To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Neighborhood News story on Chicago’s Peace Conversion Commission [August 19] correctly conveyed our mission–preparing a plan for the conversion of any prohibited nuclear weapons facilities to peaceful and productive uses. However, it gives the unfortunate impression that the city does not support this work. While our budget is small, we are currently receiving excellent cooperation from the city, particularly its Department of Economic Development and its Commissioner, Timothy Wright....

Americans would seem to have won a big victory for family unity and parental wisdom. At least that’s what the U.S. Supreme Court said it was providing last June 25 with its decision to uphold state laws that deny teenagers abortions until their parents are notified. “It is both rational and fair for the state to conclude,” wrote Justice Anthony Kennedy, “that, in most instances, the family will strive to give a lonely or even terrified minor advice that is both compassionate and mature....

Nancy Spero has always gone against the grain. When New York and abstract expressionism dominated the art world, she lived in Paris and painted people–prostitutes, lovers, mothers and children. When the slick, faceless art of pop and held sway, she developed her own hand-printing technique to produce “political manifestos.” At a time when other artists were experimenting with acrylic on canvas, she made shockingly ephemeral works on paper. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Sister Fran Ault glides blue, yellow, and purple pastels across manila paper. Her blue eyes dart behind her tortoiseshell glasses. They glance at my head. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Sister Fran, dressed in a T-shirt and maroon pants, perches comfortably on a chair at Saint Barnabas, the south-side convent where she lives. “I was an art teacher at Visitation High School in 1981, when an English teacher said her poems contained colors because she saw people as colors....

It was one of those looks-great-on-paper ideas that floats out of the Park District from time to time. They wanted to fill in a portion of Lake Michigan so that pedestrians could stand on a spit of land at the mouth of the Chicago River and watch the boats pass by. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “I think that the Park District did not understand the significance of that water at the foot of the lake,” says Richard Race, president of Hydrographic Survey Company, an offshore surveying firm....

On a rainy summer afternoon, when most children are camped out in front of the television playing Nintendo or watching videos, the Young Shakespeare Players are rehearsing for a full-length performance of Hamlet at the Anshe Emet School on Pine Grove. As the infamous prince of Denmark, Rosanna Orfield, a pretty blond 15-year-old, sinks to the floor, and Reina Hardy, a diminutive Horatio, kneels beside her. “Now cracks a noble heart,” Reina says, her voice expanding with melancholy....

PYGMALION But you don’t spend five acts striking sparks between a man and a woman only to have the woman go off at the end to some other fellow. The romantic actor Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree, who in 1914 played Higgins in the first British production of Pygmalion (opposite Shaw’s erstwhile lover, Mrs. Stella Patrick Campbell), devised a bit of stage business just before the final curtain to indicate an inevitable wedding between the prickly professor and his presumptuous pupil....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Aesthetically, the park is a beautiful combination of trees, grass, and seating that serves as a refreshing counterpoint to the el tracks and buildings that surround it. The rolling landscape and winding footpath lend a sense of serenity to an otherwise bustling and chaotic environment, and there are, in fact, plenty of places to sit. In addition to the formal seating areas, the lights lining the walkway double as small benches, characteristic of the innovation inherent in the park’s design....

The woman leading the rock band at the Vic last Friday seemed a most unlikely candidate for pop stardom. Overweight, plain, quiet, eccentrically dressed in a style that was part beatnik and part suburban shopper, she sat at her electric piano, never getting up to prance or dance around the stage the way a pop star’s supposed to. The calm center of a musical storm, smiling benignly as the other musicians cooked, she just sat there and held court–benign, complacent, even a little smug–for the rapt audience of aging children who had come to hear her songs....

A highly distinguished and immensely enjoyable selection of 13 Warner Brothers cartoons made between 1948 and 1956, 9 of them by Chuck Jones. Leading off the program is Lumberjack Rabbit (1953), the only Warners cartoon in 3-D, and more a curiosity than a classic. The eyepoppers include two masterpieces of the same year, the modernist Duck Amuck and the wildly futurist Duck Dodgers in the 24 1/2 Century, as well as one of the most beautiful Road Runner cartoons (the 1956 Gee Whiz-z-z-z), a Tweety Pie cartoon in which Sylvester loses all nine of his lives (Friz Freleng’s Satan’s Waitin’, 1954), and two hilarious character items from 1951, one starring the underrated Foghorn Leghorn (Robert McKimson’s Leghorn Swoggled), the other featuring the Three Bears on Father’s Day (A Bear for Punishment)....

