Vive la difference, if any. “In reviewing the entries, the jury could find no overt female characteristic in the work” submitted for Inland Architect’s special issue on architecture by women (January/February 1991), writes Cynthia Chapin Davidson. “One could argue that the number of residential projects here sustains the claim that women primarily do residential architecture. . . . More telling, perhaps, was the lack of high-rise buildings among the entries. Are women less interested in the high rise (with its obvious male symbolism) or are they shut out of most opportunities to design such a building?...

“I’ve found in my counseling practice that men who share housework tasks have a lower level of stress and are less prone to conflict,” says Loyola University nursing professor Donna Rankin. “I’m not saying that having your husband push the vacuum cleaner across the carpets while you dust the furniture will ensure a happy marriage, but it can’t hurt your relationship.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Illinois…is losing control of its own budget,” explains R....

DIARY OF A MADMAN Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » These stories profoundly influenced the next generation of Russian writers; Dostoyevski once quipped that he and his cohorts all emerged from “under Gogol’s “Overcoat.”‘ They are still remarkably fresh and funny–largely because office work is still as mind numbing today as it was 160 years ago. Of these tales, none is more ripe for stage adaptation than “Diary of a Madman....

THE PROMISE Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In The Promise, Jose Rivera gives us a story with both scientific and theosophical bases. On one level, it tells of Guzman, an old Puerto Rican immigrant working in an airplane factory and living next to a toxic-waste dump on Long Island. A superstitious man who still fertilizes his stunted garden with his own blood, he dreams of acquiring money to raise an army that will liberate his native country from U....

The neighborhood doesn’t have an official name. It’s the northernmost part of Rogers Park, the few blocks between Howard Street and Calvary Cemetery in Evanston, bordered on the east by Sheridan Road and on the west by the CTA’s rapid transit yard. Some people call it North of Howard, and if it ever becomes a trendy place to live some promoter is sure to shorten this to NoHo. But the area today is a long way from trendiness....

There’s always been something incongruous about Dr. John. In the 1950s he was one of the few white musicians to play an integral part in the explosive New Orleans rhythm-and-blues recording scene. Under his real name, Mac Rebennack, he played piano and guitar on sessions by such greats as Dave Dixon, Huey Smith and the Clowns, and Professor Longhair. No doubt he developed his laidback hipster personality during this time, but it never obscured the fact that he was a serious-minded, articulate student of the entire Louisiana musical tradition, from backwoods blues to the jazzy R & B many favored during the late 50s....

“Impossible things before breakfast,” sing Big Dippers Bill Goffrier and Gary Waliek. What seems impossible is selling records for this more-than-deserving band, whose major-label debut, Slam, seems to have just sunk. Too bad: the lead track, “Love Barge” (Love Barge?), is my radio rave-up pick of the year. Some years ago, the Big Dipper hook was that it was sort of an indie supergroup, with former members of Dumptruck, the Volcano Suns, and the Embarrassment; now the hook is that the band has put out three good (Heavens, Slam) to great (Craps) records and still can’t get arrested....

BREAKING THE SILENCE The title refers, in part, to the invention of the talking film, the goal that obsesses Poliakoff’s proud and stubborn protagonist. A man crammed with unrealized ideas, Nicolai Pesiakoff is on the verge of creating sound on film when he and his family are torn from their Moscow mansion, much like the Romanovs from the Winter Palace, and consigned by Nicolai’s new job to a former Imperial Railway carriage whose battered state resembles their own....

Buddy Scott and the Rib Tips have held down weekends at Lee’s Unleaded Blues Lounge (formerly the famous Queen Bee’s) on South Chicago Avenue for years. For some reason they’ve never developed a north-side reputation to match their talents. Scott’s guitar playing complements his vocal style–bluesy and passionate with a heaping dose of deep soul commitment laced with an ever-present sense of humor–and his band of “Mighty Tips,” as he calls them, are as tight a contemporary blues aggregation as any working regularly around Chicago....

Dept. of taking all the fun out of life. “Couch potatoes especially should avoid sitting in the same position for long periods,” advises Dr. Craig Tokowitz of the Illinois Masonic Medical Center. “They should by all means not sit in overstuffed furniture because it doesn’t offer the back any support.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Glasnost anyone? “Imagine: You are the manager of a large and complex public enterprise that is important, indeed crucial, to the future of the state,” writes Jay Amberg in Chicago Times (January/February 1988)....

