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To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I was impressed to read the article by Michael Bonesteel The Art of Dying (June 8) on the cover since I hardly find any articles concerning art. It is about time! I found the article very moving and was glad that Mr. Bonesteel had the courage to tell their story. I understand how hard it can be to actually tell a personal story about one’s own suffering and I admire both JorJan Borlin and Peter Schwei for sharing such an experience....

Hurtling past 40, with a wife and two, I thought I might need dental work, and so contrived to see a dentist “on barter.” The first visit was a long inspection. One dentist would pause and study the X ray, his stainless probe hanging loose in his hand like a chopstick. Target memorized, he would turn and begin to poke and pluck, until his head came up and he’d call out a number....

Harmonica player Billy Branch studied under the greats–Junior Wells, Carey Bell, the late Big Walter Horton–but he has honed a style that is much more than simply derivative of his mentors. Billy has surrounded himself with young musicians who can play traditional Chicago blues and contemporary R and B styles with equal facility, and the result may make some purists cringe but is one of the most musically satisfying combinations of the old and the new to be found in Chicago today....

Friday 5 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “When we thought about opening a space, we didnt want just a neighborhood bar,” says Darlene Mehegan, who owns the Gallery Cabaret with artist Ken Strandberg. “We wanted a place where artists could come and hang out and we could be with the kind of people we liked. We wanted, in our own little way, to make available space for the arts to flourish....

A concert debuting four brand-new compositions comes only once in a long while; that such a concert should take place in Orchestra Hall is almost unprecedented. The Civic Orchestra–and not its parent, the Chicago Symphony–is the audacious presenter here, in cooperation with the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers Foundation, and the quartet of composers showcased are among the best and brightest of the under-35 generation, all possessors of impressive academic credentials....

Sixteen hundred black-crowned night herons have come to nest in the marshes around Lake Calumet. I helped count them on a bitterly cold evening two weeks ago. The total more than doubles the previous high count recorded for this species in a single day anywhere in the Chicago area. The clouds of herons provide a very clear sign that the Calumet marshes, though surrounded by steel mills and garbage dumps, are still the richest wetland ecosystem in Illinois....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The legal system stinks, but not, as Cynthia Jenkins deludes herself and misleads others, because “the police have all the rights and you have none.” The cops are merely hamstrung by the legal system, and the bad guys know it. Some examples: There are traffic court judges who dismiss tickets, hazardous moving violations included, so fast the clerks can scarce keep up, and judges who let convicted felons charged with new felonies out on individual-recognizance bonds....

DICK TRACY With Warren Beatty, Charlie Korsmo, Glenne Headly, Madonna, Al Pacino, Dustin Hoffman, William Forsythe, and Charles Durning. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Up to a point, it’s rather intriguing that Dick Tracy’s settings seem so deliberately unreal; what’s less intriguing is that they barely seem thought through–or thought about–at all. Once you acknowledge that the look of the comic strip has been caught, you begin to wonder why it has been caught....

H-Bomb Ferguson, with his bulging eyes, rainbow-colored fright wigs, and an elastic face that would’ve done Lon Chaney proud, is one of modern blues’s most outrageous showmen. But he’s much more than Cincinnati’s favorite–and strangest–son. Like Lefty Dizz and other great blues clowns Ferguson wails his songs from the heart. While he’s no great technician–his percussive keyboard attack can get repetitious, and his voice lacks sufficient suppleness to convey a range of emotion outside the bounds of roaring exuberance and back-alley grit–the man is relentless....

It’s a normal rush-hour afternoon in the small northwest-side community called Ravenswood Manor. A van, speeding over the bumpy Wilson Avenue bridge, spins out of control. Kids on bicycles dodge the cars that drift through the stop signs. Intersections of residential tree-lined streets are jammed with traffic. Both factions in the dispute agree that there is something special about Ravenswood Manor. Roughly, its boundaries on the south and north are Montrose and Lawrence avenues, and on the west and east Sacramento Avenue and the north branch of the Chicago River....

