THE WVON RADIO STORY But it did. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » You’d think there would be no way to botch a play about WVON, 1450 AM. Probably the most important radio station in Chicago history, this 1000-watt operation on South Kedzie owned by blues impresarios Leonard and Phil Chess was the number-one station in the city from 1963 into the early 70s. With a memorable roster of deejays that included Pervis Spann (“The all-day all-night bluesman”), superhip Herb “Cool Gent” Kent, and sweet-talking Lucky Cordell, WVON turned Chicago on to the music of Aretha Franklin, Jerry Butler and the Impressions, and the Chi-Lites....

OFFSPRING Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Like Fugazi, Ian McKaye’s venerable D.C. hardcore-based outfit, the Offspring are your college English major/high school math nerd punks. Fugazi is the epitome of the uncompromising, avowedly indie outfit achieving success on its own terms. Reeking of righteousness and firmly on the side of every liberal cause, Fugazi members lie awake at night worrying about dying or about women being harassed on the street....

Pretty much everything about the Sock Monkeys is in their name: unabashed amusement, athleticism, grace, collaboration, a certain impishness, a little tribal je ne sais quoi, and even a sort of fuzzy warmth. This four-person collective twirls somewhere between postmodern dance and performance art, integrating movement, text, wonderfully absurd props, music, and notions both serious and whimsical into their work. Although individual members come up with the ideas, they develop each piece as a group, in the process creating intuitive connections among themselves....

In which business consultants try and fail to utter the words “m— t——.” Tips for trimming business travel costs, distributed by a Dallas PR firm, include: “Avoid taxis. Cab rides can be expensive, and often aren’t necessary. Instead, use an airport or hotel shuttle service to get to your destination. If you’re traveling with more than two people, you can sometimes share a limo for less than a taxi ride.” Gosh, J....

A little sliver of pork for a highway that doesn’t exist anymore. The Illinois Bureau of Tourism will dispense $2,257.80 to the Route 66 Association of Illinois to help reprint 75,000 brochures promoting “the Route 66 Hall of Fame Museum and recreational travel along the historic route.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Is the law male? Don’t ask foolish questions. “The absence of hypotheticals involving strong, competent women is another problem students at five of the six law schools [U....

To the editor: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » No sooner does Ben Joravsky take the Chicago Public Library to task for errors of fact and form [November 10] than his butt-saving proofreaders go on vacation, leaving his tokhes to twist in the wind [November 24]. (If you know not whither I refer, dear editor, take care to review Mr. Joravsky’s recent columns; therein lies a sore thumb....

Friday 25 A work for “two men and a pair of pants” is one of the three dances being premiered tonight by Urban Dance Urban Music, a nine-dancer, three-musician aggregation led by choreographer Christy Bennett and composer Dan Honnold. (The other two: an ensemble work for seven women and a duet by Bennett and Honnold.) They perform at 8 tonight and tomorrow night on the second floor of Link’s Hall, 3435 N....

FRIDAY MARCH 25 Jellyeye, the group that brought the drum opera Avalanch Ranch to town in 1992, has put together another one. Eight musicians play an assortment of specially constructed drums accompanied by sound and film backdrops in this hour-long production, which promises to take the audience to “an underworld where familiar repressions burst out and cling to you like screaming animals.” The nonfainthearted can catch the opening of Blood Lotus tonight at Chicago Filmmakers, 1543 W....

This three-week showcase features clowns, monologuists, cabaret singers, stage magicians, dancers, and even a cantor. Performers from Chicago are augmented by artists from around the U.S.–New York to California and Minnesota to Hawaii–as well as from Russia, Brazil, and Canada. Produced, as it was last year, by John T. Mills and James Ellis, the Fringe Fest runs through June 23, with shows six days a week–as few as 3 on weeknights or as many as 21 on weekends....

By Michael Miner So he writes letters to newspapers. “I probably have seven or eight in the pipeline right now,” he said. “Believe me, I don’t do it for ego. But I was on the radio for 23 years, and I felt I was involved. I was part of the community. And not being on the radio I have to find other ways of being involved.” The letters are pointed and smart, and the dailies have printed several....

