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Death, to children, is very much like sex–they’re acutely aware of it, but they don’t quite know what to make of it. The Arkansaw Bear, by Aurand Harris, deals brilliantly with death in a way that children can understand. When not allowed to visit her dying grandfather, a little girl named Tish flees into the woods, where she encounters the World’s Greatest Dancing Bear. But the bear is being chased by the Great Ringmaster, who wants to take him away forever to the Great Center Ring....

The flags are flapping overhead, but softly, not with their usual starchy pop. The wind is wafting in. Pockets of clouds are forming on the horizon, but they remain in the distance; the sky is the pale blue of a baby’s eyes. From where we’re sitting in the bleachers, the Wrigley Field grandstand stretches like a theater backdrop, and the fans are screaming for the members of the Cincinnati Reds to throw them baseballs, for it’s batting practice....

We’ve all seen the sun’s rays streaming down between clouds to brighten up patches of a lake or forest. Why do the rays projecting from the sun form a triangle with the ground, as if the sun were only a few hundred meters above the surface? We all know the rays are almost parallel. Is there some optical or atmospheric effect that causes this? –Peter Collins and Catherine Iphigenie, Montreal, Quebec...

TWELFTH NIGHT This production shifts the play’s locale to a California Gold Rush encampment in 1851, the height of the boom. While the youth and vigor of the company members (the oldest can’t be much more than 30) rendered their premiere production last year, Miss Julie, little more than a singularly grueling acting-class exercise, these qualities work perfectly in the rough-and-ready universe of a frontier settlement. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Two-Step and Twang: Country Comes Into the City Music-industry insiders insist the current country-music craze is here to stay, and Gary and Dara Kron hope their new country-western nightclub Whiskey River is too. “We were looking around for what we thought was the hottest thing coming along,” explains Dara Kron, who is betting the country nightclub concept has tremendous crossover potential with the yuppie market. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Wheeling and Able: NPR’s Man in Jerusalem “I think they wanted to find the right assignment for me, and they didn’t have the right sense of what that was,” Hockenberry reflected. His bosses weren’t going to ship him overseas out of sympathy, and they couldn’t bring themselves to send him on his merits. Hockenberry felt the only way he could prove to them he could do it was by doing it; he found himself identifying with Jesse Jackson: “Liberals have this idea Jesse Jackson will be able to become president when we reach a certain utopia....

YOUR BUTT Avenue Theatre Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Apparently the networks think Metraform’s big attraction is that it speaks in some way to the hopes and fears of what some have dubbed generation X and others refer to as the 20-something crowd. If this is true, and Your Butt is any indication of what’s slithering through the collective unconscious of the under-30 crowd, then generation X is much more cynical and pessimistic than I thought....

1989 CHICAGO YOUNG PLAYWRIGHTS FESTIVAL Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » What does this mean from a theatergoer’s point of view? In the case of this year’s three winning one-acts, chosen from 113 submissions and currently on view in an evening-long production at Pegasus, it means that these writers are writing because they have something to say. These scripts aren’t the calculated crowd pleasers one encounters from budding commercial craftsmen trying to make their way onto the television fast track....

While I can’t vouch for the adequacy of this documentary as an adaptation of Stephen Hawking’s best-selling book, this is my favorite picture by Errol Morris (Gates of Heaven, The Thin Blue Line) to date–a cogent and fascinating presentation of Hawking’s theories about the origin and fate of the universe, intercut with an account of Hawking’s fife (including how he has managed to cope with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis). I find the material from the book much more important and fascinating than the inspirational life story; though interesting in its own right, it’s a standard triumph-over-adversity scenario and it periodically threatens to trivialize Hawking’s ideas and work....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I was glad to see Jack Helbig address the important issue of the role of the audience at the performance of Krapp’s Last Tape, part of the International Theatre Festival of Chicago [June 26]. However, I must add to what he said by saying that it isn’t just a problem of the audience not recognizing a play that is “serious” or a “comedy....

