Captured at www.thetrip.com/ completetraveler/article/0,1355,1-1-4_2109,00.html The man in seat 22-C was tapping away on his laptop, working a spread sheet at 30,000 feet, when disaster struck. He reached for his Bloody Mary, missed, and spilled the drink all over his keyboard.The flight attendant rushed to help, but by the time she pulled out the napkins, it was too late. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » What’s the worst thing you can spill on your computer?...

Ted Cizma radiates calm. Never mind that carpenters are badgering him to decide how many holes to drill into the bar and maitre d’ station. Or that his understandably flustered designer almost took delivery of the wrong truckload of banquettes (they were for Blue Point, the restaurant next door). Or that the kitchen staff must devise a way to trim racks of rabbit and venison while keeping them clear of the sawdust flying everywhere (aluminum foil does the trick)....

DOUGLAS EWART’S “CREPUSCULE” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Throughout his career, saxophonist and instrument inventor Douglas Ewart has incorporated poetry, movement, and even costumes into his performances. Two years ago, he pulled off a full-fledged multimedia event–in a workshop and concert that used the rhythms of basketball for inspiration and percussion–but this weekend, if all goes well, he’ll top even that. In the Chicago premiere of Crepuscule, a piece previously presented in Philadelphia and Minneapolis, Ewart will position a series of performance “pods” throughout Jackson Park....

FINIAN’S RAINBOW, Marriott Theatre in Lincolnshire. Too seldom revived, this whimsical 1947 musical deftly interweaves the colorful denizens of “Rainbow Valley, Missitucky”: a racist senator, a leprechaun who falls for a mortal, an Irish immigrant hoping to find a rainbow at the end of a stolen pot of gold, and an integrated chorus of tobacco farmers. An amalgam of Li’l Abner and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, this sturdy confection by E....

Genesis Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “The Bible reveals that fraternity has always been a fraternity of blood,” states Malian director Cheick Oumar Sissoko, and his magnificent 1999 film of desert landscapes and fratricidal warfare, dedicated “to all who make peace,” implies parallels with today’s ethnic conflicts. Said to be the first African film with a biblical source, it adapts the story of Jacob, Esau, and Hamor in Genesis 23-38, setting it in a harsh, dry landscape of dusty temporary encampments....

Lead Stories In April, just as North Carolina representative Frank Mitchell was introducing his bill to revise a state law so that schoolteachers who have sex with their students would be punished, the chief inspector of schools in Great Britain was still dealing with fallout from his February remarks that teacher-student sex could sometimes be “experiential and educative.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In December Suphatra Chumphusri explained why she killed her drug-dealing son in Chiang Rai, Thailand: “No matter how much I loved him, I had to do it for the sake of the general society....

Jack Jones’s Italian-born grandmother, Vingencina Grieco, was cooking with infused oils all the way back in the 50s. His dad, Bill, an insurance agent in eastern Long Island, was a weekend fisherman who turned the day’s catch into delicacies such as bouillabaisse or steamed flounder stuffed with crabmeat. “He was a foodie back in the early 60s, before we knew about foodies,” says Jones. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

SHOW AND TELL, Dolphinback Theatre Company, at Angel Island. “A writer sets the circumstances and sees what the characters have to do,” playwright Anthony Clarvoe has written. “If the circumstances are hard enough, anything the characters do must be essential.” He proves himself exactly wrong in Show and Tell, however. He creates dire circumstances, all right: an explosion has killed every child in a kindergarten class, and their parents, the surviving teacher, and government officials must try to make sense of the tragedy....

Site for Sore Eyes Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » If the South Loop deal goes through, the site should be large enough to accommodate the theater’s already-designed interior configuration, but the exterior design would probably have to be adapted to the new site. No matter what happens next, the 12 organizations planning to call the theater home will have to wait at least several more years to move in....

Terry Bevington went to the mound to make a pitching change and, of course, was booed. This was last Friday, and as usual he had allowed de facto pitching ace Jaime Navarro to labor too long, into the eighth inning, even though Navarro had squandered an early 2-0 lead and then let the Texas Rangers go back in front after the White Sox rallied to tie it. Now Navarro had done it a third time, allowing a leadoff double and a one-out single in the top of the eighth to send the Rangers ahead 6-5....

