By noon the businessmen from the suburbs and the kids from the inner city had been at it for three hours, knocking down walls and hauling away rubble. Their pants, shirts, and shoes were covered with dust. “Six people had been shot [nearby] in gang fighting in the months before we took ownership of these buildings,” says Laura Leon, executive director of Nobel Neighbors. “Last year two people were shot right outside the Nobel school....

He Has a Dream Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » No more meek kowtowing for Hopkins. “I don’t want to be ushered into the MCA at age 70, have them view slides of my art and say ‘thanks,’ and then know I can die in peace because the museum has seen my work.” He is fighting for the museum to devote space in its new building (scheduled to open in about two years) to a permanent gallery for Illinois artists, a venue for all kinds of exhibits of local work: theme shows, one-person shows, group shows....

HERRINGBONE Athaneum Theatre Company Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Interesting premise for a musical comedy. This strange little show, which had its world premiere in 1981 at Chicago’s defunct St. Nicholas Theater before opening (in rewritten form) at the off-Broadway Playwrights Horizons, tries to out-Sondheim Sondheim. With its southern-gothic darkness and wicked humor, it might have come from the pen of short-story writer Davis Grubb or cartoonist Charles Addams, or maybe the early-60s cameras of Roger Corman, William Castle, or Robert Aldrich....

Johnny Cash Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Rick Rubin’s no dummy. His ongoing resurrection of Johnny Cash for rock audiences depends on carefully manipulated grand gestures–having Cash record songs written by Glenn Danzig and Soundgarden’s Chris Cornell and using Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers as the backing band on the new Unchained (American). But without Cash’s monumental charisma and innate talent, Rubin’s efforts would amount to little more than smoke and mirrors (see his attempt at blowing some life into Donovan)....

Dear Ed. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This is not a letter to second-guess Harold Henderson’s “thinking” or motives in his almost surprising article concerning what he sees as a bogus environmental crisis [“Envi- ronment: The Manufactured Crisis,” September 16]. An article based on a book written by members of the Heartland Institute, admittedly a “market-oriented think tank,” and on another book which refers to the ecological movement as “totalitarian” is difficult to take seriously....

Lead Story In July the town council in Peru, Vermont, ordered Roland Williams out of his house for a month while authorities cleaned the place up. Williams had been purchasing large quantities of dog food and cola every day to feed hundreds of rats that had gathered on his property. And New York City officials reported in May that a woman feeding cereal to rats in her apartment and singing to them also slept in a chair so they could have her bed....

These days if my parents are involved we only dine outside. That’s because Claude prefers sidewalk seating, and there’s no getting around inviting Claude. So we dined, one mildly sticky evening, in the Kamehachi garden, which is graced by a tiny tube-fed pool and is nestled perilously close to the Wells Street alley and its attendant perfume of refuse. Still, once Claude had sniffed the Golden Retriever tucked under a nearby table and panted greetings to all, we settled down for some of the best sushi in town....

By Ted Cox Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » To be sure, the tactics of hockey stress team play and the repetition of fundamental movements in hopes of creating those serendipitous moments, and a team in sync along those lines is more apt to enjoy success than a team that isn’t. That’s why so many passes go sliding untouched through the slot in front of the net in search of a teammate who hasn’t yet moved into the proper position, and why so many goals are attributed to just those passes that connect up....

Since 1989 the University of Illinois at Chicago and the Theater of Moscow South-West have taken part in an exchange program: every year or so UIC sends a number of student-actors to Russia, and every year or so the Moscow-based company sends a couple of its productions over here. Several years ago the Theatre of Moscow South-West brought a pair of Gogol plays, one a black comedy called The Gamblers, the other considerably lighter in tone, Marriage....

Dear editor: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Because of the double bands, the pool tables, the pinball machine and the jukebox–where’s the girl in the hula hoop?–the Bop Shop has gone from one of the best jazz clubs in Chicago to something resembling an arcade. The two-band setup is brutal. After listening to one band for an hour, a break from listening–not another 60 minutes of music immediately after–makes going to clubs cool....

By Adam Langer “When you think about what the issue was and why it needed to be confronted head-on,” said Saffold, “it was an opportunity for some people who would generally be fragmented to see how the police could turn from being a public protector to being a brutal individual.” Lillard says he knew he had what it took to be an entrepreneur from the time he finished kindergarten. The world is divided between those who create work and those who have work created for them, he says, and as a boy of six growing up in Memphis, Tennessee, he knew which he was going to be....

