At 8 PM on a recent Saturday six women are sitting at the best table in Crooner’s on Clark. They’ve earned their spot; after all, they come to Andersonville on most Fridays and Saturdays and always on Mondays, which is banjo night, from places as far away as Palatine. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Reynolds, who was raised in Kansas City, moved to Chicago after the war and started playing various north-side joints....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I can’t explain or excuse the treatment Ms. Mathieu claims she observed by the baristas at the Starbucks she visited. I can say that, having patronized numerous Starbucks in Lincoln Park, Old Town, the Loop, and even Evanston, the one thing that impresses me is the consistently good treatment and delicious coffee I always receive at Starbucks....

The Idiotic Death of Two Fools, Annoyance Theatre. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I hope actors Eric Hoffman and Mike Monterastelli and director Gary Ruderman don’t think this one-act comedy, created through improvisation, is anything close to original. It’s not just that the premise is an obvious steal from Waiting for Godot: two guys spar and banter while awaiting the arrival of a mysterious third person, illustrating the futility and foolishness of life through their absurd interactions....

The Little and the Beleaguered “I don’t think this book happens without Alex Kotlowitz’s book,” a writer named Daniel Coyle was telling us this week. The book Coyle has just published is called Harball: A Season in the Projects; it’s about Little League ball at Cabrini-Green, and an article adapted from it appears in this issue of the Reader. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Inner-city children in danger became a preoccupation of the Chicago papers when Dantrell Davis was murdered at Cabrini-Green in 1992....

Enclosed are two of the many articles on the death of Gloria Ramirez, who became known as “the toxic lady” because she downed several medical attendants with her fumes. Pesticides, nerve gas, cervical cancer, kidney failure, cardiac arrest, crystals in blood, and other obscure causes were cited in these and many TV reports. Did they ever find out what killed Ms. Ramirez and made the workers sick? –J. Pilla, Tucson, Arizona...

A number of things conspire to make Urge Overkill’s new album Exit the Dragon the perverse, irritating, compelling, and scabrous mess that it is. One is the decline of National Kato, one of the band’s two key songwriting forces. Where his decrepit but oddly irresistible ideas of rock songcraft ignited tracks like “Sister Havana” and “Positive Bleeding,” two standout moments from 1993’s Saturation, his riffs now seem flaccid, the melodies uninsistent, the lyrics sometimes forced or worse (“It’s just like Sly said, ‘There’s a riot goin’ on’”–not to mention an entire song built around a Monopoly metaphor)....

I ordered it on a whim. My friend Deb was talking it up. She said it was at least as entertaining as TV. Of course she hasn’t had a TV for over a year, and I don’t think she realizes that just about anything is more entertaining than TV. Anyway, she told me about it after the power went out for 12 hours during the first of the summer’s heat waves....

Feral Theatre Company, at Red Orchid Theatre. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The commune of teenage dropouts in Feral Theatre’s Written on Water purport to be none other than the airheaded Percy Bysshe Shelley, the melancholy Mary Godwin, the egotistical Lord Byron, and his groupie Claire Clairmont. But the four–permissively chaperoned by jolly Dr. Polidori and his bag of magical medications–more closely resemble the self-absorbed adolescents of Beverly Hills 90210, exhibiting plenty of obsessive crushes, sadistic control games, drug-assisted orgies/nightmares, casually spontaneous sex, and jealous snits, all analyzed in curiously modern language (“Do you love me unconditionally?...

The current X reunion tour has all the makings of a gnarly nostalgia trip. And maybe it’s true that you can’t go home again, but when the band recently took the Cabaret Metro stage and launched into “The Hungry Wolf,” they proved it’s possible to at least drop in for a visit–not bad, considering they hit the scene well over a decade ago, in 1980. That year gets tagged as the start of the yuppie decade, the years when those of us who fell into the tail end of the baby boom were supposed to be raking it in hand over fist....

