To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The solution to the hen problem (Straight Dope, June 29), can be greatly simplified, and the “riddle” Cecil refers to resolved by redefining the problem as follows: A giant and his wife share three hens, equally between them. They find two eggs in the chicken coop each morning and each gets one egg to each. That is, each gets one egg a day, or one and one-half eggs in one and one-half days, or, if you like, pi eggs in pi days, or the square root of two eggs in the square root of two days, or the six eggs in six days we are looking for, from his or her one and one-half hens....

It was with much fanfare that the Chicago Transit Authority unveiled its plans to rebuild the train yard just north of the Howard Street station. The construction plan–complete with a new “state of the art” repair shop–was part of the CTA’s multimillion-dollar effort to link the Dan Ryan and Howard Street subway lines. At first most local officials cheered the plan. “We don’t want to come across as uncaring public officials, but we are operating under tremendous time constraints,” says Bill Utter, a spokesman for the CTA....

EXPLODE and The Collective Sure, some of the Collective’s ensemble members overacted a bit. And sometimes the direction, particularly in Explode, seemed a tad pretentious. But overall this company of mostly recent arrivals from Southern Methodist University provided a solid evening of engaging, intelligent theater. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Making their debut in the small, virtually naked Heartland Cafe Studio Theater, all of the actors were surprisingly good....

LUCIA DI LAMMERMOOR In Lucia di Lammermoor Lord Enrico Ashton, having nearly destroyed the Ravenswood clan, is infuriated when he discovers his sister Lucia’s secret love for Edgardo, the sole remaining Ravenswood. In Edgardo’s absence, Enrico contrives to persuade Lucia that Edgardo has abandoned her for another, and arranges her marriage to Lord Bucklaw. After the fateful wedding papers are signed, Edgardo appears and accuses Lucia of betrayal. On her wedding night Lucia comes unhinged, murders her new husband, and then dies herself, evidently of an overheated imagination....

FORTY-DEUCE Horizons Productions Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Seen in 1981 in an off-Broadway production starring Kevin Bacon and Orson Bean and first presented in Chicago several years ago at the Theatre Building under Harriet Spizziri’s direction, Alan Bowne’s Forty-Deuce is a rich, raw satire on corporate capitalism from the viewpoint of the hustlers’ underworld. Suggesting a cross between David Mamet’s American Buffalo, Sidney Kingsley’s Dead End, and William Burroughs’s The Wild Boys, Forty-Deuce nonetheless has the fierce feel of having been lived by its author before it was written; whether or not Bowne ever worked the 42nd Street meat market, he sure knew its style and its sound....

SHORT EYES It’s an odd fit, this style with this play. Written in the early 70s–while Pinero himself was serving time in prison for armed robbery–Short Eyes is a clunky, self-conscious slice of life (larded with the occasional clunky, self-conscious slice of poetry) that draws its power not so much from its inherent worth as from certain elements of its being: Pinero’s obvious if unformed talent; his lumpen Latino voice; his nasty language; his criminal glamour; his racial, economic, and sexual preoccupations....

QUEER STORIES Zebra Crossing Theatre at Chicago Filmmakers Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Created for Gay and Lesbian Pride Month, Queer Stories gathers together the work of ten local lesbian and gay poets, novelists, and playwrights. Some of the work has been previously theatricalized, most notably Nicholas A. Patricca’s poem “Frankie,” performed last June as part of an evening of his work–The Idea of Chaos at Key West–during Bailiwick’s Pride Performance series....

THE SHELTERING SKY With Debra Winger, John Malkovich, Campbell Scott, Jill Bennett, Timothy Spall, Eric Vu-An, and Paul Bowles. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Many of my friends and colleagues regard Bertolucci’s last film, The Last Emperor, as impersonal, and they frequently allude to the blockbusters of David Lean by way of comparison. That’s an opinion I don’t subscribe to at all. For me, the personal side of Bertolucci is fundamentally bound up in a struggle to reconcile Freud and Marx–more specifically, a struggle to reconcile oedipal hang-ups with the precepts of Italian communism....

When Andy Cirzan came to work at Jam Productions as senior talent buyer a couple of years back, one of his first projects was to go out on the road with a then up-and-coming hard-rock band called Guns n’ Roses. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Cirzan was a long way from his marketing and programming work for the Ravinia Festival, where he had served his graduate-school internship and then stayed on to book the festival’s pop, jazz, and contemporary music series....

