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Harold Washington’s heir apparent was not an individual but a movement–a movement for racial fairness, economic justice, human rights, and open, accessible government. Evans’s record of consistently being tapped by Washington for key leadership roles is now one of his political assets. Ironically, it is also one of his liabilities. For years the public perceived Tim Evans as a spokesman for Harold Washington. Now that Washington is gone, many voters are unsure where Washington ended and Evans began....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In your December 11 story, “Signs of the times: a name for every neighborhood” [Neighborhood News], you make a very false assumption when in reference to Burnham Park, you say, “But, alas, the name never caught on, at least in part because of resistance from people like Dennis McClendon . . .” It should have read, “The name never caught on with Dennis McClendon....

Chatting with Kevin Mason about the lute family is like talking to a royal genealogist about the noble houses of Europe: you’re apt to learn about the members’ origins and histories, their proclivities and shortcomings, and other details too arcane for the layman. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Mason, a lute historian and player, holds a PhD in “historical performance practices” from Washington University–a now-defunct program that required a thorough knowledge of musicology and the mastery of a number of period instruments....

THE ROOT OF CHAOS On the side of deepness, there’s plenty of cynicism. And there’s some biting criticism of the American family. There’s also a nicely played moral lesson about letting fear kill our spirits. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Playwright Douglas Soderberg has created an absurd alter reality, but he’s not just spoofing the everyday. The Cernikowski family is as flat and familiar as anything on a sitcom, but their story never gets as smug as the usual TV-derived satire....

REMBRANDT LAUGHING For all his mastery and originality as a maverick independent, Jost has often alienated audiences with the harshness of his themes and the apparent distance from which he views his subjects and his characters. A 60s radical who spent over two years in federal prison for draft resistance, he has lived without a fixed address for most of his 26-year career as a filmmaker, and the alienation as well as the clarity stemming from his wanderlust has seeped into many of his fiction features....

Anyone searching the newsstands for political opinions veering more than slightly from the mainstream may find the task frustrating. Yet most newsstands carry an astonishing variety of pornographic magazines, appealing to the most specialized tastes. My local convenience store carries magazines catering to everyone from breast fetishists to fans of older women, and those willing to venture into the local adult bookstore will find (alongside giant dildos and inflatable sex partners) publications appealing to even more specialized fetishes....

Sometimes being good isn’t good enough. Sometimes you have to resort to stratagems. Then, in 1985, Ferguson heard about a competition in Cleveland, Ohio, for the “best ribs in America.” He explains, “There are national cooking contests for almost any type of product–pizza, chicken, specialty restaurants, special recipes. You read the trade magazines, and you find out where they are. It can do a lot for a business to enter them....

THE ANGELS OF WARSAW An interesting omission. Of all the horrendous things that happened in Warsaw during World War II, the quarantine and annihilation of the city’s approximately 500,000 Jews was supremely horrendous. First they were walled in. Then they were starved. Then they were “evacuated” to extermination camps in groups of at least 6,000 souls a day. When they organized a resistance, the Polish partisans refused to help them. They chose to fight anyway, and held out until the Nazis demolished the ghetto itself with air attacks and artillery....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I just take exception to one point that Mr. Krohe made and that is, WTTW’s production of The Frugal Gourmet (which recently has been shot in various locations such as Hong Kong, Athens, Greece and Rome) is not an extravagant way for Channel 11 to expend monies for the production of a major national television program....

MY EYES WERE FILLED WITH VOLUNTEARS “Inside every cardboard box is a toaster waiting to be found,” philosophizes Brendan deVallance in the middle of his new performance piece, My Eyes Were Filled With Voluntears. This curiously engaging untruth, flatly stated and left unexplained amid many similarly curious observations, neatly encapsulates the worldview behind deVallance’s piece. He gives us a way to see the magic lying dormant in the junk that ordinarily weighs down our lives....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » As I have seen the Movement over the years, it is much more than a mere collection of pacifists. Alongside its perhaps understandable fear of nuclear war has been a consistent, unvarying position regarding the U.S.’s place in world affairs. No bit of mischief, no problem, no horror, no atrocity has been reviewed by the Peace Movement that wasn’t the sole responsibility of the United States or its craven allies....

