Marc Scorca is charming, a personable man, a man with a way of maintaining eye contact at all times that makes you feel guilty for glancing away occasionally to check out your fettucine Alfredo. He’s just as charming at 9:15 at night, interrupted in the midst of washing his dog for a followup question, as he is on company time, and he’s just as ready with a speedy, educated answer to virtually any question about the arts and their funding....

Friday 1 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » What exactly makes baseball baseball depends on who’s doing the defining. To the kids, it’s the stars; to a scholar, the stats; to a Wrigleyville resident, it might be the drunken fans. But to a physicist, the game is something different. At Fermilab tonight, visting scientist Robert Adair will talk about the flight and liveliness of the ball, the collusion of bat and ball, and all sorts of other physical phenomena that affect the game....

Friday 10 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “I’ve got to be the first person ever to move to LA, then come back to Chicago for the winter,” muses Aaron Freeman, creator of the famous “Council Wars” routine. Freeman is back in town for the debut of his new show, Do the White Thing, which is about two guys stuck on a street corner because neither one can get a cab....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Dudycz is anti-choice. He says he worries about it, doesn’t say anything about better sex education or distributing free birth control, but still, like a lot of conservative men, values a fetus more highly than a live woman, except with the usual conservative exceptions. Bryan Miller says that’s all right because Annunzio is the same way....

These days, it’s no surprise to find unusual groupings of instruments–sometimes so odd you’re hard pressed to call the resulting configuration a “band” at all. But even against this backdrop, the Ethnic Heritage Ensemble gets points for iconoclasm. Most improvising ensembles supply at least one of the following instruments to tie together the music’s threads: bass, trap drums, piano, or even guitar. But the Ethnics’ most frequent alignment finds them arranging saxophone and trombone in front of percussionist/leader Kahil El-Zabar’s congas and earth drums–and letting it go at that....

McHenry County, about an hour’s drive northwest on I-90, likes to point to its glory days. Pick up a copy of its tourism-council brochure, and discover these little-known facts: In 1962 Chuck Hiller of Johnsburg hit the first grand slam homer in World Series history when he played for the Giants against the Yankees. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But its past splendor notwithstanding, McHenry County, full of lush farmland, is also full of natural charm....

There may be no more exciting pianist in jazz than Marilyn Crispell. Perhaps you (like me) hate statements that bold–especially about someone you’ve never heard of; the proper response would be to check her out tomorrow and see if I’m not right. Crispell can boast an impressively clearheaded musical vision that is particularly well served by her explosive technique. As is always the case with a pianist working on the “free jazz” frontier, Crispell begs comparison with Cecil Taylor, the grand master of unconventionally structured improvisation; in fact, Crispell herself lauds Taylor as an inspirational influence....

Lead Story Adrian Popovici, a University of Montreal law professor and author, with his locally well-known lawyer wife, of the popular newspaper column “Love and the Law,” was arrested in October after reportedly threatening to kill her. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A 14-year-old boy was referred to juvenile authorities in Salt Lake City in December after having distributed photocopies of his genitals and other body parts to residents of his apartment complex....

Few plays justify their name like this deservedly popular gay comedy, now independently revived after a successful seven-month run at Bailiwick Repertory. David Dillon’s raucous romp is a free-spirited, unashamedly explicit action portrait of seven gay male friends who gather to play Fact, Fiction, Fantasy, or Flip, a Truth or Dare-style game. A supple vehicle for carnal confessions, cuddling and kissing, telling anecdotes (including a plug for safe sex), and deliciously dishy dialogue (zinger witticisms launched by a wickedly wisecracking Ted Bales), the game quickly draws us into the action....

PIZZA MAN Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Julie has had a bad day. She’s just lost her tenth dead-end job in eight years, and it’s Friday night and she doesn’t have a date. Her plan is to trash her troubles at home, assisted by a few dozen beers, a fifth of Jack Daniels, and some loud music. When a neighbor complains about the noise she calls him a childishly obscene name and flashes him from the window....

