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The doctor is called. It is fall 1880 and the father is dying of tuberculosis in the family’s big apartment in Vienna. The 21-year-old daughter has been nursing him. She tends to him at night and her sleeping schedule is awry–she has nodded off when sitting at his bedside, and once in the summer country house she thought she saw snakes crawling from the walls, out to get him. Terrified, she tried to push one away and found that her fingers had turned into little snakes themselves....

Back to the Brink Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Not only is there nothing in the till; the Examiner is $150,000 in debt. Board member Curt Conklin, who stepped in as the magazine’s publisher a month ago, says the extent of the problem took him by surprise. After “a couple of board meetings where it was clear that this thing was just spiraling out of control,” Conklin says he came in, spent one “fun” week working on subscriptions and selling ads, and then “got a call that we couldn’t make payroll....

Hugh Hefner had a sign on the door of the old Playboy mansion: If You Don’t Swing, Don’t Ring. When it comes to presidential politics Illinois doesn’t swing, so the candidates aren’t ringing. No presidential motorcades are screaming up the Eisenhower. No attack ads with Hitchcock music, sneering narrators, and grainy mug shots of John Kerry with a five o’clock shadow are airing. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “We’re nine points ahead with Kerry in Illinois,” said King, who has been “obsessed” with beating Bush for the last four years....

When Ivan and Sophia Rabodzeenko touched down at O’Hare December 5, here to visit their son and his American family for a monthlong holiday, it was the first time the two Saint Petersburg artists had left the former Soviet Union. Ivan was looking forward to seeing the Art Institute and the Field Museum; Sophia just wanted to stand on the shore of Lake Michigan. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Kirikou and the Sorceress Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The plots of animated features are often excuses for visual showboating, but here the lilting story line, based on West African folktales, complements the alternately sumptuous and austere images. Subplots blossom out of one another as Kirikou, a preternaturally self-possessed infant, sets out to defend his village against Karaba, a sorceress who’s eliminated nearly an entire generation of warriors....

Dear Ms. True: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » While McClain’s and Joravsky’s articles are unrelated, there is a central theme, i.e., the barriers women in Illinois face when searching for excellent maternity care. As Tiffany McClain reported, the benefits of midwifery care are recognized and endorsed by the American Public Health Association and the World Health Organization, yet families in Illinois find it increasingly more difficult to find such care....

MUSIC FROM MACEDONIA AND THRACE Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Few places in the world can match the degree of overlap between folk and popular musics that persists in Greece. In the region of Epirus, in the northwest, the tart clarinet sound of the local traditions is instantly recognizable in most of the music on the radio. And George Dalaras, perhaps the country’s biggest pop star, sings rembetika (an urban Greek folk style analogous to the blues) and laiko, which translates roughly as “music of the people....

During the blizzard of ’79, which dropped over 20 inches of snow on Chicago and closed schools for a week, sisters Christina and Dymphna Timmins were left to their own devices. “Our mom wanted us to stay in,” says Christina, who is now 34. “We had just gotten a stereo, so we spent a week doing a little radio show we made up. I think there were strikes in the school district at the same time....

I am a 19-year-old guy with a problem. When I was 15, I was a lonely virgin who had never even kissed a girl. My sister, who is a year younger than me, had never had a boyfriend. One day we started talking about this and decided to practice kissing on each other. To make a long story short, it wasn’t long before practicing kissing became practicing heavy petting and then oral sex and then real sex....

It’s not all wine-and-Brie parties and lunches at the Arts Club for museum directors these days. Besides the old drag of romancing the donors and the new horror of shrinking endowments, there are minefields cropping up all around them. There’s been the fractious board at the Terra, the investment fiasco at the Art Institute, and now the big guns of a federal indictment at the Chicago Athenaeum Museum of Architecture and Design....

Hello Again was a late addition to Circle Theatre’s season this year, a replacement for The Fifth of July after that play unexpectedly turned up on another theater’s spring schedule. Written by Michael John LaChiusa and described as an “adult musical fantasy,” Hello Again is based on Arthur Schnitzler’s 100-year-old Viennese shocker La Ronde. The Schnitzler play is a game of sexual dominoes–a blitz of brief encounters and the frank dialogue that precedes and follows them....

