Hanging out with Rusty Nails is like watching a performance of Dada nonsense–he’ll slip into the voices of different characters, cite health statistics, then suddenly belt out his favorite song. He seems to be incapable of providing simple answers. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Call him offbeat, or maybe calculating. His 74-minute black-and-white debut belongs to the Roger Corman school of horror comedies, following a brother and sister as they search for the diabolical corporate and government conspirators behind the contamination of a city’s water supply....

toma.qxd Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It is with strong ambivalence that I write this to you. I applaud and thank you for running the lead story, “In With the Out Crowd,” in the December 11 issue of the Reader. Having worked with lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered (LGBT) youth for over five years, I know that the strengths and talents of LGBT young people are not acknowledged enough....

PHIL LEE 5/5, FITZGERALD’S North Carolina native Phil Lee moved to New York to play music in the early 70s, then went to California, where he worked with Jack Nitzsche on movie sound tracks and drove a truck for Neil Young. This he parlayed into a full-time trucking career–until about a decade later, when he was asked to augment the 1993 lineup of the Flying Burrito Brothers. In 1995 he moved to Nashville, the dead end where all country roads lead, and he and producer Richard Bennett began work on his debut album, The Mighty King of Love, which has just been issued on Shanachie....

SHANNON CURFMAN 11/19, MARTYRS’ When a teenager sets foot in the spotlight, everybody assumes she’s been pushed out there by the stage mother or lecherous manager in the wings, but Shannon Curfman’s drive seems to genuinely come from within. “At 10, I set the goal to have a band by the time I was 12, but I got it together about a year earlier than schedule,” says the 14-year-old blues-rock singer and guitarist, whose debut album was just reissued by Arista....

We have been taught to slap on sunscreen to prevent skin cancer. Recently I have come upon a number of references suggesting that our commonly used sunscreens may not be effective at all in preventing melanoma but only in preventing more common but also more benign and treatable skin cancer. Is this true? If so, who is behind the sunscreen lobby? Thanks in advance for letting your light shine on this....

Looking frazzled, Factory Theater artistic director Nick Digilio groans that he hopes White Trash Wedding and a Funeral will become Factory’s Coed Prison Sluts, the long-running cash cow at the Annoyance. From the looks of Digilio’s theater–hunks of plaster fallen from the walls, a lighting grid of a coffee can and clamp-on lamps–he needs something. And staking his company’s financial future on White Trash Wedding is as close to a sure bet as you get in the theater....

Exotica: Fabricated Soundscapes in a Real World Every year brings one great pop disappointment, and in 1999 it’s the nonappearance of the CD companion for David Toop’s new book, Exotica: Fabricated Soundscapes in a Real World. Even if it had come out, it would barely have registered as a blip on the pop-culture radar: highbrow art-school theorist culls his favorite tiki tracks in a probably vain attempt to legitimize an often (and often rightly) dismissed genre, yawn....

Two weeks after his 19th birthday, Angel Manfredy was out doing two of the things he liked to do best–drinking and driving. It mattered little to him that he had a girlfriend with a baby on the way. Ostensibly he was a prizefighter, but with a record of three wins, two losses, and one draw, he appeared to be heading nowhere fast. He was cut from the car, and more than 200 stitches later found himself in a hospital bed, looking into the face of his father....

Interviewing the Audience Seventeen years ago, when the Kitchen commissioned Spalding Gray’s Interviewing the Audience, the piece probably had an electric effect. The New York performance scene was revving up for its last great gasp, and Gray had carved himself an impressive niche as a confessional monologuist. In the days before Oprah and her flock had bludgeoned the national psyche with trivialities masquerading as pressing issues, turning the microphone on the audience may well have seemed radical, even liberating....

COLDCUT Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Coldcut came to prominence a decade ago with “Say Kids, What Time Is It?,” the first British record constructed exclusively from samples, and their role in introducing England to sample- and breakbeat-based music can’t be underestimated–though they’re understandably embarrassed by progeny like Prodigy. Jonathan More and Matt Black took a DIY approach to computer hardware as musical instrument that was crucial in the development and spread of the UK rave scene....

Friday 8/28 – Thursday 9/3 In local performer Steve Clark’s latest absurdity, Sarabande (Maybe That’s Why Coach Got My Liver), he stars as Captain Steve, an intergalactic cult leader who wears an Easter-egg blue rubber Batman-like costume. His trusty singing sidekicks, the Unicorn Girls, serve as a kind of Greek chorus during the technopop musical, which incorporates videos and computer animation. Show times are at 8 tonight and tomorrow night at the Athenaeum Theatre, 2936 N....

