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Morton Salt founder Joy Morton was born in Nebraska in 1855 with a silver-plated spoon in his mouth and a dual family mission: to succeed in business and to plant trees. His father, J. Sterling Morton, was a brash, politically conservative editor and big-business publicist with a Johnny Appleseed complex. He was acting governor of the Nebraska territory and secretary of agriculture (under Grover Cleveland), but J. Sterling is mostly remembered for founding Arbor Day and doing his best to turn the Nebraska prairie into something more like the forests of his boyhood home in Michigan....

CHILDE BYRON, Stone Circle Theatre Ensemble, at Profiles Theatre. If anyone ever puts out an interactive CD-ROM chronicling the life of Lord Byron, it might turn out very much like Romulus Linney’s play. A series of discrete, overanimated scenes show Byron squirming under the thumb of his overbearing mother, impregnating his sister, sodomizing his pregnant wife, and generally flipping 19th-century British morality the bird. Trouble is, escapades don’t add up to a life, let alone drama....

FRANK ABBINANTI Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Instrumental music is by nature resistant to political interpretation. Take Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony, the first famous example of a composer endorsing a revolutionary ideal: without the explicit dedication to Napoleon, the music’s Sturm und Drang would seem about as partisan as a tornado. And even in this more politicized century, the works of Shostakovich and his antiestablishment comrades, meant to express anger, anguish, and hope in political contexts, relied heavily on subtitles and notes to put across the creators’ views....

GENE COLEMAN Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Sometimes you can literally see the exactitude and intellectual passion that drive Gene Coleman’s clarinet playing and composing. His graphic scores, drafted in his precise hand, look almost as good in a frame as they sound in concert–and the hardwood dance floor he just installed at the new HotHouse is pretty impressive too. But as both a player and a writer, Coleman finds ways to temper his innate orderliness....

HENRY BUTLER Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Even by New Orleans standards, pianist Henry Butler is eclectic. In addition to being a classically trained vocalist, he was mentored by such Crescent City legends as reedman Alvin Batiste (who schooled him in the improvisational legacy of Bud Powell and Charlie Parker) and R & B pianist Professor Longhair, and his career has taken him from the touristy gin mills of Bourbon Street to gigs with the likes of Charlie Haden....

Films by Janie Geiser Geiser is still best known for her work in puppetry. (Her ensemble, Janie Geiser & Co., will perform June 1-4 at the School of the Art Institute as part of the Chicago International Festival of Puppet Theater; see the Critic’s Choice in Section Two.) Born in Baton Rouge, she discovered the art world late in high school and in the 70s at the University of Georgia, where she was an art major specializing in painting and metalwork....

David Schein was sitting in a sidewalk cafe on Western Avenue near Belden, sipping a margarita and enjoying a warm July night in 1996, when a young man stepped out from behind a red truck. Schein remembers he was Latino, about 14 or 15 years old, with a shaved head. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The two boys took off and Schein bolted from his seat, running back into the restaurant to call 911, then crossing Western with a posse of other diners to see if they could help....

JIMMY SMITH & PHIL UPCHURCH Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In his very first recordings, in the mid-50s, Jimmy Smith managed to both turn the Hammond B-3 organ into a bona fide jazz instrument and define its sound for the next 15 years. To this day, he continues to emphasize the B-3’s capacity for creating excitement, taking advantage of its electronically controlled attack to create skittering melody lines and using its electronically created sustain to punctuate them with keening cries from the upper register....

Jonathan’s Feather Delivery Service Now 56 and a professional anthropologist, curator, and former professor, he has yet to see the pyramids or the temple of Ramses II. Reyman pursued his passion all the way through grad school at Southern Illinois University. But in 1967, just as he was poised to start his dissertation on Eastern-Mediterranean trade routes, the Six-Day War broke out. “No one was going to put research money in the Middle East,” he explains....

By Kari Lydersen Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Over the years the PhD-to-be has worked as a stand-up comedian, a political organizer (a poster he shows me for a fund-raiser he put together in Vancouver is basically a picture of him sitting naked on the toilet with waist-length hair covering his torso), a bartender, a cantor, a Sunday school teacher, and “every other oddball job you can imagine....

