A man in tattered clothes staggers through the doors of the crowded Dan Ryan el car. His head is hanging down, so it’s hard to guess his age. People nod their heads, as if they recognize him. One girl tosses a dollar into the cap and asks, “Hey, why don’t you cut an album?” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » On another day on another train the same young man, now wearing a flannel shirt and a red bandanna, pushes through the doors that connect the cars....

BEATRICE AND BENEDICT This season COT is offering a sensibly abbreviated season of two productions, the current Beatrice and Benedict and, in May, Douglas Moore’s The Ballad of Baby Doe. These selections show that the company is returning to the relatively simple formula that allowed it to succeed in a city where it will necessarily be overshadowed by Lyric Opera: Select works that are less known, suitable for an intimate setting, and a bit too avant-garde for the average operagoer....

Friday 4 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Bill Clinton picked Lani Guinier to head the Justice Department’s civil rights division, but her nomination was withdrawn after being borked by Republicans, who portrayed the University of Pennsylvania Law School prof as a “quota queen.” Guinier promises a more enlightened “Dialogue on Issues of Race in America” when she delivers the keynote speech for a symposium called Voting Rights and Elections....

EMMYLOU HARRIS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » When Emmylou Harris released Wrecking Ball (Elektra) last year quite a few old fans and country purists balked at the notion of a record produced by Daniel Lanois (U2, Neville Brothers) that featured songs written by Jimi Hendrix and Neil Young. It’s easy to forget, however, that prior to the crucial role Harris played in the New Traditionalist movement in the early 80s, she was a protege of country-rock icon Gram Parsons....

Rodd Keith of killing Vietnamese. In my childishness I thrilled to the stirring refrain as trombones rose golden like the sun upon a sea of heroic baritones: “Silver wings upon your chest / You are one of America’s best” and so on. It went to number one on the charts, and every time I heard it I felt like marching around the house. From the Red Blight Mr. Aquino and his friend watched anxiously for my father’s reaction....

“My name is Mumia Abu-Jamal. I’m a journalist, a husband, a father, a grandfather, and an African American. I live in the fastest-growing public housing tract in America. In 1981 I was a reporter for WUHY and president of the Philadelphia Association of Black Journalists. Currently I’m a writer and a public radio commentator. I’ve been a resident on Pennsylvania’s death row for 11 years. Tune in to hear my regular reports from death row ....

**** THE LAST BOLSHEVIK It’s tempting to speculate about whom or what he might identify as the “director” of such Marker masterpieces as Sans soleil (1982) and The Last Bolshevik (1993). “The 20th century” seems a likely guess, for part of the meaning in both these alluring works of wisdom is the ambiguity of causes, of agency, of direction itself, in the dreams and nightmares of contemporary history–the issue of who is doing what to whom....

Orange Then Blue borrows a quote from Boston Magazine to bill itself as “Boston’s Best Big Band,” but does that ever miss the point. You really can’t restrict this 12-piece ensemble to “big band” status. You might as well try describing a giant squid as a shellfish: the term, while mechanically true, doesn’t even hint at the rules being broken. OTB–the name is a contraction of a Charles Mingus song title–delves into many of the expected sonorities and the rich array of tonal colors made possible by its instrumentation....

Patricia Barber has given her latest album (due in about five weeks from Premonition) the title Cafe Blue; now, two nights a week, she turns the Green Mill into just that. Instead of the big piano on the west-wall stage, she sits at the baby grand nestled in behind the bar, which allows her to create an intimate envelope within the cavernous saloon. And if anyone knows how to fill an intimate space, it’s Patricia Barber....

August 1992: Prairie, Pavement, Poetry, and Perpetrators I think, silently, about the old man who stands in front of my building talking with his dog all day, holding him in his arms like a child. I forget how his loud monologues unnerve me in the morning. I think about the integration on my block, the Hispanic girls with their high ponytails like I sometimes wear, the black children running home from school everyday at three with their white friends....

