Friday 7 In order to honor the 2,349 POWs and MIAs still in Vietnam, including 98 from Illinois, the local chapter of VietNow is sponsoring a flagpole dedication and 24-hour vigil, beginning at noon today on the front lawn of Ed Kwiatkowski’s house. A Vietnam vet, Kwiatkowski helps organize volunteers for letter-writing campaigns, hospital visits, and community-group presentations about those who didn’t come home. The vigil will feature speakers from several local Vietnam-vet groups, as well as from groups that serve veterans from the Korean war and World Wax II....

JUNE Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Grudge match is hardly the term for the long-awaited showdown between Sergeant Slaughter and Hulk Hogan. It was bad enough that the Sergeant was an outspoken supporter of that dirty dog Saddam Hussein; worse was his response when the Hulkster overwhelmed him in their last meeting in the ring: he snuck back into Hogan’s dressing room and threw hot oil in his face, charring the Hulk’s stony visage....

When vocalist Larry “Big Twist” Nolan died of heart failure in 1990, a lot of people wondered what would become of his band. Twist was a legendary showman, a beefy R & B shouter with a booming baritone; he radiated an avuncular enthusiasm and specialized in both hard-driving R & B barn burners and novelty blues like “Three Hundred Pounds of Joy.” His band, the Mellow Fellows, complemented him with unerring tightness and unwavering slickness....

HIS MAJESTIE’S CLERKES The setting and acoustics of Quigley Chapel couldn’t be more ideal for such a concert. Built in 1921 by Cardinal Mundelein during a period in Roman Catholicism when opulence was appropriate to anything having to do with the priesthood, the chapel, which is part of Quigley Preparatory Seminary North, is more or less a reproduction of the famous Sainte-Chapelle in Paris, the breathtaking chapel erected by Saint Louis in 1248 to enshrine what is believed to be a relic of the crown of thorns worn by Jesus during his crucifixion....

Film Fight: Music Box vs. Loews/M&R in Battle of the Bookers A turf war has broken out in the city’s movie exhibition business. The giant Loews/M&R theater chain and the one-screen Music Box at Southport and Waveland are locked in combat for offbeat art films. And neither side is even thinking of giving in. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » M&R wooed away former Music Box manager and booker John Schlesinger to help organize its program....

BASICALLY BACH at Orchestra Hall Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The aim of the original-instrument movement may be dutiful replication, but I suspect that there are other motivations. An orchestra of only 20 to 30 instrumentalists costs less to hire and can easily fit into venues such as churches and community centers that charge minimal rent. (Of course this does make music available to a wider and cost-conscious public....

Lead Story Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » McDonnell Douglas, needing to demonstrate that 410 passengers could be safely evacuated from its MD-11 jetliner, conducted two tests in October in Los Angeles. Although 11 passengers were injured in the first test, the company proceeded with the second test, in which 36 more people were injured, including a 60-year-old woman who suffered a broken spine and is now paralyzed from the neck down....

On one program. Joe Frank played a recording of actual emergency-room incidents. “Were going to insert a catheter in your penis,” stated a doctor to a moaning gunshot victim. Another time he called up three of his ex-girlfriends and toyed with them emotionally. On another program he asked, “How do you reconcile the Holocaust . . . with a God you would worship?” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Sometimes Frank’s whole show is a provocative monologue....

Throughout the country politicians of all ideological persuasions are now arguing that a combination of economic calamities has shattered the expectations of the middle class, including its assumption that it can afford to send its children to college. Politicians in Illinois recently had a chance to make the goal of higher education widely available, but they passed it up. Edgar’s aides vehemently deny that. “This wasn’t partisan,” says Dan Egler, an Edgar spokesman....

The woman at the Ravenswood post office is livid. She wants her stuck-together stamps replaced, dammit, and the clerk behind the counter won’t cooperate. She knows her money’s still good. The bureaucracy at the U.S. Treasury is less convoluted than that at the U.S. Postal Service. Any bank would replace the damaged bills with freshly minted ones as long as she had an account there. But the permanently stuck together stamps strike fear in her soul....

