Oh, Jack. How could you treat me this way? Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » So, in response to Jack Helbig’s recent Critic’s Choice for Famous Door’s production of Hellcab [November 17]: Hey! This is now twice this year that you’ve somehow wrongly “credited” me. While charting the long life of Will Kern’s comedy you state that “James Schneider directed a lamentable version of it six months ago ....

Theater League Picks a Politico Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But the Chicago Park District is where Halperin’s marketing talents apparently came to the fore, defining a powerful position that didn’t even exist before she arrived. “She is incredibly creative and a tough taskmaster,” says Park District director Forrest Claypool. Halperin helped publicize the glories of the park system through such marketing maneuvers as launching a $650,000 radio and television advertising campaign, publishing the first facilities directory, and forming a partnership with Coca-Cola to distribute park information....

When it comes to the well-being of kids at rock concerts, you’d think that reasonable people would work together to ensure the safest possible conditions. But Jam Productions and its security force, Star Security, don’t have many nice things to say about concert-safety watchdog Paul Wertheimer. That’s their right–but it’s possible that Jam and Star stepped over the line last Tuesday at the Pearl Jam show at Soldier Field. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Black Girl If you trace African film back to its first fiction feature, it is only 30 years old. Yet far from being underdeveloped, it begins on a more sophisticated level than any other cinema in the world. By some accounts Ousmane Sembene’s hour-long Black Girl was made in 1965, by others 1966, a characteristic ambiguity when it comes to African movies. Do you date them according to when they were made or when they were first shown?...

Friday 20 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » That fateful evening at the Sidelines Sports Bar and Grill in Harwood Heights began with four gay men from Chicago dancing together and ended with various members of the foursome being charged with disorderly conduct, resisting arrest, and aggravated battery. Queer Nation is raising money for their defense (which is being supplied by the People’s Law Office) with a “tag night” this evening at Big Chicks, 5024 N....

Friday 10 Saturday 11 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Children and their parents can see how dancers warm up at the dance bar and meet the recently relocated Joffrey Ballet of Chicago dancers today as part of the Magic City Family Week-Ends program. There will also be a preview performance from the group’s holiday production and workshops, ranging from beginning ballet to applying stage makeup, for children ages 9 through 15....

More than 20 years ago, Dave Liebman laid down his tenor saxophone to concentrate solely on the soprano, and he still commands one of the three definitive voices on that instrument. (Wayne Shorter. Steve Lacy.) Few of those who’ve tinkered with the soprano have been able to find its full range, to maintain the horn’s sinewy strength while exploiting its fluttery grace, yet Liebman goes even further: he plays as if within his instrument, rather than using it merely as an extension of his musical intellect....

Exotica The saddest parts of Exotica–Atom Egoyan’s lush and affecting sixth feature, a movie inflected like its predecessors by obsessive sexual rituals and desperate familial longings–are moments when money awkwardly changes hands. This film is every bit as allegorical as his Speaking Parts, The Adjuster, and Calendar–and every bit as concerned with a need for family surrogates as Next of Kin and Family Viewing–but it is only incidentally a movie about capitalism and its ability to pervert personal relationships....

This time of year, when the trees are bare, you can begin to get an idea of how many squirrels live in your neighborhood. Look for a big ball of leaves wedged into a notch between branches. The leaves are the exterior of a squirrel’s nest, and each nest is home to one adult squirrel. In a few weeks the first young of this year will be born, so some of the nests will be home to a mother and her babies....

GEORGE SHEARING QUINTET Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Elegant and playful, light-fingered and crafty, the blind pianist George Shearing qualifies as a genuine jazz perennial. He made his first record in 1939 in his native London, but it was a series of events in mid-40s New York that established his popularity: his immigration to the U.S., his adoption of bebop, and finally the creation of his signature quintet....

By Michael Miner The Community News Project originated a year ago as a set of self-evident truths perceived by Thom Clark, president of the Community Media Workshop (and cowriter of the Reader’s Snap Judgments). First of all, Clark told me, “it was my presumption that party conventions are an anachronism. The primary system has taken the place of that decision-making party, and yet news outlets still assign people to cover it....

