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THE MAIDS This production is so incoherent that I was driven to reference works to regain some notion of what this play might possibly have intended. Jean Genet’s own introduction to The Maids is of no help whatsoever. (“I thus hoped also to obtain the abolition of characters … and to replace them by symbols as far removed as possible, at first, from what they are to signify, and yet still attached to it in order to link by this sole means author and audience; in short, to make the characters on the stage merely the metaphors of what they were to represent....

The weather was oddly appropriate. There was a haze on the city skyline and a white, bleached-out quality to the sunlight; it had all the characteristics of a hot midsummer afternoon. Yet the temperature was actually a bit brisk, especially, of course, near the lake but even downtown away from the water, on the south side at Comiskey Park. In the sun, it was fine, but in the shade the wind cooled and forced the fans to keep their jackets on....

A year ago last September, I was standing at a urinal in Wrigley Field when a fellow took the spot next to me and started talking about Jim Harbaugh. Not everyone likes to talk while standing at a urinal, and even when a conversation is struck up it doesn’t often concern Jim Harbaugh–although, admittedly, it’s a lot more likely now than it was then–but that was all right because, between gentlemen, all men’s room conversations are pretty much the same, and because this fellow didn’t look like the sort who usually tries to establish a conversation in the men’s room....

Last night as I was enjoying a Kraft Velveeta Extra Thick Individually Wrapped Pasteurized Process Cheese Spread sandwich, my attention was inadvertently drawn to the nutrition information on the side of the package. Here’s the rub: there are 10 slices per package, but according to the label, the package contains 12 servings! Is this some sort of corporate typo or have I been making cheese sandwiches wrong all this time? If I can’t even swing elementary lunchmaking my career in politics may just grind to a halt here and now....

“Look,” she says, “There’s another one of those yellow ribbons.” Suddenly–and could it be he’s just imagining it?–there is an angry man next to him, dark haired, hatless, young enough to be a Vietnam veteran. “Who’s making a lot of money?” It’s as if every thought in his head has been overheard. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Yeah, go back to Russia!” And for one single instant in a frigid parking lot, two Americans face each other in blazing hatred....

Sally, 28 years old: I grew up in the inner city. We were real poor because my father was an alcoholic, OK, and he was a gambler and he didn’t work. My father was very strict. Very. I couldn’t even think for myself. I couldn’t do anything. Most of the time I sat in a chair all day. I was very angry with my mother for staying with him. I hated her then....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » If Barry Silesky thinks that his persecution at the hands of Chicago cops after being arrested for scalping tickets is “some kind of key to the decline of America,” he is mistaken in his placement of blame outside of himself. His penny-ante scam is no great act of revolutionary courage deserving applause, but a cowardly attempt to take advantage of a system that does, as he reluctantly acknowledges, keep tickets out of the hands of the “poor ‘average fans,’” a group in which he seems above inclusion....

AL ANTHONY’S SALUTE TO THE SUPERSTARS There are so many ways to approach this show. I might evaluate the six impersonators–their mimicry, their ability to entertain the crowd. We are meant to be impressed by emcee Bill Acosta’s impressions of Tony Bennett, Truman Capote, and Katharine Hepburn–and we are. We are meant to be seduced by Quinn Callahan’s Madonna, but despite a superficial resemblance, she’s only been given a few pat gestures and some innocuous choreography....

The fourth annual edition of the Chicago Latino Film Festival is showing 50 films, virtually all of them subtitled, from 19 Latin American countries, Spain, and the U.S. (including several independent works from Chicago). Screenings will continue at the Three Penny Cinema, 2424 N. Lincoln, from Friday, September 30, through Sunday, October 2. Ticket prices per program (short and a feature) are $6 for adults, $4 for students, senior citizens, and handicapped persons....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » One of the things I’m most curious about wasn’t covered in the article, however. And that’s self-promotion. It seems to be a dirty word and yet those of us in free-lance careers know that getting our names in front of the right people can be at least as important as the work itself. About four years ago, not too long after I’d moved to Chicago, I heard Tony Fitzpatrick’s name for the first time, in connection with the Poetry Slam at the Green Mill Tavern....

