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The political tussle in the drafty old church auditorium was bizarre, bitter, and ironic even by standards of the 46th Ward. He has one problem, however. Mayor Daley, whose support Quigley expects, supports the project; Jane Byrne, the mayor’s chief opponent, does not–and she showed up at the meeting to blast the mayor’s stand. As a result, Shiller and Daley find themselves allied against Quigley and Byrne on one of the ward’s most volatile issues....

Since elementary school I have repeatedly heard the story of how Manhattan was bought from the Indians for a mere $24 worth of trinkets. Something about this has long troubled me. Assuming the value of the barter items was estimated at about the time of the famous transaction, shouldn’t it be adjusted for all those years of inflation? Maybe Manhattan wasn’t such a steal after all. –Charles R. McNeill II, Washington, D....

A friend of mine, raised Catholic but now a practicing pagan, once explained to me the difference between Christian and pagan prayer. “We don’t kneel,” she proclaimed. “We don’t bow in submission to a divine other. We stand tall and proud, our arms outspread, to embrace the gods all around us.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Best of all, The Gospel at Colonus erases the lines between “amateur” and “professional,” and audience and performer....

To the editors: We sincerely believe that a formal apology from your newspaper is due to our schools and community. REBUTTAL TO THE ARTICLE: “THREE TEACHERS TALKING” PUBLISHED BY THE READER ON JANUARY 22, 1988 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Educational issues in this country, whether dealing with academic achievement, discipline, drugs, birth control, deviant behavior or gangs, warrant a serious approach which is sadly absent in this article....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I did not see the article in the Reader of August 25 on William Heirens, and, to be quite frank, I am very glad that I didn’t. One of my relatives was one of his victims, and every time I hear or read that he is being considered for parole, I become very paranoid. He performed some very brutal murders, but now seems to think he should be allowed to become a part of society again as a normal functioning person in a new community....

An American in Warsaw Gone from America, at any rate. The emergence of Solidarity in Poland made it clear that the same desire burned brightly in other places. By 1983, which is when Dobija managed to get to Poland, that country was under martial law. She spent a year learning the language and doing research into the women of Solidarity, and she left reluctantly. She returned in 1986 and has lived in Poland since....

Changing the Rules of Syndication Lazarus spoke as a freeman. In 1957, he’d taken Miss Peach to the old Herald-Tribune Syndicate and been offered the usual terms: a long-term contract with automatic rollover provisions binding the cartoonist to the syndicate essentially forever. And the syndicate would own the strip. “I picked up the drawings and went home,” says Lazarus. “I constitutionally couldn’t do such a thing.” Best of Chicago voting is live now....

While some other musical organizations in town are retrenching, the Chicago String Ensemble, under the direction of Alan Heatherington, keeps coming up with bountiful samplers of string music at its most edifying and refreshing. This all-American fare includes not only old favorites but also brand-new pieces: Leon Stein’s Oboe Concerto and Oscar Haugland’s Interlude, both to be performed for the first time, are by local boys; another premiere is the Prologue and Variations by Ellen Zwilich, an excellent if academically inclined craftsman often touted in the media as our foremost woman composer....

Ex-Chicagoan Ned Rorem returns to Orchestra Hall–where he got the informal portion of his musical education more than half a century ago–with an ambitious, brand-new vocal work, one of the Chicago Symphony’s nine centennial commissions. Entitled Goodbye My Fancy, the hour-long oratorio is vaguely autobiographical, with texts based on the prose and poetry of Walt Whitman, for whom Rorem has a special affinity. The work’s 19 movements are grouped into three large sections, loosely chronicling the life of a dedicated artist: “Now Voyager” (set to Withman’s early verse), sensual and carnal, is about self-discovery; “The Strayed Dead” looks unflinchingly at the tragedy of the Civil War (based on the pained and candid observations in Whitman’s diary); and the music in “The Harvest According” settles into the conetmplative comfort and wisdom of old age....

DOUBLE EVERY MINUTE The world that Brenton paints is intriguing and seductive, mainly because all the characters surrounding Martin jealously guard their true feelings and loyalties. In a particularly chilling moment, Raffety (Debra Rodkin), a charming British woman who also works for Joan’s terrorist group, calmly explains her order to murder Joan by saying, “She was Maoist. She had situationist tendencies.” This is a world where prescribing to the wrong branch of revolutionary thought can be fatal....

