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Sweet Dreams: Ina Pinkney Turns From Dessert to Breakfast Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Though the Dessert Kitchen flourished, Pinkney eventually began to tire of the grueling routine. “After a while,” she explains, “baking 30 pans of brownies a week is not fun.” She also longed for more sustained contact with her ever-growing list of regular customers. So the dessert maven began formulating plans for Ina’s Kitchen, a small restaurant that would be open only in the morning and early afternoon and serve breakfast and her popular baked goods....

My competitor is an alien. From a recent press release: “As companies have been forced to reduce their overhead and operating expenses to meet the demands of interglobal competition…” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Harold Washington was hurt more by the Black middle class than he was by whites,” writes William J. Leahy in Leahy’s Corner (January 1989). “It was marvelous to see Black people feeling so uplifted by living under a Black mayor....

“I lived at Henry Horner during a turbulent period–the ’60s,” recalls poet Cranston Knight in Loyola World (February 13). “It was like living in El Salvador or Guatemala: the military were posted with machine guns on the corners, and there were signs everywhere that literally said, ‘If you come out after 6 p.m., we’ll shoot you.’ We had to keep the bathtub full of water at all times, because at the first sign of tension the water, electricity, and gas would be cut off....

THE POWER FAILURE The Power Failure is set in the basement of an unnamed government institution in the capital of an unnamed country. The entire one-act drama consists of an interrogation of the Electrician (Dale Young) by the Official (Mark Vallarta), while the ineffectual Policeman (Arthur Aulisi) watches over the proceedings. The Electrician, who has a lengthy record of subversive behavior–publishing inflammatory literature, inciting riots–has been literally dragged before the Official after being horribly bloodied by someone before the play begins....

TRAFFICKING IN BROKEN HEARTS Bailiwick Repertory at the Theatre Building Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Consider Papo: he’s both sensual and sexual, the quintessential Latin lover, capable of getting it on seven times a day. We’re supposed to believe he’s a sexual magician terrified of emotion, yet everything in the play indicates he’s not at all terrified. Although he’s been hustling on Times Square since he was 15, Papo’s still enough of a softie to take in Bobby (Woodrow James Bryant), a psychotic 17-year-old runaway....

Rumor has it that the melody of “The Star Spangled Banner” was taken from an old colonial drinking song. If so, what were the original, pre-Francis Scott Key words? Can you print them uncut and complete so I can get a singalong going in the clubs?—Reena Pearl, West Hollywood, California Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » You probably have the idea that “To Anacreon in Heaven” is some raucous foot-stomper, and by comparison to the national anthem I suppose it is....

WHAT I NEED IS A GOOD BONK ON THE HEAD Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Wait–characters from a play stepping out into reality to tell their own stories? Didn’t Pirandello do something like this back in 1921? In Six Characters in Search of an Author, however, the playwright has died even before the play begins, so he can’t rescue his blameless characters from their difficulties....

Almost immediately after he arrived in Managua in late 1989, the Reverend Grant Gallup, a tall man of 59 with a strong, chiseled face and gray curly hair, joined the regular Thursday picket line outside the U.S. embassy protesting American policy in Nicaragua. Gallup had been sent to Managua by his Episcopal bishop in Chicago, Frank Griswold. The Chicago diocese and the Nicaraguan diocese had just established a companion relationship, and Gallup was to act as a liaison....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Dr. Cainkar should of course be credited for consistency. Never having protested any atrocity committed by the Palestine Liberation Organization, she cannot be expected to criticize what the Iraqi allies of the PLO did in Kuwait. She has her own definition of cruelty: “But I don’t think they’re [i.e., the U.S. Government] going to loosen sanctions until Saddam Hussein is out of power....

This archive document contains both parts of this story, which ran on November 27, 1992 and December 4, 1992. For an instant he eyed the bench. His coach and teammates were standing, their expressions an odd mix of anguish and hope. Behind them stood a clump of fans–young blacks and older Jews–Pookie, Weiss, Arnie, Montrell . . . and me. I too was standing, my eyes half covered, almost afraid to look....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Miller has relied on incorrect information supporting the popular notion that agencies disrespect birth and adoptive parents and never allow meetings between them. On the contrary, LCFS allows birthmothers to select adoptive parents first by screening biographical letters and then by meeting face-to-face at the agency. This system offers the typical advantages associated with private, open adoptions, while decreasing many of the risks and increasing the preparation of birth and adoptive parents....

