A man in a navy windbreaker is telling me about the paved area that runs north-south between the two halves of the downtown Marshall Fields, one of the few privately owned “alleys” in the Loop. “Field’s has to close it off to traffic once a year,” he says. “It’s like the Rockefeller Center in New York. You know how that works? They have to close that outdoor area to the public for a day each year in order to keep ownership of it....

One April evening 75 years ago a coterie of Hyde Park intellectuals and art connoisseurs gathered at the University of Chicago’s Quadrangle Club. Bonded by a nostalgia for the cultural havens back east–where most of them were educated–they decided to establish a society “to stimulate love of the beautiful and to enrich the life of the community through the cultivation of the arts.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Shortly after taking office, Schutze stated that one of the society’s purposes was “to stimulate study of the art of the present time, the new renaissance....

DAVID PUSZH DANCE COMPANY Shaun Gilmore at MoMing Dance & Arts Center Dancers, even more than the rest of us, hate and fear fat. Like aging, it’s a serious impediment to the body’s expressive capabilities. And if I’ve made Fat sound like a humorous insult to the obese, that’s not the whole story: Puszczewicz is very sympathetic to the overweight person’s plight, particularly when she has a yen to dance. The mood of this piece shifts from the comic to the pathetic when two slender dancers (Ellen Airi Hubbell and Emilly Stein) enter in skintight leotards to move gracefully and quickly all over the stage while the fat lady, stationary, looks on longingly....

By making it hard to establish new landfills, Senate Bill 172 has been effective in creating at least the appearance of a garbage crisis. But the crisis itself, the disaster that seems so imminent when Tribune headlines scream that there are only five years of landfill capacity left, looms a lot less scary when you realize that those headlines have been screaming for years. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Over the past couple of years Eleventh Dream Day has gradually built up a raging head of steam, a blistering one-two guitar attack that sounds like somebody throttling down an empty highway at 3 AM. Frontman/songwriter Rick Rizzo likes to write about people driven over the edge by their irrational urges, but he also constructs his songs around long vamps that the band can stretch and bend and squeeze to bursting....

DAYTON CONTEMPORARY DANCE COMPANY So how one sees black modern dance is bound to be an issue in the Dance Center’s series this year, “Present Vision/Past Voice: The African-American Tradition in Modern Dance.” The opening program was a brilliant choice: three early works by black choreographer Donald McKayle, performed by the Dayton Contemporary Dance Company. Not only is McKayle’s voice part of the black tradition–his works precede, in a similar vein, those of Alvin Alley–but his vision sets black culture apart at the same time that his generosity makes it available....

Joanie Pallatto offers an armload of stylistic contradictions, then matches them up in unexpected and often successful ways. She’ll produce a honeyed, almost cloying vocal timbre, which wouldn’t seem to have anything to do with the ecstatic, barely controlled rhythms of her scat-singing; the clash sometimes sets off sparklers. She has a trained and versatile vocal instrument, but she frequently uses techniques that minimize or even disguise it; the resultant spectacle never lacks far texture or exuberance....

Vocalist Johnny Christian has been a Chicago mainstay since the 1950s–first in gospel, later in blues and R & B–and for a while in the 70s he was appearing at clubs and show lounges throughout the northern midwest as well as in Chicago. These days he stays closer to home, where his expressive vocals and personable stage presence have made him a favorite on the south- and west-side club circuits. Christian’s style–polished, with a gritty edge that some of his more famous contemporaries, like Tyrone Davis, lost on their way to stardom–is both soothing and emotionally charged; his repertoire includes a wide spectrum of material ranging from funky R & B standards to aching ballads like McKinley Mitchell’s lovely “End of the Rainbow....

CIVIC ORCHESTRA OF CHICAGO at the Petrillo Music Shell The Chicago Symphony Orchestra has two great hopes for the 90s, and neither of them is Daniel Barenboim. The choice of Barenboim as Georg Solti’s successor is sure to remain controversial for some time to come, but two of the symphony’s underpublicized recent appointments are already garnering kudos. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Educated at Oberlin and Tanglewood, Morgan has had as mentors such luminaries as Seiji Ozawa, Leonard Bernstein, and Gunther Schuller....

