My friend Dave is trying to organize a tontine. He says it’s very simple. We each put an equal sum of money into an investment pool. Whoever outlives everybody else gets the money plus the accumulated earnings. What a strange concept! Put up your money, then hope for the ultimate misfortune to visit the other members of the group. I’m fascinated by the idea of it. What other chance do you have to gain from the deaths of your friends and acquaintances?...

I’ve heard that during times of heavy demand, natural gas suppliers compensate by introducing an inert, nonflammable gas just to keep the seals tight and the pressure steady. Is this true? Do we pay natural gas prices for the substitute stuff? Your home meter doesn’t know the difference! –Jack Ballard, Springfield, Virginia Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Cecil is not going to tell you, in this suspicious age, that no gas company ever tried to con the proletariat....

MEMORY AND METAPHOR: THE ART OF ROMARE BEARDEN, 1940-1987 Despite Bearden’s success during his lifetime, he is no longer well-known. His mainstream contemporaries of the 60s–pop artists such as Warhol and Lichtenstein or abstract painters such as Stella and Olitski–have been written into histories of recent American art, while he is often omitted. Yet he transformed the medium of collage and can hardly be termed an obscure artist. Concerned that Bearden might be excluded from art-history texts, the Studio Museum in Harlem has organized a comprehensive retrospective of more than 100 of his watercolors, oil paintings, and collages....

Though somewhat unheralded, the mandolin has a long history in blues and other southern black folk music. Yank Rachell, born in 1910 in Brownsville, Tennessee, is one of the few remaining bluesmen who specialize in the instrument. His keening, sensual style–rooted in the call-and-response tradition but imbued with an improvisational feel all his own–supports a voice that’s gutbucket gritty and also surprisingly tender, capable of everything from the raunchiest dirty blues to the most melancholy meditations....

Basically Bach, the enterprising period-instrument ensemble, deserves an “A” for chutzpah for attempting to subject Mozart’s greatest and most complex symphony to the “authenticity” treatment. The profound beauty and formalism of the Jupiter Symphony depend heavily on its contrasts and reconciliations, which can be best expressed by a large modern orchestra. (Even by 1788, the year of his final symphonic trilogy, Mozart knew what a midsize orchestra staffed with a strong wind section was capable of....

Friday 17 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The announcement of Marilyn’s Wake includes a card of the kind that commemorates Catholic funerals: on one side is a picture of Saint Francis of Assisi chatting with a branchful of birds, on the other a rather dreadful poem and the information that Marilyn the dog bought the farm on February 27, 1987, with her funeral planned for midnight tonight at Zoroya’s Funeral Parlor, 1702 S....

DORIS HUMPHREY: LATE WORKS Momenta is continuing its mission of restoring to life in the theater the lost dances of Doris Humphrey–along with Martha Graham, a founding mother of American modern dance. Last spring, Momenta reintroduced several of her lost early works; these offered both an artistic revelation and a fascinating glimpse of Humphrey’s creative growth during the 20s and 30s. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » One can only be grateful to Stephanie Clemens, the director of Momenta, for her unstinting dedication to the monumental task of returning long-lost works to life, not only Humphrey’s but works by her associates....

FIRST ANNUAL PLAYWRIGHTS’ PARTY Stage Left Theatre Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Satirical Sketches” offers a quintet of politically correct segments that are sometimes amusing, sometimes dull, sometimes promising, and sometimes incomprehensible. With the exception of Jeanne E. Martinelli’s staged poem, Roots Grow Towards Their Water Source, these sketches rely heavily on audience participation–unfortunate, given the size of the audience Wild Onion had to pick from on the night I attended....

Getting Off the Party Line “We lived in a certain kind of society,” she said. “It had absolute power over what was taught to students, including students of journalism. It went on for 40 years. What we really would need is to teach the profession of journalism to students. The teachers are mostly from the old structure–the good ones are exceptions. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Most reporters who seek her out at Civic Forum are foreigners, Rislingova told us....

IN MY MOTHER’S HOUSE Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Those fears are even more disturbing when you find yourself trapped under the big shadow cast by a famous parent. In her 1976 memoir In My Mother’s House, feminist writer Kim Chernin detailed the love-hate relationship between herself and her mother, Rose Chernin, a Russian-Jewish immigrant who became a communist leader and fearless labor agitator....

