The priest is a woman. Except for that, the Sunday Mass at Trinity Episcopal Church in Highland Park is quite orthodox. The ancient prayers are said with quiet dignity, the proper words are spoken and the appropriate gestures made over the bread and wine. The celebrant is garbed in the time-honored white alb and flowing chasuble. The choir, also robed, leads the singing of familiar hymns, accompanied by a powerful organ....

Friday 1 October means moving and rummage and the Mega Sale at Holy Covenant United Methodist Church. Assorted furniture, appliances, linens, office equipment, and miscellaneous whatnots will be on sale in the basement and outside the church. Hungry rummagers can step inside for the simultaneous “Egg-cellent Breakfast,” with omelets made to order. Breakfast costs $5 and is served from 7 AM until 1 PM, the same hours as the sale, which is free....

Captured at newsgroup alt.cynicism Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Well this has me all fired up NOT this group is so boring I might as well throw myself off a cliff, that is except for the fact that there would probably be a conspiracy to catch me at the bottom, keeping me alive but paralyzed from the neck down. Come to think of it even if I did succeed I’d still be dead which I’d imagine is sort of boredom/doing nothing for eternity or assuming that religion isn’t a brainwashing process controlled by an elite board of medieval business interests, I’d end up either in heaven with a genderless choir singing the praises of the guy who was responsible for my misery on earth....

KENT KESSLER/GENE COLEMAN Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Some of Chicago’s finest improvisers, like bassist Kent Kessler and bass clarinetist Gene Coleman, rarely get the opportunity to step out on their own and play solo. In fact it’s unusual to hear unaccompanied music these days–players and venues seem more interested in exploring ensemble interplay than the univocal statement. But solo performance is a key challenge for any improviser: to get onstage without anyone else to lead, support, or follow, with no other ideas than your own....

Jazz dance is a distinctly American form, a melting-pot stew of influences: Irish/African tap, Russian/French ballet, African tribal dances. Thoroughly blended and well spiced, it’s been served up for decades on Broadway. But recently, in a curious reversal of the integration process, jazz dance has become a popular American export, a form other cultures are absorbing. Two years ago Gus Giordano Jazz Dance Chicago brought in jazz companies from all over the world for the second Jazz Dance World Congress, a biennial event, and this week they’re doing it again....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I have engaged in a litigation practice for twenty years in Chicago and I can totally agree with the sobriquet some lawyers have given to the Circuit Court of Cook County: “circus court.” For the most part–and with few exceptions–the judges are dumb and lazy–and that is when they are not corrupt. Most are not interested in studying the law and doing what the law requires: they are interested in disposing of cases and working as little as possible....

VINCE GILL In 1989, Gill switched labels and was reunited with old pal Tony Brown, not a bad guy to know. As current president of MCA Nashville, Brown’s dominance as Music City’s premier tastemaker puts him within striking distance of Chet Atkins-hood. As a producer, his name is punched like a brand on so much product it’s hard to believe any human’s got that much time. He must be conducting studio sessions over his cellular phone....

To the editor: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Later, Puccinelli asserts that “Wallace [played by Mel Gibson] seems to be the only Scotsman who wears short sleeves, probably because Gibson associates heroism with muscle.” If Reader reviewers aren’t going to be required to pay close attention to the films they are writing on, they ought to at least glance at the publicity stills sent with their press packets: the one printed with Puccinelli’s review shows Gibson next to another actor, who got plenty of screen time as one of Wallace’s lieutenants, both of them wearing identically short-sleeved tunics....

PANTOMIME Court Theatre Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Walcott, the playwright and poet who won the 1992 Nobel Prize, sets Pantomime in a remote Tobago guest house run by retired English music-hall actor Harry Trewe (Greg Vinkler), who is composing a light musical-comedy version of Robinson Crusoe in which he hopes to star with his servant Jackson Phillip (Darryl Croxton), a retired Creole actor....

Too much has already been written about Pavement, of course, those smart-aleck popsters with a penchant for carefully framed obscurity, splotches of noise, and monster hooks that they’re hesitant to expose. In the late 80s the duo of Steve Malkmus and Spiral Stairs blurted out largely structureless nascent pop tunes smothered in lo-fi transistor noise, documented on Drag City’s Westing (by Musket and Sextant); since then the noise has slowly eroded, formalism’s gingerly creeped in, the melodies have gotten stronger, and Pavement have become salable, not to mention critical darlings....

