I was going to a benefit one night when a gentleman approached me with a red gas can saying, “Sir, can you help me out? I’m from the suburbs and my car is out of gas.” I’m sort of a shirt-off-my-back kind of guy, but I didn’t have any cash on me so I said, “Why don’t you take my gas credit card and go fill up your tank and mail the card back to me?...

The June 6 premiere of Blind Spot, a radio show on WLUW, was a live, abstract “restaging” of the Allied landing at Omaha Beach on D-day, exactly 60 years earlier. Rather, it was mostly live. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A few days earlier he’d stuck microphones in the two-by-two-foot vessels, made from scrap wood and plastic two-liter bottles, then floated them on Lake Michigan and taped the sounds they picked up....

Ken Champion likes to joke that he hasn’t worked a day since 1969–the year he became a professional musician. In the 70s he played guitar in barnstorming bar bands, and in the 80s he was a journeyman pedal steel player gigging six nights a week; since the mid-90s, improbably enough, he’s been in demand as an indie-rock sideman. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Champion, who grew up in Oshkosh, picked up his first guitar at 12 and developed an interest in jazz a few years later....

No, it’s not successful. And it’s not well done. But it’s not to be dismissed, either. Too often Idris Goodwin’s hip-hop history of “Pluto”–aka Chicago–comes across like a pageant at a progressive middle school. Director Tony Sancho’s game but incoherent cast performs ten vignettes from the life of the city, starting with the arrival of menacing Frenchmen in the 1700s and culminating with a present-day mayoral debate. Along the way we see Pluto as a depot on the underground railway, a magnet for immigrants, etc....

My Dad Is 100 Years Old In May 1948 Ingrid Bergman wrote a letter to director Roberto Rossellini: “Dear Mr. Rossellini, I have seen your films Rome, Open City and Paisan and I enjoyed them very much. If you need a Swedish actress who speaks English very well, has not forgotten her German, is barely comprehensible in French and who can only say ‘I love you’ in Italian, I am ready to come to Italy to work with you....

The Shamelessboyz Theatre Company–a London fringe ensemble focused on gay-themed work–makes its Chicago debut with American playwright Jack Heifner’s all-male reworking of La Ronde, Arthur Schnitzler’s classic portrait of erotic couplings and uncouplings in fin-de-siecle Vienna. Moving the action to contemporary Britain, the play (packed with nudity and simulated sex) tracks a series of passionate pursuits: a street hustler tries to seduce a “straight” sailor, a wealthy youth flirts with his parents’ handyman, a vain actor teases an infatuated writer....

Tony Fitzpatrick’s gorgeous new book, The Wonder: Portraits of a Remembered City, Volume I (La Luz de Jesus/Last Gasp), reproduces 30 of the Chicago artist’s cryptic, symbol-laden collage-drawings, which include ephemera like postage stamps, nudie pinups, and matchbook covers from long-gone local hotels and taverns. Evoking a romantic era that Fitzpatrick remembers from tooling around the streets of the city with his father, the works come off like enigmatic love letters....

In his five-year fight against what he calls “stupid standardized tests,” George Schmidt has had to face one formidable foe after another, including Mayor Daley. To that list he must now add another–federal judge Richard Posner, who ruled on December 31 that the Board of Education had the right to punish Schmidt for publishing a standardized test the board had given to high school students. First given in the 1997-’98 school year, the CASE was unpopular with many teachers, who thought too much of their class time–over a month a year–was already devoted to preparing for standardized tests, among them required state and national achievement exams....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Is it worse to lose a game or a key player? The Cubs lost both Sunday, but the Brewers’ loss to the Phillies might have been even more damaging. First the Cubs. When Alfonso Soriano pulled up lame going from first to third Sunday night at Wrigley Field, I thought his season was done — and with it that of the Cubs....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » According to its Web site, the Society of Environmental Journalists “is not a public relations or an environmental advocacy organization,” and you can’t even be a member if you or your employer lobby or do PR work on environmental issues. (I was a member for a year and recall how careful they are about that.) So I was unpleasantly surprised to read Katie Coleman’s gripe about some sessions of the group’s last two conferences....

