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Name the city most likely to serve as backdrop to the following scenario: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It’s possible that such a scene could take place in Paris: the French love le jazz Americain, and there are enough world travelers passing through on any given night to populate the above fantasy. Another good guess might be the small city of Perugia, Italy, where each year the Umbria Jazz Festival offers a swirl of postmidnight performances in small rooms that border cobblestone streets....

An unheralded trend in the blues is the heartfelt effort being made by a core of young black intellectuals and musicians to rekindle an enthusiasm for the music among black listeners. The problem they address is obvious, as any patron of south- and west-side clubs can attest, and as attendance at the annual Chicago Blues Festival makes all too clear: the blues remains alive largely by virtue of an enthusiastic white audience who have adopted it as a combination of party music and a glimpse into the folk wisdom of a rich heritage that’s not their own....

A LITTLE PERSONALITY Sentience’s A Little Personality offers a lighthearted, personable, positively painless introduction to dance. If you sought a performance filled with finely finished and meticulously crafted work, you probably would have been disappointed by the barely structured dances and marginally successful improvisations on the program. But if you wanted to learn how people “read” or “get” a dance, or if you simply wanted to learn more about how people move, you would have found the program satisfying, edifying, and entertaining....

ICECREAM In Caryl Churchill’s play Icecream, now being produced jointly by the Inn Town Players and Element Theatre Company, many themes are kicked about (including Churchill’s favorites, sex and violence). But the primary theme is the differences between the Americans and the British and the shattering of those myths. The title is a reference to a word that is written the same in both countries but pronounced differently: Americans say ice cream, while the English say ice cream....

On Thursday, May 12, it is almost painfully bright in front of the State of Illinois Center at the kickoff ceremony for Illinois Tourism Week. Once in a while, a breeze starts a string of balloons or a flag swinging lazily. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » While they’re making their way toward the stage, Weiman introduces Greg, “Don Pardo,” who is in charge of playing the Jeopardy theme music that will fill the brief empty spaces in the program....

Made in 1969, only three years after his Oscar-winning Closely Watched Trains, Jiri Menzel’s lovely, sensual Czech satire waited 21 years to pass the censors, then went on to win the top prize at the Berlin film festival. Cowritten by Menzel and Bohumil Hrabal from a collection of Hrabal’s stories, the comic tale, set in the early 50s, centers on a group of “bourgeois dissidents”–including a philosophy professor, a librarian who promoted Western literature, a Seventh-Day Adventist cook (Vaclav Neckar), a saxophonist, and a public prosecutor-assigned to work on a scrap heap in the town of Kladno....

Logo to Go: Local Designers Miffed at MCA Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Anyway, the force went about its task, finally narrowing the list to seven design firms, from which written proposals were requested. After reviewing those proposals, MCA executives cut the list to three–two New York firms and one from Chicago. The finalists were called in to make presentations, and the winner was a New York firm called Pentagram....

In the spring of 1969 a graduating senior at Mills College in California delivered a commencement address rather sensationally entitled “The Future Is a Cruel Hoax.” The speaker announced that the world was despoiled, the future bleak. The main cause of all the trouble, she said, was human overpopulation. Her response to that crisis was to promise she would never have children–clearly the only thing she could do on a personal level to address the problem....

When John (not his real name) first showed up at the Southern School a few years ago, he was so miserable he wanted to kill himself. “This was a teenager who had been sexually abused by his mother,” says Michael Johnson, education director at the north-side private school for children with emotional and learning disabilities. “He talked about walking close to cars. But he got himself together, graduated, and is now in the Navy....

The Bulls’ championship ring presentation ceremony, which took place before last Saturday’s home opener, seemed slightly more self-satisfied this year than last. It had a pace of its own, more of a saunter than a swagger. The public address announcement was muffed at first, catching the Bulls still downstairs in the locker room. When they did begin to emerge, led by the departed Cliff Levingston and Craig Hodges in street clothes, they stepped out, one by one, into the spotlight and trotted or walked–but mostly walked–to center court to receive their rings and congratulations....

