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Friday 20 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Of those in Harold Washington’s inside circle, Jacky Grimshaw may well have been the most interesting and toughest adviser. “I don’t remember when I met him,” Grimshaw says, although she knows she was a little girl, and he was already a bright reform legislator. Washington’s respect for her was seen in his naming her head of his Intergovernmental Affairs Office, and also in their long, hard, and loud arguments–which ended with a wink and a laugh....

It was hard to get Maitresse Susanne-D’Arcy to set aside some time to talk. On Thanksgiving morning, she was going to a far-off suburb to pick up her mother; on Friday morning, she was going to a far-off suburb to cut down a Christmas tree. But we managed to have a conversation the night before Thanksgiving while she puttered around the kitchen. She was making gingerbread. “I’m an excellent cook,” she said....

LET’S GET LOST This is jazz critic Martin Williams 30 years ago in a Down Beat review of It Could Happen to You: Chet Baker Sings. By this time, the youthful Baker had already established a reputation as a jazz trumpeter of some promise, and later in the same review, Williams concedes that as an improvising musician, he has a “fragile, melodic talent” that is “his own,” even if he “has hardly explored it....

The highly touted Emerson String Quartet, showered with awards of late, returns to town with an intriguing program that features the three Russian composers best known to the West. Prokofiev’s Quartet no. 2 and Shostakovich’s Piano Quintet in G Minor op. 57 were finished only months apart in 1940–at the dawn of the Soviet withdrawal from the international music community–but they’re decades apart in style. The Prokofiev piece, written about the same time as his great opera War and Peace, is a bold quasi-Bartokian experiment, with abundant wonderful effects drawn from folk songs of the Caucasus region, where the composer and his family had temporarily resettled during wartime....

By 8:30 on Thursday morning the future homemakers had returned from their 6 AM, 5K “Fun Run” around Grant Park. A tall, thin girl with blond hair had a suggestion that she shared only with her fellow Illinoisans. “You know, there’s been so many ‘teen pregnancy’ and ‘safe sex’ workshops, right?” There was a little murmur of agreement. “I think they should be spread out a little more.” Everyone nodded, apparently making mental notes to have fewer in the future....

WITHOUT YOU I’M NOTHING With Sandra Bernhard, John Doe, Steve Antin, Lu Leonard, Ken Foree, and Cynthia Bailey. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » If you believe, as I firmly do, that Marilyn Monroe subverts her typecasting and gives a Brechtian performance in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes–a portrait of a predator knowingly using her power–then you may be less than infatuated with Madonna’s postmodernist appropriation of Monroe’s sexpot image, an appropriation that peels away all of the Brechtian irony and commentary to give us a sexpot pure and simple, or at least a sexpot that’s purer and simpler than Monroe’s Lorelei Lee....

BASIC INSTINCT No stars (Worthless) Directed by Paul Verhoeven Written by Joe Eszterhas With Michael Douglas, Sharon Stone, George Dzundza, Jeanne Tripplehorn, Denis Arndt, Leilani Sarelle, and Dorothy Malone. Your relation to oppressed minorities. For your villains, pick an oppressed group that “ordinary” viewers know very little about, and portray them in a way that confirms their worst fears; this isn’t hard because previous serial-killer thrillers have already established firm guidelines for such stereotyping....

INTERNATIONAL THEATRE FESTIVAL at the Blackstone Theatre Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » At the International Theatre Festival this audience attitude was most apparent in reaction to the productions of the State Theatre of Lithuania. From the beginning weeks of the festival, any mention of their projected appearance in Chicago would spark the question, “Are they still coming?” When a problem with their visas delayed their arrival by a few days, rumors circulated of sinister obstacles erected by their governments–a bureaucratic bungle on the part of our government created the delay, but why spoil the opportunity for a good political shudder?...

Trumpeter Freddie Hubbard joins in with the trio led by pianist McCoy Tyner (one of the best trios he’s ever led). Both men have been pivotal to the last 30 years of jazz: Hubbard for his cocky emergence from the Jazz Messengers of the 60s (where he played alongside Wayne Shorter) and his virtuosic melding of complex musical ideas with the call of the blues; Tyner for his stormy, highly percussive keyboard style and his often spellbinding musical presence....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I have lived and worked in the Sheffield for 19 years. I have worked in the bars and restaurants here for 12 years. As a resident who works in the neighborhood I have attended several SNA meetings and read its newsletter regularly. I am also an active member of a couple of local business associations. The Sheffield Neighborhood Association has become a group of self-righteous individuals that encourages the deterioration of the restaurants and bars in the community....