Friday 6/6 – Thursday 6/12 7 SATURDAY From her first book, A Street in Bronzeville, to her latest collection of poems, Children Coming Home, Illinois poet laureate Gwendolyn Brooks has broken barriers and inspired others to follow her lead; in 1950 she became the first African-American to win the Pulitzer Prize. These days she judges poetry contests, conducts workshops, and is writer in residence at Chicago State University’s Gwendolyn Brooks Center for Black Literature and Culture....

E.C. SCOTT Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » California-based blues singer E.C. Scott knows as well as anyone how to milk every note for all the passion it’s got. But at the emotional crossroads where many of her peers veer down the showy histrionic route, shrieking and wailing, Scott leans back on toughness of timbre and tonal intensity. On her third and latest CD, Hard Act to Follow (Blind Pig), she easily summons the strength to wrestle the grittiest roadhouse rockers into submission (notably “Steppin’ Out on a Saturday Night” and the hard-driving blues-rock title tune); on deeper soul outings like “Tell Me About It” and “Another Night in Paradise,” she digs down to her gospel roots and comes up with a tantalizing fusion of churchy uplift and fatback funk....

By Sarah Downey Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “There wasn’t any real money in it. The clientele now isn’t really the milkshake type, they’re more coffee drinkers,” says Arthur Bookman, who’s owned the diner for more than half a century. “We were selling maybe three or four milkshakes and malteds a day in the summer and none in the winter. It’s technical, you see....

By Michael G. Glab “It wasn’t something I owned or ran. It was just a place for me to go.” Right now, Darke’s performers are preparing, each in his or her own way, for the show. Mark “the Knife” Faje sits on a sofa and stares straight ahead, oblivious to the growing crowd, his concentration almost palpable. Dontinion “Dante” Ingram chain-smokes, her glittering ruby red gown reflecting the candles’ flickers, as she checks and rechecks items in her equipment case....

Most jugglers are show-offs. All they really care about is the applause, which is why they always stand front and center, ready to take their bows. Michael Moschen is an exception: juggling since he was a kid performing for quarters in front of New York City’s Metropolitan Museum, he clearly enjoys the applause but is more interested in transforming juggling from a sideshow trick into a transcendentally beautiful form of dance or kinetic sculpture....

JESSE AND THE BANDIT QUEEN, Azusa Productions. Outlaws Jesse James and Belle Starr (originally Myra Belle Shirley), born one year apart in the mid-19th century, were both Wild West legends before they were 30. But playwright David Freeman is less concerned with their infamous adventures than he is with demystifying their legends. His James is less the train-robbing folk hero immortalized by Woody Guthrie than a henpecked dullard and brutal Confederate guerrilla whose Robin Hood image was self-created....

Geek Love at the Lunar Cabaret The Rhino Fest opened with Geek Love, Theater for the Age of Gold’s musical adaptation of the cult novel about a family of circus freaks. I can’t assess the faithfulness of the adaptation since I haven’t read Katherine Dunn’s book, but the play all too faithfully presents a version of the world that’s rank, pointless, and repulsive. From the cacophonous entrance music to the hideous paper sunflowers decorating the stage, this production is designed from the start to make your skin crawl....

Ornette Coleman In a way, Ornette Coleman’s four-night stand in the hallowed halls of Lincoln Center would have been exceptionally gratifying no matter how the actual performances turned out. As the founding father of free jazz, Coleman has fought long and hard for acceptance. He’s been catching flak for his unorthodox ideas almost since he started playing saxophone, as a teenager in the late 40s. According to John Litweiler’s biography, Ornette Coleman: A Harmolodic Life, bluesman Pee Wee Crayton paid Coleman not to take solos when he played in the guitarist’s horn section in 1950–and a modernistic one he had taken a year earlier in bluesman Clarence Samuels’s band actually got him and his saxophone beaten up....

The Busy Body Stage Left Theatre But Centlivre was a master of her craft. The two plays currently on view in Chicago–The Wonder: A Woman Keeps a Secret and The Busy Body–both demonstrate her intelligent, ironic sensibility and strong sense of theatrical poetry. And Centlivre’s work transcends the usual Restoration romp partly because her female characters are invariably smart and charming, not empty-headed and flighty, a fact that directors do well to recognize....