“Have you heard that ad they play on ‘XRT? Some guy bought, like, this $10,000 jeep for 10 bucks? You hear that?” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Once you got past the mounds of boxes and the people who checked your ID, you could see hundreds of handmade rugs: silk carpets, cashmere carpets, wool carpets–some with intricate golden medallions embroidered onto them, some as small as a piece of floor tile, some big enough to wrap an entire family....

Friday 11 Saturday 12 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “I’m not an artist,” says Lorenzo Rodriguez Jr., organizer of Blue, tonight’s one-night-only exhibit at 1840 W. Hubbard. “I’m a facilitator.” For this, his fourth exhibit, he followed his usual practice of renting a loft, making the artists whose work he’s showing help him clean it out, and letting them hang whatever they want on the walls....

Friday 3 Scientists are still trying to figure out exactly which islands in the Lesser Antilles were visited by Christopher Columbus, whose logs are rich with details about Caribbean geography and climate–which could help determine weather patterns over the last few centuries. Fire and Ice: An Illustrated Journey Through the Climates of Time, a lecture by Wesleyan University’s David Hickcox and Jon Sanger, will examine what the climates of the past tell us about today’s weather, as well as what we may expect tomorrow....

FUEGO ESPANOL Teresa y los Preferidos at the Harold Washington Library Auditorium October 16, 17, 22, and 23 Much of the Spanish and flamenco dancing in “Fuego Espanol” has this feeling of dancing in the village or in the local taverna. In a tango choreographed by the renowned dancer La Tati, an older, more experienced woman (Teresa) teaches and challenges a younger woman (Madeleine Gomez). The older woman moves more subtly than the enthusiastic younger dancer, who wastes her energy with flashy movements of her skirt....

MACBETH Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » On the stage before the show, a woman in tie-dyed dance clothes moves modernly to the sounds of punk rock coming from a portable cassette player. Five people sit in the center of the nearly bare black stage in a circle of green light, engaged in what appears to be some magic energy-channeling exercise, quietly speaking lines from Shakespeare’s Macbeth....

IN As a member of the yellow-program group, I began in the basement with “#1,” a perverse monologue performed with unsettling naivete by Beau O’Reilly. He tells us the long history of his relationship with his “number one,” from the shame his parents made him feel when he first pulled it out of his pants to show them to the series of complicated “mechanisms” he’s constructed to give himself maximum pleasure....

Chicago-trained, LA-based actor-writer Michael Kearns doesn’t play it safe. His open homosexuality has cost him more than a few opportunities in the Hollywood casting scene, and his grittily erotic material, couched in alternately ironic and ecstatic attitudes as he dramatizes sexual and social realities in the age of AIDS, strikes even some gay audiences as overly blunt. In Intimacies, previously seen at the Halsted Theatre Centre in 1989, Kearns plays six marginal and sometimes mean people with AIDS, including a prostitute with an infected newborn, a teenage speed freak, and a demented street person....

To the editors: “Progressive” political movie crit, as widely practiced, spurts from the same well of American pietism as various youth purity movements, the Anti-Saloon League, school-library book-banning groups, the Moral Majority, and the radical antipornography squads. As an emergent minority orthodoxy, the Left is new to the tradition but does it proud, nevertheless. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I can’t say that I objected to Rosenbaum’s review half so much as the omniscient, attitudinizing preamble....

“My job is not just to put a costume on a performer. A lot of my job is to be calm, making the person I’m dressing totally relaxed, so they can go onstage and give a really good performance,” says dresser Jackie George. “Getting nervous and having sweaty palms is not going to help in a quick change. I think the calmer I am, the better off everybody is.” Best of Chicago voting is live now....

The most indelible images from the gulf war, to my mind, were the famous video views of a “smart bomb” at work; time and again that bomb sought its bunker target, plummeting hour after hour through the endless present of CNN newscasts. For some observers the video views showed that we had managed to sanitize war, to surgically hit only the bad guys. For others the tape symbolized everything that was wrong with the war: we saw the bomb drop, but saw nothing of its impact on the ground–not to mention the impact of the “dumb bombs,” which were released in much greater quantities....