To the editors: The purpose is lower electric rates, the timing is because Com Ed’s franchise ends in 1990, and the City Council ultimately must decide. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The State Supreme Court ruled that Com Ed must “wheel” power to municipal utilities; but Com Ed claims that Chicago will have to build new power lines to the generating utilities. Long ago, the City Council passed a utility tax which finances the city out of your light bill, without consulting the ICC....

Scaup were my introduction to the true terrors of birding. For those who do not follow the sport, I should explain that scaup are ducks. Diving ducks, to be more precise. If you are not into the topography of bird wings, I should explain that the secondary feathers are attached to the second joint of the wing. Think of a chicken wing. The second joint is the part with two bones in it....

Flag Fever “If we don’t do something now,” said their message, “we’ll destroy our own businesses, our own industry, the very fabric of our nation . . .” ABC’s safe for now. Last week the U.S. Supreme Court struck down by a five-to-four vote the Flag Protection Act of 1989, which was written to impose criminal penalties on anyone who “knowingly mutilates, defaces, physically defouls, burns, maintains on the floor or ground, or tramples upon any flag of the United States....

Grace Lai was perched on a stool next to a fire hydrant near State and Grand the wintry afternoon when I first noticed her. Surround-ed by plastic bags, she looked plump and misshapen in her multiple layers of winter clothing. Strapped securely under her chin was a bright plastic hard hat. On her lap she balanced a sketch pad that boasted a watercolor of the new American Medical Association building under construction across the street from where she sat....

NRG is for “energy,” of course–that’s certainly what these fervent Chicagoans bring to today’s often-sleepy jazz scene. Youngest in spirit of the quintet is its grizzled, white-haired leader, who was already an established bebopper when the free-jazz revolution first led him to raise musical hell over three decades ago. That revolutionary ardor, inflamed by the innovations of Ornette Coleman, Albert Ayler, and their fellow radicals, burst forth in the early 80s in the form of the NRG Ensemble, featuring Russell’s high musical intelligence and several marvelously rebellious junior flamewthrowers for colleagues....

HOT L BALTIMORE at Stage Left Theatre Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Which is why it was such a joy, 30 minutes or so into Griffin Theatre’s production of Lanford Wilson’s Hot L Baltimore, to realize that two characters were having a conversation on one side of the stage, more people were having another conversation on the other, and elsewhere on the set, another person was speaking out loud into a telephone....

LA PETENERA Originally produced at the Firehouse with stark, dramatic lighting and near-perfect acoustics, and under the direction of Rosario Vargas, the Spanish-language play was a surprise hit for Latino Chicago Theater Company. But this transplant at Cabaret Voltaire is a mere shadow of its former self. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A series of poems strung together to tell a loose story, La Petenera is wholly credited to Garcia Lorca by Latino Chicago, but some of the pieces sound adapted and at least one appears to be a tribute to Garcia Lorca by another Spanish poet, Antonio Machado....

A young American soldier sits in his M1 tank in Saudi Arabia, looking up at Dan Rather, waiting an instant before answering the question. He lowers his eyes and finally says, “I’m not a warmonger, but let’s go in now and get it over with so we don’t have to come back in a few years.” No single veteran can speak for all, but few of them are more knowing than Carl Burrell, a Vietnam vet who’s a counselor at the Oak Park Vet Center....

“Smells Like Teen Spirit,” the first song on Nirvana’s major-label debut, Nevermind, is a potent, almost mythopoetic rendering of the modern rock ‘n’ roll condition. “I feel stupid and contagious / Here we are now, entertain us,” sings lyricist-guitarist-singer Kurt Cobain with ferocious glee. The song’s shattering attack confirms Nirvana’s status as, finally, a group to justify the “Seattle sound” hype. Nirvana plays around with heavy-metal–they’re heavier, in their own way, than almost anything else around right now–but they’ve leavened their potential ponderousness with the impressive Cobain and a healthy fondness for the pop change-up (“On a Plain”)....

ON THE TWENTIETH CENTURY How then does the show stand up as a piece of writing? It’s seldom been produced over the past ten years–its big cast and extravagant technical requirements take it beyond the budgets of most regional theaters–and its current revival generated considerable interest because of the success of Coleman’s current Broadway hit City of Angels. Is On the Twentieth Century a neglected masterwork whose brilliance was buried under Broadway glitz?...