THE TIME OF YOUR LIFE Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The wrong director can make The Time of Your Life corny, preachy, and smug. But the right director–and Frank Farrell is one of them–can give this gem a thousand facets. Raven Theatre’s revival offers renewed cause to do and see theater–a fitting achievement for a company noted for its heartfelt productions of vintage American playwrights like Tennessee Williams, Preston Jones, Arthur Miller, and Thornton Wilder....

When Maasai warrior Ole Tome Nemarrau first came to the United States from Kenya in 1993, it was the first time he’d seen snow, skyscrapers, or television. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It’s a nomadic society with an oral tradition; there are no written words, days of the week, calendars, or clocks. “In Western society you have watches,” he says. “In our society, the sun comes up and you go through the day....

A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM The Woodstock trappings (including selections from the movie sound track) are actually the show’s least convincing components. Despite all the tie-dyes and bell-bottoms and long hair and love beads, these young actors have no real feel for the hippie sensibility. Nor does the play support a late-60s style: an important part of the story is the heroine Hermia’s determination to remain a virgin until marriage, and sexual abstinence was not exactly the rage at Woodstock....

Blur is the most intelligent of the current crop of British bands; where imports like Bush or Oasis proffer that bottom-heavy rock the kids like these days, Blur’s singer-songwriter, Damon Albarn, places himself firmly in the tradition of social-pop tunesmiths like the Kinks’ Ray Davies. Albarn’s efficient mimicry of pop styles and ready ability to adopt the pose of a British eccentric give the music depth and have earned him a lot of critical respect at home; for just those reasons, it’s not hard to see why Blur’s been greeted with little more than yawns from the non-Anglophile community stateside....

Until recently, “family preservation” had a very specific meaning. It usually was preceded by “intensive” and it referred to programs that rigorously followed the rules set down by the first intensive family preservation program, Homebuilders in Washington State. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Family preservation workers combine traditional counseling and parent education with a strong emphasis on providing “hard” services to ameliorate the worst aspects of poverty....

By Tori Marlan The coalition was formed after Horizons Community Services, an organization that had been providing services for gay men and lesbians since 1973, noticed a steady increase in domestic-violence calls to its Anti-Violence Project crisis line–which had been set up primarily to help victims of hate crimes. The project only began documenting the nature of the calls in 1991, but according to Jerri Lynn Fields, the project director, domestic-violence calls had been coming in since day one....

Lorraine Moskal plugs in one of the giant Christmas figurines on the counter of her store. The two-foot-tall caroler, towering over the ceramic animals and music boxes that crowd around his feet, swings into action as “Greensleeves” begins to chime from deep within his bowels. His head moves a little to one side and pauses, then a metallic grinding begins to compete with the music. Lorraine quickly switches him off and starts another, a maniacally grinning elf....

Over the past 13 years the Atlanta-based cable access American Music Show–best known, if at all, as the show that spawned RuPaul and Wigstock impresario Lady Bunny–has mixed the trash sensibilities of disco with a surreal, subversive wit and biting social satires of southern culture. The result is a show that transcends camp, in which drag performers, like the outrageously over-the-top DeAundra Peek (on the far left in the above picture), are more than guys who get laughs by wearing dresses....

By Susan DeGrane Ship ballast has also been known to carry strains of cholera and cryptosporidium, a microbial parasite that can be fatal to humans and that’s thought to have caused 104 deaths in Milwaukee. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Only about 35 fishermen, bait-shop owners, and a few concerned citizens are at today’s rally, but Perch America is gaining strength, with 300 members in Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin....

The new album by saxophonist Johnny Griffin, Chicago, New York, Paris (Verve), celebrates his 50th year playing jazz by offering stylistic representations of the three major cities he’s lived and worked in. It sets out to collect blues-based material from Chicago, bebop from New York, and ballads from Paris, yet no half-baked concept can long suppress Griffin’s line-blurring enthusiasm. His earliest playing was drenched in bar-walking R & B pyrotechnics, especially when he honked with raucous bandleader Joe Morris, and he’s always retained that gritty sound, blending it with a blustery, rough-hewn bop modernism and consistently warm lyricism....

