THE FOREIGNER In this version the hapless sad sack is Charlie Baker, who has been brought to a resort in Tilghman County, Georgia, by his RAF buddy “Froggy” LeSueur, who’s there on a three-day training assignment at the nearby military installation. Charlie Baker is painfully shy, paralytically inarticulate, and as devoid of personality as a golf ball. The thought of having to interact socially with the resort’s other guests so terrifies him that Froggy attempts to relieve him of his conversational duties by introducing him to the proprietress, Betty Meeks, as a foreigner who speaks no English....

Followed the way one follows a play–with an eye for drama and the interplay of the characters–sports can pay dividends even to people who hadn’t been watching when something happened. John Daly’s victory in the Professional Golfers’ Association Championship earlier this month existed, for me, the way few sporting events have this summer–though I hadn’t seen him hit a single stroke. Other people were talking about him so much and with such delight–golfers and nongolfers, sports fans and sports dabblers–that the photos in the newspapers came to life like some image of Paul Bunyan and his blue ox Babe....

THE THIRD RAIL COMEDY HOUR Like everyone else, the Third Rail ensemble uses Viola Spolin’s improvisational theater games to create generally not very funny material. Like everyone else, they slap a sordid assortment of sketches and planned games together to make a revue of dubious quality. And, like so many other groups, they seem stuck at the awkward point between advanced beginners and semiprofessionals. Their show lacks both the exuberance of an amateur revue and the polished discipline of a professional one....

Eighteen theater companies are presented in six different programs of two to four plays each, organized along loose thematic lines by producer Doug Bragan and associate producer Judith Easton. That’s two more companies and two more programs than last year, when Bragan first stepped in to revive this non-Equity showcase founded and then discontinued by the League of Chicago Theatres. At the Theatre Building, through June 2. Wednesdays-Fridays, 8 PM, Saturdays, 6:30 and 9:15 PM; Sundays, 3 PM....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » After nearly a decade of seeing people suffer from, and eventually die from, the effects of AIDS, one would hope that the primary concern of our government officials and civic leaders would center around three objectives: 1) the fight for dollars to educate the public and prevent the spread of the HIV virus–including teenagers who represent an emerging risk group; 2) the push for new and better drugs and methods of treatment; and 3) compassion, understanding and more resources for people living with AIDS....

THE ROVER Best of all, it’s by a woman. The first European woman known to have made her living as a writer. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » An artistic director would have to be crazy not to consider producing a play that combines the classy sheen of something old, droll, and British with the contemporary hook of feminism–especially when the feminism is so unforced....

The ladies in the fur coats, the limousines carting the big shots, arrived at about the same time as Ben. Ben, a sculpted horse, arrived in a flatbed truck. All told, it took about $400,000–$325,000 of it from private contributions–to rebuild Seneca. The project’s chief overseer was Marc Schulman, president of the multimillion- dollar company Eli’s Chicago’s Finest Cheesecake. It was Schulman’s dream to have the park rebuilt and its play lot named for his father, restaurateur Eli Schulman....

Argentinean filmmaker Eliseo Subiela’s third feature, which opens the Chicago Latino Film Festival, is in many respects a worthy successor to his second, Man Facing Southeast, and even more difficult to synopsize. A writer saddled with a dull job and an unhappy marriage encounters a woman on the subway. As he gradually becomes acquainted with her and her eccentric family in the suburbs, he pays her for the story of her life, which he wants to use as material for his novel in progress....

Lead Story Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Richard Smith, 31, celebrated his release from jail in March with a dinner at the Tara Hyannis Hotel in Massachusetts. He had served 90 days for running out on nine restaurant tabs last summer. He was promptly arrested again after running out on the $28 check at the Tara. John Fogleman, 30, serving time for rape in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, was arrested in November for making obscene telephone calls from inside the jail....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » First, and most important, Outlines does not favor outing. The letter writer must be confusing us with Outweek, a New York-based weekly proud of its efforts at outing celebrities and politicians. I have enclosed Outlines’ editorial from May of 1990 (copies are available from the Outlines office), which clearly states that Outlines’ policy is not to out people....

