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By Ben Joravsky For almost 15 years Palidofsky, a playwright, has made a specialty of getting teenagers to write plays. In the last few years MTW, a not-for-profit north-side group, has produced plays written and performed by inmates at the juvenile detention center as well as by kids from public and private high schools all over the city. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The collaboration with the Field Museum enabled MTW to raise enough money to pay students for their writing, rehearsing, and performing....

Proprietary Blends Make Their Mark Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In the last 30 years proprietary blends–wines that combine two or more grapes in varying proportions–have become increasingly popular among American wine makers. But as American wines have gained a higher profile in the world wine market, some vintners have become increasingly uncomfortable with the available terminology, feeling that catchalls like “private reserve” and “table wine” (the only categories allowed by the ATF) don’t do justice to the sophistication of their signature blends....

Bet on it. Amount contributed to Republicans by commercial gambling and casino companies in the 1995-’96 federal election cycle, according to University of Illinois professor John Kindt, writing in the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science (March): $1.5 million. Amount contributed to Democrats by American Indian tribes in the business: $1.2 million. Annual budget of the National Coalition Against Legalized Gambling: less than $150,000. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

pendleto.qxd Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Though Patrick Z. McGavin’s article on the Chicago Film Critics Association (“Circle of Friends,” Our Town, March 6) accurately reflects my misgivings about the organization, it leaves the mistaken impression that a main reason I’ve dropped out is due to the board’s refusal to take a stand on free-speech controversies that I have brought before them in my role as chairman of the group’s artists’ rights committee (aka the Zappa Committee)....

FASTBALL Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Summer ended weeks ago, and by then even I’d fallen out of love with “The Way,” Fastball’s ubiquitous and supremely catchy breakthrough single. I was sick of its melancholy minor-key verse, sick of the way its shapely chorus hugs the chord changes, sick of the band’s rock-solid playing–sick of all the things that make it one of the best pop records of the year....

By Sridhar Pappu Sunim’s hammer has become an agent of his faith. He’s helped build three temples in three cities and turned a newsletter, begun with a $100 printing press, into a magazine–Buddhism at the Crossroads–published four times a year. In the process, he says, he’s built a happier and more productive life. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » His mother became a cook at the school, then borrowed money from her mother to buy a plot of land....

Holiday Horrors Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » If you’ve any room left in your heart at all for Christmas albums, as usual there are a few worth looking into: I’ve always liked fingerpicker John Fahey’s austere holiday collections, and this year guitarist Dan Crary has made a flatpicking album that belongs in the same class. On Holiday Guitar (Sugar Hill) he’s joined in his warm, faithful arrangements by fellow flatpicker Beppe Gambetta and bluesmen John Cephas and Phil Wiggins....

Next month marks the 35th anniversary of one of Chicago’s last electrocutions: Vincent Ciucci, a grocer in Little Italy, had been convicted of killing his wife and three children after his wife learned of a mistress who was pregnant. In a highly unusual press conference, held as Ciucci was being shaved and dressed for the chair, he confessed to reporters that he had shot his wife, but only in a fit of rage after she had killed their son and two daughters....

Daniel Mielniczuk and Pepe Curci, 23-year-old purveyors of “artisanal Argentine ice cream,” should be forgiven the untimely opening of the Penguin. This far north, August is not a strategic month to open an ice cream parlor. You might get ahead during the dog days, but before long even the dogged paleteros will be running in from the cold. But in Buenos Aires, where the month heralds the start of spring, they make gelato–helado, that is–the way the Italians intended, and it’s nothing like the airy blobs of butterfat northerners call ice cream....

Mekons Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » When the Mekons started recording for the local Quarterstick label in 1992, some 13 years after putting out their first album, they also finally abandoned the notion of living off the band. Bad experiences with unsympathetic major labels in the late 80s and early 90s had soured the already cynical members, and now the Mekons increasingly make records and tour like some friends hook up for joint vacations....

Rosita Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The German films of Ernst Lubitsch had already achieved international renown when Mary Pickford, worried that her immense popularity playing little girls was typing her as a “personality instead of an actress,” brought him to America to direct this 1923 romantic comedy. As Rosita, a popular Spanish street singer, she loves a nobleman who defended her with his sword; after the philandering king of Spain falls for Rosita, the queen does her best to keep the two apart....

