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About 1979 or so I remember reading an interview with the great soul singer Solomon Burke in an R & B fanzine, wherein Burke was lamenting the demise of gospel-based soul in the face of 70s disco. Burke predicted that in a few years the disco sound would grow stale, “and then the real music lover is going to say, ‘I want to hear a good, slow soul record!’” The Holmes Brothers are a perfect illustration of the kind of soul music Burke was talking about, and they also serve as a welcome example of what it means to make the old sound new....

It’s like trying to hate your grandma because she doesn’t like rock and she voted for Ronald Reagan: You disagree with her musical taste, you think her politics dangerously goofy–but darn it, she still makes the best butterscotch pie around. And she’s your grandma. The conference was at the spanking-clean Oak Brook Hills Hotel, which is actually in Westmont–but given the bland interchangeability of western suburbs, it could have been Riverdale in an Archie comic strip....

Dear InAction Line: My HMO provides a $75 benefit for eyeglasses or contact lenses, but only if you buy them at [a giant optical chain with stores all over Chicago and the suburbs]. I went to the one nearest me with my prescription, and the doctor there wanted to charge me $225 for contact lenses–when I know my regular contact-lens provider (not covered by the HMO) charges $150. So I told the doctor I would use my $75 benefit toward new eyeglasses instead....

KVETCH It could be the stuff of made-for-TV melodrama (“Get me Marlo Thomas and Martin Sheen”). But in playwright Steven Berkoff’s inventive and eccentric mind it’s much more, and much better. Berkoff’s Kvetch, receiving a splendidly played Chicago premiere by the Blueprint Theatre Group, is a dark expressionist comedy about the internal conversations of its protagonists. Though the situation of its characters may not be shared by everyone in the audience, no viewer can fail to recognize the psychological patterns of insistent self-criticism that Berkoff so amusingly and instructively dramatizes....

Johnny Copeland was one of the Houston-based guitarists of the 50s and early 60s who added rock-and-roll fire to the crisp, swinging Texas blues pioneered by T-Bone Walker in the 30s and 40s. The result was an urgent new music full of youthful exuberance and forward-looking rhythmic propulsiveness, a kind of Texas counterpart to what Ike Turner was doing in Memphis. Copeland’s style these days combines the energy of his youth with a highly developed melodic and harmonic sense: his leads consist largely of sustained, shimmering phrases that weave their way through complex melodies; the melodies themselves often depart radically from traditional forms but nonetheless retain a powerful feel of soulful immediacy....

If the stand-up world wasn’t such a club of homophobic boys (and the girls who date them), lesbian comic monologuist Lisa Kron would be far better known nationally. This sharp-eyed, sharp-tongued observer of life has enough wit and wisdom packed into her one-woman show to cheer even the sourest disposition. But most comedy clubs wouldn’t know what to do with a comedian who jokes about the way straights “have trouble believing someone they are talking with is gay or lesbian....

Lead Story Among recent letters submitted to the San Jose Mercury News’s “Action Line” column: “I voted for the Lotto game eight years ago, and I haven’t won anything. I think some of these people who are winning these millions of dollars didn’t even vote for the program.” And, “During the time I’ve been in the main jail, my sexual feeling/response has rapidly declined to almost nonexistent. I’m 25 and have never experienced such a severe lack of sexual drive....

To the editors. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » So far, I have different favorites, mine being “Men Under Water,” by Ralph Lombreglia, and “The Lover of Women,” by Sue Miller. Both stories delighted and frightened me by catching the cruelties and distances, frank humor and constant irony, and incessant senseless swirl of our lives, but, like Frankel, I read Beattie’s introductory essay and the other stories looking in vain for the point....

Everything about A-1 Entertainment and Concessions is big. Their offices and warehouses are on Ashland, a big street. They have four 21,000-square-foot warehouses. They rent out big equipment for big parties and carnivals: dunk tanks, moon walks, hot-pretzel machines, popcorn carts, huge tanks of helium. They organize big parties. “Look at that! Look at that!” Zusel shouts from his chair, pointing at the image on the TV screen. “I get goose bumps looking at this today....

THE BOY WHO KNEW NO FEAR But in making the story agreeable to children, the authors and director have compromised its dark and somewhat disturbing thrust. They’ve sanitized it Disney-style, exploiting the plot while neglecting the deeper meaning. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In the Grimm tale, The Boy Who Left Home to Find Out About the Shivers, a father has two sons. The older boy is bright and capable but plagued by fears....

