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THE WAGER Borealis Productions and Puszh Company Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The rest, idiotic gunplay and tedious, red-herring plot developments, is thuddingly predictable. So are the joyless revelations–Honor isn’t happy with her sexless marriage of eight and a half years, Ron is a weenie who hunts deer with an automatic rifle, Ward is a Spur Posse womanizer who’s constant only to his mirror, and, least surprising, Leeds is an intellectual bully who hides behind words and, yes, is afraid to love!...

If ever there was proof of the adage that what goes around comes around, it has been the recent fascination with the genius of Kurt Weill. Weill’s music used to be associated mostly with classic interpretations by his wife Lotte Lenya or dark cabaret scenes from old Marlene Dietrich movies. Recent years have spawned a new group of interpreters, ranging from opera singer Julia Migenes to rock singer Sting, but none has made a more indelible impression than 26-year-old West German singer Ute Lemper....

What This City Needs Is a $2 Million Bullfrog Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In Chicago, of course, few dreams are easily realized, and Weiskopf knows he faces an uphill battle to put his 35-foot-tall and 75-foot-wide green frog where he says it belongs. But he hopes he can find enough friends of this frog to make the sculpture a reality. The architect first detected some interest in his vision after putting a sketch of the frog on his 1989 Christmas card....

Mandolinist/guitarist Yank Rachell is a genuine blues giant. His youth was spent playing alongside such notables as Hambone Willie Newbern, Sleepy John Estes, and Big Joe Williams; later he added his sensuous tubular mandolin accompaniment to some of the most important recordings of harmonica master John Lee “Sonny Boy” Williamson. Rachell’s style combines the eccentric timing and harmonic distinctiveness of the Delta traditionalist with an aggressively well-crafted musicianship that sets him apart from many of his contemporaries whose music, though monumental in its impact, was often crude and even amateurish by today’s standards....

A Trickier Dick Before Maxwell’s nixoncarver–a fantasia revolving around a meeting between Nixon and writer Raymond Carver–nobody had ever wondered what would have happened if young Dick’s stern Quaker father had caught him dressed in his mother’s clothes masturbating atop the family tractor. Nobody had ever imagined that as an infant Nixon dreamed “of bluebirds fluttering out of his mother’s asshole.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » No one ever wrote a psychoanalysis of Raymond Carver, so he’s the flatter of the two characters....

ONCE AROUND With Holly Hunter, Richard Dreyfuss, Danny Aiello, Gena Rowlands, Laura San Giacomo, Roxanne Hart, Danton Stone, and Tim Guinee. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » After Joe retires and Renata becomes pregnant, however, Sam’s assertiveness about his Lithuanian background and his overall brashness begin to grate more and more on Renata’s family, leading to increasingly bitter conflicts . . . For: I’ve only recently caught up with My Life as a Dog, Swedish director Lasse Hallstrom’s sixth feature (Once Around, his first American picture, is his ninth), the only one of his Swedish movies that’s had a general release in the U....

MONET IN THE 90s Hanging at right angles to each other in a corner are two paintings of Norway’s Mount Kolsaas, one of which is unfinished. A comparison of the two, which are quite similar compositionally, gives a good indication of where these paintings’ magic dwells. While the unfinished picture is immediately pleasing, one needs to turn to the finished image to find a surface swarming with tiny details, each possessed of an ineffable delicacy, and each related to the others in a kind of organic interdependence that calls to mind the completeness of a living being....

In 1930 William S. Carter came to Chicago from his native Saint Louis to study art. The University of Missouri did not accept black students, and the college for blacks in Jefferson did not offer an art curriculum. At the time, the Art Institute of Chicago was one of the few institutions that did admit blacks. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Unlike many artists who complained of censorship, Carter was never told by the WPA what he could or couldn’t paint....

He’s retired now and living in Chillicothe, Missouri. But in his day, Grim Natwick helped create some of the greatest stars in movie history. Betty Boop, Snow White, Mickey Mouse, Krazy Kat, Clarabell Cow, Woody Woodpecker, Mr. Magoo–the list goes on and on. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » As Natwick recalls it, he wasn’t particularly interested in cartoon animation to begin with. Born and bred in a small Wisconsin town, he was trained as a serious artist–he studied at the School of the Art Institute–and was already established as an illustrator of sheet music while still in college....

ORPHEUS BAND The viola da gamba–a generic name, though now applied most often to the bass member of the viol clan–looks much like the modern cello: long-necked, with a pear-shaped body, held vertically between the player’s knees (gamba means leg). But the earliest viols appeared in Aragon in the late 15th century, while the violin, which was developed in the early 15th century, is believed to have descended from the rebec, an Arabic instrument introduced to Europe around the time of the Crusades....

