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To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I very much enjoyed Dennis Polkow’s interview with Georg Solti [February 3]. It was a pleasure to join mentally with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in this way, since actually attending CSO performances to hear the music is out of the question. People talk to each other and sing to themselves, crunch on cough drops (to prevent them from coughing), and rustle the pages of their programs in order to read about the music being played, thus turning the music into a species of conceptual art, especially for them....

SUSIE LUCK: HOSTESS OF MENTAL FLORIDA Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Since then I’ve noted with secret satisfaction the increasing number of productions–by performers as varied as Spaulding Gray, Lynn Book, Donna Blue Lachman, and the Neo- Futurists–that successfully combine theater and performance art to create hybrid works that are both more daring than mainstream theater and still quite entertaining. Of course, not every hybrid turns out to be as hardy as Gray’s The Terrors of Pleasure or the Neo-Futurists’ Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind....

TEMPTATION Incarceration, or the fear of it, shadows setting and story; ostensibly free, Havel’s absurdist creations turn out to be their own worst jailers. Reworking the Faust legend, Temptation shows us a scientist who foolishly believes that irrationality and the modern state are mutually opposed: he tries to explain away the irrational in what Havel has called “a grand self-delusion of the human spirit.” Best of Chicago voting is live now....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » My wife and I read your “First Person: A Waif at My Door,” February 26, with shocking recognition. We were also suckered by “Margery Davis” in September of 1987 and the details of the con were remarkably similar. “Margaret,” as she called herself, targeted us at a cash station outside the Bank of Ravenswood. The same basic story was used with the same breathless convincing delivery....

“All of our native plants have their own stories they’re trying to tell,” writes Robert Lonsdorf in Prairie Projections (January 1989), the newsletter of the North Branch Prairie Project. “Some take a few human generations to tell it. This unfinished work of allowing the earth to say ‘prairies’ and ‘savannas’ again is a contract of generations.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Another tie-up on the Ryan....

Dept. of animal wrongs. Raccoons living in Illinois state parks are suffering from gum disease, according to U. of I. veterinary epidemiologist Laura Hungerford: “These raccoons are eating the remains of human food and getting dental problems that look just like those seen in humans.” Some are suffering other injuries known to be suffered by certain humans: “Many park-dwelling raccoons have cuts on their faces and paws and a few have broken legs....

THE DUMB WAITER and Two gangland assassins wait in a bare room for the man they are to murder. Though they have a fine record with the Organization, Gus is beginning to ask a few too many questions. This hint of cold feet disturbs his senior partner, Ben, who reads him appalling stories from a tabloid to raise his misanthropic morale and to help them both ignore the mysterious dumbwaiter that persists in sending them inexplicable messages ....

THE GIGLI CONCERT Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In his searingly powerful A Whistle in the Dark, seen in 1988 at the Body Politic, Irish playwright Tom Murphy depicted a family of battling brothers, one of whom yearned for a peaceful and intelligent life in harsh contrast to his siblings’ taste for brute force; the hero’s sense of alienation was reinforced by his discomfort as an Irishman living in England....

So what’s this I hear about how all my compact discs are going to sound like mush in ten years? Apparently the acidic inks used in the discs are causing the plastic in mine to disintegrate even as we speak! But others say it’s all BS. What gives? How long will my CDs last? Should I cut my losses and get into digital tape? Or should I just cut my throat?...

Thanks for quoting me twice in More of the Straight Dope. I notice you discuss the alleged practice of gerbil stuffing. [The gerbil is supposedly inserted into the keester for purposes of sexual stimulation.] Have you found any evidence yet that this has ever actually occurred? I ask because the compilers of News of the Weird include a list of “items recovered from the rectums of patients” (page 157 of their book) that includes “a live, shaved, declawed gerbil....

PERFORMANCE CHICAGO Debora Duez Donato, originator of “Performance Chicago,” needs to raise the standards for these works. Both pieces presented on the second weekend–Joanna Frueh’s Mouth Piece and Heidi A. Lang’s Breaking It–seemed thin, unfinished, and flat, giving complicated problems simplistic solutions. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Mouth Piece, according to program notes, “focuses on the importance of individuals speaking for themselves, the significance of learning and using one’s own voice in terms of personal and social empowerment and the necessity of being one’s own mouthpiece....

