“There’s always been an undercurrent of hypocrisy in Chicago, and the entertainment industry is just one facet of that hypocrisy,” says Julian Swain. The veteran hoofer and choreographer continues, “Chicago is a very ghettoized place, but blacks here are the only ethnic group that has been ghettoized against its wishes. The clubs here were not segregated by law, as they were in other parts of the country, but they were segregated by a sort of unspoken agreement....

Goodman Loses the Edge Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But as it turned out, none of the artists got to sit down and eat with the attendees who paid $125 for dinner and the show. Instead the performers had hors d’oeuvres and cocktails in a separate room with a small number of guests who had purchased $75 tickets. “We had enough to eat, but it wasn’t exactly what we were expecting,” Allen adds....

Alicia Cuccia picks up the ringing phone. The woman on the other end has a problem. She’s relocating to Europe and wants Cuccia to find a new home for her four-year-old cat. Cuccia patiently explains that France does not require a long quarantine for pets–she should take the cat along. The woman hangs up on her. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » When Cuccia opened Paws for Thought five years ago, she had no idea that her pet-supply store would one day double as a licensed, cageless animal shelter and referral service....

JOHN MOULDER QUARTET Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » John Moulder took four years to give us his second album, Through the Open Door (on his own little Mo-Tonal Records)–and the new collection so outstrips its predecessor, in variety, nuance, insight, and authority, that it feels more like four light-years. Toiling in the shadow of the Lord by day, as a priest at an Oak Park church, the Chicago guitarist has beefed up his acoustic playing, refined the raw passion of his electric, and settled in with a rhythm section as sympathetic as it is stellar....

“Manufacturing is gone,” Mayor Daley blurted out last year as he plumped for his casino project. The abandoned factory hulks and weedy lots where tens of thousands of blue-collared men and women once worked for companies like U.S. Steel, Wisconsin Steel, Western Electric, Schwinn, and Stewart-Warner reinforce Daley’s image of decline. So do the statistics: Chicago lost half its manufacturing employment from 1975 to 1992, about 190,000 jobs. The tendency of American businesses to shift manufacturing overseas, to act simply as marketers of foreign-made goods, or to play financial manipulators to the world is dangerously delusive....

More on Ticketmaster Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Anyway, when Hitsville called Ticketmaster to ask how much service charges for the show are, the phone operators wouldn’t say. Oh, they’d cop to a $2 “shipping and handling” fee, and even a $2.25 “facility fee,” which turns out to be for parking. But even the phone supervisor refuses to divulge just how much money was going to Ticketmaster....

Lead Story In a first-person account in London’s Independent in September, Jenny Gathorne-Hardy reported that she drilled a hole in her skull to test the theory that adults’ brains would function better if blood were able to circulate to the topmost part. Reported Gathorne-Hardy, “I feel calmer, and that particular mental exhaustion I became so used to has gone.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In August 70-year-old Kim Sun Myung, who’s thought to be the longest-serving prisoner of war in the world, was freed in South Korea, where he’d been held–mostly in solitary confinement–since the outbreak of the Korean war in 1951....

As a boy growing up in Alton, Illinois, Ned Broderick listened to his father and uncles talk about World War II. “They told of going without sleep, having a hard time finding food, being in cities that were bombed flat.” He remembers saying something bad about the Germans and being surprised to hear his father reply, “The German soldiers were just like us.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In 1965 Broderick wanted to enlist in the military....

Like a lot of theater folks, Rick Hall comes from a small town; unlike a lot of theater folks, he doesn’t hide his origins. In fact, he flaunts them in this interesting solo show, which brings the Improv Institute cofounder and onetime Second City actor back to Chicago from LA. Alternating between autobiographical monologue and character sketches, Hall invokes a youth spent among farmers and meat packers–guys like Rocky LeBlanc, who sported two rows of teeth, one behind the other (perfect for biting off an opponent’s nose), and other colorful fellows Hall met while employed shooting pigs in the local slaughterhouse (thus the title)....

SALLY AND MARSHA at Cafe Voltaire Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The show that relies the least on Tampax, hairspray, and panty hose for laughs is Sally and Marsha, Sybille Pearson’s play about a South Dakota housewife displaced to New York who befriends a Manhattan neighbor. There’s nothing particularly wrong with this premise, aside from its cliche-ridden predictability (I’ll bet you can guess which is a sunny optimist who keeps a clean kitchen and which is a neurotic, pseudointellectual slob)....