This compelling 2002 documentary by Mark Moskowitz, an avid fiction reader who makes a living shooting political commercials, is a kind of literary detective story, though paradoxically the piece of literature at its center remains elusive and opaque to the end. In his late teens Moskowitz bought a copy of Dow Mossman’s novel, The Stones of Summer (1972), after seeing an enthusiastic review in the New York Times Book Review; when he finally got around to reading it 25 years later he was blown away but frustrated to discover that Mossman had never been heard from again....

Tea drinkers buried their eyes in books–An Unlikely Prophet, Sydney Omarr’s Day-by-Day Astrological Guide for Libra. Seagulls squealed from a speaker perched atop a bookshelf. Jasmine was in the air. Nature moves in cycles, Stone explained, flashing a diagram of the moon’s phases. We have 100 cycles within our bodies, he said, among them the actual-potential balancing cycle, the cognitive-emotional cycle, and the alternating nasal-airflow cycle. “Not only do cycles apply to Western psychology, they also apply to Eastern philosophy,” he said....

The New and the Neglected Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A new home was also her goal eight years ago, when her own company, Touchstone Theatre, merged with Organic. Touchstone, which she founded in 1985, had been renting an expensive space at 2851 N. Halsted, and she was hoping to move operations into the building Organic owned at 3319 N. Clark. But as soon as the merger was complete she began to learn of problems with the Organic facility–including major roof...

No quotation dictionary gives the origin of the common phrase “Elvis has left the building.” Who said it first? –Nicole A., Palo Alto, CA Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But Logan decided to take a chance. On October 16, 1954, Elvis debuted on the show, which was broadcast live on KWKH, a 50,000-watt station in Shreveport, Louisiana, that reached 28 states. The studio audience responded politely to the young singer–he had yet to develop his trademark hip wiggle or sultry sneer–but Logan and company saw his potential and signed him up for a regular gig....

The two-room Portage Park storefront that houses Ecuadoran restaurant LA PENA, cheerfully decorated in tones of green and burgundy, is family owned and operated: Jaime Fidel Castillo mans the front of the house, while his wife and mother cook the coastal Latin fare, some of the first upscale food of this type in town. A complimentary plate of impossibly thin homemade fried plantain chips starts off the meal, served with a tomato-based hot sauce flavored with carrots, onions, and cilantro....

Thirty-two ducks rotate on sturdy metal hooks hanging from the ceiling of two walk-in ovens at Vinh Phat, a tiny Vietnamese barbecue on North Sheridan. Another dozen birds cool on a wire rack, a deep pan underneath them to catch the fat drippings. In a heated glass display case up front, cooled ducks hang by their necks. A prep cook stands behind the counter with cleaver in hand, ready to chop one into a dozen perfectly even pieces, which he’ll tuck into a foil to-go container along with a piquant sweet sauce....

Bettie Serveert “We don’t have much to show for life,” Van Dyk sings on “Wide Eyed Fools,” the opening track on the band’s newest disc, Log 22. “Not a perfect home, not a perfect wife.” That chorus swells with overwhelming conviction, but the verses that lead up to it seem deliberately unfocused. Visser’s guitar lick scuttles away from a sole organ chord, a series of hi-hat taps is followed by an offbeat snare hit–the music seems to shrink from its inevitable anthemic fate....

Hard to believe, but it was more than four years ago that the Blue Men arrived with their jungles of industrial tubing and turbo-hydraulic water-spouting thingamajigs to test a postpsychedelic generation’s affinity for sensory overload. The revue is more clean and collected than it was at its premiere–much of the kinetic clutter has been thinned out to showcase the azure artists’ whimsical humor. They amuse with drums that spray fountains of paint, bottle-xylophones in Peter Max colors, costumes that ejaculate mysterious substances, synchronized chewing and spitting, video probes, dancing ropes, word games, and sing-alongs....

The sixth annual European Union Film Festival runs Friday, March 7, through Thursday, March 27, at the Gene Siskel Film Center, 164 N. State. Admission is $8, $4 for Film Center members. For further information call 312-846-2800. The schedule for March 7 through 13 follows; a full festival schedule through March 27 is available on-line at www.chicagoreader.com. SATURDAY, MARCH 8 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Fleeing her violent husband, a beautiful woman and her young son find temporary lodging with a loony grad student who’s obsessed with Kierkegaard and whose neighbor, an alcoholic day laborer, destroys plants during a gardening job because he doesn’t like his client....