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Door County’s in. So’s New Buffalo, Michigan. A long time ago I had a friend, sort of an insignificant other, who insisted on going places that weren’t. When we got there, we always found out why. We went to Starved Rock once; there was no mirror or TV in the room, no room service, no snack shop, and meals were served only at certain hours–terrible food in a dining room full of screaming kids who kept us awake by running up and down the halls all night....

JOEL HALL DANCERS So dance that fits a mold, or dancers who obey the letter but not the spirit of the choreography, can seem airless and stuffy–without that breath and ease that belong to the no-man’s-land, dangerous but free, where creativity is possible. When I see a dancer’s leg reaching hopelessly for the sky, it’s deadly to perceive it as bone wrapped with muscle or as an identifiable step from a particular dance vocabulary....

Screwed by the Tribune, Part 3 In a letter to distributors, Von Entress sounded tough: “Obviously the Sun-Times must consider other options when faced with the prospect that the Tribune could eliminate the present system and immediately create a monopoly whenever it decides. . . . Our attorneys believe the proposed contract raises serious antitrust questions. These are being reviewed with a view towards a possible suit against the Tribune.”...

CIVIC ORCHESTRA OF CHICAGO Still, when a spring collaboration between the Civic and New Music Chicago was announced, that seemed like a good excuse to hear the group again. Michael Morgan, who had proved himself time and time again with the CSO, would be conducting. And even if the group was too much for Morgan, there was a slew of new pieces to listen to. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

In a certain country: One city told a Catholic church where to put its altar. Another zoned a storefront church out of its only affordable location. A school board forced a Muslim teacher to choose between her job and the traditional robes required by her religion. A court denied compensation to the heirs of a Jehovah’s Witness who refused a blood transfusion after an auto accident. Another court equated churches’ legal rights with those of pornographic movie houses....

Our cat seems to be left-handed. Is that possible? Are animals right- or left-handed, as humans are? If so, how come, and what can be inferred from that about the meaning of life? –Pierre and Daniella, Montreal, Quebec, Canada Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » To test feline handedness, or pawedness as you prefer, Professor Cole had 60 randomly-selected cats reach into a glass tube for some rabbit meat....

My MA diploma says the degree was conferred on me “with all the rights and privileges pertaining thereto.” Ever since, I have been trying to figure out what rights and privileges I have pertaining thereto. I once even met one of the people who signed the diploma. When I asked him, he said, “Beats me.” Can you tell me where the phrase comes from and what it means? –Edith W., Greenbrae, California...

NEW YORK STORIES Written by Richard Prince With Heather McComb, Talia Shire, Giancarlo Giannini, Don Novello, and Selim Tlili. The usual argument made against sketch movies is that they’re invariably uneven–which is true enough but also rather beside the point. (If the same argument were made in publishing, we’d never have any collections of short stories.) Sketch movies by a single director, like Julien Duvivier’s Tales of Manhattan (1942), John Ford’s The Rising of the Moon (1957), Roger Corman’s Tales of Terror (1962), and Woody Allen’s own Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex (but Were Afraid to Ask) (1972), theoretically minimize the lack of balance, although these usually turn out to be uneven as well....

The best description I’ve heard of Tony Williams’s drumming came from a soprano friend of mine who labeled it “lead feathers.” Indeed, Williams seems to take thunder and bottle it so that he can dispense it at will. The control and musicianship he exhibits on an instrument that all too often is simply an ornamented click track has to be heard live to be believed. Rhythm is the lifeblood of jazz, and no one has a more innovative approach to it than Williams, who is still probably best remembered for being the heartbeat of the Wes Davis Quintet in the 60s, hired by Davis when he was a mere 16 years old....

YOU MIGHT AS WELL LIVE Temporary Theater Company at the Okefenokee Playhouse Adapted and staged by Frank Farrell, seven Parker stories and three poems compose the Temporary Theater Company’s sardonic but slow You Might As Well Live. Illustrating to the point of tiresome repetition how relationships self-destruct, the tales focus on assorted failures to communicate, some deliberate, others innocent. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The same protective (and self-defeating) sarcasm appears in “Here We Are....

