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Here’s a dilemma: How do you describe Chet Coppock without insulting him? Wait! No problem! Chet’ll take you off the hook himself. He confides a secret little dream of his and it says all you need. That’s why you’ll look long and hard to find a woman who even tolerates Coppock and his show. Listen for just ten minutes and you know it’s a boys’ club. Steve Dahl and Garry Meier, hosts of the show that precedes Coppock on Sports, joke on air that it’s really a “homo club,” just another example of the latent homosexuality pervasive in groups of grown men who linger in the male-only world of sports....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Henderson writes, “you need to understand very clearly how people think in order to program a computer to do so–and at the same time, you can check up on your understanding by seeing whether the computer in fact does what you meant it to do.” This statement overlooks the fact that there is no reason on this green earth to assume that the living thought of a living mind is in any way similar to the mechanical regurgitations of Dr....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It is an interesting coincidence that the Reader should publish a letter from Jacob Sampson [March 8] under the headline “Poland Guilty” on the very weekend that the Holocaust Memorial Foundation and the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith should be honoring Stefania Burzminska, who as a Catholic Pole hid 13 Jews for two years in Nazi-occupied Poland, thereby risking her own life and those of her family to save these people....

Watching from behind bushes and trees and logs, the animals saw not seven little children coming out of the forest but . . . SEVEN LITTLE MEN! Each one carried a pick over his shoulder and each one could have walked under your dining-room table without upsetting his cap. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The angriest member of the group was Edward “Grumpy” Burke (who had never got along with the deceased king of the realm)....

THE NUN With Anna Karina, Liselotte Pulver, Micheline Presle, Christianne Lenier, Jean Martin, and Francisco Rabal. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But the hoax had an unexpected side effect on Diderot: in the course of writing one of the contrived letters, he became so emotionally involved in the real plight of Suzanne Simonin that the letter mutated into a first-person novel narrated by her, a polemic about the imposition of religious vows on individuals against their wills....

A TUMBLEWEED IN COWTOWN Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In another time, in another place, A Tumbleweed in Cowtown would have made a good episode on Love American Style. The story is simply a variation on a stock boy-meets-girl story: nerdy lonely guy is set up by swinging best friend on a blind date with knockout single gal. In A Tumbleweed in Cowtown, the lonely guy is Phil Horton (played with considerable comic ability by Charles Spencer), a man who hasn’t touched a woman since his girlfriend Debbie moved out several years before....

“We’re such a little drop in the bucket,” says Chicago composer Gene Coleman. “You can’t really even talk about what effect our work has, or might have, on this mass of popular culture. But you have to try to get more people aware of this stuff. Otherwise, all this information is going to be gone–there’s gonna be reruns of Mod Squad, and that would be the world.” Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Beat Reporters Platen? The typewriter cylinder, Reed informed us. “When they dry out, they make a noise like a machine gun.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Reed’s second reason for setting Nightside in the 70s is that the 70s were his time here. In 1976, Reed wandered into Chicago from Massachusetts with an English degree and an idea of trying journalism. He caught on at City News Bureau, screwed up, and was banished to the midnight shift at 11th and State....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I was at the O.S. from 1967 till 1974, and still I fight with the consequences of my time there every single day. All the feelings of inadequacy and low self-esteem that I had when I arrived there were strongly reinforced by the staff, until I assumed they were truth. I was told I was crazy, that I could not function in the world, and that there was something intrinsically “wrong” with me....

KEROUAC: THE ESSENCE OF JACK I don’t think Jack Kerouac was ahead of his time, or that he died too young. He was his time. He died on time. And he took his time with him, leaving behind a distorted legend as “king of the beats.” He also left behind a substantial body of literature so honest and open that no amount of media slander and cultural hype can wholly obscure the man behind the legend....

This marks the fifth year that artist Lee Kay has exhibited his pastels-on-foam-core portraits in the Speed Queen at 3355 N. Halsted. Why a laundromat? “They leave the bright lights on at night and I thought, what a great place to show some stuff,” says Kay, who lives across the street. (He’s also shown his work at the 7-Eleven down the street.) Kay’s picked a musical theme this year: there’ll be versions of Liberace, Barbra Streisand, James Brown, and others, adorned with 3-D additions like bow ties and jewelry....

