In the 1850s and 1860s Chicago streets consisted of garbage, manure, and dirt. Horse-drawn omnibuses–our first form of mass transit–traveled down State Street on wooden planks as far south as 12th Street. The trip was risky in wet weather. According to transit historian David Young, if an omnibus slipped off the planks, it could take workers days to dig it out of the mud. Roving gangs of youths moved faster. “When they were not brawling or vandalizing public property or stealing from gardens,” writes historian Perry Duis, “they were pawning stolen goods or selling them to junk dealers....

It’s someone in the supermarket checkout line. It’s a friend from high school or a suitemate from the dorm. It’s a coworker, a neighbor, a member of your book group. Maybe it’s your cousin, your aunt, your sister. Maybe it’s you. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » That describes Weldon herself: successful journalist, longtime essayist for the Chicago Tribune, newswriting teacher at Northwestern University. But for years Weldon’s seemingly picture-perfect life had a secret side: a pattern of physical intimidation and increasingly violent assaults by her husband, a high-powered lawyer as smart and successful as herself....

Death Defying Acts This evening of one-acts is either a testament to the playwrights’ talents or an indictment of the flaccidity of modern American drama: Woody Allen, David Mamet, and Elaine May have more work of value at the bottom of their drawers than other contemporary playwrights have at the top of theirs. And though the twilight years of Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller may provide an argument for enforced early retirement in the theater world, “Death Defying Acts” persuasively and entertainingly argues the contrary....

No Growth Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Because sales of lawn tickets can vary dramatically with the weather, pavilion tickets are considered a more accurate measure of growth, and during the summer of ’92 pavilion sales for CSO concerts averaged 2,309–about 70 percent of the 3,300 available seats. That percentage shrank to 64 percent in 1993, inched back to 72 percent by 1995, plunged again to 63 percent in 1996, and then moved up again to 68 percent last year....

TwentyFourSeven Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Director Shane Meadows (who also wrote and directed Small Time, a fabulous one-hour comedy recently shown at the Film Center) tries his hand at hard-core melodrama and makes it work. In this deeply felt and freshly executed personal-best story, Bob Hoskins plays a lonely boxing coach whose project to involve the young men in his hometown in something more constructive than hanging out and getting into trouble becomes a life-changing obsession....

Absolute Negritude, Oui Be Negroes, at Bailiwick Repertory. Exploring the latitude and longitude of “negritude,” this latest revue by a primarily African-American troupe offers comic comments on an endangered heritage. Eschewing politics, the sketches instead skewer the contradictions of pop culture and the hypocrisies of history. A television executive (Hans Summers, the company’s token white) offers a lame explanation for the absence of black characters in the fall lineup: “We forgot....

A small dark patch, dead center, is the first thing that catches your eye in Melissa Ann Pinney’s photograph Mother and Attendants Dressing the Bride. Pubic hair, mundane and verboten, it’s a magnet–the thing we’re not supposed to see. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Since her college days, when she first learned to handle a camera, Pinney has redeemed her own experience by capturing it on film....

Whisper: Jaume Plensa The first piece in the show is a white, framed wall sculpture of textured cloth and paper. Scattered throughout are screened images of the artist’s face–straight on, in profile, looking up, down, or around–as if confronting you directly in the hope of making you uncomfortable. Though this self-reflexive work is not representative of the rest of the installation, it still conveys Plensa’s intention–to force the viewer to confront his own existence in the context of a common space....

CEDAR WALTON TRIO Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » To nonmusicians Cedar Walton’s piano playing can seem to melt right into the background. There are two reasons: First, despite his unruffled fluency in hard bop and his sleek, sturdy, sometimes buoyant improvisations, his style bears none of the quirky accents, trademarked phraseology, or other identifying features that immediately announce the presence of contemporaries like McCoy Tyner or Herbie Hancock....

Freedom is not enough. “If you are born to an average family on 57th Street and Dorchester Avenue…your life prospects will be good, and altogether different from what they will be if you are born to most families 10 blocks south,” writes University of Chicago law professor Cass Sunstein in the on-line IntellectualCapital (July 16). “Morally irrelevant factors produce deprivation, even desperation, in global markets. A just society, and a just world, should be closely attentive to the background conditions against which markets proceed....

