“We have two kinds of yo-yos–with and without brains,” Bob Marsh explains to a customer at Toyscape, the cluttered shop he runs in New Town. Marsh is the kind with brains: though he wears a velvet jester’s cap, he’s a former child psychologist and art therapist. His partner Sandra Yolles works the cash register; beside her sits a white porcelain replica of a phrenologist’s head with its map of human character zones....

Chicago theater is as racially and culturally varied as the city itself, yet to actor-director Stephan Turner–and many others–it often seems that off-Loop theater is still fragmented in terms of the work companies present and the audiences they target. “We live together, we work together, and then when we get ready to do theater we all go into our separate microcosms,” says Turner, artistic director of the Lakeview-based Stage Actors Ensemble of Chicago....

The programs are in Polish, the title cards in English. Fortunately, mime speaks all languages, and humor is likewise universal. Polish mime Ireneusz Krosny draws more on the conventions of clowning than of abstract Marcel Marceau-style whiteface mime, and his premises are rather generic–a conductor rehearses his orchestra, a dog owner adapts to his pet, a woman removes her finery at evening’s end. What renders these vignettes fresh and funny are Krosny’s Red Skelton-like facial expressions and an elegant inventiveness that allows him to embellish yet keep the action free of extraneous material–his entire 14-scene, three-encore show runs under an hour....

By Cheryl Ross The fight lasted nearly 17 years. Two years into it, Beatrice Lumpkin recognized that her husband and his cause were becoming an epic chapter of American labor history. Beatrice, a history major back in the 1930s, decided to keep track of the twists and turns. She began recording interviews with workers, collecting newspaper articles, taking notes. She kept up her notebook through 1996–through marches, court showdowns, broken marriages, suicides, early deaths, and deep despair, as the steelworkers slowly got their hands on some $19 million that was due them....

NIGHTMARES ON WAX Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Over the course of eight years and three albums, George Evelyn–aka Nightmares on Wax–has grown from DIY fanboy to sampladelic soul auteur. As interesting and influential as his first album, A Word of Science: The 1st and Final Chapter (Warp), was for its novel fusion of hot-tub funk samples and adeptly programmed breakbeats, it sounds downright quaint next to his new Carboot Soul (Matador)....

I worked in a fast-food fish place at Navy Pier when I was in college. There was this girl who also worked there named Briny, spelled like the briny deep on her name tag but pronounced Breeny, like beany with an R. I still thought of her as Briny like the briny deep, though. She wore tortoiseshell glasses so thick they made her eyes look like the fish eyes that stare up in schools from the smelly buckets and cleaning tables along the pier....

QUADRUPED, Neo-Futurarium. Solo performance is the cash calf of the new, about-to-be-post-NEA theater world. Artist-generated and easy to transport, it not only creates performance opportunities where there were none, but serves as a proving ground for writer-actors cutting their teeth on personal material. Too frequently, though, the performers’ instincts to protect their own wounds obscure the stories that could pierce the audience’s own callused consciousness; what comes out instead is guarded, overmanipulated, or dependent on cliches for any resonance at all....

SAKINA’S RESTAURANT Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Thanks to The Simpsons and a thousand stand-up comics, most Americans assume that Indian immigrants are likable, sexless people who drive cabs or own convenience stores and speak a very precise English in which every sentence is punctuated by the word “sir.” Bombay-born, New York-based actor Aasif Mandvi is out to smash those stereotypes. In his one-man show he plays six very different South Asians, not one of whom is a cabdriver, sir....

FINAL EXIT FRIDAY 6/25, NO EXIT Even as faux boho becomes entrenched in the mainstream, the real thing is passing into history. The Rogers Park coffeehouse institution No Exit has seen a lot of geniuses, eccentrics, and just regular folks seeking refuge from the button-down hordes come and go in its 41 years. It’s been host to chess games, political brawls, poetry readings, and musical performances and has acquired quite a collection of memorabilia....

By Mario Kladis A young couple walks by. The girl pokes her boyfriend in the ribs and points at Robbie; the boy sees the poop and starts to slow down. When he notices the three of us staring at him, he puts his arm around her, and they walk away. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Slouching?” Margot suggests. “The poop came first,” says Margot, “because, well, the poop is funny....