“Let’s face it,” says ArLynn Presser. “Living alone and going to work and coming home and eating your food and putting money in your IRA makes [single] people wonder: What’s it for? Marriage is a decision in which the unit is more important than you.” The class is called “How to Find Your Husband.” It costs $30, and it’s the most popular course in the Latin School’s Live & Learn adult-education fund-raising program, beating out such perennial favorites as “A Tour Through the Deep Tunnel Project” and “How to Write a Romance Novel....

Marriage is not a disease. Is it? State senator Beverly Fawell, the Glen Ellyn Republican who sponsored the bill, brushes aside any criticism, saying anything that prevents the spread of AIDS is worth it. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But critics of the law wonder whether testing lovebirds is getting us anywhere. Shouldn’t the state’s limited resources be spent on testing and counseling people who are at high risk–gay men and drug addicts?...

This is one of the classiest and most experimental 3-D efforts from Hollywood–as well as one of the best MGM musicals of the 1950s that didn’t come from the Arthur Freed unit–so it’s good to see it revived in its original form, complete with a stereo sound track. Adapted by Dorothy Kingsley from the successful 1948 Cole Porter stage musical, and directed by the underrated George Sidney, it does interesting things with mirrors, windows, and the relationship between stage and audience, always making sure that a lot of things get thrown at the spectator and often paradoxically exploiting 3-D as an artificial and antirealistic effect....

TERMINAL MADNESS Terminal Madness is a two-part evening consisting first of a film, Trust Me, and then of a live performance, Terminal Madness. Trust Me, the filmed adaptation of one of Grisby’s earlier performance pieces, The Appurtenances Attached Hereto, is a 17-minute miracle. Directed with consummate clarity and precision by Tom Finerty, Trust Me presents Grigsby in a wild array of surreal costumes, ruminating upon his uncertain relationship with the future....

Robert Page seems to have made a mess of things since he left Chicago. The Sun-Times’s former publisher is being sued by his old partners here and his new partners in California. Maybe Page’s big character flaw is his failure to ever choose the right partners. The charges of cronyism and financial recklessness could not have startled anyone who knew Page at the Sun-Times. In 1986 he fronted a syndicate that swung a $145 million leveraged buy-out of the Sun-Times from Rupert Murdoch, and he became president of the company formed to run it....

NO MORE PEACE! Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A fiery Marxist, Toller looked at communism not merely as a formula for a new world order but as a kind of religion. For him it provided the only explanation for the chaos that followed the First World War, in which he had served as a German-army infantryman. His devotion to communism eventually landed him behind bars, accused of treason; and when one of his plays, The Transformation, was so successful that he was offered amnesty, he turned it down because his jailmates, charged with the same crimes, would not be pardoned as well....

OF ONE BLOOD Twenty-four years later, Alan Parker made a profoundly distorted movie about the events in Mississippi–Mississippi Burning–that made the civil rights movement look FBI-inspired and -endorsed. It all but forgot to mention that black people were doing something themselves to improve their lot in the south. Now, playwright Andrew White has come along to set the record straight with Of One Blood, a fairly accurate, often dramatic, sometimes self-indulgent retelling of the events leading up to the murders....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Let me start with the more recent review of When Will the Rats Come to Chew Through Your Anus? This play is not, as Mr. Hayford says, about “the ethical nature of man,” but about a person’s attempt to create something that is better than he is and to justify his own existence through his creations....

Salsa Si, Castro No The Univision Spanish International Network flew a TV crew up from San Antonio to cover the ongoing clash of principles. The report was beamed to households in Spain, Mexico, and Central and South America. In Miami, the story topped the Spanish-language news. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Chicago, so far, has acted just fine. The idea of Viva Chicago, a lakefront Latino music festival, was a terrific one, and the Mayor’s Office of Special Events tried hard to put together a representative planning committee....

Screwed by the Tribune It sure sounded like progress. And sensitively achieved, at that. The Tribune noted that the ten-year renewable contracts signed by most distributors permitted such a change with as little as 30 days’ warning. But “to allow for an orderly transition of business,” five months’ notice was being given. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Hardly a typical distributor, Engle is a former Sun-Times circulation chief....