It seemed an inauspicious day to be wearing a kilt: hot and sunny, with highs in the 90s. Yet there stood a bearded young man in a heavy woolen green-patterned tartan kilt, tam-o’-shanter, tweed jacket with white cuffs peeking from the sleeves, thick woolen knee socks with garters, and a swath of plaid cloth pinned to his shoulder and flowing to his knees. He peered out at the summer-dried park through round wire-rimmed glasses and his dark hair was clubbed into a ponytail all of two inches long....

A Second Wind for Second City? Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “We’re pushing our product harder,” says Kelly Leonard, Second City’s director of sales (and son of WGN radio and television critic Roy Leonard). Like many other institutions, Second City is finding it must aggressively sell itself to young adult audiences faced with a multitude of entertainment options–including plenty of other improv shows–and clarify its somewhat blurred image....

A cheery group has gathered outside the door of the Improv Institute on Belmont near Western. It’s Fun Night, and for $5 these people, most of them actors on a busman’s holiday, get a chance to improvise together and receive a gentle critique from Tom Hanigan, one of the stars of the institute’s resident company. While they’re waiting for him to arrive, they shake hands. In a few minutes they’ll be humiliating themselves and each other, so it’s best to get acquainted....

DE DONDE? Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » National origin, it seems, and politics mean everything to the INS. If a refugee happens to be fleeing a regime the United States condemns, say the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, then he or she is an “immigrant” and welcomed into the country. However, if a refugee happens to be fleeing a government backed by the United States, say El Salvador or Guatemala, then he or she becomes an “undocumented alien” and is placed in a “processing center....

DEAREST FATHER On one level, Kafka has written the letter every parent fears. He recalls every unfairness, every heedless action; he broods on them, cherishes them, and finally builds them into a sort of horrific theology of the second fall of man. You were loud, he tells the old man. You were sarcastic. When we went swimming, you were broad and tall, and I “a little skeleton, unsteady, barefoot on the boards, frightened of the water, incapable of copying your swimming strokes....

FLUID MEASURE PERFORMANCE COMPANY Projection opens with Mandel and her father watching eight-millimeter black-and-white home movies of themselves. The Mandels have a context for what they see: a newborn Donna in her father’s arms, Donna as a toddler bouncing in a swing, Donna at seven or so enthusiastically performing a “ballet” on the lawn furniture, Dad giving his daughter a peck on the cheek. The movies are interesting because they’re archetypically American–they could have been taken by anyone’s parents, mine included....

Traffic is deadlocked at the intersection of Clark, Diversey, and Broadway, and as a driver struggles to negotiate a right turn he is suddenly greeted by a short man who, thrusting himself into the middle of the now moving traffic, raises his right arm high above his head, and then pushes his left forward in a churning, chugging motion that seems to propel him into the street. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Mr. Blair refers to me as an angry young playwright. Indeed, nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, I am quite a jovial sort. As I originally wrote, some aspects of theater company policy, specifically as regards casting, give me the willies, but that makes me a frightened young playwright, rather than an angry one....

The underrated James Foley (After Dark, My Sweet) shows an excellent feeling for the driven and haunted jive rhythms of David Mamet, macho invective and all, in a superb delivery of Mamet’s tour de force about desperate real estate salesmen, adapted for the screen by Mamet himself. Practically all the action occurs in an office and a Chinese restaurant across the street, and Foley’s mise en scene is so energetic and purposeful (he’s especially adept in using semicircular pans) that the unexpected use of a ‘Scope format seems fully justified, even in a drama where lives are resurrected and destroyed according to the value of offscreen pieces of paper....

JANE HAMMOND Hammond never titles her pieces per se; instead she lists the numbers of the elements from her pictorial “alphabet” that appear in the work. The untitled piece referred to as “(234, 122, 137)” features an Asian-looking man standing on two glass bottles floating in an expanse of water. He’s showing us two different types of bird’s nests, holding one in each outstretched hand. The arrangement of bottles, nests, and man creates a curious narrative whose meaning we can only guess at....

Scriptwriter John Patrick Shanley (Five Corners, Moonstruck) makes his directorial debut in a whimsical, contemporary fairy tale with romance and adventure that doesn’t quite come off, but it’s sufficiently fresh, charming, and unpredictable to deserve special marks for trying. Tom Hanks plays a former fireman now stuck in a depressing job who is told by his doctor (Robert Stack) that he has only a short time to live. A wealthy businessman (Lloyd Bridges) appears, offering him red-carpet treatment and a bunch of credit cards if Hanks will sail to a remote Pacific island (where the businessman wants to gain mineral rights) and dive into a volcano in order to appease the natives....