Formed in 1974 by three of Norway’s best instrumentalists (Stig Nilsson, violin, Aage Kvalbein, cello, and Jens Harald Bratlie, piano), the Oslo Trio makes a rare Ame rican appearance as part of the “Chamber Music at North Park” series. The group’s Chicago debut will spotlight the Nordic music for which they are so well known, including Edvard Grieg’s rarely heard Andante con moto in C Minor–one of a mere handful of Grieg chamber scores, and Lasse Thoresen’s Bird of the Heart....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Unwittingly, perhaps, it also exposes the underlying flaw of any number of Chicago’s various theater ensembles. More than once, Custer refers to the members of the ensemble joining together to avoid the “endless heartbreak of auditioning.” In other words, a group of actors who cannot otherwise get jobs join together in order to create their own....

A host of specters is haunting Peter Collier and David Horowitz, and in Destructive Generation: Second Thoughts About the ’60s, they attempt to banish, or at least to come to terms with, four of the ghosts. By my count, they succeed with one and a half, for about a .375 average; that’s not bad for baseball, and may be as good as can be expected in life, at least in lives like theirs....

When Willie Lomax examined the investment record of the Highland Community Bank, he was outraged. Well, not not the bank itself, but its officers. In fact Highland is one of only four black-owned banks in Chicago. And many of its officers–including president George Brokemond and board member Charles Davis–have strong ties to the most important civic groups and organizations in the black community, particularly Operation PUSH. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

“We gon’ eat steak today, Home?” Hayes Thornton wants to know. The practice tee upon which Worley and Thornton stand, at the Cog Hill Golf and Country Club in southwest suburban Lemont, is one of the largest in the Chicago area–200 yards wide, with hitting positions for 100 golfers. Later this cool June morning, dozens of golfers will be swatting balls off the tee, salting the range with their shots. Now, though, at 7:15 on a Monday, there are only Worley and two others....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » References to “shockingly irresponsible artists” doing “all kinds of crass, undignified, ‘inhuman’ things” obscures the work with the critic’s judgements instead. These tend to present the audience with unsolicited impressions of a defensive and intolerant personality. Why should any past or future audience entertain the notion of what Mr. Hayford approves as “responsible” art? I only bother to comment on the rest of the review because it unwittingly implicates me personally and unfairly as witness to support its negative conclusions....

The 20 companies in this first-time event (presented in conjunction with the fifth annual Bucktown Arts Fest) may not define the state of avant-garde theater on Chicago, but they offer a look at the diverse visions that operate under that very loose category. Performances are held at three venues: the Garage, 1843 W. North; the Firehouse, 1625 N. Damen; and the Society for New Things, 1573 N. Milwaukee. (A symposium on “The Effect of Avant Theatre in Chicago,” whose panelists include Reader contributors Anthony Adler, Lawrence Bommer, and Albert Williams, will be held on Monday, August 20, at the Firehouse....

THE LAST PENNANT BEFORE ARMAGEDDON Then we have Canadian writer W.P. Kinsella, who has based his whole writing career on revealing the extent to which an increasingly secular and alienated America has projected its unexpressed religious feelings onto baseball. In Shoeless Joe (made into the movie Field of Dreams) Kinsella uses all the traditional elements of biblical prophecy—mystic visions, voices from heaven (“Build it and he will come”), even visitations by angels and long-dead ancestors—as inspiration for an Iowa farmer to build a baseball diamond in his field....

APARTMENT ZERO With Colin Firth, Hart Bochner, Dora Bryan, Liz Smith, Fabrizio Bentivoglio, James Telfer, Mirella D’Angelo, Juan Vitali, and Francesca d’Aloja. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Visibly influenced by Roman Polanski (The Tenant) and Alfred Hitchcock (Strangers on a Train and Psycho), and marked by strong parallels with Claude Chabrol (Les cousins) and Pier Paolo Pasolini (Teorema), this movie is never really at the mercy of any of these touchstones; rather it uses or reflects each of them to carry the story a certain distance, but only so that Donovan can pick it up again and proceed further along his own route....

UNAUTHORIZED BECKETT This did not promise to be the trivial meeting of the minds this description may suggest. Baker is a veteran of several avant-garde productions with Theatre of the Reconstruction, including Shepard’s The Unseen Hand and resident playwright Scott Turner’s Where the People Have No Eyes. Pike’s most recent appearance was in Prop Theatre’s Mass Murder, for which he won a Jeff citation; before that he was in William S....