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Ouch! I found the way you dispensed with Uri Geller [May 13] uncharacteristically simplistic. I personally witnessed two examples of Geller’s powers, and I can’t believe I was taken in by sleight of hand. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » During the interview we tried various drawing tricks that didn’t amount to much. Then Geller asked if we had any metal. He rejected various things we had brought, so my colleague offered a heavy silver ring off his finger that he had bought in Spain....

THE LITTLE THIEF With Charlotte Gainsbourg, Didier Bezace, Simon de la Brosse, Raoul Billerey, and Chantal Banlier. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The film certainly aims to be Truffaut-like in both style and content, and in superficial ways it succeeds. Unfortunately, the Truffaut it honors is basically the mythical Truffaut–the professional nice guy with a compassionate eye for rebellious youth, puppy love, and little kittens lapping up milk, not the more complex Truffaut who made The 400 Blows, Shoot the Piano Player, Jules and Jim, The Soft Skin, Fahrenheit 451, The Wild Child, or The Green Room....

It was a gang fight. I could tell that much from my window. Twenty boys with baseball bats, pit bulls, and acne careened up and down the street, shrieking and swinging the bats as they chased down a pair of adolescents interloping on their turf. The group darted between trees and parked cars in pursuit of the two, ducking in and out the streetlight shadows. My wife punched 911. And I pulled the shade back a touch and peeked out to watch the show....

She stands next to her knotty-pine podium, a woman in her early 40s wearing a tight gold sequined dress. Her high heels are gold too, and she wears her jet black hair in a Jackie O. do. She says she’s our fairy godmother. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Cinderella was a mercenary and we can be too. That’s Polo’s word for gold digger. She’s proud to call herself one....

“All I’m hearing is Spanish. One in three peoples is speaking Spanish,” Arkady Petrov says on the beach at Olive Park. “I’m hearing Carlos. Ricardo. I thought this was supposed to be Polish city. Like Poland. How come I not hear any Polish here? Where are the Poles? Where do they live? This afternoon Yuri, who looks like Mickey Rooney with a lot of white hair, has gone to the hotel to rest....

A WEEKEND NEAR MADISON The play is a prolonged argument about feminism. Jim, an underachiever who dabbles in art and gets by doing menial jobs, hitchhikes from Philadelphia to his brother’s house near Madison, Wisconsin. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Poor old Jim doesn’t know what to think. The nude paintings he did of Vanessa may be gathering mold in his basement, but his love for her remains fresh....

The charismatic image of the young-man-with-a-horn has been around for quite some time (check out Gabriel) and in 1980s Chicago, it finds embodiment in Brad Goode. The youthful trumpeter (who looks about 19 but in fact is 24) brings vigor and a sense of history to his music, and he’s serious about its past (the postbop 50s) and its niche in the current jazz scene. Goode’s playing is often exhilarating, with a bright, sweet tone and a fluid, classically honed technique; his improvisations are forceful and sometimes even revealing; and he’s put together a solid, punchy band that balances his contemporaries with veterans twice his age....

How dirty is Playboy’s money? Each month the nation’s leading magazine for young heterosexual men who haven’t quite grown up yet celebrates the ancient art of public dishabille. But does this ritual make the magazine essentially silly or essentially malign? Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The need for “Die Queer” is compelling. The journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics recently reported on a survey that found 30 percent of gay males 21 or younger saying they’d attempted suicide....

Friday 22 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Artsy couch potatoes can indulge tonight at Stuff on Tape, a free exhibition of video works by nine Columbia College students. Actually, it won’t be much like home, since the stuff will be projected on a large screen rather than monitors, but it’s bound to beat Miami Vice. Viewing starts at 5 PM at the Hokin Art Center, 623 S....

Friday 10 Oops! In 1971, Dhoruba Bin Wahad (ne Richard Moore), a Black Panther, was convicted of the attempted murder of a cop. Just last year he was let go–turned out he was framed by the FBI. Framing the Panthers in Black and White, a 30-minute video documentary by Annie Goldson and Chris Bratton, tells Moore’s story. It plays tonight on a bill with the 50-minute American (In)justice, by Deb Ellis and Denis Mueller, a look at COINTELPRO, the FBI’s KGB-like search-and-destroy program that caught people like Wahad in its web....

