You can’t vote for or against Mr. Moneybags, but he’s still very much in every single race in this election. The race for votes–following the principle of one person, one vote–is ultimately what counts in every contest on the ballot. But the outcome of each is profoundly shaped by the money race–which follows the principle of one dollar, one vote. Illinois campaign-finance laws prohibit outright bribery but otherwise place few limitations on candidates....

Zephyr Dance Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Michelle Kranicke has developed a fine eye and ear for contrast, for visual, aural, and kinetic textures. As artistic director of Zephyr Dance, the all-female troupe she founded in 1989, she’s evolved from a choreographer making specific, often feminist cultural observations into an artist interested in a broad range of issues that just happen to be expressed through what she calls the “physical strength and daring, the willingness to try,” of women....

DAMNATIONS TX Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » On Half Mad Moon (Sire), the terrific debut album by their band, the Damnations TX, sisters Amy Boone and Deborah Kelly join the ranks of the Louvins, the Everlys, and the McGarrigles as some of the most gifted singing siblings in American music. Unlike many of their predecessors, who tended toward delicate, close harmonies, Boone and Kelly are downright raucous, but even when they roar, their voices move together with magnetic precision....

Friday 11/28 – Thursday 12/4 29 SATURDAY Environmentalists are hung up on deforestation, preserving parks, and preventing pollution. But loss of arable land is a far greater threat to our well-being, says Dwight Lowell Mather, a tax specialist and former Methodist minister who has studied the problem since he was a teenager. He’ll discuss The End of the Food Supply tonight at the College of Complexes. According to the Department of Agriculture, the U....

The best time to visit Kewanee is during the annual Hog Days festival (August 29 to September 1, 309-852-2175), when locals and visitors take to the streets for three days of socializing, drinking beer, and eating pork chops, fried dough, fried onions, French fries, gyros, brats, and calzones. Store windows are decorated with pigs, and there’s a carnival midway with games and rides plus a hog dunk. If you get bored, try the helicopter rides or mud volleyball....

MANUFRACTURE, Strawdog Theatre Company. A strong contender for worst play of the year (I can’t speak for the millennium), this derivative new work by New York playwright Anne DeMare goes nowhere loudly and tediously, wasting its large cast and the audience’s attention. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Indebted to Beckett’s Waiting for Godot and Elmer Rice’s The Adding Machine to the point of artistic bankruptcy, DeMare’s absurdist torture depicts without a shred of humor or pathos the nameless workers in an abandoned but still functioning factory....

Marat/Sade: The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade, Hypocrites, at the Viaduct Theatre. Peter Weiss’s alternately exhilarating and maddening play, in which a group of inmates assassinate French revolutionary Jean-Paul Marat under the direction of the Marquis de Sade, is a challenging, Brechtian work. But the Hypocrites often prove themselves up to the task....

PATRICIA BARBER Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Pianist and singer Patricia Barber approaches her career with the same restless energy that roils beneath the surface of her music: whether on the piano bench or in the producer’s chair, she just can’t sit still. Barber attracted much of her considerable following with the beautifully crafted originals on her last two studio albums, which ranged from darkly witty observations like “Touch of Trash” to deep meditations like “Let It Rain....

Polish Movie Springtime Piotr Weresniak directed this 1999 drama about a femme fatale who meets her match when she falls in love with a young man. To be shown without subtitles; Weresniak will attend the screening. (Copernicus Center, 6:30) Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » See listing for Saturday, March 18. To be shown without subtitles; Weresniak will attend the screening. (Copernicus Center, 4:00)...

Maria Callas Callas Edition (EMI Classics) I have to be honest–I’m bored to death by any story about an opera diva throwing tantrums. (I like them even less than stories about imperious conductors incinerating hapless musicians with their laserlike glares.) So most of the Callas mystique leaves me indifferent. The tumultuous love affairs, the wild arguments at rehearsals, the melodramatic collapses in mid-aria before horrified audiences, and so on and on–I have a suspicion that it was all much more fun when Callas was the only diva pulling these stunts....

To the editor, Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I would not have given a second thought to the editorial if I had not had my curiosity piqued by something that happened a moment later. I flipped over to Section Two and started reading some of Mr. Rosenbaum’s encapsulated reviews of other movies showing around town. There, close to the front of the alphabetical listing, was his lyrical ejaculation on Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner....

