By Michael Miner The curtain went up last Thursday on a strangely deferential Robert Feder column in the Sun-Times. Without so much as raising an eyebrow, Feder allowed Dahl to explain away behavior that a more judgmental writer would have pilloried. Feder told enough of the story that bright readers could figure out the rest. Dahl had taped and aired two people’s private conversation; then, arguably motivated by what he heard on that tape, he got WCKG to take their jobs....

By Cara Jepsen He was placed in foster care and then in a succession of group homes after the police found him sleeping in a hallway in 1986. “I wouldn’t stay because those places suck,” he says. “On the streets, I had total freedom. Nobody told me when I had to be in.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » He also started to use heroin, as did most of his friends....

BILL CODAY Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » R & B veteran Bill Coday has reemerged, seemingly out of nowhere and with all of his gifts intact, to become one of the most exciting players on the contemporary blues scene. Coday’s recording career dates back to 1969, when Denise LaSalle discovered him in a Chicago nightclub and brought him to her record company, Crajon Productions....

EITHER/ORCHESTRA Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » For 15 years Boston’s Either/Orchestra–the little big band led by reedist and arranger Russ Gershon–has maintained a repertoire as clever as its name, ranging from Duke Ellington to Charles Mingus to Frank Zappa to Fiona Apple and including a slew of originals that simultaneously celebrate and satirize most of the music in the known universe. Until the mid-90s, the band also copped an artistic attitude perfect for the Ironic Age, and it retained a relatively steady lineup built around idiosyncratic soloists who could invest even the ensemble playing with mischievous humor....

Fan First, Mogul Second Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Greynolds’s brief career as a rocker was over, but something else grew out of that adventure: over the next year he released three seven-inch singles by acts he’d befriended on tour, including Pajo, San Francisco’s Dura Delinquent, and Calexico, who went on to sign with the Touch and Go imprint Quarterstick. Greynolds named his label All City, and its catalog has since grown to include 11 singles, two EPs, and, most recently, a handful of full-lengths....

Ice cream and Hot Fudge, at Voltaire. Much as been scribbled about the differences between Britain and the United States, two nations divided, as G.B. Shaw once said, by a common language. But few have painted such a clear-eyed portrait of the darker sides of our respective national psyches as British playwright Caryl Churchill in her seriocomic Ice Cream. In scene after scene she punctures the idealized views Americans have of the British and vice versa....

In Their Nature to Nuture Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “As a theater town, Chicago has opened up and become more enlightened about new plays,” says Tutterow. Yet even he admits that few newcomers can make a decent living writing for the stage alone; theater companies beset by deficits and declining attendance can seldom afford to stage an untested work, so even the most talented authors must be creative in forging a career....

The names of Denise, her boyfriend, and her children have been changed. Denise had believed for some time that she was a success, but she’d been waiting for the day when the system, which so often seemed impenetrable and hostile, would acknowledge it. Denise’s life now bore no resemblance to the one she’d led back in 1990, when she worked as a prostitute and needed crack to get through the day....

By Jack Clark As he was being led to a holding cell, the beginning of a trip back to Rikers Island, Smith called out to his mother sitting in the spectators’ section, “Mom, I can’t do it.” His mother mouthed back, “It’ll be all right.” But for Derrick Smith nothing would ever be right again. He broke free from his guards, jumped on a radiator, and dove out an open window....

RZA N***a Please Inspectah Deck (Def Jam) Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Or are they? That’s the true mystery of Shaolin. Paradoxically, the mass media infestation the Wu warriors gloat over points to their underground cultishness as the reason they matter. This team of ace paranoids could write a book on how to achieve popularity by writing lyrics as easy to read as Gravity’s Rainbow....

ROBERT FORSTER & GRANT McLENNAN Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In 1977, when Robert Forster and Grant McLennan founded the Go-Betweens, they weren’t merely looking to satisfy their artistic aspirations: they wanted a ticket out of town. They were a couple of teenage misfits in Brisbane, Australia, whose enthusiasm for foreign films and New York punk put them painfully at odds with the city’s culture of macho conformity and government corruption....