In this dim, musty, empty storefront in Wicker Park, about 30 people have gathered to hear Vern Lyon, 46, of Des Moines. His talk is being sponsored by Venceremos (a group that supports improved relations with Cuba), and in it Lyon tells how he went from an apolitical engineering major at Iowa State University to a CIA agent overseeing sabotage and destabilization efforts in Cuba to a prisoner at Leavenworth. This 20-year odyssey also forms the basis for his book, “Plausible Denial....

Auditioning for Abiogenesis is more like an interview with a Fortune 500 company than a dance tryout. For a month applicants are put through a series of “theater games” involving props, mock scenarios, and assigned characters. How fast does their brain work? Do they know how to solve a problem? These are the questions that concern Angela Allyn, the company’s founder and director, who says she is “looking for good bluffers....

ENDGAME Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Was it that the Nobel Prize-winning playwright’s work has aged badly? That the questions of the post-World War II writers–Does our existence have meaning? Why does the world seem so absurd? Is God dead, or merely on vacation?–no longer seem important as the memory of that terrible war is buried beneath the memories of more recent wars? I’m sure that’s part of it....

“This place sucks,” Jeff Garlin blurts out as we pass a cafe with a maroon awning. “Worst tuna fish in the universe.” Garlin (whose one-man show I Want Someone to Eat Cheese With just finished a run at the Remains Theatre) is performing one of his midday rituals: a walk up Clark Street that begins at the Gold Coast Dogs at Dickens and Clark (where today Garlin partakes of a hot dog, a chocolate malted, and half my fries) and ends at Frances (“My ritual begins and ends with food”), with stops in between at various comic book shops and compact disc stores....

When David Lawrence died in 1984, there were no city hall speeches or official commemorations, but his friends remembered. “He was a good person,” says Peggy Shinner, one such friend. “He liked cats, he liked to drink martinis; he liked to garden and he was a graphic artist. He died at 40.” He died of AIDS. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “The theme of this project is that AIDS has a name,” says Shinner, coordinator of the Chicago NAMES chapter....

Nancy Reagan as poetry slammer? Well, why not? In this “amorality play”–evolved from his old Saturday Night Live routines, and sharpened considerably in response to both Mrs. Reagan’s memoir My Turn and Kitty Kelley’s unauthorized biography–Terry Sweeney offers a deliciously funny portrait of the former first lady that’s simultaneously impeccable and improbable. Fancy Nancy delivering her original doggerel on such topics as Americanism, feminism, Hollywood homosexuality, dressing well, and stepdaughter Maureen (“Ode to an Overeater”)....

Jay Marriotti’s Bonehead Call The Kid from ‘Tude Town hadn’t been around long enough to appreciate that Chicago has an attitude of its own, and deference to authority isn’t central to it. So Mariotti wrote a column ripping Michael Jordan for not going to Washington. “This is about the most disturbing, irresponsible and irrational thing Jordan has ever done in public life,” fumed Mariotti about Jordan’s decision to play golf in North Carolina while the other Bulls schmoozed with the president....

Laurie Dunphy’s Journalism Conducts a Tour takes as its subject “news” as delivered by television and movie newsreels and the effect on us of the media labyrinth we live in. The short film combines found footage and images filmed off television in a staccato rhythm that assaults the viewer, denying understanding or even entry. Early in the film, we see short clips of various TV newsmen looking out at the viewer....

Alderman Larry Bloom, the mayoral candidate who cannot win, came to Ed Weil’s third-floor Lakeview apartment for lunch on Super Bowl Sunday. I get distressed about what is happening in this campaign, he told us. I get distressed by the voters who are making decisions based on dangerous reasons. To them, it doesn’t matter what the candidates have done, or what they stand for–if this guy’s black, they give him their vote....

It doesn’t take the world’s most expert ear to hear in the music of Los Pleneros de la 21 something rich and important. Los Pleneros play bomba and plena, the fast, percussive styles of ensemble folk music from the coastal towns of Puerto Rico that exist in interesting opposition to the somewhat more stately and lyrical Spanish-sounding strains that hold sway in the island’s interior. The Pleneros sides I’ve heard showcase a series of terrifically strident and rhythmically subtle solo singers trading short Spanish phrases with a mixed chorus set against some of the hardest-driving two-chord grooves imaginable....