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Lead Story Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In March, Florence Schreiber Power, a 44-year-old administrative law judge in Ewing, New Jersey, on trial for shoplifting two watches, had her psychiatrist testify that she was under stress at the time of the incidents. The doctor said Power did not know what she was doing “from one minute to the next,” for the following reasons: a recent auto accident, a traffic ticket, a new-car purchase, overwork, her husband’s kidney stones, his asthma (and the breathing machine that occupies their bedroom), menopausal hot flashes, an “ungodly” vaginal itch, a bad rash, a fear of breast and anal cancer, a fear of dental surgery, her son’s asthma and need for a breathing machine, mother’s and aunt’s illnesses, the process of planning a party for her parents’ 50th wedding anniversary, the process of planning Thanksgiving dinner for 20 relatives, the purchase of 200 gifts for Christmas and Hanukkah, her attempt to sell her house without a real estate agent, a lawsuit she had against her wallpaper cleaners, the purchase of furniture that had to be returned, and a toilet in her house that was constantly running....

The first day Donna Blue Lachman was in Haiti, a hotel receptionist, who also happened to be a psychic, stopped her in the lobby. There in the lobby of the huge hotel, Lachman fainted dead away. Because she felt like the woman was right. And for the rest of her trip, she took extensive notes. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Lachman, now artistic director of the Blue Rider Theatre, was eventually awarded a fellowship from the Illinois Arts Council to write After Mountains, More Mountains: The Haiti Stories, a play based on her experiences in Haiti that opened in March 1989....

With former avant-gardists making rock videos or PBS specials, getting tenure or government grants, independent cinema has become something of an institution. It is not surprising that an alternative alternative cinema has emerged, created mostly by Super-8 filmmakers working with little money or recognition. Few can afford to print their films so they show the originals, complete with splices. Most never went to film school; many didn’t like it and never finished....

THE BAKER’S WIFE If one consistent element runs through the work of musical-comedy librettist Joseph Stein, it’s an interest in common people living in close-knit communities. His scripts for such musicals as Plain and Fancy, Take Me Along, Zorba, and Fiddler on the Roof focus on the experience of small-town life, offering sentiment and social criticism in equal parts. The plots of these shows are generally motored by an intrusive element that endangers the homogeneity and security of these environments: an Amish settlement is rocked by the return of a prodigal son in Plain and Fancy; a quaint New England town is disrupted by a drunk in the Eugene O’Neill-inspired Take Me Along; murder rends the social fabric of a Greek village in Zorba....

Tales of entomology, from the Illinois Natural History Survey Reports (September 1988): “With this knowledge, distribution of ant species across Illinois counties is understood more clearly. The next step is a review of the extensive soil, leaf litter, and rotten wood samples housed at the Survey.” OK as long as they aren’t part of the structure. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Developers in Uptown will not have the advantages that those in other communities had,” according to the Chicago Reporter (November 1988)....

Where does the expression “the whole nine yards” come from? Even Walter Payton has to make ten yards for a first down. Since when does nine yards equal 100 percent effort? I trust your answer is not sexual. No enhancer I’ve ever seen advertised promises anything like that. –Russell Ewert, N. Magnolia Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » One guy told me that the expression comes from the nautical term “yard,” meaning one of the horizontal poles that hold up the sails on a square-rigged sailing ship....

THE THREE MUSKETEERS Nearly every twist and turn of the original novel appears in this play: the rivalry between King Louis and Cardinal Richelieu, the (perhaps) unrequited love affair between Queen Anne and the Duke of Buckingham, and the various attempts of Richelieu and his evil retinue to embarrass the queen, estrange the king, and thus prevent the conception of an heir to the throne. Call to Adventure follows the action of the first half of the novel, ending in an exciting race to England by our four heroes to retrieve a pair of diamond tags given to the Duke of Buckingham by the queen in a moment of indiscretion....

TINY ALICE Albee describes Tiny Alice as a “metaphysical dream play,” and his description is apt, for, like a dream, its meaning exists on two levels. On the surface level, a lawyer for the extremely wealthy Miss Alice visits the cardinal and announces that Miss Alice intends to donate $100 million a year to the church for the next 20 years. The lawyer and the cardinal are fierce rivals who mock and humiliate each other the way George and Martha do in Albee’s best-known play, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?...

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The author herself realized that as she related Margery Davis’s sad story, there were a lot of loopholes in it, but as she didn’t want to seem too gullible–she assures us that she herself didn’t believe it; as opposed to this though, we, the readers, have realized that owing to the fact that the author didn’t have this experience at all, is the reason the story sounds unbelievable....

