Gambling on the Green Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The result is a two-and-a-half-hour amalgam of high-energy music and dance presented with lush lighting and evocative backdrops. A huge hit in both Ireland and London, where it enjoyed long runs, Riverdance received scant attention in the U.S. until it had eight performances last March at New York’s Radio City Music Hall. That engagement quickly sold out after it drew raves from the ordinarily jaded New York critics....

Journalism 101 At first glance the students’ position was baffling. After all, they staffed a citywide daily newspaper and the only TV station in town. Here was a story they understood in their bones like no story they were likely to cover in their professional careers. They wanted to make a statement with pickets, but they could say so much more by being journalists! Best of Chicago voting is live now....

LIMBO TALES Limbo Tales, a collection of three monologues, typifies Jenkin’s sensibility. The characters seem forever trapped in moments of transition, waiting for some event that seems unlikely to occur. In the opening piece, “Highway,” an assistant professor of anthropology (J. Michael Brennan) drives along a highway in the middle of the night, racing toward his girlfriend’s house an hour away. He’s worked himself into a state because he thought he heard something funny in her voice when they spoke earlier on the phone....

Women’s pictures seem to flourish in countries where economic transformation has jolted the patriarchal social order. In the U.S. the Great Depression ushered in a wave of tearjerkers starring Bette Davis and Joan Crawford; between the world wars in Japan, with the modernization of the economy and the revamping of rigid Confucian thought, the plight of women came under the sympathetic scrutiny of directors such as Mizoguchi and Naruse. Similar transitions have since taken place in Taiwan, South Korea, and most recently China, yielding a bumper crop of melodramas centered on the fate of suffering or rebellious heroines....

This file ain’t big enough for the both of us, I reckon. “The idea of a vast, open territory has led some to compare cyberspace with the American frontier of a hundred years ago,” write Richard Klau and Erik Heels in the Chicago-based Student Lawyer (October). “On the one hand, there is no law–as of yet–in cyberspace. Rules, to the extent that there are any, are established by the same people who might just as easily break them....

Non-Dances for Dancers and Dances for Non-Dancers at Link’s Hall, February 16 and 17 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » When Link’s Hall asked Shineflug to do a joint performance with Jeff Abell as part of its “Strange Bedfellows” series, they decided to take some risks. Abell would write monologues for dancers in which they would talk but not move, and Shineflug would create dances for people who weren’t normally dancers; their friends and colleagues would perform....

JOSEPH HOLMES CHICAGO DANCE THEATRE at the Dance Center of Columbia College, February 4-6 None of the hooks worked for me. Because I grew up in a small town, Marvin Gaye’s music was not part of my life; as a result Medley meant almost nothing to me except some dance pyrotechnics. Holmes’s dances seemed dated. The Long Road, for instance, uses a heroin addict, a middle-aged woman abandoned by her lover, and a woman in poverty to illustrate the range of women’s grief; this prefeminist piece offers a remarkably stereotyped vision of women....

*** SAVAGE NIGHTS Directed by Cyril Collard Written by Collard and Jacques Fieschi With Collard, Romane Bohringer, Carlos Lopez, Corine Blue, Claude Winter, Denis D’Archangelo, and Jean-Jacques Jauffret. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A related quandary presents itself with Savage Nights (an adequate though incomplete translation of the original French title, Les nuits fauves), written by, partially scored by, directed by, and starring a bisexual musician/composer/filmmaker who died of AIDS a little more than a year ago....

FIRE IN THE LADIES’ LOUNGE! at the Blue Rider Theatre, June 4 Katherine Boyd began the evening with her most polished, most clearly articulated piece to date. As we sat in darkness we heard the sound of hammering; then the lights came up and went down on a reclining odalisque with a bull’s-eye on her back (Julie Laffin), up at least half a story on a platform above the stage....

CAPTIVE Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » After Jessica lures mild-mannered Arthur to their pad we discover just how twisted this couple have become. A marketing executive who abandoned poetry to pursue a vice-presidency, Arthur is stuck in a corporate rut, but he gets the change he needs. Waving a gun (containing blanks), Jessica and Bill tie him up and tell him he’s the cure for their endangered sex life....

