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AA Meat Market, 2933 N. Lincoln: “You won’t believe this but I got into corporal spanking just a few weeks ago and I’m so happy,” said a short, round woman in a black cocktail jacket. Her eyes were shining. She was talking to Aimee, the love reporter, who travels all over the globe gathering stories of romance. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Aimee was with her friend Mel, a businessman in his late 30s who likes to be tied up....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A couple of years back, we had occasion to rent a GM car. When we got out of this car with the headlights on, there was a sensor of some sort that detected lights on, door open, which in turn activated a device, to wit, a buzzer. Nifty, huh? However, on our Toyota, when I open the driver’s door with the headlights on, a sensor detects same and activates a device, to wit, a shutoff switch....

THE KEY TO BEIN’ ME Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » None is a professional performer. And when they’re feeling unsure of themselves, they tend to mumble. The songs are sung earnestly but not always on key. Every once in a while one of them will break into a great big grin during a dance number that’s obviously going awry. By that time, unless your heart is made of stone, you’re grinning back....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » WHAT IT ACTUALLY LOOKS LIKE! That is what separates 20th Century conceptual art from what we recognize as greatness in the arts of other periods and civilizations. We do not consider a particular medieval painting great just because its subject matter depicts the Madonna and Child. We do not consider it repulsive because it also includes the portrait of a wealthy, corrupt patron....

THE MEN’S ROOM Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Nevius sets a supposedly realistic play in the men’s room of a bus station where, except for one token real patron, no one enters but the six characters–five men and a woman. This crummy john has become the haven for a “congregation” led by “Father” Dominic, a 26-yearold ex-seminarian who wears a dippy hat and offers his young disciples absolution from inside his favorite stall (his “magical place”)....

I never drink and drive but I swear every Chevy Nova (pre-1985) and Olds Omega (same car–different label) I see is driving down the road sideways. Well, not quite sideways but at an acute angle. Was this the product of foresighted GM engineers trying to provide a more panoramic view for drivers and passengers alike, or merely a flashback from my chemical abuse days? –H. Blank, Chicago Best of Chicago voting is live now....

In my search for a new coffee maker, a concerned friend advocated a boycott of both Braun and Krups brands because they were made by German companies that manufactured concentration camp crematoria in the 1930s and 40s. Can this be true? I’m drinking tea pending your reply. Also, did Adolf Hitler really name the Volkswagen? –Yvonne Pelletier, Chicago Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » None of the companies mentioned built crematoria, but Daimler-Benz, maker of Mercedes-Benz cars, committed other crimes....

Some monologists either show or tell. They either act out their stories as they tell them, a la Carmella Rago, who uses the full arsenal of sets, costumes, and props to supplement her tales, or they follow the example of David Cale, who speaks directly to the audience, depending solely on the power of his words to carry the narrative along. Theater Oobleck members Wylie Goodman and Terri Kapsalis use both methods....

GHOST With Patrick Swayze, Demi Moore, Whoopi Goldberg, and Tony Goldwyn. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » However, the ambitions of director Jerry Zucker soar considerably above the genre parodies he executed in partnership with his brother David Zucker and Jim Abrahams in Airplane!, Top Secret!, and The Naked Gun. Conceived as a three-toned pastiche, Ghost is entirely satisfactory both as a gothic thriller and as a comedy, but it pales when it comes to the romantic hues....

WHAT’S THIS IN MY COKE?: POETIC JUSTICE Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » What’s This in My Coke?: Poetic Justice, a collection of poems, short stories, and monologues written in response to the hearings and staged by Live Bait Theater, has one very simple problem: it’s not nearly as interesting as the hearings themselves. What could top that show? The production does, however, have a number of things to recommend it....

TWIN PEAKS Directed and written by David Lynch, Mark Frost, and others. With Kyle MacLachlan, Michael Ontkean, Piper Laurie, Joan Chen, Madchen Amick, Dana Ashbrook, and Richard Beymer. “The year’s best show!” crowed the cover of Entertainment Weekly; “the wingdingiest thing to make it onto network television in many a full moon,” echoed Ken Tucker in the same magazine. “An erotic watershed in the history of broadcast TV,” claimed Amy Taubin in the Village Voice....

