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Actually my name is not Neil Allen. I am not now, nor have I ever been, a major league pitcher. Instead I work for an organization that distributes free condoms around Chicago. Business is booming. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » With the end of the drug war and the last faint moans of the sexual revolution being heard throughout the land, these two related trends reached a kind of climax in 1990, though both have remained largely unreported and uncommented upon: Condoms, once the sexual protection of last resort, became available everywhere....

For the workers at Stewart-Warner, the signs of doom were evident long before the company made it official that cold winter day in 1985. But Williams’s worst fear–total plant shutdown–has not yet happened. And it may not. Last December, Stewart-Warner was purchased by BTR, plc., a British-based conglomerate that has the money and resources to revitalize operations here, should they choose to do so. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Half a million trees is a lot of trees when you consider that all the trees in all the parks in Chicago add up to only about 250,000. Lay half a million trees end to end and–well, you’d have a lot of dead trees, because they don’t grow that way. But plant half a million trees right way up on parkways and playgrounds, beside railroad tracks and roadsides, in schoolyards and vacant lots, and you could start revolutions....

Tonight, I want to talk to you about the wind,” announced Joe Perry. “Everybody has felt the wind, but how many of you have ever seen the wind? Don’t go away.” Someone asked, “Why don’t you put it in Wrigley Field?” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Every year, sometime around Thomas Edison’s birthday, the Inventors’ Council holds an inventors’ showcase, which both inventors and manufacturers can attend....

LOOK AT ME Look at Me is the story of one woman’s life from shortly before she’s born until her death. We see her on her birthday at various points–watch her grow from an excited fetus to a legendary child-woman painter. She maintains the same optimistic personality throughout her life: during her early years, as the emotionally abused child of an alcoholic mother and physically abusive father; through young womanhood, when she watches her father get married, for the third or fourth time, to her roommate; through a trying marriage to her college art professor; and into fame–and seclusion–as a brilliant painter....

Perhaps Lyric Opera’s most ambitious undertaking since it premiered Penderecki’s Paradise Lost 14 years ago, its new commission McTeague boasts an impressive all-American pedigree. Chicago writer Frank Norris’s 1899 jeremiad against duplicity and greed is the source material, and the production’s visual look is inspired by Greed, the painstakingly detailed 1924 film adaptation by Erich von Stroheim considered a mordant masterpiece of the silent era. William Bolcom, whose ability to juxtapose myriad musical idooms seem natural for the stage, composed the score, and Robert Altman, the veteran filmmaker whose own sagging career was revitalized by The Player, directs....

It’s quarter to one on a Saturday morning, and although I’m in a room with more than 200 other people, I’m the only one in shoes. Everyone else is wearing green toe tags on their naked feet. Everyone else, if you haven’t guessed by now, is dead. “Be sure to breathe through your mouth,” Lee instructed me as he placed the cart by the inside wall and turned back toward the cooler door....

Poet, Tree, Gift From Chicago the chaotic slate of starlight, regretless love, while the lake curls away and It is called Chicago. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “My intention was to come up with a unique angle,” Smith had replied. Spoken like a journalist, if not like Yeats. Her tree would have feelings. Her tree, at whatever risk of echoing Kilmer, would be almost sort of human....

YOUNG GIRL BLUES Johnny Winter The mismatch between playing and singing occurs on several cuts. On “Queen Bee,” Foley’s version of Slim Harpo’s “King Bee” (minus the undulating bass line that characterizes most versions of the song) Foley crunches along in an admirable blues-rock vein, heavy on the metallic fire and light on the subtlety, though she does pull off a few attractive single-string echoes of Guitar Slim. But her voice, despite the obvious attempts to embellish it electronically, is weak, thin, and adolescent sounding, with little of the worldly knowingness essential to this kind of song....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » On the other hand, maybe he ought to get real. He recounts his experiences as if they contain revelations about us and our society. Yet, that prison is very unpleasant, that the work world can be a Godawful grind, and that the National Guard would train its members to fight, probably don’t strike most of us as particularly unjust, much less surprising....

“Are you a vegetarian? Do you wear a vest? Do you know anybody who does? Do you have cats? Do you have a poster of Virginia Woolf over your bed? Will you marry me?” That’s Peggy Shaw’s proposal to Lois Weaver in Anniversary Waltz, the current piece by Split Britches, a New York-based performance art ensemble appearing this weekend at Randolph Street Gallery during its “In Through the Out Door” series, which celebrates Gay and Lesbian Pride Month....

