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THE 25TH MAN: SPENCE TAYLOR IS BACK! Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » With all the new faceless ballparks, high-dollar salaries, and cable superstation broadcasts, the charm of baseball has worn off a bit. Still, some part of all of us who grew up hurling Wiffle balls and doing play-by-play while throwing a rubber ball against the rebbetsen’s brick wall wishes we had made the big leagues and become true old-fashioned American heroes....

There are at least two fun ironies in the rather ugly dispute that has separated leader-songwriter Roger Waters from his erstwhile teammates in the greatest dinosaur rock band of them all, Pink Floyd. The first is that Pink Floyd wasn’t really Roger Waters’s group at all: it was the conception and (originally) the execution of Syd Barrett, an alleged genius and extravagant acidhead who is generally credited with inventing Brit psychedelia and, by extension, creating the progressive rock movement....

“It’s just me. What did my boyfriend say? I have “a healthy and vibrant sexuality.” And it totally just comes through in my work. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “My family has films of me at the age of two…on summer vacation, taking my clothes off. We have pictures of me at five, streaking around the neighborhood with my best friend Russell in nothing but Winnie the Pooh boots....

WFMT Watch: Another Sudden Departure This much is documented. On April 30 Voegeli attended a Friends of WFMT forum in Hyde Park. He sounded enthusiastic and permanent. “I’m spending every waking hour on a long-range strategic plan to move this station,” he declared. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Friends were intrigued by the idea Voegeli floated last month to turn WFMT into “a bold new hybrid” whose revenues came not just from commercials and syndication, but also from subscriptions and foundation grants....

“I remember that we had a house, but I don’t remember where it was,” Cheryl Green says of her earliest years. (Like many of the names in this article, Cheryl Green is a pseudonym.) She remembers three rabbits her family kept in the basement; a side yard, with a tire swing her dad built; the frogs she and her brother would catch nearby and sell to kids in the neighborhood a dollar a frog....

ADAM AND THE EXPERTS Yes, this play is about AIDS. but it would be cheap to dismiss it as yet another AIDS play, for it compassionately depicts a denial of death we all understand. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Dr. Elizabeth Kubler-Ross cites denial as the great obstacle to a peaceful death, and you get lots of denial in Adam and the Experts–of death and of sex....

Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle is a conceptual artist, an idea man. Born 31 years ago in Madrid, raised in Bogotá and Chicago, he’s got a lot to say and two languages to say it in, an arsenal of words behind every image. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » His latest vehicle is the humble juice bottle, appropriated for a show at his alma mater, the School of the Art Institute....

CAN’T STAND UP FOR FALLING DOWN For what seems an extraordinary length of time during the second half of Strawdog’s Can’t Stand Up for Falling Down, actress Mary Kanaley Nahser cries–not little trickles down the cheeks but a great flow of tears dropping off her chin onto the floor. Surprisingly, this does not impair her delivery in the least. One still wonders, however, what effect repeating this display three times a week for six weeks will have on her psychological state....

Diamanda Galas, the diva of the avant-garde whose amazing voice spans three and a half octaves, is back in town with her latest one-woman vocal extravaganza. Masque of the Red Death, which she calls a “plague mass,” is an operatic triptych dealing with the AIDS crisis. In the first part snippets from Leviticus, Job, and the Psalms are used to set up an ironic exchange between a cruel God and a quarantined man....

If you’ve endured the new Saturday Night Live, you might think satire is dead in America. But Do the White Thing, now in its third year of skewering bureaucrats, politics by crisis, and Jesse Jackson’s personificating rhetoric, is a cure for despair, a skilled set of ever-updated skits by two deft hipsters, political satirist Aaron Freeman and economics comic and composer Rob Kolson. Following Freeman’s credo that “everything in your life ends up in your act,” their revue has grown as smart as the times have turned stupid....

Earl King is one of New Orleans’s great postwar music figures, spanning generations and genres with his canon of blues and R & B. King’s “Those Lonely, Lonely Nights” in 1955 helped define the Louisiana ballad style, and his “Trick Bag” was an R & B landmark in 1962. These accomplishments barely scratch the surface, however: King’s guitar style keening, high-octane leads punctuated by choppy fills and chording–was a major progenitor of 60s blues rock....

