ALICE IN WONDERLAND Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is probably one of the most analyzed works of juvenile literature in the Western world. In the 1960s readers focused on the hallucinogenic drugs the shy mathematics professor/author must have taken to achieve his flights of fancy. In the 1970s they turned to possible pedophiliac elements of the author’s character. In the 1980s it was his heroine’s turn to be scrutinized, as scholars looked for traces of feminism....

If you’ve ever heard flumpeter Art Farmer, you probably don’t need encouragement to go hear him again: he still concocts ballad improvisations that seem to have arrived airmail from heaven, and he once again strolls the bebop boulevards at the brisk tempos of his youth. (The “flumpet,” by the way, is an unfortunately named hybrid of the trumpet and the mellower flugelhorn.) But the presence of Geoff Keezer serves as an additional blandishment....

When he first moved to New York City from his home state of Kansas, songwriter Freedy Johnston landed a job as a truck driver, delivering Italian ice. But his eyesight is poor, and he’s a lousy driver. He quickly perpetrated a series of traffic accidents and was soon fired. “I’m much better off in my new job,” he says. “No danger of running someone over with my guitar.” Best of Chicago voting is live now....

The death of a police officer evokes strong feelings among members of the law enforcement community, judges included. Any tendency to bend the rules of evidence in favor of conviction, however, can and must be resisted. –Illinois Supreme Court justice William Clark, dissenting from the court’s 1988 affirmation of Manuel Salazar’s conviction and sentence The Illinois appellate defender’s office is now making a final attempt to persuade the state supreme court to reverse Salazar’s conviction, largely on the grounds that his trial lawyer was ineffective....

East Texas Hot Links The play puts American racism under a microscope by taking us into the lives of eight people in a “colored only” bar. Struggling for survival in Klan country raises questions they answer with the trial and error of their lives. XL Dancer, played with fierce intensity by Michael Williams, looks out for himself alone, remaining loyal to the white employer who baits him with dreams of becoming a supervisor....

HOSANNA Theatre Praxis Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The play covers the late-night aftermath of a disastrous costume party: the cross-dressing Hosanna’s elaborate Cleopatra costume, on which he’d worked for weeks, was an object of ridicule. Further streaking Hosanna’s mascara is live-in boyfriend Cuirette, who continues mocking the costume after the party and boasting about his sexual conquests. In their seedy apartment, illuminated by the flashing neon lights of a pharmacy sign, they argue and throw things to avoid thinking about the fact that they’re getting old....

In Utero: A Womb With a View Godzilla meets Mothra in the new Musician, which has an excerpt from Michael Azerrad’s Come as You Are, a Nirvana bio. “I don’t feel like embarrassing Kurt by talking about what a psycho hose-beast his wife is, especially because he knows it already,” remarks In Utero producer Steve Albini. Respondeth Courtney Love: “The only way Steve Albini would think I was the perfect girlfriend would be if I was from the East Coast, played the cello, had big tits and small hoop earrings, wore black turtlenecks, had all matching luggage and never said a word....

JBTV–the locally produced weekly music video show–is about to find itself with competition in the form of a new program, Sound & Vision, partially produced by the well-connected (and financially imposing) Jam Productions. But that’s only a distraction at this critical juncture in JBTV’s evolution; co-owner Michael Harnett is more concerned with plans to turn the show into a 24-hour video channel. How are Harnett and his partners–David Gariano and eponym Jerry Bryant–going to do it?...

Lead Story Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » U.S. representative David Funderburk pleaded no contest to a minor traffic charge in Dunn, North Carolina, in October, even though he denied that he was behind the wheel when his car crossed the center line and caused an oncoming van to veer off the road and overturn. Witnesses said Funderburk drove away after the accident but returned several minutes later in the passenger seat, with his wife driving....

Lead Stories Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Contest mania: In August a federal appeals court in Saint Louis forced Nationwide Insurance Company to award an ex-employee who won a slogan contest “his and hers” Mercedes-Benzes despite the company’s claim that it was just kidding about offering the cars as prizes. And in July David Lee filed a lawsuit against the Cafe Santa Fe in Rogers, Arkansas, after it denied him a Jet Ski because he failed to write a reason why he liked a certain menu item on his prizewinning entry form....