BROADWAY BOUND Simon not only gives the memory a shape like a living statue, he also shows us Eugene’s amazement that his mother ever had a vibrant life apart from him. More important, Eugene is caught in the act of becoming a writer: this time around he doesn’t just hear Kate’s oft-told tale, he transforms it into an imaginary play by acting out potential audience reactions and punching home the reverie’s big moments....

DANCE THEATRE OF HARLEM The audiences that filled the Civic Center for Performing Arts’ four recent performances welcomed the company back to Chicago, after a seven-year absence, with cheers. The sleek, confident, handsome corps–living proof of Mitchell’s 20-year commitment–showed off its very considerable talents in an interesting, eclectic program of three stylistically diverse works: George Balanchine’s neoclassic The Four Temperaments, Mitchell’s John Henry, and John Taras’s version of Firebird, the 1910 classic based on a Russian fairy tale....

DAVID DORFMAN DANCE Horn, a piece for two dancer-musicians created and performed by Dorfman and Dan Froot, begins with one of them slung upside down, hanging by his knees from the other’s shoulders and dangling down his back. The other’s every step is full of effort; one of their saxophones grunts. They lean, slip, and balance. One lies with his leg extended and one supports the other at an unlikely angle, both score and visual image “laid back....

The German jazz authority Joachim Berendt has called pianist Joanne Brackeen “the first representative of a new type of female jazz musician, who does not merely talk about emancipation but is emancipated”; I suppose the proof of that statement lies in the fact that the issue of her being a woman in a man’s world never really comes up in discussions of her music. Brackeen has bolstered rhythm sections for Stan Getz and Joe Henderson, and she put in her time with Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers (the only woman, it turns out, to have ever matriculated at that all-male bastion of jazz prep); along the way, she has built upon the work of such contemporaries as McCoy Tyner and Keith Jarrett in forging a rhythmically charged, forceful music that allows for bebop sentiments but is not unmindful of Cecil Taylor....

Joe Henry is one of those troubadour types–Steve Forbert, John Hiatt, and Bill Morrissey are others–who get great reviews and in some cases parlay those into major-label deals, but still somehow fail to connect with a paying audience. In the case of Henry, back on an indie after two nonselling A&M albums, you can to some extent see why: I mean it’s 1992, and when I hear a mournful voice begin a song with the intoned line, “bring me the head of John the Baptist,” well, I just hit the changer....

MORDINE & COMPANY DANCE THEATRE A culture that values women primarily for their youth and beauty pressures a female choreographer and performer, especially one who reaches creative maturity sometime after 35, to reassess her role in creating and performing dances. She may continue to perform as before, inviting criticism of her changing body and physical prowess (or, if she’s Martha Graham, eliciting wonder at the sheer force of her unique performance persona)....

LONESOME IN MY BEDROOM Lonnie Brooks That slow groove stays around for a while. Muddy Waters’s “Honey Bee” was one of his most beautiful and fully realized creations, originally sung as a blues of tender resignation. But Johnson interprets it as an aggressive challenge (“Sail on, sail on, my little honey bee, sail on . . . Gonna keep on sailin’, but please don’t sail too long”). His guitar solo stays mostly within the harmonic restrictions of a single chord, but within that limited range he explores depths of emotion and musical expression that more frenetic fretmen can’t approach....

POST ACUTE WITHDRAWAL Post Acute Withdrawal says all the right things. This evening of short performance pieces treats a number of hot topics–AIDS, drug addiction, homophobia, sexual alienation–with candor, explicit language, and a good deal of humor. Stuart Allen and Valorie Hubbard take plenty of risks, revealing highly personal information (both are recovering drug addicts) and appearing in various states of undress. All of the ingredients for an engaging performance are here, yet somehow the mixture remains curiously flat....

Space Available What Robert Morse needs right now is for Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney to knock on his door and exclaim: “Gosh, mister! We want to put on a show. If we pay you $ 15,000 a day for your big new studio, will you give us a chance to prove what we can do?” Paramount’s original idea was to shoot Ferris Bueller in front of an audience, and Studio A is configured to accommodate one–halfway up one wall are doors that now lead to midair, but one day the public will parade through them to its seats....