I’m sure this won’t be the only response you receive regarding your advice to OBGYN, the pro-choice girl whose pro-life boy refused to have intercourse with her unless she agreed to have the baby if she got pregnant. Why? Because your advice was totally fucked-up. I take 95 percent of what could be considered liberal positions, Dan, but I happen to be pro-life. For those of us who are pro-life, a fetus is more than a political issue....

I’m a straight female who’s been in a loving relationship with my boyfriend for three years. I’m also a politically connected woman who’s very much in control; when I say no I mean no. A little more about me: I was born in Alabama, play the piano, and for a while was a professor at Stanford University. Currently I hold a high-ranking position in Washington, D.C. I have a tattoo of George W....

One of the Peter Brotzmann Chicago Tentet’s greatest strengths is the intricate web of relationships, some decades long, that links its players. The 2002 session that yielded last year’s marvelous Tales Out of Time (Hatology) was the first time reedist Brotzmann, trumpeter and saxist Joe McPhee, bassist Kent Kessler, and percussionist Michael Zerang had played as a quartet, but the connections that enrich Brotzmann’s big band–where all four also serve–are if anything even more evident here....

Regarding memes (February 13), why is it so important to deny me even the tiniest crumb of a consciousness, self, will, Geist, Seele, soul, or whatever the heck you want to call it? What is so threatening about my having a little bit of choice? What is so terrifying about acknowledging my ability to choose between whether I will read two, three, or four bedtime stories tonight to my four-year-old son or, for that matter, whether to get a root beer instead of a Coke?...

Your column about microwave ovens moves me to ask: Is cancer increasing because we’ve wrecked the environment? For years we’ve heard about the chemicals and emissions we carelessly spew with dire implications for our health. Meanwhile, cancer seems to be on the rise: I’ve heard breast cancer is up sharply, and melanoma too. But I’ve also heard cancer is increasing because we now live long enough to get it, thanks to modern medicine’s success against illnesses that used to kill people at an earlier age....

When I told my wife that one reason our refrigerator was having trouble maintaining a low temperature was that it was overfilled, she instantly produced three household-tips books that said a refrigerator is more efficient stuffed to the gills than it is empty. This seems to contradict the first law of physics: You don’t get something for nothing. If we take Heloise and her fellow hinters at their word, it costs less to maintain a warehouse full of fish sticks than a tray of miniature ice cubes in a motel-room fridge....

Christopher Durang’s 1976 farce was conceived as a satiric bicentennial response to late-60s angst–an alternately mocking and morbid portrait of an American family wrestling with Vietnam and its aftermath. But Chemically Imbalanced Comedy’s engagingly scruffy production reveals Durang’s dark comedy to be a timely satire of a nation muddling through a war abroad and political polarization at home. Durang mocks pro- and antiwar cant with equal fervor in his tale of an ultradysfunctional family: bossy but loving mom Ozzie Ann, ineffectual dad Harry, rebellious teen son Et, and older brother David, a blind Vietnam vet turned protester....

German-born pianist Achim Kaufmann started his career in the 80s, working in a variety of free-improv, fusion, and mainstream jazz contexts, but it wasn’t until 1996, when he moved to Amsterdam, that his playing truly took flight. The city has long been a springboard for creative musicians, and its anything-goes scene demands a focus and rigor that seem to have galvanized Kaufmann. His first solo piano album, Knives (Leo, 2004), is a mostly improvised affair, but his pieces also reveal a strong contemporary classical sensibility, spiked as they are with unusual harmonies and extended techniques....

Haki Madhubuti should be thrilled. Last month his Third World Press released The Covenant With Black America, a collection of essays conceived of and edited by commentator and public radio host Tavis Smiley. The book, which offers a detailed prescription for addressing the concerns of African-Americans, has already sold more than 100,000 copies and is in its second printing. Discussions about it are filling auditoriums across the country, and on March 26 it hit the New York Times paperback best-seller list at number six....

“Don’t call yourself a whore,” Jill Soloway’s mother pleaded when she read the manuscript of her daughter’s new book. “Call yourself a . . . sex enjoyer!” Soloway’s memoir, Tiny Ladies in Shiny Pants (Free Press), could give any mother palpitations, but Jill’s mom is used to it. In the book Soloway tells the tale of losing her virginity at the age of 17 to a George Hamilton clone she met at the East Bank Club and details her teenage career as a stalker of every celebrity who passed through Chicago, from Ric Ocasek and David Lee Roth to a not-yet-famous Tom Cruise....

