I never imagined that a little French Vietnamese storefront restaurant could make me feel like a member of the British aristocracy. I’ve always wanted to be waited on like one of the upstairs crowd on Upstairs Downstairs. I wouldn’t even mind being a royal. So what if Charles is a bit of a twit? I’ve put up with plenty of twits in my time, and it would have been a lot more pleasant with Di’s clothes allowance....

TEECHERS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » That is the gist of Teechers, and that is why the play is at times predictable and tiresome. So why would the Stage Left Theatre want to put it on? Because Teechers is also a challenging exercise in acting; and the three actors in the cast, who play a total of 21 roles, do such a fine job that they make Teechers seem almost fresh....

Probably because the floors are really strong. Lead question from a review of a self-help tape in Executive Edge (January 1991): “If dinosaurs have been extinct for millions of years, why do so many work in your office?” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » How TV promotes racism, according to Ted Cox’s summary of Robert Entman’s survey of tube crime reporting (Chicago Reporter, January 1991): “When photographs of black suspects were shown on the screen, they were named only 49 percent of the time....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Subscriptions provide money to theatres up front, but they require a set schedule of productions to make sure subscribers get all that they paid for. Over the years, this has led to many successful productions closing before they were ready to do so, and many less than successful shows having to play out a set run when subscribers, and frequently the actors too, clearly are having a miserable time....

“The American church is defiant. It thumbs its nose at Rome, allowing someone like [Father Charles] Curran to infect his students with rebellion for 20 years . . . letting altar girls serve all over the Chicago archdiocese . . . rejecting the official position on birth control. As far as I can see, the American church is schismatic!” –Kathleen Sullivan, cofounder of the National Catholic Coalition. “First, they watered down the faith, threw out the words that people understood, and introduced this idea of me and my rights and my freedoms....

Is it true honey is really . . . bee vomit? –Lisa, Chicago Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The bees collect the nectar from flowers and store it in their “honey stomachs,” separate from their true stomachs. On their way back to the hive they secrete enzymes into it that begin converting the stuff into honey. Once in the hive they yuke up the nectar and either turn it over to other workers for further processing or dump it directly into the honeycomb....

Even his detractors call him a visionary. He prefers to think of himself as an architect. McCarter says he came into the decision-making process late, after the sale of Chicago, and only at the board’s express request. He made some bad hires in the station manager’s office, and they made some poor choices. However, most of the blame seems to belong to the board–more specifically, to the radio committee and its chairman, Dan Levin–yet McCarter took the heat....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Upon entering the studio, Mr. Hayford was given a program for the show, complete with a cast list, just as any other patron would be. We even went so far as to outline the credits in red ink for his convenience. When the review appeared in the Reader, however, we were informed that two people had been in the performance who were nowhere near the building, nor do their names appear anywhere in the program....

AMERICAN SPANISH DANCE FESTIVAL at Northeastern Illinois University July 10-12 and 17-19 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This small company turned a potential weakness into strength by making this performance seem a personal exchange between itself and the audience. David Harris, the company’s musical director and vocalist, narrates and translates the texts in a comfortable, natural tone. He doesn’t overintellectualize the historical narrative or pontificate on the songs’ translations but gives them an accurate yet contemporary cast....

Ring! Ring! Ring! So when the pamphlet came in the mail from Illinois Bell offering a new feature called automatic callback, I could barely contain myself. It’s the most recent addition to Illinois Bell’s Custom Calling Services. Some of the more harmless of these services include call waiting (though some would argue), three-way calling, and call forwarding. Now they offer a feature that can automatically return the last call transmitted to your phone; all you have to do is press a three digit code: *69....

In their burst-from-hibernation show at Lounge Ax last weekend, E.I.E.I.O. were swaggering and joyful, lean and mean. The midwestern foursome (the members live strewn from Berwyn to Madison) has been in retreat for near on a year. The group has no new album to show for it, but who cares? They just fall back on the glittery gems of guitar rock that made up their 1988 grunge masterpiece, That Love Thang, retreating into the safety of a precise guitar attack, that lean rhythm section, and the silky spectacle of Steve Summers’s voice....