“So I’m lookin’ at this yahoo and I’m thinkin’, what the heck are you doin’ at Burger King at 11 o’clock at night anyway, you yimp-yacker. I gotcher Whopper right here.” “Bulls over, Bulls over. Who are the Bulls playing? They’re playing Sacareno, right?” “Well, you never know.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A lot of people on car phones probably say they’re on their way to the health club, or on their way home from the health club....

ANNIVERSARY WALTZ Shaw and Weaver have been lovers and colleagues for ten years, and Anniversary Waltz is fundamentally a celebration of their relationship. Written by them and Deb Margolin, the third member of Split Britches, it begins with Shaw and Weaver standing atop a buffet table–the only set piece–Weaver in poufy hair and ruffles, a country darlin’, and Shaw in a kind of sequined, boxy, quasi-military cowboy’s tux. Looking like a couple of bizarre wedding-cake decorations, they lip-synch Tammy Wynette and George Jones’s “We’ll Build a World Together,” Weaver all forced sentimentality and Shaw all macho understatement....

Given all the problems social-service groups have to battle–crime, drugs, neighborhood disinvestment–they shouldn’t have time to fight each other. But that’s just what board members for Hull House and board members for its affiliate the Clarence Darrow Center have been doing for the last year: squabbling over who should run the southwest-side center. The Darrow Center was formed in the 1950s as part of the Unitarian Church’s efforts to help communities around the city....

Who says they don’t put on blues extravaganzas like they used to? This one will run the gamut from straight-ahead Chicago traditionalism to funky outrageousness. Bassist Aron Burton is the traditionalist; adept on both stand-up and electric, he’s known for his sparse, rhythmic lines and a unique ability to form a synergy with even the most unpredictable lead men. He’s also a witty lyricist and an expressive singer with more than a hint of Mississippi moan in his vocal delivery....

Friday 3 With the large exhibition Abstract: Chicago, Klein Art Works capo Paul Klein has assembled what he calls a comprehensive overview of the subject through the work of nearly 80 local abstractionists. In the accompanying catalog, contributors proffer drawings and their take on how the city of Chicago has affected their work; answers range from lots (“I have always felt the need to make my work colorful and explosive”) to not at all (“My visual and conceptual biases were fairly well established before I became a Chicagoan”)....

Samuel Barber, who died ten years ago, was never an innovator, but he excelled in his narrow niche as an expressionist of personal emotion. In the 30s and 40s, he was a golden boy, one of the last romantic holdouts against the tide of serialism; by the mid-60s, his seldom-changing style had become an anachronism. He embraced traditional highbrow taste and shared Gian Carlo Menotti’s aversion to dissonance. Those inclinations may have been responsible for the critics’ posthumous devaluation of his reputation, but some of his works, when given the chance, can still cast a potent spell....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I was doubled over in disgust upon reading the Chicago police superintendent’s reply that Hitler’s Germany, a society where every imaginable liberty was violated, “had a very low crime rate” [“Good Cop, Bad Cop,” December 13]. I would like to inform Mr. Martin that people under the Nazi regime suffered some of the most unspeakable brutality the world has known....

Photographer Tony Maine first heard about the Rainbow gathering in 1975 when he was living in Berkeley, California. Some acquaintances had heard about an intriguing event taking place in New Mexico on the Fourth of July and wondered if Maine would drive. When they got to the Gila National Forest, they found thousands of people camping out in the wilderness in a sort of communal village. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Offering a set of solo improvisation for drums and percussion would seem to be a promising way of emptying a performance space; but those streaming for the exits would clearly be people unfamiliar with Jerome Cooper, who applies a particularly judicious sensibility to his instruments. In so doing, he plays against type. Even in a combo, and even if that combo is steadfastly traditional in style and content, it’s the drummer who can (and does) most readily approach anarchy in his solo spots....