These days, small, independent, and adventurous theaters are so much a part of this city’s fabric it would seem a desolate place without them; but when Robert Sickinger came here in 1963, what he found was just that. “I believe in the grass-roots theater,” he said then. “You can’t build an interest in the theater in a city by importing shows. You’ve got to grow them from within.” In his Northwestern University doctoral thesis “Hull-House Theatre: An Analytical and Evaluative History,” Stuart J....

Just outside the Belmont station the train came abruptly to a stop and we sat for a minute while the conductor and motorman conferred in low voices. With a tight look on his face, the conductor opened one of the doors, leaned out, and peered into the lightly swirling snow. “Hey,” he began calling into the night with a gruff voice. “Yeah, you. Get over here.” A moment later he pulled himself back into the train....

WAC-A-GO-GO (“THE ART OF EMERGENCE”) WAC, an acronym for Women’s Action Coalition, is a highly charged political organization that started in New York shortly after the Anita Hill travesty. “Action” is the operative word here. WAC stages “intentionally visceral and confrontational” actions to combat homophobia, racism, religious prejudice, and violence against women. When their first Chicago meeting was held in September, more than 200 women attended. WAC-a-Go-Go (their first benefit) drew over 250 fired-up supporters, including two serious-looking suits sitting in the middle of the audience....

360 DEGREES: A PLAY FOR LOVERS IN THE AGE OF GLOBAL WARMING Jerome Stauduhar’s “updated” adaptation performed by Cloud 42, 360 Degrees: A Play for Lovers in the Age of Global Warming, will provoke no public outcry, although it should. Not for being immoral–it isn’t (unless you think all bad art is immoral)–but for being silly and superficial. Stauduhar’s initial concept sounds good: an equivalent American assault on hypocritical sexual mores....

Before Eddie Vrdolyak tried to make party-switching a movement and before Harold Washington even became elected mayor, Walter Dudycz decided he was so sick of the antics of the local Democratic Party that he would run for alderman as a Republican on Chicago’s northwest side. Little more than a year old, his law has stirred up political activity throughout the city. From Garfield Ridge on the far southwest side to Wrigleyville on the northern lakefront, voters in several hundred precincts in a dozen wards will get to express their opinions next Tuesday on issues that range from night Cubs baseball to public school decentralization....

It’s one of the oldest stings in the book. Two testers–one black, one white–walk into a real estate office and ask the agent what’s for sale. Evanston officials express disappointment with the evidence of discrimination. “I guess I shouldn’t be surprised,” says Owen Thomas, executive director of the Human Relations Commission. “Evanston is a heterogeneous community, but it’s not happenstance that 98 percent of the black population lives in west Evanston....

The thing you notice most about Hillary Clinton is her accent, which rambles around on a continuum from Yale Law School to super-Dixie–depending on what she’s talking about. Or to whom. On 60 Minutes a few weeks ago, Hillary exhibited a distinct twang: “Ah’m not jus’ any ol’ little Tammy Wah-nette standin’ bah mah man,” she’s famous for saying. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I figured she meant just me....

“My mother had no clothes when they came banging on our door,” 12-year-old Nakethan Johnson is saying as he and his friends stride into the McDonald’s at Wells and Adams. Soon he plops down with his bag of hot meat, white bread, and sugar water. His friends are Tonio, Richard, Carl, Keith, and Randy, Nakethan’s 16-year-old brother. Every afternoon, between four and a little after six, they earn their money on Loop corners selling papers, then stop at this McDonald’s to spend half of it on a quick meal they all agree barely lasts them till they get home to Cabrini....

The Soul Stirrers may now be performing to exuberant audiences in the Goodman’s production of The Gospel at Colonus, but 14 years ago the legendary Chicago-based gospel group’s fate was literally in the hands of God. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The right people were Jackie Banks, the Soul Stirrers’ one genuine minister; Ben Odom, now the group’s musical director; and Willie Rogers, who returned to the group in 1980 after a nine-year absence....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The editorializing you did on the calendar item we sent you about our May 2 Town Meeting is inaccurate in almost every detail [April 27]. The Peace Conversion Commission does not operate out of the mayor’s office, but out of the Department of Economic Development. It was not formed by either of the Mayors Daley, but by the Chicago City Council, and appointed by Mayor Harold Washington....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In an aside, Mr. Joravsky notes that “the city needs every little chunk of development it can get.” This assertion is left unsupported: it is stated as purest fact, as though the issue under discussion were the molecular weight of argon or the price of Guatemalan coffee. But it is not a fact–it is an interpretation, and an absurd one....

