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Dale knows the route by heart–Illinois 33, angling across farmland to Mattoon, where I-57 stretches north to Chicago. “I can drive it with my eyes closed,” he tells his wife, Cassie. The caterpillars eat the cabbage leaves. Cassie intends to dust the plants this morning while the wind is calm. Then she’ll stake the pole beans–the Kentucky Wonders–and till up the patch where the last lettuce has gone to seed, work the soil until it’s loose and fine, and then set out some more tomato plants....

It’s quite a coup for Northwestern University’s theater department to have secured a world premiere by Joyce Carol Oates: this student production is a curiosity that borders on an event. It’s also a literary love letter from one American writer to another. In The Passion of Henry David Thoreau Oates pays complex homage to the naturalist of Walden Pond; quoting liberally from Thoreau and other transcendentalists, she combines biography with interior monologues, alternating pivotal scenes from Thoreau’s short life with the legacy of his writing....

By Grant Pick A generation has passed since the hospice movement surfaced in the United States and Elisabeth Kubler-Ross did her pioneering work on the psychic process of dying. Perhaps our society is finally coming to terms with death. As the baby boomers age, discussion has increased–about the needless prolonging of life through technology, doctors’ improved ability to relieve pain, and the dignified deaths of public figures such as Jacqueline Onassis and Joseph Cardinal Bernardin....

By Michael Miner Four days later another prominent Chicagoan who’d brought a temple down around him took center stage at the groundbreaking for the new one. E. Ratcliffe Anderson Jr., CEO of the American Medical Association, spoke at a press conference called by the AMA to announce a historic reorganization. I missed the 10 AM press conference because the Fed-Exed letter announcing it didn’t get to us until 10:30. As the AMA building is across the street from the Reader, I’m not sure such a pricey courier was required....

By Michael Miner The deck officers of this armada speak a Dilbertian tongue. “In most companies, a Berlin Wall separates the different media; at the Tribune, all media units report to David L. Underhill, vice president for video and audio publishing,” Auletta observes. “‘The goal of our unit,’ says Underhill… ‘is to be a synergy group. I love the word.’” Perhaps it’s time to replace Lincoln’s axiom guarding the front door with a cheery “We gather content to gather content....

Del Close was an alcoholic who hated booze. Booze had been wrecking his career. In 1982 he asked me to interview him because he wanted to talk publicly about checking into a hospital in Fort Worth to stop drinking. The interview was for Chicago Theatre Monthly, a magazine I put out then, but it folded before we could run the story. The American Medical Association had made a recent statement on alcohol as a public health menace....

John Sabraw Craig McDaniel: More War Stories John Sabraw at Thomas McCormick and Jefferson Little at Lyons Wier both address the alienation between human beings and objects by depicting the lush surfaces of one or a few simple things (a gear is about as high-tech as we get from Sabraw) in isolated spaces that focus attention on singular objects–a welcome contrast to our culture’s image glut. Building up their surfaces with painstaking and exquisite care, each gives bright pieces of cloth or kitschy toys an almost spiritual presence....

They’ll be dressing goats in jockey shorts and riding wild steers in drag at the Illinois Gay Rodeo Association’s Windy City Rodeo 2000. The serious events include barrel racing, bareback bronc riding, bull riding, and calf roping on foot. Cowboys and cowgirls from across the country will compete in 13 events each day, with proceeds going to four Chicago-area charities and winners jockeying for cash prizes, awards, and a place at an international competition to be held this fall in Albuquerque....

It’s fitting that the most existential of plays should function as a kind of test, and fortunate that the first Michael Almereyda picture to get full mainstream exposure should also turn out to be his best to date. But what’s being tested isn’t either Shakespeare or Almereyda but the present moment: that is, the film asks how and how much we’re capable of living in the world Shakespeare wrote about. Wittily and tragically updating the play’s action to corporate America in general and New York in particular, Almereyda is no Orson Welles, but he begins to seem like one when he’s castigated for not doing his Shakespeare like Kenneth Branagh; the censure recalls all the times square and professional Laurence Olivier was used as a reproach to Welles’s hip “amateurism....

Liz Phair “Marriage and motherhood don’t seem to have mellowed singer-songwriter/cult heroine Liz Phair,” the Boston Globe’s review of her new Whitechocolatespaceegg begins. “Now she’s a new mom, a mellow mom,” argues the Tennessean. “Motherhood hasn’t mellowed rock’s bad girl,” Newsweek claims, and Denver’s Rocky Mountain News chimes in, “Motherhood hasn’t mellowed the singer’s racy spirit.” Ah, but the on-line magazine Salon disagrees: “Yes, motherhood has mellowed Liz Phair.” Best of Chicago voting is live now....

