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Marcia Specks approached the gates of Buchenwald apprehensively, expecting to be overwhelmed. When she arrived, she had a “funny,” soothing feeling instead. She turned to her husband, Granvil, and their longtime friend Bert Van Bork and said, “They killed the bodies but not the spirits. The spirits marched out of here.” It’s a comment that three and a half years later she’s a bit embarrassed to recount–“It sounds so mystical”–and she probably wouldn’t, if it weren’t for what happened next....

Bill Horberg admired the daring and ambition of his older sister, Marguerite, when they were growing up on the north side. “She was always a trailblazer,” he says. “She was listening to jazz when everybody else was listening to the Jackson 5.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » His first passion was also music: he played the flute, and after graduating from the Latin School in 1977, he ended up at the Berklee College of Music in Boston....

Rhinoceros Theater Festival Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This annual showcase of experimental theater, performance, and music from Chicago’s fringe began as part of the Bucktown Arts Fest; now it’s produced by the Curious Theatre Branch. Taking its name from surrealist painter Salvador Dali’s use of the term “rhinocerontic” (it means real big), the Rhino Fest, now in its 11th year, features shows by such local notables as Theater for the Age of Gold, the Billy Goat Experiment, Blair Thomas, Antonio Sacre (now based in LA, but returning for the festival), John Musial, Michael K....

Hey, Faggot: –Michael Ritter, Coordinator, Prevention Programs, San Francisco State University Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Like you, I’ve read the research about heavy drinking and bad behavior. Unlike you, however, I’ve also read the American Heritage Dictionary. I suggest you pick up a copy; not only will you learn the correct spelling of “consensual,” but if you continue to flip through the Cs, you’ll learn the difference between correlation (“a measure of the interdependence of two random variables”) and causation (“the act or process of causing”)....

Stronger Than Ever Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Chicago used to be known for having a tavern on every corner, but these days that corner spot is probably occupied by a coffee chain. Starbucks opened its first Chicago location in October 1987, and with Caribou Coffee and Seattle’s Best Coffee now vying for prime storefronts, the battle for the lucrative specialty coffee market is beginning to heat up....

Digital technology in some form or another has crept into many of our homes, but for Ben Stokes, a founder of the Chicago video production house H-Gun Labs, it’s been a real life-changer. A decade ago, when he made his first video for Ministry as a fledgling out of the School of the Art Institute, Stokes labored long and hard over old-fashioned “in-camera” effects and optical printing to achieve the visuals he had in mind....

AWAY, Northlight Theatre, at the North Shore Center for the Performing Arts in Skokie. Australian playwright Michael Gow seems to think that the way to create humanistic drama is to introduce stereotypical characters in stock situations in the first act, then undercut them in the second. But the three intersecting domestic dramas that comprise Away reveal the flaw inherent in that approach: the hackneyed setups render implausible all the subsequent heartfelt interactions and reconciliations....

BAMBOLEO Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » If the Buena Vista Social Club phenomenon has a downside, it’s that the spotlight on vintage Cuban music has left the island’s contemporary sounds in the shadows. In the 90s the dominant style in Cuba has been timba, an electric and eclectic elaboration on son practiced by acts like NG La Banda, Manolin, and Charanga Habanera, and while superb modern groups like Los Van Van and Adalberto Alvarez–who’ve exerted a strong influence on timba–have come through town in the last year, we haven’t really had an opportunity to hear the stuff most Cubans actually groove to these days....

Bob Eisen’s new dance is a big, gorgeous thing with wildly varied patterns repeated just often enough to provide a sense of structure and stability. But that’s an illusion: though Eisen choreographed ten sections for each of the piece’s six dancers (including himself), the order in which they’re performed changes nightly according to a random drawing. Most of the piece is set to a Sonic Youth version of a John Cage composition that’s sometimes as loud and cacophonous as the el overhead and sometimes as gentle as a faraway train whistle; the mood shifts constantly as the dancers go through their paces, whether it’s a delicate run forward, toes dragging, hands daintily holding an imaginary skirt, or a manic dash into one of the famous Link’s Hall closets for some costume piece (sunglasses, fake fur, milkmaid’s bonnet, little shiny red shopping bag) that’s just as quickly discarded....

CODA is a coming-of-age story meant to move. And while the beats of the film may be predictable, it’s no less affecting. Following Ruby Rossi (Emilia Jones), a child of deaf adults (CODA) and the only hearing person in her family, viewers are introduced to a teenager that’s torn. Will she help her parents (played to perfection by Marlee Matlin and Troy Kotsur) and older brother (Daniel Durant) keep the family fishing business afloat or pursue her love of music?...

