Doe Coover was planning to spend her weekend hanging wallpaper in the dining room when her sister phoned Boston with the news. Over in the corner of the room, Sister Alphonsine, principal from ’62 to ’67, explains that the school’s name comes from Mount Alverno in Italy–where Saint Francis of Assisi stood when he received the stigmata. The school’s motto remains: “For it is in giving that we receive.” Best of Chicago voting is live now....

The stage of the Shubert Theatre is laid out like a television news studio for Jackie Mason’s new one-man show–desks, chairs, elaborately schlocky “JM” logos on the walls, and big and little TV monitors everywhere. The stocky, shock-haired Mason comes on and, for a couple of hilarious hours, pointedly ignores these trappings; preferring instead to stand downstage and deal directly with his audience, he employs the set pieces only when he’s mocking the self-importance of small-screen celebrities....

This could be interesting: how or for what reason this aggregation got organized is a mystery to me, but the plan is to have these four folk- and country-tinged songwriting vets up on stage with acoustic guitars, playing solo and together. John Hiatt doesn’t thrill me the way he does some people, but he does have an easy grasp of a certain bluesy groove, and it’ll be neat to see him solo and with this group....

How does a British mathematics professor at Cambridge University become internationally renowned and respected as a Mozart scholar? “Rather by chance,” says Richard Maunder, who’s in Chicago this week in connection with the local premiere of his new edition of Mozart’s unfinished C Minor Mass (K. 427, the “Great”). Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Maunder has long been fascinated by the problems of Mozart’s last work, the Requiem (K....

I can’t figure out how Len Colodny and Robert Gettlin managed to convince St. Martin’s Press that anyone would buy another book about Watergate. The bungled break-in, which toppled a president, has also toppled an awful lot of trees. According to the bibliography to Colodny and Gettlin’s Silent Coup: The Removal of a President, there have been no fewer than 28 previous books on the subject. To uncover what they believe is the true Watergate conspiracy, Colodny and Gettlin reexamine a forgotten scandal from the early part of the Nixon administration....

South Bend, Indiana, is slightly more than 100 uneventful miles from Chicago, across the skyway to the Indiana Tollroad on Interstate 90. With the 65-mile-an-hour speed limit in effect once the toll road is joined by I-80, the drive can be done in about 90 minutes–two hours with traffic on the Chicago side. Traveling east, you get off on exit 77–the second of two South Bend exits–which places you directly north of South Bend, on U....

MY THING OF LOVE Steppenwolf Theatre Company Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Much like the aimless narcissists and ex-potheads who populate Ann Beattie’s fiction, Jack drifts through his life, into adultery and out of his marriage, without regard for the consequences. And though Elly has a strong desire to keep the marriage together, she too seems to act out of instinct. (If she really thought about her shallow prick of a husband, she’d drop him in a second, or make it clear that she’s staying only for the children....

JOFFREY BALLET The opening night program showed the dancers’ virtuosity off in many contrasting ways. Nijinsky’s revolutionary ballet, L’apres-midi d’un faune, for example, created in 1912, remains a fascinating work still unlike any more traditional ballet. The nymphs and faun perform the entire work in profile, looking like figures on an Attic amphora, with movements that in their mythic, mysterious mood had an enormous influence on the development of modern dance....

That reminds me, is it lunchtime yet? From the Ethics Observer (Fall 1990): “It’s no secret that ‘Ethics’ and ‘Politics’ in Chicago have historically gone together about as well as peanut butter and pickles.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Gas guzzlers are not the problem, cars are the problem, argues Daniel Lazare in In These Times (November 7-13): “Better mileage means cheaper driving which in turn means more driving, more congestion and more suburban sprawl…....

Shirley MacLaine plays a Jewish widow with two unhappy daughters (Kathy Bates and Marcia Gay Harden) who’s wooed by an Italian widower (Marcello Mastroianni) in Queens in 1969. This delightful, affecting, and offbeat comedy-drama, written by actor Todd Graff (The Abyss, Five Corners) and adapted from his own off-Broadway work, The Grandma Plays, has been directed with verve and sensitivity by Beeban Kidron (Antonia and Jane), who’s done most of her previous work for British TV but seems perfectly at home here....