A few years back I met a journalist from Accra, Ghana, who told me he danced every day. Where? I asked, thinking of health clubs, nightclubs, maybe churches. He said he danced at home, with his children. Some African Americans try to reconstruct that way of life, a means of keeping their traditions alive through actions–telling stories, dancing, playing music. The idea is to live the heritage: African music and dance are life-giving, as vital as the heartbeats on which the drumbeats are based....

Under one of the starkest monikers in rock, Mark Edwards has been making bracing, powerful music for almost a decade, yet even modest fame and fortune have eluded the Cleveland native. Since MDID’s earliest records were distinguished by dark, droning music, despondent, emotionally naked lyrics, and Edwards’s sepulchral baritone, which sounds uncannily like that of the late Ian Curtis, many mistakenly wrote off the band as Joy Division wanna-bes. However, The Taller You Are, the Shorter You Get, an astoundingly well-crafted and intense 1989 double album encompassing acoustic folk, lilting pop, and pummeling guitar rock, established Edwards as a multifaceted songwriter whose work was anything but derivative....

Lead Story In July the former mayor of the 1980s cult-dominated town of Rajneeshpuram, Oregon, said in court that he’d used various schemes to keep people who weren’t affiliated with the cult from voting, including tampering with the food at a restaurant to make them sick and coating courthouse doorknobs with a chemical irritant as election day approached. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » New Rights...

Oasis Vic, March 19 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Oasis extend a long line of British pop bands possessing built-in obsolescence. Most of the band’s press has revolved around the volatile relationship between autocrat Noel Gallagher, who plays lead guitar, writes and arranges all the songs, and sings backup vocals, and the lead singer, his pretty-boy brother Liam, who follows Noel’s instructions, placing the snarl-laden whine of John Lydon within classically structured pop tunes....

DAVID DORFMAN DANCE Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It seemed everyone in the theater, not just the friends and relatives of the 24 mostly young area athletes who performed Out of Season, liked this work: there’s something fresh, clean, and uncomplicated about athletics despite the not-so-noble competition and aggression. Dorfman doesn’t ignore these–the piece opens with audience plants loudly insisting “I could do that!...

It’s a truism in the food business that we feast with our eyes before our palates; everyone knows presentation strongly influences the way we respond to a meal. In olden days presentation involved fancy china, silverware, and napery, plus ornate displays of serving dishes on the sideboard. By the era of nouvelle cuisine–late 60s, early 70s–chefs began to create artistic presentations on the plate itself, arranging the food just so, and even “painting” it with thickened sauces of various colors....

That Year’s Model Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Elvis Costello cemented his reputation–and for all intents and purposes ended his artistic career–nine years ago by releasing, just months apart, King of America and Blood & Chocolate. The latter was a late blast from the Attractions, the violent trio who backed Costello from This Years Model on. Impressive at the time as a reassertion of his rock prowess, it now seems a bit light....

Gee, I was doing my laps fine until Car Talk came on and I swallowed a gallon of water. Hammacher Schlemmer’s spring catalog lists a miniature “water-resistant personal radio [with earphones] that you can actually wear while you swim, still enjoying your favorite FM radio station in the water.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » And only scripts with a minimum level of irony will be considered for production there....

Trib Board: Just a Bunch of Regular Guys It’s surprising that the Cubs didn’t make a lot more of this paltry figure. Fans can relate to modest six-figure incomes. Regular-guy moguls get those. It’s the kind of situation Walter Jacobson likes to go undercover and root around in–a regular guy trying to run a big-league baseball team on only $375,000 a year. “I’m cold and I’m hungry,” we can hear Jacobson moaning....

American Ballet Theatre Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » There are few pas de deux more romantic than the two ABT plucked from Swan Lake, choreographed by Marius Petipa and Lev Ivanov in 1895. In the first the White Swan, Princess Odette, who’s been changed into a swan by the evil sorcerer Rothbart and can only become human for a brief period at midnight, dances with Prince Siegfried, who discovers her at this hour....