By Ben Joravsky Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The program originated after a state law was passed in 1988 requiring municipalities to recycle 25 percent of all garbage by 1995. (Chicago currently recycles about 5 percent of its waste, so it has a long way to go.) In 1990 Mayor Daley appointed a task force of city officials, business leaders, and environmentalists to help the city comply with the law....

Out shopping a couple of months ago, my wife and I came across a sinister item: a black T-shirt swirling with skulls and burning buildings, and bearing the baleful message CHICAGO: WHERE THE WEAK ARE KILLED AND EATEN. It’s been a hard year for Stan and his family. He and his wife were once so compatible it was scary–they were both handsome, aglow with erotic energy, and ideologically committed to mathematics and technology as the only worthwhile fields of human endeavor....

India’s film industry is three times as large as America’s, and for many years, particularly during the 50s and 60s, it served as the primary vehicle for disseminating popular music: lacking record players, most citizens flocked to theaters to hear the latest tunes. While the films they saw may have featured a wide array of actors, the music lip-synched by those pretty faces was sung by a small pool of chameleonic “playback singers....

Best known in America for his movie scores (Zorba the Greek, Z), Mikis Theodorakis’s rep back home rests as much on his political activities as on his music. Tortured and imprisoned (1967), then exiled (1970) for resistance to the 1967-’74 military junta, he later served in parliament and as a cabinet minister in the Greek government. Unlike his pal Iannis Xenakis (Greece’s other important late-20th-century composer, known for his austere, mathematical “stochastic” structures), Theodorakis crafts his music for more immediate accessibility, weaving together such disparate elements as spiny orchestral passages, Orthodox liturgical chants, mountain folk idioms, and the funkiest rebetika (urban folk-pop)....

People are talking about Amelia Earhart again, and it’s not because anyone has matched a molar to her dental records. She is the heroine of two new novels, Alison Anderson’s Hidden Latitudes and Jane Mendelsohn’s I Was Amelia Earhart, in both of which she survives on a tropical island and falls in love with Fred Noonan, the navigator she previously disliked. Which is not to say it can’t be done well....

I Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Still, Gaye’s story is arresting, even ten years after his death. He grew up the son of a combative preacher who led a half-Jewish, half-fundamentalist storefront sect. By the mid-1960s Gaye was an established Motown star–perhaps the label’s most naturally charismatic one. But his status was a bit awkward because of Berry Gordy’s paternalism and Gaye’s marriage to Gordy’s sister, who was 17 years his senior....

Rod Stewart is now our leading superstar bottom feeder, holding on to his commercial franchise by clumsily manipulating the innovations of his aging contemporaries. Say what you will about the flaccid Eric Clapton: his merchandising–from the early boxed set Crossroads to the quadruple-plus platinum Unplugged–has put him at the financial forefront of sellout 60s has-beens. Stewart’s boxed sets–which have come, inevitably, a year or two after Clapton’s (Storyteller, Unplugged . ....

Since stand-up in the United States is still dominated by hung up straight white guys slinging the same old dick shtick, it’s great to discover the trio of women who call themselves Sensible Footwear. Alex Dallas, Alison Field, and Wendy Vousden gleefully wade into waters most men (and carefully coiffed, soft-voiced stand-up babes like Rita Rudner) fear to tread. These expatriate Britgrrrls, now living in Canada, cheerfully discuss menstruation, yeast infections, and those unglamorous moments during sex when skin sticks to skin or that second helping of refried beans breaks the mood....

The Sweat Offensive For two years the folks at Pretzelrod Productions have been doing just that: bringing us an evening’s worth of short monologues written and performed by a group of witty actresses–the Sweat Girls–who proved in shows like I’m Sweating Under My Breasts, Who Does She Think She Is? and Sweat Dreams that they have the intelligence, self-knowledge, and sense of humor to give even their most personal stories universal appeal....

THE CAVE Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » With their multimedia opera The Cave, the husband-and-wife team of composer Steve Reich and video artist Beryl Korot have an ambitious goal in mind–to create a modern myth that’s just as primal and relevant as the ancient antecedents that inspired it. The opera’s title is drawn from the biblical and Koranic stories in which the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron (located on the present-day West Bank) became the burial site of Abraham, Sarah, and their descendants....