Common terns fly as buoyantly as butterflies. Their bodies rise noticeably with each beat of their wings. Hundreds of them have been passing along the lakefront over the past couple of weeks, heading south to Colombia, Brazil, and Argentina. Some will reach the Strait of Magellan. The species you are most likely to see are common and Forster’s. Unfortunately for the novice bird-watcher, these two are practically identical. It takes a very good look under very good conditions to make a positive identification....

To the editors: The many-brained and almost-all knowing Cecil Adams, who recently discussed correctly a question involving a somewhat subtle point in the general theory of relativity [June 30], has now flubbed what he (a bit hastily) describes as a problem “straight out of Physics 101” [Letters, July 21; Straight Dope, December 16]. I refer to the matter of the comparative times before hitting the ground of a plummeting and a (horizontally) fired bullet....

Pianist Joseph Kalichstein, violinist Jaime Laredo, and cellist Sharon Robinson have played as a trio for almost a decade and a half–they first got together for Jimmy Carter’s inauguration–and, to their credit, the partnership has remained as fresh as ever. Their longevity as a sought-after chamber team can also be attributed to the kind of decidedly mainstream yet thoughtful programs they offer–such as this one. For contrast, two bookends of the piano trio genre will be displayed back to back....

Rick Paul remembers exactly where and when he conceived of Lionheart Gay Theatre, Chicago’s longest-surviving company devoted to lesbian and gay plays. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » AIDS figures in Lionheart’s latest production, running this weekend and next–a double bill of (Wild) Person, Tense (Dog), by the late San Francisco writer Robert Chesley, and Minutes From Moonburst, by Paul. But the real theme of this pair of shows–featuring a five-man cast under Paul’s direction–is the aspiration toward, and eventual disillusionment with, a gay utopian vision as expressed in two very different subcultures: the San Francisco leather bar scene and the little-known “radical faerie” movement....

PASS THE LOVE Many psychologists describe a child brought for treatment as the “identified patient”–the one other family members believe to be sick. These psychologists recognize that a troubled child is usually a symptom of deep turmoil within the family. A child might be misbehaving, for example, to divert the parents from their incessant arguments. A child pegged as the “black sheep” might be just a safe and convenient target for the anger and frustration other family members feel for each other....

INCORRUPTIBLE In the second installment, On Experience, Cartmill attempts to capitalize on the previous evening’s character orientation. Now we get some history, as we see Robespierre navigate the bloody and unpredictable tides of revolution. First the monarchy retaliates, but Robespierre braves the purge to become the number one firebrand, more influential even than Danton or Marat. Then the bloodletting gets out of hand when the commoners strike back. Robespierre distrusts the capricious masses and fears that his head could easily be the next to roll....

SHIRLEY VALENTINE at the Wellington Theater This predictability is pretty much a natural consequence of the show’s format and ambitions. It’s a monologue, after all; and because it’s a monologue it can’t offer us much in the way of action. There’s very little to see here, beyond Shirley’s making dinner in scene one and taking swigs out of a bottle of mineral water in act two. The showing is incidental; the telling is all–and telling is all rhythm....

CHICAGO MOVING COMPANY The four works in the Chicago Moving Company’s current concert at the Dance Center are all driven by their music. Each dance has the character its music gives it, but its character is also determined by the way the choreographer connects the movement to the music: at one end of the spectrum that connection might be loose, dreamy, impressionistic, and at the other a beat-for-beat mapping of the dance onto its aural analogue....

Your political atrocity maven mined a mother lode selecting this year’s winners of the Janie Awards for Putrid Politics. It was the year Mayor-for-life Richard M. Daley told us “everyone is concerned about apathy” and “the future is 15, 20, 30 years from now.” It was the year he blamed Charles Barkley for Chicago street violence and defended his own less-than-vigorous participation in the 1990 governor’s race by asking, “What else do you want me to do ....

A HUNGARIAN FAIRY TALE With David Vermes and Eszter Csakanyi. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The tale of the scorned Soviet statue–apocryphal or not–bespeaks a wry defiance and a fierce resistance to official cant, which characterized public Hungarian attitudes long before the remarkable recent rush toward new civil liberties and political rights. Few filmmakers there, or anywhere, surpass Gazdag at the fine art of insinuating acerbic observations into seemingly “innocent” scenes of Party officials performing endless mischief through (or under cover of) strict bureaucratic procedures....