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THE WORLD OF THE MOON Although Chamber Opera Chicago is now seven years old, I’ve just had my first taste of the company, having attended its recent alternating productions of Haydn’s The World of the Moon and Puccini’s Madame Butterfly, both sung in English. If it had not been for the Haydn, a seldom-done 18th-century comedy that has never been performed here before, I probably wouldn’t have gone at all. My sister is a singer, and by the time I was ten I had seen Cio-Cio-San slowly singing her way through suicide as many times as most kids my age had seen The Wizard of Oz....

The Chicago Historical Society recently held an essay contest in which grammar school students were invited to write “What I Saw at the Great Chicago Fire.” About 1,000 submissions were received. All were read. Some were put on display. The following was found in the garbage behind the building. For years, the central city had amounted to no more than four east-west streets immediately south of the Chicago River–a tiny business district penned in on three sides by tacky immigrant shanties....

THE WOUND-DRESSER When Thoreau’s “great fellow” left us–exactly a century ago, on March 26, 1892–it seemed a real death in the family: Walt Whitman was mourned by his devoted readers as fervently as he had mourned Lincoln 25 years before. What Thoreau couldn’t have known is the way that five generations who never got to meet Whitman have nonetheless come to prize him: as an authentic American bard, the singer of himself and of us, the celebrator of the open road and heart, the boon companion whose rollicking and cadenced catalog of people and things captured the hopeful bustle of a bumptious America....

84, CHARING CROSS ROAD I wish my friend could see Chicago Cooperative Stage’s well-conceived, superbly directed production of 84, Charing Cross Road because then she could find out how truly intimate theater can be. Especially in a space as small as Chicago Cooperative’s stage, where the performance area is about the size of a large living room and the audience is seated around the perimeter of the space. You can’t help but feel close to characters in a play when they stand only a few feet away or literally brush against you as they enter or exit the scene....

Friday 20 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Individually, David Murray, Julius Hemphill, Oliver Lake, and Hamiet Bluiett are known as four of the finest saxophone players working today; collectively, they’re the World Saxophone Quartet, specialists in the art of ensemble improvisation. They perform tonight at 8 at the Park West, 322 W. Armitage, as part of the JAM Productions and Goodman Theatre “New Music Series....

Ever since David Shepherd began experimenting with commedia dell’arte scenarios at the Compass in the late 50s, long-form improvisation, in which plays are spontaneously created before the audience, has been the Holy Grail of improv. A few local companies–most notably Mick Napier’s Pup Tent Theatre–have recently realized aspects of Shepherd’s dream. But none have come as close to creating consistently funny, literate, and well-crafted fully improvised plays as the Free Associates do in Cast on a Hot Tin Roof....

Oliver Knussen’s one-act fantasy Where the Wild Things Are, based on Maurice Sendak’s 1963 illustrated children’s classic, was a smash when the Chicago Opera Theater mounted it two Christmases ago. Now the high-spirited production returns for an eight-performance engagement. In both the book and the opera, the young and mischievous Max (who my friends’ kids have assured me is as famous as Pooh and Christopher Robin) is banished to bed without his supper....

Considered baffling by some audiences and hilarious by others, NYC choreographer Doug Elkins defies easy labeling because he wears every label. His choreography reflects his experience as a kid who discovered dance in one of the most diverse cities on earth. George Balanchine, John Travolta, Martha Graham, Michael Jackson–Elkins steals from them all. The Patrooka Variations, an examination of the rituals of romance, also throws in Bizet’s Carmen, some flamenco, and a little James Brown....

Mammals have been in the news lately. A wandering coyote appeared in a park on the northwest side, and a colony of beavers has built a dam that’s flooding a heron rookery on Baker’s Lake in Barrington. Their increase is especially remarkable because it came in the face of almost maniacal persecution by humans. There is still a bounty on coyotes in some states, and huge eradication programs involving guns, traps, poisons, and aerial bombardment have been mounted against them....