CARNIVAL SHOES About a year ago, someone Tirabassi loves got deeply involved in a new-age cult and, judging by Tirabassi’s account, suffered a nervous breakdown. Tirabassi helped reclaim this beloved someone, which meant not only healing but deprogramming her. In the process, Tirabassi got a close-up look at the human-potential movement with its Werner Erhards and its L. Ron Hubbards, and came to think of it as an evil, soul-snatching scam....

Hearing Charlie Haden, one is almost tempted to say, “They don’t make ’em like that anymore”: in an age of busy bassists who have devoted themselves to agile acrobatics, Haden’s unhurried technique stands out. His lack of conventional “virtuosity” places all the more emphasis on his open-air note choices, his pantonal harmonic sense, and that singing, mournful, resonant tone. (Although he hails from Oklahoma, Haden plays a peculiarly Chicago bass style, in line with that of the late Wilbur Ware and the Art Ensemble’s Malachi Favors....

The 60-some one-acts (three per night) in Bailiwick Repertory’s Directors Festival 1992, produced by Cecilie Keenan, range from plays and musicals to performance art and monologues; some are well-established classic and contemporary selections, while others are brand-new pieces. They’re mounted by a slew of directors, most of them little known, who are looking for an avenue to showcase their work and get their names out to the public. See? It’s working already....

It’s a little hard to believe, but pianist Erwin Helfer–he of the boyish grin, high-propulsion bass patterns, and self-proclaimed devotion to the old Chicago and New Orleans piano greats who were his mentors–is over 50, pushing toward elder-statesman status himself. All that means is that his buoyant love affair with blues and boogie-woogie has slowly become tempered with a knowing worldliness: where he once tore through barn-burners with a take-no-prisoners abandon, he’ll now embellish his driving left-hand phrases with treble ornamentation tinged with a Hoagy Carmichael wistfulness, his raucous enthusiasm laced with fatalistic romanticism....

NORTHWEST BY NORTH WELLS at the Roxy Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » At this point it is worth noting that (1) the improvisation exercises of Stanislavsky and Spolin were designed to develop skills in all types of theater–not exclusively comedy, (2) the exercises were designed as warm- up activities for the studio and were never intended to be seen by a theater audience, (3) the Compass Players were highly educated U....

THE GOOD WAR “Everybody was patriotic and clean,” one of the women Terkel interviewed for his book says about wartime in the 1940s. “It was the last time Americans were seen as liberators. And there was something warming about that.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In the first half of Michael Hildebrand and Anita Greenberg’s adaptation of Terkel’s book, we see–with the benefit of recent memories–how patriotism feeds the bloodshed....

THE PROBLEM IS WOMEN; THE PROBLEM IS MEN Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I hope my friend never sees The Problem Is Women; the Problem Is Men, because if she does she’ll feel confirmed in the idea that musical theater is no place for interesting or original ideas. Everything about The Problem seems shopworn–cribbed from some other era. The show’s premise–pull together a group of characters and have them kvetch and sing about their love problems–is very 70s, but the problems discussed seem culled from half a dozen past decades....

Theater Talk Charles Likar’s great contribution to Chicago theater was a piece of alchemy: he turned spirit into ink. To the cheek, grit, and yearning of our dramatic world he added the printed word. In 1987 the monthly magazine New Plays & Playwrights quietly appeared, and last fall there was another, Take Stage! Both pubs consist of interviews for the most part, and Likar’s strategy is elegantly simple: send it in and he’ll run it....

It seems scandalous that Charles Burnett, the most gifted black American director offering purely realistic depictions of black urban life, has had to wait for more than a decade to get any of his films distributed in this country, and that this one only got made because Danny Glover agreed to play a leading role in it. (He also served as an executive producer.) Unlike Burnett’s previous and undistributed Killer of Sheep and My Brother’s Wedding, his new feature is steeped in folklore, but that doesn’t prevent the film from giving us a depiction of contemporary black family life richer than we can find anywhere else....

AMERICAN BALLET THEATRE Last summer Twyla Tharp stopped dancing, disbanded her dance company, and joined American Ballet Theatre as artistic associate. The company’s all-Tharp program featured four dances, including Tharp’s signature The Fugue and the brand-new The Bum’s Rush. The seriousness and genuineness of the company’s commitment to Tharp is obvious. Their dancing–especially the stylistic contrasts between those ABT members who were once in Tharp’s company and those whose training was primarily traditional–suggests that the process of mutual adjustment and accommodation is anything but easy....