Pavement Vic, May 23 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Maybe it’s a guy thing. Every male critic under 35 seems to have weighed in with a Grand Theory of Why Pavement Is God at some time or other. Pavement’s songwriter, Stephen Malkmus, is the ultimate Zen X hero: by not trying too hard and having reluctantly acquired that underground mystique, he’s attained a level of coolness that Details subscribers can only dream about....

Chicago Jazz Festival Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The lineup for the second night of the jazz festival looked promising. Opening the evening would be the Chicago-based George Freeman Quartet, a bop-rooted group featuring the leader’s biting and lyrical electrical guitar sounds and his better-known brother Von, a towering tenor saxophonist, on piano. They’d be followed by another local group, singer Jackie Allen and her trio (piano, bass, and drums), who move nimbly between jazz and cabaret styles....

SCHOOLHOUSE ROCK LIVE! The original Schoolhouse Rock, if you’ll remember, consisted of numerous two- to three-minute animated cartoons scattered throughout the Saturday-morning lineup, sometimes appearing between shows, other times jostling with a crowd of commercials. Each cartoon featured a clever original pop song that drove home some basic concept of math, English, history, or science: the threes column on the multiplication table (“Three is a magic number”) or the definition of a noun (“A noun is a person, place, or thing”)....

JINSKY PINSKY–A NIGHT IN TIGHTS With Jinsky Pinsky–A Night in Tights, Buckley works similar magic with three dancers who are well-known to Chicago audiences: Carrie Hanson, Lauren F. Helfand, and Christy Munch. They have to handle a lot of dialogue and dramatic scenes. In fact their dancing abilities become secondary as they bash their way through this extraordinarily demanding physical comedy, which leaves them literally gasping for breath on more than one occasion....

SHANNEN DOHERTY SHOOTS A PORNO: A SHOCKUMENTARY Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I thought I’d be left to privately and loftily dismiss Torso once again, but no. Did Torso think it could pick and choose its press? I was asked. Torso seems to delight in breaking rules onstage, and it was suggested to me that I should disregard their rules and go review them anyway....

THE MERCHANT OF VENICE Turning the sprawling Goodman stage into a TV studio, nearly bare except for a few set pieces and a plethora of video monitors (the empty space’s hugeness is emphasized by the long, looming shadows James F. Ingalls’s lighting casts on the vast white backdrop), Sellars resets Shakespeare’s story from Renaissance Italy to present-day California. The Jewish moneylender Shylock, the play’s most challenging and compelling character–a compendium of wounded vulnerability, caustic wit, and vicious anti-Semitic stereotypes about ritual murder and coldhearted usury, who’s been variously depicted as melodramatic monster, eccentric clown, noble hero, and fanatic madman–is played by African American actor Paul Butler as an impassive, conservatively dressed businessman....

I read that cocaine is cut with strychnine, arsenic, or other substances to stretch the volume for increased profits. I can understand milk sugar in heroin, but why these deadly poisons? Do they accelerate the effect of the drug or what? –Max Buscher, Cambridge, Massachusetts Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Dunno, but they sure scare the pants off potential users, which is maybe why strychnine and other poisons figure so prominently in media and medical reports of the dangers of drugs....

Dear Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Perhaps Chicago cartoonist Chris Ware never fully developed a sense of object permanence. His Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth comic strip, which appears regularly in New City, depicts a world of continuous creation, where people are dead one week and alive the next, where past encounters between characters bear no relevance to their present situations, where personal history generally extends back no farther than a few minutes....

Lynn Book As the audience enters Randolph Street’s performance space, Book seems to be in some sort of opium daze, or perhaps she’s portraying her character as drunk, feverish, or dying–it isn’t quite clear at first. Her eyes glaze and cross; she blinks rapidly and makes an effort to focus elsewhere, but her eyes cross again, and she tries to focus again. Watching her is uncomfortable–it’s as though we’ve entered a fairy tale, have accidentally walked into the secret room of an invalid/monster usually kept locked away....

What started in the early 80s as a loose-knit collection of street performers has turned into a multimillion-dollar international enterprise; but in its last Chicago engagement, the 1993 run of Saltimbanco, Montreal’s Cirque du Soleil showed no sign of corporate–or corporal–sluggishness. That production boasted the same brilliance, energy, and youthful invention that dazzled in the troupe’s 1989 and 1991 appearances; and memories of those shows whet the appetite for next week’s opening of Alegria (a Spanish word meaning joy)....