ROMANCE/ROMANCE The title of a J.D. Salinger story kept ringing in my head as I watched Apple Tree Theatre’s Romance/Romance: “For Esme, With Love and Squalor.” Barry Harman and Keith Herrmann’s musical–actually a program of two thematically related one-acts–is a sordid valentine, offered with love and squalor to audiences too cynical to take romantic notions seriously but too sentimental to relinquish them. Full of graceful music, and played solidly and wittily by a four-person cast under Harman’s direction (he also staged the 1988 Broadway premiere), these one-acts combine chamber-opera delicacy with chamber-pot vulgarity to make for a show that’s simultaneously enticing and repellent....

It’s taken 26 years of courtroom and political battles, but Dorothy Gautreaux’ dream is slowly starting to come true. Back in 1966, when the Urban League and a group of black west-side activists initiated their protests against the CHA and HUD, Polikoff was a lawyer for a private law firm and the city was at the tail end of an influx of southern blacks. The CHA and HUD had responded to the mass immigration by building new low- income housing in poor and already overcrowded black communities....

The old high rise in Uptown was vacant and falling apart when Herbert Heyman and Howard Landau offered the Lakefront SRO Corporation a grant of $250,000 to buy and renovate it. Come fall, Lakefront will open the Malden Arms Apartments at 4727 N. Malden, and its 86 units will be open to the poor. But Heyman and Landau are not fools. And they’re not investing for an economic return. They’re making a social investment....

When critics label Sonny Rollins the “greatest living saxophonist,” they use the term as much to invoke history as to reflect present-day considerations. No surprise there; the music Rollins created from the early 1950s through the mid-60s stands with the greatest jazz ever recorded and, not incidentally, traces what may be the genre’s most fulfilling, journey of artistic self-discovery. But even without the historiographic hyperbole–even if he’d been dropped from the sky last week–Rollins would stand among the most beguiling of modem jazzmen, at once whimsical, authoritative, emotive, and possessed of a towering musical intellect....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Sports writers may find great satisfaction in continual Bulls, Bears, and Cubs sellouts, but to the average sports fan it is not a source of joy. For a person who has no media or corporate connections, or cannot make the monetary commitment to season tickets, professional sports attendance has become very frustrating. I could survive seeing only the Sox, but the ticket situation is really devastating for my nine-year-old son....

You have wondered, no doubt, as nearly everyone wonders from time to time, where all the lawyers come from. Was there something you missed–or only skimmed–in sophomore biology? Or health class? Or gym? They seem to be everywhere you look, and yet you never see them reproducing. According to the American Bar Association, in the fall of 1990 the nation’s 175 ABA-approved law schools welcomed the largest entering class ever (44,104) to the largest total law school enrollment (132,433) in American history....

More casualties of organized gang warfare. Dr. James Kelly of the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago estimates that up to 250,000 concussions, many overlooked or minimized, have already occurred this season on this country’s football fields. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Why does the U.S. spend more per pupil on education than any other country–and get so much less? According to UIC education professor Herbert Walberg, in a new report published by the Palatine-based Heartland Institute, it’s because we’ve been doing things backward....

As the son of a sharecropper living near the tiny Arkansas town of Parkdale, young Danny Davis spent long hours in the cotton fields. But unlike most of the poor kids hacking weeds with a hoe in the hot sun, “I’d read everything I could get my hands on in my spare time,” Davis recalled. “I’d have a piece of newspaper in my back pocket. When we’d get to the end of the row there might be a shade tree, and we’d take a minute to get a drink of water....

ED Nice guy, Ed. Smart as a whip. Funny as hell. Eight heads. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The show I saw started with the audience suggesting a wedding. Ed put his heads together and came up with the saga of Angela and Jack, an unlikely but ardent pair who become affianced at first sight when Jack stops by the grocery where Angela reigns as the Aphrodite of the produce section, and shares some melon with her....

The first annual First Nations Festival features films and videos–shorts, documentaries, and narratives–on Native American issues, including religious freedom, forced relocation, and cultural preservation. Presented by the Native American Film/Video Festival Committee. All screenings will be at Facets Multimedia Center, 1517 W. Fullerton, on Saturday, November 21; tickets are $5. For more information call 784-0808, 989-6206, or 281-4988. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » An oral history of Klickitat basket weaver Nettie Jackson Kuneki and an exploration of Klickitat river culture, by filmmakers Bushra Azzouz and Marlene Farnum (1990)....

