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To the editors: I must say that I am shocked and disappointed that the Reader would allow itself to be used as a tool for the promotion of the gospel according to Bryant “Dwayne” Thomas [“Skinheads,” March 24]. As a victim of skinhead violence (I am the motorcycle rider who was stabbed and nearly died), I am extremely upset that the Reader would print such a biased, pro-skinhead article. The author of the article is obviously one of Dwayne’s lackeys; who else would describe him as charismatic and charming, when everyone I know describes him as a loudmouthed thug....

Gay $. “Gays in fact pioneered the redevelopment of several North Side neighborhoods long before the real estate industry officially pronounced them ‘hot,’” in particular Lakeview, Wrigleyville, and parts of the DePaul area, writes Valerie Denney in Chicago Enterprise (December 1989). “So strong and predictable is the influence of gays that some realtors regard them as the grain of sand around which the pearl grows.” Next? Buena Park, Andersonville, Roscoe Village, and parts of Rogers Park and Edgewater....

It takes a while to get domesticated once you get married. It’s been a year and a half now since I became a husband, a word I still cannot type without a shudder (Dagwood Bumstead! Ward Cleaver!), but the day does not go by that I don’t add some useful tidbit to my collection of household lore. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The reason we were dealing with nails in the first place is that I was installing some cabinets in our so-called den....

The Summer Olympic Games come but once every four years, something we’ve been reminded of, implicitly, every three and a half minutes as NBC’s television coverage hurries from one event to another. This time, the producer seems to say, we’re going to see everything; but in his or her wild attempt to show everything of importance at the games, we’ve seen nothing. There has been no opportunity to linger over the sports we see little more than once every four years–such as volleyball, gymnastics, and sprint cycling–because we’re too busy going from one to the other to the other....

A MOON FOR THE MISBEGOTTEN Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It must be a sign of an ethnic group’s enfranchisement when undiluted stereotypes can be depicted without eliciting any cry of protest. In Eugene O’Neill’s A Moon for the Misbegotten, Phil Hogan is an Irish immigrant farmer living in a broken-down shanty in Connecticut who drinks, lies, brags of the tradesmen he’s swindled, and abuses his children....

VAMPIRE LESBIANS OF SODOM What is this thing called Vampire Lesbians of Sodom? Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » What Vampire is is Attitude. Heavy Attitude. The sort of campy, bitchy, flaming, raving, out-there drag-queen Attitude most famously associated with the late Charles Ludlam and his Ridiculous Theatre. Created by New York cross-dress diva Charles Busch, Vampire and Sleeping Beauty are Attitude as form and function, content and technique....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Having taught in a Roman Catholic major seminary for seven years, and in Catholic institutions of higher learning for ten, I feel that I have some perspective to offer. Sad to say, this article fits my experience. While the actual percentage of offending clergy may be relatively (??) small, all who taught at my seminary knew that such events happened on a regular basis, and that such offenders (often highly placed) offended....

A LULLABY OF MURDER Tommy Gun’s Garage–a shrine to Chicago’s now-out-of-favor gangster days–has jumped onto the interactive bandwagon with A Lullaby of Murder. But unfortunately this show is a sleeper in the worst sense, its aliveness killed off by a silly script. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » So frenzied it verges on incoherence, the tedious first half fritters away interest by assaulting us with pointless pratfalls and an onslaught of period songs: “Life Upon the Wicked Stage,” “Sheik of Araby,” “Hooray for Hollywood,” “You’re the Top....

Does Canadian music have an identity of its own? Or is it just an undistinguished, far-flung branch of American music? To be frank, what little I’ve heard by members of the tiny community of Canadian composers has not made any long-lasting impression. Maybe that’s why I’m looking forward to Chicago Sinfonietta’s Salute to Canada!–to see if two recent examples of Canadian music are of more than passing interest. Malcolm Forsyth’s Sun Songs for Mezzo-Soprano and Orchestra (1985), with texts drawn from novelist Doris Lessing’s atavistic fantasy Briefing for a Descent Into Hell, is a song cycle that celebrates the sun as a source of brilliance, brutality, and spirituality; its author was named Canadian composer of the year in 1989....

Headlines we could have lived without, from Real Estate Guide (October 1987): “Glove Makers Take Future Into Their Own Hands.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “My boss asks me almost daily why I haven’t heard back” from the Immigration and Naturalization Service, Pablo G. tells Jennifer Juarez Robles of the Chicago Reporter (December 1987). “He thinks I’ve been rejected and I’m holding back the answer....

