A Sweetheart Deal in Rosemont Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But overlooked in their rush to judgment was the deal Rosemont Theatre executives cut with Houston-based PACE Theatrical Group and Ohio-based Magic Promotions and Theatricals, the primary presenters at the $35-million facility. According to Rosemont Theatre executive director Harry Pappas, PACE and Magic’s three-year contract obligates them to book 12 weeks of programming annually–6 weeks of theater and 6 weeks of concerts and variety acts....

ABA Journal: Witness for the Defense Fricker’s business at the Glancy motel in Clinton, Oklahoma, was to ask former manager Gerald Klemke about an earring that allegedly turned up in Munson’s room there, an earring worn by Alma Hall, who was a night clerk at a local convenience store. Despite what he’d testified at Munson’s trial, Klemke couldn’t say where that earring actually came from. “I don’t know,” he told Fricker....

AND BABY MAKES SEVEN Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Anna and Ruth are lovers. They share a New York loft with their gay friend Peter. Some time ago Anna decided she wanted to have a baby. Since that’s one thing Ruth can’t give her, Anna asks Peter to do the job. Peter obliges, and when the play opens Anna is nine months pregnant....

Of Diamonds and Diplomats Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » With a track record that included serving as Clare Boothe Luce’s personal aide and running the PR operation of Tiffany’s, Baldrige was well suited to overseeing a new era under America’s pretty, young president and his even younger and prettier wife. Baldrige was “the powerhouse behind the glittering evenings” that brought world-acclaimed artists to the White House, Kitty Kelley’s biography Jackie Oh!...

It’s my guess few grown-ups have ever harbored a wish to see O. Henry’s brief, sentimental Christmas tale “The Gift of the Magi” dramatized. But dancing has a way of making simple things fresh and immediate again, and so it is with Gordon Peirce Schmidt’s version of this tale for Ballet Chicago. His choreography for these touchingly young characters–the husband who sells his watch to buy his wife hair ornaments, the wife who sells her hair to buy him a fob–makes us see the healthy, almost animal self-regard that underlies love, the tenderness that pushes self-regard aside, and the fact that even the youngest love changes at every instant....

A native of North Dakota who’s lived in Denver since 1990, sweet-voiced Celeste Krenz sings songs that slip between genres. Flavored predominantly with contemporary bluegrass, her music is nevertheless infused with healthy doses of pop tunefulness and folky austerity–a classic example of post-Nashville songwriting a la Nanci Griffith, Iris DeMent, and Emmylou Harris. Krenz isn’t at that level yet, but her second album, Slow Burning Flame (Emergency), bristles with promise and in isolated patches achieves sublime beauty....

For his book States of Desire, author Edmund White set out on a cross-country trip to document the changing profile of gay America in the late 1970s. Upon his arrival in Chicago, however, he came face to face with the old school. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » While S and M circles had long taken a liking to leather, most experts trace the arrival of the leather scene to the first gay motorcycle club, the Satyrs, a group of Californians inspired in part by Marlon Brando’s star turn in the 1954 film The Wild One....

I center myself on the bench by the river in order to center myself in my world. Spring raises the water level with the runoff of city streets. The water laps at the base of the ancient willow, at the doorway to a possum’s home. “Huh,” he says, surprised, like the trees have spoken. “Dey took my lock and chain, man. Dey took it. You wanna go for a beer? ”...

I’ve never understood exactly why Firesign Theatre’s media-savvy, wickedly satirical, pun-besotted comedy style–as exemplified on such brilliant concept albums as How Can You Be In Two Places at Once When You’re Not Anywhere at All, I Think We’re All Bozos on This Bus, and my personal favorite, Dear Friends–all but died out in the late 70s while the considerably tamer and less demanding sketch-based comedy of Saturday Night Live and Second City continued to thrive....

What’s so intriguing about this 1992 black-and-white feature by Assaf Dayan, the pacifist son of war hero Moshe Dayan, is the unusually frank glimpse it offers of Israeli society today. Over the course of a long night, people from various walks of life–macho soldiers, hookers, suicidal cokeheads, oppressed Arab cooks, undercover cops–congregate in a Tel Aviv bar called Barbie. They’re a depressing bunch: bitter, disillusioned, constantly at each other’s throats. Presiding over the bleakness are the owners: the middle-aged, bored Dalia (Gila Almagor in a nuanced portrayal), who’s looking for companionship, and her younger partner Leora, an obsessive photographer (hence the movie’s title) who’s on the verge of breaking up with her promiscuous cop boyfriend....