NEVER COME MORNING Two generations of social evolution and technological progress have only exacerbated the cultural emptiness Wright described–the vast gulf between people’s physical and emotional needs and the junk they are forced to settle for, especially if they’re on the poor end of America’s ever more divided economic scale. Today, Never Come Morning (which was attacked when it came out as Nazi propaganda by the local Polish American establishment, whose complaints got the novel banned by the Chicago Public Library and made Algren the subject of an FBI investigation) seems at times almost quaint: a nearly obscenity-free depiction of an urban underclass not yet acquainted with the fast-paced thrills of crack, automatic assault weapons, and mass media that celebrate and enflame human beings’ most ruthless and selfish urges....

Trinity Irish Dance Company At one time, only boys wore the hard-soled boots that produce the tapping of such dances as the hornpipe and reel; they were too expensive for poor Irish families to provide their girls. But now, even at official Irish dance competitions, girls can and do wear such shoes. And so what we may think of as immutable traditional forms change as the circumstances that created them change....

TWO SMALL BODIES Using this criterion Neal Bell is an exceptionally talented playwright. His two-act psychosexual murder mystery, Two Small Bodies, is as cliched as they come. Eileen (Laurie Buck), a struggling cocktail waitress at a local strip club, wakes up one morning to find that her two young children are missing. Lieutenant Brann (Jim Rafalin), the hardened, predatorially sexual cop assigned to the case, quickly decides that the children are dead and that Eileen is the prime suspect....

IN THE EYE OF THE BEHOLDER More a series of events in one woman’s life than a true narrative, Eason’s one-hour show incorporates information from topical magazines and books (The Female Fear, The Beauty Myth, The Women’s History of the World) and the experiences of the cast and assistant director Heidi Stillman. Though it does offer a few statistics on wife beating, rape, and the salary gap between men and women, In the Eye of the Beholder keeps its personal feel by concentrating on the ordinary events that reveal larger societal patterns....

When Oscar Brown Jr. hit the scene more than 30 years ago, he hit it poised for stardom. A London newspaper hailed the Chicago resident as the heir apparent to Sammy Davis Jr. During the 60s he frequently appeared on TV talk shows–The Steve Allen Show, the Today show. His musicals appeared on Broadway. Kicks & Company, starring Burgess Meredith, ran on the Great White Way, as did his musical adaptation of Big Time Buck White starring Muhammad Ali....

FAREED HAQUE QUARTET Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I don’t think you can play the guitar much better than Fareed Haque. On both electric and classical instruments he strikes each note with perfect attack and timing no matter what the speed–and damn the genre. His music contains plenty of genres, from flamenco to jazz-rock fusion, Indian music to pure American finger-style blues, Middle Eastern wails to South American multitudinous rhythms....

If you are a hawk moth you pollinate an eastern prairie fringed orchid on a soft, warm night in early July by hovering in front of it and inserting your long proboscis past the sexual organs of the flower and deep into the long spur that hangs from the rear of the blossom. A pool of nectar as much as a centimeter deep awaits you there, and as you suck up the sugary syrup, the pollinium, the little packet of pollen in the flower, attaches itself to the side of your proboscis....

Hair Pacific Musical Theatre at the Athenaeum Theatre Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Directed by Dan Kern and punchily accompanied by an onstage band under Bobby Naffarette’s musical direction, this Hair is free of the flashy slickness that bloated the 20th-anniversary revival in 1988 at the Vic Theatre. Though Michael Butler, the Chicagoan who produced Hair on Broadway in 1968, produced both the Vic revival and the current one, this time around there are no lasers, video monitors, Vegas choreography, or Peter Pan flying effects....

** MY LIFE’S IN TURNAROUND (Worth seeing) Directed and written by Eric Schaeffer and Donal Lardner Ward With Schaeffer, Ward, Lisa Gerstein, Dana Wheeler Nicholson, Debra Clein, Sheila Jaffe, John Sayles, Martha Plimpton, Phoebe Cates, and Casey Siemaszko. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This state of affairs is partly the result of new definitions of “universality” developed by the studios over the past several years, which generally suppose that the ideal movie viewer has the taste and sensibility of a ten-year-old boy: think of the well-received Speed, Forrest Gump, and True Lies, for instance, none of which betrays a view of the adult world any more developed than those in The Lion King and The Mask....

The Magic City Festival’s target audience is families with young children, but no demographics are needed to define this brilliant artist’s appeal. Just as Cirque du Soleil (for whom Moschen has staged routines) has transformed the circus tradition into performance art, Moschen has reclaimed juggling from vaudeville corniness, reinventing it as exquisite, completely original movement theater. He doesn’t simply balance his spheres, illuminated hoops, and flaming torches but imbues them with a life of their own, partnering them balletically or guiding them as if by telekinesis....