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PERSONALS Mind you, Personals never gets oppressive. In fact, its dark undercurrent is often at odds with the show’s many bouncy, witty tunes. Written by a committee of three book writers and lyricists (David Crane, Seth Friedman, and Marta Kauffman) and six composers (William Dreskin, Joel Phillip Friedman, Seth Friedman, Alan Menken, Stephen Schwartz, and Michael Skloff), Personals quickly casts off its implied theme–how newspaper personals influence love–in favor of the more universal topic of love, sweet and sour....

DREAMINGS: THE ABORIGINAL ART OF AUSTRALIA There is no single form of aboriginal art, but the same spirituality inspires each piece. The subjects of each painting and sculpture in the exhibit are “Dreamings,” the supernatural ancestral beings who once lived everywhere as rocks, fire, yams, birds, water, human beings, dead bodies–even as a sensation like itchiness. But the Dreamings are also the ancestral beings’ spirits, which are eternal and embodied in everything that now exists....

Last April Alex Seith and Thom Serafin had a funeral to go to out in Sterling, Illinois. Tom Davis, who’d sold them WSDR AM back in 1987, had passed on. “I was in the middle of the third decade of my rosary,” Serafin tells us, “and he came in and insisted I leave the church. I wondered, what the heck is so important? It turned out we had a consultant working at the radio station who was involved in new formats....

“We tend to think of time as a smooth-flowing river,” writes IIT’s Michael Davis in Perspectives on the Professions (August). “History is different. It does not so much flow as jerk along like a worn commuter train, stopping often and only rarely moving fast. This year was one of the rare moments.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Your tax dollars at play. “The data on economic activity in enterprise zones reported by [the state Department of Commerce and Community Affairs] are all of the ‘good news’ variety,” according to the Illinois Tax Foundation’s new report, Enterprise Zones in Illinois....

Now is perhaps the best time to celebrate the 1985 Chicago Bears, champions of Super Bowl XX. Because if there was ever any doubt that that was a great team–a great team not only in what it accomplished but in its comprising a unique and enduring group of characters–the season just completed last Sunday proved the point once and for all. The core of that team remained intact through this season, and–in all likelihood–it will remain on into next season....

ALL YOU CAN EAT AND OTHER HUMAN WEAKNESSES “All You Can Eat and Other Human Weaknesses,” the Chicago premiere of Xsight! Performance Group, is quite simply the most electric debut concert I’ve ever seen. A one-time-only, whacked-out performance event created by Brian Jeffery, Timothy O’Slynne, and Mary Ward, “All You Can Eat” comprises dances and comic sketches within the framework of a 60s spy-show parody. Yes, the concept is as hokey as it sounds, but it enables the trio to produce a performance that is consistently unpretentious, entertaining, and accessible, and often intelligent, thought-provoking, and resonant....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In response to your May 12 lead article, “Babies Wanted,” I feel that a very serious point is being missed. The couples involved want babies, and claim to have always wanted families. They want babies to care for and show “love.” A few years ago, these aging yuppies would have said that their career was fulfilling enough, but now, with the advent of thirtysomething and baby boom, caring for babies has become hip, in, the thing to do....

OUT OF ORDER It’s no accident that two very funny farces currently running take place in hotel suites. Hotels are perfect settings for farce: even the classiest joints have an inescapable taint of naughtiness–hotels are where you go to do things you can’t do at home. And hotels have doors. Lots of doors, leading to all kinds of places, great for slamming, running in and out of, and hiding illicit lovers and dead bodies....

Sculptor Margot McMahon wanted to build a testament to some of Chicago’s finer citizens and make it a family project. She called her father the artist, her brother the photographer, and her friend the writer. Together they created “Just Plain Hardworking,” a show of drawings, sculpture, photographs, and brief histories that document the lives of ten longtime Chicago residents. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The idea for the show emerged from a dinner McMahon had with Egan, a family friend, in November of 1987....

Since the day in 1942 when he was expelled from high school in Yumping, China, Chen Chan Cheng, proprietor of the Peking Book House in Evanston, has been following a calling: to educate himself and the rest of the world. “Where have you been?” Cheng asks buoyantly, trotting toward the customer and cradling her hand before the door can shut behind her. Cheng treats all his customers –most of them regulars–with the same affection....

