Dear Zazz: I’m a reporter–or perhaps I should say I was a reporter–on a big Chicago newspaper. I come into contact with all kinds of important people every day, but none of them ever meant squat to me until the day I met HER. She was young, smart, attractive, moving up in the world. My heart went zing! So I told my boss about her and asked to be given a different assignment....

AN EVENING WITH MY FRIENDS If you set out to write the worst play in the world, you would certainly strive to make the script trite, pretentious, and hopelessly implausible. The dialogue, of course, would be inane, and the “profound” passages would be written in rhyming verse. At least some of the characters would be insulting stereotypes, and any treatment of sex would be smarmy. You’d also want to include a couple of ghastly musical numbers, and you’d want them performed by actors who can’t sing or play their instruments....

Friday 4 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Lithuanian Christmas-tree ornaments were once made from real straw, but here in America ordinary white drinking straws will do. Helen Pius, who has been teaching this traditional art for more than 25 years, conducts classes at the Balzekas Museum of Lithuanian Culture, 6500 S. Pulaski, every Friday night in November, starting tonight, from 7:30 to 9. You may attend as many classes as you wish....

I have only considered entering the Chicago River once–when, shortly after I moved here, I was fired on the first day of my job. “You had better have intestinal fortitude,” my fat, homicidal boss had gassed, and I replied that what I had was closer to intestinal flu. A half hour later I was standing on the LaSalle bridge, flat broke and staring numbly into the opaque water, feeling appropriately melodramatic....

The fifth annual Chicago Latino Film Festival includes 40 films, practically all of them subtitled, from Latin America, Spain, and the U.S. (some of which are independent works from Chicago). Film screenings will be held at the Three Penny Cinema, 2424 N. Lincoln, and at Facets Multimedia Center, 1517 W. Fullerton (except for opening night, which will be at the First Chicago Center Theatre, First National Bank of Chicago, 20 S....

Sometimes we take our local treasures for granted. Erwin Helfer is one of the premier living purveyors of the myriad piano styles that have made Chicago a music mecca since the 20s, and Clark Dean’s saxophone style carries echoes of Bud Freeman, Sidney Bechet, and Ben Webster, while retaining a lyrical romanticism all his own. Helfer learned from the masters, including Little Brother Montgomery and Sunnyland Slim, and he’s a worthy successor....

OIL CITY SYMPHONY Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » From her singlemindedness as she heads into a drum fill to the toothy, approval-seeking smile that takes over her face when she gets through a song with no mistakes, Vaughn-Raney has the Karen Carpenter wannabe down pat. Vaughn-Raney’s wonderful performance is only one example of the perfectly detailed comic incongruity that informs Oil City Symphony. The play is set in a southwestern hick town’s social hall–the theater is festooned with pictures of trophies, prize pigs, and Future Farmers of America banners, and cookies and punch are served in the lobby after the show....

Texas singer-songwriter James McMurtry inevitably is identified in the press as the son of novelist and screenwriter Larry McMurtry (Lonesome Dove, Terms of Endearment, The Last Picture Show). To some extent, these references are merely the consequence of having a famous parent, and McMurtry can probably give thanks that he labors in a far less prominent vineyard and with greater ability than poor Julian Lennon. On the other hand, McMurtry’s songs have distinctively literary characteristics that justify the attention to his lineage....

SMALL DOMESTIC ACTS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This bittersweet comedy concerns two lower-middle-class couples–one straight, the other lesbian–whose lives are turned inside out when their friendships turn more serious. Lipkin minimizes the melodramatic potential of her story by giving as much weight to the friendship between machinist Frank and his lesbian work buddy Frankie as she does to the unfolding love affair between Straight Sheila and Lesbian Sheila (as Lipkin names them in the program)....

THE NEXT GENERATION PROJECT And it’s a young group. Their dances are filled with fears and obsessions that they can’t always overcome. They contemplate adolescence, relive bits of childhood, and look inside themselves. They are very much caught up in the storm of early adulthood, with its attempts to find and live by values that will last longer than the next fashion trend. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Rossen and Walden’s movement centers on obsessive rituals involving food: smashing rice cakes to bits or carefully stacking them; carrying armfuls of marshmallows or standing under showers of them....

