“There is no soil on vacant lots in Chicago,” Elizabeth Tyler told a food conference last month at Northeastern Illinois University, speaking from her experience as supervisor of the Green Chicago community-garden program of the Chicago Botanic Garden. “Our lots grow rubble. We always have to haul in soil.” But once that is done, she says community gardeners in town have successfully grown crops as seemingly exotic as sorghum, peanuts, and cotton....

What happened to the astronauts after the Challenger explosion? Everyone assumes they were blown to pieces, but about six months after the accident I saw an article saying the emergency oxygen systems for the astronauts had been manually activated, meaning some or all of them had survived the explosion. I also remember the tanks had 3-5 minutes of usage, meaning they were breathing for at least as long as it took to fall....

The Trial of One Short-Sighted Black Woman vs. Mammy Louise and Safreeta Mae, ETA Creative Arts Foundation. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Marcia L. Leslie’s political play about racial stereotypes and their history, given the form of a passionate if somewhat predictable courtroom drama, speaks to a neglected audience: black women. A struggling black businesswoman is suing the all-giving, malleable Mammy Louise and her sex-kitten daughter Safreeta Mae because their stereotypes hobble her progress....

BAUBO PERFORMANCE PROJECT FESTIVAL OF NEW WORK Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I love this story. First, it reminds me that comedy is the child of sorrow and loss. Second, there is nothing more mysterious, and hence nothing funnier, than our own bodies. And third, the end of the story runs counter to all my cultural expectations about the proper time to mention the vulva–either not at all, or in a strictly sexual, if not pornographic, context....

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED FINAL DAYS British director Steven Berkoff penned this ritualistic, updated, highly physical adaptation of Aeschylus’ tragedy about the Trojan War hero murdered by his vengeful wife. Dale Goulding’s taut, well-cast staging suggests both archaic ritual and absurdist anarchy by juxtaposing the poetic text with enigmatic, eloquent passages of mime, dance, and martial-arts movement. Agamemnon captures a sense of moral outrage as well as the sheer fascination of one of mythology’s most enduring horror tales....

This exciting existentialist road movie by Monte Hellman, with a sharp script by Rudolph Wurlitzer and Will Corry has my favorite Warren Oates performance and looks even better now than it did in 1971, though it was pretty interesting back then as well. James Taylor and Dennis Wilson are the drivers of a supercharged ’55 Chevy, and Oates is the owner of a new GTO (these nameless characters are in fact identified only by the cars they drive)....

By John Corbett Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Over the course of his 70 years, Gilles Deleuze created a unique body of work, much of it written in conjunction with collaborators like Claire Parnet or Felix Guattari. Such tandem tracts as Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus (both of which bear the suggestive subtitle “Capitalism and Schizophrenia”) were conceived and written as duets, ensemble works that forced the individual thinkers to surrender themselves to the process of writing together....

Valley of Abraham I think the most important intellectual discovery I’ve made in the past year came from the early pages of Eric Hobsbawm’s The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914-1991. In a way, it’s an observation so obvious that I wonder why it never occurred to me before: “Unlike the ‘long 19th century,’ which seemed, and actually was, a period of almost unbroken material, intellectual and moral progress …there has, since 1914, been a marked regression from the standards then regarded as normal in the developed countries and in the milieus of the middle classes and which were confidently believed to be spreading to the more backward regions and the less enlightened strata of the population…....

American composers don’t crop up all that often in the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s subscription season, let alone at the mostly easy-listening Ravinia Festival. But next week they’re well represented in back-to-back Ravinia concerts that spotlight a pair of early pioneers who steered classical music, if only a bit, from European dominance. Edward MacDowell, born in New York right after the Civil War, was a turn-of-the-century transitional figure. Though trained as a pianist in Paris, he soon gravitated toward German romanticism as a composer....

We met Nicole Pacheco training to stock the salad bar at Whole Foods. Her veggie-spattered apron and disposable gloves swore they were diligently doing their duty. But our Fashion Inspectors wondered: Was her entire uniform kosher? Was it putting in an honest day’s labor or was something fishy going on? They peeled back the layers to check. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The double-wrapped outfit is sanitarily sealed in a regulation apron, which, according to Diana de Marly’s book Working Dress, is likely the earliest article of occupational clothing....