If this meeting of perpetually nervous, thinking guitar bands doesn’t turn into the best twin bill of the season, I promise to eat my entire collection of Velvet Underground albums. You might identify the Feelies as the cooler-than-cool group from the reunion scene in Jonathan Demme’s Something Wild, the artistic pinnacle of North Jersey nerd rock, or the geniuses who discovered minor chords before R.E.M., but none of these would prepare you for the sheer drama of their slipping, sliding, slithering, striking live sets....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Good News which we as believers in Jesus [the] Christ proclaim is that out of total and complete love–and for no other reason–God condescended to become a human being, and in so doing brought us into life with Him. We believe that God our Father created us that we might live in eternal fellowship with Him, as close to his heart as a woman is to her husband....

Johnny Copeland has managed to harness the furious energy of modern hell-bent-for-leather blues guitar and fit it into the sophisticated tradition of his Texas roots. Copeland led the house band at Shady’s Playhouse in Houston in the early and mid-50s; there he came into contact with the music of such greats as Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown, the young Johnny “Guitar” Watson, and the definitive modern Texas guitar stylist T-Bone Walker. Aside from a brief foray into soul music in the 1960s, he’s never forsaken his original inspiration, the blues....

John: Why do you stop us on the king’s highway and refuse us leave to go on our way? –Daniel Defoe, A Journal of the Plague Year The manager of a furniture store is fired because the owners suspect that he has developed the disease. No one doubts anymore that AIDS is a public-health problem of massive and growing proportions. But it is also a civil rights problem–and those two problems are inextricably linked....

People like myself who often despair of finding a new cop-and-crime movie that isn’t encrusted in cliches should make a beeline for this wonderful sleeper by writer-director George Armitage (Vigilante Force), based on a novel by Charles Willeford (Cockfighter) and coproduced by Jonathan Demme. A small-time thief and ex-con (Alec Baldwin) arrives in Miami, latches on to a local hooker (Jennifer Jason Leigh), and winds up stealing the gun and badge (along with the dentures) of police detective Hoke Moseley (Fred Ward) in order to pose as a cop while pulling off more thefts....

You could call them Chinese Rich Melmans, or maybe the Asian Levy Brothers, except that they’re not related. In fact George Kuan and Austin Koo don’t even like each other very much anymore. But over the last 20 years, working together and separately, the two entrepreneurs have established a remarkable dynasty of restaurants, educating local palates in a wide range of provincial cooking and serving the best Chinese food in Chicago....

A seafood restaurant in Pilsen: two glasses of white wine have loosened up Orlando Perez–born-again Christian, quadriplegic, proud Sandinista from Los Madrigales, Nicaragua–enough for him to tell his camel joke. The interpreter survives and even laughs along. With his bloodhound eyes and husky build, Perez looks like Diego Rivera sitting in a wheelchair. He eats pulpo (octopus), and says his nickname used to be el pulpo because he was all hands....

How many bikers’ hospital bills would you like to pay? Only one-third of Illinois motorcyclists wear helmets, and the state Department of Public Aid thinks there oughta be a law. “Unhelmeted motorcyclists have three times as many head injuries….The University of Illinois at Chicago reports that acute health care costs for the 5,484 injured motorcyclists in Illinois during 1988 were more than $35.3 million, almost half of which came from public funds–including the already overburdened budget of the Department of Public Aid....

Contrary to your column of some years ago [More of the Straight Dope, page 329], there is authority that a marriage performed by a ship’s captain on the high seas is valid. In Fisher v. Fisher in 1929 the New York Court of Appeals (the state’s highest court) held that “in the absence of any such law which condemned the marriage …” such a marriage was valid. The court also reasoned that Congress “had recognized that on board a ship at sea … there is … a law of marriage,” because Congress had enacted a statute requiring a vessel’s master to keep a log book recording every marriage taking place on board....