Lead Story Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In June a 41-year-old female patient in Kansas City accused her gynecologist, Dr. Frank E. Baum, of having hypnotized her so that she would have “telephone sex” with him. She said that she went to him complaining of a pain in her side and that he later left a series of phone messages saying, “You are going to become dependent on me....
We head back down the corridor, past a second stairwell Richardson says she won’t use. “Stick your head in there,” she says. I do, and yank it back as the stench of urine hits my nose. The girl shakes her head again. “But my sister might know him. I can ask her when she gets home.” Later the sister calls the clinic to say she’s never heard of Andrew Cole....
CHICAGO SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA Solti’s stay was short this season–only two weeks of concerts–largely because the performances were really warm-ups for the orchestra’s east-coast tour last week. Yet because of the enormous weight and importance of the works performed, the length of his stay seems irrelevant. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » There was a time when Arnold Schoenberg would also have been viewed as an early-20th-century giant–and he still is to some extent....
SOME THINGS YOU NEED TO KNOW BEFORE THE WORLD ENDS: A FINAL EVENING WITH THE ILLUMINATI Why is it? “When we’re talking to God, we’re praying. When God talks to us, we’re schizophrenic.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The setting is a bombed-out church in some not-so-distant nightmare future. Pat Robertson is president, Richard Nixon is vice president (a combination that sounds less strange when you recall the stories of Nixon in his final days, leading spontaneous prayer sessions in the Oval Office)....
What’s Going on at Inside Chicago? We’re a long time getting around to writing about Inside Chicago. But it looked so low rent when it debuted in 1987. And we were preoccupied with Chicago Times, which soon appeared and has distracted us ever since with its stormy misadventures. Clearly, Gershon Bassman did some of the key things right. “They seem to have focused on some reachable, identifiable audience segments,” says Jim Dolan, a media consultant who knows Chicago well....
From the pages of Snowbound, the zine with ice in its veins ¥ Issue number 1 (3023 N. Clark #708, Chicago, IL 60657-5205; $4.75) I moved away from Chicago in 1992. I was going crazy from being a sixth-year student in art school, and I was bored of the art scene and artists. One hot July weekend, I took a vacation with my cousins to Las Vegas and decided to stay....
ANOTHER ANTIGONE Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But Gurney does more in his plays than merely mirror upper-class attitudes and mores. For one, Gurney, who’s a tenured professor at MIT, keeps the WASP power elite at an ironic distance in his work, spending as much time puncturing his puffed-up WASP protagonists as he spends puffing them up. For another, he has an exquisite sense of dramatic structure....
Can This Bookstore Be Saved? We asked for the clinical details. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “In most cases that’s probably true,” he said. “The exception to that, probably, is Latin American literature.” Last spring Guild issued an appeal that promised “for just $10 per month, we can adopt this bookstore” over the signatures of Gwendolyn Brooks, Studs Terkel, Andre Schiffrin, Jonathan Kozol, and Dave Marsh....
To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Apparently Jean Peterman [Letters, October 20] misunderstood my October 6 letter. I did not say or imply that prochoice supporters fail to advocate a whole range of reproductive options. On the contrary, I recognize and respect the efforts of prochoicers who strive to create better choices for women and children even as they defend the legal availability of abortion....
You know it’s going to be a bad afternoon when a female physician with decent-looking fingernails introduces herself with a firm handshake and then, just minutes later, says, “I’ve got a hunch it’s your prostate.” “Do you have any other symptoms?” the nurse practitioner asked, as if having to pack a burning 16-pound testicle in ice and carry the thing around in a sling wasn’t awful enough to warrant a few hundred million units of penicillin with no other questions asked....
THE LIFEWORK OF JUAN DIAZ and GIANNI SCHICCHI Ray Bradbury used this culture that surrounds death in Mexico as a springboard for his short story “The Lifework of Juan Diaz.” He also added another well-known aspect of Mexican death culture, mummification as it was practiced in Guanajuato. Bradbury had seen the mummy catacombs there after the war and was so fascinated–if not horrified–by the sight of them that they became the basis for at least two of his short stories....
