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LINK’S HALL CHANCE DANCE PERFORMANCE FEST For his dance, The Third Anniversary of the 1st Cub’s Nite Game on 8-8-88 or Without Normal Speech, Eisen uses a technique borrowed from Merce Cunningham. Five minutes before each performance, Eisen and his three dancers pick numbers from a hat to determine the order in which individual phrases and sections of the dance will be performed. Eisen’s method makes hash of any kind of story the dancers may be trying to tell, or any story the audience is trying to hear....

Return of the Rolling Reporter “It’s actually much easier to live as a disabled person in the third world than in the United States or Germany or Great Britain,” John Hockenberry was telling us. “They’re used to being humiliated and having themselves be made fools of–in which case I fit in. I was used to being made a fool of. So we were all like brothers. If I needed half the neighborhood to carry me up the stairs, there was half the neighborhood....

FOLLOW THE BOOKER: Chicago’s premier rock club, the Cubby Bear, has always had a schizophrenic existence: Cubs fans by day, rock fans at night. Suddenly, however, the club’s concert schedule is blank, with little but second-rate metal bands booked for the future. What’s going on? Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Tonight (Friday) the club is planning a show of force with a lineup of about ten local bands, from Spies Who Surf and the Sapphires to the Elvis Brothers, the Slammin’ Watusis, and the Insiders, all playing on a common setup to keep dead time to a minimum....

The deluxe model applies a spark to the gas tank. From Hammacher Schlemmer’s new catalog (Fall 1989): “EXECUTIVE’S PRIVATE PARKING SPACE GUARD.É Using ultrasonic waves, it detects cars entering your space and immediately sounds an adjustable 120 dB alarm which alternates with a synthesized voice message that says ‘Warning! Reserved parking. Please move your car or it will be towed.’” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Convenient memory....

“When I was 29, I guess it was, I had gotten pregnant. I didn’t know until I was like three-and-a-half-months pregnant. I didn’t know because it’s not unusual when you’re doing a lot of drugs not to get your period. And when you’re high all the time, you don’t really notice bloating and side effects and all that. I took a test at a local clinic–I found out on a Saturday....

Romantic minimalists in the extreme, the Feelies sweep a lot of people off their feet with their lush yet quick-stepping two-chord trances. In my book, people affected this way are usually airheads: give them any brightly colored balloon to hold on to and they float away. Me, I’m turned off by the Feelies’ self-aggrandizing navel-gazing, by their banal turns of phrase delivered as poetic philosophy, by the easy pleasures they derive from a vague weltschmerz–in short, by the same things that turn me off to countless other hapless romantics....

WHY COWS ARE LOUSY TIPPERS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » You have been misinformed about the fabled practice of cow tipping. I spent a year working on a dairy farm where I participated in countless 3:30 AM milkings and observed over 300 sleeping cows a day. Cows sleep lying down, not standing up. –Mitchell Bellman, Montreal, Quebec People such as myself who are always out there on the front lines of science learn to expect stuff like this....

I have often heard it said humans “use only 10 percent of our brains.” (Why people make a point of saying this to me I’m not sure.) But for all the times I’ve run across this statement, no one has ever cited a source nor explained precisely what it means. Does it mean only 10 percent of the neurons ever fire at all, leaving the other 90 percent to atrophy? This would explain quite a bit about politics and college athletics, but it doesn’t seem appropriate for most functioning adults....

“Vanessa Rubin sings with soul.” That sentence sounds like a jazz album title from the early 60s. But it makes perfect sense when you learn that during her youth, the Rubin family hi-fi brimmed with records by Dexter Gordon, Cannonball Adderley, and others who exemplified the earthy mid-50s melding of jazz with rhythm and blues. And besides, what better way to describe the undercurrent of sassy funk in Rubin’s singing? This expression of soul comes neither from Rubin’s material nor from any overt references to R & B....

ZIEGFELD’S LAST WORDS Monumental Oak Rapier & Dagger Club Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The setup for the acts, and the source for this production’s title, is the presence of a doddering Flo Ziegfeld. He bumbles about, performing minor magic tricks while he talks about his life in vaudeville. Whenever he exits, vaudeville’s lost gems appear before us. This production is among the most amateur I’ve seen; it’s like a high school pep assembly....

