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To the editors: Bryan Miller’s Neighborhood News on Unity Temple (October 13) is full of misstatements of fact which could easily have been avoided by consulting actual documents instead of relying on oral reports by those trying to stampede the congregation of the Unitarian-Universalist Church in Oak Park into accepting the demands of the Board of the Unity Temple Restoration Foundation (UTRF). Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » UTRF was not organized by a group of architects, etc....

Lead Story For almost a year California’s employment-disability agency paid wealthy physician Gershon Hepner of Century City $266 a month on his stress claim. The district attorney believes Hepner’s “stress” was brought on by the fraud, grand theft, and tax evasion he’s been charged with. Hepner pleaded guilty to all of them and is awaiting sentencing. State law entitled Hepner to the money because another physician certified that the stress was “job related....

Lead Story A 27-year-old man was put in jail in San Mateo County, California, for theft in November after police spotted him leaving a store with a bag full of stolen goods. Also in the bag was a plastic inflatable doll that police said the man must have brought from home. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » While Jeff Davis, 26, was trying to make a deposit at an automatic night-deposit machine at a bank in Lawrenceville, Georgia, last year, the machine clamped down on his arm and he had to be rescued by police....

There is no small note of pride in DeVon Rose’s voice when he calls his Bird’s Eye View Museum “the world’s largest display made from toothpicks and popsicle sticks.” Like any town, it started out small. Twenty-eight years ago, when Rose was living in Elkhart, Indiana, he built his first model: an accessory for his sons’ model railroad setup. It was a large model of his father-in-law’s workplace, a grain mill on the outskirts of Wakarusa, a small town ten miles south of Elkhart....

“How delightful it would be if he could remain exactly as he is, while the portrait aged and withered in his stead,” said the painter Basil Ward in the comment that inspired Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. The characters in Lawrence Steger’s new solo performance piece also try to stave off their inevitable ends through various poses. In Stave, a clown dressed in a white mantilla creates puppets with his hands whose fascistic dialogue espouses a world in which everyone else’s imperfections but theirs will be punished; a terry-cloth-swathed rock star lounges in her dressing room and regales her visitors with pointless egotistical humor, unable to stop being “on” after the show is ended; a drag queen in a white T-shirt lip-synchs to David Bowie; a disenchanted Catholic launches into a rebellious tirade against Christ in a selection from Down Under, by the Victorian decadent J....

Farming just isn’t what it used to be. Last month McCorkle School at 4421 S. State hosted Illinois Farm Bureau consultant Tom Miller and his dog Sparky. “This Week…in the Chicago Public Schools” (March 23) promoted the presentation, noting that Sparky would show “how animals sniff illegal substances in baggage at airports as Miller discusses various illegal substances and why they are prohibited with fourth- and fifth-grade students”–all this “as part of the ‘Agriculture in the Classroom’ program...

One of the highlights of my year is an all-girl backpacking trip with a group of friends. I mentioned this at a party recently, only to have some (male) geek give me dire warnings about women camping while on their periods. He claimed bears are irresistibly attracted to the scent. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Always wise to discriminate in re party chitchat, Kate; you never know when you might bump into a (shudder) non-Straight Dope reader....

NEWS FROM LAKE LILLIAN Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » John has kindly enclosed an informative booklet published by an affiliate of First State Bank of Lake Lillian, no doubt the same outfit that sent our original correspondent the 25-cent check that occasioned my brilliant disquisition on corporate cash management and boondock banking (February 24). Lake Lillian, we learn, is the “Gateway to the Little Crow Lake Region from the South....

THE WOMAN WHO KEPT GETTING STUCK Nicole Hollander’s comic strip Sylvia has a character called the Woman Who Worries Too Much. Her worries are wildly creative–things like whether the breakdown of the ozone layer will affect the radicchio crop so that she won’t have a good source for vitamins. But in her chic dress and haircut she’s laughably distant from any real problems. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Lauri Macklin worries a lot too, but she focuses on the big problems....

L’ATALANTE With Michel Simon, Dita Parlo, Jean Daste, Gilles Margaritis, and Louis Lefevre. The popular French stage and movie actor Michel Simon, who had already appeared in four Jean Renoir films, was selected to play Pere Jules, and the German film star Dita Parlo, who would subsequently play a lonely war widow in Renoir’s La grande illusion, was cast as Juliette; this package and the script were handed to Vigo, along with a request to include some songs in the film....