Jacques Rivette’s greatest film since the 70s is one of the most penetrating examinations of the process of art making on film. It concerns the highly charged work of a figurative painter (Michel Piccoli, giving the performance of his career) with his beautiful and mainly nude model (Manon of the Spring’s Emmanuelle Beart), but also the complex input and pressures of the painter’s wife and former model (Jane Birkin), the model’s boyfriend (David Bursztein), and an art dealer who used to be involved with the painter’s wife (Gilles Arbona)....

Who does your fries, my love? C. Joe Decker 3. Sole Mio Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » When nouvelle cuisine was in its heyday, a Chicago critic wrote, “The greening of America must refer to the mandatory sliver of kiwi fruit on top [of almost any dish].” Now that nouvelle cuisine has gone the way of the dodo bird and kiwi fruit has become a culinary commonplace, more raffine embellishments, without which no chef would dare to harbor immortal longings, put the finishing touches to entrees all over the city....

MARILYN AND MARC It makes me think they must offer classes in this: On the blackboard, the teacher writes, “My first wife was so immature. When I was taking a bath, she’d come in and sink all my boats.” “Go home and write 25 variations on that,” he tells the roomful of Wood-be’s. “Tomorrow I’ll show you how to turn them into a play.” Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Fortunately, Jules Stein didn’t take enough expensive drawing paper to North Avenue Beach that day, and after a while he ran out. The light was still good, his nylon pens were working fine, the chess players he’d been sketching were still at it, but he had nothing to draw on and there was no art supply store nearby, Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Stein–now a sprightly 73–got his start as a sign painter, then did lettering for Chevrolet in Detroit during the Depression and later for advertising agencies in Chicago....

Charles Carpenter’s Native American subjects stare at us across gulfs of time and culture. In rich sepia tones imbued with the cachet of age, they inhabit a world not our own. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Carpenter used diffused natural light to illuminate his subjects, most of whom pose–singly, in pairs, or in small groups–facing the camera, confronting the photographer and the viewer. The large size of the glass-plate negatives–six-and-a-half by eight-and-a-half inches–lends an exceptional clarity of detail....

When Jesse Helms stands up in Congress to inveigh against pervert artists, David Wojnarowicz is one of those he has in mind. Wojnarowicz, who’s “queer” and an AIDS activist, is seemingly better known for the confrontations his work has provoked than for the work itself–he’s been a frequent target of the censorship crowd. “Some of us,” he observes in his recent book, “are born with the cross-hairs of a rifle scope printed on our backs....

Yes, they still play the blues in the juke joints of the Mississippi Delta, and guitarist Booba Barnes is one of the region’s most popular musicians. Barnes is usually found holding forth in the dirt-floored Playboy Club in Greenville, Mississippi, and his music matches the ambience. His guitar fires out rough-edged bursts with unorthodox phrasing and an intensity that makes clear his stylistic debt to early-60s Howlin’ Wolf, and his harp blowing fuses the raw emotionality of the Delta tradition with a surprisingly lyrical undercurrent–Slim Harpo’s “Scratch My Back” is a Booba Barnes standby....

SELECTIONS FROM THE BOOK OF HOPE Don’t believe the title. Selections From the Book of Hope is an unintentional journey to despair. The “hope” it holds would earn Nietzsche’s gratitude; if anything, Chicago playwright Keith Huff’s four short plays offer the perfect antidote to aspiration. As cruel as they are cerebral, as detached from their characters as they are devoid of compassion, these “selections” suggest that if there’s a Book of Hope, it’s a tome the devil sent to hasten our annihilation....

The more things change…In preliminary excavations for a new campground at Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore, archaeologist Mark J. Lynott and colleagues unearthed artifacts showing that “people camped for short periods of time in this area for the last three thousand years” (Singing Sands Almanac, Summer). Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “While plenty of people make money from art-related activities and the American public consumes the by-products as ‘Culture,’ artists are doing their historic thing: starving and praying for fame,” writes Montana painter Karen Kitchel in the Chicago-based New Art Examiner (June/Summer)....