Sexual Perversity in Chicago Deborah: Does it frighten you to say that? Those problems undermined the Wing & Groove Theatre’s attempt at the play in January–a production that launched what amounted to a Mamet minifest this year as theaters from Des Plaines to Pilsen and Wrigleyville to Rogers Park revived a slew of early and midcareer Mamet works (among them Edmond, Glengarry Glen Ross, Speed-the-Plow, and two Oleannas), while Skokie’s Northlight Theatre offered the local premiere of Mamet’s recent The Old Neighborhood....

BOBBY RUSH Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Lately rap and shock-rock acts have been monopolizing the attention of America’s public moralists so expertly that you wouldn’t expect a blues artist to draw their fire, but this year Kentucky officials cut singer and harpist Bobby Rush from the lineup of the state’s Hot August Blues Festival. They were apparently afraid his stage act would be too risque for families with children; the ACLU is looking into the matter....

Bill Talsma started hoarding the black and brown tangles of audiotape he found strewn on sidewalks and snagged in shrubs, but he wasn’t sure what to do with them. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This urban tinsel is so ubiquitous that it’s practically invisible. Once he began wondering about it, Talsma started seeing it everywhere. In two and half years he collected about a thousand ribbons of varying lengths and conditions....

NOVEMBER Some seven million migratory birds lay over in Chicago on their way south each year, and one of their favorite stopping points is the Lincoln Park Bird Sanctuary. Today’s free Vote for the Planet festival will examine the links between Chicago and the South American rain forest and the environment’s relation to science, art, politics, and spirituality. There will also be food, body work, and booths representing groups such as the Nature Conservancy....

Sex-o-Rama 2: Classic Adult Film Music By Joshua Green Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » As porn’s gone aboveground, so has the distinctive music associated with it–that grinding, vaguely psychedelic mix of plucked bass lines, wah-wah guitar, and cheesy Moog. Four years ago Motel Records scored an underground hit with Vampyros Lesbos: Sexadelic Dance Party, a selection of original music from the “horrotica” films of German director Jess Franco, including Mrs....

By Tori Marlan Dennis tells this story not to advocate throwing money at clients but to encourage his audiences to see their charges as more than the sum of their problems. In Yvette’s case the cartoon was just the beginning. Kaleidoscope set her up in her own apartment and assigned a social worker and a team of youth workers to help her make the transition. They visited daily. Noticing she was a compulsive cleaner, they helped her enroll in a janitorial training program and later find a job as a housekeeper at a motel....

KATHY TAYLOR Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Since its founding in 1993 by a group of local musical-theater artists, M.A.M. Records has put out five albums, including two anthologies by the Second City Divas, an unofficial collective of leading Chicago singer-actresses. Among the “divas” is Kathy Taylor, the talented and elegant mezzo noted for her performances in such local productions as Next Theatre’s Goblin Market and Drury Lane Oakbrook’s Follies as well as touring companies of Les Miserables and The Phantom of the Opera....

Growing up in Shelter Bay, Michigan, a tiny village of 35 people on the Upper Peninsula, gave Marlon Magas nightmares. “I was terrified of ghosts as a child,” he says. “I thought that they were all around me. There was a trail deep in the woods, a few miles from my house, where there were three graves with three small wooden markers: the Trudell sisters.” His elementary school, Deerton, was in the middle of some woods near a swamp, where Magas played during recess....

A mirthful tone creeps into Stuart Klawans’s voice at the mere mention of Elaine May’s widely panned 1987 movie, Ishtar. “Yes, that qualifies as a ‘folly,’” he says, “probably the last from the U.S. for some time.” Klawans, film critic for the Nation, has just written a history of this peculiar genre, Film Follies: The Cinema Out of Order. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Klawans’s notion of “film follies” originated four years ago as he was writing a proposal to the Museum of Modern Art for a series that he says would “parade those really big, big movies on MOMA’s big screen....

Roasted Peanuts Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Local producer Michael Leavitt faces an uphill battle to turn America’s favorite loser into a winner on Broadway. Last November the Fox Theatricals producer premiered a revival of You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown at the North Shore Center for the Performing Arts in Skokie, where it won mostly positive reviews. The show then embarked on a brief tour that would eventually take it to the Ambassador Theatre in New York, but after it sustained a huge financial loss in Detroit, coproducer Columbia Artists Management, Inc....

