Dear Reader, Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I work at Healthcare Alternative Systems, Inc., where we provide free treatment to women who are survivors of severe abuse, domestic violence, and/or recovering from addiction. About 90 percent of these women have both issues. These therapies and the support of a group do seem to reverse many effects of severe trauma for those who are able to remain in treatment....

By Ben Joravsky Future Commons is a vocational school that was created three years ago by the central office in partnership with Chicago Commons, a social service organization. Enrollment’s limited to fewer than 300, giving teachers, parents, and students a greater say in creating core courses in English, history, and science, as well as vocational classes in graphic arts, manufacturing, architecture, and drafting. Students are linked with “mentors”–architects, writers, lawyers, and other professionals–who they get to “shadow” at work....

KALICHSTEIN/LAREDO/ROBINSON TRIO Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Like virtually all major orchestras and chamber groups, the Kalichstein/Laredo/Robinson Trio is by and large a curator of the time-proven classical canon. As such the threesome is competing for listeners who already have access to laudable performances of the standards. The trio’s members–pianist Joseph Kalichstein, violinist Jaime Laredo, and cellist Sharon Robinson (Laredo’s wife and duet partner)–are accomplished veteran instrumentalists capable of sparks and sparkles in a live recital, but that still might not compel nondevotees to sit through another rendition of a Brahms trio....

LIFTER PULLER Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It’s sort of redundant to praise a decent indie-rock band for being ironic and “edgy,” isn’t it? After all, angular guitars, crisp dry snares, oblique emotional displays, rampant pop-culture references, and strangled vocals are as inherent to the genre as beer and big rigs are to country. But Minneapolis’s Lifter Puller deserves extra credit both for studying the rules so assiduously and for never sounding at all studied....

MUSIC OF THE BAROQUE Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » For years Music of the Baroque has been among the most consistently intelligent and accessible ensembles in Chicago. And even when it’s financially strapped–this season its revival of Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo was canceled due to poor advance ticket sales, and the group will mount only seven programs–it lavishes as much attention on every concert as NASA does on a Mars mission....

Musical Chairs Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Salus started out at the Music Box after graduating with a degree in film from Northwestern. He was a part-timer working the concession stand and proved adept at odd tasks like repairing the stand’s antiquated hot-butter dispenser. From there he moved up to the projection booth, a key post, and the owners began grooming him for the manager’s job....

By Mario Kladis “Sorry,” I said, “I don’t smoke.” The guy bit his lip and stared at me, trying to decide if I was lying. There were still five or six quarters in my pocket, but I just sat there making my poker face. He shoved the lighter in his pocket and went up to an Asian woman measuring detergent: “Hey, se–ora, you need some pens? Two bucks.” Best of Chicago voting is live now....

By Steve Bogira The long federal sentences for drug crimes, Rostenkowski told the crowd, are especially ill conceived. He described an inmate he’d met, a 20-year-old man with a 17-year sentence for having acted as a drug courier. The man deserved punishment, Rostenkowski said, but locking him up “from the end of adolescence to the beginning of middle age” seemed “excessive.” He pointed out that there was no evidence of progress in the war on drugs, despite all the young people being sentenced to decades in prison for drug crimes....

STEVE REICH Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Of the holy trinity of American minimalism, Terry Riley may be more brashly original and Philip Glass more ardently lyrical, but it’s Steve Reich who has best explored the style’s potential for dramatic storytelling. Reich often incorporates his music into multimedia presentations that draw on history for their emotional resonance–a technique that reached maturity with his Different Trains (1988), which he called a step toward a new kind of documentary music video theater....

Last Friday was the last call at Cirals’ House of Tiki, and news of its closing brought out plenty of fans. “To me it was just a bar and a restaurant,” said owner Ted Cirals, “but I guess it turned out to be more than that.” He described the outpouring of gratitude as “amazing”–phone calls came from “all over the country.” The Tiki became a neighborhood landmark. Like Jimmy’s Woodlawn Tap and the Valois restaurant, the bar brought color and a sense of community to an area dominated by the University of Chicago’s gray Gothic architecture....

The time has come to confess. I know that I am putting myself in danger of prosecution, but I have faced death enough times to know that the next time could easily be my last, and so have decided to come clean now rather than let this mystery remain unsolved forever. Yet we were shocked and frightened when our father burst into our bedroom armed with his trusty .410 gauge and shot at the damn thing right through the window screen....

