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To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The teachers and counselors chose to be at the School for highly personalized reasons. The children were placed at the Orthogenic School because they could not function in normal family, social, or educational settings for their own highly personalized reasons. Dr. Bettelheim and the staff had a singular focus and purpose –to develop a nurturing environment in which severely disturbed children could function and develop psychologically....

LES MISERABLES The story, culled from Victor Hugo’s sprawling novel, is the saga of Jean Valjean, a convict who served 19 years for stealing a loaf of bread. At the opening of the show, set in 1815, he is paroled and after some desperation steals again. But he’s saved from a life of crime by a generous and forgiving bishop. From then on, Jean Valjean devotes himself to a virtuous life, making sacrifices when need be for those less fortunate than himself....

SPEED-THE-PLOW You’ve heard of must-sees. David Mamet’s Speed-the-Plow is definitely a must-see. Not only because it’s very, very good, but because you’ve got to see it if you want to find out what makes it so good. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Some plays can be read, but I tried reading Speed-the-Plow and it didn’t work at all. In fact, it was extremely disappointing....

How do you get to the ice-carving competition? I asked. This was at the recent Restaurant Hotel-Motel Show in McCormick Place. “It’s simple,” an usher told me. “Just follow the blinking red arrows and when you hear the sound of chain saws, you’ll know you’re there.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Chicago is a hotbed of ice-carving activity,” said Wagner, who, not coincidentally, is also president of a company that sells ice....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Musicians have always wondered why the Reader has ignored the criticism of both live jazz and recorded jazz. Each week numerous theatre, performance, dance and graphic artists are reviewed within the back of the music listings, but live jazz and blues and even rock suffers. Perhaps music of this nature is considered like new Italian restaurants, a fad, a condition....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » According to a recent Reader item [Calendar, November 10], the nuns at Auschwitz are, “inexplicably,” still there. Well . . . It’s about time someone did some explaining to the seeming thousands of short-memoried American liberals bashing the Catholic church and (inexplicably, I might add) the convent at Auschwitz. May I remind all of you that the largest number of Catholic religious ever collected in one place were forcibly interned at Auschwitz during the war?...

This is the one question we wanted to ask Russ Meyer: Why is the violence in some of your movies handled either morally (Mudhoney) or relatively amusingly (Up!) but in others (Lorna) rather revoltingly? How could the man who made the brilliantly subversive Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill! turn around and make Supervixons, one of the most depressingly violent movies of the era? Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Meyer is referring to the infamous bathroom-murder set piece, one of two extended scenes of carnage that bookend Supervixens....

Fans of the late Walt Kelly’s long-running comic strip Pogo know what a keen ear Kelly had for the American vernacular and what a Joycean delight he took in playfully twisting the language until sense and nonsense were one; even the most familiar Christmas carols were transformed into absurdist hymns like “Deck us all with Boston, Charlie!” and “Good King Sauerkraut looked out on his feets uneven.” Admitted Pogo-phile Frank Farrell collected a representative sampling of Walt Kelly’s work, including 13 of Walt Kelly’s best nonsense songs with music by Norman Monath, and selections from his humorous and autobiographical writings, and shaped it into a three-man musical-comedy revue starring Farrell, Jon Beliveau, and Ben Masterton....

RISA SEKIGUCHI: RECENT PAINTINGS The subjects of the 16 small, untitled paintings in Sekiguchi’s current show at the Chicago Cultural Center are, on the surface, nothing out of the ordinary–simple still-life arrangements, and solitary figures in interiors or landscapes. But many of them are charged by the strange, unreal quality of early evening light and by its function as a signifier for states of transition or emotional upheaval. One painting, for example, presents a dark red sky filled with heavy black clouds massed above a low horizon....

DZUMA (THE PLAGUE) at the Rainbo Club We’ve got AIDS, after all. And vast famines. Also, the greenhouse effect. Also, the plastics that never decompose, the nuclear waste that never cools, the toxic chemicals that make eating even an apple a risky business. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » We’ve got drugs and the war on drugs, poverty and our absolute ineptitude in the face of poverty....

