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Back in early 1989, school officials glowed with pride over their $530-million plan to remove cancer-causing asbestos and renovate several run-down schools across the city. But they’re not bragging anymore: 22 months have passed and hardly any construction is under way. The school board’s original renovation plans (announced in February 1989) called for new roof and windows at Lake View at a cost of $6.6 million. But removing the asbestos was the first hurdle to clear....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Lee Sandlin’s story Just a Weekend in the Big City in the October 22 issue I found interesting and well written. I am, however, troubled by the tone of the brief characterization of Rudolf Steiner’s work and of his particular contributions to child development and education referred to in the story. A basic understanding of his educational thought, which now lies at the foundation of more than 500 independent schools worldwide (sometimes called Waldorf schools) would make comprehensible the isolated example given about discouraging the use of TV and video games for young children....

ROWBOAT Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Beckett was adamantly precise in his stage directions, often specifying the number of steps an actor should take or the seconds a pause should last. When American Repertory Theatre broke from the stage directions for Endgame in 1985, employing a multiracial cast and setting the play in a defunct subway station, Beckett was enraged. He and his publisher threatened to sue, sent telegrams, released press statements, and were about to pull production rights when, in the final hours before the show, an agreement was reached....

On August 16, 1921, more than a thousand men dressed in white bedsheets with crimson crosses over their hearts wandered up and down Central Park Avenue south of Foster offering each other a ritual handshake of three fingers and three flicks of the wrist, much to the amusement of residents who watched the spectacle from their porches. About 2,000 cars were lined up, ready to begin the procession to the first statewide Ku Klux Klan ceremony in Illinois....

SINK OR SWIM Indeed, much of the richness of this autobiographical film, whose honest engagement with essential human dilemmas proves immensely moving, stems from its refusal to make simple choices or settle into unambiguous positions. One of Friedrich’s themes is the interpenetration of the past and the present; we discover that theme as her adult identity gradually emerges from a difficult childhood, but also in the way that the past keeps reasserting its influence, even in adulthood; this is one of many examples of the film’s divided, multiple nature....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In the first place, Zotti–along with every other journalist in Chicago–should renounce the misty descent into portraying Chicago as a “primitive society” desirous of “tribal chieftains.” The imagery is certainly romantic, but evoking primordial conditions and feudal allegiances doesn’t help us understand the city. We aren’t a hunting and gathering society lurching toward agriculture. We approach the 21st century, and Chicago is making the uncertain shift from a manufacturing-based to a more diversified economy....

DANNY AND THE DEEP BLUE SEA Tight & Shiny Productions at Cafe Voltaire Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It doesn’t look promising at first. Roberta sits curled up into a tight little knot at her table, chin tucked truculently into her collarbones, attention riveted on the bottom of her beer mug. Danny is draped like a bar rag over his table, oblivious to the wounds he’s recently received in an alley brawl the cause of which he does not remember, staring morosely into his beer mug and occasionally stealing a glance through his eyebrows at the rest of the world....

Johnson’s Raps: Kids Bring the Noise to WJPC After five hours on the air, a young rap DJ’s thoughts turn to…dusties, of course: There’s no contradiction: the radio kids like rap and dusties; and the high is natural. Pink House is 25, with a radio voice that’s high, wide, and handsome. His immense good humor disguises an intense single-mindedness when it comes to radio, a product of his first exposure to legend Tom Joyner....

The last time I saw him he was lurching around the outfield at Wrigley Field, injuring himself as he stumbled after a fly ball to left. Dave Kingman mashed 48 King Kong-size homers for the Cubs in 1979, but it seemed he left town in shame. He was remembered less for his homers than for the dead rat he mailed to a reporter he didn’t like and that awful column he “wrote” for the Sun-Times....

Lawyer Goes Straight, Steps Up to Sportswriting Lester Munson Jr. gave up the newspaper game 23 years ago for the noble calling of law. This year, at age 48, he gained the lofty perch of president of the Du Page County Bar Association, a title that might convey to you a life swelling in honors and dignity. What, then, are we to make of Munson’s sudden decision to chuck it all–in order to write sports for gosh sake?...

