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URBAN RENOVATOR BLUES Their premiere production–Renovation Ensemble’s Urban Renovator Blues–is short, funny, interesting, and, most impressive, difficult. Daniel Wirth’s original one-act, which he also directs, is a grotesque exaggeration of American upper-middle-class values that demands manically styled performances from its two actors, John Alcott and Cynthia Wasseen. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Simply named the Man and the Woman, they are dressed as successful young professionals and pass the evening in a living room (whose is not clear) vehemently trying to remain picture perfect and “authentic” in a world full of cheap imitation (the bookshelf, for example, holds nothing but Reader’s Digest condensed books)....

Where’s Greeley When We Need Him? Father Andrew Greeley’s last appearance as a Sun-Times columnist was the morning of Halloween. Going away wasn’t his idea. Mark Hornung, editor of the editorial pages, told us, “It was time for some new and different voices.” In due course the Philadelphia Inquirer located Greeley and asked him to write something. Because Greeley appreciates a Chicago audience at least as much as a national one, he wanted this commentary to run locally as well....

Ping pong ping. Drops of water in a tin cup. Pong pong ping. A church organ from hell shatters the calm. Da da da da da-daa da da! It’s late at night; your radio knob’s tuned to the left side of the dial. A baby cries. A chicken clucks. A cat meows. And then the voice rumbles through your speakers like an approaching thunderstorm. “. . . old as now it was...

By most accounts, peace ended and the sniping began at the Joyce Kilmer elementary school sometime late in 1990. “They are trying to bully me because I’m standing up for what I think is right,” Malave counters. “I will not be intimidated.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Kilmer’s biggest problem is overcrowding. The school was built to house about 900 students, but enrollment may top 1,200 by next year....

In the spring of 1991 Dr. Laurence Spang was cleaning teeth and filling cavities in his seventh-floor office at the Metropolitan Correctional Center, the federal jail of many narrow windows at Van Buren and Clark. Two years earlier, he had tested positive for HIV. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In a bid to clear his conscience (“I get upset if I get a parking ticket,” he says), Spang got on a plane for Washington, D....

Dark Nights Ahead for Northlight? Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Northlight board members apparently have been to find alternative spaces in which to produce the 1990-91 season. Options in Evanston are severely limited. The Coronet theater, a former cinema, seems one of the most likely prospects at the moment, though the theater has little or no backstage space and office space would have to be rented in another building....

DORIS HUMPHREY–LOST WORKS The reconstruction of dances by past masters is vitally important to our understanding of how those masters shaped and influenced the dance we see today–whether classic ballet or modern dance. The recovery of that ephemeral past is also a matter of some urgency, for memories fail and mortality overtakes the artists who originally performed the works. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Momenta is composed of the Academy of Movement and Music’s students....

For a half generation of jazz fans–those who came of age to the music of John Coltrane–there remains something almost mystical about Elvin Jones, who authored the apocalyptic pulse at the heart of Coltrane’s quartet. Jones was the drummer who took the beat which had previously occupied several discrete parts of the drum set, and spread it out to the entire instrument; that concept, along with a resilient creativity and almost scary energy, defines his style....

Early this winter flocks of white-winged crossbills invaded northern Illinois. Sightings were reported from various locations in Lake County, including Illinois Beach State Park, where the pine groves at the park’s southern end are very attractive to crossbills. Irruptive behavior is a response to the exigencies of life in the far north. Northern ecosystems–cold and dark for much of the year–are not very productive, and they also tend to support small numbers of species of both plants and animals....

Glomming On: Attack of the Electronic Media “At some point Channel Seven with Linda Yu and Joel Daly interviewed me.” But for all the attention everybody paid Cathy Stachura, the Spunky Wife Back Home, the Sun-Times’s Leslie Baldacci was always special. “She was a real sweetheart,” says Stachura. “I think that’s why the articles were so nice. She called every couple of days and got a chance to meet my kids and she put down what they were saying in the right words....