Carl Barat doesn’t have a prayer of getting more press than his old Libertines bandmate Pete Doherty, which makes it easy to overlook his new combo, the Dirty Pretty Things. The group includes two other ex-Libertines, drummer Gary Powell and guitarist Anthony Rossomando, so maybe it’s no surprise that its debut, Waterloo to Anywhere (Interscope), covers some familiar territory. The music echoes the mod-punk poetics and resolutely English pluck of the Libertines’ 2002 debut, Up the Bracket, though producer Dave Sardy gives the songs a high-gloss pop finish, and the subject matter is considerably darker....

Richard Kelly’s surreal, subversive mix of sci-fi and teen drama tanked at the box office when it first appeared, shortly after the 9/11 attacks, but has since become a cult favorite at midnight shows and on DVD. This new theatrical release features 20 minutes of additional footage that introduces the characters in a more leisurely fashion and provides a more elaborate rationale for Kelly’s enigmatic time-travel story. Jake Gyllenhaal plays the title character, an angry suburban teen whose visions of a fearsome six-foot bunny lead him to believe he’s been chosen to save the universe....

Dreams Come True Nathan hadn’t accepted work from an artist who walked in off the street for so long she can’t remember another time it happened, though she says she’s sure there have been others. If artists, even “outsider” artists, want to get in the door, they send a resume with slides or a CD and a cover letter. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Crump didn’t crack the selective River North scene entirely without a plan....

The oddly defensive motto on Eric Reed’s Web site–“It’s all right to swing”–may become increasingly cryptic as his career develops. In fact, given that the 35-year-old pianist has already started to think outside the neoclassical box, it may be cryptic already. Reed got his first big boost in the mid-90s as a member of the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra led by Wynton Marsalis, in whose bands any failure to swing–and swing hard–was the cardinal sin....

Three Times With Chang Chen, Shu Qi, Di Mei, Liao Su-jen, and Mei Fang Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In “A Time for Love,” set in 1966 in Kaohsiung, Chen (Chang) receives his draft notice, then writes a love letter to May (Shu), who works at the snooker parlor where he hangs out. He discovers that she’s taken a job at another snooker parlor, and to the strains of “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” and “Rain and Tears” he heads off to find her before reporting for duty....

Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King has been nominated for 11 Academy Awards, including best picture and best director, and he has a good chance of finally winning at least one of these coveted prizes, largely because the film is visually awesome. If he doesn’t, it may well be because of the almost universally disliked ending–or rather multiple endings. There’s the victorious battle ending. There’s the curtain call of characters visiting Frodo at his bedside....

Keith Reddin’s uncompromising 1984 black comedy offers a bleak look at damaged goods in the optimistic Eisenhower era, chronicling the bad breaks befalling a one-armed Korean war veteran afflicted with post-traumatic stress disorder and a confused, unfaithful wife. (The Iraq fiasco makes the play all too contemporary.) As if earth weren’t noxious enough, the couple ends up literally going to hell, a cesspool of cruel conformism and regimentation. Though a tad too minimalist in its props and decor, Audrey Francis’s earnest staging for Pine Box Theatre Company wisely takes the play’s cruelty seriously, conferring some dignity on the damned all-American couple (Jonathan Edwards and Anne Adams, heartbreakingly ordinary)....

Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I’ve never worn a bonnet, but I have to cop to being one of the obsessed. Once a year, even in adulthood, an overwhelming, unspoken urge sends me toward The Long Winter, and then all the other Little House books, out of sequence, until the floor around my bed is littered with pieces of my crumbling 1970s-era paperbacks....

I’ve always preferred the blues community on the south side, both as a musician and as a spectator. It’s just more down-home and more accepting of eccentric types. Some of my best nights onstage happened here back in the early 90s. My college buddy Jay and I were the white bookend guitar players for Johnny Drummer & the Starlighters. On a typical night here you’d see an array of characters, from a drummer named Top Hat–who always wore a top hat which stunk to high heaven, but nobody would tell him–to Gaylord the Arkansas Belly Roller, a very portly, well-dressed gentleman who would walk around and try to brush up against every woman in the place while he sang–hence the nickname....

The long overdue local debut of Nixon in China evokes the landmark moment in 1972 when canny cold warrior Richard Nixon reached out to Mao Tse-tung in a shrewd election-year ploy to divide the communist bloc, pave the way for peace in Vietnam, and lure voters away from the Democrats. Composer John Adams and librettist Alice Goodman have reimagined the occasion, dramatizing the psychological and strategic subtexts of the small talk and sloganeering as Tricky Dick and his first lady parlay and party with Mao and his wife, Jiang Qing, while TV transforms a diplomatic visit into a global media event....