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Doris Sikorsky can remember being embarrassed about her Polish-speaking grandmother as a kid. “We lived near Devon and Milwaukee,” she says. “My parents, first-generation Americans, had moved out here early, and it was far from the ethnic neighborhoods. So most of my friends were non-Poles.” Still, the old-world traditions were alive in her home and at the parochial grade school she attended, where Polish nuns taught her the rudiments of the peasant art of paper cutting....

Friday 10/1 – Thursday 10/7 Long before Mike Royko conceived of Slats Grobnik (or was conceived himself), turn-of-the-century Chicago Evening Post columnist Finley Peter Dunne used fictional Bridgeport barkeep Martin J. Dooley to put forth his views on everything from the fetid conditions at the stockyards to the Spanish-American War. The writer and his work will be celebrated at this weekend’s Finley Peter Dunne Remembered forum at the Irish American Heritage Center, 4626 N....

I can’t think of a better match than singer Roberta Flack and Deeply Rooted Productions, the Chicago troupe Kevin Iega Jeff founded in 1995, two years after he left New York to head the Joseph Holmes Chicago Dance Theatre, which promptly folded after a painful decline. Flack’s soft yet generous contralto, smooth but a little burred and ragged, was perfect for such ballads as “Killing Me Softly” and “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face,” hits in the early 70s....

Yes, Jack Clark, there are too many bus stops [March 31]. The CTA should be eliminating many of them–who wants to take a bus if it misses every light because it stops every block? I hope your article inspires a round of eliminations of bus stops at the CTA. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » One: the new transfer policy. This largely unheralded reform gives riders a two-hour window to take advantage of the 30-cents transfer and the free “third” transfer, allowing for a dirt-cheap round-trip errand....

Dear Mr. Rosenbaum, Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » We think that you are undoubtedly the best film critic working today. In our opinion, you pen insightful, intellectual, and trenchant columns that analyze films more deeply and skillfully than any other critic currently published, and we are thankful that someone as knowledgeable about film as yourself writes about world cinema when most American critics couldn’t care less....

Lead Stories In September in Columbus, Ohio, Peter “Commander Pedro” Langan was convicted of federal assault and gun charges stemming from a 1996 shootout with police. Langan also has been convicted of two bank robberies and faces trial in four others as the leader of a neo-Nazi, white-supremacist gang that used the robberies to fund its activities. To show Langan’s kinder, gentler side at the trial, his lawyer brought in a man and a woman, both preoperative transsexuals, both of whom Langan was dating around the time of the robberies while dressing exclusively as a woman....

Thelma Bruce has lived in the same house since 1953. When she first moved there, Park Manor was predominantly white. For many years blacks took a risk moving south of Bronzeville. “But I don’t feel we took any chances, really,” she says. “A few black families were already here when we came, and we had no problems. This was always a nice neighborhood.” Marshall has been getting a lot of attention lately, but he seems unaffected in both his art and demeanor by his new celebrity....

Dear editor: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I am a renter in Lincoln Square and share many of Mr. Clark’s ill feelings about the gentrification of this neighborhood. But what Mr. Clark has given us in this article bears a striking resemblance to what he anticipates from the mouths of yuppies in years to come, “war stories about pioneer days when the neighborhood was little more than a slum....

Hey, Faggot: Hey, C: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Your chances of catching herpes from your girlfriend, under your circumstances, are pretty slight. But low as they are, there is still a chance. Psychologically speaking, you can obsess about the tiny risk you’re taking, letting it ruin your life and your relationship, or you can accept the risk, continue to take precautions, and make up your mind to stop being such a paranoid dope....

By Nora Duff Or so I thought. Malachy’s charm turned out to be genuine; his mind was quick, and his love of words ran deep. His escapades were reminiscent of the tales told by the Irish men in my own family. Broad and highly entertaining, these stories nevertheless hovered near sadness, and even tragedy. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » He began his first book tour last June with an appearance at the Mercury Theater on Southport....

Dear editor: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Michael Miner’s excellent discussion of the JAMA-JFK affair [March 5] left much unsaid, not the least of which was that, whereas the journalists at the Chicago Headline Club honored Dennis Breo’s JFK articles in JAMA with the prestigious Lisagor award, the same articles earned a rebuke by Johns Hopkins’s Wayne Smith in one of journalism’s premier peer-reviewed periodicals, the Columbia Journalism Review....