THE MILLION BELLS OF OCEAN, American Theater Company. Human beings and sentient household objects happily coexist in Edward Mast’s off-kilter, hypertheatrical world. In fact that’s probably the most realistic aspect of The Million Bells of Ocean, which introduces a barrage of absurdities: street gangs conversing in ancient Aztec tongues, earwigs delivering edicts from the heavens. Encouraging the audience to get caught up in a series of theatrical mind games, Mast constantly sets up expectations, then gleefully topples them....

THOMAS HAMPSON Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Like tenor Jerry Hadley and soprano Dawn Upshaw, baritone Thomas Hampson is firmly rooted in the world of opera but frequently ventures into the more rarefied confines of the art song and the pop realm of musical theater. Just a shade over 40, this Indiana native won first place in the Metropolitan Opera’s annual competition in the early 80s, then left for Europe and landed at the Zurich Opera, where he became a protege of conductor Nikolaus Harnoncourt....

Two-Bar Blues Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This understandably caused a stir among some musicians. “This is how we make a living and we should be able to play anywhere we want,” says guitarist and singer Michael Coleman, who hasn’t played Kingston Mines in 15 years and is now a regular at Rooster Blues. “We don’t tell them who to sell alcohol to or who to let into the club....

By Ben Joravsky Bottomless Closet was founded in 1989 by Laurel Baer, a radio marketing executive. “Laurel was listening to a radio show while driving to work and she heard some women on public aid talk about their transition problems,” says Kathy Miller, Bottomless Closet’s former executive director. “One woman said, ‘I have skills, I’m motivated, I worked before, but I don’t have the budget to buy an interview suit.’ Laurel thought, ‘I could take ten things out of my closet and outfit this woman....

John Hodgman, 12/18/00, 01:48 AM -0600, URGENT! IF YOU CARE ABOUT DEMOCRACY AND ANI DIFRANCO, READ NOW! Dear Friends, Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Meanwhile thousands if not MILLIONS of Florida voters were effectively disenfranchised by rampant voting irregularities and, in some cases, the use of ether. 400,000 ballots in one county alone were summarily discarded for being double punched, half punched, spindled, or slightly chewed....

By Kari Lydersen Charlie Williams has been at the car wash since 1963, when he came to Chicago “following a lady.” He says, “It’s the only job I’ve had since I left the farm,” which was in Greenwood, Mississippi. “Earl was just a kid when I started working here. And there are customers who have been coming here as long as I’ve been here.” Best of Chicago voting is live now....

By Ben Joravsky Over the years those doctors became part of the Anchor Medical Group, an HMO that was eventually bought by Rush Prudential. Pardys didn’t keep track of the ins and outs of health care or of the large corporations that continually swallowed smaller practices. But then, she was happy with her doctors. “They cared about us, they knew us,” she says. “I can remember when my doctor saw some curious symptoms and said, ‘Didn’t you tell me your brother was a diabetic?...

BURTON GREENE Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In the late 50s and 60s, Cecil Taylor stood like Chopzilla in the path of young new-music pianists: you could go around him, or maybe sneak between his footfalls, but no way could you ignore him. What Burton Greene chose to do was simply accept and work within Taylor’s sphere of influence. Greene began studying classical piano at Chicago’s Fine Arts Academy in 1944, at the age of 7, and turned to jazz in his late teens; by 1963 he had moved to New York, where he and bassist Alan Silva founded the Free Form Improvisation Ensemble....

Last year the Chicago Blues Festival pulled off a major coup by reuniting Ray Charles with his star-studded horn section of the 1950s, and during the first decade of the annual free event, now in its 16th year, there were many comparable once-in-a-lifetime evenings. But whether due to budget constraints or City Hall’s (probably correct) supposition that a few hundred thousand people will pack Grant Park no matter who’s playing, moments of greatness have been few and far between in recent years....