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Michael Haynes is built like Adonis, with white-blond hair and skin the color of alabaster. Wearing a tight white T-shirt and standing stock-still beneath the two-story columns of the Civic Opera building, the 29-year-old resembled a marble statue in faded black jeans. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Three groups of men were requested to make these moves while stripped to the waist. When the first group began the piston pantomime, the rippling of various skin tones, well-developed back and shoulder muscles, and glorious pecs fell into spontaneous harmony....

Out of the Closet Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The library will move its holdings of over 12,000 books and some 800 periodicals to 5,500 square feet that formerly housed a card shop and a liquor store. “We were simply bursting at the seams in our old facility,” explains Russell Kracke, Gerber/Hart’s managing director. Kracke predicts that the Granville location will be adequate for at least another seven years....

The language in Police Deaf Near Far stings like the snap of a whip. In fact David Rush’s gritty account of injustice employs two languages, spoken English and American Sign Language. And in Stage Left Theatre’s production of a work inspired by a true story, the actors are so bilingually articulate that we barely notice our assimilation into the world of deaf citizens struggling for recognition. Under the direction of Drew Martin, Robert Schleifer delivers a riveting performance as the hearing-impaired activist whose frustration at society’s indifference leads to his martyrdom; similarly capable are Peter DeFaria and Karin McKie as the police officers who inadvertently become his executioners and Pat Parks as an interpreter whose efforts cannot prevent the bloodshed....

PRINCE PAUL Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Nothing in hip-hop is more tired than macho gangsta boasting–which makes Prince Paul’s recent “hip-hopera” A Prince Among Thieves (Tommy Boy) all the more amazing. Producer and auteur Paul (aka Paul Huston) expands the humorous, concise hip-hop skit writing he used to killer effect on De La Soul’s earliest stuff and his own Psychoanalysis: What Is It?...

Rats are the deadliest creatures on earth. Back in the 14th century, the lice that caused the Black Death rode into Europe on a herd of black rats. The insects sucked up the plague virus from the rodents’ blood, then passed it on to the human race. Within four years one out of every three Europeans was dead, a decimation far worse than the continent suffered in World War II....

JAZZ MANDOLIN PROJECT 9/1, HOUSE OF BLUES Like Medeski, Martin & Wood, the Jazz Mandolin Project started out on the Boston indie label Accurate, now records for Blue Note, and has attracted the affection of the jam-band crowd with help from members of Phish–Trey Anastasio sits in on the surf ditty “Hang Ten,” the final track on the JMP’s new Xenoblast. The group’s music is built on the attractively loose, occasionally funky grooves of drummer Ari Hoenig and bassist Chris Dahlgren–whose formidable talent is better experienced on his own jam-free album Best Intentions (Koch)....

By Ted Kleine Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “We’re not operating on a shoestring,” Haas says. “If you’re successful in civil rights litigation, you can be compensated. It’s not an easy way, though. One of the ways we’ve been able to survive economically, we have no secretaries here. Everybody does their own computer work.” In the early 1970s the staff posed for a New York Times story about their “law commune....

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. JEFFREY ALTERGOTT Free in-store concert. Next Friday, June 2, 8 PM, Borders Books & Music, 2817 N....

One day not too many years ago, I was at work and this man comes in. He walks right past the sign that says Authorized Personnel Only, and he walks straight over to my desk in the middle of the office and says, “Were you in second grade at the Ericson School?” He said, “Well, I’m glad I saw you again.” And he left. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Around the Coyote Dancer-choreographer Ginger Farley organized this performance troupe, which combines the disciplines of music and dance. Chopin Theatre, main stage, 7 PM. Extreme Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Shakespeare’s romantic tragedy is offered in an outdoor production by the Tripaway Theatre. “Performing Shakespeare under the stars is a popular approach in summer, but what’s a small-budget company to do when their performance space is [without] electric lighting, artificial amplification, and man-made scenery?...

