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AIN’T MISBEHAVIN’ Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Like his jazz contemporaries, Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, Louis Armstrong, and Cab Calloway, Waller often played the clown, his patter a smooth, disarming way to ingratiate himself with possibly unfriendly white audiences. Happily, Maltby’s 1978 Tony winner–and Apple Tree Theatre’s tenth-anniversary season opener–replays Waller at his uninhibited best, romping through toe-tapping tunes with infectious delight, turning everything into a party....

The unpaved alley behind Draper Street is eight feet wide, less than one block long, and cluttered with weeds, dog turds, and clumps of brown grass. And yet it’s been the booty in a bizarre and bitter yearlong struggle waged by the neighbors on its north and south sides. Perhaps the clash was inevitable. The neighborhood around Draper Street, in western Lincoln Park, has been a working-class community, but it’s changing....

In the wake of the recent flag-on-the-floor exhibit at the School of the Art Institute Gallery, the Illinois House of Representatives is considering a bill passed by the Senate to cut funding for the school from about $65,000 to $1. During demonstrations against the exhibit this spring, state senator Walter Dudycz, one of the leaders of the protests, urged his supporters to express their displeasure to corporations that contribute to the Art Institute....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I read your article on Around the Coyote 92 and some of the artists who were not happy about the organization [Neighborhood News, September 18]. I participated in the show, and all the artists I met in the Ludwig Drum Factory were all happy about the exposure they received. Some of us didn’t sell anything but that can even happen in an art gallery show especially with the way the economy is doing right now....

Flat Duo Jets is the vehicle of one Dexter Romweber, a North Carolina blues boy who’s spent about a third of his 23-year-old life playing with his band. His burst of fame came in the 1986 documentary on the Athens, Georgia, music scene: Athens, GA./Inside-Out. Romweber, a bristling and uncontrollable on-screen presence, nearly ran away with the movie–and he’d only been passing through town to boot. The wildman guitarist is part preacher, part seeker, and does three things: fast blues, slow blues, and novelty instrumentals, (“Sleepwalk,” “Harlem Nocturne”), each of these shot through with a rockabilly sensibility and all (except the instrumentals) benefiting from his rich, resonant voice....

Back when she was working at Second City, before she moved to LA to launch a TV career, Dear John’s Isabella Hofmann could be frequently found in nightclubs hereabouts vocalizing with singer-songwriter Tony Zito, whose long track record ranges from the 1970 road show of Hair and the pop recording duo Frannie and Zoey to writing a string of scores for plays and musicals at the Body Politic, Goodman, and other local theaters....

ISHMAEL HOUSTON-JONES A seminal talking dance was Douglas Dunn’s Nevada, which premiered in New York in 1973. In the after- show “discussion period,” when a choreographer customarily comments on his work, Dunn fitfully stood up and sat down in a chair while his taped voice read a piece that began: “Talking is talking. Dancing is dancing.” The tape recited all possible variations on these statements, including: “Not talking is not not dancing....

THE LIGHTED FIELD The lovers, light and shadow, and their offspring space and time are my themes, working with their particularities is my passion and delight. –Andrew Noren Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Andrew Noren’s lovely 59-minute The Lighted Field–part five of his ongoing work The Adventures of the Exquisite Corpse, which has engaged him over the past two decades–belongs mainly to the nonnarrative realm....

“It’s terrible to bite the hand that feeds you,” says New York Times columnist Anna Quindlen about her boss. “But the man is sticking his finger out at the whole world.” She is talking about the New York Times story naming the woman who claims to have been raped at the Kennedy compound, a story that also revealed traffic tickets the woman had gotten, that she was a single mother, and that her mom was a big shot’s mistress before becoming the big shot’s wife....

Is your mind a turntable? Are your emotions imitations? Are your orgasms filed under the Dewey decimal system? Do you look both ways before dying? It is a brilliant, irritating, silly, and important book–and those four adjectives apply, often simultaneously, to just about every one of its many pages. Lipstick Traces is an essay without a thesis, a history without causality, a confession without intimacy, a prophecy without belief. Above all, it is a dream of cultural violence: a kind of violence that emerges from nowhere, flickers for a moment, and disappears again....