KAHIL EL’ZABAR & THE NEW ETHNIC HERITAGE ENSEMBLE Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Ethnics are dead; long live the Ethnics, who tonight grow from a trio to a quartet. Of all the various musical enterprises undertaken by percussionist-producer-activist Kahil El’Zabar, the Ethnic Heritage Ensemble is not only the longest-lived but also the most unusual: since the early 80s the EHE has featured drums and two horns, turning the expected balance for postfreedom trios–which would normally feature two rhythm instruments and one melody player–exactly on its head....

Mise-en-Scenesters “He kept saying how close he was to getting the financing,” says Rosen. “But little by little our film fantasy would give way to patches of lucidity. This guy would not call us back, or when he did he would talk about how difficult it was to hammer out the details of the tax situation or the liability issue.” Rosen and Pritikin, who were living in San Francisco, decided to investigate the situation on their own....

Lead Stories Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » At the Vatican’s request, Brazil’s leading religious artist, Claudio Pastro, is giving the image of Jesus Christ a makeover for the third millennium. According to an October report from Knight-Ridder, the new look will be one of serenity and victory, rather than suffering, and Jesus will have traces of Asian, black, and Indian features. The Litigious Society...

Europe The children’s fluency in German varied, but there was one phrase almost all of them seemed to have mastered: Hilfe! Hilfe! Ich bin Auslander (“Help! Help! I am a foreigner”). They yelled it at each other as they played cops and robbers; one would pretend to shoot another, who would raise his or her hands and plead for compassion on the basis of refugee status. They thought it was funny, giggling as they said it, but the truth beneath their words was disturbing and profound: though they’d only just arrived and many were no more than seven, they already understood their status as outsiders and how dangerous that might be....

Sex Change Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It’s hard to imagine the nubile Victoria Abril as a young man, but she’s fairly believable playing an androgynous teenager who longs to be a woman; as both Jose Maria, a shy, repressed country boy, and Maria Jose, a seductive nightclub entertainer in Barcelona, she’s poignant, dignified, and subtly bisexual. Basing his 1976 feature on a true story, Spanish director Vicente Aranda steers clear of tawdry melodrama and pat psychology; he matter-of-factly charts Jose’s gradual transformation as a stubborn journey toward self-fulfillment encouraged by those who understand him....

Shoot Me, I’m Only the Piano Player The poor thing appears only once a year or so, playing piano beside Honey, uttering an occasional lyric like she’s reading the list of ingredients on a jar of peanut butter. Musically, she gravitates toward Hall & Oates, Peaches and Herb. She flatters herself when she describes her looks as a cross between Anjelica Huston and Mr. Ed. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Even as a National Basketball Association coach, Larry Bird still looks the part of a country boy. When his Indiana Pacers came to town for a first-place showdown with the Bulls last month, Bird appeared for his pregame media session dressed in shiny black shoes, dark pants, and a light-blue shirt with just the top button undone. With his hands in his pants pockets and with that familiar sparse blond mustache, he seemed every bit the young church deacon who has just finished the dishes from the men’s fellowship breakfast and is now about to clip on his tie, throw on his suit jacket, and go upstairs to act as an usher....

Music listings are compiled by LAURA KOPEN and RENALDO MIGALDI (classical, fairs and festivals) from information available Tuesday. We advise calling ahead for confirmation. Please send listings information, in-cluding a phone number for use by the public, to Reader Music Listings, 11 E. Illinois, Chicago 60611, or send a fax to 312-828-9926, or send E-mail to musiclistings@chicagoreader.com. BLINK-182, BAD RELIGION, FENIX, TX Saturday, 7:30 PM, New World Music Theatre, I-80 and Harlem, Tinley Park....

By Elana Seifert But the good news for preservationists seemed like a bad omen for many area stores. “When the city stepped in to save Goldblatt’s, some people thought that was the end of the controversy, but we knew it was just the beginning,” says Mary Ritchie, executive director of the Chicago Avenue Business Association, an organization representing 110 member retailers on Chicago Avenue between Ogden and Western. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Friday 8/27 – Thursday 9/2 “We attack with laughter and reason, in song and in mime, every form of oppression and injustice,” said Italian playwright Dario Fo when he accepted the Nobel Prize for literature in 1997. He was speaking of his collaboration with his wife, Franca Rame, and their use of satire. The pair wrote the five sexually charged monologues that make up Orgasmo Adulto Escapes From the Zoo. Italian actress Francesca Fanti stars in the one-woman show....