It’s 11 on a Saturday morning in February, and the sky is a soiled white. Plenty of parking is still available just outside Triton College in River Grove, and station wagons are still being unloaded. In the basement, aisles marked by folding tables have been laid out for the first Black Heritage Expo. In the first aisle along the wall is a table with T-shirts, and another piled high with copies of In Search of Goodpussy: Living Without Love....

Alegria The players in Cirque aren’t superbeings. They’re as ordinary as the men and women sitting next to us. In fact, on one of its last pages the program invites the audience to audition for the show. Unlike photographer Joel-Peter Witkin, Cirque is searching not for freaks but for folks who want to develop their potential and have a “grand adventure.” It’s this ordinariness, which is never lost in the extraordinariness of the show, that makes Cirque du Soleil such terrific performance art....

This archive document contains both parts of this story, which ran on September 29, 1995 and October 6, 1995. This comment had been occasioned by the group of writers the Review was now publishing, whose supercharged language, uniquely American rhythms, and starkly personal themes set them in stark contrast to the mannered and bloodless heirs to modernism that populated the pages of most literary journals at the time. Many of these writers in the Review were bound by a connection–actual, invented, or imagined–to the city of San Francisco....

Nature Conservancy’s Beauty Myth Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Your Neighborhood News story (January 13, 1995) reminded me again of how naive are the Nature Conservancy members. The NC would apparently like to ban all people, including the taxpayers who bought and support the forests, and the rebel mountain bikers of TURF (to which I claim no association or allegiance), from the Cook County forest preserves so that the NC can pursue its goal of returning the forests to their condition before European settlement....

POETRY & MUSIC FROM THE GUILD COMPLEX Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This funky Bucktown event being presented at the tony North Shore venue is the equivalent of a hot item from the Knitting Factory being presented at Lincoln Center. Performance poetry, of course, has been championed for years by the Guild Complex; now, because that group’s offices are housed in Arts Bridge, an incubator for cultural groups that has ties with Ravinia, the city’s prominent literary arts center has been asked to present a sampler....

Hey, Faggot: Drawing attention to the illogic of her irrational oral-sex phobia probably won’t turn the trick, however: I’m guessing (hoping!) she already knows men pee with their dicks and she’s simply blurting out, “Why would any man want to put his mouth where I pee?” because what’s really going on in her head is far more complicated and harder to articulate. It probably goes like this: “I was taught by (a) my mother, (b) unreformed Catholic nuns, or (c) feminine-hygiene product commercials that women’s genitals are dirty and unattractive and that they should be scrubbed with Brillo pads, flushed with noxious chemicals, and stuffed with sterile paper products....

Anthony Gongora is a painter as well as a choreographer: he depicts the human figure in bright oils or watercolors. And in this program of solos, created over a period of several years, he’s painted portraits not so much of people as states of being. A solo from the 1990 Complexities reveals a bored neurotic, trapped on a stool amusing himself with a big red scarf; the 1991 Home Is Not in the Heart deals with homelessness....

TRULY 9/15, METRO This Seattle trio featuring former Soundgarden bassist Hiro Yamamoto and original Screaming Trees drummer Mark Pickerel could be a supergroup–if anyone had ever heard of them. On their debut album, Fast Stories…From Kid Coma (Capitol), these castoffs sleepwalk through the detritus of the postgrunge era, propping up riffs, licks, and sounds that you may well have heard before (on records by Nirvana, Dinosaur Jr, and Pond) with big production that includes overused swirling Mellotron and Wurlitzer textures....

Steppenwolf’s New Business Boss Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » After graduating from Notre Dame, Gennaro worked as an actor, appearing in various off-Broadway productions and national touring companies of shows as disparate as Godspell and Julius Caesar. He eventually turned from acting to law, earning a law degree from Fordham University and practicing as an entertainment attorney before moving into arts administration. After a couple years as general manager of a small regional theater company in New Brunswick, New Jersey, Gennaro became managing director at Ford’s Theatre, the site of Lincoln’s assassination and still one of D....

Vienna Choir Boys Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Long famous as a tourist attraction in their native land, the Vienna Choir Boys also serve as Austria’s globe-trotting goodwill ambassadors. At any given time two choruses of 24 boys each are on the road, while two more stay in Vienna, participating in weekly concerts with the Vienna Philharmonic and other ensembles. The government-subsidized school that trains these boys, who range in age from 10 to 14 (or until their voices break), also keeps in reserve about 100 more students....