When they decided to call their meeting, the organizers figured 40, maybe 50 voting members would attend. But as the minutes ticked down to starting time, all the seats were taken, and a line of people without seats–attendance was estimated at roughly 200–snaked around the wall of the carpeted conference room and out the door. Contributions are up–this year the organization raised roughly $70,000 and will break even for the first time in years....

MANSON: THE MUSICAL I tried desperately to get someone to go with me to see this double bill. Through the years I’ve taken friends to see some of my choice theater assignments–acrobatic rats, Kabuki G-string dancers, and even a guy who wrapped himself in duct tape while talking about scoring dope (I liked that one a lot; my companion’s reaction was mixed). But Manson: The Musical had no takers. You can go too far, my friends said....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » When I did precinct work for Mayor Harold Washington, I quickly learned that a person cannot just walk into highrise buildings on the north side. Almost all of them have either a doorman or a security guard that required you to be let in by a tenant and sign a register. If you don’t live in the building or have any business there, you don’t get in period....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The performance was, in Hayford’s words, “at first glance entirely meaningless and empty.” No second glance was possible because there was nothing else to see. This was a stultifyingly banal, abysmally performed, and conceptually vapid exercise in quintessential boredom. It gave new meaning to the term “excruciatingly dull.” It recalls the tag line for Dan Aykroyd’s Leonard Pinth Garnell character on Saturday Night Live: “And now for some truly bad performance art....

As she plummeted toward the Wisconsin countryside below, JorJan Borlin tried desperately to straighten out her parachute. The lines had tangled, creating what is known as a “Mae West” effect, the chute ballooning out between them. It was only her second jump and the ground was coming up on her much too fast for her to pull out her reserve chute. Teddy was an exceptional child in many ways. For one thing, he weighed nine pounds, 12 ounces when he was born, causing the attending nurse to remark, “This one must have come with his own paper route....

“Downstate definitely is the road less traveled,” writes Glenn Coleman in Chicago Enterprise (August 1988). “Cook County alone generates nearly 70 percent of the state’s estimated $8.6 billion in travel-related income.” These numbers don’t have much effect on state lawmakers, however, who require the Illinois Office of Tourism to spend half its $10 million advertising budget and two-thirds of its development grants downstate–“marketing pig races, flea markets, and other quaint but relatively minor-league attractions outside the Chicago metropolitan area....

Gobbling gobblers is OK, according to Greenkeeping (November/ December): “Of all the meat and poultry choices, turkey is among those that are most free from pesticide residues…not totally pure but much less contaminated than fatty foods such as beef steak and hot dogs.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The biggest gentrifying area in the city during the 1980s–where property values rose by 150 percent or more, $40,000 or more in absolute terms–is “a broad belt on the North Side from Lake Street to Lawrence, filling virtually every [census] tract between the already affluent lakefront neighborhoods and Western Avenue,” reports Ed Zotti in Chicago Enterprise (December)....

Here’s a question that’s bugged me for all eternity–is time travel possible, even in theory? –Jan K., Baltimore, Maryland Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The possibilities of deductive reasoning thus having been pretty much exhausted, I consulted the Straight Dope Science Advisory Board. While the question is far from settled, a few optimists do think time travel may be possible. In fact, a widely noted paper was published last fall proposing a hypothetical time machine....

It will be, backers say, one of the biggest nonsubsidized economic shots in the arm the southwest side has seen in years. Sometime this summer they’ll clear the 30-acre forest that sits in front of the cemetery and across the street from the high school at 87th and Kedzie, and construct 62 single-family homes and a shopping mall. The city’s annual sales-tax haul from the mall–anchored by a Dominick’s–could run as high as $100,000, which is $100,000 more in taxes than the land produces now....

A Manhattan literary agent (Nicolas Cage) who has problems with women imagines that he’s turning into a vampire. This is the first script by Joseph Minion to be produced since After Hours, and it reflects some of the same obsession with predatory and/or defenseless females and New York perceived as an expressionist landscape; the variable but generally competent direction is by British newcomer Robert Bierman. Practically nothing happens other than the gradual deterioration of any distinction between reality and fantasy, and the theme is closer in some ways to Jekyll and Hyde (with the emphasis almost entirely on Hyde) than to Dracula or Nosferatu....