By Susan Messer Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A dark Mercedes passes me from behind. The driver’s got his window open, and he’s waving a big Styrofoam cup in a crazy-eight pattern. A van approaches from the other direction, and when the two vehicles meet the Mercedes driver tosses his cup at the van. It bounces off and lands in the street, and the two vehicles keep right on going....

“Don’t touch” is a rather silly admonition in a store full of toys. Ted Frankel has no patience for such scolding when parents bring their kids into Uncle Fun, his kitschy toy shop in Lakeview, where it’s nearly impossible not to find yourself picking things up. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Frankel was raised in Cleveland by parents in the toy business (father did wholesale, mother retail), and they were always bringing home samples....

The new rock opera Aida isn’t lyricist Tim Rice’s first foray into the world of ancient Egypt: in 1968 he and Andrew Lloyd Webber teamed up for the first time on a 15-minute children’s pageant based on the biblical saga of Joseph, the dream-interpreting Hebrew slave who rose to power in Pharaoh’s court. Expanded over the years to its current two-act, 105-minute form, this is a playful, family-oriented pop romp, a welcome alternative to the seasonal crop of Christmas Carols....

Liquid Gold, 5-lb. Test Productions, at Profiles Theatre. Less speculative than most science fiction, Jeffrey Raymond Dainton’s new drama portrays a not-too-distant future in which drastic changes in climate have caused an infestation of bloodthirsty poisonous spiders. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In one sense Liquid Gold presents a fairly standard postapocalyptic scenario, and Dainton doesn’t bother to mask his fondness for the likes of H....

Manuel Ocampo: God Is My Copilot Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Engaging, observant, and wickedly ironic, Phillip Rodriguez’s 1998 hour-long profile of Filipino-born painter Manuel Ocampo belongs with the best of the genre. Ocampo, whose gaudy, surreal, disturbing canvases incorporate images and motifs from religious and pop culture, first won the attention of the west-coast art scene in the late 80s. Yet Rodriguez punctures the pretensions of an art world that latches onto controversy while turning its pets into celebrities: connoisseurs such as Dennis Hopper and Julian Schnabel explain why Ocampo’s art appeals to them, then the sweet-looking Ocampo dismisses their psychological theories....

MIRIAM FRIED Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Violinist Miriam Fried, born in Romania in 1946 and raised in Israel, has been working the international concert circuit steadily since her New York debut in 1969, but she doesn’t enjoy anything like the marquee status of a much younger soloist like Sarah Chang. Her timing’s at least partly to blame: though she was well-known as a prodigy in Tel Aviv as early as the 50s, the classical music world hadn’t yet started making superstars out of preteens....

“Until I was like 15 or 16 I only listened to classical music,” says Julieta Venegas, who at 27 is one of Mexico’s few female rock stars. “I was mostly into modern Russian composers like Khachaturian and Rachmaninoff, who were really intense. And Satie, which is simple.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Now Venegas’s rhythmic incantations of her subtle, poetic lyrics–presented in a definitively alt-rock manner–can be heard on radio stations all over Mexico....

The ninth annual edition of the Polish Film Festival, produced by the Society for Arts, runs from Saturday, November 1, through Tuesday, November 11. Film and video screenings will be at the Gateway Movie Theatre, Copernicus Foundation, 5216 W. Lawrence. Tickets for most programs are $7, $6 for Society of Arts members. Tickets for the opening night on Saturday are $15, and tickets for video presentations are $4. Festival passes, good for 15 screenings (excluding opening night) are $75....

PRIVATE LIVES, Writers’ Theatre Chicago. Noel Coward based his flawless 1930 script on more than just a road map of the heart. As Michael Halberstam’s adept staging artfully reveals, Private Lives continually transforms one fascinating tension into another in this tale of two ill-matched couples honeymooning in Deauville. Amanda and Elyot, embodying wealthy eccentricity and jazz age abandon, are a divorced couple who end up deserting their new younger spouses to reunite, fleeing to Paris for a second chance at love....

ROBERT WARD Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Guitarist Robert Ward helped found the Ohio Untouchables, a Dayton-based group that scored regionally in the early 60s on the tiny LuPine and Groove City labels–and that went on, after Ward left, to win international fame as the Ohio Players. But his most significant recording during that era was the 1962 epic “I Found a Love,” with Wilson Pickett’s early band the Falcons: Ward’s sulfurous leads intertwined with Pickett’s screams in an unstable marriage of spiritual and carnal intensity that helped define the emerging style of soul....

