THE SIX AGES OF WOMAN In the second monologue, our heroine has become Mrs. Vicki Ziwicki, reveling in her Mediterranean furniture, her baby-doll nighties, and the freedom to fornicate, even if her spouse does strip only to his socks and refuses to make love until Championship Bowling goes off the air. Vicki at this point has a “master plan”: no children for at least three years, keeping her job until a house has been bought and paid for, and producing two carefully timed offspring, one of each gender....

After the first atomic fireball flashed in the Alamogordo desert in July 1945, Manhattan Project scientists vainly warned gloating officials that this awesome weapon was destined to be a short-lived American monopoly. They knew Soviet science soon would duplicate this terrible feat–with or without the help of cloak-and-dagger antics. But, as the confession of physicist Klaus Fuchs attested, espionage played a role in hastening the Soviet project toward success in September 1949....

The vibraphone is an instrument that’s become peculiar to jazz–how often do you hear it in any other kind of music?–and Bobby Hutcherson is unique among vibists. The three other major practitioners, Lionel Hampton, Red Norvo, and Milt Jackson, are all straight-ahead players; Hutcherson dwells wholly in realms of fancy. Temperamentally he’s a romantic, given to long solos that are streams of melody, flowing smoothly, meandering in odd directions, or crashing through wild harmonic rapids....

See the Springsteen interview in Rolling Stone last month? Turns out he’s been in therapy since 1982. There’s nothing wrong with that–‘cept now he’s beginning to talk about it, and God knows what sort of psychotherapeutic rationalizations produced the double disaster of Lucky Town and Human Touch. I hate to put it so cruelly, but I like my superheroes fucked up. And I want them fighting for justice out on the streets, not on the couch....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In recalling the Chmielnicki pogroms, Mr. Hankelsman doesn’t choose to mention that Chmielnicki was a cossack chieftain who led an uprising against Poland, ravaging the countryside and slaughtering thousands of Jews and Poles. In fact the rallying cry of the cossack insurgents was: “Jew-Pole-dog: all of one faith.” Of course there were some people, dregs of society, who betrayed both the Jews and the resistance fighters....

THE WELL OF HORNINESS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The title, a not so gentle takeoff on Radclyffe Hall’s classic lesbian novel The Well of Loneliness, is the first of this romp’s many in-jokes. Staged as a radio broadcast from “WLEZ,” the play includes hilarious sound effects, cardboard cutouts, corny commercials, an intrusively officious narrator, and the occasional temper tantrum from a sensitive artiste....

LONG NIGHTS (WITH DREAMS OF FALLING) Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Ray Pride’s Long Nights (With Dreams of Falling), now playing as part of Prop Theatre’s “Late Night” series, is emblematic of this quandary. Significantly, Pride doesn’t focus on the details of the tempestuous situation at the center of his play but on the passions and consequences that situation provokes. We never really know why Helen (Dado) and Johnny (Andy Rothenberg), Pride’s two protagonists, are always fighting, but we identify, however embarrassed we may be about it, with the obsessiveness of their love affair....

During the Depression, a sexy orphaned teenager (Laura Dern) from a sharecropper family moves in with a well-to-do southern family (including Robert Duvall, Diane Ladd, and Lukas Haas) to take care of the kids and help with the housework. Adapted by Calder Willingham from his own autobiographical novel and directed by Martha Coolidge (Valley Girl), this is a beautifully realized, finely felt period piece with strong characters and nuanced performances (all four of the leads shine) and an acute sense of the diverse incursions that female sexuality makes on southern gentility....

A disheveled old Jew–or is it an Assyrian?–passes another man on the crosswalk at Devon and California, then turns abruptly to face him, eyes blazing, speaking aloud like a street person, but in good, clear, American English: Here at the Semite crossroads of Chicago, Jews in skullcaps are rubbing shoulders with Assyrians, Palestinians, Greeks, the whole Mediterranean mishegas. In a newspaper box, the New York Times headline declares, “U.S. and Iraq Prepare for War,” while inside the paper a science feature, no doubt destined for low readership this Tuesday, says the universe may not have started with a bang after all....

CRIMES AND MISDEMEANORS Woody Allen’s latest, Crimes and Misdemeanors, contains some of the best sustained filmmaking the aggressively self-made auteur has turned out in years, at least since 1984’s Broadway Danny Rose. But the movie is as bitter as a two-day-old cup of coffee, and just about as cold. Allen’s vision, always self-centered, has turned ever more inward, until the familiar New York setting of his films has taken on the aura of a psychic landscape, a minefield of deliberately sprung moral booby traps....