Hey, Faggot: Hey, WTCACOIW: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Since there’s not much difference between big kitties and little kitties–tigers are basically enormous house cats–I thought a zookeeper could offer a stimulating perspective on cats in heat. Perhaps a death-defying perspective: house cats in heat will take on pencils, furniture, humans, anything at all. My family’s cat humped my father’s Chevy Nova–god alone knows what a tiger in heat might do to an unsuspecting zookeeper....

Hey, Faggot: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Whether porn inspired his desires or merely allowed him to indulge them in his precoital days is really unknowable; maybe shaved pussy and bad-girl sluts were his turn-ons before he saw his first video. It happens, you know: porn caters to hetero male turn-ons more often than it creates them. You may not share his turn-ons, but when you’re indulging them together, I’ll bet you his mind is on YOU and what YOU’RE doing and not on old videos stacked up on his VCR....

WILL OLDHAM 7/16, LOUNGE AX I’ve never understood the personality cult surrounding this New-York-by-way-of-Chicago-by-way-of-Louisville singer-songwriter. On over a dozen records (most of them credited to Palace or variations thereof) he’s created plenty of eerie 3 AM moments whose sparse, bluesy neo-Appalachianisms translate just fine to the angst of the urban urbane. But just because he’s got an extended family of musicians, producers, and visual artists doesn’t make him a hillbilly, and just because he’s poetically inarticulate when fresh-faced fanzine kids grill him on the Meaning of Everything doesn’t make him a prophet....

The In Inn Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Dating back to 1894, the Bismarck was quintessential Chicago, catercorner from City Hall and a favorite hangout of local politicos. But few people familiar with the increasingly dowdy Bismarck will recognize it as the Allegro. At the direction of California designer Cheryl Rowley, guest rooms have been repainted an eye-opening grapefruit pink; suites are a slightly softer yellow flecked with star bursts....

VASEN/JPP Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » If the idea of folkloric music makes you think of crusty sounds, peasant costumes, and line dancing, the recent Nordic folk movement might take you by surprise. Drawing on traditions from across Scandinavia, it’s fueled primarily by younger players eagerly incorporating rock and pop; in other “world music” contexts this might seem forced, but in the best of the new Nordic music the extraneous materials are subsumed, digested, and entirely reanimated....

By Ben Joravsky There’s a genre of education narratives that features a lone crusader who after minor setbacks achieves what everyone said was impossible: transforming a classroom of knuckleheads into high achievers. Michie’s book breaks this mold. In the tales he tells he fails almost as often as he succeeds. But there are lessons to be learned in either instance. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » From day to day he never knew what to expect....

BILLY JOE SHAVER Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Most of the major figures of the 70s outlaw movement–including Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson, and David Allan Coe–have continued to make listenable records into the 90s, but Billy Joe Shaver might be the only one who’s done his best work this decade. Though he’s still best known for writing most of the tunes on Jennings’s 1973 classic Honky Tonk Heroes, his 90s albums for Zoo and Justice have captured him as a giant presence in his own right, overshadowing alt-country pretenders with the real, uncut shit....

BLACK HEART PROCESSION Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » On 2, the second album by San Diego’s Black Heart Procession, Pall A. Jenkins and Tobias Nathaniel further distance themselves from the dull drone rock of their better-known band, Three Mile Pilot. The new record, their first for Touch and Go, develops a casual but highly personal take on Americana: its superficially familiar acoustic guitars, piano, organ, spare percussion (courtesy of former Clikitat Ikatowi drummer Mario Rubalcaba), and plaintive, almost painfully earnest singing combine in beautifully gothic dirges that place them in a league with Will Oldham and Tom Waits....

Captured at www.heartfire.com/ firewalk/pages/experience.html A typical firewalk might have anywhere from ten to 50 participants. Tony Robbins, author of Unlimited Power, has had as many as 1200 participants at one of his firewalks. Most firewalks take place in the evening and are divided into two sections–the workshop and the walk. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Within a few moments the fire is leaping 15 feet into the sky....

Surgery and other medical procedures used to be a private matter. A few years ago at a party, a dear friend who’s a local attorney pulled me into a quiet room. There were deep scars behind her ears and bruising around one eye–the only remnants of her face-lift. “Don’t tell anybody,” she whispered. Another friend, a prominent journalist, once lured me into her bedroom and proudly showed me her breast job....