MUSIC KILLS A MEMORY at ‘Od’s Blood Theatre –Jim Carroll Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Music Kills a Memory takes the form of a lounge act, meandering its way with songs and stories through the lives of three women who meet at a Sex Addicts Anonymous session and form a singing group with silent, mysterious accompanist Monty Carlyle (Chuck Larsen). Each of the women has a wildly different personality and musical style....

Lead Story James Fentress, 23, was arrested for taking an ambulance for a joyride in Oklahoma City in May. Fentress, who was dressed as an ambulance-company driver, was apprehended when he stopped in a parking lot to show some kids how the siren works. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » When sheriff’s deputies in Albuquerque, New Mexico, arrived to evict Rick “Reptile” Little, 30, from his home in June due to a rent dispute, they found 140 snakes (at least 40 of them venomous), along with owls, toads, rabbits, salamanders, moles, lizards, turtles, tarantulas, scorpions, dogs, cats, and fish....

John Frankenheimer still hasn’t regained his stride since his black-and-whlite films of the 60s, but he’s settled down into being a pretty good director of thrillers, and this is one of his best for some time–comparable to the kind of lean, purposeful work he used to do for such 50s TV shows as Studio One and Playhouse 90. On the border between West Germany and Czechoslovakia in November 1988, American and Soviet border control commanders Roy Scheider and Jurgen Prochnow, embittered veterans of Vietnam and Afghanistan, get embroiled in a petty personal war of their own....

From the looks of it, Bette Ozmon may have been duped. She paid $8,000 for a silver filly, Heidenway’s Peaches ‘N Cream–who turned dark: mottled brown with silver and black streaking. “I’m so angry, I don’t even want to think about it,” Ozmon says, kicking a clump of hay as we walk around her Marengo farm. “I had such hopes.” “Miniatures are great lawn mowers, great fertilizer providers, and they’re a pet, all in one,” Ozmon says, as she walks around the property....

AND WE REALLY HATE EACH OTHER As an example of YIF’s ingenuity, take their handling of an exercise in which a character is to be afflicted with a rare behavioral disease suggested by the audience. An unimaginative spectator saddled Michael Elyanow with Tourette syndrome, and the actor had to go with it–but he combined Tourette with narcolepsy to produce a disability not only original but funny. In another sketch three comedians who’ve made their reputations on homophobic caricatures find themselves unable to shed their cartoonish personas....

Believe it or not, ballet is finally a homegrown form in Chicago: if you haven’t seen Ballet Chicago in the last two years, you haven’t seen how they’re shaping a unique repertory highlighting works by artistic director Daniel Duell and resident choreographer Gordon Peirce Schmidt. This weekend’s performances feature two of Duell’s works: the pas de trois from Verdi Divertimenti and the world premiere of Improvisations in the Fifth Dimension, set to music by Mozart and Poulenc....

PRESUMED INNOCENT With Harrison Ford, Bonnie Bedelia, Greta Scacchi, Brian Dennehy, and Raul Julia. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Frank Pierson-Alan J. Pakula screenplay juggles a number of other topics–political back stabbing, child abuse, police corruption, purloined evidence, shattered idealism. The film’s tone is somber and angst-ridden, with characters muttering or whispering most of the dialogue. This sotto voce thriller is being promoted as a bracing antidote to this summer’s clamorous, mindless Hollywood output–a cavalcade of gunplay, explosions, car crashes, and similar carnage....

Films and videotapes from more than 25 countries will be screened at Facets Multimedia Center, 1517 W. Fullerton, Friday, October 11, through Sunday, October 20. Single tickets are $5 for adults, $3 for children and Facets members; a pass good for four films is $15 for adults, $10 for children. For more information call 281-9075. SATURDAY, OCTOBER 12 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » ANIMATION CELEBRATION A selection of 13 animated shorts from Canada, England, the U....

“I want to paint you,” says Emil Nolde to his wife Ada early in Degenerate Art, Tom Jacobson’s historical drama about life and art in Hitler’s Germany. “I’m not ugly enough,” Ada ironically responds. Much of the art created by Nolde and his fellow expressionists, who were living and working in a Germany left desperate and humiliated by World War I, was indeed ugly–which made it truthful despite its fantastical quality, and which is why it was banned by a Nazi government seeking to glorify the Aryan nation....

