Setting poetry to music is no mean feat, and things get even riskier when the music is breezy dance pop and the poetry is erotic free verse. Undertaken with the participation of Erica Jong, who provides a languorous reading of her poem “Smoke,” Vanessa Daou’s Zipless–as in fuck, natch–(released last year by Daou and her husband-arranger-producer Peter Daou on their Lotus label and recently rereleased by MCA) manages to overcome these odds....

Waiting for the Dough Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A year ago Splinter cast 18 actors in The Investigation, to be presented that April and May to school groups and the general public. According to Gary Alexander, a member of the cast who took a lead role in helping everyone get paid, each actor got a contract that spelled out the basic terms of employment....

ANGELS IN AMERICA Steven M.L. Aronson: Is there anything you’re still afraid of, aside from the things we’re all afraid of like death? Written, like the books of the Bible, in response to a sense of apocalyptic political and spiritual upheaval, Angels in America is a prayer for more life in a world overrun by death. From his own perspective as a gay man who’s seen extraordinary suffering–and who knows many others around the globe have seen and endured far worse–Kushner casts a visionary gaze on a “ruined paradise” beset by AIDS, plague, war, genocide, and environmental destruction....

At Sharon’s Place of Beauty the women sitting in plastic caps under cone-shaped hair dryers occasionally peek over the tops of their magazines to take in the scene. The salon’s decorations are unremarkable: a few mirrors, a handwritten “customers only” notice posted above the pay phone, and a brown sign with gold lettering that reads “We Are Beauticians Not Magicians.” But packed in around the lemon yellow barber’s chairs are teenage boys, smoking cigarettes and talking noisily....

Mezzo-soprano Constance Beavon was an art historian before she switched careers, and at this free Art Institute recital titled “In Harmony With Silence” she uses her expertise to highlight musical contributions to the French symbolist movement (which also inspired the painter Odilon Redon, who’s currently the subject of a comprehensive exhibit at the museum). The symbolists called for a unity of literature, philosophy, art, and music, and its practitioners–including the poet Mallarme, a key leader of the movement–were fascinated with faraway places and dreamlike, phantasmal images drawn from science and mysticism....

Patty Loveless By Chris Varias Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Patty Loveless is one of the few radio stars who doesn’t deserve to be dismissed. Not only does she have a delivery as emotive as any crooner working today, she knows what to do with it. Teaming up with her husband, the revered producer and Nashville player Emory Gordy Jr., who has contributed to such landmark albums as Gram Parsons’s Grievous Angel and Steve Earle’s Guitar Town, the pair form a song-crafting machine, plucking better-than-average material from songwriters and sending it up the charts....

At this point in his not-so-long but oh-so-controversial career, tenor saxophonist David Murray invites you to pick and choose. The most widely recorded jazzman of his generation, Murray appears on CDs with his big band and octet, as guest soloist with other big bands, with the World Saxophone Quartet (which he cofounded), and with a variety of different sidemen in small-group contexts. For me, the best format in which to hear Murray remains the smallest: his duo with the Chicago percussion shaman Kahil El’Zabar....

Bathe Me, Doctor Faustus By Justin Hayford Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » If Doorika ever needed a ghost writer they’d probably channel the spirit of Gertrude Stein: like her, they’re fascinated by rhetorical dissociation. Their performances seem designed to exasperate, with their strings of non sequiturs and their curious gestures repeated again and again, all of them headed nowhere in particular. Often it seems impossible to “see through” Doorika’s stage action to the “meaning” behind it....

Freakwater knows it takes more than a pedal steel guitar, a big belt buckle, and a broken heart to make country music. Over the last decade Freakwater’s Catherine Irwin and Janet Beveridge Bean have mastered old-fashioned hillbilly music’s essentials: poignant storytelling, ruggedly congenial musicianship, and an appreciation for life’s endless struggles, basic pleasures, and brief duration. With their recently released fourth record, Old Paint, they’ve created another rustic gem that stands as the band’s moodiest, most thoughtful effort to date....

Ironmistress Halcyone Productions at Heartland Studio Theatre Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This production is definitely pleasurable, in part because it’s honest. I’m not even that keen on the Ironmistress script, and this still qualifies as the most satisfying theater experience of 1994 for me. Ironmistress, a rather odd one-act, offers an impressionistic portrait of a real figure from the 19th century. Martha Darby is a middle-aged, upper-class British woman who owns and operates a steel mill circa 1840....