IN THE FLESH To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there’s the rub; / For in that sleep of death what dreams may come. –from Shakespeare’s Hamlet Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Set in north London’s Pentonville Prison, said to be the resting ground of such notorious executed killers as Dr. Crippen, In the Flesh concerns the consciousness-altering relationship between two inmates. Cleveland Smith is a seedy career con, a small-time dope dealer wrapped in an “armor of indifference” against whatever pain or pleasure the world might visit on him....
When German composer Gerhard Staebler heard Chicago poet Angela Jackson read one of her poems at an artists’ retreat two years ago in San Francisco, he was inspired. Dedicated to four black American women writers, “Warriors” addressed the courage of groups fighting for political freedom. Staebler liked its message so much that he composed a choral arrangement around it. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » About the same time, local composer Annie Randall was similarly inspired by Sylvia Plath’s poem “The Applicant,” a bitter description of marriage as a cold, mechanical business transaction....
MY CHILDREN! MY AFRICA! The play opens with a debate between two prize students: Thami Mbikwana, a master orator from a poor black township, and Isabel Dyson, a white student visiting from a neighboring school. Their debate over whether women should receive the same education as men is moderated by the brilliant Mr. M, who warns them that they should never let their argument devolve into a shouting match–that they should always rely on reason to express their views....
Lead Story Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Police in Dryden, Michigan, report that in July a man frustrated at finding a pay phone out of order walked to his truck to retrieve a gun and fired “four or five” shots into the receiver before driving off. Last June in Rock Island, Illinois, James Steward, 29, was accused by police of threatening two relatives at gunpoint in their home, shooting their TV set, and fleeing....
Jazz is the music of the young, goes the old cliche; it surely helps to have plenty of stamina and energy for the late-night, sometimes all-night Outerfest shows. But with this year’s Chicago Jazz Festival severely truncated, the mostly free-jazz Outerfest assumes special importance. The music begins sometime after 10:30, when the main festival in Grant Park closes down, and along with the musicians on the program, sitters-in are welcome (Lester Bowie, Ray Anderson, Yosuke Yamashita, Chico Freeman, and Reggie Nicholson have joined the postfest jams in previous years)....
CHICAGO DANCE MEDIUM For one thing, the Chicago Dance Medium appears to be trying to reduce dance principles to some pretty elementary levels–not technically but emotionally and intellectually. But do we teach children poetry by reading them greeting-card verses? Do we teach music by playing the latest Burger King jingle? Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Chicago Dance Medium’s artistic director, Rosemary Doolas, choreographed three of this evening’s works; all of them display her basically sunny outlook and nice feeling for music....
To the editors: Again on p. 20, Sr. Connie refers us to “good economists . . . and financial wizards” who must surely know how to get people off of welfare for good. Are we to take this seriously? Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Once more on p. 20 Sr. Connie tells us that 61% of people in shelters are there because they’ve been evicted (no source for this statistic)....
TALES OF THE LOST FORMICANS As flies to wanton boys. . . . –King Lear Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I was reminded of Marvin, Ruth, Bessie, Lee, and the others when I saw the new Lifeline Theatre production of Constance Congdon’s play Tales of the Lost Formicans. Like McPherson, Congdon gives us an average American family in an average state of entropy. Dad’s got Alzheimer’s; Mom’s got Dad; and their grown daughter Cathy has got custody of her teenaged son Eric, who’s got serious difficulty adapting to his parents’ divorce....
Spread across an arid plain that lies between the Pacific coast and the Andean foothills of southern Peru, an enormous tangle of forms, the “Nazca Lines,” poses one of the world’s most tantalizing archaeological mysteries. Here a 200-square-mile expanse of land is embossed with piles of rock and shell arranged in lines that form more than a hundred giant geometric shapes and figures–animals, birds, insects, plants–some of which become coherent only when looked down on from an altitude of at least 1,000 feet....
