It may have escaped your notice, but spring has begun. Skunk cabbages officially kicked off the vernal season two or three weeks ago. Spring is also under way for the 70 sandhill cranes that passed through Calumet Park a week ago. And it is under way for killdeer, redwings, and grackles. The juncos that spent the winter here have begun to sing as they prepare to return to their breeding grounds in the north woods....

Lloyd Levin might seem an unlikely guide to the pristine realm of the Sisters of Christian Charity, Daughters of the Blessed Virgin Mary of the Immaculate Conception. In the 1970s he appeared in these pages as an alternative-lifestyle guru, a silver-tongued champion of gays, swingers, and recreational drug users who was spearheading a scheme he called All Together, Inc., an organization intended to weld society’s diverse naughty people into a lucrative market segment and sell them insurance....

By Michael Miner “Nigel was very decent about it,” Jackson told me. “He said it was not totally final–there was some negotiating process to go through with the guild. But I wanted for the record for him to consider the moral consequence, the precedent. Honor has to count. Morality has to count. Longevity has to count. And I think the broader community should realize that in some sense none of us are secure if the best years of our lives are thrown away with the mark of a pen....

richards.qxd Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Although I wasn’t quite sure what point Ben Joravsky was trying to make with his article on the 77-year-old freelance illustrator, Ralph Creasman, in “No Job Too Small,” November 28, whether 1) City Hall is picking on the little guy or 2) enforcement of business-license laws is arbitrary, he should have mentioned how lucky Mr. Creasman was that he didn’t have to pay for all those years he didn’t have a proper license and that his office had the right zoning for running a business....

Two Planks and a Passion All you need to make good theater, according to an old maxim, is two planks and a passion–a sturdy yet portable stage and a soul-deep belief in the power of drama. That catchphrase has inspired generation after generation of artists, yet history shows it’s also been routinely disdained by egotistical producers and audiences thirsty for spectacle. Today’s off-Loop theaters wrestle with whether they should–or can–compete with the high-tech extravaganzas that dominate the for-profit entertainment marketplace, but the conflict dates back to long before theater became a commercial enterprise....

Just a few comments about the Rock, Etc., column in the October 1 Reader: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Historically, Naked Raygun’s earliest years (documented on the 1981 compilation Busted at Oz) consisted of a sound a lot closer to the punk of England’s the Fall, and even Chicago’s own Silver Abuse, sort of an antimusic punk rock. One of Raygun’s feature instruments of that period was a synthesizer, which was more of a new-wave tool for other bands back then....

Lead Stories Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » No more inhumane punishment: In May Phoenix sheriff Joe Arpaio announced that officials at the Maricopa County jails would start playing audiotapes of classic novels (like Little Women) at lights-out every night. The novels replace the previous bedtime fare, which ran for four years: a videotaped lecture series by former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich....

Lead Stories Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In September a judge in Newmarket, Ontario, found professional dominatrix Terri-Jean Bedford, 39, guilty of running a house of prostitution, despite her claim that she was selling only role-playing sessions. The judge based his decision on evidence that some customers masturbated during the sessions. The court also heard testimony about a customer who wanted to be chased like a fly by a swatter-wielding Bedford and a man who pretended he was a floor tile while Bedford walked on him....

PAUL WERTICO TRIO Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Hyperkinetic drummer Paul Wertico established this trio in 1994, and since then it’s grown into his primary expressive outlet. It’s unusual for Wertico to concentrate on one project like this: in the past, whenever he came off the road from his regular gig with the Pat Metheny Group, within days he’d have arranged a dizzying number of appearances to try out new sounds with different bands he’d assembled....

Run Lola Run Herbert Knaup, Armin Rohde, and Joachim Krol. Don’t be put off because Run Lola Run begins with two weighty quotes, one of them from the last of T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, “Little Gidding.” I didn’t quite catch what it said–the person seated in front of me decided to stretch at that point–but I can’t believe it has any serious bearing on what follows. I take it to be a quintessentially Germanic reflex gesture claiming some sort of significance, like the elaborate presentation of a Gothic clock that follows, or the pixilated city crowd that comes next, or the narration about “man” as “the most mysterious species on our planet,” which reminded me of Edward D....