Now in its sixth year, this festival of experimental films will be screening its prizewinners on two consecutive nights. Only two films will be shown both nights, the special jurors’ award winner (Fred Marx’s Dreams From China, a pungent, ambivalent personal essay about his two years in that country) and one of the first-prize winners (Sal Giammona’s Wall in the Woods, a densely compacted reverie about a cosmic eggbeater, featuring lots of special effects and imaginative graphics)....

CRY-BABY “I’m tired of being good,” says sweet little Allison Vernon-Williams near the beginning of Cry-Baby, the new musical comedy by John Waters. This WASP beauty with the double-barreled handle, whose closest flirtation with sin has probably been mixing plaids with stripes, is a prom-queen type at her Baltimore high school in 1954 until she utters those magic words while gazing with barely bridled lust at cute leather punk Cry-Baby Walker....

THE DREAMER EXAMINES HIS PILLOW Act Now Productions at Cafe Voltaire Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I suspect that a lot of the differences can be explained by casting, and by the fact that Act Now director Oliver Oertel never forgot that performance is everything. It would be hard to imagine three better actors for this play’s trio of working-class New Yorkers–a burnt-out painter, his daughter, and her sometime lover–than Patrick Carton, Seana Kofoed, and Todd Stashwick....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Michael P. Walsh in a letter published on June 8th, 1990, referred to the performance of the Los Angeles Poverty Department (LAPD) as exploitive. LAPD is a theater group comprised of homeless and formerly homeless individuals and directed by performance artist John Malpede. Mr. Walsh’s letter involves two different levels of misunderstanding. His letter was written in response to a review of LAPD’s performance at Randolph Street Gallery by Justin Hayford [May 25]....

The last four weeks of the Bears’ season have been like the four stages following a death. There was denial that the crushing Monday-night loss to the Minnesota Vikings meant anything drastic, anger over the loss to the Cincinnati Bengals in overtime, resignation with the loss to the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, and finally, last Sunday, acceptance after the loss to the Green Bay Packers. The Bears truly are as bad as they have seemed, and it is not solely Mike Ditka’s fault, or Jim Harbaugh’s, or Mike McCaskey’s, or the fault of that grimmest of sports reapers, old man age, but all of the above....

Since elementary school I have repeatedly heard the story of how Manhattan was bought from the Indians for a mere $24 worth of trinkets. Something about this has long troubled me. Assuming the value of the barter items was estimated at about the time of the famous transaction, shouldn’t it be adjusted for all those years of inflation? Maybe Manhattan wasn’t such a steal after all. –Charles R. McNeill II, Washington, D....

Pity those poor lawyers. This year a whiny, greedy one was eaten by a tyrannosaurus in Jurassic Park; a porky, frightened one was chased by a lassoing cowboy in a Miller Lite commercial; and the very thought of his son turning into one sent poor Gomez Addams into a deep depression in Addams Family Values. With that in mind, we asked a few lawyers: What’s the best lawyer joke you heard this year?...

Friday 28 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » There have been a lot of hot rock films–Performance, Wild in the Streets, Tommy–but none of them has quite matched the staying power of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, the campy drag musical that has haunted midnight screenings for 13 years. Made on a shoestring and featuring Susan Sarandon in her presuperstar days, Rocky Horror and its mostly improvised audience participation still amaze....

CHECKMATE and The theater practically invented the thrill of the unknown: you never know what may happen when you enter–or how you’ll feel when you leave. Maybe this time, a part of you hopes, you’ll be changed, shaken up, reminded why you got hooked in the first place. Although the odds for that are worse than in the new Lotto, you can’t win if you don’t play. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

When the hard-boiled types in City Hall got wind of Pat Quinn’s latest gig as director of the city’s Revenue Department, they all agreed that something flashy was going to happen. And you can’t blame them, really. The standard reaction to Pat Quinn is skepticism. It’s practically contagious. No, it just doesn’t make sense. No sane reformer would invade that hornet’s nest, unless he had some trick up his sleeve. And sure enough, two months or so into his job, here comes Pat Quinn, brass and drums booming louder than ever....

Marv is a little drunk this morning, a bit unsteady as he circles through the courtyard of the Olive Branch shelter in search of a cigarette. “Yo blood, I’m tellin’ you. I hit the muthafuckin’ ground when they came around the corner.” As he listens, Small Head picks at a sore on his left foot; his basketball shoe and sock are on the ground beneath the bench. “All of them had Uzis ‘n’ shit,” Junior continues....