Dale Messick spent some time this morning gazing at the Tribune Tower and the flag waving on top from her hotel room window a few blocks away. She was thinking about the beautiful golden red sunsets that are only possible in Chicago–and only at certain times of the year. “I was here in January and it was zero. Now it’s 95,” she says. “No, mother,” pipes up Starr, who was born in 1942, “you were an inspiration to women....

The first Mayor Daley contributed 23 of the 46 chromosomes in every cell of the current Mayor Daley’s body. This much we know scientifically. But Chicagoans aren’t satisfied with the limits of modern biological research, so finding more similarities between the two Daleys has become an indigenous sport. It’s a sport, however, that has yet to be organized, so in the spirit of public service we present the following convenient comparison chart....

To the editors: I recently caught up with Jonathan Rosenbaum’s review of the current Indiana Jones offering, “Temple of Dumb,” published in your June 2 issue. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » And Mr. Rosenbaum is certainly entitled not to like the movie–yea, to heap his scorn upon it. I’m not putting it on my 100 Best list, either. But to cry that it’s manipulative and stifles the imagination?...

AMERICAN BALLET THEATRE Both choreographer and dancers have made remarkable accommodations to unfamiliar forms in this new piece. Dove’s gone wild with pointe work, giving it to men as well as women, yet he’s integrated it surprisingly well with his reckless style of movement. And the nine ABT dancers who perform Serious Pleasures–Ethan Brown, Robert Conn, Christina Fagundes, Susan Jaffe, Carld Jonassaint, Lucette Katerndahl, Parrish Maynard, Keith Roberts, and Ashley Tuttle–take Dove’s ball and run with it, abandoning dignity and dignifying abandon....

It’s like Christmas in July. Well, August anyway; a half dozen people, mostly in their 30s, are gathered about a large dining table. They joke as they pass around Scotch tape and wrapping paper. There is an air of celebration, almost giddiness. Duane Bean is an ex-con, but he’s no thug–wouldn’t harm a fly. He’s a voracious reader and he prays, hard, when he has to make a decision. In fact, he was a lay Catholic minister at the University of Illinois at Chicago a few years back....

It was one of those can’t-lose community development opportunities urban planners dream about. Two groups of southwest-side activists–the Greater Southwest Development Corporation and the Boulevard Arts Center–had joined hands to transform the Hi-Way theater, a boarded-up, tax-delinquent, onetime X-rated movie house at 6315 S. Western, into an arts center. The center would benefit black and white neighborhoods throughout the southwest side, creating 700 jobs and pumping millions of desperately needed tax dollars into county and city coffers....

One thing you can say about Florence Brown’s older sister is that she is mighty secretive. Another is that she is a very fortunate woman. Florence told the story on Sunday at the future Chicago Maritime Museum in the North Pier Terminal on East Illinois. It was the culminating day of the “History From the Heart” writing contest, which members of the Chicago Maritime Society set up to tap memories of the days when the lake meant more than a summer day’s recreation....

MADAME MAO’S MEMORIES Artists are even attacking each other. Consider the Miss Saigon affair: British producer Cameron Mackintosh decides to bring his blockbuster update of Madame Butterfly to New York, complete with West End star Jonathan Pryce as a Eurasian pimp. Actors’ Equity says no to Pryce, a white man, playing a Eurasian character. Mackintosh responds by threatening to cancel the whole multimillion-dollar production. Equity caves in on Pryce–but not, it insists, on the principle of the thing....

When Western ears first encounter the vocal stylings of Pandit Pran Nath, the greatest living exponent of the classical tradition of northern India known as Kirana, what immediately stands out is the low, rich droning sound. At first, much of his music sounds repetitious and unchanging, although this is an aural illusion; the music is constantly shifting in pitch, timbre, and expression, but never in its incomparable beauty. Indian scales (or ragas) contain subtleties of pitch that are often undistinguishable to ears used to Western singing (which, because of its emphasis on projection and large sound, tends to be sloppy about pitch)....

PASTEL REFUGEES As our story opens, it’s not a beautiful day in the neighborhood. It’s the eve of Dov’s heartrending departure for an asylum in Kansas. And joining the group is Carla, fresh from having her stomach pumped. So it’s an especially tough time right now, as the group must both let go and accept. Perhaps it’s this very tension that prompts the kids, at the drop of a cue line, to tell their stories....