MARTIN PURYEAR That skill was not acquired easily. An African American born in Washington, D.C., in 1941, he drew, read, and made things as a child; studied painting at Catholic University in Washington; lived in Sierra Leone and learned carpentry from local workmen; studied printmaking in Stockholm while apprenticed to a master cabinetmaker; and finally studied sculpture as a graduate student at Yale. He has traveled to the Arctic and Japan, and he’s lived in Nashville, New York, and until recently, Chicago....

Lead Story Richard Hensarling Jr., 25, was jailed in August for the robberies of four central Florida banks. He later admitted that, from the reactions of his fellow inmates, he had learned his lesson about using women’s dresses as robbery disguises. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » As a guest lecturer (on the secrets of his Wall Street success) at Purdue University in February, Arthur J....

ONE HUNDRED AND ONE DALMATIANS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Someone is kidnapping the dalmatians of London–specifically, the 15 puppies of Pongo and Missis of Regents Park. And though Mr. and Mrs. Dearly (whom we egotistical humans would call their owners) have even called Scotland Yard, ultimately it’s up to the parents to deliver not only their own tots but scores of others from a grisly fate at the hands of the fashionable but heartless Cruella DeVil....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But the juxtaposition of white neighborhoods and black neighborhoods is an uneasy one. As black families seek to improve their living conditions by moving into white neighborhoods, white home owners fear that the patterns of the 60s and 70s may reappear. In the last 12 months interest rates have fallen dramatically and, once again, conditions are conducive to “white flight....

“Oh wow!” Fritz Wildermood froze in his tracks. He couldn’t believe his eyes. A misty oracular nimbus seemed to form in the hushed air above the “new arrivals” case at Babs’s Bookstore. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The fact that he was attending junior college and working part-time as his uncle’s gofer at the Teamsters local and part-time pumping gas on the weekends didn’t faze his new friends a bit....

The fat lady sings again…and again… Lyric Opera of Chicago reports that it concluded its 1989-90 season “at an historic 102.7% of box office capacity.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A racist city deserves a pair of racist newspapers. Number of racially motivated (“bias”) crimes in Chicago from July 1, 1988, to June 30, 1989, according to the Chicago Commission on Human Relations as reported by David Protess of Northwestern University in Chicago, March 1990: 227....

William O’Neal spent the last few hours of his life with his uncle Ben Heard, a retired truck driver from Maywood. It was Martin Luther King Day. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » O’Neal achieved lasting infamy in 1973 when his role in the 1969 raid in which Black Panther leaders Fred Hampton and Mark Clark were murdered was revealed. Though O’Neal was a Panther insider to the point where he was in charge of security for Hampton and possessed keys to Panther headquarters and safe houses, he was at the same time serving as an informant for the FBI....

On the last day of the last Cubs home stand of the 1990 season, the manager’s wife decided to skip the game. She’d said good-bye over the weekend to the regulars who sat around her all summer, and to the ushers and other personnel who tended to her during the season. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » As Don Zimmer left on the Cubs’ last 1990 road trip to Pittsburgh, Soot packed their clothes and personal items into the car and drove back to their home near Saint Petersburg, Florida....

Why Is This Man Hiding? What happened? That is not clear, because the principals all refuse to talk about it. But from various sources whose knowledge we admit is secondhand, we gather that Page was persuaded that Kane and Cunningham had become an expense too great to justify. It might be that members of the board of the Chicago Sun-Times, Inc., made this clear to Page directly–various members, in particular chairman Leonard Shaykin, a New York investment banker, had been observed around the paper in recent weeks....

The relationships of white musicians to black music have always been a bit weird: the whites end up either as exploiters or mired in a too-respectful stasis. 3rd Bass are a consumingly committed pair of rappers from New York’s outer boroughs whose almost obsessive adoption of a black idiom has already produced an amazingly successful record (The Cactus Album) and promises more. M.C. Serch and the cigar-chomping Prime Minister Pete Nice aren’t didactic like KRS-One, gritty like Ice Cube, or flighty like De La Soul....