Hey, Faggot: So much so that I’m seriously considering taking the one-night-stand route (which has never been appealing to me). Furthermore, sexual/emotional/intellectual compatibility are intertwined assets which I have a difficult time separating. The result is that I find myself jealous of those people who can fuck first and ask questions later. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » You have two probs: You want to lose that darn virginity, and you want a deep and meaningful relationship....

Sylvia Hernandez ran away from the circus to join real life. It wasn’t that her life under the tents didn’t offer romance. Her German mother was an acrobat, and on a visit to Havana in 1958 met and fell in love with her father, a Cuban gymnast. The head-over-heels part came later when the pair worked up a teeterboard act, the circus stunt where someone heavy jumps on one side of a board and the person on the other end gets hurled into the air, somersaulting to the shoulders of someone else standing nearby....

Miss Margarida’s Way Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » That’s just the way Miss Margarida wants it. The heroine of Roberto Athayde’s blistering satire on sex, school, and society is a psychotic superteacher who wants to prepare a generation of well-adjusted adults–good little consumers who won’t shake up the status quo epitomized by her beloved but unseen principal, to whom she offers a devout genuflection combined with a stiff-armed Nazi salute....

Tom Gold, a scientist at Cornell University, believes that bacteria are living under our feet in staggering quantities–not in our shoes, although they are certainly there too, but deep in the crust of the earth. They are known to thrive in acid, on hot coals, and in deep-sea vents at 480 degrees Fahrenheit, so he figures that wherever water can seep into microscopic cracks in the rock, there you will find some hardy bacterium making do with just a few chemicals and the heat emanating from the center of the earth....

Plenty of people don’t know quite what to make of the collective led by reedman Willem Breuker, but don’t blame them: Breuker has designed his nonet and his repertoire to purposely blur as many lines of demarcation as possible. Is it music or performance art? When his entire band of high-flying Dutchmen begins shouting and racing around the stage or audience space, one begins to wonder. Is it free jazz or a brief history of the Dutch bourgeoisie?...

Haiti’s Boukman Eksperyans has demonstrated an impressive ability to weather adversity. Last summer the group’s bassist Michael Melthon Lynch died of bacterial meningitis; antibiotics that could have saved him were unavailable in Haiti due to the U.S. embargo that followed the overthrow of Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Shortly thereafter the group found themselves stranded in the middle of a world tour, when, having finished some European dates, they were denied entry into the U....

Recently the Sun-Times reported a City Hall crackdown on cabdrivers who refuse to pick up customers in tough neighborhoods or who pass up African American customers. “Cab driving is a tough, dangerous profession–and there are a lot of wonderful drivers out there–but the rules are there for a reason,” said Caroline Shoenberger, commissioner of consumer services. Harry: What people do not understand, when you see a cabbie in the street, it does not mean always he has to pick you up, because sometimes he wants to go to the bank, pick up his children, he’s coming to eat, he has to go to the washroom....

Marc Alan Jacobs is constantly playing Spot the Jew. “Sometimes I’ll go in real close and see if they are wearing a chi or a Star of David. There are certain facial features or hairstyles people associate with Jews, but it’s a look that actually may or may not exist.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » As an artist Jacobs is interested in the unconscious assumptions people make about identity based on real or imagined physical characteristics....

LION IN THE STREETS Roadworks Productions at Synergy Center Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Roadworks Productions offers a very watchable production, a midwest premiere, sacrificing little of Thompson’s raw fatalism but cushioning it with a highly theatrical staging that includes several dances (beautifully choreographed by Peter Carpenter) echoing the play’s action. In fact director Abby Epstein begins the play by putting Isobel–the lost girl who turns out to be a ghost searching the neighborhood for her killer–at the center of a long, involved dance with the rest of the ensemble (or neighborhood) in which she alternately tries to join and flee them....

MCKAY’S BEES A sort of pacifist Karl Marx with an entomological slant, McKay envisions a utopian city called Equilibrium composed primarily, one might assume, of workers, queens, and drones. It isn’t long before McKay comes to realize that lessons learned by observing bees aren’t easily applied to humans. The journey west is fraught with danger, involving marauding thugs and alligators, and upon arriving in Kansas the three are plunked down in the midst of violent conflicts between supporters of slavery and abolitionists....