I am a happily married woman with two beautiful children, and I have a deep, dark secret. When I was 17 I ran away from home. With nowhere to go and nobody to rely upon, I ran into a man who referred me to an escort agency. I performed sexual acts for rich men who paid me large sums of money. It helped me survive for the year I was in LA....

U.S. Maple So I was a little taken aback–but not necessarily displeased–by the raging controversy they inspired on their stint opening for Pavement on the road this summer. Comments in various indie-rock Web forums ranged from “U.S. Maple kicks ass….I think they totally upstaged Pavement” to “I would rather have my fingernails pulled out with a pair of rusty pliers than sit through that shit again.” Pavement fans being generally a mild-mannered lot, we didn’t get the fistfights and rioting that accompanied, say, the debut of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, but the back-and-forth was virulent enough to make me wonder if this subcultural-fragmentation thing is getting really out of hand....

DAN DARRAH 11/26, JOY-BLUE Singer-songwriter Dan Darrah holds down a regular Friday-night gig at this friendly little bar, playing funky modern hippie music to unwind from office work by–vaguely Cat Stevens-esque stuff with traces of salsa and hip-hop. On his self-released CD, Farina Dumplings, he plays guitar, harmonica, piano, keyboards, and some percussion, accompanied by a drummer and a bassist; here he goes it solo. SPLENDER 11/26, DOUBLE DOOR DKNY shills Splender have made some waves in the biz with their faux indifferent “Yeah, Whatever,” but the only tune on their Halfway Down the Sky (on Columbia’s C2 imprint) with any hint of personality is the opener, “I Don’t Understand,” which is catchy in a tuneless, forgettable Romantics kind of way....

Among Friends The crux of Thatcher’s drama–about three middle-aged friends whose relationships are severely tested by jealousy and betrayal–lies in one particularly fine scene at the beginning of the second act, as the simmering tension between the men reaches a full boil. Will, a high-minded if somewhat self-righteous schoolteacher, accuses Dan, a decorated Vietnam vet and real estate tycoon, of betraying and using him and Matt, an unlucky schlub who works as a salesman at Sears....

Friday 8/7 – Thursday 8/13 8 SATURDAY Since at least 1230 BC people have walked laby-rinths–single-path mazes that are said to bring insight, revelations, and empowerment. In this New Age, labyrinths are making a comeback all over the world. They’ve even hit the Chicago area–tonight from 6:30 to 9:30 seekers can walk a replica of the labyrinth in France’s Chartres Cathedral under a full moon, and then discuss whether they’re enlightened or just disoriented....

Kahil El’Zabar has an enduring allegiance to the spoken word, which is not always the case among musicians. The percussionist and bandleader is a published poet and struggled to create a performance space a few years ago, the First Amendment Cafe, for music and verse. As curator of Steppenwolf’s interdisciplinary “Traffic” series, he’s thrown together musicians and wordsmiths from Amiri Baraka to Sam Shepard to Kurt Vonnegut in often unexpected ways....

Giselle Cinderella Defining precisely what is classical generates many questions. How old must a work be before it’s withstood the test of time? Is a classic honored in a Confucian manner–just because it’s old? Or is it something more? We are social animals who make art to satisfy an expressive need we cannot satisfy any other way, and in the process come to know ourselves again and again. Regarding a classic as “been there, done that” is nonsense; it is not about closure but about restating the enigma of life....

MAKING PORN, at the Theatre Building. There’s one good reason to see Ronnie Larsen’s Making Porn, which has returned to Chicago after running off-Broadway for the past year. And it’s not gay porn superstar Ryan Idol–who’s left the show anyway. As Jack Hawk, the straight actor turned reluctant gay porno icon, Idol spent perhaps two minutes undressed. Otherwise he was competent and likable, even managing a credible sense of shame when told to strip for the cameras, but like almost everyone else in the cast he made big, obvious choices, which are about all that Larsen’s script allows....

Jokingly I suggest to Ricardo Caballero that his Mexican cooking is so distinctive because he spent so many years working at French restaurants. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Listening to him recount his remarkable string of restaurant gigs is like hearing an oral history of the city’s fine-dining scene during the last third of the century. He crossed the border in 1964 at age 15, landing a busboy job at the Como Inn....