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Born in Chicago in 1912, Katherine Dunham cobbled together a remarkable career. She made her professional debut in 1933 in Ruth Page’s ballet La Guiablesse while studying anthropology at the University of Chicago, then was awarded a fellowship by the Rosenwald Foundation and psychoanalyst Erich Fromm to study dance in Martinique, Jamaica, Trinidad, and Haiti. The Federal Theater Project hired her in the late 30s–under its auspices she choreographed L’Ag’Ya, a fighting dance from Martinique that the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater added to its repertoire in 1987–and when that gig ended she got herself a job at the old Sherman Hotel, where she and her company appeared as part of Duke Ellington’s floor show....

LAUGHTER ON THE 23RD FLOOR, Open Eye Productions, at Angel Island. The actors in Malcolm Haymes’s go-for-broke revival may lack the big resumes that came with the 1994 Briar Street local debut of this play, but they do comic justice to Neil Simon’s loving look at the golden age of television. Sounding a lot like skits from the original Your Show of Shows, Simon’s autobiographical work doles out guffaws as TV gag writers of the 50s (surrogates for Larry Gelbart, Selma Diamond, Imogene Coca, Mel Brooks, Mel Tolkin, Carl Reiner, and Simon himself) clash and kvetch....

Cristina Iglesias at Gallery 312, through December 17 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It is this paradox, created by a fusion of opposites–organic lyricism and man-made materials, invitation and rebuff–that’s the crux of Iglesias’s art. A Basque who lives near Madrid, she’s acquired an international reputation at 41; the present exhibit is an intelligently edited version of a show organized by and first presented at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City....

OVERLAND, New Tuners Theatre, at the Theatre Building. Not itself pioneering, this vibrant musical pays rich tribute to yesterday’s pioneers. In a masterful no-frills staging by Warner Crocker for New Tuners’ “Stage One” series, Overland sweepingly chronicles the epic if familiar trek of American homesteaders. Heading for Oregon in 1844, this wagon train encounters both predictable and surprising obstacles: disease, insanity, disunity, wolves, misogyny, homesickness, lost horses, and swollen rivers. Ken Stone’s generous book and wise lyrics deliver believable crises and colorful characters–perhaps even too much of both....

ROBBIE HUNSINGER QUARTET Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Call it the miseducation of Robbie Hunsinger: a classically trained double-reed player, proficient on the oboe and several of its cousins, takes a left turn from Music of the Baroque and sinks waist deep in Chicago’s fertile avant-garde–performing with Ken Vandermark, Georg GrŠwe, and legendary visitors like Evan Parker and Joseph Jarman. Hunsinger’s training, combined with her love for free improv, places her comfortably in the neutral territory between jazz and classical, most notably with the double-reed trio Corvus, which can sound like a flock of its namesake....

We realize you’re gay and everything, Dan, but whatever happened to pussy? You used to write about women’s genitals once in a while, and then you were my hero. I still have the column you wrote about the importance of the clit, and I give it to every new boyfriend. But I don’t think you’ve written one word about pussy in, like, two whole years! Your column is all one cock, two cock, big cock, blue cock....

I’m 21 and my girlfriend is 22, and we’re having a baby. We are just getting out of college and don’t have jobs. She wants to give the baby up for adoption or get married and raise the baby together. If I had never gotten her pregnant I think I would have married her eventually, but I’m not ready. I have always wanted to be a father, and the thought of giving my son up for adoption and never seeing him again when there is such love between my girlfriend and me seems insane....

Dan McGrath says there’s no conspiracy. But where’s his evidence? Where’s the proof that a tight little cluster of Tribune Company overlords, whose chain of command descends to the Cubs clubhouse and the Tribune sports department, isn’t jerking the hapless satraps at the bottom? Satraps like manager Don Baylor and sports editor Dan McGrath. Too wrought up to let the matter go, Mariotti was back at it the next day, accusing “Cubs management” of “using sinister methods to undermine Sosa’s reputation” to lay the groundwork for dealing him....

GAZA STRIPPERS 3/6, LOUNGE AX I’m always enamored of a good mystery, and no one can tell me shit about this band except that it’s the new project of former Didjits singer and guitarist Rick Sims. I do know that next week the Gaza Strippers will take whatever (probably raucous) thing it is that they do down to South by Southwest to try it out on all the schmoozeballs in Austin, so tonight might be a good night to take a chance on an unknown band with a hell of a great name....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » DuVALLS 2/20, METRO “There ain’t no joy like a honky-tonk uptown,” sing Hinsdale’s DuValls, pompadoured and string-tied keepers of the rockabilly flame, on their debut, Introducing…the DuValls (Sophisti-Cat). Actually this Illinois Entertainer showcase at Metro is stretching the definition of “honky-tonk,” and there’s not a single note on this album you haven’t heard before, from Buddy Holly’s jerky ooh-a-hoos to the ring of Eddie Cochran’s hollow-body guitar–but then you don’t come to this stuff looking for originality....

