DIRTY HANDS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In a small European country called Illyria an angry young man, Hugo, has rebelled against his privileged upbringing and self-perceived wimpiness by joining the quasi-Marxist Revolutionary Party. Recognizing a thinker and not a doer, the party sets him to work on its newspaper. Hugo longs to be a man of action, however, and finally gets an assignment to assassinate a party leader who’s been displaying signs of compromise and cooperation with the party’s enemies....

I Was Really Very Hungry: A Portrait of M.F.K. Fisher, Live Bait Theater. This new play reveals the emotional appetite of one of the greatest American food writers of the 20th century, Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher, whose writing went beyond recipes, restaurant reviews, and menus to probe human behavior surrounding food and hunger. Kelly Nespor has collected Fisher’s short stories, food writing, and personal diaries and arranged them in a loosely chronological way so that we see her transformation from impressionable schoolgirl to idealistic first wife to mature, worldly writer and wife of painter Dillwyn Parrish....

ART BRIDGMAN AND MYRNA PACKER Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Bare-Bones Circus, Bridgman and Packer’s evening-length work presented at the Dance Center, lends itself nicely to the vaudeville notion. (But a short new piece for local performers that preceded it, The Crowd–the result of a two-week residency–felt tacked on, possibly in fulfillment of a grant requirement.) In their circus, Bridgman and Packer subtly play with fantasy and reality....

It wasn’t 30-something paranoia or a morbid sense of humor but the image of Beethoven lying on his deathbed, shaking his withered fist at God and yelling for more time, that inspired the creation of the quintessential 90s gadget: a clock that counts down the hours, minutes, and seconds left in your life. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Altholz, a 45-year-old talent manager, and Faldner, a 37-year-old conductor, invent things....

MASS MURDER II There’s Erzebet Bathory, the 17th-century countess who bathed in the blood of 650 virgins and was the genesis of many a vampire legend. And Susan Atkins, one of Charlie Manson’s girls. And let’s not forget Lieutenant William Calley, who was sentenced to life in prison (reduced to 40 months of house arrest) for his part in the slaughter at My Lai. Add to these the latest nightmares, from Wisconsin (Jeffrey Dahmer) to Waco (David Koresh), and you have a comprehensive evening of ruminations on bloodshed that makes the throat go a little dry....

PURPLE HEART Organizer Lynn Book’s concept for “Purple Heart” probably seemed like a good idea: invite back some of the artists who helped make N.A.M.E. a force in local performance. And a lot of these artists–like Evans, the members of Fluid Measure, Carmela Rago, and Grigsby–have fascinating interlocking histories. Perhaps not taken into account was the fact that many of these folks are no longer active participants in the performance scene....

Performing Arts Group Thinks Big An its 35th anniversary season, Performing Arts Chicago is nearly doubling its roster of music, theater, and dance events and hoping to cement its reputation for presenting the best of what’s new and adventurous from around the world. After a comparatively quiet 34th season, in which it presented only 11 attractions as it tried to retire a $179,000 debt, the presenting organization (known as Chamber Music Chicago until 1992) is expanding to 19 events this year after paring its debt down to $28,000....

Scott & Meg–Tonight as 6, at Organic Theater Company Greenhouse, South Hall. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Meg Martin and Scott Prendergast, a young-and-coming comedy team, are fast, fluid, quirkily eloquent improvisers well worth watching. Their late-night offering showcases an awesome ability to work and play together as they create six full characters inspired by audience interviews in 75 minutes. Deftly delivered, with wry surprises and escalating quirks, were three romantically tied couples whose sexes varied from those of the actors: an unbearably rich playboy and his southern-belle bride, a shy puppet-factory employee and an irate customer complaining about an exploding Gonzo doll, and a calculus geek who finds his true equation in a clueless English nerdette....

The creative nucleus of Autoclave, an astonishing but little-known and short-lived quartet from Washington, D.C., has split into two disparate projects that are attracting the notice the first band deserved. The original foursome, whose entire recorded output consists of a single and a ten-inch LP, crafted a striking, warm art-pop, guitars arching and undulating around each other; woven into and above the din were odd rhythmic shifts and strange melodic twists....

In 1995 Bill Wyman’s writings generated more letters to the editor than any other regularly featured writer. These letters weren’t from readers informed or appreciative of his work; they were usually enraged or disgusted. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It’s puzzling why the Reader, with the best pop music coverage in Chicago, would continually give a front-page column to someone who elicits consistently negative replies....

