What causes a person to shiver uncontrollably following urination (i.e., “piss shiver”)? My friends and I have wrestled with this for years even to the point of consulting medical authorities (they didn’t know either). We currently have two theories. One is the Rapid Heat Loss Theory, which states that an uncontrollable shiver passes over the body following the rapid loss of several ounces of 98.6 degree liquid. This theory seems to have good face validity, but as far as we can tell females do not experience piss shiver, which puts a hole in that idea....

Did medieval lords really have the “right of the first night”–that is, the right to be the first to bed the local brides? This figured in the movie Braveheart, and I know I have seen other references to it. I’m not saying the big shots didn’t take advantage, but I have a hard time believing this was a generally accepted custom, much less a law. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Dear Editor; Bryan Miller in her piece “Guns & Women” [February 4] has unfortunately bought the line of the National Rifle Association and the gun manufacturers that women have been arming themselves at a rapid rate. In fact, gun ownership by women did not increase by 53 percent from 1983 to 1988. Surveys by the National Opinion Research Center (NORC) at the University of Chicago indicate NO change in the ownership of either firearms in general or handguns in particular from 1980 to 1993....

With poor TV reception and the nearest movie theater 60 miles away, Sally Alatalo grew up depending on the world around her–namely her father’s Texaco station in northern Michigan–for visual stimulation. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Alatalo’s interests might have remained mere diversions had she followed the usual path for girls in her hometown: early marriage; motherhood; endless days of laundry, cleaning, and cooking; and maybe a part-time job to supplement the family income....

Chicago Symphony Orchestra Ravinia Festival, August 5 Battle isn’t particularly monstrous by Hollywood or rock standards; she’s never been reported to have set fire to a hotel room, for instance. But her behavior was too much for the classical world, even for musicians accustomed to diva fits. The Met finally fired her openly, and many other opera companies and symphony orchestras have quietly not rehired her. Some singers, including soprano Carol Vaness, have declared to the world that they’ll never work with her again, and many others have said the same thing to their managements....

Before I Disappear Productions like Victor/Victoria, Tony ‘n’ Tony’s Wedding, and Vampire Lesbians of Sodom rely on camp and burlesque traditions for their box-office appeal. Whatever political subtext may pulse beneath the sometimes brutal wit and careful excess of drag storytelling, these shows usually feel more like romps than revolutions. Somehow, knowing that there are really a man’s wide feet in those size-12 pumps makes everyone but those on the far right feel safe....

CONTEMPORARY CHAMBER PLAYERS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In the Ralph Shapey years, the Contemporary Chamber Players, while open-minded, tended to favor older, east-coast establishment figures–those stubborn, at times inventive adherents of 20th-century Eurocentric aesthetic currents. The new music director, Stephen Mosko, belongs to a younger generation that fuses diverse influences. Just as important, he’s based on the west coast, always a hotbed of experimentalism....

“I had fun in this class! I learned a lot,” wrote Jon Moritsugu in his course evaluation for intro to film theory and aesthetics at Brown University. His instructor, though, had another opinion: “Jon’s performance this semester was profoundly dismal. . . . Jon has ably demonstrated that he has not learned any of the course material. Trying to work with this student was a thoroughly unenjoyable experience for me.”...

“My big break,” says Galen Kingross, “came when they put me in charge of cotton candy.” Kingross works concessions at Cirque du Soleil, but his “big break” brought him a step closer to what he wants to do: work the crowd. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Then last year a girlfriend took him to see Cirque du Soleil when it played in San Francisco: “I was totally blown away....

Harmonica player Lester Davenport’s first big break occurred in 1956 when he joined Bo Diddley’s touring band and cut a few sides with Bo on the Chess label. Despite that auspicious beginning, this master of the sweet-toned, emotionally rich Chicago harp style remained little more than a neighborhood celebrity on the west side until a few years ago when he signed on with Big Daddy Kinsey and the Kinsey Report. That job gained Davenport worldwide recognition and prepared him for his long-overdue ascension as a bandleader....

