earley.qxd Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Can Name Withheld and I be listening to the same WBEZ? In his/her letter (“Radio for Dummies,” April 17 Letters section), the correspondent rails against an “idiotic” Eight Forty-Eight discussion on forest preserves, and then goes on to claim that the insidious impetus behind WBEZ’s trend toward the “dumbing down” of public radio [Hot Type, February 20] is its politically correct attempt to create (in Eight Forty-Eight?...

Swords into plowshares. An architectural jury commented on the reclamation of a Forest Park torpedo-factory-turned-mall for use as a 2,500-seat worship hall for the Living Word Christian Center (“Focus,” November): “This project represents a new way of looking at adaptive reuse as well as a new sense of what worship is.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » How many tens of millions dead would it take?...

School decentralization, “as it’s been tried so far, has been a half-measure because nobody wanted to make fundamental enough changes in the lives and incentives of adults,” reports Paul Hill of the University of Washington, one of two principal investigators in a six-city study that included Chicago (Education Week, September 10). According to the University of Chicago’s Anthony Bryk, the other principal investigator, “Most of the districts started with a chop-the-top philosophy,” leaving few administrators to help guide and support individual schools....

DIRTY LITTLE SHOWTUNES, at the Theatre Building. Aggressively gay, this charmingly bold parody revue features witty, often explicit lyrics by Tom Orr set to classic Broadway and operetta tunes. In the spirit of Gerard Alessandrini’s Forbidden Broadway, “Show Me” from My Fair Lady morphs into “Show Queens!” and “Mame” becomes the tell-all “Nude!” We also get the stereotype-ridden patter song “I Am the Very Model of a Modern Homosexual,” “How Do You Solve a Problem–Gonorrhea?...

FRED VAN HOVE Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The list of records Belgian pianist Fred van Hove has cut as a leader is relatively short (and the list of those that have been issued in the U.S. is even shorter)–which makes his imposing presence on the European free-jazz scene over the last three decades all the more remarkable. Best known as a frequent collaborator of German saxophonist Peter Brštzmann–on screech classics like Machine Gun and Balls–he’s able to summon great reserves of stormy violence, as in his thunderous, bass-heavy clusters....

The Memory of Water Her daughter Mary is understandably perplexed by the dead woman’s refusal to disappear. “You seem like nice, personable people,” Vi says to her about the daughters she raised. “But I don’t know what you’ve got to do with me.” Mary, in turn, is only beginning to realize how little she knew her mother–and how impossible it is to escape her influence. “Have you finished?” she asks defiantly as Vi continues to criticize from beyond the grave....

El Paso Blue As Octavio Paz notes at the beginning of his 1961 meditation on Mexican culture and identity, The Labyrinth of Solitude, there comes a time in the lives of individuals and nations when they ask themselves, “What are we, and how can we fulfill our obligations to ourselves as we are?” Paz associates these questions with adolescence and with Mexico’s state of development–that awkward period between childhood and responsible adulthood when we first have “a vision of our existence as something unique, untransferable, and very precious” and then, in the next instant, realize that “we are alone....

Porn director and drag queen Chi Chi LaRue refuses to refer to his cast members as actors, though he admits “there are some people in my industry who truly can act as well as fuck.” But good help is hard to find. “I once hired a straight boy who took two girls home and fucked them all night in a hotel room,” he says. “He came to the set the next day and told me he couldn’t perform....

This 1995 film by Italians Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi is, like their others, compiled from footage taken in cinema’s first decades–in this case during World War I. Searching archives in Russia, Austria, and Hungary, they located film that shows camps for prisoners of war and orphans; we see little actual fighting. Each scene is tinted–the color apparently chosen, as was the case in many silent movies, to reflect the content or mood of the subject matter....

The church bells chimed, welcoming Kerry Wood to the majors on Sunday. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But is he ready? The Cubs’ radio analyst, Ron Santo, has compared him to Sandy Koufax, and TV analyst Steve Stone said Sunday he has “the best arm I’ve ever seen come out of the Cubs’ organization.” Yet that latter remark, a cynic might suggest, is damning with faint praise....

warner.qxd Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It would be interesting and beneficial to see the Reader’s resources address solutions to the residential aspects of diversifying neighborhoods where rents and property values are increasing. I could have replaced the whole second half of that last sentence with “gentrification,” but I hoped to momentarily retain the attention of those righteous souls who tout diversification except, of course, for diversifying with higher income families and therefore regard “gentrification” as some sort of plague....

