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FRANKIE AND JOHNNY IN THE CLAIR DE LUNE Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » If you’ve seen Murray Schisgal’s The Tiger or William Mastrosimone’s The Woolgatherer or John Patrick Shanley’s Danny and the Deep Blue Sea, then you’ve seen a misfit romance. They’re intimate little two-character dramas (great for audition pieces or showcase productions) in which a couple of borderline sociopaths with heavy emotional scar tissue alternately harass and cling to one another–hissing and spitting and confessing all their deepest, darkest, most expository secrets–until that inevitable moment when they rediscover a forgotten vulnerability and fall in love....

Lead Story Stanford University researchers recently ended a long-standing debate among owl specialists as to which sense owls most rely on to detect food at night. In a September journal article determining sight to be most important, they reported fitting owls with eyeglasses. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Skin-care expert Constance Schrader, quoted in the U.S. Postal Service Guide to U.S. Stamps, says people can temporarily banish skin wrinkles by pulling the skin over a wrinkle taut, then licking a stamp, applying it to the wrinkle, and pulling it off, which produces a “healing rush of blood” to the affected area....

Out on the lakefront, Chicago filmmaker Heather McAdams is playing tunes by the King on a junky little tape recorder. Trent Carlini–“Italy’s #1 Elvis Stylist” reads his tour jacket–is going through his time-worn Elvis moves in sync with the music as McAdams shoots. She’s worried the late afternoon sun isn’t sharp enough to make his rhinestones sparkle. He needs to know, “Do you want me to perform the song, or should I pose it?...

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The dispute over the future of the strip of land running from Montrose to Irving Park between Graceland Cemetery and the Howard “L” [Neighborhood News, September 1] is made more interesting by a recounting of its history. The strip was never a road, at least in any dedicated sense. Rather, it was a railroad right of way....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Scripture is central to understanding fundamentalism. Not–as they fondly believe–that their theology comes directly out of the Bible. Rather fundies put their whole theology into the scripture, so that their critics are viewed as fighting the Bible rather than the doctrine. Those who say that Beatrice inspired the Divine Comedy don’t mean that she dictated it word for word; fundies, however, interpret “All Scripture is inspired by God ....

The Disappearing Donor Blues Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The beginning of the apparent end of the Borg-Warner Foundation can be traced back to July 1987, when the parent corporation opted to go private to avoid what management perceived as a hostile takeover. (Chairman and CEO Jim Bere was unavailable for comment.) The company assumed a huge debt to finance the buyout, and then began selling assets to pay it off....

THE HEIDI CHRONICLES When Wendy Wasserstein’s The Heidi Chronicles opened off-Broadway almost three years ago, it triggered an avalanche of articles and reviews, most of them concerned with how successfully Wasserstein had critiqued the baby boom in general and the women’s movement in particular. Inevitably such articles revealed much more about the writer and the periodical in which the piece appeared than about the play. Walter Shapiro, for example, writing for Time magazine (a publication always eager to discredit the projects of radical youth) dubbed the play an “elegy for [Wasserstein’s] lost generation” and crowned the playwright a “chronicler of frayed feminism....

When I was back in tenth grade I did this term paper on Thomas Jefferson and I seem to remember coming by something that said he’d had a dozen or so children by one of his slaves, who was named Sally or something like that. What’s the straight dope on this, Cecil? Is this a major coverup conspiracy? –Kool Moe Steve, Washington, D.C. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » If TJ’s sex life was the subject of a coverup, Kool Moe, it was an amazingly inept one, considering that even tenth-graders seem to know all the details....

POST POST PORN MODERNIST It’s easy to talk about the crazy, sensationalistic things Annie Sprinkle is doing during her 12-day run at Theater Oobleck. In Post Post Porn Modernist, among other things, she douches and pees onstage. She also displays her cervix to anyone and everyone interested. Even the intermission has its slice of the bizarre: for $5, audience members can have a Polaroid taken of them with Sprinkle’s breasts on their heads....

ACTION “You find out what’s expected of you,” says Shooter in Sam Shepard’s Action, early in the play, “then you act yourself out.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Tom McCarthy’s performance as Shooter is the centerpiece of Crazy Horse Theatre Company’s production of Shepard’s early one-act play about (hey, it’s Shepard) alienation. McCarthy is both frustrated and frustrating, beatific and horrifying, sensual and awkward....

