MARCH Dreaming Lucia, the newest play from the Lookingglass Theatre Company, looks at the life of James Joyce’s troubled daughter Lucia. After a peripatetic childhood she had a series of mental breakdowns in her 20s and was eventually institutionalized. According to writer and star Joy Gregory, the play explores the “lost histories of a young woman’s life.” Previews are tonight, tomorrow, next Thursday, March 9, and next Friday, March 10, at 8 at the Athenaeum Theatre, 2936 N....

Three compositions were written for the joint centennials of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and the University of Chicago, and Shulamit Ran’s belated entry, Legends, promises to be a middle-of-the-roader. As a composer, the Israeli-born Ran is not as resolutely radical as her onetime mentor and U. of C. colleague Ralph Shapey, whose contribution to the anniversary was the sprawling and fascinating Concerto fantastique. She’d probably thumb her nose at Easley Blackwood’s Symphony no....

hitsville With nothing to do all day Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The hotel, owned for two generations by the Beider family, is a 121-room affair overlooking the intersection at Diversey, Clark, and Broadway. The lobby’s decor is a riot of pastels; curtains, art, and painted wainscoting cover the walls. Comfy sofas are provided for pre-load-out lounging. Just off the lobby is a tiny laundry room (an important amenity for the touring musician) and an alcove where free continental breakfasts are served till the reasonable hour of noon....

Tony Fitzpatrick lumbers through the subdivided confines of his new Dime Museum, occasionally stopping to bum a cigarette or write up another sale. Alert and poised as usual, he’s duded up and in the mood to celebrate. It’s a “private opening” in early February, sort of an informal dress rehearsal for the museum’s official public opening next Friday, March 12. Surrounded by a bevy of friends, family, and coworkers, Fitzpatrick is king of the night and loving it....

“I’m your garbage man,” mumbles G. Love, demonstrating how he has managed to broaden his curious mush-mouthed delivery into an original and effective rap-influenced sprechgesang–all of which serves to underline the old saw that often it’s not what you mumble, but how you mumble it. Meanwhile the Special Sauce rhythm section follows him up with one- and two-chord vamps that betray a much deeper spiritual understanding of the funk pulse than one usually hears from young white bands like this....

Gentle Frost Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Frost was born in San Antonio and moved sporadically with her mother between there, Austin, and Guadalajara, Mexico. She spent three years as an undeclared fine-arts major at the University of Texas, flunking core courses but devouring a wide variety of music classes, from electronic music to voice to theory. “I was studying just to learn to play, which I still can’t do,” she explains....

There’s fire beneath the ice: Jerry Butler’s delivery caresses your ear like a lover’s wine-chilled breath–those shivers you feel are goose bumps. Butler, best known for his vocals on the Impressions’ 1958 classic “For Your Precious Love,” played a major role in forging the subtle Chicago soul sound that emerged in the early and mid-60s as a counterpart to the sweatier cadences of southern R & B. Ballads like “Make It Easy on Yourself,” “I Stand Accused,” and the topical “I Don’t Want to Hear Anymore” are his stock in trade, but he’s also capable of burners like the soulfully rocking “I Can’t Stand It....

THAT JEFF GARLIN THING FOOD, FUN & DEAD RELATIVES Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Or, like Garlin, you have to start taking the kind of risks onstage that only veteran performers can pull off. Garlin has taken Lenny Bruce’s perhaps apocryphal advice to Del Close in the 60s–“Throw away your act”–literally. He has no set show. Instead, he hangs around the lobby asking people as they walk in, “What do you want me to talk about?...

“Chicago has, and is, an environment,” insists city Department of Environment commissioner Henry Henderson in Urban Naturalist (January-February). “It may look and feel different from unpopulated wilderness, which is usually associated with ‘ecology,’ but our Urban Environment is morally, ethically and in every other way an environment, and is due no less care, respect and stewardship than a redwood forest.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Utility lobbyists are drooling at the possibility that the Citizens Utility Board (CUB), long a pesky thorn in their sides, will be considerably weakened” in the Republican-dominated state legislature this year, reports Rich Miller in Illinois Politics (December)....

The Philadelphia Phillies came to town last week in the thick of the National League playoff race. They were in second place in the East Division, two games behind the Central Division’s Houston Astros in the battle for the wild-card postseason berth. Yet no baseball fan in his or her right mind would have traded the Cubs for the Phillies straight up, not even if their positions in the standings had been included in the deal....