Unity Temple was Frank Lloyd Wright’s first public building: a landmark, and one that attracts thousands to the intersection of Lake and Kenilworth in Oak Park. The boxy structure is renowned for its fine acoustics and wretchedly uncomfortable pews. To make matters worse, at about that same time word got out about a $20,000 study of the temple’s concrete, done by the respected engineering consulting firm of Wiss Janney Elstner Associates....

DYSAN But at least this Chicago premiere by the Actors Repertory Theatre is persuasively performed. Eric Nightengale’s staging makes up in energy for what it must inevitably lose in coherence. The actors know what they’re doing, and usually that’s half the battle. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Here, unfortunately, it’s a lot less. There’s still the story to contend with. Dysan depicts a love triangle that defies time and logic: it brings together two men and the superwoman they’ve fought for over the centuries in several different incarnations....

The call of the upland sandpiper is one of the eeriest sounds in nature. A long wailing whistle that rises and then falls, it has been called as sad as a November wind, and indeed it does sound more like the wind than the cry of an animal. We have a few birds in far southern Cook County in some old fields that have been taken over by the Forest Preserve....

The Buffalo Grove Prairie is a typical Illinois natural area: a long, narrow strip of native black-soil prairie sandwiched between the Soo Line tracks on the east and the bare clay of a construction site on the west. Overhead, supported on two rows of steel towers, two Commonwealth Edison high-tension lines run the length of the prairie. Along the western edge is a third line supported on wooden poles. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

NEW DANCES ’88 A dance concert, like a good meal, is ephemeral, meant to be consumed at a sitting. Like a gourmet meal it relies on established traditions, and often it’s made up of several courses. But the goal of a meal is satiety, while a dance concert–especially a concert like “New Dances ’88”–often whets the appetite for more. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » There’s a fascination in the dancer moving without volition–who seems to be activated by light, or sound, or electric current–and that’s what Wired exploits....

MACBETH But though there are plenty of ways to mess up Macbeth, there are more means to play to its strengths; and every good production, including this inaugural venture by the European Repertory Company, adds to those assets. Though uneven in performance and aggressively streamlined in concept, this staging by Yasen Peyankov (a Bulgarian theater artist who came to Chicago in 1990 to seek asylum) presents an old play in bold new ways; and given the innovations, it’s less crucial that every role deliver the goods....

The most intriguing feature this year at Ravinia’s annual A.A.C.M. offering may be the contrast between two remarkable drummers. Reggie Nicholson, with Mwata Bowden’s quartet, is a master of free motions, of subtle interplay using a wide dynamic range, of infectious rhythms and organically growing swoops of sound; Avreeayl Ra, with New Horizons, is all excitement, mixing African, Latin, and jazz rhythms with power and never failing to bring out a band’s best....

There are two great figures in American rock ‘n’ roll: Elvis Presley and Lou Reed. The other great difference between Elvis and Lou is a difference in generations: Elvis was an entertainer, while Lou is an artist. Again and again, in reading about Elvis, one encounters–from even the most disinterested critics–a description of the power he is said to have emanated on stage. Lou, meanwhile, is out to please himself first and foremost....

In the remembrance of Captain Walter Dyett, the Jazz Institute of Chicago has taken on a worthy cause: Dyett, while teaching music at Chicago’s DuSable High School, shaped and inspired a slew of the city’s greatest jazz players, including (but not limited to) Gene Ammons, Johnny Board, Richard Davis, Dorothy Donegan, Johnny Griffin, Joseph Jarman, Leroy Jenkins, and John Young. Several Dyett alumni–saxist Von Freeman, his brother George on guitar, and trumpeter Paul Serrano–are in the octet assembled for this tribute, which also features reedman Jimmy Ellis and pianist Jodie Christian....

The fight over Chicago’s electricity franchise has sunk pretty low. It’s almost as though the hick pitching radio ads for Commonwealth Edison scripted the whole show. CEOC organizers don’t actually want the city to buy Com Ed. They do want the city to terminate its franchise agreement with the utility by December 31, 1989, the last possible day it may do. so. Terminating the agreement would force Com Ed into negotiating with the city–and presumably organizers–about electric rates....

Since 9 AM last Friday four Tibetan Buddhist monks from the Namgyal Monastery in Dharamsala, India–home of Tibet’s exiled Dalai Lama–have been working undeneath a canopy on a wooden platform on the second floor of the Field Museum of Natural History. They are slowly drawing a six-and-a-half-foot-wide, exquisitely detailed circular picture–not with paint, but with 18 different colors of fine-grain sand that they carefully tap onto a horizontal board, directing the stream through long, thin metal funnels....