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THE HOUSE OF CORRECTION Scene one is beaucoup Ionesco. You have a middle-class married couple, Carl and Marion, and their friend Steve. Steve tells them he’s been distraught on account of his wife’s having been brutally murdered, and he needs a place to stay until he’s back on his feet. At Marion’s request, Carl agrees to put Steve up. But when Carl and Marion are alone together, they discover that neither of them has ever seen Steve before, and each had mistakenly assumed him to be the other’s friend....

Jeffery Leving comes across in person as low-key, almost self-effacing. There’s a kind of gentle unobtrusiveness in his manner–as if he would go to great lengths not to offend. You will find none of the abrasive, state-your-business-because-time-is-money manner typical of high-powered attorneys. Nor will you find indications of the neater-than-thou sterility of great corporate law offices at Leving’s headquarters near Madison and Clark. Like the chief proprietor, everything is a bit rumpled, askew, and out in the open....

How do “night” rear view mirrors work? One flick of the switch and it seemingly dims all. –Chris Gaffney, Toronto Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The trick is that the two reflecting surfaces are the front and back of the same piece of glass. Said glass is specially ground so that the back surface is slightly tilted relative to the front one. (In other words, the glass looks wedge shaped from the side....

Driving down 127th Street, you might not notice the hill Blue Island sits on–even though it’s about 50 feet high, a mile wide, and six miles long north to south. According to A.T. Andreas’s 1884 History of Cook County, Blue Island got its name because weary voyageurs sick to death of flat, swampy prairie sometimes had the illusion that its heavily wooded north end was floating on a distant, shimmering lake....

Orson Welles once remarked half facetiously that movies are the biggest and most expensive toy train ever invented for grown-ups. More so now than ever, as today’s aspiring young filmmakers know well. At the top four film schools in the country–Columbia University; University of Southern California; University of California, Los Angeles; and New York University–tuition and related expenses can run up to $45,000 for a four-year undergraduate degree and $20,000 for a two-year MFA....

With its $500,000 revival of Where the Wild Things Are now running at the Chicago Theatre, Chicago Opera Theater (COT) is facing what must be the wildest financial mess in its 16-year history. The trouble appears to have developed during at least the last two years of former general manager Marc Scorca’s tenure at the organization. After a six-year stint with COT, Scorca departed last June in a blaze of glory to become executive director and CEO of OPERA America, a Washington, D....

Do fish think? Years ago, in a famous Second City routine, Severn Darden concluded that they do, but not fast enough. For most students of animal behavior, whether they are ethologists, psychologists, or evolutionary ecologists, the question itself is absurd. Griffin calls for the development of a new kind of science that he calls cognitive ethology, a science that would “venture across the species boundary and try to gather satisfactory information about what other species may think or feel....

Critics have been creaming their jeans over the Go-Betweens for nearly ten years. The Australian combo is led by songwriters Robert Forster and Grant McLennan, who took their name (one assumes) from Joseph Losey’s moody, heavily symbolic movie. The pair have dispensed with the moodiness in favor of an ever-more-crystalline pop production, but they’ve retained an evocative air of languid, romantic dissolution. Their sound combines galloping acoustic guitars, Forster’s Tom Verlaine-ish voice, lyrics that competently deal with some complex romantic issues, and of course that production....

Which Paper Do You Read? The Sun-Times story, which ran inside, was lifted from the Washington Post wire. It began: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The question long unanswered was whether Gallo had then knowingly claimed the French virus as his own. After two years of research Crewdson had no answer to this question. He could only report, “The evidence is compelling that it was either an accident or a theft....

That a flourishing nude beach should develop on the Wisconsin River near Mazomanie (pronounced MAZE-o-mane-ee) will be unsurprising after a few days exploring the area. Maybe it’s something in the air–or in the unglaciated earth of south-central Wisconsin’s green hills and valleys–that has encouraged so much public eccentricity, to the point of both genius and apparent lunacy. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » With that out of your system, you can better appreciate the area’s more benign oddballs....

Rockin’ at the Dailies Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Both the Trib and the Sun-Times have been shoring up their popular culture coverage of late. Best new feature: Greg Kot’s column “First take” in the “Friday” section of the Tribune, billed on its premiere (October 23) as “a column of news, notes and commentaries on the pop music scene.” The first two entries were pretty interesting critical features on Paul K....

