I’ve been hearing advertisements on the radio for years now, urging us to “name a star for a loved one” by sending $35 to the International Star Registry. Is this outfit for real? If I send my $35, will there be a legitimate star in the actual sky named for me? And will this name be internationally recognized forever? –Eric Lundberg, Chicago Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Unfortunately, no matter who you pay your money to the only way your star will be “internationally recognized” is if you tell your brother-in-law about it in Tobago....

AMERICAN BALLET THEATRE Even in 1948, however, Denby was pointing out that the “shock value” of Tudor’s dances didn’t last. And certainly today the seduction in Pillar of Fire (and by a boy from the wrong side of the tracks!) and the mistress and lover of Jardin aux Lilas in themselves no longer shock. The surprise is the intensity of feeling Tudor’s choreography still conveys, and his brilliant use of what we might consider small and ordinary means....

TIPPI: PORTRAIT OF A VIRGIN Trunk Productions Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Check it out, Kathleen! Tippi isn’t good, wholesome entertainment at all. It’s a put-on! This TV movie for the stage addresses such classic after-school themes as premarital sex, drunk driving, and religious freedom with a script that might have been written by Stephen King and a directorial style inspired equally by old Annette Funicello movies and Pink Flamingos....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » As an Evanston resident, I was impressed with your treatment of the Evanston racial steering incident recently reported in the Neighborhood News column [March 3]. After living in Wilmette for six months, my husband and I moved to Evanston with the hopes of finding a more diverse, liberal group of neighbors. There is nowhere in the Chicago metropolitan area I’d rather live....

The Japanese-American truck driver who is giving the young black sailor a lift into Honolulu from Manana Barracks, the black naval camp near Pearl Harbor during World War II, keeps staring down in the direction of the sailor’s hips. He asks several times “Are you comfortable?” and apologizes for his uncomfortable truck. The sailor is perplexed, reassures the driver that he is quite comfortable. Finally, the driver blurts out, “How do you fellows manage this?...

“You want my olives? I can’t eat them anymore.” Richard Bray, literary causemeister and author of Guild Books, settled exhaustedly into a booth at the Seminary for lunch. Three weeks earlier he had been laid open like a book on an operating table at Michael Reese while doctors did some preventive maintenance on the clogged plumbing of his heart. Bray ordered a postoperative lunch of lox and bagels (hold the cream cheese, no salt)....

“Nerdy. You’ve got to act a lot more nerdy,” director Jim Gill tells Charlie Miller, a Winnetka teenager, at rehearsal. “You’re walking onstage too cool. So there’s not enough contrast when you walk off really cool. Do something like this: put your hands in your pockets, head down, and take these really nerdy itty-bitty steps as you walk onstage. Think nerd. Got it?” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A generation ago, in the standard heart-to-heart between doctor and parents after the birth of a Down’s syndrome child, the family was encouraged to institutionalize their child soon after birth–for everyone’s welfare....

HALFWAY CONTENT So it was inevitable that someone would put together an evening of ten-minute plays. What was not inevitable was that this show–Halfway Content, the inaugural production of the newly formed Eclipse Theatre Company–would be free of the sort of awkwardness, inhibition, and artistic self-indulgence that sinks most first productions. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Mary Sue Price’s That Midnight Rodeo, about a cowgirl trying to decide whether to end her career or abort her baby, falls somewhere between Guernica and Long Walk to Forever....

The libretto of Engelbert Humperdinck’s Hansel and Gretel (by Humperdinck’s sister) is unassuming and wryly observant, but it is the beauty and simplicity of the music that ensures this one-of-a-kind fairy tale opera’s status as a timeless classic. Originally intended as an antidote to Pucciniesque verismo, the frolicsome, shimmering score for the story of the brother and sister trapped by a witch in her gingerbread house serves as a vivid and refreshing reminder that childhood traumas can be infinitely more fascinating and meaningful than adult ones....