When I was a little kid my mother always warned me not to sit too close to the TV because it would “ruin your eyes.” Now I am saying the same thing to my two sons. Is this really true? Exactly what eye damage can occur? Is there an optimal distance from which to view a television screen? I am aware of the mental damage that children can incur from watching television but have never been clear about the adverse physical effects of this pastime....

THE TROJAN WOMEN Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Chicago Actors Ensemble has chosen to bracket Euripides’ play with a rather peculiar beginning and ending, which suggests a certain inconsistency or incompleteness of interpretation. This production opens, in a dense haze of dry-ice fog, with a modernized prologue that sets the scene in a hip, irreverent tone. And at the end, after the final scene of hopelessness and devastation has been played out, the actors skip back onstage for their curtain call grinning from ear to ear as if they have just performed Oklahoma!...

An English feature written and directed by playwright Anthony Minghella, about a young woman (Juliet Stevenson) stricken by the death of her cellist lover (Alan Rickman) who appears to be revisited by his ghost. This comes across as an English realist variation on the sort of quasi-supernatural stories that producer Val Lewton specialized in during the 40s: that is, the supernatural elements are used to enhance the realistic psychology rather than the other way around....

To read the awestruck mainstream press on the subject of the Madonna tour documentary Truth or Dare—breathless features, interviews, and reviews marveling at the movie’s unparalleled frankness—you wouldn’t suspect that the film is actually the most baldly manipulative and scarily dishonest piece of propaganda to be recorded on celluloid since at least the Reagan campaign’s “Morning in America” commercials and possibly since Triumph of the Will. Far from being a first-of-its-kind backstage look at the rock-star psyche, the film has about half a dozen precedents, notably D....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In response to Mark Ruffin’s impassioned diatribe about jazz, WNUA, commercial popularity, and me (published in the November 12 Letters column), I need to start with a brief apology. As Ruffin points out, I am indeed aware of the presence of some “acoustic” and/or “mainstream” jazz on WNUA — particularly the program hosted by Ramsey Lewis, on which I have been a guest (at the invitation of Mark Ruffin, that program’s producer)....

A TALE OF THE WIND With Ivens, Loridan, Han Zenxiang, Liu Zhuang, Wang Delong, Wang Hong, Fu Dalin, Liu Guillian, Chen Zhijian, Zou Qiaoyu, and Paul Sergent. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It’s been four years since this prophetic and poetic masterwork was made, and it’s just arriving in Chicago. But I wonder if we’re ready for it even now. For starters, what do we know about Joris Ivens?...

BRIGHT LIGHTS, BIG CITY With Michael J. Fox, Kiefer Sutherland, Swoosie Kurtz, Phoebe Cates, Frances Sternhagen, Tracy Pollan, Jason Robards, John Houseman, Dianne Wiest, and William Hickey. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In a deft act of self-positioning, the novel is prefaced by a quote from The Sun Also Rises, and follows a narrative trajectory that roughly parallels that of The Catcher in the Rye: that is, on the pretext of saying something about a “lost generation,” it follows the obsessions and wanderings of a young hero cut loose from his bearings over a few confused days in Manhattan, in flight from his own despair and nervous collapse (as well as from his family)....

Judi Kaczmarski, manager, Watra Church Goods, 4201 S. Archer: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “We’ve seen people get a little looser with their spending. The prospect of a Clinton administration has already made condoms more acceptable; with the Bush administration, in spite of the fact that the surgeon general said condoms are what we need, there just wasn’t ever much of a push for them....

Give birds enough time, and they will show you their nests. In years past I couldn’t fully appreciate this truth because I didn’t know how to approach the birds, how to persuade them to reveal their secrets. Looking back I realize that what I thought of as nest hunting was really mostly random wandering and aimless staring. I may have thought I was searching diligently, but mostly I was standing around hoping a bird would walk by carrying a nest....

Jerzy Kosinski was standing at the gift counter in the lobby of the Playboy Club examining the bric-a-brac laid out for sale to tourists. One by one he picked articles off the counter–cigarette lighters, beer mugs, key chains–and held them up to the light. From time to time he asked the counter attendant to retrieve one of the more expensive objects, watches, for example, which were prudently kept in a glass case....