Eighteen theater companies are presented in six different programs of two to four plays each, organized along loose thematic lines by producer Doug Bragan and associate producer Judith Easton. That’s two more companies and two more programs than last year, when Bragan first stepped in to revive this non-Equity showcase founded and then discontinued by the League of Chicago Theatres. At the Theatre Building, through June 2. Wednesdays-Fridays, 8 PM, Saturdays, 6:30 and 9:15 PM; Sundays, 3 PM....

A CHARLIE BROWN CHRISTMAS Synergy Theatre Company Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In translating the Peanuts TV special to the stage, director Tony Stavish employs the same technique fellow Metraform members Jill and Faith Soloway used to create their cult hit The Real Live Brady Bunch, currently playing in New York: you just appropriate the program, performing it verbatim onstage. The Soloway sisters were content to win laughs by re-creating the look, feel, and aura of The Brady Bunch–a re-creation best illustrated by Becky Thyre’s uncanny impersonation of Marcia Brady–but Stavish is after bigger game....

A CONSTANT STATE OF DESIRE Karen Finley’s A Constant State of Desire is like a seance, with Finley acting the medium extraordinaire. Finley delivers a series of monologues–for lack of a better term–in a feverish, incantatory cadence meant to evoke the spirits of the characters described. But she does not seem interested in bringing them to theatrical “life” as fully rounded psychological beings. Instead Finley the performer is present throughout, letting the words of her characters–at times funny, bitter, horrifying, brutal–spill out as urgently as if she’s been possessed....

MARTHA GRAHAM DANCE COMPANY Graham wasn’t the first choreographer to reject classic ballet, to discard her toe shoes. Nor was she the only one intent on creating a new American dance. She was, however, the first to develop a vocabulary based on contraction and release that allowed her to explore the complex manifestations of the human psyche in movement. She commissioned outstanding composers and set designers (she designed the costumes), who contributed to the organic quality of her unique theatrical dances....

Daylight pours through the kitchen window of the small apartment. This room resembles an overexposed photograph compared to the adjacent living room, where Andy sits in the dark chain-smoking Marlboros and chuckling at Judge Wapner of The People’s Court. Like AIDS, the disease has no cure; unlike AIDS, its cause is still a mystery. The belief that environmental factors cause the disease has now yielded to the widely held professional opinion that it’s caused by biological factors–although external forces, like family stress, may trigger the illness....

You’re not getting older. You’re getting cracks in your piping. From “Nuclear Energy Insight 98” (April): “Most young adults inevitably learn that there is life after 40. Moreover, upon entering their fifth decade, they often find they’ve reached the prime of their lives. Baltimore Gas and Electric believes the same will prove true for its Calvert Cliffs nuclear power plant.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » News that didn’t happen....

The sleepy northwest suburbs of Skokie, Morton Grove, and Niles seem unlikely sites for the hottest political race in the November 6 election. But that’s exactly what voters have got in the 56th legislative district, where the race for state representative is up for grabs. “If Conn wins, you’re putting a long-standing liberal seat into the conservative column, and that would be dramatic change,” says Charlotte Jaffe, whose husband, Aaron, held the seat for over a decade, until he resigned in 1985 to become a Cook County circuit court judge....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Rogers Park Tenants Committee’s Anti-Drug Abuse Group [Neighborhood News, May 11]–which includes parents; Local School Council members from Kilmer, Field, Gale, and Sullivan schools; religious leaders; and, Park District employees–welcome the June 4, 1990, announcement of “Operation S.A.F.E. (Schools Are For Education)” by Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley, Superintendent of Police Leroy Martin, and General Superintendent of Schools Ted Kimbrough....

MOROCCO Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » You don’t need to know much about Morocco to appreciate Allan Havis’s play. In fact, I suspect it helps if you know nothing at all. That makes it easier to accept its anti-Arab premise: that a prominent American businessman’s wife is arrested in Fez for what local authorities consider evidence of prostitution (sitting in a bar alone) and is then tortured, sexually abused, intentionally infected with syphilis, and kept confined while her husband is unable to do much more than visit the jail every day and blow up at the senior officer there for not letting his wife go....

A film that might be regarded as Nicholas Ray’s farewell to Hollywood (if not commercial filmmaking), as well as his tribute to Chicago in the 20s, it is also one of his most affecting love stories. An unlikely alliance between a crippled and crooked lawyer (Robert Taylor) and a dancing show girl (Cyd Charisse), both of whom try to escape the power of a tyrannical mobster (Lee J. Cobb), forms the basis for a flamboyant poem in delirious color and ‘Scope that is treated with a mixture of violence and lyricism that is unique to Ray....