FISH 8/15, Park West Not to be confused with the homophonous hippie band, the former lead singer of Marillion has made a comeback album brimming with the AOR-friendly high prog that you didn’t think anybody made anymore. Fish’s enhanced CD Sunsets on Empire is the real thing, full of deep and dense ruminations on love and war, with obligatory references to “kings, queens, and pawns” to keep it vintage and “roadside gangstas” to make it current....

JONAS 1/31, THURSTON’S This Minneapolis foursome cloaks scaled-down Led Zeppelinisms in a chintzy gothic gauze on its recent front-parlor-recorded CD, Hopeless in Gaza (My Spleen!/Channel 83); acoustic guitarist and lead vocalist Sarah Khan drags poor Debbie Harry into the mess by launching into the “man from Mars” routine from “Rapture” near the end of “I Can Fly.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » RENFIELDS 1/31, METRO On its latest CD, Sounds of Romance, Sounds of Horror (Afterglo), this garage-rock trio, formed seven years ago in De Kalb, evokes the raved-up, protopsychedelic spirit of early Yardbirds....

FOOTNOTES Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Cinderella story we know today was published in 1697 by the French author Charles Perrault in his book Tales of My Mother Goose. Perrault based the story on an oral fairy tale that, interestingly, seems to have originated in ninth-century China. Perrault made many changes to the crude peasant original to sanitize it for a bourgeois audience....

TRIO Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In the last couple years, more than a few of us who had high hopes for saxist Joshua Redman have given voice to our disappointment in his increasingly formulaic approach, but I figure that this band has a better chance of kicking him up a few notches than almost any other he’s played with. Here Redman, who usually leads a quartet, finds himself in a cooperatively led pianoless trio–a format that has inspired plenty of exciting improvisation in the 40 years since Sonny Rollins popularized it....

Let me tell you how my brother Eddie got his first dog. It’s one of the stories I tell my grandchildren. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Anyways, what appears is a little brown dog. We decided that he looked very hungry, so we gave him a piece of a roll. And then we gave him another piece. Then we walked another block–and he was right behind us, so we gave him some more....

Dear editor: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » All during the campaign for governor, the Tribune devoted a vast amount of print to any gay organization holding a press conference to denounce Congressman Poshard with little or no opportunity accorded for Poshard to respond. The Nation article suggested that the gay vote deserted Poshard in droves. So where was the payoff for the gay lobbying groups?...

steele.qxd Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Your article on Gallery 37 [“The Show Must Move On,” August 14] was very interesting. Gallery 37 does a wonderful job of keeping Chicago’s teenagers busy after school and in the summer. Teens learn important job skills. They learn about the creative process. They learn about themselves. Teenagers need to learn these things in order to become productive adults in our society....

Duo Neurotica Likability has long been one of Stephanie Shaw’s strong suits. An appealing performer in just about every way imaginable, she’s assured, intelligent, funny, and vulnerable, one of those people who commands attention seemingly without effort then delivers the kind of thoughtfully entertaining material that shows she deserves the attention. Yet in her first two solo pieces–the 1997 Good Eatin’ and 1999 A Proper Dragon, both pieces about pregnancy and motherhood created for the Neo-Futurists’ “Neo Mondo Solo” series–Shaw seemed just a bit too quick with a joke, a little too eager to please....

Buddy & Julie Miller Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Over the last few years, Buddy and Julie Miller have done a lot of high-profile work for other people. Buddy’s guitar playing has been a regular feature in bands led by Emmylou Harris and Steve Earle, and he did an excellent job producing the new Jimmie Dale Gilmore album. And he and Julie have had their tunes recorded by Harris, Little Jimmy Scott, the Dixie Chicks, Lee Ann Womack, Hank Williams III, Garth Brooks, and Suzy Bogguss, among others....

Dear Ms. True: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I recently read Steve Zwick’s article appearing in the March 10, 2000, edition of the Chicago Reader entitled “Surfin’ Turf: Going door to door with Citizens for a Better Environment.” While most of the article is devoted to the fund-raising techniques of Citizens for a Better Environment (CBE), a citizens’ environmental group, in one section Mr....