THE TWO GENTLEMEN OF VERONA It’s intriguing but debatable, this speculation that the lives of 20th-century men are, compared to those of Elizabethan males, emotionally deprived. How do you measure feelings, much less measure them across the centuries? Then there’s the assumption that 20th-century actresses can evoke more emotion from roles than their psychologically stunted male colleagues can. That’s not just unprovable, it sounds like a dare, not unlike that stupid tennis championship match between Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs....

BORN ON THE FOURTH OF JULY In Vietnam war films, U.S. troops are over there because they’re over there because they’re over there. Not one feature film–unless you count John Wayne’s frothing right-wing fantasy The Green Berets (1968)–ventures a plausible reason why billions of dollars and tens of thousands of American lives (and over a million and a half Vietnamese lives) were squandered cruelly in Southeast Asia. What we tend to get on-screen instead of explanations are bits and pieces of pretty pathetic mumbo jumbo....

When the President last performed in Chicago, the band seemed ill at ease and out of place: it was a rare live performance, and the President plodded through the repertoire as if it were a necessary speech to unimportant union members. But, like its namesake, the President has undergone significant changes since 1989. For starters, this new-music sextet–which sits somewhere on the border between jazz and rock and counts electronic sounds, Ornette Coleman, industrial-noise music, and postminimalist composition among its constituencies–has three new members....

No great crowds are beating a path to the door of the unpretentious Hoang Mai Restaurant on North Sheridan, but the faithful claim that its food and service are unparalleled among Vietnamese establishments. “The Vietnamese tell me it’s the best food in the community,” says Lisa Gershenson, owner of a north-side catering service and lover of Vietnamese cooking. “The other owners eat there, I think, because of the quality. Everything is prepared with love....

By nightfall the Shoesmith Park Little Leaguers and their parents have gone home, and the tree-lined corner at 49th and Dorchester is calm–except for the basketball courts. There a group of a dozen or so young men has arrived, and a loud full-court game is under way. “This has gone on for far too long; something’s got to be done,” says Virginia Walker, president of the Shoesmith Park Advisory Council. “If the Park District can’t control these games, the hoops should come down....

I CAN’T KEEP RUNNING IN PLACE And a musical that, because it was neither too militant nor too cute, I found myself liking. I Can’t Keep Running in Place contains no gratuitous male bashing, no smothering sisterhood-and-solidarity smugness; and on the other hand nobody ends up deliriously happy because she’s finally landed the man of her dreams and there’s only one tears-and-hugs reconciliation. The surprisingly intelligent and insightful script, written, I’m told, by Barbara Schottenfeld at the age of 21 when she was at Yale, distinguishes between assertiveness and aggressiveness, recognizes that women are manipulated by other women as well as by men, and even considers the possibility that self-help classes like the one in the play may be nothing more than “menopausal masturbation....

In jazz, it’s not that unusual for a player of one instrument to be influenced by those of another. In fact, many breakthroughs in instrumental style have come about when a musician heard another sound and then challenged the limitations of his own instrument to achieve it. When guitarist Joshua Breakstone began listening to jazz, he paid close attention to the great postbop trumpet players, and it shows–in his easy, one-note-at-a-time approach to melody, in his phrasing (which mostly eschews the percussive effects the guitar can attain), and in his round, variably articulated sound....

LITERAL TRANSLATIONS (OR, WHAT WE THINK WE TALK ABOUT WHEN WE TALK ABOUT LOVE) Certainly the first monologue Reid delivers–a somewhat too long section from Eudora Welty’s retelling of the Circe episode in Homer’s Odyssey–is as much about power, self-esteem, and manipulation as about love. In the tale Circe falls in love with Ulysses only after she discovers he’s immune to the potion that turns his crew into swine. And having given her heart to Ulysses, she learns that often as not married men return to their wives....

LITTLE ME Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Is it Nancy Reagan rebutting Kitty Kelley’s biography? No, it’s Belle Poitrine (nee Schlumpfert)–star of stage (OK, burlesque) and screen, destined to leave acting for the lifetime role of a politician’s wife. She was born on the wrong side of the tracks in Venezuela, Illinois, where her mother settled after coming north “from the finest house in New Orleans”–that’s house, not home....

Nine years ago science writer, film producer, and former Field Museum exhibit designer Vic Banks took a break from Chicago. He visited and fell in love with a place that sounds a bit like the rural midwest: a flat, sunny grassland disdained by east-coast sophisticates. But this landscape–the Pantanal–is in semitropical southwestern Brazil. And it is still lush with a quantity and variety of wildlife long gone from our part of the world....