LAWRENCE OF ARABIA With Peter O’Toole, Alec Guinness, Anthony Quinn, Jack Hawkins, Jose Ferrer, Anthony Quayle, Claude Rains, Arthur Kennedy, and Omar Sharif. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This was of course during a period when the French New Wave was nearing the height of its glory, when Antonioni and Fellini were first acquiring mass appeal in the U.S., and when the New American Cinema was just beginning to make a pronounced impact–to cite only some of the excitement that made Lean’s achievement look relatively staid and conventional....

This has to rank as a genuine Happening: Brad Goode, the diminutive and charismatic young trumpeter, in front of a nine-chair string section–not to mention another horn player, vocalist Jo Belle, and a rhythm trio anchored by Joel Spencer–in a west-side jazz tavern-cum-gallery. The Happening gains power from the hovering shadow of Charlie Parker, who succumbed to the siren song of orchestral backing when he recorded and performed with a string quintet in the mid-40s....

Friday 6 Autumn is heavy-duty travel time for midwestern birds, so the Morton Arboretum is offering bird walks for migration watchers. Today’s hike, from 8 to 10:30 AM, is for beginners. Next Saturday’s excursion, also from 8 to 10:30, is for those with previous bird-watching experience. The walks cost $3; bring binoculars and a field guide. The arboretum is at I-88 and Route 53 in Lisle. If you’re registered for the class, there’s no parking fee....

Davenport, with its population of more than 100,000, is the largest of the Quad Cities, and one of two situated in Iowa, on the west bank of the Mississippi. (The others are Bettendorf, Iowa, and Rock Island and Moline in Illinois.) Hard-hit by the farm bust of the 80s, Davenport has a quiet downtown area that blends quickly and unassumingly into residential neighborhoods sporting classic examples of 19th- and early 20th-century midwestern frame-house building....

My first visit to the Calumet marshes was in the summer of 1982. My guide for the trip was Larry Balch, an expert birder who is now the immediate past president of the American Birding Association. I volunteered myself as a delegate for the Chicago Audubon Society to the Lake Calumet Study Committee, a coalition of conservation organizations that had been put together by Dr. James Landing, a geography professor at Circle....

Jonathan Richman’s babycakes enthusiasm has subtly but undoubtedly grounded popular music’s excesses over the past 15 years: singers of elephantine pretentiousness, from Emerson, Lake and Palmer to John Cougar Mellencamp, have had to keep an eye looking over their shoulders as Richman has not only filled his albums with songs like “I’m Nature’s Mosquito” and “The UFO Man” but ended up making better albums than theirs to boot. (Back in Your Life, in its own way, is almost as broadly revelatory as This Year’s Model....

Lobsterman stands, as he is inclined to do, at Michigan and Pearson, tall, red, and proud. Hurrying shoppers ignore him as rain begins to fall, assailing his huge red head and shiny satin skin. For a few minutes he seems a mere shell of a man–stiffly awaiting recognition, even acknowledgment. He starts to wander east toward the lake when a woman stops him. “Can we take your picture?” one kid asks....

Love of Labor As Geoghegan writes: “The weaker labor becomes, the more (in the U.S. at least) it is resented. It holds up in a few bastions, shrinks into a smaller, privileged elite, where everyone makes $13.00 an hour, and everyone else is cut out. So labor, beaten to a pulp, helpless, in retreat on every front, appears more privileged, more remote, more irrelevant to the working majority. Yet this isn’t labor’s fault....

Still based in Chicago, the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians is also still recognized as a beacon of free-jazz expression throughout the world. The AACM also still operates on a shoestring; hence this concert, a benefit for the AACM school, the loosely structured program in music and life that boasts Douglas Ewart and Chico Freeman among its more famous graduates. Three groups–Mwata Bowden’s Winds & Thangs, Vandy Harris’s Front Burners, and a quintet led by trumpeter Ameen Muhammad and the sensational saxist/composer Edward Wilkerson Jr....