A guide to something happening all around you. Fantastic Fanzine Intense, confessional, edited by Riot Girl D.C. organizer Erika Reinstein, with contributions from Riot Girl D.C. Issue number one declares: “The fact that I am alive is a Riot, a hah hah fucking Riot. You can abuse me but I’ll still be here, and I won’t let it go.” With a strong focus on sexual abuse, this is not a playful zine–spare, it documents nightmare memories....

The bombing of Baghdad–deadly fireworks bursting across an eerie night sky on his television screen–reminded Mark Nelson of the video game Nintendo, a fitting comparison coming from an artist who believes that in America anything can be reduced to an amusement. While he watched the news, ideas started coming for his new installation piece, GringoLandia II. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Nelson’s first GringoLandia, mounted in a Chicago gallery a year ago, was a 3-D walk-through arcade constructed of objects found on barrio streets, American artifacts, toy machine guns, and pictures of General Noriega....

It’s a harmless-looking, friendly group. Granted, these people aren’t average-looking–some of them are dressed as medieval princesses and alien lords. The less outrageous ones sport T-shirts bearing thoughts such as “Outside of a dog, a book is man’s best friend. Inside of a dog, it’s too hard to read– Groucho Marx.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A woman named Lisa Freitag–someone who appears more likely to lecture on interior decoration than mayhem–steps to the front of the room....

Although I have seldom agreed with the new CSO administration in its choice of debuting conductors, one notable exception was the appearance last season of 77-year-old German conductor Gunter Wand. This was, incredibly enough, a U.S. debut as well as a CSO debut for Wand, who has been one of Germany’s most important conductors for over 35 years. Why the delay? Wand is so meticulous in his preparation for concerts that he declined coming abroad because of the limited amount of rehearsal time available with American symphony orchestras....

Inside his second-floor studio at Links Hall, Fujima Shunojo is talking to a student. He is sitting Japanese style (on his knees) and reminding the student, a nine-year-old Japanese-American girl in a pink-and-white kimono, to bend her knees. “Even if it hurts you’ve got to bend,” he tells her. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Fujima tries to follow the tradition of the strict sensei (teacher) but admits that he is not as strict with his students as his teacher was with him....

Three fascinating examples of recent filmmaking in Eastern Europe (all completed in 1990) that tell us something about what it’s like to live there now. (If we had world news on TV that was worthy of the name, this is the sort of work we’d see every week.) Drahomira Vihanova’s Czech The Metamorphosis of My Friend Eva presents a striking emotional portrait of an aging, alcoholic jazz singer who was unable to perform under the communist regime....

FEAST OF ILLUSIONS Still, in the theater of beginning playwrights, all you need is to get your people to chugalug and old friends start to dig up skeletons and hang out dirty linen as if it were sweeps week in the soaps. God forbid that anyone should down a few drinks and not have a hideous secret ready to explode at the drop of a climax. There’s no easier exposition than the “revelations” that come from the bottom of the bottle....

H.P. Zinker are three Austrians recently transplanted to New York who record loving homages to John Bonham via extravagantly arranged heavy metal. Songs alternate between fairly pretty acoustic interludes and fairly serious thunderousness; on top comes guitarist Hans Platzgumer’s offhand vocals, casual and conversational and not half bad considering he’s writing in English. (“It is somehow easier for me because I don’t know too many words.”) Meaningwise, they’re standard alienation stories, but this is basically an instrumental band anyway....

WE GOT A DATE The Goat Island performance group is one of Chicago’s hidden jewels. Their first piece, the critically acclaimed Soldier, Child, Tortured Man, premiered here in 1987 and then went on to tour 11 American cities. Though their current work, We Got a Date, is only their second, it demonstrates a remarkable maturity, thoroughness, and rigor, combining physically demanding movement sequences with skillful acting and careful staging to create a refreshing evening of performance....

To the editors: The Reader’s ongoing diatribes against Rich Daley and in favor of Tim Evans by David Moberg and fellow liberal party liner Doug Cassel (most recently “The Fuel of a New Machine” and “What’s This Election About?” in the March 31 issue) are about as convincing as a $3 bill. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The rich supported Daley the moment it became clear that he would be our next mayor....