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Thanks, I needed that. One workshop offered during the 72nd National Restaurant Association convention here last week: “Don’t Lose Your Restaurant By Accident. Don’t kill or maim your customers; it’s bad for business…” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Under the current system, some districts in Illinois are the Grand Cayman Islands of public school finance,” writes Merrill Goozner in Chicago Enterprise (May). “Because they harbor large concentrations of business property, they can levy extremely low tax rates and still end up with some of the highest per pupil expenditures in the nation....

The Next Best Thing to Reagan “Abysmal,” “embarrassing,” “demagoguery,” and “silliness” all decorated the Tribune’s evaluation of George Bush’s presidential campaign; “lousy running mate” summed up Dan Quayle. Squires wasn’t nicer in conversation. “I don’t think the guy has ever really accomplished much or initiated much in his career,” said Squires of Bush. “He’s always been more of a presider.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Naive is a kind characterization for [Dukakis’s] statements on sensitive and complicated matters such as ....

I have a question. When a prisoner is put to death by lethal injection, does he or she still get their arm cleaned with an alcohol swab? –Mark Alonso, 101st Airborne Division Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » There are several reasons for this. Apart from its usefulness as an antiseptic, alcohol causes blood vessels to rise to the surface, making it easier to insert the needle....

A while back you put down an anonymous writer who asked, “How come when you hold a chopstick in your teeth and pluck it, the TV screen shimmies? Nothing else shimmies.” You ascribed the effect to heavy metal poisoning. Well, Cece, I think you dismissed the question prematurely, without trying it. This effect does occur and results from a vibration of the eyes (connected to the tooth bone) at a frequency near that of the vertical scan rate on the TV, producing a visible modulation effect of shimmying, speaking vernacularly....

Opening for pretentious romantic swellheads the Church and dippy romantic swellheads Let’s Active, brilliant romantic swellhead Tom Verlaine may alone well be worth the price of admission (though I gotta admit, the Church sure do sound purty). Back in the late 70s, Verlaine was the renowned leader of the seminal new wave band Television, a group that miraculously revitalized the tired old idea of “guitar rock” by combining intricate, extended, and superambitious song structures with the simple rhythmic thrust, stark presentation, and defiant attitude that gave new wave and punk their startling jolt....

This promises to be an evening of brutal assaults on all sorts of things: your ears, your mind, your finer sensibilities, you name it. Urge Overkill are three local boys who grind out helpings of typical Chicago sludge rock beneath a peculiar veneer of Kennedy-era Rat Pack chic; with their turtleneck sweaters, crushed-velvet embroidered jackets, strange alter egos–the band members claim to be named National Kato, King Roeser, and Blackie Onassis–they verge on being more interesting to think about than to actually hear....

SCROOGED With Bill Murray, Karen Allen, John Forsythe, Bobcat Goldthwait, Carol Kane, Robert Mitchum, Michael J. Pollard, and Alfre Woodard. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Consider the overall context. A kind of ersatz Dickens adaptation (in contrast to a genuine Dickens adaptation like Little Dorrit, perhaps the best to date, which will open at the Fine Arts in the weeks ahead) with only a rudimentary relation to its model, Scrooged is one of several Christmas pictures shrewdly released before Thanksgiving in the hopes of reaping benefits throughout the remainder of the year....

ADDRESS UNKNOWN The collection of pieces has a basic structure, but no script–each short section is improvised every night. The show begins with “Home,” in which each member of the ensemble sits in an isolated portion of the stage and free associates about the concept of home. Other titles include “Public Aid,” “The Bum,” and “I Got a Job.” These pieces have various formats. In some a situation is set up with various characters and the group improvises from there....

BLEACHER BUMS Now, 12 years after its initial run, Bleacher Bums has returned to the Organic, bigger and slicker than ever, fat with grants from major corporate sponsors, and directed by former cast member Joe Mantegna (who is credited with the original concept). The good news is that the play–updated to reflect the new lineup and the introduction of lights–has held up remarkably well; after all these years it is still charming, funny, and entertaining....

BRILLIANT TRACES The problem is, a lot of garbage comes out with the good stuff. Fornes merely teaches how to unlock the imagination and produce original dialogue; shaping that dialogue into a play requires another step, a crucial, private step that transforms the raw material into drama. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Johnson must have used Fornes’s technique, or one very much like it, for Brilliant Traces begins with a wonderfully startling dreamlike image....