Michael Jordan was asked how the confidence level of this year’s Bulls compared with the confidence of the team that won three straight championships. “I think we’re confident,” he said, but added, “The team that won three championships had a different swagger to it.” Winning between 57 and 67 games a year gave that team a track record of success during the regular season and a position to defend in the playoff seedings....

San Francisco’s Thinking Fellers Union Local 282 are brilliant low-rent assimilators with lopsided pop sensibilities. While grounded in a kind of Beefheartian art rock, over the course of seven albums and EPs they’ve poked around in country, Cajun, jazz, and various (mostly Eastern) ethnic strains, returning home with smidgens of these styles stuck to them like burrs. The result, tempered with a healthy dollop of well-harnessed chaos, is damn near impossible to describe....

Loosely based on the relationship between Thomas Jefferson and his slave Sally Hemings, Doug Cooney and Karen Stephens’s Tom & Sally is a discomforting and fascinating look at our conflicted country and one of its more hypocritical and philosophically marooned founding fathers. Watching it is a bit like reading a John Grisham novel. You’re riveted by the story, but at the same time you keep stumbling over awkward phrases, tasteless passages, and vaguely as well as overtly sexist points of view....

By Cara Jepsen V.Vale, creator of the now-defunct zine Search and Destroy and former copublisher of RE/Search, has launched a new venture, V/Search, which recently released its first publication, Zines. The 200-page book features scams, pranks, tips on creating a zine, and a directory of 900 zines. Vale will sign copies tonight from 6 to 8 at Quimby’s Queer Store, 1328 N. Damen. It’s free; call 342-0910. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Soul music fans know Chuck Jackson as the dusky-voiced charmer whose series of hits–“I Don’t Want to Cry,” “Any Day Now,” the lovely “Daddy’s Home” with Maxine Brown, and nearly a score of others–made him one of the most in-demand stars on the R & B circuit from the early 60s through the early 70s. But Jackson is more than a mere soulster: graced with a versatility that earned him the moniker “Mr....

The Art of Dining Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Complex, original female characters also make Howe a significant figure in the landscape of contemporary American theater: she explores women’s obsessions, their sensuality, their intelligence and aesthetics with a gutsy bravado often missing in plays by men. Women artists are fixtures in Howe’s work, from Mags, the successful New York-based artist in Painting Churches who returns to Boston to paint her aging parents’ portraits, to Agnes Vaag in Museum (who never actually appears but is exalted and gossiped about by other women), an artist who digs in the woods to find material for her striking primal art....

Who rates an obituary in the Chicago Tribune? For an obit in the New York Times, one must enjoy proximity to power, fame, wealth, or the newspaper’s office. To garner a handsome write-up in a local newspaper, one need only have lived in the community. The Trib falls somewhere in between. Unsurprisingly in the second-largest archdiocese in the world, Roman Catholic led the entries in specified religions. Protestants took second place, followed closely by Jews, who had 9 percent of the large obits and 12 percent of the small ones....

Film Dreams Can a documentary about high school basketball make it big at the box office? At the moment that is the question uppermost in the minds of Chicago-based filmmakers Steve James, Frederick Marx, and Peter Gilbert, along with scores of behind-the-scenes movie executives whose job is to make the public want to see what Sun-Times film critic Roger Ebert has labeled “one of the best films about American life I have ever seen....

All immigrants have some difficulty adjusting to a new culture, but some of William Gorman’s clients have a harder time than most. Gorman is a UIC psychologist who works with victims of torture. Gorman’s clients often develop problems with substance abuse, have trouble trusting people, and even suffer from guilt for surviving at all. “The psychological consequences of torture compound the damage of the physical torture,” Gorman says. Torture victims can also run into legal problems arising from their emotional ones....

Women who have abortions are seldom referred to as mothers. But author and educator Judith Arcana believes that this denial has led to the dehumanization of women deciding not to have babies. For many, abortion remains a secret they can never share. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “We need to speak of our abortions, not in an atmosphere of guilt and shame as a result of spiritual terrorism of contemporary antiabortionists, but in open recognition of our regret or loss or joy or relief–even of mourning–and in acceptance of the responsibility of our choice,” writes Arcana in her essay “Abortion Is a Motherhood Issue,” included in the recently published anthology Mother Journeys: Feminists Write About Mothering (Spinsters Ink)....