Dr. Faustus Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In our economically unscrupulous era, when soulless exploitation of labor has become America’s favorite spectator sport–not long ago everyone from Jay Leno to the Rolling Stones sang the praises of billionaire Bill Gates for becoming even more wealthy–it’s hard to understand why neither production of Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus earlier this year bore even a tangential relationship to the real world....

In Harold Henderson’s “The City File” column (March 11) Dwight Conquergood, speaking at a Northwestern conference on race and the media, is quoted as saying that “Labeling someone a gang member licenses the most rabid racism and class bias.” I don’t know who Conquergood is, but he sounds like a PR spin doctor hired by the gangs themselves as an apologist. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » First of all, gangs come in all colors....

Pullman artist Olivia Gude paints other people’s words on walls and banners hanging in public places. Using quotes from interviews with area residents, Gude says she wants to show a community what’s on its mind. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Gude has continued her oral-history approach, combining public art and community discourse in Echoes of the Heart: A Banner Arts Project, a series of eight-foot banners about race relations in the southwest-side neighborhood of Marquette Park....

Many years ago we all dreamed of a world in which punk rock–real punk rock–topped the charts, saturated the airwaves, and got in everyone’s face. Well, it’s happened–Green Day and Offspring are selling in the millions, and more bands keep coming. The latest astoundingly successful entry is Bad Religion, a dozen-year-old punk outfit led by Brett Gurewitz, capo of Epitaph, the label boasting the largest-selling punk record ever with Offspring’s close-to-triple-platinum Smash....

It’s a matter of some dispute whether Roman Polanski’s letter to the darker side of the romantic impulse–a French-English production made in 1992–represents him at his best or worst (I’d say the former), but there’s little question that this is his most emotionally complex movie to date. With its American, English, and French characters representing the three cultures Polanski has known since he left Poland, it’s also quite possibly his most personal film–and certainly his most self-critical....

When Bodeco’s Ricky Feather grasps his guitar and hunches over the mike like a pro wrestler waiting for his opponent, his band becomes something more than a hell-bent, primitive rock ‘n’ roll combo. Feather doesn’t just inhabit the group’s primordial grooves–a seething mix of bluesy Bo Diddley rhythms and swampy white-trash guitar undulations–he’s possessed by them. He doesn’t get too wild or ferocious, but his bizarre determination takes on an intractable force....

In response to the Freakwater article which ran in the November 22 issue of your paper [Post No Bills], we would like to clarify a few things. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » First, we do not consider the main stumbling block in completing a deal with Freakwater to be creative control. Regardless of the fact that major labels (of which we are aligned to Warner Brothers) do not give up 100 percent creative control lightly, we still must take creative differences into consideration when we are signing artists to E-Squared....

Michael Fitzgerald says there’s no question his mother Sally is the key to the continuing success of Fitzee’s, the family’s barbecue joint that’s recently relocated to the corner of Cermak and Indiana. Mrs. Fitzgerald spends 12 to 14 hours a day at the restaurant, chopping up slabs of ribs, tossing oak chips on the fire, serving up platters of hot links, and slathering chicken wings with her patented fat-free barbecue sauce....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » My summer camp with the bucks ended with a cut; a broken malt liquor outside my bedroom window. While proper citizens debate “whether Rogers Park . . .” DUH CROWES gather on the nearby corners or doorways driving YUPPIES inside to cringe behind Levolored windows while LIBERALS offer up their children to hero worship and peer domination [Neighborhood News, August 20]....

A rumble of boos fills the dark auditorium. “Check one, two. Check one, two,” repeats a deep voice over the PA. “Are you ready?” But the 250 students at Prosser Vocational high school, on West Wrightwood, sit on their hands, united in their belligerence. They know the enemy is behind the curtain. Look where you’re headed, look where you’re headed . . . To start thinking about carrying a gun....

HITCH UP THE MULES Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Using slides to illustrate our displaced priorities and materialistic mind-set (including a hilarious series in which he parties with a Clinton look-alike), Mulrooney hearkens back to the pioneer days, when trying to live past the age of 40 constituted the only life-style. In the show’s sharpest segment, he asks randomly chosen audience members to call out their occupations in the midst of a pretend Indian attack on a wagon train....