GOOSE AND TOMTOM Now imagine the child’s sensibility incorporated into an adult play–American Buffalo through the eyes of Teddy. A pair of heist artists plot against their rival. They discover they’ve been ripped off. They let their girlfriend stick pins in their arms to prove they’re tough. They discuss the spells that witches and ghosts have cast on them. Logic vanishes, chronology swirls, and the universe gets ugly. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Florence has a particularly odious habit of quoting “authorities” who are least to be trusted. Thus, she quoted a footnote in Roe v. Wade to prove that Wade was correct. She also quoted from the notoriously anti-Catholic organization called Catholics for a Free Choice for the Roman Catholic Church’s viewpoint! That’s like asking Phyllis Schlafly what Eleanor Smeal believes, or vice versa....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Jonathan Rosenbaum writes that when Sweetie “bathes her own father, she’s quite capable of dropping the soap into the tub as an excuse for groping him.” I saw this scene as one that revealed a secret at the heart of this family, anchoring the meanings of the odd and the quirky behavior displayed by all of the characters....

I have trouble sleeping. I don’t mean that I have trouble getting to sleep. I have trouble getting to bed, doing what I have to do to prepare to give up, go under, put out the light. I have trouble trusting that the world won’t forget me, fly off in its spinning, leave me dumbly unconscious, alone. Sometimes I stay up just because it’s the best time of the day for me....

Shivering, huddled by the heater, wrapped in scarves and afghans. Renting movies, checking the windchill factor, ordering out, cursing and whining, buying Chapstick. These are the popular methods of fighting extreme cold. Another possible antidote: stop by your local florist and rush home with some fresh-cut tulips, roses, or irises, shipped from a more humane climate, full of color, warmth, the promise of light at the end of the tunnel of winter....

POCKET THEATRE, PRT. I (LAMBS OF GOD) A collection of character portraits conceived and performed with a maximum emphasis on objectivity and honesty, Pocket Theatre is the kind of show that leaves the viewer thinking: I know these people–what does that say about me? Many theaters in Chicago fancy themselves purveyors of “true grit,” real observations of the human condition; far too often, the “grit” is just technique turned to the service of shock....

The fabled Robert Johnson took Robert Junior Lockwood under his wing as his stepson in the late 20s or early 30s; since Johnson’s death in 1938, the personal and musical spirits of the two men have been inextricably intertwined. Lockwood, however, is no Delta clone; through the years he’s developed a reputation as one of our most relentlessly exploratory bluesmen, constantly moving into new realms of musical expression. Lockwood’s own compositions (“Little Boy Blue,” “Black Spider Blues”) are notable for their slow-burning heat, outrageous sexual innuendos, and underlying aggression....

When you enter E.B. Collinton, Ltd., in the Monadnock Building, be advised not to carry a Bic. The proprietors don’t take kindly to Bics. Hamilton and Collins, who combined their names to create the English-sounding name of the store, have taken great care to give their establishment an 1890s feel. It features a nonworking fireplace with a white wood mantel, framed vintage magazine ads from the Parker pen company set against the blue-green walls, and gold-leaf lettering on the Dearborn Street windows....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I feel constrained to comment on the feature length article in your March 10th edition on “Officers in Trouble”–the tragedy of Selena and Ed Johnson. It is not finished of course–there are still two unnecessarily orphaned children who hopefully will secure a support system to help them enter the adult world as effective, productive, and reasonably stable people....

Sugar’s Secrets: Real-Life Socialite-Fiction Editor Tells All The hype is on to make Sugar Rautbord, one of Chicago’s most overexposed socialites, into the next Judith Krantz or Danielle Steel. That may be a tall order in the fickle world of women’s commercial fiction, but Diane Reverand, publisher and editor in chief of New York-based Villard Books (a division of publishing giant Random House) and a fan of Rautbord’s, is betting it could happen....

What was that name again? David Haenke in Conscious Choice (Summer): “The cure [for civilization] requires respectful recognition of ecological (‘wild’) boundaries, acknowledgment that the wild is sacred, and that nature–Earth-GAIA-ecological reality-wildness-God-Goddess-the Great Spirit–is really in control.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Chickening out. “Conservatives certainly understood the impact that homoerotic work would have on the public,” reflects Richard Bolton in the Chicago-based New Art Examiner (June/Summer)....