MAD FOREST Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Caryl Churchill’s play Mad Forest, in its Chicago premiere at Stage Left Theatre, tries to capture some of the absurdity, the fear, and the frustrations of the Romanian revolution. Structured in three acts that represent events before, during, and after the revolution, Mad Forest has some strong material, some solid performances, and the advantage of topicality, but the current production is confusing and cold....

“The whole world of music comes at us from all sides these days,” says Neil Rolnick, oblivious in this Indian restaurant to the guy playing ambient music on the African kora immediately behind him. “Looking back, what I got from studying with [French composer] Darius Milhaud is that–he lived over the Place Pigalle [the red-light district] in Paris. He loved to open the windows, and there would be all this music and sound, and it all went into his music....

Music once rang from the building at 1815 W. Roosevelt Road, filling the west-side night with the sound of the blues. Some of the greatest masters in the music’s history–Howlin’ Wolf, Hubert Sumlin, Freddie King played there. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A lot of places have called themselves the home of the blues, but few have had a more legitimate claim to the title....

Clay Shirky, associate member of the Wooster Group and founding member of the New York-based Hard Place Theater, is clearly a man who loves stirring things up. In his last theater piece, Excerpts From the Attorney General’s Report on Pornography, which Hard Place performed in conjunction with Bailiwick Repertory and City Lit Theater last summer, Shirky took a flawed, biased, lacunae-filled government-commission report–a text many doubted could have been translated to the stage–and transformed it into a fascinating, intelligent, entertaining, and infuriating piece of theater that examined the subject of pornography (and the commission’s assumptions) more thoroughly than the commission itself did....

Fish Head, 16 W. Ontario: As club openings go, it was more of a mixed crowd than usual. Besides Candice, who is an architect, and Dawn, who does makeup, and Scottie from Jam, who always wears his hat backwards, and BJ, who is back from New York to work at China Club, and Larry, who left China Club to work at a club that hasn’t opened yet, and a woman in white heels who looked like Charo, there were about 80 fish, though the fish kept to themselves....

Some of us were looking forward to the LAST one! Argonne National Laboratory notes that December 20 was the 40th anniversary of the first illumination of light bulbs by nuclear-generated electricity. “In honor of the anniversary, one of those bulbs was re-lit with electricity from an advanced reactor designed by Argonne for the 21st century.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Citizens for a Better Environment has charged that the [proposed] incinerator [in south suburban Robbins] has accumulated $190 million in subsidies awarded by the state–nearly 20 times the money Illinois has put into recycling,” writes Liane Clorfene Casten in Chicago Enterprise (January)....

THE GAS HEART at the Chicago Actors Ensemble Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Gas Heart is broken into three acts, and during the first intermission all the performers here dance with audience members. During the second intermission, they go out into the lobby and fight. It’s all planned, so I guess really there is no intermission. The Gas Heart is really a nonplay....

THE LAND OF EVERYWHERE “Children worry about the threat of nuclear war,” it said. “Here is an unusual and well-crafted play that deals with the subject of the spiraling arms race in an entertaining, nonthreatening and disarming way.” There was also something about the piece being “a lighthearted model of conflict resolution.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Even before I finished reading, I knew I’d lost the kid as a theater companion....

THE SPY THREW HIS VOICE: A PLAGIARISM IN TWO ACTS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Their latest work launches their new Andersonville space, a sprawling, art-filled warren that’s situated over a funeral home (appropriate, considering that smoking is permitted throughout, though so far not in the auditorium). Oobleck’s cerebral concoction The Spy Threw His Voice: A Plagiarism in Two Acts is both an indulgently clever meditation on the ownership of art and an original reflection on the subject of plagiarism....

There’s been loose talk going around Oak Park about staging a “running of the bulls” this summer. Not real bulls–Oak Park has a pooper-scooper law–but a charity footrace in which players from the NBA Bulls would challenge what organizers describe, with a straight face, as Oak Park’s macho males. Hemingway is still being read; during the Reagan years, for example, his bwana’s approach to the third world became fashionable again. More impressive, he is still being written about....