Drinking and writing, the Neo-Futurists tell us, has a long, proud history. In this remounted show, which travels to five Chicago bars, Sean Benjamin, Chloe Johnston, and Steven Mosqueda focus on an era when it wasn’t so easy to put a drink beside one’s typewriter: Prohibition. The format blends audience participation (one can win a pint for answering a question correctly), facts about Prohibition, quotes from celebrated writers of that time, banter between players, and wry, moving first-person monologues–in the great Neo-Futurist tradition, by far the best part....

Thanks to some trimming of both parts of Henry IV, Barbara Gaines’s theatrical marathon–five hours plus, with 40 minutes for dinner–moves at a sprightly pace. And though her take on Shakespeare’s double whammy is by no means revolutionary, she wisely drives home the point that the heart of the story is a turf war between blue-blooded gangsters, focusing on the cowardice and deceptions of both rebels and royals. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the climactic showdown at the end of Part 1, when Prince Hal’s Eastcheap street-fighting ways overwhelm Hotspur, whose sense of honor in battle is misplaced....

Hubbard Street takes a refreshing detour from the lyrically beautiful into the just plain odd in two new dances. The first program, “Sublime Sentiments,” includes the Chicago premiere of Julian Barnett’s Float, which looks like a romantic duet for nine-year-olds. You sense the duo’s affection, aggression, and competition in an ear placed over the other’s chest, a unison hop while the two hold hands, a hand placed over the other’s mouth....

Is There a Designer in the House? Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Lindsay says the old logo was being applied inconsistently and had begun to look dated. It had been in use since 1990, except for a few years when there was an attempt to market the school and the museum as twin aspects of the same institution–Art Institute of Chicago the School, and Art Institute of Chicago the Museum....

After introspecting over the reasons I am applying to Lakeland Community College, I would have to say that my main influence was Jane, a young lady that I used to work with here at Joseph McElroy Sr.’s Loan Office, up until about three weeks ago. I never liked her that much, which may come as a shock to you, since I just wrote that she is my main influence for applying to your esteemed Institution....

Though this Parisian band blends French Gypsy jazz, Rom music, and klezmer, last January the siblings at the heart of the group–Olivier Slabiak, who plays violin and sings, and his brother Eric, who plays violin and accordion–told the French newspaper L’Humanite that during the late 90s they considered themselves purists. Back then they were keen to avoid being lumped in with all the “world beat” artists adulterating their music with faux hip-hop, and at least in comparison they did sound pretty old-fashioned: cimbalom and violin dominated the instrumentation, and the lyrics, when there were any, were in Romany....

If the video footage on their MySpace page is any indication, Mika Miko’s second coming to Chicago will deliver us all unto punk heaven. Los Angeles hasn’t spawned a rowdy cabal with this much teen spirit since the Dangerhouse days; it’s as if these five girls walked out of a Bags/Eyes/Dils show and immediately started a band. Listening to their newest full-length, 666 (PPM), you’d swear most of the 80s and 90s never happened....

Lead Story Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » According to police in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, 38-year-old Karen Madden confessed earlier this year to stealing $550,000 worth of jewelry and handbags from the home of her boss, Judy Hample, who is chancellor of the state’s university system. Hample testified at a July hearing that Madden, whose trial is to begin this week, had called to apologize after her arrest and subsequent firing and went on to ask, “I hope you and I can still be friends and I would like to use you–can I use you as a reference, just for the work part?...

So nobody you know ever met that certain special someone at a bar, right? The quality women are all waiting around at some mythical church ice cream social in the sky, right? Well, I’m here to tell you that occasionally good women do frequent bars–even the four o’clock kind. I’m not a big drinker, though I do enjoy the occasional glass of port at Christmas as well as the occasional 30-pack on Arbor Day....

The hour-long In Plain Clothes is like an elegant pencil sketch, unassuming but confident in its light, clean strokes. To create it, choreographer Siobhan Davies talked to other professionals interested in what she calls the body’s “use of space”: a linguist, a cardiothoracic surgeon, a landscape designer, and an architect. Whatever their input was, it’s been thoroughly integrated. In the main structuring device, a line of dancers strides across the stage at intervals, dropping off or picking up others along the way to initiate or end solos, duets, trios....