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The gladiolus was Scott Smith’s favorite flower. Ric McDonough planned to put some in the garden of the northwest-side home he bought with Smith when the two decided to settle down after dating for 12 years. That was seven years ago. Though Smith was HIV positive, McDonough, who is not, envisioned a long life with his partner. On the day of their big move, Smith dragged out two large lawn chairs and placed them under a tree in their new backyard–a sign that he was ready to sit back, relax, and take whatever curves life threw at them....

Life in New York is nothing like Friends. “Those apartments would cost at least $3,000,” says Kera Bolonik, “because studios are going for $1,900 these days. There’s no way, not with their jobs. Except maybe in Queens.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » As an editorial assistant at HarperCollins, Bolonik met Jennifer Griffin, and the two hit it off immediately. Griffin, says Bolonik, played Dorothy Parker to her Fran Lebowitz....

Joe Lovano Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In the last few years Joe Lovano has recorded with fellow tenor saxophonists Joshua Redman and Flip Phillips–a skilled but overhyped 31-year-old traditionalist and a rabble-rouser in his mid-80s, respectively–and that alone demonstrates the tremendously broad territory he occupies in modern jazz. On Lovano’s 1994 Tenor Legacy (Blue Note) he plays the master to Redman’s apprentice; the young saxist’s handlers might have hoped the album would mark him as a successor to Lovano, poised to pull off the same marvelous wedding of mainstream lyricism and postfreedom expressionism, but Redman doesn’t really have that potential....

JONATHAN FIRE*EATER Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Not a guy, but five of them, yelping and pounding away at guitar, bass, drums, and Hammond organ as if their short lives depended on it. The skinny on Jonathan Fire*Eater (besides the occasional tie) is that they’re some rather young men with rather old ideas about what rocks. Now barely legal to work in most rock clubs, they began playing together as fifth graders in Washington, D....

By Ben Joravsky The history of buying and financing homes in Chicago has not always been pretty. In the 1950s and ’60s many real estate companies, banks, and mortgage lenders were responsible for bottling black residents into segregated slums, which were starved for investment because of redlining lending policies. As the surge in southern migration made it impossible to contain black residents in the same old neighborhoods, the industry mastered an equally repulsive practice....

Charles Ray While the attention-grabbing qualities of these works are consistent with an art world bent on turning heads, Ray’s work is successful because it pays attention to craft and balance–everything here is elegantly made and pleasing to the eye. More important, Ray imbues his work with a restless self-questioning, a desire to look beneath the surface, to investigate what makes things tick. His great achievement is melding the sometimes superficial aspects of postmodernism–such as the direct appropriation of forms–with a modernist interest in articulating the nature of materials that goes beyond mere self-referentiality....

I am a 21-year-old male, straight, and a virgin. I’ve been waiting to find the right woman, and she’s obviously somewhat reclusive. I have been propositioned by quite a few homosexuals, and while I’ve never been attracted to men, I do find the attention flattering. Anyhow, I’m starting to think that maybe I am gay and just don’t know it. I haven’t gotten my dick sucked in over six months, and the right hand isn’t doing it anymore....

Schivarelli’s Beef Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “The evidence,” the promo shows Zekman telling Schivarelli, “seems to indicate you’re cheating the city.” There’s no response from Schivarelli in the promo, which quickly cuts to Zekman investigating unsanitary restaurants. But now Schivarelli says, “I made myself available any hour, day or night. It was down to a point where people would leave messages at Demon Dogs at ten at night and I would call them back....

The Last Barbecue Walking back to my car one clear July night after a visit with in-laws, I realized that the wide, crew-cut lawns and winding, deserted streets of crisp, new suburbs–carved out of farmland in Schaumburg, Wheaton, and beyond–were the means to an end, and that end was silence. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The story line is minimal, almost nonexistent. And the action is mundane in the extreme....

[Re: “Del Close,” March 12] “About this time–I guess it was ’58 or ’59–I was taking acid for the Air Force. They were investigating REM–rapid eye movement–and I started as an experimental subject. The point is they would take me to the dream lab in Brooklyn, hook me up to this machine, I would dream, and when REM indicated dreaming, they’d wake me up and say, ‘Are you dreaming?’ ‘Yes, I am, you motherfucker....

