I have always laughed at people who, before opening a carbonated drink which has been shaken, tap the top of the can with their finger so that it doesn’t explode upon opening. After lengthy arguments, we even performed a semiscientific experiment by shaking a drink and opening it with and without tapping the top, but with no solid scientific conclusion. We would like to know what you, in your infinite wisdom, think of this....

I’m not sure when I first began noticing the arcane titles at the tops of paper bags (samples enclosed), but, seeing them once, I began to note others in great variety. Since they don’t seem to indicate paper weight or bag size, what are they? And why the Boy Scout names? –Mary Shen Barnidge, Chicago Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » No argument, the marks on paper bags can be pretty strange....

Along with The Glass Menagerie and The Odd Couple, Edward Albee’s 1959 The Zoo Story has become almost a rite of passage for young American actors. But where most fledgling thespians virtually attack Albee’s elegant parable of urban alienation, Daniel Meyer and Michael Shannon stalk it. Their deliberation and patience permit the play to unfold with the inevitability of classic tragedy, for conflict and violence are inevitable when a social man in search of privacy and an isolated man in search of intimacy meet and battle for possession of the same corner of the universe–in this case, a bench in a public park....

VALLEY OF THE DOLLS StreetSigns Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » About 25 years ago the play’s director, Michael Hildebrand, fell in love with the movie, he said, “fascinated with its badness.” Based on Jacqueline Susann’s novel, Valley of the Dolls is a potpourri of Hollywood cliches, a titillating 60s soap opera about a culture of drugs and free love gone bad. Three women become friends in New York’s cutthroat show-business world, their lives turn wildly successful, and they wind up drowning in California decadence....

Nancy’s Magazine Tofu Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Almost half of all respondents claimed that, when it comes to their feelings about tofu, friends and roommates are the ones who made their mark. “My old roommate Pat cooked it up with lots of garlic. Although I do not eat tofu today, I do eat lots of garlic,” said one. Who knows how many other things tofu has led people to?...

After more than a decade as eastern Asia’s reigning star, Jackie Chan is changing his image. It’s about time. At 40 the Hong Kong iconoclast is a bit too old for the daredevil martial-arts stunts that made him famous, and younger rivals like Jet Li have emerged to appropriate the characters he so endearingly limned in Police Story and Project A–those brash, mischievous, resourceful variations on the trickster-monkey-cum-itinerant-mercenary archetype of Chinese folk legend....

A Time to Kill Rating * Has redeeming facet Directed by Joel Schumacher With Matthew McConaughey, Samuel L. Jackson, Sandra Bullock, Kiefer Sutherland, and Ashley Judd. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Grisham has sold more novels than there are readers in this country. I read The Firm in the hopes of divining the reasons for such an accomplishment and came up empty-handed. Though the book quickly fell apart, the opening chapters were admittedly gripping....

Andy Kane is standing in front of City Night, a large horizontal painting done almost entirely in black and white that shows a rat flying over the city of Chicago. Within the giant rat’s body are several animal and human creatures, and beneath it are grids of building windows; the rat clutches a small humanoid figure in its claws. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » One night Kane, who has long been afraid of rats, saw one running along the baseboard of his room at the residential hotel where he lived....

The summer before last, on the day Lawrence Steger’s performance piece The Swans (re-mix) was scheduled to open, the show’s writer, director, and star lay gasping for breath in a tuberculosis isolation ward at Northwestern Memorial Hospital. He hadn’t mounted an evening-length piece for nearly five years, and he’d spent almost a year developing this one with fellow cast members Laura Dame and Douglas Grew. It’s traumatic enough for a performer to cancel opening night, but for Steger, who learned in 1990 that he has HIV, it was the realization of one of his worst fears as an artist....

Guitarist Michael Hill, who hails from the South Bronx, is attempting to do with the blues what fellow New Yorker Gil Scott-Heron has done with funk-jazz: retain a spirit of celebration while sending out serious messages of liberation and warning. Hill’s lyrics portray a world that’s far from the juke-joint revelry of most blues. Urban decay, unjust wars where young men of color die for white men’s money, inner-city violence, and racial unrest fill the songs with anguished outrage that finds its musical expression in a relentless sonic onslaught–the Mob sprays you with notes the way a guerrilla army would spray you with bullets....