To the editors. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » As a former psychiatric nurse whose experience was still in an era (’66-’68) of hushed-voice awe of Freud, and as one who experienced much of Masson’s isolation when I voiced frequent reservations about the therapy experience as I observed it, I found much to agree with in the article. My own objections at that time took a slightly different course–it seemed that one pathology was being replaced with another (the frequent “out-of-it” syndrome on admission being replaced with fulminating hatred of whomever was seen as responsible for their illness as the initial symptoms were allayed with pharmaceutical therapies); the ignoring of much research even then available that seemed to point to genetic or biological precipitants; and the disgusting attempts on the part of staff and therapists to fit retroactively one’s case history to the diagnosis on the patient history, among other things....

The drummer who composes has always been rather rare in jazz, but in recent years Damon Short has demonstrated that the species is by no means endangered. As a percussionist he usually plays careful, craftsmanlike accompaniments; at his best, though, he engages in truly exciting interplay with his soloists. As a composer he’s not exactly eclectic–he’s obviously listened selectively to the best post-hard-bop composers. On the other hand, he’s hard to pinpoint: often his scores are darkly hued, sometimes they’re merrily animated, they frequently stimulate improvisers to distinctive solos and occasionally to structured collective improvisations....

FLESH AND BLOOD Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Allan is a reckless 17-year-old who boozes and tokes as if he doesn’t think he’ll turn 20. Sex, which he has with a lot of women, makes up for what he believes life has denied him. Allan’s one anchor is his older brother Jim, a 26-year-old gay man who is in every other way a very straight arrow....

The more theater I see, the more I’m convinced there is a direct relation between simplicity and power. The simpler the performance–the less encumbered it is with inessential props, costumes, scene changes, sound cues, elaborate multimedia effects, arcane performance theories–the more directly the work speaks to the audience. Which is why I am so taken with the work of Kenny Lerner and Peter Cook, who perform under the name Flying Words Project....

If there’s a musician’s musician in blues, it’s Matt “Guitar” Murphy. Murphy developed his style in the churning, innovative postwar Memphis blues scene, where the rough sounds of traditionalists like Howlin’ Wolf coexisted uneasily with the slicker, more sophisticated music being developed by artists like Little Junior Parker, B.B. King, and Bobby “Blue” Bland. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Despite his impeccable reputation among musicians and aficionados, however, Murphy has never received the popular acclaim that other, lesser talents have come to enjoy....

SUNNY McGlinn isn’t just a scholar-conductor who knows where to find musical gold, he also knows how to restore it to first luster. McGlinn’s mine was a Secaucus, New Jersey, warehouse, a building that to music lovers is what Tut’s tomb was to Egyptologists. In 1982 crates were found there filled with lost and/or forgotten original scores by Victor Herbert, Cole Porter, the Gershwins, Richard Rodgers, and Jerome Kern. McGlinn was among the first to see the trove; with tender care he gleaned from it the material that fueled Carnegie Hall’s 1985 Jerome Kern Centennial Festival, featuring the three romps Oh, Boy!...

Lottie Da says every woman’s fantasy is to be either a nun or a slut. “I always wanted to be a prostitute. That was my fantasy life. But I never was–because I didn’t need to be,” she concludes. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Lottie Da, the former Lottie Jo Meyers, a graduate of South Shore High School and the University of Illinois at Chicago (when it was still called Circle), says her interest in prostitutes and other “bad girl” characters in the movies began in her teens in the 60s, when she spent time living in the Playboy mansion....

This 1927 silent vehicle for Greta Garbo, which costars John Gilbert, doesn’t make too much sense as an adaptation of Anna Karenina, Tolstoy’s great novel about adultery. At least half of the plot–everything involving the character Levin–is pared away in Frances Marion and Lorna Moon’s script, and the direction, by Edmund Goulding, is more serviceable than inspired. The real reason you should see this, apart from Garbo’s imperishable radiance, is that Chicago Symphony Orchestra violinist Arnold Brostoff has composed a lovely original score for the film that members of the CSO will play while he conducts....

AT THE DROP OF A HAT . . . April 24-26 and May 1-3 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Both pieces begin with stark, startling images. For At the Drop of a Hat . . ., the audience enters the dark performance space to see projected images of grass and two truncated, seemingly running legs on a screen. Nearly centered on the stage is Orlin, statuelike and about eight or nine feet tall in a long, skin-tight green dress....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Perhaps no show in the history of entertainment is without flaw. But come on, Tom. Of course the costumes will consist of fringed vests and bell bottoms–this is a 60’s revival! Of course a lot of the guys will be wearing wigs. Of course almost all of the cast is under twenty-five and “weren’t there” (this is 1988, and most readers do possess basic math skills)....