When I began this story, I saw Neil Hartigan as a wimp, a dull boy, a party hack. The story that I proposed was one describing how this hack worked his way through the ranks of the Democratic Party, machine and postmachine, until he reached the top. I knew only the bare bones of Hartigan’s story, but they seemed to spell that tale. The houselights dim, the young honor guard in red-and-white Hartigan T-shirts lines both sides of the aisle, the spotlight shines on the candidate, the band plays “Twist and Shout,” and to passionate applause Neil Hartigan comes down the long aisle of the Prairie Capitol Convention Center in Springfield, grinning, shaking hands, saying hello, occasionally kissing an old friend....

BLUES IN THE NIGHT Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The setting is “a cheap hotel in Chicago in the late 1930s”–an image nicely evoked in Daniel Ostling’s expressionistic assemblage of stairways and platforms framed against a plain backdrop washed with moody blue, purple, and red light by Tom Fleming. Under these lights parade three actresses representing three Hollywood-style stereotypes of black females: the Girl, the Woman, and the Lady....

SEPTEMBER Friday 25 We here at Calendar have a personal interest in what the folks at the Panic/Anxiety/Phobia Clinic have to offer: we often exhibit advanced forms of what we call p.r.-o-phobia, defined as extreme fear in the face of press releases or public-relations people. Just joking. But if we weren’t, we’d go to the clinic’s free presentation tonight, Facing Your Fears: Recovery From Panic and Phobias. There’ll be talks and a videotape covering everything from the various manifestations of panic attacks–pounding heart, nausea, fear of losing control–to the various phobias, including standbys like morbid fear of death and agoraphobia and new stuff too, including something called derealization, which the clinic describes as “feeling ‘weird’” (we can relate to that)....

A WALK IN THE WOODS Might actually, and did. Or seemed to, anyway. Like I say, it was only a moment, and it was over in a moment–presumably as soon as the Gipper’s handlers got him back to the hotel room, calmed him down, and made him repeat to them exactly what he’d told Gorbachev. There was never any real danger of a spontaneous breakthrough. There was much too much at stake for that....

The last job Ida James had was seven months ago. The caseworker from Public Aid had sent her to shelve books in the library at Triton Junior College. For a while, James, a west-side resident, hoped the job would get her off welfare. Pat Wright, the economic-development planner with the University of Illinois at Chicago’s Center for Urban Economic Development, helped the group get started. She says “It will be tough....

“I’m going to come out fighting like a lion tonight,” says David Diaz. He’s a dark-eyed, square-shouldered kid from the near north-west side, 13 years old, one of 15 young pugilists lacing on the gloves for the Hamlin Park Boxing Club. LeBron gets the evening going at the microphone with a nifty soprano rendition of “The Star Spangled Banner.” He forgets the words down the stretch, but no matter: it’s a game effort, and the crowd howls with delight....

To the editors: –The decision to sell the camp was a two-year process originally recommended as part of a long range planning process that took three years. In fact, the decision to sell was delayed a year to give the members who thought the camp could be made self-sustaining a full season to demonstrate that. Sadly, with their best efforts operating costs could not be covered, let alone needed capital costs....

Hunkered down, sometimes to the point that his tenor saxophone appears to be parallel with the floor, the burly Fred Anderson suggests a cosmic sumo wrestler–a noble fighter grappling with destiny. His music does little to alter that impression. The tone is dark and expressive; the improvisations are freewheeling and pantonal, yet they retain a songlike accessibility that has escaped many better-known players of “the avant-garde.” Anderson holds three important niches in Chicago jazz history: he helped found the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM); his bands have served as early proving grounds for such musicians as trombonist-composer George Lewis and reedmen Chico Freeman and Douglas Ewart; and his own uncompromised musical vision had a direct influence on the generation of musicians represented by the Art Ensemble of Chicago....

To the editors: I’m a little late entering the Dennis Polkow Bash-o-Rama but hope my entry can be accepted anyway. I have not read Polkow’s reviews for long, since I moved here from New York City six months ago, so I don’t know about his old mistakes. I AM appalled by his new mistakes. Two other things not mentioned in any of the other Bash-o-Rama letters. 1. After making up his research for Rosenkavalier from his own imagination [October 6] Polkow apparently did no more research for Clemenza than read the program notes [October 20]....