RICHARD III Renegade Theatre Company at Footsteps Theatre Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The anachronistic choice of a sword as Richard’s weapon is only one of the points at which Liermann’s analogy breaks down. Another is the complacency with which so many of Richard’s henchmen, in the midst of an allegedly anarchic milieu, resign themselves to their executions. And what are we to make of the vanquisher, Richmond, dressed in dazzling white and invoking God with the fervor of a crusader to the holy land–is he a social worker, a ghetto priest, or simply a cleaner, comelier rival gang leader?...

You might fear that a show with the trendy title of Shakespeare’s Greatest Hits would be thin. But even an postliterate (hell, semiliterate) era there are too many not yet converted. Shakespeare Repertory, a Jeff-winning theater (Cymbeline), has concocted an anthology to demonstrate the Bard’s worth. Powered by a young and unpretentious cast, Barbara Gaine’s pastiche of scenes from ten of the Bard’s best is well paced and richly acted. It slides seamlessly from Romeo and Juliet’s balcony scene to the low vaudeville of the lovers’ mix-ups in A Midsummer Night’s Dream to the knock-down courtship bout in The Taming of the Shrew....

Number of insects “on file” at the state Natural History Survey: 6,000,000. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Hot property. According to the graphs in the Civic Federation’s booklet Chicagoland–A Fiscal Perspective 1978-1987, the total value of property in the city of Chicago rose from $35 billion in 1979 to about $37 billion in 1987, after corrections for inflation. The value of suburban Cook County property, on the other hand, remained stagnant at about $53 billion in constant dollars over the same period of time....

Do other languages have vulgarities and obscenities that are used in conversation as they are in English? My husband worked in his youth with Italian-speaking laborers and says the worst he ever heard them say in Italian was “fangooloo.” (He says that, contrary to popular impression, this means only “make a tail,” in other words, “show me your back,” or “go away.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Honestly, Sally, were you raised in a convent?...

I understand a few of the reasons behind our complicated English measurements. For instance, an acre was the area plowable in one day using draft animals. But where, pray tell, did the mile and, while we’re at it, the yard come from? I mean, 1,760 yards or 5,280 feet can’t possibly hold any mystical significance, even to the Illuminati. –Michael Hollinger, Herndon, Virginia Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Never underestimate the Illuminati, chum–I’m still stumped by the 17/23 correlation....

NOT NICE GIRLS: PHOTOGRAPHS BY WOMEN 1930-1980 Most are casual but penetrating portraits of weathered, solitary individuals. At first our attention is caught by their strangeness–the overdone makeup of an old woman in Woman With Veil, San Francisco, the exceptional girth of a woman at the beach in Woman at Coney Island, New York, the clashing, garish patterns of the hat and tentlike dress worn by another rotund woman in Woman in Flowered Dress, Riviera....

KINGS-X TYRANNOSAURUS REX CONSTANTINOPLE When Jenny Magnus burst into the performance space at N.A.M.E., giggling, twisting, and trying to fend off an invisible tickling attacker, there was something nearly orgasmic, and just about unbearable, about the moment. That she regained her composure was inevitable. But that she managed to retain that harrowing tension between pleasure and pain–to revel in it, to practically cry with it–that was brilliant. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Art, says filmmaker Jonathan Demme, is one of the few courses of action people who are otherwise powerless still have at their command. In Haiti, a country that has 60 percent unemployment and staggering illiteracy rates, the culture is infused with numerous untrained and intuitive artists. “Everybody goes out very early and seeks a way of doing something productive for money, and that inevitably makes people turn to something artistic,” says Demme....

At 8:30 AM Captain Lowell “Beetle” Bailey is standing at the controls of the Chicago Peace, watching a tall towboat as it slowly shoves ten barges toward him up the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal. The Peace rocks slightly in the water, her two 600-horsepower engines thrumming, as the barges, which are lashed together into a “tow” that is two barges wide and five long, drift to a stop in front of her....