On the Edge Theatre Company Igloo, the Theatrical Group Off-Off Loop Theatre Festival at the Theatre Building Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The three plagues to devastate the 80s were of course government, television, and sex (categories large enough to let OTE throw in sketches they’ve had kicking around for some time. Government (represented by a demagogue who runs on a platform that would sound natural coming from a crazy on the Broadway bus) isn’t half as ubiquitous as sex....

Brown-headed cowbirds have become so abundant in Illinois that they are threatening to eliminate our state’s nesting populations of wood thrushes, hooded warblers, ovenbirds, and scarlet tanagers, among other species. That is the provisional conclusion arrived at by Scott Robinson of the Illinois Natural History Survey after completing the first year of a projected five-year study of the birds of the woodlots and woodlands of central and southern Illinois. They were also restricted by their habitat requirements....

FOLLIES Before A Chorus Line came to epitomize the “high-concept” musical, there was Follies. Combining the songwriting genius of Stephen Sondheim with the staging innovations of codirectors Harold Prince (Sondheim’s collaborator on the earlier Company) and Michael Bennett (who, of course, went on to create Chorus Line), the ground-breaking Follies was recognized as an artistic landmark from the moment of its 1971 premiere. Wedding the flamboyance and frivolousness of the old-fashioned musical comedies of the Rodgers and Hart era with the emphasis on psychological development of the mature musical theater pioneered by Rodgers and Hammerstein, Follies used its own inherent stylistic elements–song and dance, sets and costumes, the physical presence of singer-dancer-actors on a stage–as a metaphor for the drama it depicted....

Now that Taste of Chicago is over, Grant Park has returned to normal–and to genuine music making. This weekend’s Grant Park Symphony concert is a trio of 20th-century works from the conservative wing. Receiving its American premiere is Paul Patterson’s Te Deum (1988), the last installment in the 44-year-old British composer’s trilogy of large-scale (three-choir) choral works. Patterson once favored the high-intensity, percussive styles of Krzysztof Penderecki and Gyorgy Ligeti, but Te Deum, commissioned by the Hereford Cathedral, reflects his conversion in the early 80s to the English choral tradition and the music of Benjamin Britten....

In this day when all the hip performers seem to make a big to-do about questioning, shocking, or enlightening their audiences, Washington, D.C., choreographer Liz Lerman has a simple appeal: she makes dances that attract an audience. Once she has their eyes, ears, minds, and hearts, she might very well question, shock, or enlighten. But she always seems to do so in a warm, funny, and very human way. Take Anatomy of an Inside Story, a solo in which Kimberli Boyd tells stories passed down in an African American family....

“I hate musicals,” says singer and actress Marianne Faithfull in her low, whiskeyish voice. “Really despise them, detest them. I used to quite like them. . . . But recently it’s got so, so–” She gives a small but intense shrug of disgust. “Uhh! Andrew Lloyd Webber. Uchhh!” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » More usually teamed with an electrified pop band, the 43-year-old Faithfull is in Chicago this week for a concert with the classical chamber ensemble the Chicago Sinfonietta....

Can a Gold Coast watering hole cum supper club whose decibel level stops just short of painful produce food worthy of serious attention? For Yvette, the answer is a resounding yes. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The setting, however, doesn’t match the food. Tables are too close together, and there’s no smoke-free zone. Conversation is only possible at full volume, as the two pianists take their work seriously and pound out a storm–everything from light classics to show tunes–on the twin keyboards....

The legendary baritone from Downers Grove is back, much sooner than anyone anticipated, stepping in at the last minute for an ailing Frederica von Stade. For those who missed Milnes’s spectacular performances as Hamlet in the long-neglected French grand opera by Ambroise Thomas recently presented at Lyric Opera, there are two big excerpts included in this rare recital appearance. For those who know Milnes primarily as the greatest Italian-repertoire baritone of our day, his expertise in lieder and the art-song tradition will come as a delightful surprise....

Nostalgia sucks; and for obvious reasons, it’s even worse when punks are involved. With this in mind, beware Television reunion concerts. Two things about the group can’t be overstated: the allure of its original recordings–the glorious Marquee Moon (1977) and Adventure (1978)–and its symbolic importance. The albums rang, and still ring today, with an eerie limitlessness; Tom Verlaine’s gulped vocals, the somehow reptilian cast of his and Richard Lloyd’s guitar work, and a gripping atmospheric overlay evoked a dark and beckoning netherworld....