Theater in the Gay 90s Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Next month plays with gay themes will occupy two of the three stages in the Theatre Building. About Face Theatre’s production of Mart Crowley’s landmark drama The Boys in the Band opens June 2. Then, ten days later, Ronnie Larsen’s comedy Making Porn will return to the Theatre Building, where it enjoyed an extended run in the summer of 1995....

In 1996 a record number of African-Americans went to the polls–more than 5.5 million are registered in the south, an all-time high–and they were asked once again by many black candidates for their votes because they’re the same color. Dickerson too tried to attach himself to FDR’s coattails, but his campaign had two fatal flaws, the first of which was his light color. His honey-hued skin wasn’t much darker than my tan, and the opposition camp whispered that he wanted to be white....

Bailiwick Repertory’s 12th annual showcase of projects by emerging directors features evenings of short plays on double or triple bills. The scripts run the gamut from established classical and contemporary selections to avant-garde rarities and untested original material. Each play will be performed twice over the course of the festival; an open postshow critique by local directors of each production’s first performance will allow the directors to incorporate comments from the discussion into the play’s subsequent performance....

Dear Bob Greene (c/o the Reader), Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Now two evil empires of modernity and progress–the Old Town School of Folk Music and the Chicago Public Library–have joined forces with the city of Chicago to upset Bob’s/Jack’s placid existence. The parties to the arrangement can better point out your various misrepresentations regarding the sale of the Hild Library building to the Old Town School and its ostensible effects on the surrounding neighborhood....

Chicago Latino Film Festival Three little boys decide to conjure up the dark forces in this 1998 Brazilian comedy directed by A.S. Cecilio Neto. (Water Tower, 6:00) The Comet A small-town priest falls for a beautiful ex-con and joins her in heroin addiction. This 1998 film from Portugal seems driven more by its torrid scenes–priest with naked woman! priest shoots up!–than by its characters, whose motivations remain obscure. Some moments are dramatically effective (the fallen priest protecting a group of Gypsies, for instance), but director Joaquim Leitao provides more cynical exploitation than genuine insight....

“Even as they are becoming more effective, black talk [radio] stations are disappearing,” reports Salim Muwakkil in In These Times (March 7). “From 1995 to 1998, 9 black-owned AM stations folded.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The census, in one sentence, from Pierre deVise: “The 1990 Census cost more ($25 per household), employed more workers (708,000), sent questionnaires to more wrong addresses (13.4 million), got a lower mail response rate (63%), had more return errors (14....

Friday 2/19 – Thursday 2/25 20 SATURDAY This week’s cover story provides one view of Richard M. Daley’s performance as mayor. Today’s free conference, The Daley Show: The Mayor, His City, and the Future of Chicago, offers some other perspectives. Speakers, including Judge R. Eugene Pincham and Roosevelt University professor Steve Balkin, will address areas in which they feel da mare has fallen short, such as investigating police brutality, providing public housing, and improving education....

Derek Goldman and Jessica Thebus’s recounting of a shameful chapter in Chicago history is agitprop at its best, portraying the martyrdom of five innocent workers whose crime was a belief in the eight-hour workday. Part of Steppenwolf Theatre’s Arts Exchange Program, this absorbing 90-minute depiction of labor’s fight for justice focuses on a single day–May 4, 1886–when a bomb thrown at a labor rally in Haymarket Square killed seven cops, triggering a witch-hunt....

Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil: the Concert Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Johnny Mercer, we are told in John Berendt’s book, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, never lived in Mercer House, the grand Victorian mansion his great-grandfather built in Savannah, Georgia. But Mercer is a strong presence throughout Berendt’s account of the 1981 shooting of a 21-year-old hustler by the owner of Mercer House, gay antiques dealer Jim Williams–an event that anchors Berendt’s fascinating foray into Savannah’s eccentric, steamy, and sometimes eerie demimonde....

Lead Stories Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In December, according to an exchange of letters excerpted in the Wall Street Journal, the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality, acting on the complaint of a neighbor, scolded a Montcalm County landowner for “construction and maintenance of two wood-debris dams across the outlet stream of Spring Pond,” reminding him that a permit is required for such “inherently dangerous” construction and advising him against any further “unauthorized activity....