THE ART OF THE SOLO OR GOING STARK RAVING MAD IN A ROOM BY YOURSELF Erkert is one of Chicago’s best choreographers, nominated three times for the city’s Ruth Page award for choreography and winning once. She began a remarkable cycle of dances in 1991, in an all-woman concert whose unifying theme was mothers and daughters. Erkert’s 1992 concert dove into gender issues, with dances about her father, about regular guys (including Erkert’s husband), about growing up female, as well as a reworking of her Sensual Spaces that added a father figure to Erkert’s own mother figure....

Excuse me, I have a library appointment about some diagnostic tests. Suburban author (Sweet Reprieve) Ginny Maier: “I believe you could literally put yourself through medical school, with the exception of practicing surgery, by studying medicine at the Arlington Heights Memorial Library.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Promises, promises. In December 1993 Mayor Daley said the Chicago Department of Housing would create 4,888 new affordable housing units during 1994....

By Harold Henderson Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » As we would like others to see us. “Chicago is leading the way on every major issue facing urban America,” Dennis Britton, who heads the Community News Project being set up for the Democratic National Convention this summer, is quoted as saying in a recent news release from the Community Media Workshop: “housing, education, public safety, job creation, brownfield development and inner-city investment....

Ute Lemper is a vocal chameleon in search of a personality of her own. So far, the concert career of the German-born chanteuse has thrived on artful, uncanny revivals of repertoires made famous by the likes of Lotte Lenya, Marlene Dietrich, and Edith Piaf. Her voice, to be sure, is more pure and supple than her idols’, but at age 30 she hasn’t quite mastered their world-weariness and insinuating styles. Even her performing persona seems a work in progress; the look she’ll sport in her new show “Paris/Berlin/New York” is that of Garbo by way of Annie Lennox....

Adapted from Tomas Rivera’s autobiographical novel, . . . And the Earth Did Not Swallow Him sheds rare light on a neglected corner of American history. Set in 1952, the film is a series of carefully observed vignettes focusing on the travails of a family of Chicano migrant laborers. A veteran documentary and educational filmmaker making his feature debut, director Severo Perez at times succumbs to the dull sanctimony characteristic of American Playhouse, one of the film’s producers, but he and his team put excellent production values on the screen, especially considering that the shoot covered 47 locations throughout the midwest....

Once again your movie critic makes some terrible errors. In his review of Pocahontas [June 30], he talks about the “genocide” of Native Americans by Europeans and cites the massive decline in population between 1500 and 1550 among indigenous peoples as evidence. What he didn’t mention was that the big killer was disease–smallpox, in particular. Reading the various accounts of the war between the Aztecs on one side and the Spanish and their native allies on the other, one of the big factors in the Aztec defeat was smallpox–a massive epidemic swept the Aztec empire during the war....

“I represent the externalization of not fitting in. I don’t want to fit in,” says Mark Thomas, leaning his chair against the banana yellow walls of his office. He’s wearing black jeans and a black motorcycle jacket, and his long brown hair, which is usually in a ponytail, is hanging straight from his receding hairline to his shoulders. “So many people are fed up with the straight world but have to make a living....

Dear Mr. Lazare, Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I wish to confirm that everything you write about my meetings with the people of the Cultural Center is correct. I am pessimistic about the realization of a Guinan exhibit at the Center, even if we find the sponsors. By the way, this question was not raised by Mrs. Weisberg: Will they make the show if we find the sponsors?...

Friday 19 Horace Cayton was a pioneering black sociologist and author of the noted study Black Metropolis. Today he’s the subject of The Life and Legacy of Horace Cayton, a free one-day seminar running from 12:30 to 4:30 at the Woodson Regional Library, 9525 S. Halsted. Participating panelists include Jackson State prof emeritus Margaret Walker, author of Jubilee and a friend and colleague of Cayton’s; novelist Cyrus Colter; Irma Jackson Wertz, Cayton’s wife in the 1930s; Northwestern sociology professor Aldon Morris; and Richard Hobbs, author of The Cayton Legacy....

Rolled up and leaning in a corner of the Link’s Hall office is a 30-foot-long, 11-foot-high painting on paper of a Greyhound bus, left over from a wonderful dance by Bob Eisen called Bus Tales, part of last year’s monthlong Chance Dance Fest. Every summer since 1990 the Chance Dance Fest has combined some fascinating dances and performance art with other looser, more experimental work. Some performers use the fest to preview pieces they’re working on, the way Jellyeye did with its acclaimed drum opera Blood Lotus last year....

