Darbone, a fiddler, and Edwin Duhon, an accordionist, first pulled together the Hackberry Ramblers, they began spicing the traditional Cajun sound with the blues and newfangled influences like hillbilly music and western swing. In 1935 the band signed to RCA/Bluebird, recording a number of sides in both English (often as the Riverside Ramblers) and the musicians’ indigenous patois; through the 40s and 50s the Hackberrys worked country-and-western roadhouses around Lake Charles, Louisiana....

Home, Alone Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “I’d always rather record myself, and if that means spending a ton to get studio equipment and learning how to use it, then I’d rather do that,” says Smith, sitting beneath a big Beatles poster and in front of a fortress of computers and mixing boards while his mom fixes lunch in the kitchen. “I can’t write a song and then record it, I always do it all as I go along....