Lead Story In October a young couple had to be treated for hypothermia at a Gernsheim, Germany, clinic after the parked car in which they were having sex rolled down a boat ramp into the Rhine River. The man who owned the car, who wasn’t in it at the time, was cited by authorities for the water pollution caused by leaking gasoline. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A man whose name was withheld by reporters was rescued in November by fire fighters after he spent the night in the pit of an outhouse at a boat landing near Eugene, Oregon....

Candlelight’s Forum Theatre. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Ray Cooney and John Chapman’s dreary 1967 sex farce Not Now, Darling has a mechanical plot, witless dialogue, and snickering 12-year-old-boy attitudes about sex. In short, it lacks everything that makes Cooney’s later work fun, most notably his brilliant political farce Out of Order. It even lacks Cooney’s trademark double-entendre title (Wife Begins at Forty, Run for Your Wife)....

Along with his contemporary Cannonball Adderley, Phil Woods essentially defined the alto saxophone in jazz after Charlie Parker’s death in 1955; over the succeeding four decades he has honed one of the most personal and recognizable styles in all of jazz. It resembles a language all its own, marked by distinctive idiomatic expressions–the equivalent of spoken slang–that occur within the complex grammar and syntax of bebop. And these phrases reach the ear via Woods’s arresting tone: polished but heavily textured, and filled with vocally inflected devices of an earlier era....

King Crimson Yet King Crimson took a different tack. As other bands became bloated, King Crimson tightened up its act. By 1974 they were down to a three-piece band (bass, guitar, and drums), cutting back on Mellotron, flute, and violin and reducing the music to a stark, heavy grind. Apparently, founding guitarist Robert Fripp saw where prog rock was going and wanted nothing to do with it. He dissolved King Crimson after recording 1974’s Red, killing the band before punk had a chance to....

BILLBOARDS Joffrey artistic director Gerald Arpino says in a program note that Americans traveling the country watch “billboards loom overhead, reflecting our society and enveloping our senses with their direct, powerful messages.” If these dances do the same, what are the messages being sent? Unfortunately but perhaps inevitably they’re not new–nowhere near as threatening to our complacency about sexuality as Prince is in his music. Only one choreographer of the four even approaches the delicate, insidious way he foments revolution....

Dear Mr. Joravsky: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Several months ago Mr. Holstein did approach the manager of the Whole Foods Market Midwest Bakehouse, Bobby Turner, about producing pretzels. At this point, Whole Foods Market had been already test baking pretzels in response to customer requests. Mr. Holstein was looking for a manufacturer for his pretzels and felt that our Bakehouse was an obvious choice....

Ballet Chicago’s Union Tangle Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » First and foremost, AGMA is trying to fashion a response to a baffling proposal from Ballet Chicago management for a 1994-’95 employment contract that would last a mere five weeks. Covering salaries for 25 dancers and stage managers, the contract would run from March 6 to April 9, 1995, which includes the proposed dates for the Spring Festival of Dance, when Ballet Chicago has apparently reserved the Shubert Theatre for a week of performances....

Only the dead don’t bowl. Everybody’s tried it, anybody can do it, nobody wants to see it. Would you pay to watch bowling? Of course not. Not if the match featured the greatest bowlers of all time. Who are the greatest bowlers of all time? Who knows? As a spectator sport, bowling isn’t much. Most bowlers don’t pay much attention to their own game much less anyone else’s, especially after a couple of beers....

The longer it runs, the more relevant A Red Orchid Theatre’s Born Guilty gets. Ari Roth’s stage adaptation of Peter Sichrovsky’s book traces a Jewish journalist’s quest for interviews with adult children of Nazis–a quest that exposes layers of emotionally crippling denial within the guilt-ridden families and their society. Since the show’s opening last March, Germany’s supreme court has ruled that free-speech laws don’t protect claims that the Holocaust never took place; a Holocaust-doubting ad stirred up furious debate around the United States when it ran in college newspapers; a Japanese book proclaiming the virtues of Hitler’s political strategy provoked international controversy; and new investigations have exposed German war criminals around the globe even as the decline of communism has unleashed a wave of neo-Nazi activity....

The Chicago Chamber Musicians are a curious bunch. Staffed mostly with CSO first-chairs, this chamber collective of seven core members ought to have established a strong presence in the city by now. One reason it hasn’t, I think, is its generic repertoire: sure, it’s nice to hear Larry Combs playing his clarinet and Gail Williams tooting her horn, but does it always have to be Mozart and Brahms? The group’s latest concert program is a case in point....