Planet Threatened by Grumpy Lawyers! Compare covers. The Planet’s most recent page one labors too mightily, hawking “The Redneck Murder Exemption Plan,” “POLKA WARS,” “JFK SHOT HIMSELF,” ” The Attack of the Christo Umbrellas,” “New City Crushed . . . ” (heralding some dubious whimsy inside about a made-up softball game; the Planet doesn’t have a team), “Bob Greene and Oprah Winfrey Exposed,” and “Michael Jackson’s Nose Vanishes!” Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Small Time: The Shake-up at Chicago Times So what happened? Revenues for the first year came in 44 percent below those “conservative” projections and expenses 14.5 percent above. Paid circulation, which was supposed to exceed 45,000 by the end of the first year, hit 15,000 instead. Todd Fandell was one of those directors. Some of the money that put Chicago Times on its feet was his. Some was his dad’s, some came from friends....

THE ADDING MACHINE Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Puppet shows for adults are not without precedent, although we tend to think of them as kiddie fare nowadays. In recent history the Bobby Clark puppet troupe attempted to stage adult revues with marionettes (a curvaceous marionette doing a striptease is about as adult as you can get), but for any thriving puppeteering tradition, we must look to the Bunraku, one of the major forms of Japanese theater....

Sorry, I won’t be able to come over the evening of December 31. I have other plans… Walgreen pharmacist Pauline Cheung advises consumers to “weed out your medicine cabinet once a year” to get rid of outdated drugs. “Because it’s an easy date to remember, I do mine every New Year’s Eve!” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “In architecture, if you’re able to hold the same values and priorities as your male counterparts, the sky’s the limit,” says Diane Legge, formerly a partner at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, according to Today’s Chicago Woman (November 1990)....

THE CUSTOM OF THE COUNTRY Nicholas Wright has taken a similar approach to his play, The Custom of the Country. He started with an early 17th-century play by Beaumont and Fletcher and mixed in some bloody Jacobean tragedy and some Shakespearean romance, full of magic and miracles. For good measure, he threw in liberal doses of farce, satire, and historical drama. He seems to have believed that such a daring mixture would yield something original and exciting, but the result can be summed up with my son’s expressive reaction to his own experiments–“Blaaah!...

I understand the new Comiskey Park now under construction in Chicago will be the only baseball stadium in the major leagues with home plate in the northwest corner, rather than the southwest. Why are all ballparks oriented this way? Don’t the owners of the White Sox care that they’re going to have the only exception? –Jerry, Chicago Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Right field is the “sun field” in most major league ballparks because the right fielder must look into the sun when catching fly balls during afternoon games....

WHO FRAMED ROGER RABBIT With Bob Hoskins, Joanna Cassidy, Christopher Lloyd, Stubby Kaye, Alan Tilvern, and the voices of Charles Fleischer and Kathleen Turner. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It’s an irritating but essential facet of the most exciting and original movies that they’re the hardest to describe with any precision, and the preceding paragraphs, at best, sketch the point of departure for Who Framed Roger Rabbit and the explicit meaning of its title–which uses the film noir meaning of “framed” to ask, Who set Roger up?...

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » We can’t. There is an underlying theme to Merryweather’s bitter letter which does need to be responded to. “Isn’t it just a business?” asks Merryweather about Guild. “Why should ordinary people start giving them money [?]” And “If the Guild wouldn’t run after every new thing in town . . . and just settle down to running a venture like a bookstore, they might be more successful....

OK, 1988 was a pretty dull and inconsequential year, save for that thrilling presidential contest between Colonel Flagg and General Anesthetic, and the inspired leadership of Chicago’s new mayor, Bossed. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » What with JFK’s assassination of 25 years ago, and King’s and RFK’s of 20 years ago, and Mayor Washington’s death of one year ago, you could almost count on seeing a hearse every time you flicked on your TV....

In 1988 four classmates from the School of the Art Institute joined forces to buck the gallery system. Instead of waiting to be discovered, Richard House, Wendy Jacob, Laurie Palmer, and John Ploof decided to create their own noncommercial exhibit space. They used an empty apartment in Bucktown for their canvas, each taking a room or section to work on, and set about their individual business. One filled a bedroom with sand, another soaked a mattress in honey....