On May 9, 1985, my cousin Janet came to my house for dinner, and we ate the fruit of an avocado in a salad. After dinner I carefully scrubbed the lustrous skin of the dark avocado seed, removing all the pulpy mush, and poured water in a glass one of my roommates had stolen from the Northwestern food service. I stuck three toothpicks into the skin of the pit and, using these as a brace, balanced the seed in the glass so its top was out of the water and the bottom was immersed....

When Tumia Romero quit her job in the City Hall press office in February to go back to school, her friends and colleagues gave her a quiet good-bye party and some gentle words of good luck. To switch from Daley to Gardner–from the favorite to the long shot–may seem flaky, even politically suicidal. But Romero knows too much about city politics to be casually dismissed. For eight years she was the Radar O’Reilly of the City Hall press operation: the lower-level clerk who got things done....

There’s nothing pure about “pure” dance: when it’s done well it produces plenty of thoughts and feelings in the viewer, opening up to the imagination vast new territories. Somehow pure dance frees us to see all the nuances of the movement, which can be obscured by plot, characters, even ideas that are too muscular. Marie Chouinard–an award-winning Canadian choreographer who’s been making dances, primarily for herself, since 1979–has rethought Stravinsky’s Le sacre du printemps and given it a visceral new abstract form....

George Bernard Shaw’s proto-absurdist play was a flop in its 1910 premiere; but time has affirmed the strengths of this often very funny work. Set in a rambling country house, it starts out as a meandering romantic comedy full of the usual flirtations and follies: underwear magnate John Tarleton is planning for his daughter Hypatia’s marriage to upper-class twit Bunny Summerhays, not knowing of Hypatia’s secret flirtations with other men–including Bunny’s father, a retired colonial officer more comfortable with foreign “heathens” than his own family....

Based on the real-life story of a young working-class couple who robbed banks in Chicago’s northwest suburbs in 1991, John McNaughton’s Normal Life takes the classic film noir plot of outlaw lovers on the path of self-destruction to a bleak, unsentimental extreme. When Chris first meets Pam, he’s drawn to the whiff of danger about her. An upstanding rookie cop, he also strives for a conventional existence in the tract-home community where he grew up....

Outside, there is no trace of life. A blitzkrieg of subzero temperatures, snow, and ice has turned Little Village, a southwest-side Chicago neighborhood, into an urban tundra. “Well?” Leo steps back. He’s about five yards from the six-by-six-foot canvas, which towers over him. (Earlier Leo’s mother had helped him lower the painting onto the floor so he could reach the top.) Leo has one foot up on a folding chair, while his cat Tiger coils around the other....

For weekenders heading to one of Michigan’s many lakeside resorts, traveling away from the city can feel like traveling back in time. At least that’s how the proprietors up there hope it will feel. The 20-room Gordon Beach Inn in Union Pier, owned by Devereux Bowly, a Chicagoan and past president of the Hyde Park Historical Society, advertises itself as “a step back in time.” One reviewer even went so far as to call the decor “Amish”–despite cable TV and Jacuzzis, to say nothing of up-to-date paper-thin walls....

THE STATE I’M IN: A TRAVELOGUE Wherever she’s performing, whatever project she’s involved in at the moment–whether one of her mainstream acting gigs, a performance piece, or a performance variety show (Big Goddess Pow Wow, Wac-A-Go-Go, 11 Minutes Max!)–Killen has a knack for attracting ink. Even when her work is uneven or flat-out bad (like A Cocktail of Flowers, her dreadful late-night follow-up to Music Kills a Memory), Killen attracts the kind of press attention most performers would die for....

Every so often I read about certain prehistoric reptiles not being true dinosaurs. A trip to the encyclopedia yielded the statement that at the same time there were dinosaurs there were also pterosaurs, crocodiles, etc, who were not dinosaurs. But it never actually defined what a dinosaur was. So what exactly differentiates a dinosaur from other lizards? –Rob Wintler, Santa Monica, California Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I understand your confusion....

ALAMAT (LEGEND) This is an exchange familiar to the children of immigrants whose well-meaning but overzealous attempts to assimilate can create painful rifts. In this case, the “old country” is the remote Kalinga mountain district of the Philippines, home to a warrior tribe whose centuries-old way of life has been repeatedly disrupted by outsiders. First anthropologists took away a band of “savages” (including Patungao’s grandfather) to be displayed at the 1904 Saint Louis World Exposition....