Restaurants Go Where the Customers Are: Home! Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The powers that be behind both Room Service and Chef’s Express believe the service they offer will grow more popular for a couple of good reasons: people are working longer hours, and for many yuppie couples with young children, going out to dinner is more of a bother than eating at home....

It’s not a very large neighborhood. The major distinction of the eight-block area that runs southwest from the corner of North and Wells is that it has stubbornly resisted large-scale redevelopment for over 30 years. “It’s absolutely absurd to put urban renewal in this area,” said Jean Washington, spokeswoman for the Near North Property Owners Association, which is fighting the project. “It’s like putting urban renewal on Astor Street.” Best of Chicago voting is live now....

After years as sideman to some of Chicago’s most illustrious legends–Big Walter Horton, Sunnyland Slim, and Otis Rush among others–guitarist Steve Freund is stepping out on his own. Those who remember him for his puckish, sometimes outlandish rhythm patterns behind Horton’s sweet-toned harp are in for a surprise: he has disciplined (but not reined in) his imagination, and his intensity has grown over the years. Freund still mixes and matches styles with a delightfully audacious exuberance, but he’s toned his excesses down: crisp and fiery, his leads at once cut to the bone and restlessly seek new directions, all within the context of straight-ahead blues improvisation....

As the Chicago International Film Festival moves into its second week, there are still a lot of interesting and exciting movies to be seen. I feel compelled to note that none of the 16 features on this week’s program that I’m familiar with are as beautiful or as potent as Jean-Luc Godard’s Nouvelle vague–one of the 39 films shown in Toronto last month that Chicago festival director Michael Kutza boasted to the press about having rejected....

Don’t read this at lunchtime. From the U.S. General Accounting Office Reports and Testimony (July 1990): “FDA and USDA inspectors do not test trucks for bacterial or chemical residues that may remain in a vehicle after it has hauled garbage because the test would be too costly, complex, and time-consuming and because they have found no instances of contamination from cross-hauling. If a truck looks, smells, and feels clean, inspectors consider it safe for food transport....

THE LARGEST ELIZABETH IN THE WORLD Playwright Stephen Gregg’s The Largest Elizabeth in the World is a hilarious absurdist fantasy about a teenage girl who grows to be 50 feet tall. Gregg, who also penned Griffin’s successful Sex Lives of Superheroes, produced last season, displays a remarkable talent for merging the ridiculous and the mundane. He creates characters with a wealth of quirks and puts them in bizarre situations, yet manages to ground his plays in a basic honesty about human nature....

When you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras. It’s an oft-repeated med-school axiom that means consider the simple solution first. Clarence “Joe” Gibbs Jr., a researcher at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), hears hoofbeats, and unlike many of his colleagues, he’s thinking horses. Along with Jonas Salk, the developer of the first successful polio vaccine, Gibbs is working on an AIDS vaccine that does not employ such post-Watson-and-Crick technologies as recombinant DNA, synthetic peptides, or anti-idiotypes to immunize against human immunodeficiency virus (HIV)....

Understand that my argument against night games was always an aesthetic argument. Although I admire Citizens United for Baseball in Sunshine and the other Wrigleyville groups that have fought the good fight against lights, I consider their arguments concerning parking and rowdiness a bit tenuous. Having moved away from and then back to that neighborhood in the last year and a half, I can testify that anyone who thinks that parking near a ballpark is bad should try parking near ClubLand and Union....

Frederick “Toots” Hibbert is one of the half dozen or so Jamaican musicians who can justifiably lay claim to having “invented” reggae, and hardly anyone disputes that he gave the genre its name (“Do the Reggay,” 1968). When he and Bob Marley were getting their first U.S. releases (1974 or so) the two were considered rivals for the pinnacle of the reggae pantheon. I don’t know whether Marley just had a better hype machine or what, but Toots deserves attention every bit as much as Marley did....

TRIPLE PLAY Metraform Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Nevin’s Fishing for Men is a comic allegory that compares the various strategies women employ to attract men (perfume, lingerie, pretending to like sports) with the art of fishing. Catherine (Ann Marie Ready) teaches her younger sister Jennifer (Meaghan McCarville) the art of catching a man by baiting her hook with such lures as skimpy negligees and copies of Sports Illustrated doused in perfume....