You won’t catch me complaining about massively attended jazz concerts in Grant Park; nonetheless, there’s a qualitative difference between those small figures on the band-shell stage piped through Gargantua’s own sound system and the intimate surroundings in which jazz is more often heard (and in which jazz history is most often made). Luckily, late-night jam sessions at two sites near Grant Park–Joe Segal’s Jazz Showcase and Southend Musicworks–help round out the most nearly perfect jazz-festival weekend in America....

Stylistically distinctive (with a rhythmically inventive use of jump cuts), impressively acted (by Jean-Francois Stevenin, Yves Afonso, and Carole Bouquet), and simultaneously unpredictable and rather bewildering as narrative, Jean-Francois Stevenin’s second feature, made in 1986, looks like nothing else in contemporary French cinema. Stevenin, who is mainly known as a rather ubiquitous actor, plays a character who accidentally runs into a boyhood chum (Afonso); together they decide to pay a surprise visit to another mutual childhood friend who now lives outside Grenoble–a mysterious figure who never makes an appearance and the film basically charts their long wait together, largely in the company of the missing friend’s wife (Bouquet)....

FIVE TINY POINTS OF LIGHT This program offers a little of each. Fragments From the Permanent Collection, by Michael Brayndick, is based on the above-mentioned premise–a man trying to strike up a conversation with a woman. The man, played by Yakov Neiditch, is smitten with a young woman, played by Kori Koerner, who sits in front of the same painting at the Art Institute every day at lunch hour. Admiring her from afar, he imagines her to be utterly confident and tranquil....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » First, Saul stated that the two candidates’ positions on abortion were so close that they were not an issue in the discussion. Not true: many members were keenly interested in both candidates’ positions on the involvement of parents in a minor’s right to choose an abortion, the very early endorsement session coming as it did on the heels of the Supreme Court’s decisions on the Minnesota and Ohio parental notification laws....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » On Friday, September 28, 1990, Lewis Lazare wrote an article entitled “Theater People Wonder: Where Have All the Profits Gone?” which appeared in your newspaper in The Culture Club column. The article is centered around a brief conversation Mr. Lazare had with me on Monday, September 24, 1990. The conversation was elicited by Mr. Lazare for and on a different subject matter and focus....

INSIDE GEORGE Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But lack of action isn’t the real problem. Contrary to what the title implies, George has nothing inside him. He’s a cardboard cutout of a character who exists only as a pose. Even though he’s supposedly the author of ten books and three novellas, he doesn’t say anything even remotely interesting. And when he tries to express himself, he tends to generate bloated, pompous prose....

A WINTER TAN With Burroughs, Erando Gonzales, Javier Torres, and Diana d’Aquila. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Ironically, this collectively conceived and generated feature comes across very much like a one-woman show, a “concerto” for Burroughs (who is probably best known in the U.S. as the female lead in The Grey Fox). Indeed, without Burroughs’s capacity to bring a certain charismatic range and inflection to the letters, the project probably would have been unthinkable....

PRETTY WOMAN With Richard Gere, Julia Roberts, Ralph Bellamy, Jason Alexander, Laura San Giacomo, Alex Hyde-White, and Hector Elizondo. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Vivian, still dressed in her gaudy hooker clothes, is snubbed and humiliated in a Rodeo Drive boutique, but then enlists the assistance of a hotel manager (Hector Elizondo) and later Edward himself in purchasing her wardrobe for the week. Edward, meanwhile, in the course of planning the takeover of a ship-building company, reveals to Vivian that his estrangement from his recently deceased father is behind both his corporate ruthlessness and his emotional blockage....

Harpist Mojo Buford is best known as Muddy Waters’s last regular harmonica man and longtime understudy, but he’s also a well-respected blues veteran in his own right. He got his start in Chicago in the 1950s, filling in for his mentor at Smitty’s Corner at 35th and Indiana when Waters went on the road. Eventually Buford’s group became known as the Muddy Waters Junior Band, making him the first in a long line of “Muddy Juniors” working around Chicago....

Using sign language, gesture, mime, and choreographed movement as well as spoken word, sound, and music, this 25-year-old ensemble creates theater by and for both hearing and hearing-impaired people. It invariably offers playful twists on the classic literary material it works with; its version of Homer’s Odyssey treated the tale as a diversion spun by soldiers inside the Trojan Horse. In this season’s offering, an adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s adventure story Treasure Island, the pirate Billy Bones approaches the audience and orders them to put up their hands–so they can sing and sign along with him on the pirates’ anthem “Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum”; and when the hero Jim Hawkins–played by a woman–hides in an apple barrel and eavesdrops on Long John Silver and his band of cutthroats, she watches them through a hole in the barrel rather than listening....