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Clark Street between Belmont Avenue and Wrigley Field is distinguished by a motley assortment of ethnic eateries. You’ll find Japanese, Mexican, Thai, Chinese, Korean, Ethiopian, and Philippine restaurants along that stretch. American food tends to be limited to hot dogs and hamburgers with one interesting exception–Joel’s Theatre Cafe. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The decor suggests a 1940s supper club. Dark gray predominates on walls, on the ceiling, and in the carpeting....

RUDOLF NUREYEV & FRIENDS But Nureyev is no longer the electrifying ephebe of past years, nor is he now the only defector to claim our affections. For that matter, the political climate has changed so radically that Russian dancers no longer have to defect to perform abroad, and they’ve become so familiar to us that the mystique surrounding Soviet ballet is rapidly fading. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » So what does an aging legend, for whom the roar of the crowd remains the breath of life, do?...

So you want to buy a giant prehistoric cockroach for your museum, but you don’t know where to go. How about a Tyrannosaurus rex? The jaw of a mastodon? Maybe a nice bouquet of Permian Period ferns? If you’re looking for dioramas, coral reefs, medical models, human figures designed to complete anatomical accuracy, then there is really only one man to see. And it’s been the same man for more than 50 years....

Last May the Leadership Council for Metropolitan Open Communities marked its 25th anniversary with a celebration in the Grand Ballroom of the Palmer House; the party drew 1,300 guests who marveled at the progress Chicago’s made in integrated housing during the past quarter century. Those achievements, noted Kale Williams, director of the council, are “truly astounding,” “unmatched anywhere in the nation.” Others, like Barry Sullivan, chairman of First Chicago Corporation, toasted the dedicated professionals and volunteers, who took to heart the words spoken here by Martin Luther King in 1966: “We’re going to make this an open city because it’s right, because it’s practical, and because it’s sound economics....

THE BABYSITTER And sometimes even baby-sitters. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In his short story, The Babysitter, Robert Coover brilliantly ridicules the sexual fantasies triggered by a teenage girl. And in his fine adaptation of the short story, director Victor D’Altorio, working with the Parallax Theater Company, cleverly intensifies the absurdity and violence that Coover finds implicit in such fantasies. But Coover provides several other outcomes....

Victims of old-time English teachers. From a recent press release: “We all yen for the taste of Grandmother’s cooking but fear the calories, fat, sodium and all the other No-No’s about which we’re finding.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “It was frustrating for our hearing president when all the deaf would get real excited and start signing and the hearing president would be looking and looking and he couldn’t understand what was going on,” says Bob Radtke of Ridge Lutheran Church’s ministry with the deaf and hearing impaired (Church and Community Forum, August)....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » No sensible freelance expects to earn a living from the left press; we write for ITT because we support the paper politically and value the open forum it offers. Problems with arbitrary copy changes and misplaced manuscripts, not money, forced us to seek a contract in the late 1980s. Understanding ITT’s problems, we accepted an unorthodox contract which lets the paper indefinitely delay payment to writers when the money runs short....

One gray, cheerless morning it came time for me to check out the new Pursuit of Happiness LP, Love Junk. At first it sounded exactly like the kind of 1970s mainstream hard rock that once served as sound track to my adolescent life: tough, tight, edgy riffs blasting with impeccable Todd Rundgren-produced sonic force out of both of my crappy stereo speakers. I stood there feeling suddenly young and pumped again, wondering whether I should torch up a joint to finish the tableau....

Cecil, are there such things as “baa-baa-babies”? In other words, if a human male has sexual relations with a sheep, can the sheep become fertilized and deliver a quasi-human-sheepish blob, otherwise known as a “baa-baa-baby”? Several associates claim there are bottled baa-baa-babies in the labs at UTA, and that there are laws prohibiting sexual union between men and sheep. I can’t say if these people are speaking from real-life experience or not, but I say it’s absurd....