International Theatre Festival Loses Its Leader Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Sahlins’s abrupt resignation raised a question among many observers: Did the board of directors force her departure, or did she choose to abandon a sinking ship? Neither Sahlins nor Marsden returned phone calls, but Gray said they made their respective decisions “completely on their own.” Sahlins claims she could no longer handle the job’s fast pace or management responsibilities....

Thirty-two publishers turned down a new book called Volunteer Slavery for no good reason. Here are two of the worst: (1) The Washington Post wouldn’t like it. (2) The author and memoirist, Jill Nelson, is some kind of horny, angry, upper-middle-class “Negro” gal. Where’s the market? Who can relate? Nelson is your garden-variety single black mother who grew up summering on Martha’s Vineyard. In the mid-80s, at the age of 34, she gave up her beloved New York and an underpaid career as a free-lance writer to take a staff job on the Sunday magazine the Washington Post was about to launch....

At age 20 the youthful-looking Kronos Quartet still doesn’t quite have the technical prowess of a great string quartet, but its devotion to multiculturalism and political causes certainly marks it as a galvanizing musical spokesman for the 90s and beyond. One of a handful of crossover successes, the Kronos, who these days visits the city about once a year, has won over a boomer following that is the envy of establishment institutions such as the Chicago Symphony....

At tiny Daniel J’s on North Ashland, kitschy black construction-paper bow ties adorn napkins folded to look like shirt fronts, the tablecloths are covered in brown butcher’s paper, the curtains look like they’re made from bed sheets, the waitstaff wear flowered plastic aprons, and on one visit we had to lick off our utensils after each chic course–yet reservations are almost mandatory. North Shore paranoids brave the perils of the city for Daniel J’s....

Gwen Gerard Gwen Gerard, a French artist who’s lived in Chicago since 1991, makes sculptures out of building materials and junk–scrap wood, metal plates, window screens, paper bags, newspapers, shredded remnants of dirty plastic–that seem to have sprung straight from the city’s construction sites and garbage-strewn vacant lots. But some of her work also contains fragile, ephemeral things–baby teeth, locks of hair, disintegrating bits of old leaves–that speak of tenderness, of a romantic sensibility not usually associated with this gritty town....

Ben Joravsky’s “Rabbis’ Rules” [Neighborhood News, December 1] exposes the dangerous attitude towards interfaith relationships held by many Conservative and Orthodox Jews. When will out of touch “leaders” like Rabbi Philip Lefkowitz realize that outreach efforts to the intermarried and interdating must extend beyond the synagogue? Those programs that have been most successful in welcoming the intermarried into the community, like the “Stepping Stones” program for children and parents of an interfaith household, are those held in nonconfrontational settings....

SON OF FIRE Son of Fire is a good show, as far as craftsmanship goes. It’s efficiently staged, interestingly designed, generally well acted, and under Dan Stetzel’s musical direction consistently well sung. But it misses the point of the story it seeks to dramatize–a real-life scandal that shocked the Chicago art world in the mid-1980s. Instead of giving the episode the subtle in- quiry it invites, director David Zak and composer-librettist Christopher Moore (a good musician but not a gifted lyricist) settle for a broad, heavy-handed treatment that’s completely at odds with the ambiguous story....

The seeds from our backyard cottonwood tree were coming down again, and my children were asking if they could go outside and play in the snow. The five-year-old who lives two buildings down had gathered up a small pile of fluffy white seeds and was collecting them into balls and throwing them straight up into the air. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » We hadn’t thought about it that way....

Zephyr Dance Ensemble Many of Zephyr’s members have their roots in Barat College, a small school in Lake Forest formerly for women only. I taught several computer classes there a number of years ago and was fascinated with its social and political tone. Decades ago Barat was essentially a finishing school for girls from wealthy Catholic families and quite conservative. Within the last 20 years, it’s become coeducational and has begun to focus on adult education for North Shore residents; its tone has become more liberal and more working-class....

What is a feminist? To some, feminists are a breed forever tarred as “bra burners”: radical left-wingers dedicated to the destruction of the family and the emasculation of American men, bull-dykes from central casting, abortion enthusiasts, latter-day kibbutzniks who want to turn their children over to someone else–usually the government–to raise, at no cost to themselves. I worked for the Title XX legislation that allowed women to take shop and boys to take Home Ec....