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To the editors: Your cover story (April 10) about Jeanne Bishop and the supposed Irish connection in the murder of her sister and brother-in-law paints Ms. Bishop as a victim of FBI dishonesty, Winnetka police naivete, and Chicago media crassness. In telling this strange story John Conroy made numerous references to “Irish activists.” He was less than scrupulous in explaining what these individuals are “active” in doing. The whole truth gives an interesting twist to Jeanne Bishop’s posture as a grieving victim....

EVIL TRIGGERS DOWN AMATEUR STREET Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » So a play like Beau O’Reilly’s dark comedy Evil Triggers Down Amateur Street is refreshing. This antirealistic play foils every attempt to take it as a mirror held up to the world. True, O’Reilly does start out with a framework that could have been lifted from any odd B movie or Mamet play: a pair of petty con men, Jack Sugar and Arson Fix, set about gathering the personnel and know-how to pull off “the big grab”–kidnapping Keith Richards and Mick Jagger....

FACETS Specific bodies make specific dances. A strong dancer will use angular, percussive movements because it’s easy for a strong body to throw itself quickly. A flexible body will prefer swinging movements that create a lot of momentum, because a flexible dancer has enough range to wind up and let loose in a big arc. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Triptych begins with three women (Ann Boyd, Winnie Ladd, and Jane Siarny) standing in a line behind one another in a shaft of light in a far upstage corner....

I used to get really angry every time the Tribune ran an editorial about an endangered species. Their usual slant on efforts to prevent the extermination of one of earth’s unique genetic combinations was “What the heck, we’ve got millions of them. Is anybody really going to notice if we lose one?” Red squirrel populations in southern Arizona are scattered, separated by lower-altitude areas where scrub, grassland, and desert vegetation are dominant and where the squirrels can’t live....

Last summer, Clarence Fountain and his gospel group roused audiences out of their seats in the Goodman Theatre’s The Gospel at Colonus, in which ancient Greek myth was reset as an African American church pageant. Fountain’s gritty lead vocals, propelled by the vibrant harmonies of the rest of the group, proclaimed a decidedly earthy brand of religious feeling in that musical’s wedding of Christian and pagan sensibilities. Now the Five Blind Boys–the original group was brought together by Fountain in the 1940s at Alabama’s Talladega Institute for the Deaf and Blind–are returning to Chicago in a different musical format; they’ll be singing traditional and contemporary gospel songs to a nightclub audience more accustomed to the blues....

Chicago was built on garbage. The politics of garbage has never vanished, nor has its odor substantially improved. The latest case in point is Chicago’s so-called blue-bag plan to meet state mandates to recycle more waste. Promoted as a bargain-basement, no-hassle solution to a big problem, it’s likely to balloon into a costly fiasco: a “recycling” plan that doesn’t seriously recycle and instead sets the stage for building massive, environmentally dangerous waste incinerators....

These rosewood elevator doors, hand-carved with sylphlike figures, used to slide open on the 11th floor to reveal a sultry blond curled behind an expansive marble-topped reception desk, the walls behind her lined with poster-size photos of nude women, graciously welcoming you to Playboy magazine’s photo department. But last week, on one of Playboy Enterprises’ final days in its hutch at Michigan and Walton, the desk and the blond and the nudes and the world they represent were disappearing fast as the room filled with a ceiling-high heap of trash–brown plastic garbage bags, nicked plywood backdrops, fake French windows, bent bamboo bed frames, and boxes bulging with old shoes, towels, ribbons, confetti, and lacy, racy underwear....

ONCE FIVE YEARS PASS I shouldn’t actually pin all the blame on Garcia Lorca, since his play–inscrutable as it is–has been muddled even further by its Latino Chicago Theater production. That production’s stupefying nature is perfectly captured by the synopsis included in the program: “Once Five Years Pass is a legend of echoes that need to be revealed through a transcendental intuition that gives a glimpse and shakes the curiosity of only those whom are ready to give of themselves and enter its fascinating labyrinth....

Neal Cassady won’t go away. The wild young man dashing madly down the highways of experience, liberated from conventional restraints and searching for sex and salvation in the American night, sent chills of horror down the spine of respectable society in 1957, when Kerouac immortalized him as Dean Moriarty in On the Road. A few years later, just when America thought it was safe to drive again, he came roaring back, in the flesh this time and crazier than ever, as the pilot of the bus Ken Kesey and his “Merry Pranksters” took cross-country in the psychedelic 60s....