FIVE OF US Both remarks ignore one fact, however. Even if other people are useless because, well, they’re not us, we still have to live with them. Like it or not, we’re human (and humane) only when we realize that to everybody else, we are other people. And if we deny them reality–i.e., humanity–we lessen ours, often to the point of no return. Call it what you like–“No man is an island,” or a humanist’s theory of relativity–but those who ignore this truth will never be true adults, no matter how old they are....

When Rene de Costa introduced Joan Brossa and Nicanor Parra to each other at a reception in Madrid, he expected something to happen. An embrace, an argument, some name calling, maybe some flattery. Something. De Costa, a professor of Romance languages and literature at the University of Chicago, and his colleague Sonia Mattalia were hosting a party to launch an exhibition of the two men’s work. This was the first time Brossa, who’s from Barcelona, and Parra, who’s from Santiago, Chile, had been together in a show, but de Costa, who had long studied them, could not imagine them apart....

Oh, it may look like your classic Chicago tenor battle, this annual pairing of saxists, Johnny Griffin and Joe Henderson (each of whom looms among the most respected tenor men of his musical generation)–but it’s not. Instead, this annual event shoves musical pugilism aside in favor of showcasing these two powerful musical intellects, and in the process illuminates a less-traveled path through jazz history. Griffin, who is a tenor battle all by himself, used to win such competitions with ease; at 60, he still displays the speed and cogency that stood out even among the beboppers (where the first of those qualities was expected and the second separated the cats from the kittens)....

Better bring the fire extinguisher for this one–it’s a summit meeting of some of the hottest, most audacious Young Turks on the contemporary scene, and it has the potential to be either a scorching success or an out-of-control blues bonfire. Guitarist Neal, son of Baton Rouge harmonica legend Raful Neal, is probably the most restrained of the bunch; his incendiary leads are tempered with maturity and taste, due likely to the sparse musical style of the Louisiana tradition in which he was raised....

David Watts isn’t in the movie Gorillas in the Mist. But if they ever make a sequel, here’s how the first scene might look: Watts says that he quit running Karisoke for the same reasons most people wouldn’t want to go there in the first place. “As much as I care about the future of gorillas, human beings are social animals too. I’m not sure that kind of long-term isolation is a good idea....

The artistic graveyards of Chicago are filled with promising start-up companies that didn’t make it. Evanston’s Light Opera Works has survived by being crowd pleasers, performing a wide range of operettas, from Gilbert and Sullivan to Johann Strauss. Operettas are generally romantic comedies, with hummable music and fluffy plot lines that dont invite much pondering of the greater significance of it all. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Our basic reason to start another opera company in Chicago was that we had a very distinct, limited repertory in mind,” says Kraus....

The Woodstock Opera House overlooks a tree-lined cobblestone square in the center of McHenry County’s most scenic city. Built in 1890 in the steamboat Gothic style, the handsome landmark was originally conceived as a multipurpose city hall. Over the years, as municipal offices were relocated, the building gradually turned into a center for the town’s cultural aspirations: its 400-seat theater has played host to the likes of the Patti Rosa Players, a very young Orson Welles, and the Woodstock Players, whose summer-stock alumni include Shelley Berman, Paul Newman, and Geraldine Page....

The Bulls’ season–already heralded as potentially their first championship campaign–began, as in a dream, with a haze hanging over the court, the product of an indoor opening-night fireworks display during the introductions. The Bulls did little to make the smoke disperse. They played in a trance, showing almost no movement on offense and failing to get back on defense. They hit their spots on cue, but in the manner of actors in a lifeless play where the characters show no interaction....

Why are there green lights under escalators? Should I start believing in Escalator Trolls? Am I seeing the Otis borealis? Or do I just have a brain tumor? Please–the straight dope! –John Sandel, Chicago Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I don’t know about the brain tumor, John, but I do know this: you can’t have a stomach tumor without a stomach. Escalator companies put lights under the steps near the top and bottom of the escalator in order to silhouette the edges of each step....

THE WEIRDLY SISTERS The Weirdly Sisters is a combination adventure story and psychodrama. At its most basic level, the play deals with a neglectful mother’s difficult relationship with her two daughters. The mother has to deal with her feelings of failure and ambivalence toward her offspring, while the daughters find different methods of coping with their feelings of abandonment. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But the story itself is anything but simple....