There was a wind that afternoon; it came straight off the lake and brought the chill factor down to zero. When Deidrich turned onto Jackson and saw the beggar his first thought was of his own good fortune–to be employed, married to a wise woman, warmly housed, and the owner of several damned good winter coats. The story was so transparent it angered Deidrich. “You don’t carry a wallet?” he cried, a mistake....

The Arabian Nights at Goodman Theatre Studio Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Even Chicago theater, at least the theater that gets national notice, has been long on bombast and grit and urban realism–but short on poetry. Which is why Mary Zimmerman was such a revelation. Before Zimmerman became a director she was a poet. And from the beginning, it was her poet’s ear for what Roland Barthes called “the rustle of language” that set her apart from other Chicago directors....

African Film Festival Three documentaries: Ivan B. Watkins’s Zambo (1996) from the U.S., Rafael Deugenio’s Candombe (1995) from Uruguay, and Nadine M. Patterson’s Moving With the Dreaming (1996) from the U.S. Watkins will attend the screening. (Ferguson Theater, 1:30) The Road Taken A 1992 video documentary by Cuban filmmaker Gloria Rolando, chiefly about Yoruba philosophy and singer Lazaro Ros. On the same program, Marc J. Hart FX’s U.S. video Drive By of Thoughtz (1996) and Michelle Stephenson’s American-Brazilian We Choose to Rap (1995)....

Christopher Plummer’s elegantly aquiline profile and a certain stagy flamboyance in his acting (which he smartly lampooned as a Shakespeare-spouting alien in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country) make the Canadian actor perfect for this grandly entertaining tour de force. It first hit Chicago in March of ’97, then went on to Broadway, where Plummer won that year’s Tony for his portrayal of Jazz Age classical actor and matinee idol John Barrymore....

Audience members are asked to supply the key elements of the plot in full view of one another–you yourself might even have volunteered an acceptable suggestion at some time–so there’s no doubt that the Free Associates’ annual Christmas parody is spontaneous and made from scratch. And that’s not easy with Tennessee Williams’s southern-gothic classics, which involve repressed sexual desires, destructive emotional dynamics, and domestic crimes shrouded in secrecy. But on the night I attended, some unlikely suggestions yielded romantic fantasies involving elves and an obsessive longing for a holiday in Las Vegas (“that new vacation town”–it was 1956, after all)....

The bad news is you have HIV. The good news is you have HIV. “HIV patients reported that they have discovered the important things in life, removing trivial problems,” according to a Centers for Disease Control summary of a small study published in AIDS Alert (October). About half the 51 patients surveyed thought their lives were better after they became infected, and less than a third said their lives were worse....

MCA: Room at the Top Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Consey completed the herculean task of funding, erecting, and opening the MCA’s $50 million new building on East Chicago, but according to art dealer Richard Gray, there was “a certain incompatibility between Kevin and the MCA’s mission. It appeared that the institution under his direction was not able to project and communicate a clear sense of what its mission should be....

It could be a scene from an Emmerich Kalman operetta: the year is 1928; the place, Vienna, where music is king. The characters: a famous Hungarian composer with a new show in production and a ravishing Russian starlet half his age. They meet at the checkroom of a cafe he’s known to frequent. He helps her with her coat; she thanks him by name. “You know me?” he asks. “Oh yes,” she replies....

Lauren Katz is working under the hood of her car. John Lehr has his tanning foil out and he’s sunning himself, working on his moles. He waves to Mrs. Johnson, the lady next door, who yodels in reply, “Just goin’ inside. Got m’sausages. See ya laaater!” Turning back to Katz, Lehr finds her ogling the local divorcee as she saunters down the street. “That’s a nine and a half,” she tells Lehr as she swigs iced tea from a German liter glass....