“DEGENERATE ART”: THE FATE OF THE AVANT-GARDE IN NAZI GERMANY It should come as no surprise then that a totalitarian regime would mount an attack on modern art. If the goal of such regimes is a populace that does not think for itself and is easy to control, any expression that reminds a person of his existence as a particular individual with particular traits, rather than as a member of the group, is a threat to the power and authority of the state....

A DANCE TRIBUTE TO MICHAEL JORDAN Gus Giordano, the doyen of Chicago jazz dance, has always been fascinated by the social phenomena that stir the public. Several years ago, for example, at the height of our curiosity about motorcycles and bikers, he choreographed a provocative piece about Harleys and the men and women whose sometimes violent lives centered around the machines. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This year Giordano has created A Dance Tribute to Michael Jordan, the highlight of a program by the same name....

“Look what I got!” screams the title of Betty Carter’s most recent album. She’s got her first major record contract in nearly 30 years; the CD reissue of several albums from her own Bet-Car label; an appearance on big-time TV (the Cosby show, this past Thanksgiving); and an exaggerated, expressionistic, and often breathtaking style that remains daring after all this time. She sings the slowest ballads of the century, with elastic phrasing that lags several measures (not mere beats) behind the rhythm, and then scats at tempi that scare some horn players....

CHAOS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The theory of chaos values inclusion over exclusion. Wholeness over dissection. Dynamics over stasis. The paradoxical over the linear. It’s science finally discovering what Walt Whitman, William Blake, Meister Eckehart, and the Buddha knew all along. But what it’s got to do with the Lifeline show called Chaos, I can’t exactly say. Written by the quartet of Christina Calvit, Louise Freistadt, John Szostek, and Steve Totland, Chaos seems to consider itself a theatrical realization of ideas associated with chaos theory; I’d be more inclined to think of it as a theatrical realization of certain warm-and-runny, sweetly mystical feelings that ooze around that theory....

The friendly and melodic Scottish foursome Del Amitri traffic in a throwbacky, uncomplicated pop rock from an earlier time; the slight lilt in singer Justin Currie’s voice and the sometimes jaunty instrumentation remind me strongly of the Sanford/Townsend Band’s “Smoke From a Distant Fire.” Currie’s songs are always serviceable, and sometimes–like on a lot of 1990’s Waking Hours and rather less of the new Change Everything–they can pass for serious writing....

IT WAS THIRTY YEARS AGO TODAY The better fare supports the show’s theme, abuses of authority in America. Take the sketch about the petty tyranny of two Wrigley Field security guards (Chris Farley and Timothy Meadows): only a few feet apart, they breathlessly communicate over walkie-talkies, bark out sinister code terms like “sector” and “pre-entrance area,” and sadistically hassle two friends of Harry Caray (“Read my lips, stay behind the line!...

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » One of the unfortunate consequences of litigation is that those involved are always advised not to speak to the media, and so Marj Byler is likely in a position where she is unable to defend herself publicly. The inherent unfairness of these circumstances led me to write this defense, not of Amnesty International but of Marj Byler....

MEMORANDUM Fr: William Wormwood Fare Chaos. As you no doubt remember, between April and July we made no fewer than five announcements regarding “experimental fare” plans, each more confusing than the last. In April we came up with the plan in which all fares were cut by 50 cents but transfers were eliminated. Three announcements later, in late June, this plan had mutated into a complicated three-tier structure with different fares for rush hour, off-peak, and weekend buses and trains....

On May 12, 1989, when word got out that Paul Glick was closing his prestigious Michigan Avenue salon, chaos erupted among his employees. Hairstylists normally poised and sophisticated began scurrying from one work station to another, cursing and complaining. “That son of a bitch!” one screamed. “I knew it I knew it I knew it! How can he do this to us?” Another young stylist gazed out the window down onto the Magnificent Mile and quietly wept....

SARAFINA! Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » You would be hard-pressed to glean from Sarafina! even a few meager historical facts–for example, that the vast majority of the demonstrators were schoolchildren protesting the government’s attempt to use Afrikaans as the exclusive means of instructing black children, an attempt seen by many as a way of limiting the employment opportunities of South Africa’s blacks to low-paying servant work....

SWAMP FOXES Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Swamp Foxes is a behind-the-tube look at prime-time TV. The once popular TV series Swamp Foxes is slipping in the ratings. Jim, the director of programming, and Roger, the writer, plot to salvage their careers by setting up a fall guy, Doug, a Michigan scholar and author whose unsolicited scripts can be blamed for the show’s failure....