On a cold day in November Mark Dawson stood outside the Western Avenue elevated station and distributed fliers warning riders of a CTA proposal to close the Ravenswood line in 1996 for a two-year rehabilitation project. Residents and riders didn’t know the CTA had plans for the line until late 1991. That was when a secret CTA memo was leaked saying that the agency was considering permanently shutting down the Green Line because it would be too expensive to repair....

Lead Story A researcher concluded in the July issue of the European Journal of Physics that the torque of an average piece of buttered toast falling off a table of average height causes “an inevitable butter-down final state [hitting the floor].” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » According to a July Associated Press story, Ellie Jenkins, of the Mosquito Control Commission in Savannah, Georgia, spends her workdays driving around to specified locations, standing with her arms and legs spread, and ascertaining how many bites a minute she receives–five a minute is the threshold to summon county spraying trucks....

Lead Story Reading, Pennsylvania, fire department official Michael J. Moyer was suspended for a day without pay last October 12 for having violated a directive not to drive his department car in the town’s Labor Day parade. Moyer wasn’t paid that day for his regular 8 to 6 shift, but the person called in to replace him had to be paid overtime. Moreover, regulations required that person to give up his own subsequent shift, and the person who filled it, also paid overtime, was Moyer–who thus earned $313 for his day’s work instead of the $155 he would have made had he not been suspended....

The Pakistani-born Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan is regarded as the greatest living exponent of qawwali, the devotional music of the mystical Sufi strain of Islam in southern Asia. Working with an ensemble of tabla drums, reed organ, and handclapping chorus, Nusrat sings the various lyrics of the Sufi devotional repertoire, which uses the images and ideas of romantic love as an analogy for religious experience. As the rhythm builds, the emotional pitch of the performance grows more intense, encouraging the faithful to lose themselves in the oceanic immensity of God’s will....

The Scholars of Cambrai, one of the better local a cappella choruses, live up to their name with this exhaustively researched program on music and politics in Renaissance Florence. The political life of that city in the 15th and 16th centuries, of course, revolved around the scheming Medici clan, who, as it turned out, also had a taste for music. It was the Medicis who imported Franco-Flemish composers to liven up the local music scene and to enhance their own prestige among the nobility of Italy, and some of the family even indulged in music making themselves....

Department of tact. Graham Grady, the city’s new building commissioner, who wants to increase city demolitions of abandoned buildings from 751 last year to more than 1,200 this year: “Contrary to stereotype, I think most city employees are basically good people who are capable of quality work. But there are some knuckleheads” (Chicago Enterprise, March/April). Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » You have reached the foundation....

There were many serious errors in Mike Miner’s [February 17] article “The Anti-Cult Candidate” on my campaign against abuses of power of all forms and for the job of mayor of Chicago. One point on which Mike is utterly correct, however, is the manipulation of “news” in Chicago by power groups who rarely, if at all, have the best interests of the people in mind. Unfortunately, rather than truly explaining my Safe Haven programs to your readers, Mike too had his own agenda as he freely admits....

ROMEO AND JULIET Footsteps Theatre Company Director Jean Adamak easily avoids this trap with her all-female cast. By requiring women to interact romantically–even sexually–with other women she breaks the romantic stereotypes every actor brings to this play. So Romeo and Juliet’s first meeting is played as a thrilling flirtation, rather than as the first meeting of the two greatest lovers in history–which is more genuine. Their kiss might not be anything more than that....

A young Moroccan woman who returns from Paris to her ancient hometown of Fez to see her dying father is unexpectedly pulled back toward Islam. “Am I in the 15th century or the 20th?” Nadia writes her French boyfriend, but when he visits she no longer wants to see him. Farida Ben Lyazid’s script evenhandedly acknowledges the competing influences on Nadia and the other characters, establishing that their lives are a mix of external forces and their own choices....

“She wandered off in death as she often had in life, without much consultation, staking out new territory with a theme clear only to her wrapped in a mantle of mystery.” There was indeed a kind of mystery about Joy Darrow, as her husband remembered in his tribute at her memorial. (It’s quoted above.) Not the mystery of the usual kind—of secrecy and withdrawal. Rather, it was the mystery of her extraordinary openness and hospitality, her almost preternatural availability....