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The problem with basketball is that the games too often come down to not merely one but a series of “last shots”; that, and the professional season lasts too long. The sport nevertheless is enjoying a well-deserved resurgence. Attendance is higher than ever in the National Basketball Association because the games no longer consist of 46 minutes of trudging up and down the court and then two minutes of basketball on the way to a final shot, but rather 46 minutes of one team trying to blow the other out and vice versa, and then two minutes of basketball on the way to a last shot....

Why do women shave their legs and underarms? When did this custom begin? If it’s for hygienic reasons, why don’t men do it too? Is it all a big conspiracy by the razor companies? I’ve heard some European women don’t shave. Please clarify this mystery. –A., Chicago Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The aim of what Hope calls the Great Underarm Campaign was to inform American womanhood of a problem that till then it didn’t know it had: unsightly underarm hair....

Although I haven’t read the Phillip K. Dick story (“I Can Remember It for You Wholesale”) that this is derived from, this loud, fast, bone-crunching SF action thriller has at least two of the virtues of much good SF in print: the creation of a foreign (if vaguely familiar) landscape and the alienated sensation of displacement. Arnold Schwarzenegger plays a construction worker in the year 2084 who discovers that he’s been implanted with both false memories and a false identity; he has to make it to Mars–now colonized and controlled by greedy capitalists who create and abuse mutants through their control of the air–in order to clear things up....

KRITHIKA RAJAGOPALAN Krithika Rajagopalan’s art, on exhibit one evening only during the “Nights of the Blue Rider” festival, is unlikely to resemble anything you’ve seen before. It combines music, poetic texts, dramatic story telling, and dance as no single Western form does. Not only that, but the truncated and fractured traditions of mainstream U.S. culture mean that we don’t have a prayer of producing religious art. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

On December 1, in a City Hall press conference conveniently scheduled to precede by one week his formal reelection-campaign declaration, Chicago’s acting mayor Eugene Sawyer introduced a glossy new AIDS education campaign. Joining Sawyer to handle specific questions on the city’s response to AIDS was Lonnie Edwards, MD, MPA, commissioner of the city’s Department of Health. Edwards displayed a series of slickly produced posters to be used as billboards and newspaper ads....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » While the quote attributed to me is correct, it was taken out of context (it originally appeared in the Chicago Tribune) and unfortunately gives the impression that my criticisms are directed toward the congregation of Alexian Brothers and Saint Sebastian’s as well as the Archdiocese of Chicago. Nothing could be further from the truth. The archdiocese, on the other hand, has contented itself to sit back and take credit for the hard work of others....

To the editors: Re: “Group Efforts: the art world observes a day of the dead” [November 24] Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Namely, according to Edelman, once again “Chicago was left out” of being in the know, in this instance about this nationwide day of observance to memorialize the artists and others who have died or are dying of this virulent disease. Ms....

“Somebody turn up that Raiders game,” shouts a burly man in a flannel shirt, and a blind man complies, turning up the volume of the play-by-play. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It’s September 30 and we’re waiting in line for the men’s room at Comiskey Park, the last day for baseball at this historic stadium. It’s the seventh inning and the Sox have just gone up on Seattle by a run, and this throng of 75 is trying to shove its way into a room made for no more than 30....

FUN and NOBODY Fun and Nobody are American Kroetz. Kroetz crossed with David Mamet. A pair of related one-acts by Howard Korder of New York, the plays combine the fractured, lumpen jazz of a Mamet script like American Buffalo–“Where we goin’?” “I don’t know.” “OK!”–with the flat-footed sociopolitical bluntness of Request Concert Kroetz. They reimagine the capitalist kick in the teeth as administered by a culture wearing Air Jordans. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

“Sometimes when you get everything ripped out from under,” says Faith Smith, “you have to take a look at where do you want to spend your time and what’s going to be meaningful.” She’s talking about the early 1970s, when she became part of “a very ugly battle” that raged within Chicago’s American Indian Center on Wilson Avenue. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » At that point Smith was five years out of college, five years spent working with fellow Indians on the streets of Uptown; she had just become acting director of the center, which she and others believed should focus on poverty and the problems of Indians on the streets....