Dancing on the Anatomical Planet of Perceptual Fusion Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Forget the title: it’s merely an amalgam of the names of the four different troupes that teamed up for this concert. The piece that promises to be the most challenging and interesting is the Anatomical Theatre’s 2081, based on Kurt Vonnegut’s story “Harrison Bergeron,” about a futuristic society’s efforts to level everyone’s abilities....

Zenaida Lopez, one of the “local heroes” in a photo exhibit at Artemisia Gallery, was born in Puerto Rico. Her family moved to Humboldt Park when she was eight, and she’s been there virtually ever since. Seven years ago she opened Boriken Bakery on West Division Street, and it has become a gathering place for the Puerto Rican community, particularly its activists. Lopez–whose political-activist brother Oscar Lopez Rivera is still in prison, having refused President Clinton’s clemency offer–has organized numerous political events herself, including the May 4 demonstration in which about 50 people blocked traffic on Division to protest the U....

Influence Peddlers Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » One of the latest bands to emerge from this culture is Chicago’s own Number One Cup, whose models are indie titans Superchunk and Pavement; on the band’s 1995 debut, Possum Trot Plan, the gem “Divebomb” is mired in a loose stew of lo-fi muck and half-baked songs. All of which makes the new Wrecked by Lions (both albums are on the small Rhode Island label Flydaddy) a rather dramatic turnaround....

JEAN SMITH Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The last thing I expected from Jean Smith was a mostly instrumental solo album: in Mecca Normal, her punk rock duo with guitarist David Lester, her words–bluntly political or private and allusive–are integral to her singing. But her voice has always served as an instrument too, not just as a way to deliver lyrics; one of the things that makes Mecca Normal such a sensational live band is the way she and Lester fluidly trade the roles of rhythm and lead....

The Horn Kerouac may have coined the term “beat generation,” but John Clellon Holmes was its first novelist, chronicling the frantic lives of way-cool hipsters in 1952 in Go and introducing the world to the beats in a famous 1952 article in the New York Times Magazine. His more talented contemporaries may have gone on to greater success, and certainly Holmes’s death, in 1988, was not accorded anywhere near the press given to the recent demises of Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs....

PETER SCHREIER Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » German singers tend to go about their business more efficiently, consistently, and thoughtfully than their southern European counterparts. As a result their art, as exemplified by soprano Elisabeth Schwarzkopf and baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, is more subtle in its emotional shading, but it’s also visibly less demonstrative–which is probably why Germany and other Nordic countries have yet to produce superstars with the mass appeal of the three tenors....

My husband has a foot fetish. He loves to hold me down and tickle my feet. He even goes so far as to tie me up and tickle my feet for ten minutes at a time without stopping. No matter how much I beg him to stop he continues. When I ask him what it is about tickling me that gets him off, he says he doesn’t know, he just gets off on it....

The Hick, the Spick and the Chick Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » As priests have probably known for centuries, listening to confessional storytelling gets old real fast. But not the way Paul Turner, Antonio Sacre, and Donna Jay Fulks tell stories. Their tag-team approach to autobiographical performance transforms this potentially onanistic art into a community event. Like a group of friends whiling away the evening on a front porch or a trio of jazz musicians jamming after hours, Turner, Sacre, and Fulks take turns, riffing on the stories that came before them and setting the stage for the ones to come after....

Viktor Kossakovsky tracked down everyone living in Saint Petersburg who was born in the area the same day he was, July 19, 1961. His inspired documentary, which combines thumbnail sketches that transcend character study, is as un-self-indulgent as its premise is narcissistic. Cutting back and forth between events in several peoples’ lives that range from the highly privileged to the apparently inconsequential, Kossakovsky maintains a liberating sense of randomness, though the transitions are never jarring or empty....

DAVE ALVIN Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Dave Alvin made his name as the lead guitarist of the Blasters, but since leaving that band in 1986 he’s recorded seven solo albums, documenting a darker, subtler, and more stylistically varied side of his musical personality. Though none of the tunes on his new Public Domain (Hightone) are his own, Alvin claims in the liner notes that these traditional blues and bluegrass numbers, hymns, murder ballads, and workingman’s songs have defined how he’s heard, played, and written music for his entire career–he’s known most of them since he was a teenager, when he and his brother used to search thrift stores and swap meets for old vinyl....