A NIGHT AT DYKES WHO DATE The first piece on this double bill of one-acts is a monologue, A Night at Dykes Who Date. I have considered this play’s value as entertainment, as propaganda, and even as a community service, and I’m left with one overwhelming response: boredom. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The setting is a lesbian dating service. A woman enters, takes a seat, and responds to tape-recorded inquiries reminiscent of The Dating Game....

Over the last decade text has forced its way into visual art with a frequency not seen since medieval allegorical paintings. The faith contemporary artists put in words is an odd development in an age of troubling illiteracy. For these artists, most of them politically inclined, text fills the gaps on what viewers might have missed from the visuals alone, reducing art to its most literal meaning. For those who use words to obfuscate, like the legions of artists who fill canvases with non sequiturs, written language becomes a mysterious symbol, like Masonic signs to the uninitiated....

BORDERLINE So what else is new? ask all those who have read The Bonfire of the Vanities and know all about the sordid underside of life in the fast lane. But playwright John Bishop is not interested simply in mapping territory already explored (in the 1960 film The Apartment, among other places). Through the device of a lecturer-commentator, we learn of the Graham family’s legacy of violence and flight. From its beginnings in the region forming the boundary between England and Scotland, the Graham clan was forced to endure innumerable clashing armies and the accompanying rape, siege, and sack....

Friday 7 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It’s impossible to tell how many gays died during the Third Reich, but one Gestapo figure indicates that between 1936 and 1941 approximately 41,000 men were convicted for homosexual felonies. Many more gay men perished unregistered and unrecorded in early concentration camps such as Mauthausen and Fuhlsbuttel. Martin Sherman’s play Bent tells the story of Max and Horst–two men who meet, make love, and die in Dachau....

Friday 16 During Run-D.M.C.’s 1988 tour, riots erupted in Los Angeles, New York, Pittsburgh, and Saint Louis, leaving 39 persons hurt and sticking rap music with a reputation for inciting violence. KRS-ONE defies that stereotype with his hit single “Stop the Violence.” Last year he pulled together a group of rappers to record “Self-Destruction,” another song designed to raise the consciousness of urban youth. Proceeds went straight to the National Urban League’s programs against crime, particularly black-on-black crime....

To the editors: N. Sheridan Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I’ve been waiting for your letter. Emerson once wrote, “To be great is to be misunderstood.” After reading your letter, I feel great! It sure took you long enough to write though. Ten years to be exact. That’s how long I’ve been doing cartoons for the Reader. Being the avid reader of the Reader that you say you are, you must go into one major spazz attack when you get to the phone-sex ads!...

Exercises in Absence The latter days of Keith Richards’s career are defined by things not there. Note the almost entirely decayed structure of his face and body: cheeks almost gone, eyes sunk back in his head, teeth seemingly receding. He’s our most beloved public wraith. His solo concert tour (and album) four years ago was an exercise in absence: onstage at the Aragon he was interacting with something that wasn’t there, dancing around a point in the center of the stage that was unquestionably empty, yet also somehow occupied....

You can hear an indigo bunting singing from a block away. Not only hear it, but see it as well. Indigo buntings seek the highest branches for their song perches, and they prefer dead branches with no leaves to obstruct the world’s view of their bright blue plumage. The closest human equivalent to this fusion of sex and aggression is the old Bo Diddley song “Who Do You Love,” which begins: “I walk 47 miles of barbed wire / Use a cobra snake for a necktie / I got a brand-new house on the roadside made from rattlesnake hide / Got a brand-new chimney up on top made out of a human skull / Now come on take a little walk with me honey and tell me, Who do you love?...

Green Lake, Wisconsin, a leisurely three-and-a-half-hour drive northwest of Chicago, is probably best described as a resort community–a vacation spot–but it will likely seem a little quiet to anyone expecting the usual resort-community diversions. Whether this is because of its location–in the dead center of Wisconsin, surrounded by farmland–or because of the abiding influence of the nearby American Baptist Assembly, one cannot say for certain; probably both reasons are viable. In any case, the lake is the area’s greatest resource, and most diversions concern some kind of boating....

The second feature of Zhang Yimou (Red Sorghum), perhaps the best-known “Fifth Generation” director from the People’s Republic of China, is even more beautiful and complex than its predecessor, both in its ravishing uses of color and its grim critique of feudalism. Winner of a Golden Hugo at the 1990 Chicago Film Festival (under the title Secret Love, Hidden Faces), it is the first Chinese-language film to have been nominated for an Oscar, although the Chinese government tried to disqualify it and has prevented it from receiving any public screenings domestically, apparently because of its pessimism and its failure to provide any role models....