Program of seven Greek-produced features, sponsored by the Greek Ministry of Culture and Sciences and the Greek Film Center. All films will be screened at the Copernicus Cultural and Civic Center, 5216 W. Lawrence, April 24 through April 30. Tickets are $5, or $30 for all seven; for more information, call 777-8898. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » MANIA An updating of Euripides’ Bacchae, with a modem career woman experiencing a Dionysian revelation while strolling through an Athens park; George Panoussopoulos directed....

TEASIN’ YOU Johnny Heartsman Eaglin is a New Orleans legend who was a force in the 50s-era Crescent City R & B explosion and has since become a mainstay on the blues festival circuit, though he’s never really been a household name outside Louisiana. Self-taught, eclectic in his choice of material nearly to the point of mania, he’s built a reputation in a city known for its free spirits as a flamboyant musical maverick....

FEAR AND LOATHING IN LAS VEGAS, A SAVAGE JOURNEY TO THE HEART OF THE AMERICAN DREAM ETA Creative Arts Foundation Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » To their credit, this is also the company that has spent the last three years developing a loud, outrageous, in-your-face performing style, which they never tire of telling us is “a variation of the classic Italian Commedia Dell’Arte,” as the program says....

Facts we could have gotten through the day without: According to Gillette, the “average North Atlantic male”–whatever that is–“generates an average of 27.5 feet of facial hair in his lifetime.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “If they want to call it bribery, that’s fine with me. It’s bribery, but it’s open bribery…. It’s just something you can’t turn down.” So says Martinsville mayor Truman Dean of the $800,000 “no-strings” state grant his downstate town got to keep up its interest in hosting a “low-level” radioactive waste dump....

The Last Rewrite Man We were once a rewrite man at the Sun-Times. We can describe the breed with confidence. A rewrite man might be thought of as a literate reporter, a master of such advanced techniques as spelling and writing in complete sentences. Add to his virtues the stoicism it takes to sit at a keyboard, vised in lacerating ear phones, cajoling a bumbling correspondent in the field who can barely read his own notes, let alone make a coherent narrative of them....

I’m trying to locate the author of a poem and what book I could find it in. On the CBS TV show Beauty and the Beast, the character Catherine read Vincent this poem: To my most grievous loss? That thought’s return Could to my sight that heavenly face restore. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Normally Cecil tries to avoid name-that-tune-type questions, in large part because the Teeming Millions’ recollection of the words, title, or whatever is usually so scrambled as to make identification impossible....

Jack Nicholson directs and stars as upscale Los Angeles detective Jake Gittes in the much-awaited, much delayed sequel to Chinatown (1974), scripted, like its predecessor, by Robert Towne and set 11 years later, when Gittes is fatter and even more cynical about his work. Harvey Keitel costars as the other Jake, Meg Tilly plays his unfaithful wife, and this time the local real estate issue is oil rather than water. Despite an extremely complex plot that’s not always easy to follow, Towne’s script, brimming with witty and cynical dialogue, has the functional beauty of a well-made car....

THREE WISHES A ten-year-old girl, Ellie, has developed a behavior pattern of lying. Though Ellie is basically a good kid, she’s become a scapegoat at school and has no friends. Meanwhile, on Earth’s “other” moon, genies are languishing in boredom. No one has wished for a genie in 300 years, since nobody believes in them anymore, and genies are not allowed to visit Earth unless they’re called. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Re: your honorific review of my 1-man show, “Woollcott Died for You!” (Reader 9-22-89). Have contacted law firm of Winken, Blinken & Nod, who I found in dis bar. Can report good time had by all. Am reminded of G.B. Shaw’s retort to an interloper who screamed that his new show was rotten: “You and I know that, but who are we among so many?...

WAVELAND RADIO PLAYHOUSE: ON THE AIR The most involved and lengthy adventure is from a series called Rex Koko, Private Clown; here we get one episode, “Die, Clown, Die,” which is completed over the course of the evening. Our hero, Rex Koko, has all the trappings of Sam Spade, but his business is jokes and his underworld contacts are circus folk, freaks, and critters. The story–which is outrageously complicated, full of strange twists and characters–is ultimately not very important....