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Theater League’s New Marketing Manager Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But these concerns haven’t dampened Barger’s enthusiasm so far. “I’m basically an optimist,” she says. She came to the job May 1, bringing with her a discipline that comes from nearly a decade in the corporate sector. She worked at Flair Communications and at the Foote, Cone & Belding ad agency before leaving Chicago seven years ago for Winston-Salem, North Carolina, where she toiled in promotions and public relations for Hanes Hosiery and then for RJR/Nabisco promoting Life Savers, jobs that helped prepare her for the cash-starved world of Chicago theater....

To the editors: Ignorance, ineptitude, and some downright nastiness are evident in Peter Margasak’s October 29th one-sentence commentary on Wishbone Ash’s November 3rd pre-tour date at Beaumont [Spot Check]. As a classically trained musician and longtime connoisseur of both music and musical venues, I was appalled at Margasak’s pompous dismissal of Wishbone Ash’s pre-tour date as “less a chance to cash in than an attempt to pay an overdue phone bill....

UNIDENTIFIED HUMAN REMAINS AND THE TRUE NATURE OF LOVE Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Quite a lot of body, actually. Human Remains is all about bodies, one way or another. Fraser and his director, Derek Goldby, have installed a big bed center stage at the Halsted Theatre Centre and plopped a succession of attractively naked people down on it, giving them no end of sexy–if only simulated–activities to perform with each other....

The woman at the next table drops her french fry and stares openmouthed at the man nearby; he is gesturing wildly and speaking with a peculiar glee. By now the woman is 20 paces away, her Wendy’s lunch untouched, and she is not looking back. Too bad. Jeffery Lyle Segal is just as apt to be discussing the “nice things” he does: the people he’s aged for commercials, the costumes he’s made for Halloween, the makeup work he’s done for W....

Friday 27 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » There will probably be images of Harold Washington at the juried Columbia College student art exhibition but they’re not likely to ruffle feathers the way David Nelson’s Mirth and Girth did at the School of the Art Institute. Founded in 1890, Columbia only had 125 students in 1962, when it began an aggressive urban recruiting policy for faculty and students....

Friday 10 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Yesh Gvul, Hebrew for “There is a limit,” is the name of a group of Israeli soldiers opposed to serving in the occupied territories. “Called to service for the purported task of protecting Israel’s national security,” say group supporters, “the soldier members of Yesh Gvul find themselves instead saddled with the distasteful duty imposed by the politicians: systematic terrorization of the Palestinian population....

Friday 7 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A specially commissioned work by South African choreographer Thuli Dumakade is the focus of the Muntu Dance Company’s 14th annual concert series. Dumakade’s work, Kindred Spirits, is a three-part suite about aspects of South African life the choreographer thinks have been overlooked during the turmoil there–an intertribal wedding, township life, and the resurgence of black culture. Also on the bill: Sama So, by Djibi Traore and Souleyman Diop, and Doudoumba Soli, by Youssouf Koumbassa....

By all accounts, Saint Ignatius is one of the finest Catholic grade schools on the north side–its enrollment economically and ethnically diverse, its principal dynamic, its teachers dedicated, and its parents committed. Such disputes are becoming common as the church struggles with how to allocate its resources as middle-class Catholics continue to leave the city. The archdiocese, which faces a $15 million deficit, has closed 53 inner-city churches since 1990. As reporter Andrew Herrmann recently wrote in the Sun-Times, the archdiocese is targeting its limited resources toward a handful of far-off suburbs and upscale neighborhoods like Dearborn Park while cutting back on “overserved” communities in Chicago....

On the basis of fairly extensive experience with Santa Cruz, California, I report that the students of the University of California there can be divided cleanly into four distinct groups. In steeply descending order of group size, they are: those who like it there and take drugs; those who don’t like it and take drugs; those who like it and don’t take drugs; and those who neither like it nor take drugs....

I had a vision once. I was standing on the apron of an Amoco station outside Chenoa, filling up during a drive from Chicago. Glancing toward the west, I saw a trainload of the damned, wailing and thrashing their arms about as they were borne off to Judgment through a fiery cloud. Shaken, I described the scene to my wife when I got home. She calculated from the time and location of the sighting that all I had seen was Amtrak’s southbound 3:15 out of Chicago, backlit by a setting sun, passing me at the precise moment that its passengers learned the Amcafe was already out of chicken salad....