West of Omaha about 40 miles, past the “AK-SAR-BEN” racetrack and amusement park and the ever-flourishing hills of Boys Town, and across the Platte River, sits the amiable little town of Wahoo, Nebraska. Famous for being the birthplace of producer Darryl F. Zanuck, the town has a billboard on the outskirts that proclaims: In those years I was very much involved with my Wahoo relatives. From the age of five, I was dispatched to Nebraska each June....

Irrepressible energy, great swing, a rhythmic sharpness that can make you jump up and dance, a modern style of melodic invention, an unusually high voice for a blues shouter (and a startling growl, too)–these were LaVern Baker’s virtues in the mid-50s. Back then she was among the stars whose rhythm-and-blues shaded into rock-and-roll. Having become famous through a series of novelty hits such as “Tweedle Dee” and “Jim Dandy,” she was nonetheless much more than a mere novelty, as her album’s worth of Bessie Smith songs accompanied by an all-star jazz band shows....

Everyone was at Elmer Gertz’s 85th birthday party at the Cliff Dwellers Club–it was given by the Blind Service Association, of which Gertz is president. Everyone. Every big Chicago name was laid out on the name-tag table in alphabetical order–from the media, from the arts, from business, politics, and law. The mayor sent a proclamation delivered by Alderman Mary Ann Smith; court of appeals judge William Bauer gave a testimonial and compared Gertz to Clarence Darrow....

It should come as no surprise that the new decade finds Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom once again keeping time with death. It has always been one of his more familiar companions; it’s part of what gives him more substance than any other Updike character. John Updike has made the play of words on paper his life–in poetry, in fiction–and the world he creates exists as few other fictional worlds do. Yet he’s always been overly willing to ornament that world with the trappings of his own life–the comfortable settings, the nagging ethics, and the more than occasional philanderings of middle-class and upper-middle-class existence as it’s played out in homes where the most recent New Yorker rests on the coffee table....

She sits like a sarcastic Buddha and struts like a rock star, tartly dispensing strategies for survival to a legion of lovelorn loonies, presumptuous pets, demanding daughters, mischievous aliens, and even a self-pitying Satan. She’s the heroine of Nicole Hollander’s popular syndicated comic strip Sylvia, brought to brassy, kicking life in a splendidly juicy performance by Carole Gutierrez. Newly relocated from Pegasus Players to the Organic Theater in a commercial transfer, this musical comedy by Hollander, Arnold Aprill, Tom Mula, Cheri Coons, and Steve Rashid preserves the grouchy satire and mocking anticonformity of its source while offering a bright, imaginative visual substitute for the strip’s dark density in Thomas M....

Why is a football called a pigskin? –Ben Schwalb, Laurel, Maryland Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The main drawback of a pig’s bladder was that inflating it by way of the obvious nozzle was too grody for words. Still, it was an improvement over what the English traditionally regard as the original football, namely the noggin of an unsuccessful Danish invader. If you were offended by the aesthetics of this you could always stuff a leather casing with hay or cork shavings or the like, but such balls lacked zip....

THE SUBJECT WAS ROSES The people who collaborated on the Marbleworks production of The Subject Was Roses make music together, and I’m not referring just to the actors–the designers and the director also make crucial contributions. Together they bring genuine depth and dimension to this simple story about an ex-soldier at the end of World War II who’s trying to extricate himself from his family. This production at Niles College, way out at Harlem and Touhy, was one of the most satisfying I’ve seen in years–and I don’t even like the play very much....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Furthermore, in Extraterrestrials Among Us, Andrews went on to say that the book Clear Intent, by Lawrence Fawcett and Barry Greenwood, “does such a masterful job of using the government’s own documents to prove that the UFO phenomena are real that no open-minded person who inspects the assembled evidence is likely to have any further doubt about it....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It is a strange event when someone involved in theater feels compelled to rise to the defense of a critic, but the discussion that has been swirling around in your letters section [March 29 and April 26] regarding Mary Shen Barnidge and her review of Make Yer Bed and Lie seems to have enough energy packed into it to warrant a comment....