Above the law. A member of the Chicago Police Department’s Area Two School Patrol, quoted in Trends and Issues 91: “We had an incident on the last day of school. The principal called us into his office and said, ‘Here, I want to turn this in.’ He handed me a .38 revolver. When I asked him where he got it, he said he took it off a kid two or three months earlier, but he didn’t want to do anything about it at the time....

THE MEETING The time is Valentine’s Day 1965, but this is no lovefest. Malcolm X’s home has just been firebombed; Dr. King, making a rare visit to the north, is still haunted by the violence of Selma, Alabama. Malcolm X will be assassinated a week later by another Black Muslim; the killing of Dr. King is three years away. But in Stetson’s deeply engaging play, these young men–Malcolm X, 39, and Dr....

The last two weeks have done much to establish where the Bears stand in the National Football League this season. After a beginning in which they defeated four straight mediocre teams by slim margins, the Bears then lost to two very good teams by large margins. This left the Bears somewhere in the middle of the NFL pack, but where? Now that they’ve returned to their winning ways with three straight victories–the last two especially impressive, in that the Bears beat a couple of pretty good teams by encountering and overcoming their own weaknesses–they’ve shown that they’re a lot closer to the top than to the bottom....

My skin has usually been pretty clear, even through my adolescence. But now I’m 25, and recently I’ve been breaking out a lot. I also have been having a lot of sex for a couple of months straight. Is there some weird kind of hormone thing that’s doing this to me? I thought sex was supposed to cure your pimples. –Marty Tyler, New York Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Folding chairs are arranged in three neat semicircles around the tiny makeshift stage–a slightly raised platform with a jungle backdrop, all purple, green, brown, and gray tendrils, vines, and leaves. Big rocks have been painted onto two folding screens that are placed off to each side, and one suspiciously square boulder rests in lone splendor just to the right of center stage. Soon after, the same man takes the stage. Without any kind of introduction he kneels and begins blowing into a long tube; it’s maybe three or four feet in length, about three inches across, and it’s painted in bands of brown, beige, and gray....

In the past ten months, Dr. David Edelberg says, “I’ve written more prescriptions for people to read the Tibetan Book of Living and Dying than I have for antibiotics.” He adds, “Usually when you clear up the mind problems, the body problem becomes more controllable.” After 25 years as an MD, Edelberg established the Chicago Holistic Center as a place for Western medicine to work cooperatively with Eastern, eclectic, and bodywork therapies already widely available elsewhere....

In 1979, a young attorney named Michael H. Minton successfully argued that a housewife was worth more than $40,000 a year. The public snorted and the press made fun, but the ramifications proved enormous. When the dust finally settled, the 33-year-old Chicago lawyer had catapulted matrimonial law into an entirely new arena. Enter Michael Minton and a wealthy couple called the Gallaghers. It was 1978, one year after passage of the Illinois Marriage and Dissolution of Marriage Act....

8 Bold Souls is the most famous unknown band in America. They play mostly in tiny Chicago clubs, far from the center of the jazz world; nevertheless, when the Village Voice took a poll of jazz critics to determine the outstanding albums of the 1980s, 8 Bold Souls won second place–especially amazing considering the disc was issued by Chicago’s obscure Sessoms label. The usually New York-focused music press has covered them for years, and a few years ago the Atlantic Monthly printed a long interview with their leader, Edward Wilkerson Jr....

Our Father Almighty, creator of heaven and earth,” the black-suited reverend began, “look down upon this family, these friends. Give them the strength and the courage they need. Let them know that you’re too wise to make a mistake. You’re too good to do wrong . . .” The city’s black newspaper, the Chicago Defender, gave Laverne’s death more attention: “W. Siders mourn brave fire victim” read the headline of the front-page story the paper ran three days after the fire....

Airplanes landing at O’Hare often fly right over the Rosemont Horizon, and even inside the enclosed stadium you can hear the whine of their engines as they drop. The Horizon is nearly three quarters full on a cold, drizzly Saturday night in late February, the third night of the International Championship Rodeo. Some of the spectators say they have come because they have free tickets, some because they remember going to the rodeo when they were kids, some because they like animals....