MOVIEGOERS 12/19, SCHUBAS The trick of good pop is to hit ambitious heights while pretending to have no ambition at all–to get folks who were barely aware of you at the time to catch themselves later humming lines about “the heavy-duty cycle of life” while in the laundromat. The debut CD by the local Moviegoers, Twinpop (Hear Diagonally), nestles in life’s mundanities like it belongs there, conjures deja vu when you least expect it, and picks up steam until you realize you’re having a lot more fun than you thought you would....

LONESOME ORGANIST 7/9, EMPTY BOTTLE Part of the appeal of Jeremy Jacobsen’s performances as the Lonesome Organist is the “How the hell does he do that?” factor–he sings and plays keyboards, horns, guitar, harmonica, percussion, drums, and whatever, often simultaneously, yet he sounds much more fully orchestrated than many four- and five-person outfits. But despite his endearing onstage haplessness–at times the whole pile of instruments seems about to collapse–Jacobsen carefully plans his manic-sounding music, making sure there’s something there for the short people in the back....

It’s easy to see why this movie is a little too long. It must have been frustrating for filmmakers Shainee Gabel and Kristin Hahn to make only one movie out of all the exciting footage they got on their trek across America. Many of the women’s experiences were recorded by cinematographer Bill Brown, though the movie–an array of people and places that encourages American audiences to see the nation with tourists’ eyes–obscures this fact, almost suggesting that the camera we see the women take in and out of the trunk of their car is somehow capable of taking pictures of itself....

A fluke turned fatty eggnog into holiday trim. English colonists new to America’s ale- and wine-barren shores improvised on a drink served in small, handled “noggins” at pubs back home. Ale, also called “nog,” or dry sack wine was mixed in the noggin with milk and eggs. In America, rum–an ingredient in some grogs–ran freely. The colonists substituted the more potent liquor and dubbed it eggnog. Administered at bedsides as well as pubs, eggnog became a favorite cure for melancholy....

CLOUD 9, About Face Theatre. A sturdy vehicle for a supple cast, Caryl Churchill’s 1979 gender-bending play is its own two-act rotating repertory. Kyle Hall’s cast successfully rises to its occasions. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The first act, set at the apogee of the British Empire, depicts a patriarchal, colonialist, racist, misogynist Victorian family. Since divorce is forbidden, adultery flourishes, and since only certain forms of heterosexuality are approved, pedophilia, miscegenation, and homosexuality come in through the back door....

Comeback Kids Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Hill was raised in Denver, earned an undergraduate degree in directing from the University of Northern Colorado, and moved to Chicago three years ago. She’s made what she considers a pretty good living as a freelance scenic designer and artist while trying to break into the city’s tight-knit directing ranks, and in her spare time she’s directed a few shows, including Private Passage and The Sensitive Swashbuckler at Stage Left....

HAPPY APPLE Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I don’t know what niche this trio occupies back home in the Twin Cities, but in Chicago it fits neatly between the hell-for-leather expressionism of Ken Vandermark’s quintet and the nuanced musings of mainstream journeymen like saxist Jim Gailoretto and guitarist John McLean. On Happy Apple’s second and most recent album, Part of the Solution Problem (No Alternative), drummer David King, saxist Michael Lewis, and bass guitarist Erik Fratzke offer up a lot of variety and the skill to control it: they can run from mournful lullabies to big-energy romps, but they always sound like the same band....

HILTON RUIZ & DAVE VALENTIN Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Born in New York City to Puerto Rican parents, pianist Hilton Ruiz grew up in a neighborhood filled with Latin music. But as a child prodigy who’d played Carnegie Hall at age eight, he was soon looking beyond the end of his nose for inspiration, and by 1973, when he was barely into his 20s, he was working for visionary reeds master Rahsaan Roland Kirk....

KAHIL EL’ZABAR’S EXPERIMENTAL BAND Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In his work as a nightclub promoter, arts activist, and artistic director of Steppenwolf’s “Traffic” series, Kahil El’Zabar tends to fix his gaze on the future. But in his latest musical project the percussionist and bandleader serves up a slice or two of the past as well. His new Experimental Band–a nine-piece ensemble he conducts but does not play in–honors the original band of that name, the mid-60s orchestra developed by Muhal Richard Abrams into the famous crucible of the AACM....

“Believe it or not, I was in a shell once,” says Dorothy Plaut with a laugh. The 66-year-old was diagnosed with depression caused by a chemical imbalance in 1976. Nine years ago, after a hospital stay to treat her condition, her doctor recommended that she check out a theater workshop run by the Thresholds psychiatric rehabilitation center in Lincoln Park. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » There are plenty of problems the Thresholds ensemble members may want to forget....