Lead Stories Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A May San Jose Mercury News story reported on a craze among Japanese youth for rap, hip-hop, and an African-American lifestyle. The kids curl their hair into Afro-like hairdos, darken their skin, and drink a brand of beer called Dunk, which is apparently popular because it’s dark and associated with basketball. And in June Japanese students studying at a workshop in New York City performed gospel music at Harlem’s Memorial Baptist Church to enthusiastic applause....

Lead Stories Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Los Angeles Times reported in February on astute decisions made by Colombian drug cartels to increase their U.S. heroin sales. The cartels reduced prices and increased quality so that customers could achieve an adequate high by smoking heroin rather than injecting it with potentially dirty needles. The U.S. government estimates the Colombians have now captured two-thirds of the east coast market despite producing only 2 percent of the world’s heroin....

Lead Stories Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Sports highlights: In September Susie Nelson, who had lived across the street from Wrigley Field, filed a lawsuit against the Cubs because she says a ballpark security camera was aimed at her bedroom window at various times over the 18 months she lived there. And electrician Randal Jay Palmer, 37, was charged with trespass in October after he allegedly set up a video-camera feed in an overhead light fixture in the Kingdome dressing room of the Seattle Seahawks cheerleaders....

Hey, Faggot: Hey, Brandon: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In the spirit of Abigail Van Buren’s Project Dear Abby–which encourages people to send cards and letters to American servicemen and -women–I am sending you three complimentary copies of the just-published collection of my columns, Savage Love: Straight Answers From America’s Most Popular Sex Columnist. I hope you find this collection amusing. When you’re done pissing yourself laughing, you could use these books to teach English to children who fail to meet the stringent standards of the CIA’s–excuse me, I mean the Peace Corps’–organ-harvesting program....

Hey, Faggot: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Sure, it’s possible to be a healthy human being with no interest in sex, no desires, no urges, no lust, no nothin’. It isn’t possible, however, to be in a romantic, come-here-you-beautiful-hunk-of-woman sexual relationship with someone like that without losing your mind. If you’ve been hanging in there all these years in hopes that when she finally got her shit together you could have the nonplatonic sex-love-rock ‘n’ roll relationship you desire, and she ceases to assemble her shit just short of that goal, well, that’s when it’s time to walk....

The Family Events Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In this whimsical 1997 elegy by Leszek Wosiewicz, a young boy narrates a series of vignettes that subtly illustrate the changing life of a small Polish town in the late 40s and early 50s. His tales combine fact and fancy, yet with each narrative his perception of the world widens, retaining its innocence but gradually losing its naivete....

Robert Capa: Photographs My dad was not alone. Volunteers from America, England, France, and Russia–to name only the republic’s most prominent allies–flocked to Spain, sacrificing in a way few today would consider doing for Bosnia, Chechnya, or Palestine. For Americans and Russians alike, Spain’s struggle to escape a feudal monarchy seemed to replay their own national dramas. And for Europeans the Spanish civil war, which was won only with copious assistance from fascist Germany and Italy, was the first warning of the larger battle to come....

A Light in the Darkness Kunosic found a woman standing in her hallway, flanked by two soldiers. The woman ordered Kunosic and her children to vacate their apartment immediately. The soldiers didn’t display guns, but they didn’t have to: word had already spread throughout Sarajevo that people who resisted orders had been shot and even killed. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » She has helped her countrymen living here by assuming two roles: coordinator for the Bosnian Refugee Center and founding member and executive director of the Bosnian and Herzegovinian American Community Center....

Amy Ahlstrom says her ideas didn’t sit well with other students in art school. Originally a painter, Ahlstrom, who earned an MFA from the School of the Art Institute in 1995, had turned to quilt making, silk-screening medical illustrations and images from comic books on the quilts. At her final critique, “Half the people there were like, ‘You just need to be a painter. You should just be painting on canvas,’ and the other people were like, ‘Well, this isn’t really like a quilt....

Big Deal Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Where’s Jean Valjean when you need him? Only a handful of the shows look at all promising, and none of them seems like the kind of blockbuster that can pull patrons back into the Loop. Saturday Night Fever was roundly panned by New York critics, and the musical Mamma Mia! can’t rely upon the Abba fanatics that made it a hit in London....