Hubbard Street Dance Chicago at the Shubert Theatre, through May 2 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » For better and for worse, Hubbard Street Dance Chicago is the consummate professional company. Twenty-one years ago, when it was a troupe of four women performing in nursing homes and other modest venues, artistic director Lou Conte made a point of paying his dancers, a story he’s told in numerous interviews....

I’m a newly remarried 50-year-old man. My wife and I have settled into a comfortable vanilla-sex routine. I enjoy it. My problem is that I also enjoy kinky sex. When I was single I used to see pro-doms pretty regularly. I’ve tried to introduce BDSM to my wife gently but without much success. She’s obviously not interested in something that happens to interest me very much. I think I have three alternatives....

Look down practically any block in the city and you’ll see at least one example of the typical Chicago three-flat. A gray stone facade, modestly embellished, fronts a solid red-brick structure with no yard to speak of, though the owners may have squeezed in some landscaping. Outside the dignified old house at 4512 S. King Drive, a chain-link fence encloses a lot so small that the house shares an outer wall with the building to the south....

By Ben Joravsky Passions are fired by the fact that almost all the players know each other well; some of them have been going at it since the early 70s, when most of Humboldt Park was still controlled by Keane, the 31st Ward’s alderman and Democratic committeeman. A combative old cuss, Keane ran the City Council for Mayor Richard J. Daley in much the same way Ed Burke now does for the late mayor’s son....

Where did the words abracadabra, hocus-pocus, and presto come from? How did they become associated with magic? –Matthew Mitchell, via the Internet Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Hocus-pocus has been around since the early 17th century. The Oxford English Dictionary tells of a certain conjurer called Hocus-Pocus who used the phrase as part of a faux-Latin incantation during his act: “Hocus pocus, tontus talontus, vade celeriter jubeo....

By Kari Lydersen The staff at Bickerdike don’t like Granato any better than he likes them. In December the company filed a lawsuit against the alderman, a response to charges he’d made in a July press release, which he’d issued after Bickerdike brought about 100 pajama-clad protesters to his office one night. “On July 27, 1998, Jesse Granato published the following false and defamatory statements,” the suit reads. The statements include: “The killing of 7 year old Nikia Terri was partly the result of Bickerdike’s non-caring attitude....

A Price Above Rubies Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Though scoffed at by some professional Jews, writer-director Boaz Yakin’s 1997 second feature (after Fresh), about the painful break of a young wife and mother (Renee Zellweger) from her husband and Hasidic community in Brooklyn’s Borough Park, is for me a potent and very moving polemic about the oppressive misogyny often found in Orthodox Jewish life, predicated on a kind of patriarchal mind-set that seems surprisingly close to attitudes found throughout the Middle East....

Sarah Sze: Many a Slip Many a Slip, set up in the MCA’s Project Room, is the debut museum exhibition by this 30-year-old Brooklyn-based artist. This piece and others she’s done in Berlin and London–described in a miniature catalog put out by the MCA and the Chicago art magazine Whitewalls, featuring thoughtful essays on Sze by Staci Boris and Francesco Bonami along with photographic details–make it clear the artist has carved out a niche for herself between sculpture and installation....

davis.qxd Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The August 16 storm was a flash flood. While severe thunderstorms were predicted, there was no way to predict the extent and intensity of the rain. This is in contrast to many disasters, such as hurricanes and river flooding, where you can anticipate a disaster long before it strikes and have damage assessment teams in place. The storm did not leave a highly visible path of destruction....

November storms bring birds, and as a rule of thumb, the bigger the storm the better the birds. This year we marked the anniversary of the sinking of the Edmund Fitzgerald with a storm as violent as the one that sent that ship to the bottom of Lake Superior. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The whooping crane seen and photographed at Illinois Beach State Park around noon on Wednesday, November 12, may be facing that problem....