Andrei Tarkovsky’s masterpiece, which, like his earlier Solaris, is a very free and allegorical adaptation of an SF novel (Arkady and Boris Strugatsky’s Roadside Picnic). After a strange meteorite hits the earth, the region where it fell is sealed off; known as the Zone, it is believed to have magical powers that can grant the most secret wishes of those who enter it, but it can be penetrated only illegally and with special guides....

I’m always surprised by the range of sounds, textures, and moods evoked by the String Trio of New York; one wouldn’t think that a jazz group bereft of piano, horns, and drums could be so versatile, let alone could sustain the rhythmic drive expected of so much jazz. But with just guitar (James Emery), bass (John Lindberg), and violin (Regina Carter), the trio manages to obviate the need for other instruments....

Once inside, [my father] put down the bundle of newspapers he carried under his arm . . . and hugged my mother. Then he took his fedora hat off his head and put it on mine. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It was assumed that I would have a fedora hat of my own by the time I was twelve years old. My father had had his first fedora at the age of nine, but he recognized that the circumstances of his bringing up had been different from the circumstances of mine ....

THE BALD SOPRANO Written in 1948 and first performed in 1950, Eugene Ionesco’s best-known work satirizes a closed world: a pretentious middle-class English household. Ionesco mocks its inhabitants by making them mouth arbitrarily assembled sentences from an English phrase book he was studying. Their irrelevant remarks parody the cliches and rote emotions of bourgeois conversation, the detritus of a frozen life. Of course arbitrary identities are common in phrase books; Ionesco goes one step further to suggest that, yes, such tourist aids actually mirror bourgeois reality....

Why are residential toilet seats always round, and public toilet seats always “U” shaped? Who started this practice? –R.G., Jacksonville, Florida Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Who the unsung genius was who started this practice we may never know, but it’s now embodied in industry standards. Cecil was chatting with Shabbir Rawalpindiwala, chairman of the toilet-seat committee for the American National Standards Institute, and he told me that after months of solemn deliberation, he and his fellow intellectuals had definitively set the design of public (and private) toilet seats for all time, ensuring that our grandchildren will have U-shaped public potty seats too....

I heard aphids are born pregnant. Is this true? If so, how does it work? –Lilian Wentworth, Silver Spring, Maryland Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » You think your life is miserable, cucumber, just be glad you’re not an aphid. Not only are they born pregnant, they’re pregnant without benefit of sex. Not that sex with an aphid sounds like much of a treat. Two things are at work here: parthenogenesis and paedogenesis....

After about six months of listening to it, I’m convinced that what the Vulgar Boatmen’s first album, You and Your Sister, is about is a half century of American music. You hear it in the country blues cadences of “Cry Real Tears,” the Buddy Holly hand claps in the title song, the lyrical tips-o’-the-hat to the Band on “Katie” and Ronnie Hawkins on “On the Street Where You Live,” the Velvet Undergroundy power-strumming on “Drive Somewhere,” the pretty musical homage to R....

UNDER MILK WOOD Under Milk Wood was commissioned by the British Broadcasting Corporation but tried out in the spring of 1953 in a New York concert reading (later released on record) that starred Thomas himself, along with such American actors as Sada Thompson. By the time the play was broadcast on BBC radio in early 1954, with Thomas’s fellow Welshman Richard Burton in the lead, the poet was dead. (This production, probably unintentionally, coincides with Thomas’s alcohol-fueled death on November 9, 1953, a few days after his 39th birthday....

Up on the fourth floor of the Public Library Cultural Center, there’s a series of partitioned spaces filled with strange objects and constructions–“site-specific installations,” as they’re known in the art world. Such works, built specifically for a particular site and often creating an environment into which the viewer enters, are not readily salable commodities. Indeed, this type of art can trace its origins in part to a conscious revolt, beginning in the late 1960s and early ’70s, against the commercialization of art, which has by now reached almost obscene heights....

December 30 Through January 1 Help victims of contra war have a happier new year by attending the Vietnam Veterans Against War New Year’s Eve Party, at 3935 N. Marshfield. Admission is $5; additional donations and items such as aspirin, bandages, and diapers are encouraged. Details at 327-5756. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Sugar Blue and his harmonica will entertain New Year’s Eve at Wise Fool’s Pub, 2270 N....