The eleventh edition of the annual festival of black independent film runs from Friday, July 31, through Sunday, August 9 at the Film Center, Art Institute, Columbus Drive at Jackson, and at Facets Multimedia Center, 1517 W. Fullerton. Tickets are $5, with discounts available to Blacklight and Film Center members. For more information call 443-3737 or 281-4114 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » STEPPING RAZOR–RED X A documentary feature from Canada by Nicholas Campbell about the life and violent death (in 1987) of reggae artist and radical Jamaican political activist Peter Tosh....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I read with much interest Karen Fort’s article “Mothers” (February 2, 1990), and also with some regret. I, too, once promised that I would decide when I would have my babies and how many. Then, after my husband and I made the decision that we were ready and wanted to be parents, we discovered, after 7 years of medical treatment including surgery, that I was infertile, and that the decision when I would have our children and how many was not mine to make after all....

Does Chicago Need a Kinder, Gentler Nightclub? Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Competitors and observers don’t offer much hope for Millie’s long-term survival. Neither Holme nor Boucher is well established on the club scene, and without a following it’s difficult to fill a giant space in the crucial early days. “The drawing power just isn’t there,” said one source. As it now stands, Holme’s concept also may be unrealistic....

My survey of the breeding birds of Somme Woods Forest Preserve is drawing to a close. The birds that will nest there this year are already sitting on eggs or feeding young. For some species, the young are out of the nest and the parent birds are preparing to nest again. By the time the Cook County Forest Preserve District began to acquire the land in the 30s, farming and grazing had destroyed most of the native vegetation....

GIRLS, GIRLS, GIRLS, LIVE ON STAGE, TOTALLY RUDE Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » When Dot, a slim, pretty newcomer, applies for a dancing job at Babe’s, Chartreuse reacts with intense ambivalence–arguing on Dot’s behalf with the skeptical club owner and teaching Dot the tricks of the trade on one hand, but quivering with paranoid competitiveness on the other. But Dot has more on her mind than vying for Chartreuse’s tacky throne....

HELLO FROM BERTHA Bertha and Willie may not have the depth of the heroines of Williams’s longer, dramatically fuller, more heavily plotted plays–A Streetcar Named Desire’s Blanche, for example, or Summer and Smoke’s Miss Alma, or The Night of the Iguana’s Hannah–but all these Williams women are sisters under the skin, and the skin they’re under is Williams’s. The demons that drove the writer–his obsessions with the conflict between spirit and flesh, his terror of disease, madness, desertion, and death–motor the subjects of these two brief character studies....

WHITE DOG With Kristy McNichol, Paul Winfield, Burl Ives, Jameson Parker, Lynne Moody, and Marshall Thompson. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » When Jon Davison, the producer of Airplane!, was first assigned to the project, he reportedly didn’t want any part of it. Then he had the brilliant idea of assigning Fuller to the project. Fuller completely rewrote the script with Curtis Hanson, a friend of his who had already worked on one of the earliest drafts; apart from some of the characteristics of the dog Gary described and the white man who ran the animal training compound, all of the Gary book was jettisoned....

A visitor to this near-west-side neighborhood won’t be long deceived by the colorful sign at 2454 W. Harrison: “B and E Country Store: Specializing in Country Ham and Loose Chitterlings.” The door and windows are shuttered, testimony to a steady economic deterioration in the neighborhood that gives some streets an eerie ghost-town atmosphere. The partnership’s founding members are Darrell Rupiper, a priest at the neighborhood’s Precious Blood Church, and Jim McKeown, a Naperville marketing consultant who phased out his own successful business in order to work full-time for the partnership....

OAK THEATRE PROJECT There were dancers all over the place–onstage, of course, but also at the little round tables in front of the stage, at the bar, along the back, in the lobby, and filling up the balcony. An acquaintance estimated that 50 percent of the near-capacity audience were dancers. With its comfortable cabaret atmosphere and live jazz by the Ensemble of Non-Thought, the Oak Theatre that night was a very happening scene....

Wolf Lullaby Australian playwright Hilary Bell takes as inspiration here a number of recent gruesome child murderers, most notably the two ten-year-olds who lured a two-year-old English boy away from his mother and brutally killed him. In Wolf Lullaby, the mutilated body of a little boy who’s been strangled, bitten, and stabbed repeatedly with a pair of scissors is discovered. The evidence suggests a child murderer, and suspicion eventually falls on nine-year-old Lizzie Gael, a seemingly sweet but mischievous and troubled girl....