To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » While I would not suggest that our experience is typical, it was illuminating. We had already sent our $2,000.00 non-refundable deposit to Easter House and, though outraged by paying high prices that we believe were for their legal fees to defend their program, we had borrowed enough money to cover their then-current fee of $20,000.00....

Even if pianist Randy Weston had never written African-inspired compositions (in the 50s), been among the first American jazzmen to visit the continent (early 60s), or settled in Morocco (late 60s), he might still suggest a transplanted African king of noble bearing. Weston’s music, now darkly percussive, now lightly skipping, consciously combines subcutaneous rhythmic subtleties with the harmonic language of the hard-bop era; the crossbreeding should be highlighted by the trio he’s brought to Chicago this week, featuring the African saxophonist Talid Kibwe and conga drummer Big Black....

Joann, 751 North Clark: Julie was staring at Agnes and thinking about taking her own life while Agnes happily belted out “It Had to Be You” and Louie Jacovone played the piano. Agnes’s eyebrows were made with a pencil. She said she came in because she saw the place from the bus. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Julie turned morosely to Jim and Char, who also looked pretty merry....

SIX DEGREES OF SEPARATION The young man is black. That’s important because the people Paul swindles are white–and because he uses his blackness as part of his deception. After all, you can’t pretend to be the son of Sidney Poitier if you’re not black. One night he bursts into Flan and Ouisa’s apartment, bleeding from a wound he says he got from a knife-wielding mugger. He’s Paul Poitier, he says, a classmate of Flan and Ouisa’s daughter at Harvard....

Critics—like parents—make the same mistakes generation after generation. Fashions and labels may change, but still one artist is dismissed for an unfocused emotionalism, another for offering style as a substitute for substance. Rock critics often ape their more literary counterparts, and are not immune to their ailments. For instance, a friend—a reformed rock critic and onetime member of a garage band who’s now employed by the music industry—called about a year ago, and when talk turned to New Order and its compilation record of 80s dance music, he said, “They call it Substance, but that’s just style....

The problem with the old-boy network is that they’re still boys. “Every really successful woman I know wants to become either an entrepreneur or a freelancer and go into business for herself,” says contributing editor Liz Mitchell in Today’s Chicago Woman (January 1990). “That’s because she doesn’t want to sit in the corporate lunchroom or executive dining room and talk about football pools. She wants to talk about important subjects.”...

Writing about the Bears can be difficult, because of the thick media veneer that covers the entire organization, from the lowest defensive back to Mike Ditka and on up through the ownership. They are, after all, the Bears, and this is–as painful as it is to admit–a Bears town. While the Cubs and White Sox and Bulls and Blackhawks are worshiped in (progressively diminishing) circles, they remain human beings. But there is something about the Bears that makes them not exactly larger than life, not exactly phony, but superreal....

Prior to the invention of the flying machine, did people fold paper into the traditional paper airplane shape and let ‘er fly? Or did the airplane inspire the invention of the paper airplane? –Michael Anstead, Montreal, Quebec Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Unfortunately, that’s about all we can definitively say about paper airplanes, a subject that is shrouded in obscurity–deservedly, the cretins may say....

THE POPE IS NOT A EUNUCH I mean, it’s your basic recipe for disaster, isn’t it? Here be the Ooblecks: a group of extraordinarily literate, highly politicized young theatricals from Ann Arbor, Michigan, with a notion of ensemble so pure it would scare most actors half to death. They build their shows collectively, nonhierarchically, developing scripts as a group and working without benefit of a “director” in the conventional sense of the word–forming instead a sort of directorate of the whole....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Second, it ignores a key fact. I gather the building Krohe wishes Saarinen had been allowed to build is the one entered in the Chicago Tribune design competition of 1922. The essential features of this building were incorporated into the 333 N. Michigan Avenue building; cf Chicago, 1910-29, Condit, pp. 118-19. Third, Krohe assumes a great street is the result of an accumulation of great architecture....