Annie Sprinkle’s Herstory of Porn: Reel to Real We all know sex is used to peddle everything from chewing gum to automobiles. But as a “postporn feminist,” Sprinkle has used it to sell cultural radicalism through her own brand of performance activism. The last time I saw her in Chicago, several years ago at Lower Links, she taught a “sex-education class” topless, inviting audience members to feel her breasts, giving the stage to her transsexual lover, who stripped naked to show us his dual genitals....

HEADHUNTERS WITH HERBIE HANCOCK Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Of all the musicians who escaped Miles Davis’s orbit to colonize their own planets in the 70s, pianist Herbie Hancock stayed closest to the master’s fusion funk. By emphasizing the oozing rhythms and thick, sweet colors of the black pop music of the day, Hancock turned jazz-rock fusion into jazz-soul fusion. So when the musicians he’d first assembled for 1974’s Head Hunters put out two more albums under that name after Hancock moved on, it shocked no one that the records dripped with wah-wah-washed, backbeat-heavy funk....

The Complete Jazz at the Philharmonic on Verve 1944-1949 Norman Grantz, the founder of Verve Records, understood this in the early 40s, when he brought jazz from smoky clubs first into the Philharmonic and then into other traditional concert halls around the globe. The series initially infuriated critics, who thought the music and its enthusiastic audiences vulgar, but it thrived in the U.S. until 1957 and into the 1960s in Europe....

IF.THEN.ELSE/SOLENOID Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » These two underground electronic acts, performing as part of the ongoing local “/bin” series, record for the new Berkeley imprint Emanate, run by Deno Vichas, aka If.Then.Else. Most of Realizations, the first If.Then.Else album, sounds something like early Aphex Twin, with gentle melodies, spacey effects, and fusionoid flourishes over twitchy electro breaks, though there are a few darker cuts: in “Anachronism,” a sinister bass pattern snakes along over grating percussive fragments; “What If” is barely there, an echoey approximation of deep space on disc....

Headline Schmeadline For dancers at the old Dance Center of Columbia College, these feelings had always been accompanied by an additional fear: Will I stub my toe and crash in the dark on my way from the dressing room to the stage? She wasn’t exaggerating. A 1990 graduate of the dance department, Cole went on to manage the Dance Center’s box office, run accounts payable, teach modern dance there, and perform with the resident troupe, Mordine & Company Dance Theatre....

By Michael Miner So Bienen must make his mark on Northwestern. And there are two ways to do so that are certain to impress the trustees who’ll choose Shapiro’s successor. One is to raise the university’s standing academically, from a school on the fringes of America’s first rank to a school firmly nestled within it. The other is to raise millions and more millions of dollars. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Last week, three aldermen sponsored resolutions calling for hearings to flay Commonwealth Edison over power outages caused by a snowstorm that included 50-mile-an-hour winds. Let’s face it: the whole mess was what insurance companies refer to as “an act of God.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Cartoonish mishaps are so common at Com Ed nuclear plants, they might as well make Homer Simpson their poster boy....

Your response to the fat couple with the lackluster sex life was no better or worse than most of the mainstream media’s information about fat people–which is to say, it was incorrect, unhelpful, and silly. I’m a happy, healthy fat chick. My boyfriend is a happy, healthy fat guy. I’m an adorable 270 pounds, and he’s a sexy 350 or so. We enjoy an active, varied, and satisfying sex life....

SKEETER BRANDON Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Before he returned to his native North Carolina in the early 80s to work as a gospel singer, keyboardist-vocalist Calvin “Skeeter” Brandon put in time as a sideman with both soul-blues singer Clarence Carter and the doo-wop group the Chi-Lites. Now he’s finally come back to the blues, and though his most recent recording, License to Thrill (New Moon), saddles him with a so-so earlier version of his current backup band, Hwy 61, his raw talent shines through....

A rip-roaring mix of swashbuckling, crotch kicking, bullwhip cracking, and body slamming is taking place on the stage of Columbia College’s Getz Theater. The crowd shouts at and taunts the fighters. “Go on girl!” yells one woman. “Kick some ass!” In the center of the packed auditorium sits David Woolley, who can barely conceal his glee. He leaps up sporadically and pumps his fist in the air, spurring the audience on to cheer even louder....