In July the city passed an ordinance regulating downtown bike messengers, and just about everyone applauded. “Some of these riders, the way they zip in and out of traffic and over the sidewalks, are a detriment to the safety of pedestrians and themselves,” says Alderman Burt Natarus, who led the movement to adopt the ordinance. “We’re not trying to take away their livelihood–we’re trying to protect lives. Most of the owners of the large messenger services support it, because it makes so much sense....

About to make her Carnegie Hall debut at age 44, the Japanese-born pianist Mitsuko Uchida will try out the introduction program here first. Daughter of a diplomat, Uchida grew up and received most of her musical training in Vienna. An insightful and precise keyboard interpreter, she’s been an unaccountably late bloomer as an international concert artist. Her reputation only began to spread ten years ago, after a series of recitals she gave in London traversing the entire cycle of Mozart sonatas....

Sure he’s bucking conventional wisdom. Sure he’s tilting at windmills in this age of media politics, when people supposedly vote image, not platforms — but, hey, that’s Tom. “In my 16 years of government service,” Tom Hynes stated in his campaign literature, “my approach to important issues has been to attack the issue, not my political opponent.” We have Hynes’s word that this campaign will be no different. “In the weeks to come I will discuss the issues and share ideas with you,” he promised in a commercial that aired a few weeks back....

Lead Story Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Latest self-inflicted testicle wound: In October Stanley Brown, 19, snatched a woman’s purse in Miami at gunpoint, fired two shots at her (but missed), and while running away tried to stuff the gun into his waistband, causing it to fire. According to a witness, Brown ran a few more steps, stopped, pulled back his waistband to take a look, and said, “I’ve been shot....

DANCING IN THE STATE Dancing in the Streets, a New York organization headed by Elise Bernhardt, last year embarked on an ambitious five-city project devoted to producing dance in public places. So far there’s been dance in Union Station in Washington, D.C., dance on the beach in Miami, and dance in an architectural landmark in Los Angeles. Last week the Dance Center of Columbia College cosponsored the lively “Dancing in the State” at Chicago’s State of Illinois Center....

MY FATHER’S GLORY With Philippe Caubere, Nathalie Roussel, Didier Pain, Julien Ciamaca, Therese Liotard, and Victorien Delmare. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Pagnol’s output as a writer has become fashionable again, thanks to the popularity of Jean de Florette and Manon of the Spring–both based on Pagnol novels and directed by Claude Berri. Regrettably, Pagnol’s special qualities as a filmmaker are still being overlooked–and I’m not even sure that his most distinctive qualities as a writer are highlighted in the Berri films....

My Life State law requires that prisoners younger than 17 attend school no matter how heinous their crimes, so the Chicago Board of Education runs a school for them, the Cook County Juvenile Temporary Detention Center School. The school is on the second floor–just above the courtroom, just below the jail–of the juvenile court building, which is near the intersection of Roosevelt Road and Ogden Avenue on the near west side....

SILENT OTHELLO It is a curious choice, and it isn’t satisfying. For one thing, if you don’t know the original you’re utterly lost. For another, Melcori never provides a reason for the absence of words. The live, original music by Michael Zerang, Don Meckley, and Kent Kessler is often provocative, but it simply can’t carry the show. It is, after all, played like a sound track–incidental music and sounds that suggest a moment rather than tell a story....

It seems like a marriage was made in heaven between Hong Kong’s Golden Harvest Films and Jim Henson’s Muppetry. The delightful offspring is a live-action romp based on Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird’s comic book characters, scripted by Todd W. Langen and Bobby Herbeck with the sort of goofy wit that suggests that Thomas Pynchon could have made pseudonymous contributions to the dialogue, and directed with skill and assurance by Steve Barron....

Things you could get a heart attack just thinking about. Professional ice cream taster John Harrison on his family ties to the industry: “My blood runs 16 percent butterfat.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “As a ’60s person, I’m drawn to those who burn fast and hot, who live life to the ultimate, who go against nature and all the rules,” says Camille Paglia in the San Francisco Examiner’s Image magazine (July 7), reflecting on AIDS and the sexual revolution....