Friday 4/3 – Thursday 4/9 What is that quality that makes some people the center of attention–and how can we get some? Author and screenwriter Elinor Glyn called it “that strange magnetism which attracts both sexes.” In her screenplay for the movie It, a department store owner (Antonio Moreno) becomes infatuated with his “pert and unabashed” employee, played by Clara Bow, who catapulted to stardom as “the It Girl.” It will be shown tonight at 8 at the Gateway Theatre, 5216 W....

Friday 5:55 PM National Anthem The Thompson Community Singers start the bill; everyone will eventually end up onstage together. 11:50 AM Gospel Warm-up with Betty McDaniel Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Although Atlanta-based LaShun Pace and her siblings, known professionally as the Anointed Pace Sisters, began traveling the Pentecostal revival circuit as children, it wasn’t until the release of her first solo album, 1991’s He Lives, that she emerged as a major force in contemporary gospel music....

GRAVEDIGGAZ/KILLAH PRIEST Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » On their 1994 debut, 6 Feet Deep (Gee Street), Gravediggaz constructed such a garish, almost cartoonish vision of inner-city violence that they unwittingly invented a new (albeit short-lived) hip-hop subgenre: horrorcore. The production of former De La Soul associate Prince Paul (known as Dr. Strange here) was typically lean, with crafty samples, tough beats, and killer bass lines, but the raps of Frukwan (aka the Gatekeeper), Poetic (Grym Reaper), and RZA (the Rzarector) were hysterical rants, amplifying familiar ghetto tales with slasher-film hyperbole....

There weren’t many places for kids to hang out when Jim Welton was growing up in Arlington Heights in the 1960s and garage bands were springing up everywhere. Welton was a senior at Arlington Heights High School in ’64 and was in one of those bands when a teen music club called the Blast opened in temporary quarters in the local VFW hall and changed things in a big way. A year or so later, when the club was attracting national acts like the Beau Brummels, making the northwest suburb a hot teen destination, Welton’s band was an opening act....

No Cuts on the Party Line This is a well-publicized field trip to the state capital. The state legislature is holding a special veto session, and the city is sending 36 aldermen on three private buses to lobby for more state money for education, health care, and the Chicago Transit Authority. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Kruesi says he’s ridden every train line on the CTA since he took over, and as many of the bus lines as possible....

? & the Mysterians Empty Bottle, November 1 It’s not the sort of recognition ? was seeking: he claims that he was born on Mars, that he’s lived many lives, and that he’ll return in the year 10,000 to sing “96 Tears.” But by most accounts his name used to be Rudy Martinez, and he was born in Mexico in 1945. According to Mysterians guitarist Bobby Balderrama, the band members’ families migrated to Saginaw from San Antonio to work in the fields, and stayed to take jobs at the General Motors plant in Saginaw....

PAUL MCKEE & JOHN FEDCHOCK Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Stick two trombones in front of a rhythm section and most people imagine one of two scenarios: the exacting give-and-take of J.J. Johnson and Kai Winding, the bop-era ‘bone men whose onstage jousting sounded less like a pitched battle than a sophisticated conversation, or the longest four minutes of a high school stage-band concert....

You recently gave this advice to a gay man involved with a married bisexual man: “Don’t mess around with bisexuals.” You went on to tell the reader he should not mess around with married men either. Staying away from people who are in committed relationships is sound advice. But condemning all bisexuals as poor relationship material is prejudiced, biphobic, and hurtful. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It wasn’t prejudice and fear that colored my advice for Bud, Jennifer, but plain ol’ common sense....

oetting.qxd Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I hope Studs Terkel’s Hot Type fantasy (April 17) about being appointed publisher of the Sun-Times comes true. In addition to upgrading Garry Wills and downgrading George Will, he should kick out Dennis Byrne, Tom Roeser, Robert Novak, Arianna Huffington, and especially that reactionary Uncle Thomas (as in Clarence) Sowell, who replaced the great Molly Ivins. Personally, I experience the effects of the rightward swing....

John Barrymore’s Hamlet “had a withering wit….Though undisciplined, it crackled with the lightning of personality,” wrote the critic John Mason Brown; he could just as well have been describing the flamboyant, self-destructive star himself. Barrymore’s back in Chicago (where he made his stage debut in 1903), uncannily reincarnated by Christopher Plummer in this Broadway-bound tour de force. A superb technician, Plummer portrays the jazz age’s greatest classical actor in 1942 (the year of his death), as a charismatic, caustically funny charmer and aging alcoholic battling the demons of fear and failure....