THE CHICAGO PROJECT “The Chicago Project,” performed by Concert Dance, Inc., is meant to celebrate Chicago architecture. The choreography is by a Chicago dancer, Venetia Stifler; the set, made up of architectural photos, is by a Chicago teacher, Frank Vodvarka; and the music is by Chicago composers Paul Solberg and Rick Snyder. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Stifler divides “The Chicago Project” into three parts, performed in the following order: Magic Spaces (1985), Private Places (1988), and Corporate Cases (1989)....

Designing a public space or building that is truly public is perhaps the greatest challenge of all for an architect or artist. According to the terms by which it is defined, a public space should anticipate virtually any demand that will be placed on it by a member of the public. At the same time, architecture is a tricky business. It is by nature a prescriptive discipline. It tells us where to sit, where not to sit, where to walk, or to keep on walking....

This room could make you snow-blind. Arranged along the white walls are tables with white tablecloths. Sitting at the tables, seven white men in white lab coats. At each of their stations, a little white plate with a roll of roast beef and some crackers, and three glasses of red wine. Each man has a big white plastic cup with a white plastic funnel that will serve as his spittoon....

I found out about Rahn Harris’s cars on a recent visit to the Hyde Park Co-op, where Harris works in the produce department. He is arguably the most popular member of the produce department because of the big plastic baby rattle he keeps on the produce scale. Customers shake the musical rattle to get his attention when he’s away stacking vegetables, and you don’t wave a baby toy in public without lightening up a bit....

In 1970 Jack Ryan, a 32-year-old special agent for the FBI, was assigned to a stakeout set up to capture two of the nation’s most notorious fugitives: antiwar activist priests Daniel and Philip Berrigan. The Berrigan brothers had gone underground after being sentenced to three years in prison for destroying draft-board records in Catonsville, Maryland. Their mother had been admitted to a hospital in Syracuse, New York, and there was suspicion that her sons might come to visit....

Friday 1 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The old CrossCurrents club is being resurrected as Cotton Chicago, a new entry in the city’s blues circuit. The club’s owner is James Cotton, master of the blues harp and veteran of jams with the likes of Howlin’ Wolf, B.B. King, Elvis Presley, Muddy Waters, Janis Joplin, Steve Miller, and Johnny Winter. There will be a grand-opening performance by Cotton himself–it’s his birthday–at 10 and midnight tonight at the club, 3204 N....

To the editors: Doug Cassel’s article of March 17th seems more like a campaign piece for Tim Evans than a realistic analysis of his career. Cassel repeatedly suggests that Alderman Evans kept struggling against the Chicago Democratic machine in the years before Harold Washington’s Mayoral victory. Yet those of us who observed his activities closely during those years have no such memories. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In 1976, when Ralph Metcalfe Sr....

STRETCHING OUR ROOTS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » New York artist Susie Brandt’s quilt, Dainty, at first glance looks like neither a quilt nor fabric–and it’s definitely not dainty. Hung loosely on a wall so that it falls in folds, it lacks the geometric shapes and repeated patterns of traditional quilts. Instead, it’s composed of countless overlapping bits of lace ranging in color from bright white to faded brown....

Most Sunday afternoons, there’s a crowd of people queued up in front of the Conrad Sulzer Regional Library right before it opens. Like addicts waiting for a fix, they pace and fidget, alternately glancing at their watches and the library’s front doors. When the portals finally open at one they stream inside and head for their departments of choice. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Andrews says she visits the Sulzer branch a few times each week to do research and possibly to bump into something interesting....

I have a souvenir of the Bulls championship. It’s a copy of the Revolutionary Worker newspaper, the voice of the Revolutionary Communist Party. On the cover is a picture of Chiang Ching, the recently deceased widow of Mao Tse-tung. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The flyer said a lot of things. It was on both sides of a page, single-spaced. But basically it said that the looting, rock throwing, and other raucous revelry on the west side was really a “poor people’s press conference,” a spontaneous eruption of revolutionary fervor against capitalist oppression....

Lighten Up, Harold Maybe he’s pooped. And that worries us because of the other thing we hear from the campaign trail. Which is that the mayor’s not exactly in fighting trim. He weighs too much. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » We called around. The ballooning of an already fleshy physique is generally laid to the mayor’s success in swearing off cigarettes a year or so ago....