It’s the Saturday before Halloween, and Charlie’s Ale House near DePaul is stuffed with humanity–wall-to-wall and floor-to-ceiling. Cuddly critters, retro archetypes, ethnic stereotypes, cultural icons, sexual fantasies, seasonal monsters, celebrity cartoon characters, and anthropomorphic household objects have climbed tables and chairs to escape sweating onto each other’s greasepaint. It isn’t working. Tom’s exhilarated. People have been buying him gin and tonics all night. “They love me,” he says, and they should: he’s spent uncountable hours sculpting this costume....

THE GIRL OF THE GOLDEN WEST Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Girl of the Golden West has always been a somewhat problematic work, despite 40-odd curtain calls on its opening night in New York in 1910 and certain recent attempts to claim a greater stature for the composition than it has traditionally been accorded. Maybe the critical establishment of yore was too snotty to praise the work because of its rough-and-tumble (and at times comic) American setting, yet it is flawed....

THE GOLDEN AGE As the play begins two young gentlemen, Peter and Francis (Reid Ostrowski and Matthew Schaefer), are having an adventure in the wild. Peter is a wealthy geologist; Francis is a have-not with some trepidations about exploring. After discovering a dead body covered with flowers and with gold bits in his mouth, the two are led by a wailing, snarling young girl to an odd community in the midst of what used to be a much larger village....

How much U.S. currency (cold cash) is in circulation around the world? Who decides how much to print? With the government continually borrowing money, shouldn’t lenders be broke by now? Where do they get the money to keep lending out, especially when they know that none of it will ever be paid back? –F. Lucre, Dallas Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Coins and paper currency are economic petty cash....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Like most Americans, while growing up I went to church and so I considered myself a Christian, but that was in word only. God, faith, salvation, sin, all that didn’t matter to me; Christianity to me was just any old religion, something like a rabbit’s foot in a time of trial. However, I had a friend who took his faith seriously, and he would tell me about a Jesus who cared for me, a Jesus who wanted to be known....

A DATE WITH ELVIS After his death he became Saint Elvis of the Tabloids, the holy, blissful martyr for America’s only state-sponsored religion–consumerism. Black velvet paintings of Elvis were sold alongside equally garish paintings of Christ, the Virgin Mary, and the pope. Elvis seemed an inexhaustible source for parody and satire. He became a regular feature in tabloid headlines and Bob Greene columns. The bottom really fell out of the Elvis-parody market when David Wolper had a couple hundred Elvis impersonators performing simultaneously at the hyper-kitsch 1986 birthday celebration for the Statue of Liberty....

One of the most profound and beautiful things about the blues is its acknowledgment of the synergy between opposites. At its best, the blues celebrates and understands that pain and joy, violent aggression and expressions of love (especially sexual love), and hopelessness and faith complement one another as elements of a single whole. An artist or an art form committed to exploring one of these polarities will inevitably end up contemplating its opposite as well....

Listening to recordings of rising Senegalese superstar Baaba Maal, I’m struck by how this may be the first African dance music I’ve heard in which the most impressive aspect of the performance is not the band’s bubbling bouillabaisse of tropical rhythm–not the sexy hip-twitching drumbeats, the twinkly guitars, or the punchy horns–but rather the singer’s voice. To be sure, Maal’s group, Dande Lenol, purveys all the rhythm one would expect from a west-African ensemble, and it’s great to shake the butt to....

THE BEAR ** (Worth seeing) Directed by Jean-Jacques Annaud Written by Gerard Brach With Douce, Bart, Jack Wallace, Tcheky Karyo, and Andre Lacombe. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In fact, the apparent viewpoints of the orphan cub and the big solitary bear–mainly that of the former–do form part of the story, but only a part. In this respect the animated Bambi actually comes closer to showing humans from the viewpoint of animals (even though the Disney feature is shot through with an anthropomorphism that The Bear mainly seeks to avoid), because the Disney movie denies the humans any language of their own....

Friday 4 You can celebrate the suburbs and the lawn-care demands of fall at the first National Lawn Mower Racing Championship, held under the auspices of (what else?) the U.S. Lawn Mower Racing Association, at the Lake County Fairgrounds today. Scoff if you will; USLMRA prez Gerry Smith scoffs back, “A lawn mower whipping around a course at 30 miles an hour is really a sight to behold.” The association promises heats in three classes (stock, factory experimental, and tractors), a drag race, a display of antique mowers, a mower built around a 150-horsepower Chinook jet-helicopter engine, even a precision lawn-mower drill team from Arcola, Illinois....