Some of my best friends love the Star Top Cafe. It has a devoted cult following of risk takers who enjoy unusual, complex, aggressively spiced cuisine–people who would try antelope nipples if they were on the menu. Other friends, the kind who always wish those pureed turnips on their plate were mashed potatoes, don’t like the place at all. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Star Top Cafe caters to a young crowd, and the clientele, like the food, is full of odd combinations....

SCENES FROM THE CLASS STRUGGLE IN BEVERLY HILLS With Jacqueline Bisset, Mary Woronov, Ray Sharkey, Robert Beltran, Ed Begley Jr., Arnetia Walker, Wallace Shawn, and Bartel. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » At first glance, discretion is not a characteristic one would quickly associate with the director of Private Parts, Death Race 2000, or Cannonball, but the awkwardness of personal expression runs alongside the more sensational motifs in these over-the-top sex-and-violence extravaganzas....

LAUGHING WILD Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Which may be why I feel a certain affinity for Christopher Durang and his recent comedy, Laughing Wild. Best known as the jolly blasphemer who gave us Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All for You, Durang specializes in bitterly funny diatribes, just ever so lightly dusted in dramaturgy. A theater of spouting off. In Laughing Wild he’s not only found a structure that allows him to spout hilariously across an almost unlimited range of topics, but also to double back and contemplate–seriously, even touchingly–the nature of the spouteur....

The other day at work we were sitting around (on our coffee break, of course) telling stories about our middle school days. We discovered that although we grew up in different parts of the country (Atlanta and Dallas), the students in both our middle schools believed you could tell the quality of a necktie by the number of golden threads running through the lining inside. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

WOMEN ON MEN Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This ambivalence is expressed most overtly in the sketch in which a young mother unburdens herself to her uncomprehending two-year-old son, confessing that she married her proctologist husband because she would never be better than him at his craft. She wonders why, after encouraging her spouse to be more open about his emotions, she looks at him with contempt on the one occasion when he gives way to tears–and why she suddenly feels threatened by his vulnerability....

When John Corigliano accepted the position of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s first ever composer-in-residence three years ago, he expected to produce a large orchestral work here, although what form such a work might take was unclear to him. That was before Corigliano lost some of his dearest friends to AlDS, and before he saw the Names quilt project. The power of that experience inspired him to write his First Symphony, as a tribute in particular to the three friends who are the subjects of the work’s first three movements....

Of all the youngsters stealing the jazz spotlight these days–a list that starts with Roy Hargrove, Benny Green, and Philip Harper, and that Wynton Marsalis has already outgrown at the advanced age of almost 29–Christopher Hollyday could well turn out to be the most important. He’s only 20, but facts are facts. His recently released album, On Course, is only his second for the Novus label, but it’s a wild leap past the first, showcasing his own compositions and the crackerjack quartet he brings to town next week....

“This is not the kind of job you talk about in social situations, because most people find it distasteful,” says Don Smith, frowning. “What we do isn’t for everybody. But it’s a job that has to be done. We can’t have deceased animals lying all over our streets.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Until 1978, a private rendering company picked up the city’s dead animals....

DWARFED BY COMPARISON Curious Theatre Branch Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Trixie and Alice have been scarred by their family in opposite ways. Trixie, who manifests a chronic skin disorder that seems to be eating her alive, is a chain-smoking alcoholic avant-garde theater artist. Alice, who practices her tap routines as though her life depends on it, is constantly cleaning up everyone’s mess....

BASEL BALLET Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Basel Ballet, the only Swiss ballet troupe making a considerable splash on the international theatrical circuit, introduced itself to Chicago with three charming performances of La fille mal gardee (“The Poorly Guarded Girl”), the oldest ballet still in the active dance repertory. La fille, created by Jean Dauberval in 1789, a few weeks before the French Revolution began, also bears the distinction of being the first comic story ballet, with characters who were real human beings instead of the mythic Olympians that the French court generally deemed worthy of theatrical presentation....