David Kilgour is quite simply one of the best purveyors of tuneful guitar pop to record since the advent of punk. His first band, the Clean, kick-started New Zealand’s underground music scene in 1981 when its first single, “Tally Ho!,” recorded at a cost of $50, topped that country’s charts for weeks without any radio play. Kilgour defined the band’s sound with three attributes: his singing, which effortlessly ranges from insouciant ennui to aching melancholy; his guitar playing, which encompasses a giddy rhythmic attack, brisk acoustic strumming, and explosive solo excursions that betray influences as diverse as Gram Parsons, Jimi Hendrix, the Velvet Underground, and the Beach Boys; and most of all his gift for writing simple, elegant, indelible melodies....

Downtown Chicago just got a little scarier. Besides the latest Loop rapist, now you can also be assaulted by inanimate objects. “Ultimately what you’re concerned about is the force that’s generated when object hits skull,” says Slavsky. “You’ve got an object that’s falling, so it has momentum. It falls on your head. Your head will exert a force on that object to change its momentum. Conversely, that object exerts an equal and opposite force on your head....

The No Fishing signs appeared around the lagoon on the landfill at Northwestern sometime in the late 1980s. The university brought in a dredger and a contractor to remove silt and generally upgrade the lagoon, which connects to Lake Michigan at its north and south ends. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » When the dredging and upgrading was completed a couple years later, the No Fishing signs stayed up....

Like Chaplin and Keaton, Hong Kong’s Jackie Chan espouses a chivalrous, almost puritanical attitude toward the opposite sex: women are chaste naifs to be protected and humored; more often than not, they’re consigned to the sideline to cheer on the nimble Chan and his kung fu comrades as they battle villainy. But in this 1992 installment of the Police Story series, also known as Supercop, Chan’s detective character teams up with a woman who can match him karate chop for karate chop, a lady cop from mainland China played by formidable martial-arts champ Michelle Yeaoh....

On June 10, 1942, Nazi soldiers surrounded the Czechoslovakian village of Lidice. They killed the men outright–192 of them–and sent the women to Ravensbruck concentration camp. Of the 105 children in the village all but a handful were murdered; these few, with Aryan features, were reserved for adoption by Germans. The Nazis reduced the buildings to rubble and carted the rubble away. Then they set to work on the land itself, leveling old hills and forming new ones, uprooting trees in one place and planting them in another, even changing the flow of a nearby river....

RUDRESH MAHANTHAPPA QUINTET Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The alto saxist Rudy Mahanthappa dedicates one piece on his debut CD to the dual influence of Ornette Coleman and Steve Coleman. In fact, though, the entire album makes clear that both Colemans (not related) have left their mark on Mahanthappa. His more open-ended improvisations benefit from the pan-tonal perspective of Ornette; on the other hand, his angular contours and top-of-the-beat rhythms bubble up out of the hip-bop cauldron of the spirited M-Base bands led by the other Coleman, with whom Mahanthappa has studied....

Hey, Faggot: Any advice would be graciously appreciated. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I got in touch with two experts on your behalf: Marcy Bloom of the Aradia Women’s Health Center in Seattle, and Nancy Jordyce, an Ob/Gyn in private practice in the lovely state of New Mexico. If it’s a physical problem: “There are surgical procedures, but they’re drastic. Any surgical procedure should be viewed as a last resort,” says Bloom....

JAZZ DANCE WORLD CONGRESS A few nights later, at Northwestern’s Pick-Staiger Concert Hall, Kitti did a very different kind of dance. Jazz pianist Viro Rantala, performing onstage, provided intricate, swinging cascades of notes, and Kitti transformed the jazz-dance vocabulary, accenting yet softening such details as the high, hunched shoulders, the sinuous lateral curves. Distilling its asymmetrical, dynamic yet cool essence, he made it look like something else, something unfamiliar. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

If you think county government is clean, you haven’t done any scrubbing lately. County Clerk David Orr: “Cook County government spent about $1.84 billion in 1992, but lobbyists claimed they spent only $118,263 to influence decisions. Seventy-seven percent (77%) of this total was reported by Common Cause and Chicago Metro Ethics Coalition, two reform groups who listed their entire organization’s budgets.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Clinton Administration betrayals are not our biggest worry–we expected those,” writes Chicago Coalition for New Priorities director Elissa Bassler in the New Priorities Voice (Winter)....

In the southern Illinois town of Marion, an octogenarian recalls the arrival of the Italian armada of 24 Savoia Marchetti S. 55X hydroplanes at Chicago’s Century of Progress on July 15, 1933. He was a 21-year-old clarinetist with the Jefferson Barracks (Saint Louis) Sixth Infantry band stationed in Chicago for the exposition. For months his band had alternated with its Fort Sheridan counterpart in escorting distinguished visitors and Chicago politicians onto the grounds....