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Front and Center Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “I’ll have to be part Mother Teresa and part Gandhi to keep peace among the natives,” says Higgins. As general manager she’ll answer not only to the village but to Professional Facilities Management, a theatrical administration company contracted by Skokie to manage and operate the North Shore Center for the Performing Arts. Luckily for her, the village has set up a separate foundation to handle fund-raising, but Higgins will have no shortage of headaches, including a poorly staffed box office, scattershot marketing, low attendance, and a dearth of summer bookings....

GIANT SAND Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In 1989, well before samplers made it cheap and easy to capture on tape that unpredictable and slippery thing called the thought process, Giant Sand guitarist and songwriter Howe Gelb and drummer John Convertino made a remarkable record called Long Stem Rant (Homestead). Gelb had already released four albums of tough, sunbaked roots rock under the Giant Sand name, but this broke the mold: it was stripped-down and spontaneous, with stream-of-consciousness vocals and few identifiable choruses, and Gelb seemed more like he was carrying on a conversation with his guitar than accompanying himself on it....

JAMES NEWTON Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » There’s no separating James Newton’s musical accomplishments from his instrument of choice: in his hands, the jazz flute has reached the likely pinnacle of its evolution. Classically trained but artistically intrepid, Newton combines Hubert Laws’s rosy timbres with the streaked earth tones of Eric Dolphy, screaming post-Coltrane imprecations with classic Ellingtonia, etching fine details on even the most epic lines....

The farcical, often satirical Kyogen style developed as part of the ritualistic No theater to provide comic relief between No plays, showing the foolishness of ordinary people and mocking their frailties with rhythmic vocalizations, stylized physical movement, and minutely detailed timing. Often compared to commedia dell’arte, Kyogen has some of the same charm but lacks that form’s frenetic energy and loud stereotypes. The Nomura troupe is one of Japan’s all-male family-based Kyogen troupes, started when Mansaku Nomura left his father’s sake-making business to become an actor....

Long Live the King (the King Is Dead) Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Redmoon Theater–Chicago’s best-established, most innovative puppet pageantry troupe–is closing its summer season with the final version of an expansive outdoor spectacle, Long Live the King (the King Is Dead). This dreamlike, sophisticated story of an itinerant royal family combines a mobile, visually stunning set with sweet, eerie images of life on the road and Keystone Kops-style comedy....

Lead Stories Brenda Anne Sorochan, 41, was convicted of assaulting a 79-year-old woman in Edmonton, Alberta, in January; Sorochan had forgotten to take her medication for manic depression. Swiss airline passenger Thomas Dolder, 39, was released from a facility in Halifax, Nova Scotia, after assaulting a flight crew in October; he had left his antipsychotic medication in his checked baggage. Former Detroit police officer Paul Harrington, 53, was charged in October with killing his wife and children; he had run out of his medication for severe depression....

Lucinda Williams Lucinda Williams’s career started out uneventfully enough, when in 1978, at age 26, she recorded her first album for Moses Asch’s Folkways label. The daughter of poet and professor Miller Williams (who read at Bill Clinton’s second inauguration), she’d spent much of her childhood moving around the south, from Jackson to Baton Rouge to New Orleans to Atlanta to Macon, and Ramblin’ on My Mind, a collection of mostly Delta blues and old country covers recorded for $250, paid tribute to the music she’d heard along the way....

SADAO WATANABE & AKIO SASAJIMA Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Though he’s contentedly cranked out less-than-inventive pop jazz for most of the last 20 years, reedist Sadao Watanabe has earned his stripes as the grand old man of Japanese jazz. One of the first Asian musicians to study at the Berklee College of Music, in the mid-60s, Watanabe swam in the freedom-churned currents of the era, adopting the vocabulary, if not the tone, of Jackie McLean, Wayne Shorter, and even Chick Corea (who played on his first album for an American label)....

This may sound weird, but ever since I was a kid I’ve been aroused by the sight of sexy women smoking cigarettes. I’m always on the surreptitious lookout when I’m in public for women with cigarettes in their hands. I record and/or watch stuff on TV that doesn’t interest me in hopes of catching scenes of women smoking. I save any and all pictures I come across. None of this comes close to satisfying my fetish....

The Awkward Age Born in La Grange in 1958 and raised in Bedford Park, Missbach was somewhat of an outsider, both because she was raised by a single mother and because she “had opinions, as opposed to just watching TV.” When she was about 12, her mom took her by bus to a peace demonstration in Washington. Intensely aware of the 60s, its counterculture and demonstrations, “I wanted to be older so bad....