DEFENDING YOUR LIFE From the very titles of his four comedy features, we know that Albert Brooks is both a serious and an honest filmmaker, because each one is a precise and accurate indication of what the movie is about: Real Life, Modern Romance, Lost in America, and Defending Your Life. But what makes Brooks funny is much harder to get at or agree on. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Lead Story A New Jersey memorabilia firm, Royal Golf Associates, is asking $15,000 for the .38 caliber revolver that Clifford Roberts (longtime chairman of the Masters golf tournament) used to commit suicide on the grounds at Augusta, Georgia, in 1977. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In January the Chicago Trunk and Leather Works started renting $1,100 briefcases (about $200 for three days) to executives who want to improve their image for meetings....

A hand reached out and touched my shoulder. Maybe it was the Styrofoam quart of matzo-ball soup and the plastic bag full of hallah I was holding that tipped him off. Whatever, I didn’t like the accusatory tone that accompanied his question. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I didn’t really want to answer. Maybe because I didn’t think it was any of his business....

The last time the Replacements were here they were mature rather than excitable, sincere rather than searing, and the album that eventually followed–the recent Don’t Tell a Soul–has many of the same elusive strengths and obvious weaknesses. Its failure to greatly widen their audience, however, leaves the Replacements once again at a crossroads–which is what makes this show interesting. The band still has something to prove, especially since their decision to replace Bob Stinson with Slim Dunlap appears to have been a not-quite-inconsequential boner, somewhat akin to the Rolling Stones replacing Mick Taylor with Ron Wood....

If you have had your fill of exposed pipes and bare brick, take heart. Rust Belt Cafe is yet another converted factory, but with a difference. The menu is small, but as Spencer Tracy once said of Katharine Hepburn, it is “cherce.” Divided into “smaller” and “larger” portions rather than into appetizers and entrees, offerings encourage diners to choose according to their appetites; the waiter won’t sneer if you order a meal made up of the smaller portions....

To the editors: Permit me to clear up one misimpression from Ben Joravsky’s otherwise accurate story on TEACH America [Neighborhood News, February 14]. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » One of Chicago’s best-kept secrets is that we have the nation’s largest private-sector market of education providers: 448 private and parochial schools offering safe, values-oriented, cost-effective learning environments to more than 125,000 youngsters, to one out of every six school-age children here....

“This stuff is like an FBI file,” says Nick Kamzic about the papers on his lap. “I’m like a secret agent. I can’t tell anyone exactly who I’m looking at, or why. Today is just another baseball game. Let’s just say I’m looking at both clubs. The less I say, the longer I’ll last as an employee. Scouts hate to get their name in the paper. There’s lots of jealousy in baseball....

XSIGHT! PERFORMANCE GROUP It helped that Xsight members know how to get in and out fast; they don’t carry much excess baggage. The seven dances took just a little more than an hour to perform. Of those seven, three were taken from Xsight’s performance last spring, “All You Can Eat and Other Human Weaknesses”; a fourth, Sudden Summer, is arguably the precursor of a leather-bar trio that appeared in “All You Can Eat....

Sue Powell Bernstein met Andries Botha in 1986, just at a time when the spirits were “right.” Bernstein, a professional fund-raiser from Evanston whose three children were at last grown and on their own, had recently separated from her husband and was looking for a commitment–“something to get me up in the morning besides my job.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Botha, a successful sculptor in his own right, had spent much time in the black townships studying the ancient, rhythmic skills of Zulu rope making, weaving, beading, and knotting....

The Importance of Being Earnest has been seen on countless stages, but Oscar Wilde’s much more dramatic life has not. To Patrick Trettenero and Jerome Stauduhar that life seemed a show that could almost sell itself. Its wild arc–Wilde went from the closet to jail for sodomy and from there to his grave–was the impetus for their play, Living Up to My Blue China: The Art and Passion of Oscar Wilde....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Tom Boeker is about as sensitive as a chain saw. No argument from this quarter. In this respect, certainly, he is far from the ideal. If, in addition, he were merely some real estate agent wrapp’d in a reviewer’s hide, if he were stupid or cared nothing about theater, I could understand his revilement at the hands of the Anonymous Directorate....