LOOKING THROUGH TWO JOHNNIES In Looking Through Two Johnnies, Beau O’Reilly and Jenny Magnus have taken on the enormous task of examining the complexities of war, both its reasons and its ramifications. Like Bertolt Brecht, they use broad, absurd characters to bring to life the preposterous reality that is life during wartime. Like Brecht, they use music and poetry and direct confrontation to remove the audience from the fiction a little and allow them to think about what’s being said....

More Sturm und Drang at WFMT “Mr. Antlitz was one of the last ties to the old WFMT,” Brackett explained. “He had his feet in both camps, I think.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “One of the major reasons I stayed in Chicago rather than go back to my native Texas 30 years ago was because of WFMT,” Brackett was saying. “It was second to none....

Lead Story Among the information that came to light in April as a result of Atlanta’s new laws requiring governmental financial disclosures was the existence of the city’s not-well-known Board of Astrology. The Associated Press could find no records of the board at City Hall but concluded after interviewing its three smoked-out members that the board’s purpose is to administer tests and provide licenses to prospective astrologers. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

The Entrepreneurial Spirit Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In August, the Cinema International Corporation shipped live snakes in promotional kits for the voodoo movie The Serpent and the Rainbow to 700 video stores in England. Animal-protection activists complained that the instructions incorrectly stated that the snakes did not have to be fed for the month they were on display. Animalens Inc., of Wellesley, Massachusetts, markets red contact lenses for chickens at 20 cents a pair, pointing to medical studies showing that chickens seeing red during the day are happier and eat less food....

ON THE OPEN ROAD At its first-act best, On the Open Road is a millennial comedy, a vision of life on the eve of Judgment Day. Its setting is a nameless country that resembles by turn Nazi Germany (the music of Wagner and Beethoven booms through the air), postcommunist Eastern Europe, a totalitarian South American nation, “liberated” Kuwait, and the urban wastelands of America’s inner cities; across this dangerous and devastated terrain two homeless men plod toward the ever-elusive Land of the Free....

No two people I’ve discussed Wishbone with can agree on what to call the neighborhood it’s in. Since gentrification, everyone’s confused by all the new names for old places: River North or North Town, where Wishbone is located, at Grand and Wood just west of Ashland, is really West Town. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The place looks more like a luncheonette than a restaurant, with gray formica tabletops and a counter and stools....

“This piece is probably terrifying you,” says Twyla Tharp in a quiet, matter-of-fact voice. “But that’s the way it’s supposed to be.” Feet and hands come in for a disproportionate amount of Tharp’s attention. She starts by asking what the key word is for the arms in The Fugue. Relaxation? one dancer hazards. No, she says, that’s an illusion. “It’s honesty,” she nearly shouts, “truth for the arms!” After the arms, hands....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But you catch my meaning: Whether public or private–note that at this level of the power structure, no such distinction obtains–hence, we’re talking about state capitalism, wherein the state is an instrument of capital, and politics, or what in the media they call “democracy,” reduces to factional struggles among the wealthy–I dare someone to show me any real difference between the Office of the Mayor of Chicago and of the other CEOs around the city!...

Charles Barkley’s uniform hangs, all over, low and loose. The shorts are pulled up in back, over his considerable ass, but they can be said to be high on the waist only in comparison to the front, where they dip beneath the line of his somnolent and impervious gut at about the level of the string on a bartender’s apron. The legs of the shorts are wide, allowing ample room for the thighs to move at that rolling, half-track gait they appear to be best suited for....

Why do the spouters on some water fountains produce two streams of water that merge into one before reaching your parched lips? Why not just one stream to start with? –Steven Palkovitz, Alexandria, Virginia Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “In 1896, Halsey W. Taylor lost his father to an outbreak of typhoid fever caused by a contaminated water supply. This personal tragedy led the young Halsey Taylor to dedicate his life to providing a safe, sanitary drink of water in public places....