LITTLE MAN TATE With Adam Hann-Byrd, Jodie Foster, Dianne Wiest, Harry Connick Jr., David Pierce, Debi Mazar, and P.J. Ochlan. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The title hero is a boy genius named Fred (Adam Hann-Byrd) who occasionally narrates his own story, which transpires mainly between his seventh and eighth birthdays. He’s gifted in so many ways that, at least on the schematic level of Scott Frank’s script, he often seems like several boy geniuses jammed together: a self-taught reader by age one, he also quickly reveals himself to be a talented visual artist, a remarkable classical pianist, an original and accomplished poet, and a mathematical wizard who breezes through a college course in quantum physics when he’s seven....

What are muskrats worth? This is a complicated question. We can easily calculate their value as furs. About ten million muskrats are trapped every year in North America. Pelts bring an average of between three and four dollars each, so we could declare the value of muskrats to be between $30 million and $40 million a year. And muskrats make a more general ecological contribution, one they share with every species of plant and animal no matter how rare: they contribute to the biological diversity of their native ecosystem....

The kid heard about it late morning on Thursday. First thing, he got in the car and drove from Des Plaines out to Carpentersville, near Elgin. He saw his brother-in-law, got the tape, and roared into Chicago. By quarter of three, he was in position, in the hematology and oncology ward of Children’s Memorial Hospital. The kid was ratty looking, maybe 16, with a rust-colored attempt at a beard clinging to the underside of his chin and up along his jawbone; watching him sidle nervously around the ninth-floor “teen room” you’d be forgiven for thinking that his manner–more than vaguely reminiscent of Crispin Glover’s in River’s Edge–was the product of a creative combination of amphetamines....

HOUSE OF PAIN Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This 1916 script, originally titled The Laboratory of Hallucinations, is a rather mild but still representative sample of the Grand Guignol’s repertoire. The brilliant surgeon Dr. Gorlitz, director of his own hospital/asylum, is so obsessed with his research on the brain that he’s indifferent to pain or suffering, in himself and others. Not surprisingly, his lovely, gentle wife, Sonia, prefers the company of the cheerful and handsome archaeologist John De Mora....

At 5 PM on a Tuesday, have someone tell you that a person you want to interview will be speaking at a Dukakis fundraiser that night. Watch enviously as a man says his white ticket was taken from him and the woman at the table gives him a blue one. Wonder if you could get away with that. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » When they begin to let people trickle in, one at a time, wonder what you will do....

Lead Story In March motorists in Stone Mountain, Georgia, reported seeing the image of Christ in a forkful of spaghetti on a Pizza Hut billboard. One woman said the image caused her to abandon plans to quit her church choir. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Among recent proposals by Los Angeles police chief Daryl Gates to abate criticism of his department’s excessive force in making arrests was a training program, complete with videos, to help citizens improve their behavior while being arrested....

While it lacks the controlled energy and the sense of closure found in She’s Gotta Have It, Spike Lee’s second feature-length “film joint” is much more innovative, ambitious, and exciting: a full-scale tackling of class warfare within the black community, set in a mainly black college in Atlanta, that explodes in every direction. The conflicts are mainly between the light-skinned, upwardly mobile Wannabees, who belong to fraternities, and the dark-skinned Jigaboos, who feel more racial pride; the issues between them range from the college’s investment in South Africa to straight versus nappy hair (the latter highlighted in a gaudy, Bye Bye Birdie-style musical number)....

Even among the most successful blues artists, versatility has never been especially common. Some in the 50s, like harmonica player Little Walter and the still-active guitarist Louis Myers, honed a style that allowed them to play a classic Delta-influenced Chicago blues and swinging, jazzy styles with equal facility. In a similar fashion certain contemporary artists, such as Cicero Blake, Clarence Carter, and Otis Clay, have successfully fused a slick, uptown blues style with soulful funk....

The Candidate of Cool So O’Connor figured an “Abraham Lincoln Republican” like himself would be good for the city’s soul and the party’s soul, and might even get elected. “I sent a note to the governor saying ‘I’m thinking of running for mayor. I think I can win. I think I would be a good mayor. I’m probably too chicken shit to do so, but you ought to know.’” Some black committeemen were encouraging, the Sun-Times did a story–there O’Connor was, a candidate....