Cibo Matto You’d almost expect the flat bellies of Cibo Matto’s Yuka Honda and Miho Hatori to be swollen with food considering the gastronomic celebrations that fill their debut, Viva! la Woman. The group–whose name is a loose Italian translation of “crazy food” and whose songs have titles like “Apple,” “Sugar Water,” “Artichoke,” and “Know Your Chicken”–was, according to the liner notes, “conceived over the dinner table.” But the duo’s hearty appetite for comestibles is merely symptomatic of their more general hunger for the spice of life: variety....

Last Thursday Stuart Brent looked out the window of his Michigan Avenue store and glared at the freezing drizzle. “And then the rain turned to snow,” he says. “And I looked up and said, ‘God, at this late stage in my life are you going to turn me down?’” The party, says Brent, “was the apotheosis of my lifetime. It culminated everything I’ve done. Philip Roth said he never, ever allowed anyone to give him a party....

Editor: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » R.M. Schultz’s incoherent diatribe against the International Socialist Organization (Letters, November 24) would not warrant a response, except for the chauvinistic remarks against gays tacked onto its postscript. For the record, we in the International Socialist Organization are quite proud supporters of gay and lesbian rights and liberation, having marched in Chicago’s Pride Parade each year for over a decade, supported numerous other progay activities, besides sponsoring our own meetings on the subject....

Friday 24 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » For its Exquisite Corpse Show, Chicago Filmmakers asked nearly two dozen Chicago artists to create one-minute films illustrating the title theme. Participants include: Susan Anderson, Dan Dinello, Tatsu Aoki, and Filmmakers’ own Ines Sommer and Johnny White. The shorts will be randomly strung together and screened tonight at 8. Also on the bill: Man Ray’s Les Mysteres du Chateau du De....

To the editors: Having once worked on a long piece on NPR myself, I read Glenn Garvin’s feature in the June 25 issue with interest. I read with even greater interest an exchange on that piece between Jim Naureckas and Garvin in the letters column of the August 13 issue. I don’t know either man, and I don’t want to get involved in the ideological points of their debate, but from my own research on NPR it seemed to me on first reading that Naureckas nailed Garvin on a number of inaccuracies and that Garvin’s response was to avoid Naureckas’s points and insult him....

The latest venture of Lyric Opera composer-in-residence Bruce Saylor and his mezzo-soprano wife Constance Beavon is this two-day showcase, organized with the Italian psychoanalyst/composer Sandro Gindro and the Italian Cultural Institute, of works that try to rekindle spiritual fervor in our increasingly agnostic times. Saturday’s program is choral and orchestral. Included are Saylor’s Jubilate and The Star Song, both written for soprano Jessye Norman; Ma tovu for chorus and organ by his mentor Hugo Weisgall; God’s Grandeur for mezzo-soprano, chorus, and orchestra by Donald York; and Virgilio Mortari’s Planctus Mariae (1986)....

Ruth St. Denis, a beautiful young woman born Ruthie Denis in New Jersey in 1878–the “St.” was a later affectation–found her thematic inspiration in 1904 when she chanced upon a poster for Turkish cigarettes featuring a picture of the Egyptian goddess Isis. Her choreography thereafter was based largely upon mythological and mystical subjects and rituals, which she researched carefully and interpreted in an exotic, mysterious, and sexy manner. Stephanie Clemens, founder and artistic director of both the Doris Humphrey Society and Momenta, the modern dance company in residence at Oak Park’s Academy of Movement and Music, has in recent years been restoring classic works by the founding mothers and fathers of modern dance: native Oak Parker Humphrey, Humphrey’s longtime partner Charles Weidman, and the extraordinary St....

Lead Story Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Matrimony news: In Kissimmee, Florida, in August, Ronald Legendre married his girlfriend, Hope. The best man was unrelated but also named Ronald Legendre, and the judge was yet another unrelated Ronald Legendre. And applying for a marriage license in Allen County, Kentucky, in October were Brandy Joy Lambert, 18, and Bee Jay Bigmeat, 21. In August Russell Lawrence Lee, 64, an African-American man who said he wanted to defuse the racial tension in America after Detective Mark Fuhrman’s trial testimony, filed papers in Ventura County, California, to change his name to Mister Radical Aidid Supernigger....

Billy Corgan is explaining how an English music paper decided that the most newsworthy thing about him was that he really wanted to be a girl. “People continue to make something of the fact that we have a girl in the band, which in our mind is completely negligible,” he’s saying, sipping iced tea in a Wrigleyville bar. “Now, in that context, I was trying to explain how there’s this constant pressure on men in rock to, you know, rock....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Charles Earp’s letter of March 26 failed to validate censorship. That Mr. Earp, “as a leftist . . . accept[s] the feminist arguments against pornography more readily than those of the puritanical right” is insignificant. His contention that “pornography is offensive to the majority of Americans” might be true, but it’s equally insignificant. But rest easy, fellow leftists....