Hollywood filmmaking reached its aesthetic apex in the 50s. Though many directors used the studios’ vast resources merely to tell stories, auteurs were breaking new ground with their use of composition, camera movement, and editing, presenting their narratives clearly enough to meet the demands of the mass audience yet artfully enough to be almost abstract works of moving light. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Following fairly closely the Francoise Sagan novel on which it’s based, the film’s principal action occurs in summer in and around a villa on the French Riviera rented by wealthy playboy Raymond (David Niven) for himself, his teenage daughter Cecile (Jean Seberg), and his current mistress, Elsa (Mylene Demongeot)....

BOSCO & JORGE, SHALABI EFFECT Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Bosco & Jorge, the duo of Bill Lowman and Brad Gallagher, supposedly met when they were 12 at a concert by guitarist Leo Kottke. In the ten years since, they’ve been developing their own take on Kottke’s fingerpicking style, and on Bosco & Jorge, their recent debut for the local Explain: label, they show off what they’ve learned....

Time for a new holiday tradition? How about Christmas Eve in Skokie with that town’s funniest Jew? Caryn Bark is back with the show that will not die, Diary of a Skokie Girl. Since 1994 it’s been produced at Footsteps Theatre Company, Centre East, Apple Tree Theatre, the Royal George, and the Skokie Club. Next stop: the Mir space station. Bark’s pointed, poignant reminiscences of growing up Jewish in 1960s Skokie are a welcome tonic during a holiday either sentimentalized in Currier & Ives soft focus or commodified into Christmas, Inc....

HELLACOPTERS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Hellacopters’ performance at the Empty Bottle in December was the sort of experience that sends music writers scurrying for their most hyperbolic cliches. I’ll try to be more judicious: they didn’t kick my ass, fry my brain, or blow the roof off the building. But no one who witnessed the fury of these Swedish garage rockers left making any jaded remarks about the death of rock ‘n’ roll (or talking up Nashville Pussy, for that matter)....

Jails, Hospitals & Hip Hop Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In this solo show, New York monologuist Danny Hoch recalls an ill-fated flirtation with mass-media fame–a guest shot on Seinfeld that fell through because he refused to deliver a stereotyped Spanish accent. “They didn’t want the real thing,” he says of the sitcom’s creative team. “They wanted somebody that could do the real thing but still be one of them....

The audience only outnumbered the performers by slightly more than two to one, but Andrew Calhoun wasn’t whining. As president of Waterbug Records, he’s been staging weekly concerts to showcase the artists on his Evanston-based folk label. “A lot of people think folk music is John Denver,” he says. “I’m flattered if anyone shows up.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » At the time Calhoun was depressed: his marriage had broken up, and he’d stopped touring....

Art historian Wu Hung came to a startling conclusion while organizing the exhibit “Transience: Chinese Experimental Art at the End of the 20th Century,” which opens this weekend at the University of Chicago’s Smart Museum of Art–he sees no historical precedent for the current crop of artists emerging in China. “They refuse to be labeled ‘Chinese artists,’” he says. “Of course, they’re still Chinese in nationality. But they’re so influenced by the West–by MTV and global pop culture–that they’ve developed a new sensibility of displacement not rooted in any older tradition....

Lead Stories More evidence that drinking is the cornerstone of weird news: In Reno a retired police officer was arrested on suspicion of DUI in May after he pulled into a gas station and attempted to withdraw money from a gas pump, as if it were an ATM. Also in May a drawbridge operator in Saint Pete Beach, Florida, was fired for drinking on the job after he opened the bridge without warning, forcing a car to leap the gap....

By Deirdre Guthrie Five years ago he thought differently. He was living at Oakdale and Broadway, sharing rent with his companion Madeleine Floyd, and working at a public health clinic nearby. One night he came home from work, lay down for a nap, and woke with half his body numb. He’d suffered a stroke, and his left side has remained somewhat paralyzed ever since. “Now I need a cane and can’t make a fist,” Baker says, curling his fingers slightly to demonstrate....