THE BUTTERFLY The play is about a beautiful butterfly (Denise Dailey McCauley) who flies into a dark attic and gets trapped in a spider’s web. The spider (David Saperstein) claims he is starving and must eat the butterfly or die. But he is struck by her beauty and touched by her deep desire to keep her “appointment with the sun,” so he offers her a deal–he’ll let her go if she promises to lure two or three fat, juicy bugs into his web....

The highest-paid chief executives in Chicagoland, according to Business Week (October 21), run Comdisco (Kenneth N. Pontikes, $2 million salary per year), Bally Manufacturing (Robert E. Mullane, $1.8 million), Sears (Edward A. Brennan, $1.5 million), Abbott Laboratories (Robert A. Shoellhorn, $1.33 million), Sara Lee (John H. Bryan Jr., $1.301 million), and Waste Management (Dean Buntrock, $1.3 million). Farther down the list, but since you asked: the Tribune’s Stanton Cook gets $922,000; Michael R....

Could I start now and get it all over with right away? According to the American Academy of Pediatrics, based in Elk Grove Village, “By the time today’s child reaches age 70, he or she will have spent approximately seven years watching television.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “The absence of a comprehensive industrial development plan has created uncertainty about how hospitable Chicago will be to manufacturing in the future,” according to the Chicago Association of Neighborhood Development Organizations in its newsletter (Winter 1990)....

“Perhaps the next development in performance poetry will be an attempt to become more like professional wrestling,” writes Gloria Klein in Letter eX (June). “A poetry ‘slam’ is not too far from it already. What is professional wrestling if not a form of entertainment that is metaphor without language? When Cactus Jack battled Arachne Man the crowd went wild. These two wrestlers even carried on their struggle outside the ring. The referee, like punctuation that no longer means anything, couldn’t get them to play by the rules....

Who is this St. Jude dude? Why are people always thanking him in the classified section of the newspaper? –Lisa Keyes, Madison, Wisconsin Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I am continually shocked at how little the coming generation knows about the realm of the spirit. Saint Jude is the patron saint of hopeless causes. Also known as Jude Thaddeus, he was one of the 12 apostles, but other than that virtually nothing is known about him....