When these three self-proclaimed “middle-aged” women left their day gigs and hit the road in 1988, some predicted that their folksy, hummin’ and strummin’ approach toward blues would wear out its welcome and they’d eventually be relegated to some cubicle in Kingston Trio Hell. But so far the Uppity Blues Women show no signs of slowing down. Keyboardist Ann Rabson’s facility in classic blues piano styles has won the admiration of veterans across the country; bassist Earlene Lewis has increasingly adapted her countryish vocals and tub-thumping string-band bass playing to fit the bluesiness of the band’s repertoire....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The jokes at other people’s expense in Smile Orange are not benign, even if they are benignly presented. Rhone’s flippancy about sexism, homophobia, and prejudice against the disabled might be considered, after more than 20 years of women’s liberation, post-Stonewall activism, and soul-searching about human relations, at the very least insensitive. But the fact that director Jaye Stewart didn’t address the hatred in the script is more than unfortunate; it robs Smile Orange of any righteousness it might have had....

Why do so many public buildings want you to use the revolving doors rather than the regular doors? –Seamus McCafferty, Hoboken, New Jersey Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » As with many things, there are two reasons–the ostensible reason and the real reason. The ostensible reason is that the revolving doors create an air trap. Since the interior of the building is never directly exposed to the outdoors, there’s less chance of all that expensively heated or cooled air getting out and running up your utility bill....

Fifteen years ago Warren Zevon was the most daring and brilliant of a crop of talented west coast singer-songwriters that included Jackson Browne and the Eagles, among others. The Zevon of those years combined a macabre, surreal comic sense (“Werewolves of London,” “Excitable Boy”) with a penchant for tender sentimentality (“Hasten Down the Wind,” “Accidentally Like a Martyr”). Borne along by the rising tide of easy rockers, and specifically by the gracious patronage of Browne and Linda Ronstadt, the Chicago-born Zevon was a rising young star, a critic’s darling, and a miserable alcoholic....

Writers Rise to Kill the Kill Fee It didn’t. So the magazine canceled the section, and Watson collected $225 for his article, a quarter of what he’d have been paid if it ran. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Watson arrived here in August 1990 and quickly signed to do a story for Chicago magazine. What Chicago wanted, he tells us, was 3,500 words on personal finance, with separate sections explaining how to maneuver shrewdly in the realms of accounting, banking, real estate, insurance, investing, and finding a lawyer....

To the editors. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It is not well known that the men and women who first fought for social and legal acceptance of contraception in this country were unwilling to do the same for abortion. Indeed they firmly opposed it. In the 1880s, feminist physician Edward Bond Foote argued that contraception was necessary not only to promote the well-being of women, but to reduce the destruction of fetuses, which he deemed an unjust taking of human life....

Friday 28 Abe Lincoln sang “fasola” and so can you. “Shape note” or “fasola” singing is a native American style of folk music designed to help those who can’t read music sing in groups. Using tunes that date in some cases from Elizabethan times and employing ancient scales and unusual harmonies, “fasola” is notated by shape–different shapes indicate different tones. The Chicago Sacred Harp Singers is holding its annual Midwest Sacred Harp Singing Convention, which is expected to draw musicians from the leading “fasola” families....

When he was 14 years old, Hung Nguyen left his godfather’s farm and set out alone for a town some 100 miles away at the southernmost tip of Vietnam. He had heard a rumor that people who wanted to escape to America were leaving from there secretly in boats, and he was determined to go with them. He knew that his American father, if he was still alive, probably didn’t know he existed, but he wanted to find him if he could....

In the last days of their summer vacation, some animated high school students have assembled backstage at a WTTW studio. The teenagers sit in their hippest back-to-school outfits around long folding tables occupied by the station’s fund-raising telephones. They’re waiting to audition for slots on “Screened by Teens,” a new segment to be featured on WTTW’s nationally distributed show Sneak Previews–returning to the air after a one-year hiatus. A press release quotes cohost Jeffrey Lyons: “Sneak Previews concentrates on the issue at hand–is the movie under discussion worth the viewers’ time and money?...