My friend “Rebel Ruthi” Limper talked me into going to the Toys for Tots planning meeting, a meeting for the biker toy run that commenced with a guy named Animal yelling into a microphone, “Awright everybody, shut the fuck up!” Later in the week Santo called to make sure I was coming. He said the poetry would probably reflect bikers’ interests: “sex, drugs, and rock and roll.” He also said that it would be much louder than your average poetry slam because bikers tended to be loud....

NOVEMBER For nearly three years the Free Associates have been doing the nasty to Tennessee Williams with their improvised weekly theater piece, Cast on a Hot Tin Roof. Now they’re introducing a holiday version, A Dysfunctional Dixie Christmas, which they say is “a lighthearted look at Santa, homosexuality, and shattered dreams.” It runs Fridays and Saturdays through December 11, and then again on Saturday, December 18, at the Bop Shop, 1807 W....

Over the last few years, in between managing an adult education center on 18th Street and developing youth-education programs for Mayor Daley, Gabriele Strohschen ran a series of what she calls “cross-cultural exchanges”: educators from around the globe came to swap teaching strategies with their counterparts in Chicago. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » She gave her first reading at Chicago’s Underground Wonder Bar on Walton....

In the world of stand-up comedy, where standard topics are condoms, cops eating at doughnut shops, and foreigners working at the 7-Eleven, Paul DiGiulio is an original. His humor is observational, even scientific. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » When he taught the occasional sex-ed class to seventh- and eighth-graders from a south-side housing project, DiGiulio kept this particular routine to himself. One time he did tell them, “I was going to teach you about menstruation, but I think it’s the wrong tune of the month,” but only one person got it....

It’s a balmy autumn day in 1998, and you decide to lunch in Grant Park. You never used to have time for such a treat, but these days it takes only 14 minutes to get there from your office at the Sears Tower, and that includes the walk to the trolley station at Canal Street–leaving plenty of time for a sandwich and a quick gawk. The Loop circulator, in the works since 1987, is just now emerging from the “nice idea” stage....

Fashion Enforcer Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Curious Jorge, who claims to be a longtime watcher of club couture, believes that most fashion problems begin in the suburbs. “Thursday nights are OK in most of the clubs,” he observes, “because most of the crowd is from the city; but Friday and Saturday nights are the worst because of the suburban influx.” Hair apparently is a big problem out there beyond the city limits....

I made a firm resolution that this spring I would get out and do a lot of birding, and so far I have been able to keep it. In the past couple of years, a combination of work, family responsibilities, and household chores reduced my birding opportunities to near zero. I was spending more time sitting and writing about birding than I was actually looking at birds. Then there is the simple matter of remembering the enormous mass of information that birders have to carry in their heads....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In his August 10th essay on core curricula, “What Counts as Culture?” George Lipsitz writes that “a curriculum that goes unexamined and unchanged is no help to critical thinking.” Unfortunately he spends a great deal of space attacking “neoconservatives,” rather than discussing the standards that should be used to examine curricula. However the following sentence briefly states what criteria (or lack thereof) he uses, namely that “The new scholarship and teaching, rather than celebrate the individual genius of works presumed to have ‘transcendent’ or ‘universal’ artistic value, now see the creation of culture as social and historical; the question is why different standards emerge at different times....

A fascinating documentary by Ken Ausubel that starts off as provocative muckraking and winds up as an informative and thoughtful essay. The muckraking concerns former coal miner Harry Hoxsey and his virtually lifelong battle with the American Medical Association about his apparently effective folk remedies for cancer. The AMA and the U.S. government essentially outlawed Hoxsey’s practice in the U.S., but his remedies are still used today in a clinic in Tijuana....

LIVE DANCERS TONITE Written and directed by David Gillian and Michael Brett, Dancers is a 70-minute “musical comedy episode” set in a seedy go-go club somewhere off Rush Street. Actually the place and its denizens–all gently spoofed by six members of the new SBTH Theatre Company and varying guest performers–are fairly timeless. The intimate Sneakers Annex space, which could just as easily pass for a mid-50s combination truck stop/clip joint (except for Mark Mac Lean’s clever predisco music), teems with the eternally generic: aggressively festive decorations, an obligatory mirror ball, a jukebox that blows bubbles and whose needle keeps skipping in the middle of songs (unless the girls stomp the stage in the right spot), and a postage-stamp stage, virtually in the audience’s lap, where the girls endlessly bump and grind....