Lead Story Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In October a British dermatologist reported that a 26-year-old female patient, involved in hormone therapy to get rid of excess facial hair, suddenly became sexually irresistible to her pet rottweiler. The doctor, writing in the medical journal the Lancet, said the dog “would not leave her alone” and attributed its behavior to changes in the woman’s skin secretions....

It’s 4 AM and I’m swimming through crowds of dancers. They’re everywhere in this club–on benches, bar stools, tabletops, in every possible nook and cranny. The only people not dancing are the ones playing volleyball: two guys with Marine Corps hairstyles in neon yellow shirts, and based on their grunts and sweat stains, they’re darn serious about this sport. A pile of vomit near the volleyball court goes unnoticed. Stick-girls ogle the sports....

It’s always interesting to see how musicians who’ve been successful on record come off live. The transition between bandstand and studio can be tricky, and some of our most important blues artists have had trouble with it. In some cases–Howlin’ Wolf comes to mind–an artist’s stage presence has an excitement or intensity that can’t be reproduced mechanically; you’ve got to experience the full force of the personality to appreciate the music....

THAT SERIOUS HE-MAN BALL Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The protagonists of Alonzo D. Lamont Jr.’s That Serious He-Man Ball are no disaffected ghetto adolescents, however, but middle-aged adults carrying trendy bags for their gear, wearing expensive sneakers, and possessing not one but two clean, well-kept Spaldings. Twin is an executive with the Xerox Corporation, Sky is a job counselor for a social-service organization, and Jello is an author with a graduate degree....

THE CRICKET IN TIMES SQUARE at Strawdog Theatre Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The tale itself is a classic of simplicity. A Connecticut cricket named Chester, lost in a Times Square subway station, is befriended by Mario, a young boy whose family owns a less-than-successful newsstand. Mario’s mother is not real keen on Chester, but when his musical talent emerges–Chester, it turns out, can play Italian opera by rubbing his wings together–she turns into his biggest fan....

Shot for the astonishing sum of $5,000, Gregg Araki’s second feature is accurately described by its writer-director-producer-cinematographer-editor as “a minimalistic gay/bisexual postpunk antithesis to the smug complacency of regressive Hollywood tripe like The Big Chill.” A college reunion of sorts takes place when Rachel (Maureen Dondanville), a lesbian, and Sara (Nicole Dillenberg), a hetereosexual, decide to visit their gay friend Michael (Bretton Vail) in LA for a weekend; their new lovers (Andrea Beane and Marcus D’Amico) are in tow, and Michael’s former lover Alex (Lance Woods) happens to turn up as well....

The most important play of last Monday’s Fiesta Bowl, in which Notre Dame and West Virginia battled for the national college football championship, took place in the third quarter. The Fighting Irish led 26-13, but the Mountaineers had just completed their first touchdown drive of the day and then intercepted Notre Dame quarterback Tony Rice deep in Irish territory. Notre Dame had dominated the football game in all facets all afternoon, but this appeared to be West Virginia’s chance to get back in it and steal the title....

To the editors: That leads me to my central argument: Dean’s assumption of simplistic literalism in blues lyrics is patronizing to the point of borderline racism (as are her references to the “violent roots” of the culture that spawned the blues–that culture was shaped by religious, spiritual, and liberational impulses far more than by any indigenous predisposition toward violence). The blues is an art form of great subtlety and craftsmanship; irony and ambiguity are at the heart of much blues expression....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A regular listener to radio talk shows quickly realizes that Dudycz doesn’t have what so notoriously have been called “the necessaries” for political office (which is not to say that many incumbents do have them). The most encouraging sentence in Miller’s article is at the end: “If Dudycz wins, they’ll take out the eraser at redistricting time, and that will be that....

CABARET REBOB Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The varied performers include folksinger Chris Farrell, performance artist Betsy Walton, Russ Flack, Karol Kent, and Paul Raci of the Friends of the Zoo, and comic Peter Burns of the maybe sleeping, maybe defunct Willow Street Carnival. And there can’t be many small cabarets that have their own six-member rock-jazz band–International Fingers, led by the show’s musical director, Domenic Bucci, on the guitar....