They come to us, it seems, fully formed, Venuses rising on shells of hype. When they arrive in town next week, the Cubs and White Sox will seem set, their lineups solid from top to bottom, their pitching shaky but for the moment stable, and, of course, ever optimistic. They’ll seem like the teams we’ve been waiting for, and their rosters will seem to make sense, as if any other moves were unnecessary at best or, at worst, downright stupid....

Before the landlord’s notice came, Rosemary Winblad and her two daughters lived comfortably and affordably in a well-managed federally subsidized apartment building at 833 W. Buena in Uptown. “I got this notice that says I’m a no-good tenant,” says Katherine Castillo, an immigrant from Belize, a country in Central America. “I was confused, so I [went] to the managers. They say I was late on rent once. I [have] lived here for one and a half years, and I was late once, so I’m a no-good tenant?...

THE TEMPEST Let me get something off my chest first. I was a guest on a TV show the other day–one of those four-chairs-and-a-moderator setups they run at around sunrise on weekend mornings to fulfill FCC public-service requirements. The subject was the controversy over Miss Saigon, the British supermusical that transplants the Madame Butterfly story to wartime Vietnam. Briefly, Asian American actors were angry to learn that the show would be coming to Broadway with its London star, a white man named Jonathan Pryce, playing the important role of the Engineer–who’s supposed to be Eurasian....

Friday, January 18 What–no French toast? If you’re into pancakes or one of the all-time great breakfast cereals, get to Logan Square’s Biggest Pancake Breakfast. It’s sponsored by Quaker, so Aunt Jemima pancakes will be on the grill and Cap’n Crunch cereal will be in large supply. The breakfast raises money for the Logan Square unit of the Boys & Girls Clubs of Chicago; it’s $3, $2 for kids under 13 and seniors....

After four weeks of filler concerts, the CSO season ends with two of the most promising programs of the ear, both under the direction of Klaus Tennstedt, and both spotlighting Mahler. Yes, Mahler is a frequently heard composer here, but with what Tennstedt brings to these works, they take on a whole new sound and significance. When Tennstedt did his first Mahler First here some three seasons ago, he brought a new Viennese warmth to the CSO strings and a subtlety to the brass and winds–a far cry from the more bombastic Mahlerians we usually hear....

Sunday morning. It’s late, close to 9:30 already, and some of the regular Maxwell Street vendors have left empty tables in the light drizzle. At the northeast corner of 13th Street and Newberry, I look twice at what I see on a grainy slab of wood across makeshift sawhorses: two tall Russian fur hats, so new that their earflaps haven’t been untied yet. One is black rabbit, the other a heathery tan something or other....

I am getting mildly obsessive about finding a cedar waxwing nest. I think there is at least one pair nesting at Somme Woods, the forest preserve where I am doing a survey of nesting birds. There may be several, but I haven’t been able to get close to pinning down even the approximate location of any nests. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » On a few occasions I have seen a single bird hawking for insects from the top branches of a tall dead tree....

“I have a body that is ideal for a performance artist,” says Frank Moore, who was born with cerebral palsy and is 99 percent physically disabled. Moore’s performances are touching in the most literal and provocative sense. A recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts performance art fellowship in 1985, Moore shares with Karen Finley (who’s also appearing in town this week) the distinction of being on the “hit list” set up by the fearmongers who seek to set the arts agenda these days....

Considering how much has been done by now with the rock guitar, I’m amazed to hear somebody doing something with it that doesn’t make me want to vomit or fall asleep. But New York-based guitar virtuoso Gary Lucas has a new CD out, Gods and Monsters, with an impressive cast of musicians’ musicians–drummers Keith LeBlanc and Michael Blair, Pere Ubu bassist Tony Maimone, and vocalist Jon Langford of the Mekons–and some of the most consistently pleasurable and interesting rock-idiom guitar playing I’ve encountered recently....

Hey–it’s another band from Austin! This one, however, is from little Austin, Minnesota, population 23,000 less about 4 since Martin Zellar and his troupe made the move to Minneapolis some years ago. Austin’s stayed with Zellar ever since, though, and the town and its denizens are the main populators of his unapologetically country-inflected songs. “I don’t want to hurt my parents / I just want to leave town,” he sings, and you believe him....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Maturity normally brings with it the realization that the evils which beset the world are complicated, cannot be solved by simple nostrums or philosophical formulas, and that the best most of us can do in this life to accomplish humanitarian goals is by working on little pieces, one at a time . . . mostly by doing one’s job as well as one can....