It started out like one of those dreams that plague college students. Except that this wasn’t a nightmare test in a barely attended class, this was a real test, sprung without warning on a CTA bus one weekday morning in 1980, and I couldn’t wake up to escape it. The bus slowed for another stop and, as if to reassure me, the woman rose from her seat and stood behind the other two passengers at the front door....

Wrigley Field’s Stairway to Heaven It’s a long haul up to the press box in Wrigley Field, and Bus Saidt of New Jersey’s Trenton Times felt every step. “This is pretty tough on me,” he told the Sun-Times’s Joe Goddard during one of their climbs last April. And when Saidt paused to catch his breath, Goddard, who felt concerned about him, also stopped. Saidt was a well-liked man, and friends who were angry that he died found themselves angry at the Chicago Cubs....

What is the meaning of a ten best list? For me, at any rate, it means a list of movies with the highest possible mystery quotient–the movies that fascinate me the most because they still have secrets to withhold. And the best litmus test that I know for determining this quality is repeat viewings. If a movie that knocked me out seems less mysterious after a return visit–as was the case with Broadcast News, Cross My Heart, and Orphans–then it doesn’t belong on the list....

Ray was 21 and from Berwyn, had a clear, angelic complexion and sported a tufty head of black hair that made him look a little like Steven Tyler of Aerosmith. He’d been playing electric guitar for years and thought he was good, but still didn’t really have a band–with him was a pal named Brian, who was a drummer, but not the drummer, if you get the distinction. Ray had been practicing for this night at Limelight, this potentially momentous night, for some time....

HUBBARD STREET DANCE COMPANY Which is what makes it so odd to see them doing Daniel Ezralow’s Super Straight Is Coming Down. This dance, created for Hubbard Street, is one of two Chicago premieres that the company is presenting this spring at the Civic Center, and it’s subversive. It’s a slap in the audience’s face–and a breath of fresh air. The original music, by Tom Willens, booms and squeaks and is silent at odd times....

“It’s fun to be fooled,” Jay Marshall asserts. Marshall has been a performing magician, ventriloquist, and puppeteer for more than 50 years. (One of his ventriloquist’s props–a glove called Lefty–is in the Smithsonian.) He also owns and runs with his wife, Frances, Magic, Inc., the famous north-side store and mail-order business that sells everything from magic wands ($2) to sculptured ventriloquial figures ($500–and for that price, it would be declasse to call them dummies)....

CHICAGO MOVING COMPANY But as a choreographer she must also work with the beginnings, middles, and ends of dances, and there Shineflug isn’t as strong. In recent years she’s been adding text to her pieces, possibly to give them the additional shape and structure they need. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Her 1991 Bewegung, which opened her concert at the Dance Center, comes close to success, but like many of Shineflug’s dances it’s missing one thing....

IMPROVOLYMPIC Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Though ImprovOlympic has grown steadily in popularity, the game has bounced from one location to another. Now, Close and producer Charna Halpern seem to have found a permanent home: the cabaret at Papa Milano, a restaurant on Lincoln near Armitage. There, four times a week, the Harold happens. Each improvisation is unique, and each includes its fair share of failures and flubs....

Can the Rainbow Coalition beat the Rambo Coalition at its own game? If the funky metal titans in Living Colour have their way, the answer may be yes. If Living Colour’s debut album, Vivid, is your first exposure to the snap, crackle, and atomic explosion of guitarist/idea man Vernon Reid, you might be tempted to describe him as Eddie Van Halen with black skin and a college-level vocabulary. But unlike Fast Eddie, Reid is as subversive a presence from the neck up as he is from the neck down....

MACHINAL Like Elmer Rice’s The Adding Machine or Chaplin’s Modern Times, Sophie Treadwell’s 1928 expressionistic drama–now being staged by Fly’s Eye Theatre, an arm of Theater Oobleck–depicts a world where human relations equal economic transactions, where people sell their future without feeling the loss. Helen’s ill-defined hopes for happiness or freedom don’t stand a chance. Alienation dogs her like her insomnia. Every attempt she makes to escape the tedium of work or marriage only brings on a new subservience....