You can stop looking for that check in the mail. Chances are it’s been dumped! Four Chicago mail carriers alone disposed of more than 2,100 pieces of deliverable mail this year. U.S. attorney spokesman Randall Samborn says statistics aren’t compiled yet for ’97, but he believes there may have been as many as 20 such cases by October. On the brighter side, Samborn also says “a couple dozen a year is normal....

It’s a dazzling, ear-opening feast of reason: director Andrew Callis continues his brilliant series of staged readings of lesser-known works by the fecund George Bernard Shaw (earlier pieces were The Doctor’s Dilemma and The Apple Cart). Shaw’s 1921 Back to Methusaleh–a five-act, eight-hour epic–is a tour de force he modestly called “my Ring,” but Shaw Chicago performs only acts one and five, with a running time of a little over two hours....

These two rather strange works by Jem Cohen, shot on film and shown on video, focus on normally neglected aspects of cities. We see some monuments but more often the side of a curb, some graffiti on a wall, or a tilted view of a seemingly random street. Cohen dedicates Lost Book Found (1996) to Walter Benjamin, who wrote on the anonymous fabric of large cities, and Ben Katchor, whose Julius Knipl comic strip’s surreal explorations of New York’s underside are echoed in Cohen’s story....

I wait in the alley behind the nursing home in my battered van with its liver spots of rust. It’s like a getaway car, engine puffing and side doors wide open, ready to whisk a guy I’ll call Willie to his new apartment. He wants to make his final exit from the nursing home through the alley delivery door, quickly and quietly, before anyone asks questions. Maybe slipping out the back adds to the drama for Willie....

“I was so bored in my hermetically sealed world that I couldn’t stand it,” says Karen Keane, describing her suburban childhood in Chicago Heights. So after graduating from the School of the Art Institute in 1982, she took off. “For most of the last 13 years I’ve been traveling. My life is going to study other cultures on extended stays.” She’s been to France, Slovakia, India, Thailand, Korea, and Nepal, but her longest stays have been in Japan....

There’s no better way to defrost the dead of winter than with percussionists Hamid Drake and Michael Zerang and the dreams they conjure of arid desert, beating sun, sweat, and sand. Drawing primarily on the warm sound of frame drums, which trace back to ancient Mesopotamia, they play earthy world music without new-age sentimentality. Pulse-driven and mesmerizing, their music sets up rhythmic cycles. One minute you’ll feel the two of them draw apart, generating independent patterns of surface taps and resonant bass tones with the pads of their fingers....

Jimmie Dale Gilmore Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Austin’s Jimmie Dale Gilmore is one ornery sumbitch. Thwarting the very real possibility of gaining a larger audience after the terrific, expansive Spinning Around the Sun, he waits three years to release the current Braver Newer World. When it arrives, turns out he’s swapped the gently burnished country rock of the previous album for a truly inside-out folk rock....

Although he served three years in Boston’s great pop failure Dumptruck and has played and/or recorded with, among others, Yo La Tengo, Syd Straw, Freedy Johnston, Pooh Sticks, and Miracle Legion, chances are you’ve never heard of Kevin Salem. That’s OK, he’s probably never heard of you either. But after a couple of listens to his impressive debut, Soma City (Roadrunner), you’ll be interested in getting familiar with him. A popster with an ax to grind, Salem evokes a wide variety of sources: imagine the hooks of Tommy Keene, early Tom Petty, and Matthew Sweet sung with a nasal Dylan-esque moan amid a chunky, aggressive guitar attack that suggests the loose, raw grooves of the Rolling Stones and the blustery soul-searching of Neil Young....

To the editor: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Mr. [Richard] Wexler’s suggestion that the Chicago Tribune’s coverage of child welfare issues has been motivated by a desire to aggrandize itself [“The Children’s Crusade,” March 24] is irresponsible. And Mr. Wexler’s allegation that the Tribune deliberately set out to dismantle family preservation programs is equally spurious. In fact, as Michael Miner admirably points out elsewhere in the issue [Hot Type], it is Mr....

Beate Minkovski acknowledges that some may be offended by “Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary,” an art exhibit about the Virgin Mary opening tonight at Woman Made Gallery. “We always do a show like this after the holidays because people need sobering up,” she says, citing last year’s self-explanatory offering, “Holy Baloney.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Though “sacrilege” may be the first word that comes to mind when viewing some of the artwork, Minkovski says the most appropriate term to describe the exhibit is “honesty,” citing the oft-mentioned truism that if Mary were to give birth to Jesus today she’d be condemned as an unwed teenage mother....