Young Playwrights Festival Though festival coordinator Rolanda Brigham said enthusiastically in her opening-night speech that “everybody’s a winner,” only three plays have been awarded the privilege of a three-week run in the dead of winter, and they seem to have been chosen as much for their messages as for their literary merit. And Pegasus’s frequently perfunctory or bloated productions fail to tighten up the authors’ inchoate glibness or employ appropriate actors....

Local improviser and former chef Frank Janisch has two great passions: cooking and comedy. As a frequent guest on the Food Network’s Ready…Set…Cook! he’s been able to combine these interests to great effect, dazzling audiences with his irreverent blend of off-the-cuff humor and kitchen wizardry. His shtick also translates well to live performance; one night each month since the beginning of summer he and a cast of dozens have been transforming the Annoyance Theatre into the “Dreary Lane Dinner Playhouse....

By Michael Miner What, then, of the word with which it was confused? Can it ever be put up with? A couple of weeks ago the Midwest Bookhunters–80-some dealers of rare old books–held their spring fair at Navy Pier. That isn’t where they’d wanted to be. A year earlier they’d gathered at the new Gentile Center of Loyola University. The daylong fair was a success, and the Bookhunters hoped to return....

By Ben Joravsky In 1961 he moved to New York City, where he worked his way up to a top marketing job at Revlon. He returned to Chicago in the 1970s and eventually found himself working under commissioner Leonora Cartwright in the city’s Department of Human Services. In the political reshuffling that followed Harold Washington’s 1983 election, Cartwright resigned and Pinkney was let go. He figured the time had come to stop the nine-to-five nonsense and go to sea....

Dear Ms. True, Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Imagine my surprise when I discovered, and this only by telephoning Mr. Joravsky to clarify a couple of points on the day of his deadline, that this central thrust of the story, one we had agreed on from the start, was entirely absent from it! I was able to insist that he reinsert the issue in a single paragraph, but this resulted in a somewhat schizophrenic aspect to the story, with no one else but me in the story addressing the issue and me identified in the story’s subheading as opposed to a loophole that would allow the bar to open....

BLACK STAR Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Black Star–New York rappers Mos Def and Talib Kweli–arrived last year as hip-hop saviors, embracing old-school virtues in a rigorous critique of commercial hip-hop’s artistic stasis. Their own rhymes feature a noticeable absence of the misogyny, violence, and greed at the heart of the genre’s woes, and on “Children’s Story,” from last year’s Mos Def & Talib Kweli Are Black Star, Mos Def offers a parable for Puffy, asserting in no uncertain terms that swiping beats and hooks wholesale from stars kills the culture: “The kid got wild, startin’ actin’ erratic / He said, ‘Yo, that presidential, I got to have it…....

Feigen Flees Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Owner Richard Feigen was a pioneer art dealer in Chicago; he opened his first gallery here in 1957, just as the city was developing a homegrown community of young collectors interested in contemporary art. Feigen started with a specialty in surrealist and German expressionist art, but early on he took an interest in the careers of Chicagoans, exhibiting local artists like Edith Altman and Seymour Rosofsky alongside such international figures as Jean Dubuffet and the Chilean painter Matta....

KURT ELLING Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Encores can trip up even the best musicians: following your own act promises few rewards and lots of pitfalls. But Kurt Elling, the dynamic young singer who holds an important key to the future of vocal jazz, has nothing to worry about. In every aspect, his latest Blue Note album The Messenger–for which this writer supplied the liner notes–represents a maturation over his 1995 debut....

Hey, Faggot: My options are threefold: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Compromise and have an exclusive three-way relationship. But the only way this would work out is if I change my feelings about monogamy, which I don’t think I can do. Hey, L: I am a 17-year-old senior in high school. I thought I met the girl of my dreams. She has a great sense of humor, and we share lots of laughs....

Rose Divita By Fred Camper Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The shifting function of Divita’s one-word labels is only one of several contradictions in her work. Her intense realism often collides rather oddly with the labels. While the word “Alas” for an image of a lonely prairie road suggests the landscape is a metaphor for emotion, the field’s physicality seems to argue against reducing it to a symbol....