The Balancing Act’s calm, cool, and collected appearance belies an almost hysterical amalgam of textures and influences rioting beneath the acoustic surface. Steely Dan rhythms appear in one song, Flying Burrito Brothers harmonies in the next. Similarly, as soon as you have one lyrical fixation pegged–floors, roofs, and furniture figure prominently on the group’s new record, Curtains–much more complicated and abstract issues soon surface in songs like “Learning How to Cheat....

SEPTEMBER Snikt! Snikt! What’s that? It’s the sound of the steel-sharpened claws of Marvel Comics hero the Wolverine. If characters like the Wolverine, the Punisher, and the Silver Surfer get your heart racing, check out the Comic Book Marketplace this weekend at the Holiday Inn O’Hare, 5440 River Road in Rosemont. Special guests? Snikt! Of course: George Perez, the current writer and artist of Wonder Woman; Bill Reinhold, the artist of The Punisher; Aliens artist Mark Nelson; Green Lantern and Swamp Thing artist Pat Broderick, and Batman cover artist Mike Mignola, among others....

PARIS–NEW YORK: PHOTOGRAPHS BY EUGENE ATGET AND BERENICE ABBOTT Atget roamed his city with a view camera, exposing cumbersome glass-plate negatives. Not only was his technology of the 19th century, his views tend to be small, intimate, and timeless. He was not interested in sweeping skylines, in the Eiffel Tower, in the hum of busy boulevards. Among the subjects in this exhibit are an open-air bookstall, a corset shop, a newsstand, a vegetable shop, a bar....

It looks like the free ride has finally come to an end. “The speed limit is 45,” he said again. It was like talking to a cop out in the sticks, someplace in Iowa or Nebraska, or, worse yet, in the suburbs. It was as if my speeding were a personal affront, as if I’d spit in his face. “You’re not gonna last long in this town,” I wanted to tell him, “if you’re gonna take every illegal lane change personally....

I have a modest proposal. We all know that Chicago is desperate for jobs. And everybody, from the mayor on down, seems to believe that a unique attraction could induce more tourists to spend their money here, boosting employment and tax revenue. Mind-altering drugs–I prefer to think of them as ingested entertainment–are a major market with obvious appeal to millions of Americans, not to mention many foreign tourists, but only in this Pleasure Dome will they be able to enjoy these delights in relaxed safety....

I didn’t think a visit to the new Geneva Lakes dog track would make me sad, but it did. It happened before I even had a chance to lose any money. The minute they raised the doors on the little metal starting boxes and the greyhounds bolted out, some memory trigger popped, and I could feel my own dog Leo brushing past my leg, could see him charging out the door and down the street, a small furry blur hell-bent on freedom....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Why did you waste an entire page of last week’s paper on Ted Cox’s “New Order” article [August 4]. Cox would have done better had he traced the “gross, self-aggrandizing performance of Johnny Rotten and Public Image, Ltd.” to its origins. After all when Rotten gets onstage with a heavy suntan and bleach blonde hair and then sticks the microphone up his ass, he’s not just turning the show into a farce–he’s also doing what he set out to do from the beginning: to destroy pop music....

INDEPENDENCE The obvious solution–get away before the damage sinks in for good (and evil). That’s the fight-or-flight option facing the three Briggs girls in Lee Blessing’s well-named Independence, a play about breaking away from Mom and Independence, Iowa. The eldest daughter has already flown this cuckoo’s nest: after a four-year absence, Kess, now a Minneapolis music historian living with her lover Susan, returns home because she has just learned that her mother Evelyn almost killed her sister Jo....

“The Soviet people did not want bread; they wanted information!” Helen Teplitskaia slaps the table to make her point. “The easiest way to control people is to deny them access to ideas, to limit what they can hear and see, prevent them from reading books and magazines that do not follow Communist thinking. By the time she left Leningrad two years ago to seek medical help in the U.S. for her young son, she had already introduced some important changes....