Editor, Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » What if that truck with his plates had been used in a drive-by shooting? What if his plates were used on a car by a serial rapist to throw off witnesses? What if his plates were last seen on a truck that hit a little girl and thus delayed time in finding the culprit? Anyone who leaves their plates on a vehicle they no longer own is an idiot (would you give your driver’s license to a stranger?...

Biological invasions are slow-motion disasters. They start small: a few insects hitchhiking on some imported nursery stock, a few seeds escaping from somebody’s backyard and taking root in a ditch, a field, or a woodlot. The spread is slow at first. Small populations, even if they are very fecund, can produce only small numbers of seeds or young. Sometimes the invading species spends decades as a small, inoffensive part of the biota before suddenly becoming a major pest....

The Adventures of Don Quixote What few people realize is what a rich, funny, complex novel it is. Actually, it’s two novels: the first part, published in 1605, was immediately popular, first with readers in Spain and later in France and England. In fact, the book was so popular that an unscrupulous rival took the characters and published a sequel, hoping to cash in on Cervantes’s luck. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

By Deirdre Guthrie The house manager and former clown I went to see for a job told me I’d be seeing the “working-class” side of circus life–a life the usher in the top hat had warned would consist of eating cookhouse slop, sleeping in walk-in closets, and squatting like trailer-park trash. I signed on for the summer tour, assigned to the box office. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Tess, a big, boisterous girl with wild, frizzy hair and a massive cast on her leg, came from Oklahoma and liked to show me pictures of her family–lots of kids with home perms and ruddy cheeks....

By Deanna Isaacs Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It wasn’t always like this, but that’s life: you get your rack of letters (some better than others) and make your moves. Kaminsky, a daydreamer with a creative bent, graduated from South Shore High School and went to Southern Illinois University, where he made his first big mistake by majoring in accounting. “No one tells you these things in college,” he says, but “as a CPA, it’s bad news having an imagination....

sampson.qxd It’s enough for ten articles, but to address the Pitocin and induction issue–well-off women can afford the latest “trends”–doesn’t make it safer, but they have more options. Poor women are fodder for “studies” and have no choice. When I started OB, women were automatically given huge medio-lateral episiotomies–there was no good study to support this barbaric procedure, sometimes done without anesthesia, and when there were so many deliveries I didn’t call the resident until too late to cut one, actually they would say, “Damn, didn’t get to cut the epis,” even though the woman delivered with an intact perineum....

By Scott Rosenberg Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Down in the gray moist cinder-block gym of Hamlin Park, at the corner of Hoyne and Barry, Ninos is in the middle of his two-hour daily workout. He pounds a heavy bag with quick body punches, exhaling sharply with each blow. Dancing in a circle, he keeps his focus on the bag, even as his father bellows commands over his shoulder....

Rights of Passage Certainly Michael’s preferred mode of transportation is out of the ordinary–he travels by bike. Were he a resident of Canton or Kuala Lumpur, this wouldn’t be unusual. But here in Chicago, pedaling regularly on busy streets makes him a revolutionary, and along with a few hundred fellow bikers, Michael hopes to send the city a message: the revolution will not be motorized. As part of a worldwide phenomenon called Critical Mass, hundreds of bikers will gather this Friday at 5:30 PM in the Daley Center plaza to take a leisurely ride through downtown streets at the height of rush hour....

The Strange at the Lunar Cabaret Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » As many of her Curious Theatre Branch cohorts and she herself have done in the past, Magnus begins with an ethically charged question–can we share our darkest impulses with others, or are we solely responsible for our own ugliness?–and creates an unstable environment in which overworked minds labor through it. The minds here belong to two unnamed characters, a desperate, self-loathing woman (Magnus) and a psychologically insightful young girl (Amy Warren)....

By Ben Joravsky “I love many of our new residential neighbors, but they have to recognize that we have a right to be here too,” says Marilyn Labkon, who owns General Iron, the scrap-metal recycler at Clifton and Kingsbury. “We don’t want to leave.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Our customers are mostly alley entrepreneurs or peddlers with factory accounts and wreckers who buy reinforcing bars and beams,” says Labkon, who runs the business with her two sons, Adam and Howard....