You pick up a sign and you walk in the street,” says Gordie Benjamin, a gay man frustrated with his artist friends’ indifference in a time of moral and medical crisis, in this solo performance by New York monologuist Richard Elovich. “It’s not theoretical. It’s not Lacan…. It doesn’t leave room for your ambivalence.” There’s nothing ambivalent about Elovich, for whom art and activism are inevitably, imperatively linked. If Men Could Talk, the Stories They Could Tell, seen at Randolph Street Gallery in 1990, linked AIDS with the Nazi holocaust, as Elovich depicted the friendship of a physically deteriorating comic-book illustrator and a high school science teacher....

Why are your shelves full of identical old books? For $29.95 each, Hammacher Schlemmer’s catalog (Spring) offers videocassette covers with “a hand-painted spine that actually resembles a classic leather-bound volume, with the name ‘Ruskin’, the 19th-century writer, printed on it.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Average donation to charity per adult in the six-county area: 15 minutes a week, 0.8 percent of income. What the average adult thinks he or she should donate: 2 hours, 4....

THE DUMB WAITER The problem is that neither the director (Frank Bartella) nor the actors (Frank Adducci and Kurt Christensen) has any idea how Pinter should be performed. They all seem to think–God knows why–that Pinter should be played as loudly and with as much emotionalism as possible. Why talk when you can shout? this production asks. Why shout when you can scream and gesture wildly? Why not play Pinter ten times louder and broader than he has ever been played before?...

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Reading Huebner’s article (10/29/93) on the “swashbuckling” Hector Duarte and his murals we are told of his (Huebner’s) “awe” at learning that Duarte had been enrolled at the Siqueiros Mural Workshop, we learn that (of Rivera, Orozco, and) Siqueiros was “the most radical of the three, aesthetically and politically . . . ” and “Siqueiros was a charismatic, polemical Communist Party firebrand ....

When I was in college, not so many eons ago, it was pretty much an article of faith among us intellectual iconoclasts that, though we could put a man on the moon, we still had no idea how a bumblebee could fly. Do we? –Keith Hanson, Silver Spring, Maryland Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Of course. You think this is on a par with quantum mechanics or something?...

Whatever Happened to Black Power? Imagine Anderson at Indiana University in the mid-60s, a black from Gary adrift in a white, rural sea. “I was going through total culture shock,” says Anderson, who was the single black in his freshman class in journalism school. Imagine the galvanic effect on him when Young Turks took up the chant of “Black power!” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Coming from a working-class background as I do,” he says, “and coming from a powerless segment of the community, you get these myths and you latch on to them....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Would Professor Sheehan have us believe that he is unfamiliar with the work of Ghulam Ahmad (Jesus in India, Tabshir Press, Qadian, 1889), whose work was the first to expose what is now becoming a growing belief–that Christ survived the crucifixion physically and did what he was supposed to do (something Professor Sheehan would agree to) since he was sent NOT to the Gentiles, but to his people–he travelled to Northern Hodu (India), where ten of the 12 tribes of Israel had been scattered, in order to complete his mission of telling the Children of Israel about the Kingdom of God?...

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » He is quite right in insisting that liberal theologians are inconsistent–they want to disbelieve the miracles of the New Testament and still hold to the uniqueness of Christ; they want to demythologize the New Testament and still have a savior of sorts. Sheehan is consistent enough to take liberalism to where it logically leads, namely to the complete emasculation of Christianity....

LAKME Coloratura Diana Walker enthusiastically subscribes to the Joan Sutherland school of diction, which is to say she swallows her consonants. So she might have been singing Sanskrit, though the rest of the opera was sung in English. Sutherland actually uses poor diction so that she can stretch out her vowel singing, which helps sustain the once-beautiful timbre of her voice; she consciously sacrifices intelligibility for sound. It’s a questionable choice, for hard, sharp consonants increase projection and focus, and provide a context....

LADYHOUSE BLUES Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In Kevin O’Morrison’s Ladyhouse Blues, what doesn’t happen to the characters is what happens in the play. The title says it all: the setting is a “ladyhouse,” a home where four sisters and their widowed mother act out their different blues. It’s a searing hot August in 1919, and the men still haven’t returned from World War I....