Two works by young local talent are being premiered on this Chicago String Ensemble bill, both commissioned for Elizabeth Cifani, the Lyric Opera’s principal harpist, who’s appearing as a guest soloist here. Paul Seitz, a Racine native based in Madison, has come up with a piece that features the wire-strung Irish harp as solo instrument, supposedly the first classical work to do so since 1792. Seitz, who was drawn to the instrument’s bright, bell-like sound says his chamber concerto “may have come out of awareness of tragic civil conflicts around the world”; he took the title, When Touched by Better Angels, from Lincoln’s 1861 inaugural speech....

CONTINUUM: VISIONS FROM YETUNDE According to the program, all traditional African cultures believe that the spirit lives on after death, and the Yoruba nation believes that if an individual has a strong presence while living, after death that soul will be remembered and live on for many generations as a clan spirit, eventually returning as a newborn baby: Yetunde means “mother returns.” But in Continuum this beautiful concept is ruined because Yetunde is an irritatingly all-knowing teacher who visits four confused young souls in their dreams and bombards them with wisdom from the ages....

“When you’re younger, you hesitate,” says bharatanatyam dancer and choreographer Hema Rajagopalan. “But when you’re older, you’re ready to say to narrow-minded “connoisseurs’: Hey listen, listen to me. I am challenging you. Tell me what is wrong with it.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Rajagopalan has been experimenting with classical Indian dance for 20 years, taking the results of her experience with Western dance back to India–and getting good reviews....

Sonic Youth Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » There was no official radio sponsorship of the event, but Q101 was on the scene with a remote broadcast, cheerleading the ideals of Lollapalooza and alternative rock. The station’s presence was somewhat ironic, though, since it never plays two of the concert’s mainstage acts–Cypress Hill and the Jesus Lizard–and gives only limited play to other participants like Sonic Youth, Beck, Pavement, and Sinead O’Connor (who subsequently left the tour)....

These days percussionist Kahil El’Zabar has more than a full plate: the former president of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians as well as a co-instigator of house music, he finds himself scoring films, touring and recording with saxist David Murray, teaching college, and serving on federal arts panels. But he always comes home–which in this case means not just Chicago but the Ethnic Heritage Ensemble. For more than 15 years, the EHE has served as El’Zabar’s base of musical operations, spurring and incorporating the major currents of his prolific activity....

The Lucid Dreamers Two of Hauptschein’s plays–the first of his scripts to be produced, running at Live Bait as part of the Annual David Hauptschein Theatre Festival–reveal the extremes of his abilities as a playwright. The Lucid Dreamers, a “kitchen sink surrealist play” about a stereotypically myopic American family plagued by disturbing dreams, mysterious illnesses, and noxious odors, is as flat and lifeless as its sterile suburban setting despite Hauptschein’s repeated attempts to keep things freakily unpredictable....

The tuba, the basso profundo among brass instruments, is handicapped by a straight-and-narrow range and a booming sonority, yet unwieldy as it may seem, it has its ardent practitioners and fans–including the thousands who will participate in next week’s International Tuba/Euphonium Conference at Northwestern University. One aficionado is John Williams, who likes to garnish his movie scores with tuba wails. Ten years ago, to mark the centennial of the Boston Pops, which he then headed, Williams even wrote a Tuba Concerto, a quasi-Wagnerian romp that turns the tuba into an unlikely hero with engaging braggadocio....

The Kramer By Jack Helbig Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In The Kramer the admissions director for a small secretarial school, Bart Kramer, becomes obsessed with improving the lives of his rumpled male secretary, Art, and Judy, one of his more repressed and unsuccessful students. The Homage That Follows features dueling meddlers, a formerly self-righteous teacher, Katherine Samuels, and a highly intelligent but low-achieving mathematician turned ranch hand, Archie....

By Fred Camper Piazza, 41, came of age at “the tail end of the hippies.” He read the Communist Manifesto at 15, “and I was suddenly branded as a communist.” He recalls that his freshman year at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign “was the first year there weren’t riots, which I was gearing up for. Streaking happened; fraternities became popular again; everyone was already distancing themselves from demonstrations. I felt incredibly let down....

Some of the Bruce Springsteen fans who were upset at the scalping incident I’ve been writing about recently displayed a touching naivete when it came to the subject of the practice’s legality. If you’re just tuning in, the incident in question happened at the Tower Records on Wabash early on a Saturday morning a month ago. After what was supposed to be a randomization process to line people up to buy tickets to Springsteen’s acoustic performance at the Rosemont Theatre, it became apparent that a scalper had foiled the system....