In the past several months Jan Flapan has learned more than she ever wanted to know about unpaid bills. “It’s not just the Chicago schools. There are 84 small [Illinois] school districts in worse financial shape than Chicago. There are 10,000 people waiting for help with substance abuse. There are more than 14,000 waiting for mental health care. There’s $30 million in federal job-training funds that didn’t come to Illinois last year because the state didn’t appropriate the matching funds....

The city’s blue-bag recycling program is bad news because it’s too easy? “We think the [City of Chicago] blue bag program is a step backward for recycling,” Rod Meshenberg of the Resource Center tells David Cohen in Compass (December), newsletter of the Chicago Audubon Society. “Source separation [instead would] let participants get in the habit of reusing instead of simply disposing recyclables. The city program lets people simply dispose instead of saving material....

Apart from Crumb, this film by Steven M. Martin may be the best American documentary feature of 1994. It’s certainly one of the most fascinating, taking as its subject the electronic musical instrument known as the theremin; Leon Theremin, the Russian visionary who created it; and all the remarkable things that have happened to inventor and invention over the past seven decades. In a way, the film also describes the complex history of a concept in this country: how a particular sound gave birth to electronic music (Robert Moog is one of the many people interviewed here, along with Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys and various classical musicians) and wound up being used in Hollywood, mainly in SF films....

DANCE EVANSTON ’93 The one who remained well within traditional jazz territory was Giordano company member Joseph C. Mann. His solo, Little Earthquakes, uses pop music (by Tori Amos) and a highly dramatic, athletic technique to communicate heartbreak. A single bare light bulb hanging stage center sets the mood, revealing Mann at first only in silhouette, his back to us, arms wrapped around his waist, “jazz hands” like starfish jutting from his sides....

When reporters cover government or industry they know they must “follow the money.” Yet when covering the child welfare system, that famous admonition often is ignored. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » At the federal level, foster care is an “entitlement.” For every eligible child placed in care, a portion of the cost is reimbursed. There is no comparable “open spigot” for programs to keep children out of foster care....

Familias Just take a look at this year’s dance offerings in Chicago: we had Bill T. Jones in Still/Here working with “the dying” (a rather broad category, we admit) and Liz Lerman working with the elderly (among others–for the first time some critics were the targets of community outreach when she hosted a movement workshop for artists and arts handmaidens). Donald Byrd’s Minstrel Show explored prejudice, particularly against blacks, and Jane Comfort’s S/he reversed racial and sexual roles to comment on–what else?...

Sculptor Mark Bello doesn’t have a Christ complex or Saint Francis fantasy, but he’s inviting a bunch of birds to a lakeside brunch–on him. He’ll be wearing a cosmopolitan suit of bread featuring baguettes, chappathi, matzo, pita, and Wonder. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Bello titles his one-man bird-feeding act Beneath the Bread, part of Randolph Street Gallery’s Off Site Specific performance series. After pecking away at his outer garment, Bello’s winged accomplices will reveal his underlying message: a skeleton costume....

Super Stocks By Frank Youngwerth Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » At first the Super Stocks didn’t resemble the Beach Boys; they sounded more like a cross between Hank Williams and King Curtis: the rough-edged, twangy lead vocals bespeak an adult driver (albeit with an adolescent car obsession) as tenor saxophonist Steve Douglas roars mightily over a chugging rhythm and organ walking bass lines. On the four Shut Down tracks Usher’s humble three- and four-chord tunes and basic vocal harmonies tread the ground between country and western music and R & B....

Devour the Moon It’s based on Marinetti’s 1932 publication The Futurist Cookbook, which extended his avant-garde movement from the page to the kitchen. Proposing fantastical edibles to replace the stultifying Italian staple pasta, he established the Holy Palate Restaurant, essentially a chic performance event that shocked and entertained patrons who came as much to gawk as to eat. Daniels and his team have done a good job of re-creating a Holy Palate banquet....

Andrew Imbrie is known for his meticulous craftsmanship and intellectual respectability, but it’s his music’s serene confidence that distinguishes him from the pack. The retired Berkeley professor’s idiom is freely atonal and heavy on chromaticism, which allows him to paint spare and hauntingly beautiful soundscapes. This Chicago Composers’ Consortium chamber concert will feature two of Imbrie’s compositions. In the Roethke Songs for soprano and piano (1980), he has set five texts by the New York poet Theodore Roethke in a direct, jocular manner that plays up the poems’ disciplined diction and meters....