Nineteen-year-old Erik DeBat says he used to get an adrenaline rush from doing graffiti, a high from knowing that his name was in so many places. He ran with a pack of ten other taggers who called themselves “Mad” and prided themselves on eluding the cops. On certain nights, in a location spread by word of mouth, they met with other packs of writers, pulled out their portfolios, and tried to impress each other with snapshots of their tags–the number, the locations, the bravado, the stick-to-itiveness, the colors, the angles, the art....

FRED NAGELBACH Many sculptors have used architecture or furniture as a point of departure, even as a source of inspiration. Margaret Wharton’s work revolved around chairs for a time; more recently she has turned to books. Charles Simonds builds tiny houses–for “little people”–resembling the pueblos of southwest Native Americans. In the Site Cafe at the Museum of Contemporary Art, one wall is devoted to a Simonds installation that allows the viewer to imagine a culture, time, and place altogether removed from the urban experience....

The expatriate Chicago saxophonist returns to his old hunting grounds for two gigs sandwiched around Thanksgiving–and isn’t it about time? When Wheeler moved to Paris a couple years ago, he left a noticeable hole in the local scene: relatively few musicians communicate the sense of committed urgency that distinguishes Wheeler’s best efforts. He often plays as if he had been thinking about nothing but the music since the last time he held the horn; he plays as if he has to, not wants to....

CHICAGO SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA It’s not hard to understand why Barber was popular in the postwar Eisenhower years; with his patrician looks, reserve, and impressive pedigree he embodied what passed for highbrow culture in America. Moreover, his meticulous, largely tonal style–used most expressively in the Adagio for Strings and Knoxville: Summer of 1915–gently reassured listeners jarred by modernism’s dissonance. By the early 60s he was the winner of a pair of Pulitzers (for the opera Vanessa and his piano concerto) and numerous other official accolades....

Chicago Fans A fitter augury cannot be imagined. The Chicago Cubs staggered out of Arizona with the worst spring training record in baseball; whereupon, Keith and Stacey Kramer of Steamboat Springs, Colorado, launched a newsletter dedicated to the tormented Chicago sports fan far from home. Sluggo’s is owned by Norm and Sheila Lebovitz, who until 1985 ran the Chicago hot dog chains Sammy’s and Lemmy’s. “We’re a Chicago restaurant in San Diego,” Norm Lebovitz reported....

Cutting through the freezing wind, the el train shakes snow from the Belmont platform onto a troop of 15 bundled runners milling around below. The Sunday afternoon sun is just a rumor behind a blanket of gray clouds; officially the temperature hovers around ten degrees, but it’s more like five below with the windchill. Apparently, though, the Chicago Hash House Harriers are aware of none of this. Single-mindedly, they trudge around in the snow and frozen gravel searching for a red spray-painted arrow....

It’s Curtains for the Performing Arts Center Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » There’s no telling what prompted the CSO to go sour on the project after seeming so enthusiastic about it a year ago, but the apparent switch suggests a break in communication between the trustees, board president Richard L. Thomas, and executive director Henry Fogel. One trustee said Thomas never formally polled board members before joining the feasibility committee and suggested that Thomas was simply interested in “going along for the ride....

LES BALLETS AFRICAINS Les Ballets Africains was formed in 1952, and became the national dance troupe of the Republic of Guinea in 1958 when Guinea gained independence. It makes only limited claims to authenticity, and no bones about that fact. Louise Bedichek argues in an exceptionally intelligent program note that authentic African dance is ritual, and that genuine religious ritual has no place in the theater. Les Ballets Africains bases its dances and narratives on traditional forms, but it also drastically cuts and freely combines the dances and stories of different peoples....

Patriotic Lithuanians rise up in arms to vanquish foreign invaders–sound like a cold-war fantasy? It actually happened in the 1400s when the proud kingdom of Lithuania (which had once laid siege to Moscow) fought back against harassment from their western neighbors, the Teutonic knights. This chapter of Baltic history serves as the basis for a middle-period opera by Ponchielli, the equally prolific contemporary of Verdi and a transitional figure in 19th-century Italian opera (between the bel canto of Donizetti and the verismo of Puccini)....

Like fellow avant-gardist John Cage, Lou Harrison has turned a lifelong infatuation with Oriental music–especially the Javanese branch–into a rich and varied body of fascinating, Eastern-accented sound assemblages. Incorporating a wide variety of influences and techniques ranging from his mentors Henry Cowell and Schoenberg to Chinese shadow-play music, Harrison’s music can be mesmerizing: waves of enchanting melodies that ebb and flow in sharp, exotic rhythms. Much of what this west-coast iconoclast and theorist composes reflects his concerns with “love, plant growth, peace, and concerted enjoyment on the journey to death....