Some singers celebrate their debt to Billie Holiday by covering her songs and noting her mannerisms. Sheila Jordan does neither, but she embodies the Holiday spirit more faithfully than most. Like Lady Day, Jordan eschews the merely pretty, finds the improvised notes nobody else wanted, and revels in the naked purity of a somewhat unorthodox vocal instrument. As Jordan snakes her way around a familiar melody, both she and the song seem to undergo a transformation: wringing the song line to squeeze out its essence, she contorts her face into unexpected caricatures....

“I think there are two Tiananmen Squares,” says Shen Tong, one of the student leaders of China’s near revolution in the spring of 1989. He’s speaking at a private club to a small group of Chicago academics, businesspeople, and foundation representatives as part of a two-and-a-half-week tour to promote his recent autobiography, which he wrote last spring as a full-time student at Brandeis University. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I would like to explain what I think is the background of today’s CHA/HUD policies. Chicago and 160 other cities burned after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. in ’68. The powers that be were afraid so they studied together through the Kerner Commission to see how such rebellion might be prevented. One of these representatives of big business, government, and military was developer Anthony Downs whose proposals for “Spacial Deconcentration” found their way into HUD manuals....

STEAMSHIP QUANZA Building Company’s Steamship Quanza is therefore a rarity–everybody does everything right, from the writers who came up with the idea to whoever chose the shoes worn by Eleanor Roosevelt in act two. The playwrights, Stephen Morewitz and Susan Lieberman, keep their objective in focus, while giving their characters sufficient humanity to prevent the script from resembling a history lesson. The spare action is stripped bare of histrionics, and the actors are not afraid to display emotion but know how to play subtleties....

It was on August 16–the Wednesday morning after the family got home from vacation–that Karen Pritchard first heard the sound of trouble: “I got up in the morning, and I heard noises that sounded like the garbage pickup. But then I realized it wasn’t Thursday.” “The kids know the paths, how to walk through it,” says Karen. “The adults don’t. There’s an island out there where they go camping.” At the end near the golf course is a pond with some open water, and Karen has occasionally seen a rowboat out on it....

In August 1979, 18 Chicago artists and actors decided they wanted to stage plays, taking risks with material and experimenting with form. They called themselves Innisfree. They would champion unknown playwrights. They held production meetings. But they couldn’t agree on a play, and they never staged a single production. The group split up, and the few members who decided to try again–Gary Cole, David Alan Novak, Steven Bauer, D.W. Moffett, and Lindsey McGee–called themselves the “Remains....

THE PROMISE DuckWorks Productions at the Blue Rider Theatre Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In telling his story, Rivera steals a page from novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s bag of tricks, creating a living, breathing fictional world (set in working-class suburban Long Island) made up of equal parts miracle and mundanity, a world where spells are real and enchantment is a daily danger but where the poor are still forced to work at stifling factory jobs and live on the edge of (perhaps toxic) public landfills....

A week ago last Wednesday at Wrigley Field, the wind blew straight in off the lake out of the northeast. Wispy, sparse, low-flying clouds passed overhead, growing larger as they seemed to scrape the top of the grandstand and then diminishing as they continued on to the southwest. Shawon Dunston looked up between turns in the batting cage and said, “Don’t it look like the sky is falling?” Andre Dawson stepped out and Dunston stepped in, kicking at the dirt in the batter’s box, muttering, “The sky is falling....

The Bears’ glorious Indian summer came to an abrupt end last Sunday with a 41-13 loss to the Minnesota Vikings. The resurgent Bears hoped to clinch first place in the Central Division of the National Football Conference with a victory; instead, they finished the game humbled and hurt, with old wounds reopened. The game lacked the free-falling feeling of collapse common to the Bears’ other notable defeats of recent years–the back-to-back playoff losses to the Washington Redskins, the 41-0 thrashing at the hands of the San Francisco 49ers in 1987, the magical replay defeat in Green Bay last season, and the miserable second-half failure against the Redskins almost exactly a year ago when the Bears could have regained a tie for first place in the division at 7-5, a loss triggering Mike Ditka’s sadly accurate “we may not win another game this year” diatribe....

I’ve always cast a jaundiced eye on the shenanigans of scientific fringe groups. But my eye is a little less yellow when I look at Wilhelm Reich. Reich claimed to have discovered a life energy he called “orgone” back in the 1930s. He made a device that supposedly accumulated the energy, the “orgone accumulator” (ORAC), and another that allegedly could manipulate it in the atmosphere called a “cloudbuster.” Some MDs who still subscribe to Reich’s theories publish the Journal of Orgonomy....

Carolee Schneemann is a painter. She studied painting in college. She painted a male nude that got her in trouble with her male teachers. She has pretty much stayed in trouble ever since. She has a gift for getting men upset with her art. Soon afterward she was teaching drawing at the University of Illinois campus at Navy Pier and hanging out at Second City. “They helped me think about using the self for performance....