It’s probably just as well Chicago won’t be hosting a 1992 World’s Fair commemorating the 500th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s first voyage to the Americas. Even at the proposed cost of over $2 billion, the festivities probably wouldn’t have held a candle to the lakefront Columbian Exposition of 1893. That fair–it was a year late because the mammoth task of construction held it up–attracted some 24 million visitors at a time when the national population was 63 million....

Is travel writing dead, killed by mass tourism and tourist guidebooks? According to Paul Fussell, whose book Abroad: British Literary Traveling Between the Wars revived scholarly interest in the travel genre, its heyday has long passed. As editor of The Norton Book of Travel, an anthology devoted largely to the glory days of travel writing–the last century and the first half of this one–Fussell laments that we are in the twilight of both travel and travel writing....

STUMPY’S GANG . . . A COMIC MUTATION The newest member of the cast is Booger, who consists almost entirely of a periscope eye and a ventral vagina with a prehensile clitoris through which she feeds. On this day Booger turns on her savior, eating Frank’s entire hoard of Twinkies, his obnoxious coworker, his intimidating supervisor, and eventually the whole world. In despair at the Frankenstein he has created, Frank commits suicide, climbing into his own fiery furnace at the beckoning of a clown-host mentor....

SUFFERING FOOLS at the International Performance Studio Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Today, much of the glitter is gone. Tabloid articles about drug abuse and alcoholism in Hollywood have dulled its sheen, and the lights of Broadway are dimmer than they’ve been in years. Of course you can still see the old films and fantasize about reclining in a champagne bubble bath after a quick dance with Ginger....

THE NUTCRACKER This all-American ballet was created 98 years ago in Saint Petersburg for the pleasure of the czar and his aristocratic cronies, and it was based on “The Nutcracker and the Mouse King,” a story by E.T.A. Hoffmann, a popular 19th-century German writer noted for his grotesque gothic fairy tales. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The first performances were not an unmitigated success....

The Chicago baseball season didn’t deserve to the way it did. By that I’m not referring to the third-place finish of the White Sox or the Cubs’ fourth-place finish–no, those were both fully deserved–but to the last Chicago game of the year. Andre Dawson homered to give the Cubs a 3-2 victory over the Montreal Expos. It wasn’t quite as dramatic as his home rim in his final Wrigley Field at-bat in 1987, when he earned the Most Valuable Player Award with 49 homers, 137 runs batted in, and a ....

The day dawned with a blue and unsullied sky, but by game time early last Sunday afternoon, clouds extended from horizon to horizon. They were big, puffy white clouds that gave the field at Bill Veeck Stadium a dappled, shady appearance; they were bottom-heavy, dark on their undersides, but they were so spread out and disorganized that they weren’t even capable of threatening rain. Too bad for the White Sox, because by the time the game became official, after five innings, they had already blown a 1-0 lead and were down 6-1....

The people from Ohio are gathered around the wolf playpen, anxiously awaiting the appearance of the wolf puppies. They’re getting their cameras and video recorders ready. There’s little activity among the main wolf pack on this hot day. Imbo, the male leader (known as the alpha male), sleeps in the large fenced-in enclosure atop a wooden wolf hut, which looks like a flat-topped A-frame doghouse open at both ends. His subjects sleep on the ground beneath him....

Until July 29, you and every other citizen of Illinois owned equal shares in a 30-acre parcel of real estate near 6500 north, 900 west. That’s at the bottom of Lake Michigan, just east of Loyola University’s lakeshore campus. But you don’t own it anymore. That afternoon, Governor James Thompson signed a bill authorizing the sale of the land to Loyola for $10,000, so that the university can fill 18 1/2 acres of it, expanding its campus by about a third....

BIRTH RATE It takes someone familiar with the sight of lots of people crammed into a few rooms to expose the problem that never really went away. It takes a Polish playwright. Based on an essay by Tadeusz Rozewicz, Birth Rate is Kazimierz Braun’s highly stylized, metaphorical evocation of the emergency–“too many people, too little time,” the prospect of seven billion people crowding the planet by the year 2000. Best of Chicago voting is live now....