The last song on Bob Dylan’s new album, World Gone Wrong, is a spare, four-verse ballad, the story of a pilgrim who after a long, mysterious quest–“The cause of my master compelled me from home / No kindred or relatives now”–finds himself alone and at rest. The fact that Dylan himself is nearing the end of a journey makes this song an especially touching statement of isolation. “The Lone Pilgrim” is one of ten traditional folk-blues tunes here, ranging from the rather obscure to the very obscure, adorned on this record with nothing but a roughly recorded voice and guitar....

The world took little note last Thanksgiving when American auto racing turned 100 years old. NASCAR, racing’s largest sanctioning body, didn’t even take a Post-it. In Chicago, where it all began, there wasn’t much more than a sparsely attended reenactment of the first race–no hype, no commemorative T-shirt marking the centennial. If fans did something special that day they did it in private, perhaps with a piece of cake or an extra lube job for the pickup....

Maps are intrinsically appealing because they can be both utilitarian devices and objects of painstaking, beautiful detail. But “Art on the Map,” on view at the Chicago Cultural Center, isn’t merely about the distinguished history and craftsmanship of mapmaking. It’s an examination of the map as metaphor: for travel, for political, philosophical, and metaphysical boundaries, and for explorations into the world of self-discovery. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Curator Gregory G....

For the last dozen years Mary Krcmar filled her prescriptions free of charge at the city’s southwest-side health clinic not far from her house in Gage Park. But a few months ago the city announced that sometime in 1994 it would stop providing free medication to seniors who visit the clinic, now called the Southwest Community Family Wellness Center. The center, at 4150 W. 55th St., was built in the 1970s as part of Mayor Richard J....

Alot better than one might have expected, this remake of Billy Wilder’s weakest romantic comedy of the 50s manages to minimize the jaded, dirty-old-man aspect of the sub-Lubitsch original (a flaw it shares with Wilder’s Love in the Afternoon) with better casting. Humphrey Bogart certainly had his gifts, but Harrison Ford makes a much better romantic lead as a tycoon opposite a gamine chauffeur’s daughter; and if Julia Ormond initially seems to be playing Audrey Hepburn rather than Sabrina–an impression furthered by various references to Funny Face–she eventually takes over the part for herself....

Uptown Businesses Pull Together . . . As part of the project “Working Together: Building Community Through the Arts,” the plan finds its roots in a survey conducted last winter in Uptown, Pilsen, West Town, and South Shore, as well as suburban Schaumburg. The survey asked artists, arts groups, and social service agencies to “assess their economic contributions to their communities,” says the foundation’s executive director, Alene Valkanas, “the moneys they’ve invested in upgrading their properties, the individuals they employ, the volunteers they bring into the community, and their audiences’ range of economic levels, which is really quite impressive....

In case the readers of the July 29 Letters column didn’t understand Terry Levin’s extended comments about Bob Wulkowicz as the “lone ‘environmentalist,’” or my alleged public gaffe, I will try to explain his job function: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » So far, Madeline Kanner is of no real interest to the bureaucracy or Levin. But when Joravsky puts it on a Reader page for public display, where it might offer some political embarrassment, Terry’s word processor leaps into action....

THINGS I DIDN’T NEED TO HEAR, PART 1 THINGS I DIDN’T NEED TO HEAR, PART 2 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Your recent discussion of farts and beans is misleading [July 28]. I call your attention to a paragraph from my monograph, “A Metaphysical and Anecdotal Consideration of the Fart” (Alphabeta Press). “Little did we know as children about the power and symbolism of beans....

Now we know. They were just saving her for a special occasion. –Jim Siterlet, Urbana, Illinois Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » First male marketing genius: OK, we got the main stud in there, we got his buddy, we got his wife, the kids, the pet dinosaur, the car … what are we leaving out? Second male marketing genius: Uh, Betty. When I first wrote about Betty I was as a voice crying in the wilderness....

Anthony Ranieri is one of those classical performers and composers who work largely outside academia and the establishment concert circuit. Which is to say he’s not as well known as he ought to be. A graduate of Lake Forest College, he’s spent the last 35 years learning his craft in what some might regard as a haphazard fashion. He’s studied composition at area conservatories, electronic music at Indiana University, and piano at Northwestern....