Back in the Victorian age travel writing was a relatively straightforward proposition–at least intellectually. The travel itself could kill you. A glance through the titles of some typical Victorian travelogues–In Darkest Africa, First Footsteps in East Africa, No Passport to Tibet–evokes precarious voyages through unfamiliar and (by Western standards) uncharted lands, filled with strange animals and insects and nefarious diseases, through dangerous extremes of climate. Travel writers in those days were a hardy lot, yet most of them died young....

CONCUSSION ENSEMBLE 3/25, METRO Lite, instrumental prog rock from Boston whose hook seems to be the presence of four percussionists. On its self-released debut, Stampede, the Concussion Ensemble bashes out rather ordinary if intricate rock tunes and adheres almost exclusively to staid four-four patterns with virtually no polyrhythms. The rhythm section makes a big noise but has little to say, and the ubiquitous guitar gets the real spotlight. The ensemble, which includes former members of Human Sexual Response and their hellspawn the Zulus, opens for For Love Not Lisa....

DAR WILLIAMS 4/19, SCHUBAS A keen eye for detail and a sobering sense of humor separate Dar Williams from the growing legions of new folkies, too many of whom borrow confessional songwriting tactics from the 60s to vent their often insignificant spleen. On her second album, Mortal City (Razor & Tie), Williams fine-tunes her delicate balance of contemplation, spirituality, and rapier wit to muse on a wide variety of subjects close to the heart....

BABE THE BLUE OX, MOTORHOME 10/18, DOUBLE DOOR Tim Thomas uses 12 guitars and 12 tunings on Babe the Blue Ox’s ambitious major-label debut, People (RCA), but if he could just write songs that flow more than they sputter, he could harness his rhythm section’s serious funk potential to get this lumberingly eclectic New York-based three piece off the ground. Chicago’s Motorhome achieves liftoff on its new Brad Wood-produced single, “My Spaceman”/ “Little Bird” (Zero Hour), but guitarist Josiah Mazzaschi needs to jettison a few of his effects pedals–and bassist-singer Kristen Thiele to get over her fear of flying–before the band can really soar....

“Much of the southern and central Midwest has been dominated by the oak-hickory forest-type for nearly 8,000 years,” according to Jeffrey D. Brawn in Illinois Natural History Survey Reports (May/June). But now “oaks are gradually being replaced by shade-tolerant species, especially Sugar Maples.” Should managers and conservationists try to maintain the status quo by prescribed burning or by “weeding” out maple saplings? The Natural History Survey will study the question, but it already seems clear that there is no “natural” answer....

Dear Reader: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The rules of reviewing an improv show should differ greatly from reviewing a regular show, just as the two art forms are completely different. A scripted show is the same night after night, so regardless of when the reviewer comes, he or she will see the same thing. An improv show is always different, you’ll never see the same show twice....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I am appalled by the cancellation of Stuart Rosenberg’s shows [Hot Type, November 26] (and, quite honestly, while I have talked to many people about Torey Malatia’s misguided machinations, I have not talked to a single listener who did not find Rosenberg’s shows to be significant and valuable contributions to the station’s programming). However, it is important to see what this episode reveals about just one of the WBEZ family values....

WHAT COPS KNOW Live Bait Theater The setting of both shows is Chicago’s north side–Area 6, a police microcosm because of its socioeconomic sprawl. This was Fletcher’s turf when she interviewed a slew of uniformed and plainclothes officers–beat and tactical cops. The book that resulted both benefited and suffered from the close access to police sources Fletcher enjoyed. While the stories have an authenticity a less privileged reporter might not have been able to achieve, Fletcher’s friendliness with her interviewees generally keeps her out of problematic areas like police corruption and brutality....

One day while reporting to her job as an elevator constructor, Christina Herzog discovered something near her workbench that had clearly been left for her–a long penis made of pipe caulk. The group recently launched a program called Worksite 2000 in an attempt to increase the number of women construction workers and to improve their working conditions. They’re now working with contractors at four work sites: the Cook County Jail expansion, the McCormick Place expansion, the renovation of the Juvenile Detention Center, and the construction of the new downtown post office....

Brigid Murphy beams from her seat amid the comfortable colorful clutter of her Pilsen apartment. “What’s there not to be in good spirits about?” she asks. “I’m going to film school in the fall, I’ve got a scholarship, and I’m doing a show. There’s a lot to be thankful for and happy about.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Including beating cancer. For the past two years the producer and host of Milly’s Orchid Show has been fighting lymphoma....