Watch Dog, Chicago Actors Ensemble. Playwright David Gilbert made his splash as a screenwriter with the 1984 break-dancing movie Beat Street, then taught screenwriting at DePaul for nearly a decade. So it’s no surprise that Watch Dog seems a film script masquerading as live theater. The short, punchy scenes jump from location to location every few minutes (making Robert G. Smith’s immobile corporate-lobby set monumentally inappropriate), and they’re filled with quirky characters having quirky conversations about their quirks that might have some impact if underplayed and filmed in close-up....

Friday 6 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Rigoberta Menchu Tum grew up on a coffee plantation in Guatemala, one of the most brutal regimes in Central America, and now lives in exile in Mexico, where she continues to campaign for the rights of her country’s indigenous population. You can hear the 1992 Nobel Peace Prize winner speak on Human Rights in Latin America at 8 tonight at Saint Vincent DePaul Church, 1010 W....

Soprano Ellen Hargis, the soloist in this recital, is a leading specialist in 17th-century vocal repertoire. She and lutenist Kevin Mason, both members of the early-music ensemble the Orpheus Band, have compiled a sampler that contrasts the two prominent singing styles of the time, French and Italian. The French songs tend to be on the dolorous side, eliciting an emotional response quite different from the passionate Italian declarations. The differences, of course, were derived from the ways the languages are spoken: just compare the French word for “love”–the languid, long-breathed amour–to the Italian’s abrupt, emphatic amore....

It’s an old critic’s cliche that political theater can’t be entertaining and pure entertainment can’t be political. Kay Martinovich’s dark-night one-act Get Your Feet Off My Neck!, subtitled “a performance examining gender roles,” is both–a social critique and a fine and funny comedy. Mind you, this is no close-minded propaganda. Get Your Feet Off My Neck! works a lot like another Zebra Crossing Theatre show, last year’s Woman’s Day, in which a popular women’s magazine was dispassionately examined until all its hidden contradictory messages about love, power, and body image were revealed....

Latest news on the Chicago Music Awards: A new and improved Chicago Music Awards ceremony seems set for March 10 at Metro. The event, now in its third year, has operated thus far under the auspices of the Illinois Entertainer, which did a rather ragged job the first year and a fairly defensible one the second, when the Smashing Pumpkins and their album Gish took home most of the trophies. A 1993 version scheduled for last fall was postponed after Metro owner Joe Shanahan and WXRT program director Norm Winer got in on it, and now it seems likely to be a pretty creditable affair....

“When I came in here I picked up that one,” says a young man, pointing to a flesh-colored latex object Chicago artist Jeanne Dunning has placed on the floor during a gallery talk for her current exhibit at the Museum of Contemporary Art. Over a dozen of the ambiguous plastic shapes–they squeak when you squeeze them–are strewn about the room. At first glance they look like gourds, green peppers, pears, and bananas; but they also resemble human organs....

Rhinoceros Theater Festival But Over could also be taken as a subtle message to all Rhino Fest audiences that, once you finished viewing the extraordinary spectacle of Laffin’s piece and stepped into the Lunar Cabaret, your evening of polished, edgy, thoughtful theatrical innovation was over. Inside, audiences were in for show after show of the same old fringe stuff, hastily created, sloppily presented, and lavishly praised by the artists’ friends....

The theater component of “Del Corazon: Mexican Performing Arts Festival 1994,” sponsored by the Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum, kicks off this weekend with two shows by this bilingual, family-oriented San Francisco company. One of the oldest Chicano theaters in the U.S.–and the only one that tours regularly–the group purveys a distinctive mix of performance and educational components. The highlight of its repertoire is Rosario’s Barrio, a whimsical, sometimes campy satire on multiculturalism and commercialism in which a woman who’s hired to host a Nestle-sponsored children’s TV program spices the show with streetwise commentary about immigration, drugs, unemployment, and other ghetto realities (“Can we say ‘eviction notice’?...

Vampire Lesbians of Sodom, Theatre Building. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Charles Busch’s campy comedy, a raunchy collage of ancient and modern mythic kitsch, is a showcase for hilarious drag clowning and ingenious visual design under Doug-las L. Hartzell’s direction. It tells of two blood-sucking bisexuals whose misadventures span millennia. Their first meeting, in pagan Sodom and Gomorrah (“the Twin Cities”), joins them in an unholy rivalry for concubines and corpuscles; eventually the pair land in 1920s Hollywood, where as La Condessa and Madeleine Astarte they become the silver screen’s most famous feuding divas, and then in 1970s Vegas, where Astarte (now an Ann-Margret-style stage star) helps La Condessa (now a cleaning lady) make her comeback....