Progress-report time at the Showcase, as Philip and Winard Harper bring their terrifically talented but mystifyingly flawed sextet back to Chicago. Their last visit offered several great moments, but it lacked the consistently crisp playing, as well as the tracer-bullet purposefulness, that define great bands–qualities one should expect from this brother act of several years’ standing (and the very qualities that illuminated Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers, the original model for the Harpers)....

Jeffery Lyle Segal shows us his photo album of “before” and “after” snapshots. Almost all of his clients seem to share an obscure American malady of the 1990s: substandard eyebrows. It appears there’s an epidemic. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I enter the back room of the Lincoln Park library with caution because I fear a gathering of the horribly disfigured, the hopelessly vain, and paramedics....

Diane Williams is drilling her developmental English class on basic methods for winning an argument: Give a factual reason, refer to an authority, cite a specific example, predict the positive consequences of your argument or the negative consequences of the opposition. The walls at DeVry Institute of Technology are thin; when she pauses to allow students time for written exercises the room fills with the steady beat of chalk pounding on the blackboard in an adjacent classroom and then a gravelly, instructive voice asking which is warmer, 20 degrees Fahrenheit or Celsius....

To the editors: If Dr. Duesberg is right, our paranoia may be totally useless. We will continue to have safe sex until science knows more. But nothing important is 100 percent certain. We have the right to enjoy the highest quality of life possible. We need to trust the “experts” who advise us. We need all the facts that “science” can offer us to make our own personal decisions. The idea that we may be suffering longer than necessary because of professional “turfism” makes me mad as hell....

If you like to ride in cars that move on rails as much as we do, you’re probably excited about the trolley system that Mayor Daley wants to build in downtown Chicago. Construction wouldn’t begin until 1993, and some crucial things must happen first. More detailed engineering and design studies still have to be made, and Washington must be convinced to chip in a third of the $600 million cost. We may never see the trolley....

MUZEEKA Guare seems to have used this same passive-aggressive strategy in his 1968 play Muzeeka, which is being staged by the Strawdog Theatre Company. It appears to be friendly, good-natured, and playful, but beneath the surface it churns with anger and anxiety. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Hiding hostility behind a charming facade is an adolescent gesture of contempt, one that says, “I’ll give you smiles and good manners, you fool, because you couldn’t possibly understand the pain I am in....

MY BLUE HEAVEN Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Molly Sanford and Josie Williams–characters directly based on Chambers and her lover Beth Allen–have retreated from the oppressive environment of New York to make a go of country life. Molly, a writer, hopes the seclusion will help her write better; Josie has a hankering to open up a salvaged-goods store; and both of them anticipate that living together away from urban pressures will bring new intimacy to their somewhat stale relationship....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The story so far–Outlines has reported the names of closet gays who are felt to be politically incorrect often with little more proof than the person’s name mentioned by what Outlines calls activists but I call thugs, informers and hooligans. Defending their policy on WBEZ, when asked by the moderator how they avoid slander and libel suits, Outlines said the paper reports on “what people say at rallies or bars” and simply report those comments!...

SELLING WATER On the other hand, nothing was concluded. There was no point, no closure. Whole subplots dangled incomplete. I waited until the cast started to leave, bags under their arms, then I left. If they weren’t going to stick around, neither was I. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Speaking of doomed efforts, the cast of Big Game Theater’s world-premiere production of the play is generally pretty good....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Re. “Walk Right In” (Reader, Our Town, 9/22/89): Kudos, Jack, Rod (and John Touhy). “Gatecrashing” has such destructive implications; it’s the art of superficial self-confidence–looking like you know what you’re doing. Even the truly skilled, deserving or admittable can gain from the occasional exhilaration of pandering to the expectations of the righteous. I learned this from my brother, who is physically imposing, but who always considered it more artful to finagle than to bully in....

Metaphors from hell, or in this case from Joe Cicero, executive director of the North River Commis-sion, in One City (November/ December 1988): “If the symphony and the opera are continually necessary to calm our savage breasts, why then aren’t neighborhood organizations similarly supported since it is they who provide the glue supporting our municipal feet of clay?” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “In marketing Uptown as ‘Lincoln Park North’ developers seem to be targeting their message to young, urban professionals,” according to the Chicago Reporter (November 1988)....

The day after the Bears lost to the New York Giants in the playoffs, the Bulls played host to the Milwaukee Bucks, the team they had just shouldered aside to seize first place in the division. It was the Bucks, and not the defending NBA champion Detroit Pistons, who led the Central Division for most of the first half of the season. While the Pistons suffered from their usual slow start and then a succession of injuries, and while the Bulls stumbled at the gate trying to integrate new team members, the Bucks perfected their plodding, disciplined style and became one of the surprises of the league....

Norm Sloan ducks out of the rain just before 10:30 AM on a quiet Saturday and stakes out a dry spot at the entrance to the Century Shopping Centre. His arms are full of the tools for the day’s work: signs from County Clerk David Orr’s office, a folding table, a metal folding chair, a big rainbow-colored umbrella, and a backpack and a Treasure Island bag filled with pens, forms, clipboards, and personal belongings....

Nobody knows what happened to them, the people who populated the desolate Scottish Orkney Islands some 6,000 years ago, people who lived in architecturally advanced stone houses complete with beds and cupboards and tanks to keep their fish fresh and cool, the people who erected the majestic and mysterious Standing Stones of Stenness. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “These stones were set up astrologically,” says artist Kim Soren Larsen....

They used to gather under the streetlight with the shot-out bulb–looking tough, blocking traffic, selling drugs. There were about a dozen of them, most younger than 21, and they acted as though this little chunk of Humboldt Park near the intersection of Pierce Street and Kedzie Avenue belonged to them. “We felt we had achieved the American dream,” says Colon. “Until then, we had never owned our own home. Isn’t that the American dream–to own your own home?...

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » He said, “The children were placed at the Orthogenic School because they could not function in normal family, social, or educational settings for their own highly personalized reasons.” Does he expect us to believe that the mere fact that someone chose to put us there is proof that we couldn’t function anywhere else? It’s true that there were some autistic children at the school and some with severe neurological problems....

THE GAMBLER Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A couple of years ago Lyric launched its “Toward the 21st Century” initiative, which was intended to “show the direction opera is taking as the turn of the new century looms.” Under this heading Lyric planned to stage contemporary or neglected works that had found favor with an establishment elite but had been roundly ignored by general audiences....

The 11th edition of the annual festival of black independent films continues through Sunday, August 9, at the Film Center, Art Institute, Columbus Drive at Jackson, and at Facets Multimedia Center, 1517 W. Fullerton. Tickets are $5, with discounts available to Blacklight and Film Center members. For more information call 443-3737 or 281-4114. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » RIGHT ON! THE ORIGINAL LAST POETS A fascinating time capsule–shot in 1968, released in 1970–this is a filmed performance of three angry, talented black poets....

Cartoon Collector “And there’s plenty more that I was unable to contact or didn’t respond to me who do equally fine stuff,” Berger said. “It’s amazing what’s going on out there. . . . There are so many people doing such tremendous stuff, and the fact it winds up as liner in a bird cage is disturbing.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » We asked Berger to account for such a bounty....

“The AMA has built a fortress around medical care in this country. They have achieved their fortress illegally. They’re in the position of power in the health-care system.” That attitude has hurt chiropractors in the past and continues to hurt them today, say members of the profession. Both sides claim their primary concern is the well-being of patients, patients who might be helped–or hurt–by chiropractors. “At the turn of the century, medicine was in a pretty bad array....