A FEWER GOOD MEN: THE FUROR OVER GAYS & LESBIANS IN THE MILITARY Lifeline Theatre at the Organic Theater Greenhouse Lab Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Actually, neither honor nor morality has much to do with the U.S. military’s treatment of gays and lesbians. Not content merely to reject or eject such personnel, the armed forces have historically gone on purging binges, ferreting out sexual minorities with a zeal that would have done McCarthy or Torquemada proud....

Mercedes Teixido: The Nothing and the Everything Contemporary Art, through Each of Mercedes Teixido’s tiny sculptural installations is its own little world, as if an actual event were depicted within the bell jar that protects each one. A mound of hair is arranged a bit like a haystack, for example, and poised above it is a tiny magnifying glass too far away to be seen through. The multiple lines of the hair give the scene some of the precise detail of a Dürer etching or a page from an illuminated manuscript....

Prodigal Playwright Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Sidney Bechet Killed a Man caught the attention of Shinner and artistic director Dennis Zacek, who wasted no time in scheduling a staged reading last winter. If there was one question they had about the script, says Shinner, it was whether its long monologues would play as well onstage as they did on the page. The reading was an unqualified success, and since then Flack has only fiddled with the ending....

Legendary names from the glory days of Chicago soul music make a rare appearance on a show that promises to be equal parts sweet nostalgia and contemporary R & B workout. The Steelers, although they charted nationally only once (“Get It From the Bottom” in 1969), have remained among our city’s most dependable and popular musical aggregations for nearly 30 years. In the words of Chicago soul historian Robert Pruter, they “never made a … bad record; they were too good a group....

TALK TO ME LIKE THE RAIN AND LET ME LISTEN and Watching Tennessee Williams one-acts is like flipping through an artist’s sketchbook: they’re filled with simple, evocative jottings that explore a dramatic or poetic idea on a small scale. Such works often gain strength from simple stagings: the spare production of two of Williams’s pieces on view at Cafe Voltaire highlights the works themselves–though these one-acts only hint at the talent of this great modern dramatist....

In this delightful all-ages entertainment, performers Hugo Suarez Flores and Ines Pasic combine a childlike absorption with their own bodies and the superb technique of two experienced artist-athletes. In a sometimes wacky, sometimes wistful program of wordless comedy vignettes, the pair reshape their body parts into highly individualized puppets–like kids often do, only with the physical skill and imagination of supremely gifted dancer-mimes. With the aid of a strap-on nose and a floppy costume, Hugo turns his knee into a bouncy, bald-headed street musician who strums a ukulele and beams with goofy pleasure at the audience’s response; this is the Ginocchio of the title, whose name (recalling that of another well-known puppet-person) comes from the Italian word for knee....

War is–green?! “Thousands of unexploded bombs and mines from the Gulf War are still strewn across the Kuwaiti desert. According to Charles Pilcher, a conservationist who has taught at Kuwait University for many years, the results are wonderful,” reports the Chicago-based Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (March), citing the Washington Times (January 6). “The unexploded ordnance has deterred the hunters, joy riders, and flocks of sheep that had created ‘phenomenal desertification in western Kuwait....

The Rhinoceros Theater Festival began as a performing-arts component of the multidisciplinary Bucktown Arts Fest. Though over the years the two events have separated–with the Bucktown fest remaining a neighborhood affair while Rhino Fest has moved north into Lakeview and Andersonville–the Bucktown festival presents repeat performances of several Rhino Fest shows, as noted in the listings below. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Reader lists festival offerings on a week-by-week basis; following is the schedule for August 24 through 31....

Since you dealt so thoroughly with gerbil stuffing a few years back, I know you are the man to answer this question. There is a rumor going around about that frozen Stone Age man they found in the glacier between Austria and Italy in September 1991. What I have heard is that scientists found traces of semen in the man’s anus. I know this is sticky territory, but is this rumor true?...

WHITE AFRICAN MASK: IN SEARCH OF THE MISSING LINK That’s a fair question, but Bonnett doesn’t attempt to answer it. Instead she starts off by taking us on a tour through what she calls the “Library Museum of Human Conditioning” to show us unconvincing “exhibits” intended to shed light on human cruelty: a drunk in the gutter, a greedy businessman, an unjustly imprisoned African American. She presents social issues we pondered in high school as if we’d never been exposed to them before....