Ours is a society that takes it as a given that every child should be educated to the limits of her or his abilities. There are special programs in place for the learning disabled, for the mentally retarded, for the physically handicapped, for the emotionally disturbed. An earlier age might have segregated or even institutionalized most of these groups; today they’re more likely to be “mainstreamed” in a conventional classroom....

Chicago Symphony Orchestra at Orchestra Hall, February 15 But the 12-tone scale uses notes in a system that’s still jarring to the ear, even though we’ve been listening to it for decades. With no one note serving as a grounding point for the melody, it’s characterized in part by its difficulty, since it’s entirely nonintuitive and, indeed, usually counterintuitive for the performer based in traditional Western classical music forms. Some neurological studies suggest that it’s counterintuitive for any normal ear: the brain likes certain patterns, and 12-tone refuses to provide them....

Tank Girl With Lori Petty, Malcolm McDowell, Naomi Watts, Ice-T, Don Harvey, Reg E. Cathey, Scott Coffey, Jeff Kober, Iggy Pop, and Ann Cusack. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The year is 2033, and a cosmic accident has made water the scarcest commodity around and reduced civilization to rubble. Kesslee, the evil head of the Water and Power Company, promptly shows how evil he is by smashing all his glass wall maps in a momentary rage, then ordering one of his stooges to walk barefoot over the shards....

At first glance it seems an unlikely sight. Naomi Wolf, author of The Beauty Myth, a feminist polemic describing how women are hurt by the perpetual unfulfillable quest for physical perfection, is smiling winsomely in an ad for . . . panty hose. You know, those nylon and spandex torture devices that make a 90-degree day seem like a 100-degree one, that push in the gut and mask unsightly veins. Liberated women who have conservative jobs can’t wait to rush home and tear them off....

When Jenny Magnus landed in eastern Germany this winter–bringing along original performance pieces, longtime collaborator Beau O’Reilly, and little else–she was met with bewildered stares. “They said to us, “We’ve seen Americans through TV, through magazines,”‘ she recalls. “‘But you are Americans we have never seen. You are Americans we did not know existed.’ Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “They convinced the city government to give them this building, this Volkspark, for a dollar a year or something,” Magnus says....

Chicago Symphony Orchestra Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It is also not the same thing as just playing together. Just playing together is what happens at pickup gigs like weddings and Christmas Eve services, when groups of singers and instrumentalists are thrown together with only a little bit of rehearsal. The results are usually thoroughly professional and acceptable but seldom approach any ideal of music making....

Guitarist Walter “Wolfman” Washington earned his nickname from his amorous exploits rather than through any innate animalistic tendencies, but a touch of lycanthropic madness permeates his musical personality as well. Washington worked for years with New Orleans R & B legends like Johnny Adams and Lee Dorsey, gaining a reputation as a fiery session man of brilliant and eclectic virtuosity–a necessity in the churning sonic gumbo that is the Crescent City music scene....

The Women in the Director’s Chair International Film & Video Festival, now in its 13th year, continues Friday through Sunday, March 18 through 20. It highlights shorts as well as features by women, including documentary, animated, narrative, and experimental works. Screenings are at Chicago Filmmakers, 1543 W. Division; the Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum, 1852 W. 19th St.; Randolph Street Gallery, 756 N. Milwaukee; and Columbia College, 624 S. Michigan. Tickets are $6, $4 for Women in the Director’s Chair members, students, and senior citizens with a valid ID; festival passes are also available....

ARE YOU NOW, OR HAVE YOU EVER BEEN MELLOW? Second City Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Of course there are some easy targets (Prozac, unisex bathrooms, Chicago’s undermotivated schoolteachers, “Dr. Death,” Fabio) and easy sight gags (Secret Service agents hiding). Unexpected are strange charmers like “Maya,” a sweet spin-off of Prelude to a Kiss: a white man turns into a kindly old black woman whenever he returns to his hometown, and to his amazement, so does his buddy....