Donna Blue Lachman has always been a fabulous storyteller–personable, funny, warm–but she hasn’t always been a great actress. When she played Frida Kahlo in a celebrated one-woman show, she played Frida as she would have been if she’d been Donna Blue. But earlier this year Lachman played all five members of the fictional Fischer family in the comedy Family Secrets, an experience that’s reflected in her revival of The Thirst. When it premiered a year ago at the Blue Rider Theatre, it seemed just another installment in Lachman’s autobiography, concerned with her memories of her grandfather and great-grandmother and the stories of their shtetl life in Central Europe....

Whenever we got on the 12th Street car to go down to Halsted Street we would pass Holy Family church, and I don’t think we ever passed it where my mother didn’t say, “My mother was buried from that church.” So several years back, when I heard they were going to demolish the church, I sent them $25. And because of my $25 they didn’t demolish it–they restored it instead....

By Neal Pollack In 1993 a man Strama had known from Back of the Yards, Jim Bria, passed away, leaving behind a pigeon coop. During World War II, Bria had been a member of the U.S. Pigeon Reserve Signal Corps. He was also a previous president of the American Racing Pigeon Union, and had, Strama says, loved pigeons more than life itself. Bria’s coop was the Rolls-Royce of pigeon-coop technology and represented the accumulated knowledge of 60 years of pigeon keeping....

The Lakota tribe’s “winter count,” a spiraling collection of glyphs symbolizing a noteworthy event from each year, functioned as both a means of keeping track of time and a pictorial history. One of the counts fell into the hands of missionary Aaron Macaffey Beede, who donated it to the Chicago Historical Society in 1923. It’s part of the interactive exhibit “Go West! Chicago and American Expansion.” A glyph from 1812, “Capa Cikala ti ile” (“Little Beaver’s house burned down”), is believed to depict the burning home of trader Registre Loisel, who got his nickname because he was small and usually stayed inside his wood house....

Chicago has its share of the country’s top corporate criminals of the 1990s, according to a list compiled by Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman in their weekly on-line column “Focus on the Corporation.” They ranked corporations by the size of the criminal fine imposed on them: 7th was Archer Daniels Midland, fined $100 million for antitrust activities; 8th was Sears Bankruptcy Recovery Management Services, $60 million for fraud; 52nd was Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Illinois, $4 million for fraud; 62nd was Chemical Waste Management Inc....

“It’s easy to be cynical about these periodic effusions of concern about crime,” writes Salim Muwakkil in In These Times (March 3), recalling the deaths of Dantrell Davis (in 1992) and Robert “Yummy” Sandifer (1994). “But there is something decidedly different about these Girl X protesters. The community-building message of the Million Man March seems to have penetrated deeply into the community. Already, members of two church congregations, the Fernwood United Methodist Church and the Miracle Temple, have formed a security force of volunteers who will patrol varied high-crime areas....

MATT WILSON QUARTET WITH DEWEY REDMAN Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » For those who have followed drummer Matt Wilson’s activities over the last few years, it’ll be no surprise that he’s hooked up with Dewey Redman this weekend. Redman–the sometimes transportive saxist and veteran of groups led by Ornette Coleman and Keith Jarrett–hired Wilson for his trio tour last summer; returning the favor, the young drummer made Redman the centerpiece of his debut as a leader, As Wave Follows Wave (Palmetto), which the New York Times cited as one of 1996’s best jazz releases....

By Mike Sula Cajandig visited the fence a few more times that fall, but she had her own raccoons to care for and a sudden series of personal problems to deal with. In May it was time to let her last two raccoons go. She’d released the first pair in November, so she knew this wasn’t going to be easy. “I know I cried for a week after I released the first two and I was going to have to do it again,” she says....

Hey, Faggot: –I Kidnapped Dolly Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » To answer your main question–who buys and fucks these things?–I called Sex World, Minneapolis’s adult superstore. The nervous male checker couldn’t tell me how many blow-up dolls Sex World moves in a day, week, month, or year. Nor could he tell me who buys and fucks these things. All he would tell me was that female blow-up dolls are available on the first floor, and male blow-up dolls are in the gay section on the third floor....

darin.qxd Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Unfortunately, the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency, which has the responsibility for providing for clean water in our state, doesn’t seem to take the problem as seriously. Their reaction to the notion that polluted runoff from Illinois agriculture may be contributing to toxic levels of pollution in the Gulf of Mexico has usually been more in line with that of the fertilizer companies than with those trying to solve the problem....