WRONG TURN AT LUNGFISH The description is Pygmalion, of course. George Bernard Shaw’s didactic comedy worked awfully well as a model for Garson Kanin’s flagwaving Born Yesterday and Willy Russell’s heartwarming Educating Rita, and less obviously (and so more effectively) for Jerry Sterner’s brilliant and provocative Other People’s Money. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Garry Marshall and Lowell Ganz’s new play, Wrong Turn at Lungfish, reuses the tried-and-true dramatic formula Shaw made famous in his play about a phonetics teacher who tries to educate an illiterate girl and ends up unleashing a free-willed woman....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » There is no better way to delegitimize a nation than to brand it as racist, thereby placing it outside the pale of civilization. The result is that violence against Israel is not only tolerated, but morally necessary. Scholars have also found a connection between Resolution 3379 and a parallel effort to deprive Jews of their status as victims of racism, replacing that history with the Orwellian image of Jews as Nazis....

Friday 3 Sometimes a person has something to say and the sidewalk is the only place that’s just right to say it. If such sentiments strike a familiar note, hie yourself down to the third annual Dreamerz Sidewalk Coloring Contest. Dreamerz is a punk bar in the early morning hours but hosts this yearly afternoon art event as well. Materials? Anything that’s water soluble–chalks, pastels, even clay. $600 in prizes are available, to be awarded in adult and under-16 categories; first place winners get $200 and $150, respectively....

Here, in a small closet, are the relics rescued when the Playboy Mansion was turned into a dorm: a menu from the 24-hour kitchen that touted such “Bunnie Bounties” as a purple milkshake concocted with grape juice, an assortment of Barbi Benton albums in a box marked “Hefner’s Record Collection,” and a few decorative plastic rabbit heads. “While there’s a great emphasis put on all the notable individuals who were here in the Hefner era, we now are entering a new era of the up-and-coming,” Haldemann says....

THE VISIT “I’ll even attack you or eat you whole / Down in the dark my bone mills roll / Porridge for my porridge bowl.” –from “The Minotaur’s Song” by Robin Williamson of the Incredible String Band Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A satirical fable written in 1956, The Visit constructs a mechanism, a sort of mousetrap for catching humanity at its self-serving worst....

Mr. Windex does windows. Inside and out, he washes the windshields of hundreds of taxicabs every day, joking and hollering, parading and performing as he squirts and wipes. In his brown trousers and dingy Chicago Bears T-shirt he walks confidently among the moving cabs–past them, between them, patting the hoods and yelling greetings to the multinational drivers. Four sailors in white uniforms approach from the north. “Excuse me! Excuse me!” Mr....

When Sir Georg Solti ran into his old classmate Gyorgy Sandor in Salzburg a couple of summers ago, the two had much to reminisce about. Both had been students at Budapest’s famous Liszt Academy of Music. “I remember Georg well,” says Sandor. “He was a superb pianist and a student of Dohnanyi. Somehow all of the performing students went to Dohnanyi, which I did too; but after a year and a half Bartok listened to me, and I stayed with him from there on....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Midway through his unintentionally hilarious defense of disco in your September 13 issue, Bill Wyman chides 70s rock-and-roll songwriters for their pretentious lyrics. However, his next few paragraphs contain four words (“logorrheic,” “lumpen,” “unparsable,” and “tautological”) that had me, an English teacher with 15 years experience on both the high school and college levels, running to a dictionary for definitions....

Ronald Reagan was still in the first term of his presidency when Oak Park started discussing an ordinance to preserve its stock of architecturally valuable buildings. That was in 1984, and in the ensuing seven years little progress has been made. An ordinance has been proposed, but it probably won’t pass anytime soon. Oak Park’s seven-person board of trustees is paralyzed, afraid of upsetting either side of what has become a rancorous debate....

A rarely screened classic of 1954 that has the singularity of being the only major American independent feature made by communists. A fiction film about the strike by Mexican American zinc miners in New Mexico against their Anglo management, informed by feminist attitudes that are quite uncharacteristic of this period, it was inspired by the blacklisting of director Herbert Biberman, screenwriter Michael Wilson (A Place in the Sun), producer and former screenwriter Paul Jarrico, and composer Sol Kaplan, among others....