To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Knowing that a large portion of your readers are middle-class, upscale young people, I really wonder how many bothered to read the article. And how many who did read it were motivated to emulate Mrs. Novak. Of course, many young people are busy with their careers, but couldn’t at least some of them follow Mrs. Novak’s example after they are married?...

Street lamps light the asphalt and cement of Ashland Avenue, unexpectedly vacant even for midnight on a freezing Friday. Exhausted but watchful on the ride home from a north-side theater, I slackly pedal my bicycle south between Taylor Street and Roosevelt Road. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Now I really pump the pedals, my eyes never leaving the runner’s narrow, wedge-shaped reptilian face. He’s been staring at me–a fat guy in the waning 30s–since I saw him....

PRIVATE PASSAGE At prochoice meetings, you hear people trying to figure out how to beat the prolifers at their game. I heard one woman shout, “Let’s kick some prolife butt!” A few of us toyed with the idea of patenting “Abort Prolifers” bumper stickers. But when you come right down to it, it’s difficult to one-up a crowd of screaming moms, grandpas, men of the cloth, and little kids chaining themselves to the doors of a medical clinic....

On September 11 the soccer teams from Roosevelt and Amundsen high schools faced off in a rematch of last year’s Public League championship. They wore last year’s uniforms and played on a muddy field without bleachers, bands, or cheerleaders, while a couple of cops periodically warned both coaches and the referees to move their cars from nearby Foster Avenue lest they be towed. That’s putting it mildly–at least a lot more mildly than soccer referee Kenneth Newman puts it....

“There is never a need for a woodcarver to buy wood and thus pay someone to kill trees,” writes David Stein in Things Green (Winter ’89), the newsletter of the Chicago Green Alliance on West Maxwell. “In the city you can find a great deal of discarded furniture in the alleys and dumpsters.” There are limitations, of course. “I carve a lot of spoons, and one reason for this is that the size and shape of most of the discarded wood I find lends itself to such a use....

THE TEEMING MILLIONS POUNCE Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Alex, I want you to know that I am filled with Christian love for you, your insufferable personality notwithstanding. Permit me to amend your objection so it makes some sense. The second law of thermodynamics states that, left to themselves, things tend to go to hell in a handbasket. The truth of this assertion is irrefutable, but it has no bearing on the present discussion....

TRUTH IN THE TELLING Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Perhaps inspired by Calvino’s fantastic collection of Italian folktales, Transient Theatre brings us Truth in the Telling, six Italian tales linked by a new one. Ranging from light and humorous to dark and terrifying, they provide an entertaining and magical world and tell us once again how important a story can be. Framing Derek Werner’s adaptations is a princess in the Land of Tedium who is bored and depressed....

The plaintive, percolating, drawing-room rock of the Verlaines was formed in far-off Dunedin, New Zealand, a remote town in a country whose name is synonymous with remoteness. Strangely enough, Dunedin has produced a refreshingly eccentric alternative rock scene, including the exquisite Chills and a number of other reputedly worthwhile bands. The Verlaines, a three-piece outfit led by singer-songwriter and free-lance surrealist Graeme Downes, play elegantly textured songs with the timeless instrumental feel of the Velvets or the Feelies....

A TRIPNOTIC NIGHT Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The plays’ collective title, A Tripnotic Night, is one framing device. Another is the presence of an onstage character called “The Dreamer” (Randi Shepard), whose actions constitute a jumping-off point for each of the plays, which we are to assume are her dreams. Though her personality is left unspecific, her dress, props, and reading matter suggest that she recently arrived at college....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Battery caged hens get a horrible disease, that’s new to chickens, called Caged Layer Fatigue (Caged Layer Osteoporosis) in which they become paralyzed from being cooped without exercise while constantly drained of calcium to produce egg shells. The lack of exercise and other abnormal constraints imposed on them cause fat to accumulate in their reproductive systems....

ASK FOR THE MOON With the coming of the urban “manufacturies” more and more women found themselves performing their “homework” under the direction of a factory owner who would then pay them a wage fixed by himself. It has been estimated that by 1800 roughly a million women and children were involved in English clothing trades, with lace making alone accounting for as many as 100,000 females aged ten and up, mostly in low-skilled occupations that earned approximately half of what males earned for the same work....

BOLSHOI BALLET My disappointment may be due to the memory of the legendary Bolshoi roster of superstars that first dazzled American audiences 30 years ago with daring leaps and spins and uninhibited, passionate projection. It made ballet unforgettably exciting and had a remarkable impact on Western ballet technique, as our dancers discovered that such virtuosity was possible. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Bolshoi today is a young company that has acquired a more refined look....

CANDIDE Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » So the professor doffs his elbow-patched jacket for a white wig to portray the philosopher Pangloss, a cockeyed optimist whose maxim that “all’s for the best in this best of all possible worlds” leads him to amazing heights of rationalization, for everything from wholesale wartime slaughter to his own syphilitic ravages. One nice-looking pair of students take on the roles of Candide and Cunegonde, the idealistic young lovers separated by war, earthquake, the Inquisition, sexual enslavement, and various other disasters that they invariably manage to survive until they can find each other again....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I keep wondering when you people of the fourth estate are going to get to the basics which are the issues we voters should use to elect any official. You know, stuff like qualifications. What have they done for us in their other political jobs? How have they voted on important issues affecting the city? Show us where they live....

“When I was just out of college I worked with a musician, and we built this leotard that had movement-sensitive switches on it,” says Debra Loewen, choreographer and artistic director of Milwaukee’s Wild Space Dance Company. “It was hooked up to a computer, which was hooked up to a synthesizer. So every sound you heard, I created by my movement.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Eisen also expects the touring groups to “keep the work simple....

It’s an old saying, but still true: Death isn’t pretty. Some tips to keep your fashion sense alive on that New England vacation . . . Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Silly people have long considered fashion a matter of life and death. Now, in the state of Maine, it really is. In October a Maine jury acquitted hunter Donald Rogerson of manslaughter in the death of Karen Ann Wood....

FOR SALE: 700-acre former Army base, 25 miles north of the Loop, with more than 450 buildings enclosing more than 2.9 million square feet. Golf course, 1.75 miles of beachfront, 900 century-old oak trees, and 11 plant species threatened or endangered in Illinois. Asking between nothing and $2 billion. Final decision on sale and price to be made by a former congressman from Wyoming. Why fight over an old fort? Its value lies more in where it is than in what it is....

They’re known as “phillumenists” or “lovers of light.” They’re also known as the Windy City Matchbook Club, and they meet, religiously, on the first Sunday of every month at the Indian Boundary Park field house to indulge in what is said to be the world’s largest hobby next to stamp collecting: collecting match covers and matchboxes. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “I don’t smoke but I’d go on all these dates and carry matchbooks with me in order to light cigarettes for girls....

Like many doctors just out of residency, I found myself looking for moonlighting jobs when I entered private practice. Educational loans and rent wouldn’t wait for the world to beat a path to my door. A friend told me about a job assessing disability claims, good pay and no patient responsibility. I was offered an interview, over lunch, and I was happy to oblige. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

HI-HAT HATTIE! Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Of course, that place wasn’t at the big table. Blacks were relegated almost exclusively to servile roles onscreen as well as off in the 1920s and ’30s, and McDaniel was no exception. She had an impressive career in terms of the quantity of films she was featured in, and some of those films were quite notable: I’m No Angel (“Beulah,” Mae West said to McDaniel, “peel me a grape”), Show Boat, Alice Adams, Nothing Sacred, The Male Animal, and of course Gone With the Wind, for which she won an Oscar....