Ordinarily, the most interesting thing about Alderman Eugene Schulter is the way he pronounces the “council” in “city council.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » At last Tuesday’s council meeting, Schulter gained another distinction–an unusual one for the normally loyal administration alderman. His was the lone voice opposing a cable franchise along the lakefront for 21st Century Cable, a company bursting with associates of Mayor Daley....

Housed in the Ivanhoe Theater’s “catacombs,” whose faded brick walls partially mortared with bones date from when the Ivanhoe was a restaurant with a medieval theme and the cellar was a dungeon fun house, the Free Associates have carved a niche for themselves among Chicago’s improv groups. Though they rely on the customary draw of audience interaction, soliciting viewer suggestions about characters and situations, director Mark Gagne’s four-year-old company specializes in affectionate, informed parodies of popular literary works, films, and television shows....

I am in mourning. I have felt denial, anger, depression–the whole seven steps of grief. Not because Christian rock is growing like a cancer. Or because the New Republic has slouched toward the right. No, my sorrow is because good old Sassy–that ultracool teen magazine that used to light up the newsstand with sarcastic articles like “Are You Obsessive-Compulsive? Are You? Are You? Are You? Are You? Are You?”–has been bought by dweebs....

It was once reported of the Elizabethan playwright Ben Jonson that “he hath consumed a whole night lying looking at his great toe, about which he hath seen Tartars and Turks, Romans and Carthaginians, fight in his imagination.” Alas for my poor imagination: all I see at night in the void around my feet are Jay and Dave engaged in their spectral skirmishing. I don’t even have the slightest idea what they’re fighting about, any more than I did back at school, when my history teacher kept trying to drum into my head whatever the hell was up with Carthage....

MY FAIR LADY But there were also the chandeliers, and the opulence they epitomized; Oliver Smith’s dazzling sets and Cecil Beaton’s ingenious costumes contributed hugely to My Fair Lady’s original production. “Nothing impresses an audience more or produces a more dependable, spontaneous burst of applause than to see a chandelier appearing from on high,” wrote Lerner in his autobiography, The Street Where I Live, issuing a dictum surely burned forever into Andrew Lloyd Webber’s brain....

Pink, Bailiwick Repertory. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Douglas Wood is one of off-Loop theater’s busiest composers and musical directors, with credits ranging from Lifeline to Steppenwolf; in this Pride Performance Series production he steps out front as a singer and actor. Combining monologues, poetry, and soft-soul songs, Pink offers interlocking vignettes about gay life. One series of speeches concerns a Texas preacher’s son and his evolution from terrified teen to out-and-proud adult coping with the AIDS crisis; Wood puts an intriguing spin on the story by moving from the present to the past....

Handsome Family 8/30, Lounge Ax For a former Texan, the Handsome Family’s Brett Sparks shows lots of Canadian influences–Neil Young’s rattling guitar, Leonard Cohen’s languorous balladry, and Gordon Lightfoot’s polite diction. But on this Chicago mock-country band’s sophomore outing, Milk and Scissors (Carrot Top), lyricist-bassist Rennie Sparks (Brett’s wife) keeps the focus on morbid Americana, speculating on Amelia Earhart’s dying thoughts and Liza Minnelli’s fear of Skylab. Prong 8/30, Metro Less bilious and less catchy than, say, Ministry, this threesome calls its latest Rude Awakening (Epic), but it plays more like a mild sleep inducer....

By Harold Henderson Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “For 50 years, planners in this country have been saying that when people ‘come to their senses,’ they’ll realize that sprawl is bad and start using transit instead of the private automobile,” Northwestern University’s David Schulz tells Planning magazine (December). “But people have already decided that the suburbs are where they want to live, and the car is how they want to get there....

Hey, Governor Jim, didja hear the one about the Czech politician? “I think a lot of Republicans look at me as an eccentric, an aberration–the king’s fool,” says west suburban Republican, Czech American, and new state treasurer Judy Baar Topinka to Jennifer Halperin in Illinois Issues (March). “What people forget is that the king’s fool used to have a major role in making policy. But he was never the one who lost his head afterward....

“Free speech absolutism is at best a theology–indeed, a theology in which no one really believes,” writes U. of C. law professor Cass R. Sunstein in the New Republic (December 6). “Often regulation of speech is perfectly acceptable; consider again the laws governing perjury, attempted bribery, false commercial speech, unlicensed medical and legal advice, criminal solicitation, access of speakers to private property and much more. But the failure of free speech absolutism does not mean that there is no such thing as free speech…....