About ten minutes after June Saathoff signed the papers on her new house 21 years ago, the broker told her she had just bought the house Walt Disney was born in. Lots of property owners would welcome, even pay for, the association with something old and venerable. But Saathoff says no one understands her fears: tourists trampling her property, bureaucrats deciding what’s best for it, the fact that if it’s designated a landmark she won’t get to make any changes to the outside of her house without consulting the Landmarks Commission....

Though his name recalls Germany’s most famous musical tribe, Michael Bach claims no direct blood ties to the great J.S. Not that it matters. The cellist extraordinaire, at age 33, can stand on his own right as a virtuoso and as an avid champoin of contemporary chamber music. Classically trained–under the tutelage of Pierre Fournier and Janos Starker–Back decided on his present specialization in the mid-70s after a summer at Darmstadt, one of the hotbeds of experimentalism....

Variety has been essential to the spirit of the Chicago Jazz Festival ever since the first one 12 years ago. Chicago’s festival is a smorgasbord of music, and the quality of the music has remained high indeed. This quality is largely due to the festival’s seeking out of original musicians–players and composers who create from that most primal of artistic motivations, need. “Express yourself,” Von Freeman likes to tell other musicians, and those words are close to the essence of jazz, with emphasis on “yourself....

ONCE UPON A TIME THERE WAS A FAMILY Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But all is not as it seems. The father is carrying on an affair with his secretary, who’s called Like because of her habit of beginning every sentence with that word. The mother is a nymphomaniac/prostitute (the parish priest is one of her most, uh, faithful customers). The teenage son stuffs his teddy bears with cocaine, generously supplied by the chief of police....

The west-side slumlord doesn’t want to pay property taxes on his shabby old tenement. So after five years, he owes Cook County about $150,000 in back taxes. County officials post the building at a scavenger sale for tax-delinquent properties, just as the law requires. “The system is filled with loopholes that enable owners to avoid paying their property tax,” says Scott Lancelot, a member of the task force and director of redevelopment for the nonprofit Neighborhood Housing Services....

PSYCHO BEACH PARTY Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Now a new company–the Red Bones Theatre, located in an appropriately edgy Uptown neighborhood–has produced Busch’s Psycho Beach Party. The play begins as a simple parody of beach-party movies–all but parodies to begin with–but quickly becomes more complex and perverse. Busch adds to the original mixture parodies of Hollywood psychological melodramas (The Three Faces of Eve, Spellbound) and plenty of camp humor, including a protagonist written to be played in drag....

NAKED LUNCH And some of us are on Different Kicks and that’s a thing out in the open the way I like to see what I eat and vice versa mutatis mutandis as the case may be. Bill’s Naked Lunch Room . . . Step right up. Good for young and old, man and bestial. Nothing like a little snake oil to grease the wheels and get a show on the track Jack....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I found James Krohe Jr.’s piece on Richard Bray and Guild Bookstore, Chicago Reader, April 14, 1989, to be offensive at best, and extremely poor journalism at worst. The article opens up with, and continues to utilize throughout its length, supposition, absence of fact and what can only be an undertone of malicious intent. Consider Mr....

My boyfriend says plants and trees have natural lifespans like animals. I say if a plant doesn’t die of disease, drought, famine, fire, etc., it will not die. Look at those age-old trees out in California. Please help us settle this argument. –S.U., Chicago Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Death, disease, drought, famine–at last a question that speaks to me. To simplify matters, let’s just talk about trees....

A minor but very enjoyable Nicolas Roeg fairy tale–adapted by Allan Scott from Roald Dahl’s novel, and one of the last films on which Muppet master Jim Henson worked–about a very wicked Grand High Witch (Anjelica Huston) in contemporary England with a plan to turn all that country’s children into mice. She hatches this plot at a plush seaside resort, where she and her coven are posing as members of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, and where the other main characters are staying, including a nine-year-old American orphan (Chicagoan Jasen Fisher)–one of the witch’s first victims–and his Norwegian grandmother (Mai Zetterling)....