Friday 9 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Clarke House, the Greek Revival home built in 1836 by hardware merchant Henry Clarke, escaped the fire of 1871, but Clarke had the house moved 28 blocks south anyway. In 1977, when the city took it over, the house was moved back to near its original site on Prairie Avenue and now sits among other houses designed by some of the great architects of the Chicago School, including H....

“Make sure you mention the sheet-metal workers–the backbone of the CTA!” hollers a man in the stairwell. The man, by no coincidence, is in fact a sheet-metal worker, and the stairwell he occupies provides access to the southbound platform of the Belmont station of the Howard el. In the small area beneath the platform, between the ticket booth and the stairs, a group of four CTA workers stir paint and unload supplies from several oversized storage boxes....

The flyer bore the famous photograph of Pruitt-Igoe being dynamited in 1972. The public housing complex in Saint Louis, an icon of the Modernist movement in socially conscious architecture, had been abandoned as unlivable. Beneath the photo was the legend “Want another chance?” Thus enticed, architects and social-service professionals trudged to the Merchandise Mart in February for a day-long symposium on the topic “New Opportunities for Architecture in Social Change,” sponsored by the Chicago chapter of the American Institute of Architects....

Most voters in the Fourth Legislative District–which encompasses all of Evanston as well as bits of Wilmette and Rogers Park–are anti-gun, prochoice, clean-up-the-environment, spend-more-for-education liberals (or progressives, as they call themselves these days). They may not realize it at the moment–distracted, no doubt, by higher-profile campaigns–but with Tuesday’s contest for state representative, these Evanston voters can help to chart the course of liberal politics for the coming decade. The irony is that Evanston used to be a bastion of Republican politics....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » They discovered about 1,000 breeding pairs on their 240-acre plot, about the same number you would expect to find in a rich forest in eastern North America. However, there the similarities ended. In a North American forest those 1,000 pairs would belong to a total of about 50 species. In Peru the 1,000 pairs represented 245 species, a number approximately equal to all the species known to breed in the entire state of Illinois....

To the editors: Nevertheless, I must say that I was a little taken aback when I read their remarks about John’s painting exhibit here on campus a couple of years ago. While it may be appropriate to refer to Manitowoc as a “conservative town” and while that may fit the metropolitan stereotype of a smaller Wisconsin town, their cheap shot was extremely disconcerting. If anything, they should have lauded the “Manitowoc branch of the University of Wisconsin” for its actions relative to his exhibit....

John Cusack says he first encountered a modern version of commedia dell’arte–the satirical, seemingly improvisational form of entertainment popular in Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries–several years ago in Los Angeles. “Me and my friend Jeremy Piven went to see the Actors’ Gang,” headed by actor Tim Robbins. “We were wowed by them, by their energy. It was a revelation–a total contrast to the boring movie I was doing at the time....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I would like this antihuman woman to know that she has played right into the hands of abusers everywhere by making this claim. I will also send copies to the men and women who abused my sister, my preteen cousin, and a male cousin of mine who committed suicide (because he could not handle the abuse perpetrated against him)....

The town doesn’t lack for good piano bars, cabarets, or restaurants, but not many venues offer a sophisticated mix of the three. You can count such spots on one hand, and when you do, three of your fingers identify Bob D’jahanguiri’s supper clubs, Toulouse, Yvette, and Yvette Wintergarden. The dapper Iranian, who worked as a waiter and captain in smart venues such as Arnie’s and the old Mr. Kelly’s before striking out on his own in 1979, has a similar passion for elegant cabaret music and keeps a string of local players working through good times and less than good times....

Decades make for arbitrary divisions, but there’s no denying 1990 was the year Wrigley Field became an upscale, yuppie ballpark. Wrigley could be forgiven before for attracting college kids to its bleachers and suit-and-tie types to its box seats, but this year they took over. Combining with others of their ilk, known by their fondness for Simpsons T-shirts and neon-pink caps, the yups bought season tickets in order to attend the All-Star Game, then the not-quite-so-upscale moved in to buy the rest of the seats months in advance....