Storefront Hitchcock When I first heard that Jonathan Demme had made a concert film of Robyn Hitchcock playing in a storefront on 14th Street in New York City, I pictured the British troubadour framed like a piece of merchandise, with some sort of amplification system piping his music out onto the street. He’d attract a crowd of passersby, the sort of folks who might never have heard of him otherwise, and by the end of the film they’d be enthralled, roped into his lunatic vision of humanity....

A WRINKLE IN TIME, Lifeline Theatre. Lightning has struck the same stage twice: Lifeline is remounting James Sie’s adaptation of Madeleine L’Engle’s children’s sci-fi classic, debuted eight years ago in an ingenious staging by Meryl Friedman. Recalling The Wizard of Oz, this delightful 90-minute journey celebrates a girl who thwarts the forces of evil: Meg combines pluck and luck to rescue her father from an unspecified menace. An oddball who fears everything is her fault, she gets help from Calvin, a “popular big shot,” and from Charles Wallace, her precocious baby brother....

Kelly Willis Maybe you can’t judge a book by its cover, but you can tell a few things about a country singer by her hairdo. On the first of three poor-selling albums for MCA’s vaunted Nashville division, Well Travelled Love, Kelly Willis looked like a bookish bumpkin proudly displaying her first perm; as if in desperation, her coif grew even poofier on her 1991 follow-up, Bang Bang. But on the cover of her brand-new album, What I Deserve, her stringy blond hair is parted down the center and tucked behind her ears, framing her chiseled features and square jaw in a manner that highlights her all-American beauty with minimal fuss....

Not color-blind at all. Chicago suburbs that had at least 18 percent fewer black residents than they would if income were the only factor that determined where people live: Berwyn, Braidwood, Cicero, Elmwood Park, Fox Lake, Godley, Hainesville, Harvard, Harwood Heights, Hodgkins, Ingalls, Long Lake, McCook, McCullom, Melrose Park, Monee, Oakwood, River Grove, Rockdale, Round Lake, Wilmington, and Woodstock (from a February report by the Leadership Council for Metropolitan Open Communities, “Black, White and Shades of Brown: Fair Housing and Economic Opportunity in the Chicago Region”)....

Friday 9/12 – Thursday 9/18 Contemporary Five, Cadentia Nova Danica, Strange Brothers, and the Archetypes, and has worked with John Coltrane and Albert Ayler. The performances are tonight and tomorrow night at 8:30 at the Chopin Theater, 1543 W. Division. Tickets are $20, $14 for Vietnam veterans and students. Call 773-278-2210. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » 13 SATURDAY Mike’s Moonlite Luv Cruise is named after Velour Motel member Mike Armstrong, who’s a seafaring man by day....

Foresight is 20/20, Galileo Players, at Second City, Donny’s Skybox Studio, and It’s a Mediocre Life, Posin’ at th’ Bar Productions, at Second City, Donny’s Skybox Studio. Although a background in quantum physics might help, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to understand the Galileo Players’ quirky humor. Thankfully, Foresight Is 20/20 doesn’t attempt to unpack all the mysteries of science in one hour. Instead the ensemble uses familiar concepts–Darwin’s theory of evolution, Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time, astrology–as a platform for investigating some common misconceptions about the nature of scientific thought....

OLIVIA TREMOR CONTROL Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » With a trio of transcendent albums–In the Aeroplane Over the Sea by Neutral Milk Hotel, Tone Soul Evolution by the Apples in Stereo, and Music From the Unrealized Film Script, Dusk at Cubist Castle by Olivia Tremor Control–the group of musical friends known as the Elephant 6 collective has established itself as the great white hope of American indie pop....

By Jeffrey Felshman Ron was found guilty of murdering his infant son, Paul, and then donating Paul’s organs to cover up the crime. (I wrote about the case for the Reader in the summer of 1995.) Paul had died while in Ron’s care in early December 1991, an apparent victim of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. Paul’s heart ended up saving the life of Quinn Kyles, commonly known as Baby Quinn, who was born with a defective heart and desperately needed a transplant....

The deal hasn’t gone down yet, but it looks like architect Paul Schweikher’s home and studio won’t be bulldozed to make way for an expanded water treatment plant after all. The village of Schaumburg is about to fork over a half million dollars to buy this little-known treasure, rescuing it from the clutches of the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District, which has held it hostage since 1988. That’s when the MWRD condemned and acquired the property, apparently unfazed by its listing on the National Register of Historic Places and the testimonials of architects and historians....