SIDE BY SIDE BY SONDHEIM, Pegasus Players. Born a generation too late to fully participate in Broadway’s most fertile era–roughly the 1920s through the ’50s–Stephen Sondheim still turned out witty tunes and pleasing lyrics worthy of the masters: Rodgers and Hart, Rodgers and Hammerstein, George and Ira Gershwin. When this revue of early Sondheim songs opened in 1976, he hadn’t yet written Sweeney Todd, Sunday in the Park With George, or Into the Woods, yet this lively, loving anthology contains an embarrassment of riches....

The Columbus mosaics are hardly the only pieces of public art languishing in storage. John Warner Norton’s 1929 mural Printing the News, Distributing the News, Transporting the News, removed from the concourse ceiling of the Riverside Plaza building more than five years ago, is still rolled up in a warehouse on the northwest side. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The 180-foot-long mural, the subject of a 1997 Reader story that I wrote, was originally commissioned by the Chicago Daily News for its Holabird & Root building at Madison and Canal....

The Gut Girls Sure, we have the much-loved guttural denizens of largely imaginary rural and urban hells, the eccentric individuals created by Sam Shepard and David Mamet. Frank Galati’s adaptation of The Grapes of Wrath was one of the more admirable mainstream experiments in interpreting working-class literature. August Wilson has extended earlier genres with his poetic histories of African-Americans, but he critiques racism, not classism. The best American playwright in this vein, Naomi Wallace, has found a loyal audience in England, not the States....

The Laughing Lama We are congregated, on a recent Saturday, in an unlikely temple. It is a smallish suite on the first floor of the Uptown Bank on Broadway, where the furnace kicks in too often with a too-loud blast. At the door of the suite, a long-haired, batik-clad woman held a glass jug. As we filed past her, she tipped into the palm of each hand a puddle of a brilliant orange yellow liquid she identified as a purifying saffron water....

Why can’t Mayor Daley just be nice to Alderman “Thank you, Mr. Mayor,” said Shiller, sounding a bit nervous, perhaps because she so rarely puts those words together in the same sentence. “I just actually wanted to just make a note that it isn’t often that we get to work collectively on something that we both support–” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “We did it,” said Daley again....

Beauty and the Bureaucracy Massarella says he read through the contract while Red Red Meat was finishing up its most recent record, in May 1996. He says, “I walked right into the control room and said, ‘You guys, we’re idiots if we sign this thing.’” Although the label had assured the band that some troublesome matters could be dealt with later, it bothered Massarella that the contract still referred to the band as Red Rex Meat, and that Treat & Release had exclusive rights to distribute the record everywhere in the world....

Everyone talks about the weather, but nobody preserves it. Last month the Art Institute hosted an event at which two cabinets were displayed, one containing “the exact atmospheric conditions of New York City” at 12:51 PM on April 12, 1997 (“46 degrees and rainy with 6 mph winds”), and the other of Los Angeles at the same time (“cool, dry and still”). “By maintaining these conditions,” proclaims a recent press release, “the moment is perpetually sustained in the present....

CLAUDE WILLIAMS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In his prime–that is, back in his halcyon days as a septuagenarian– you could hardly find a more delightful, slyly rambunctious jazz presence than Claude “Fiddler” Williams. You could hardly find any recordings by him, either, which left audiences largely unprepared for his impish high spirits, but that’s changed with the release of several CDs in the last five years....

DAVID GRUBBS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In David Grubbs’s hands the pop-song format is a boomerang; he can throw it away, but it always comes back. On Gastr del Sol’s 1993 debut LP, The Serpentine Similar (on Teenbeat, with bassist Bundy K. Brown), he sang elliptical verses over sparse, jittery tunes. Then the Louisville-raised U. of C. grad student joined forces with multi-instrumentalist Jim O’Rourke, and Gastr del Sol’s next four releases–two albums and two EPs–cast aside conventional forms in favor of discontinuous structures and deconstructive experiments....