I’ve lived in the city all my life. I’ve had guns put to my head, knives thrust at my midsection, once I was threatened with a machete. I didn’t drive until I was past 30. I’m a nervous guy anyway, or that’s what people have told me. I’m not fearful; I don’t normally approach the unknown with trepidation. I don’t worry about the bomb, or the judgment of an unmerciful God, or my wife’s old boyfriends....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Last week’s “What a Waste!” by Harold Henderson was garbage masquerading as journalism [September 28]. First, Henderson blatantly attempts to discredit Illinois’ environmentalists and grassroots groups (disparagingly referred to as “environmentalists of the not-in-my-backyard persuasion”). It is the job of the journalist (or so I thought) to present issues in an unbiased manner, especially those as complicated and contentious as the solid waste disposal problem....

VIDEOS BY SADIE BENNING The reason may be other cultural developments that Astruc couldn’t foresee. For one thing, written language has itself suffered a precipitous decline over the same 43-year period. (The corresponding decline in literacy is apparent to anyone who has ever read student papers.) For another, new technologies by no means guarantee new aesthetics or ideologies; on the contrary, despite an avalanche of economically motivated hype telling us the sky’s the limit, to date new technologies have mainly meant either a brutal reinforcement of old Hollywood codes and models or the foreclosure of certain options (such as the use of black and white)....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » As Justin Hayford in his review of the Turbulent Mirror production of Kafka’s Metamorphosis points out, it resists interpretation [July 6]. The critic who expects coherent interpretation, remains frustrated and angry. Many have pondered the imagery of the Metamorphosis year after year and came to different results and new conclusions, often depending on the current stage in one’s life or historical experience....

Midsize Theater Project: Got Three Years and $25 Million? Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But, as those awaiting the space know all too well, the green light hasn’t been given to the project and isn’t expected to be in the near future. After about a year and a half of consulting work and discussions with arts groups about the kind of theater they need, the options have been narrowed to three sites: Navy Pier, Cityfront Centre, and Dearborn Station....

ARCHITECTURE IN PERSPECTIVE VI The job of the perspectivist is to translate the three-dimensional ideas of an architect into a two-dimensional representation for the general public. Until recently, architecture schools in the United States taught architects themselves the fine-arts techniques needed to make the transition from blueprint and design sketches to realistic drawing. Up until the 1950s, rendering was considered so much a part of an architect’s practice that architects rarely farmed out illustration work....

Lilian Fink is not one for public demonstrations. But when the landlord proposed to raise her rent by 52 percent, the 81-year-old grandmother took to the streets. On June 7, Fink and 75 other residents of the federally subsidized apartment building at 510 W. Belmont marched and chanted outside landlord Howard Fink’s near-north-side office. They argue that his proposed rent increase, which must be approved by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, would force them to move....

Quick! Where’s the tuxedo? Did you call the caterers? Chicago psychologist Kate Wachs advises the desperately seeking single, “Be as happy as you can–which is quite happy, actually–while being a single person. Enjoy each day as if it were your last ‘single’ day, and as if you are about to be married tomorrow.” Sounds a bit hectic. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “The state Department of Conservation has announced plans to give away 165,000 white pine seedlings to Illinois’ third-graders,” writes James Krohe Jr....

The first mention of the proposed change came in a Chicago Tribune article written with bouncy cheer–as if to say, thank God, at long last, they’re gonna jazz up the old bag on North Michigan Avenue. However, not all readers of that article shared Levy’s enthusiasm for the proposal. There is, in fact, a fierce and dogged battle going on between Hancock, a powerful corporation based in Boston, and residents of Streeterville, one of the city’s wealthiest and best-organized neighborhoods....

SERIOUS MONEY Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The British are a little different. As a group, I mean. What with a House of Lords and a House of Commons–and a queen, for chrissake–class war’s a tradition with them. They seem to understand the politics of money. They seem to realize that greed’s not just a sin but a system. And they seem to know that behind every obscenely successful man there’s a Thatcherite government, goading him on....

Tex Winter first developed his triangle offense decades ago, but it went nowhere until he got the Bulls to adopt it, after Phil Jackson became head coach. It’s an unorthodox approach to offensive basketball, to be sure, but it’s not like the wishbone or the veer or the run-and-shoot in football–grand schemes that dramatically alter the offense and that demand to be taken on their own terms by the defense. The triangle is more a philosophy than a strategy, more an outline than a scheme; it replaces set plays with patterns and tendencies, diagrams with positions on the floor....