Shane Bugbee’s dog, Roxanne, is a pit bull, but she doesn’t seem particularly ferocious. She sleeps on the sofa for hours at a stretch and, when approached by a stranger, drags herself to the floor to allow more efficient ear-scratching. Her stump of a tail twitches like a beating heart. “I put stuff out for examination,” he says. “I don’t edit. It’s all artwork to me. It’s all up to each person’s interpretation....

RED KRAYOLA 1/13, LOUNGE AX After making the first Chicago appearance of their 27-year existence last fall, the Red Krayola are in town for a return engagement. Their September show was a spirited blend of oblique humor and lean guitar-drenched rock, informed by a keen sense of dramaturgy. Expect more of the same. Founder Mayo Thompson, the band’s only constant, will be joined by guitarists David Grubbs (of Gastre del Sol) and Tom Watson (of Slovenly and Overpass), both of whom performed at the Chicago debut, and drummer George Hurley, the tenacious timekeeper for Firehose and the legendary Minutemen....

While Ellen DeGeneres of the sitcom Ellen dithers about whether to out her on-screen self, Dan Butler, who plays a flaming heterosexual on Frasier, puts himself on the line as the openly gay author-star of this one-man show. A hit in LA and then off-Broadway (where Greg Louganis played Butler’s role), The Only Thing Worse You Could Have Told Me… comprises a dozen or so vignettes about contemporary gay life that allow Butler to draw on his charismatic stage presence and dramatic range while dispelling myths about homosexuality....

To the editor: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » That kind of loser talk breaks my heart. It’s the final act of a team with dying pennant hopes. I am a lifelong south sider/south suburbanite who against all rationality continues to be a White Sox fan–even to the point of taking my kids out a couple of times a year to the unwelcoming, unappealing new Comiskey....

The fest, which runs through June 19, heads into the home stretch this week with openings by two companies–the Netherlands’ Dogtroep in Camel Gossip III and Ireland’s Gate Theatre in Sean O’Casey’s Juno and the Paycock–and one solo artist, San Francisco monologuist Marga Gomez (in two pieces, Memory Tricks and Marga Gomez Is Pretty, Witty and Gay). These shows dovetail with closing performances by England’s Stephen Joseph Theatre (Alan Ayckbourn’s company) in Communicating Doors, Greece’s Attis Theatre in The Persians and The Kanon, and Canadian soloist Robert Lepage in Needles and Opium....

Do you remember your first bank? “I robbed banks all over. All small branch banks. Never nothing downtown, Loops and all that–too big. Chances are very slim that you will get away. You can do it, like you hand a note to the teller, but I didn’t go that way. “I was successful because I didn’t stay in one thing. I was a burglar, then I went into banks. I was a bank robber, and then I went into jewelry stores....

I like science, and every time the sun completes another turn around the earth I resolve to learn more about it. “More than 80% of Americans believe that science and technology make their lives healthier, easier, and more comfortable,” reports the International Center for the Advancement of Scientific Literacy at the Chicago Academy of Sciences, but “fewer than half of American adults understand that the Earth orbits the sun yearly. Only 9% can explain a molecule” (Nature’s Notes, Fall)....

PAUL TAYLOR DANCE COMPANY In the 1987 Syzygy (which immediately followed Roses), Taylor smashes up the movement. Every line that can be broken is: the dancers bend at the neck, the waist, the knee, the wrist, so we see tossed heads, flipped hands, jutting hips. And it’s all done so quickly the dancers are like marionettes on fast forward. Just as he breaks up the dance spatially, Taylor breaks it up temporally: a dancer in the midst of a Saint Vitus’s jig comes to a complete halt or begins to move in slow motion....

In the testosterone-infused world of improv and sketch comedy, it’s refreshing to see a show where the women so completely dominate the stage and the men are so, well, clueless. In the collection of rudimentary two-character scenes known as Disco Bob, director/performer Amy Seeley and Jenny Kirkland consistently shine. With her snappy, sometimes bitchy demeanor, Kirkland has perfected a wide array of whiny bourgeois suburban roles. And Seeley, a brilliant impersonator of losers, dopes, and most anybody else with dubious social skills, is hilarious, even (perhaps especially) when she isn’t saying anything....

Jan Erkert & Dancers Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Whole Fragments begins with the onset of illness–the dancers walk backward with their arms raised as if they were being robbed, disappearing into a translucent tent. We see their shadows moving on the tent wall as well as videos of them performing the same movements projected onto other tent panels. They seem to have been taken away, sequestered in a half-world....