The Biggest Story in the World The delegation from Kiev (the capital of the Ukraine) spent its last night in Chicago being feted at a restaurant in Ukrainian Village. We asked Marianne Liss, local correspondent for the national Ukrainian Weekly newspaper, how it went. She said, “Well, nobody was killing each other.” “And I said, ‘You mean we haven’t felt it on the skin?’ Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Please–not right after lunch! Chicago writer Bruce Rutledge, reviewing an anthology of alleged legal humor in Barrister (Spring): “The volume as a whole is not unlike a smorgasbord prepared by demented Swedes: pickled herring next to a plate of Oreo cookies, a large bowl of Clark bars by the borscht.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » You should not be in charge, Barbara Engel tells counselors of adult rape victims: “If I had been treated like a ‘client’ with a personality deficit because I was attacked three times, I might not have the self-confidence to be speaking to you…The danger in treating women like ‘clients’ is that we divide ourselves from them; we become the powerful healers, they become the helpless victims with their recovery resting in our skilled hands....

THE OTHER CINDERELLA Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » For example, though usually the Prince is a rather shadowy and remote figure whose only purpose is to charge in and deliver the waiting maiden, here he’s a 25-year-old bachelor whose best friend is–gasp!–gay. The King, worried about the image produced by such camaraderie, proposes to remedy the situation by inviting all the eligible females in the kingdom to a grand party at the palace so his son can choose a bride from the parade of womanflesh....

Radicals come in all shapes, ages, and varieties. And they all–1,200 of them or so–seemed to be at the first-ever Midwest Radical Scholars and Activists Conference, held in late October at Loyola. There were Maoists and Trotskyists and social democrats and anarchists. There were members of the Communist Party and the Revolutionary Communist Party, Democratic Socialists and International Socialists, representatives of the Progressive Student Alliance and the Progressive Student Network, of the Left Green Network and the Youth Greens, editors of the Socialist Review and In These Times, of the New Patriot and Libido....

Eighteen theater companies are presented in six different programs of two to four plays each, organized along loose thematic lines by producer Doug Bragan and associate producer Judith Easton. That’s two more companies and two more programs than last year, when Bragan first stepped in to revive this non-Equity showcase founded and then discontinued by the League of Chicago Theatres. At the Theatre Building, through June 2. Wednesdays-Fridays, 8 PM, Saturdays, 6:30 and 9:15 PM, Sundays, 3 PM....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Couldn’t help but notice somebody being mad at Bill Wyman & his XRT article, (Ted Romne, 7 Dec. 90–Letters). Hate to jump to a critic’s defense, but it was a pretty good article; the history of the station alone made it worth printing. However, Ted makes an interesting point which underlines the contradictory nature of “alternative” music....

Friday 10 After photographer Roland L. Freeman heard Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I have a dream” speech, he dedicated himself to documenting black people’s lives. Freeman’s principal project has been the African-American diaspora, especially the migration from rural to urban areas. His work is being exhibited in Roland L. Freeman: Witness Documentarian, which opens today at the Museum of Contemporary Photography at Columbia College, 600 S. Michigan. The museum is also featuring ‘O, Write My Name’ Harlem Heroes, American Portraits: Photographs by Carl Van Vechten and Black Photographers 1840-1940....

With extended tenures in bands led by pianist McCoy Tyner and drummer Art Blakey–powerhouse percussionists both–bassist Charles Fambrough has learned more than a thing or two about holding the time together. He’s also apprenticed himself to the rhythms and song forms of Brazil, courtesy of Airto Moreira–whose band he anchored in the mid-70s–and gotten a chance to observe the emerging-leader phenomenon, joining Grover Washington’s first touring band and later appearing on Wynton Marsalis’s first album....

Hong Kong comedy star and auteur Michael Hui has often been called the Chinese Jerry Lewis, but if rough Hollywood equivalents are needed, W.C. Fields or Rodney Dangerfield might come closer to the mark. Hui’s movies tend to deal with changing life-styles in contemporary Hong Kong, and this time he’s the embattled owner of a traditional family barbecue restaurant who’s losing his customers to a new American-style, fast-food chicken franchise across the street....

COASTAL DISTURBANCES This summer it does. Holly meets Leo Hart, a lifeguard also on the rebound. Tumbling hard for this dreamy, awkward lady, Leo wastes no time telling her–with his paws. When Holly tries to photograph the beach, Leo in effect insists on entering the frame. To prevent her resistance, he symbolically buries her in sand. When Holly talks about the Indians who once peopled her beach or fantasizes about love among the dolphins, Leo drags her back to the present–the only tense it seems possible for them to share....