A sense of good cheer pervaded the last City Council meeting before the holidays, on December 14, where the aldermen finished weeks of discussing Mayor Daley’s 2006 city budget by making a few amendments and signing off on it 48 to 1. Fourth Ward alderman Toni Preckwinkle was the sole no vote; the 33rd Ward’s Richard Mell was absent. Percent increase in the national consumer price index over the past year: 3....

Dave Mowers’s winning brand of performance hinges on his talent as a raconteur. Not that he hasn’t got all sorts of acting chops. In the course of this lively, offbeat coming-of-age story, he hulas, does the cancan, and recites an epic poem’s worth of well-constructed couplets; his classical training also figures into several misadventures along the way. But as in the hit Hot August Nights, performed here two years ago, his easy candor and zest for life are what really captivate....

If the Map Room, the Bucktown beer mecca, has an archetypal customer, then Jonathan Surratt must be it. On a recent afternoon he sat at a table there, drinking a hard-to-find Belgian pale ale (Von Honsebrouck’s Brigand) and scrutinizing a map–a Chicago beer map, no less–on his laptop. “I could do this all day,” he said, scrolling west on Irving Park past an icon for Mike’s American Ale House. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Gabrielle Reisman’s fable of true love among the Gen-Y set is sweet, occasionally funny, and quite charming thanks to actors Jimmy Freund and Elizabeth Middleton. But there’s something missing. In keeping with the current vogue for love stories involving time/memory displacement (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, The Time Traveler’s Wife), Reisman’s one-act mysteriously drops Shevat, a standard-issue mercurial child-woman, into the studio apartment of Brian, a cook. Freund and Middleton play not only the lovers but all the other roles, including Brian’s aggressive stoner friend, the addled landlady, and a mysterious pushcart salesman who delivers bite-size nuggets o’ wisdom as well as ice cream and corn dogs....

Let God and man decree –A.E. Housman, Last Poems Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Charlotte was the quintessential survivor. According to her book, she beat her abusive father to death with a kitchen utensil in an act of “preventive self-defense.” She made it through air raids, deportations, jail, Nazi oppression, the ruin of Berlin by Russian invaders, and the tyranny of communism. She lived openly as a “sexual intermediary,” thanks in large part to the childhood influence of a cross-dressing lesbian aunt who shared with Charlotte her hidden copy of Die Transvestit, by the Alfred Kinsey of his day, Dr....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Sarah Staskauskas has long been a familiar face to anyone who’s been going to rock shows in Chicago over the last two decades. She’s been a bartender at Wicker Park’s long-gone Dreamerz (in the space that now houses Nick’s), the Empty Bottle, Lounge Ax, and more recently at the Hideout. And she’s fronted a number of local bands over the years, most prominently the Dishes and the Camaro Rouge....

Innovative pianist and influential composer Chick Corea has been responsible for a bewildering array of projects in his 40-year career. They include his acoustic trio and electric quintets, startling solo piano programs, a modified merengue band, the recent mainstream sextet Origin, and the original Return to Forever, the Brazilian-flavored group that introduced Flora Purim and Airto Moreira to American audiences in the early 70s–so many ensembles, in so many styles, that he’s got a hefty backlog of band names to recycle at will....

Rihanna’s Good Girl Gone Bad could serve as a template for pop R & B success. Comely, limber, light-skinned artist who’ll look good on the album cover? Check. Cameo by famous rapper on the single? Check. Two or three tracks produced by Timbaland? Yep. Songs about sex, shaking your booty, loving your good man, and dissing your no-good man? Got ’em. Now just spend an obscene amount on promotion and get ready to rake in an even more obscene amount of cash....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » First, they were dealing with Goldman Sachs, which acted as an adviser to Chicago and Indiana — and as an investor in both deals. “When Goldman Sachs began advising Indiana on selling its toll road, it failed to mention to the state that it was putting together a fund whose sole purpose would be to pick up infrastructure for the best price possible in order to maximize returns for its investors....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Be sure to read Tori Marlan’s cover story in the new issue of the Reader on Mohamed Mohamed Hassan Odaini, a young Yemeni man who’s been a prisoner in Guantanamo for the past five years. Consider the glimpse it offers of Congress subverting our system of checks and balances. “The Republican-controlled Congress did what it could to help the Bush administration stave off judicial oversight,” Marlan writes....

Last year’s inaugural Intonation Music Festival was a collaboration between indie-rock Web site Pitchfork, concert promoter and musician Mike Reed, and event-planning company Skyline Chicago, but despite the festival’s spectacular success its organizers split up before the start of planning for the 2006 installment. Pitchfork and Reed have launched the Pitchfork Music Festival, which debuts at the end of July, and Skyline has announced that it will continue Intonation with a different musical curator each year....

Keep ‘Em Both Away From the Court But wait–it’s Miller nobody trusts. She talks a great game–Miers is definitely the quiet one–but her words ring hollow. At the Society of Professional Journalists convention the other day she said, “As long as our confidential sources are acting in good faith, we have a duty to protect them.” But who thinks I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby Jr. was acting in good faith? Or as she told the Senate Judiciary Committee when she testified this month on behalf of a federal shield law, “Confidential sources are the life’s blood of journalism…....

Clayton Counts calls himself “one of the hardest-working unknown DJs in the city.” Since moving here from Texas five years ago, he says, he’s played everything from “lounge music for old people to hip-hop for kids” at places like Whiskey Sky, Reserve, Darkroom, the Allstate Arena, and countless private parties. He DJs to support his work as a composer and producer. “I was a writer before I moved here,” he says....

Sometimes I wonder if the Pernice Brothers ought to rehearse under suicide watch. One of their T-shirts bears the slogan i hate my life, and the mini comic that came with preordered copies of their latest and possibly greatest CD, Discover a Lovelier You (Ashmont), depicts the band sitting around backstage debating the best ways to die. Then there’s the lyrics, like the chorus of “Saddest Quo,” from the new album: “There’s a train wreck / Picking up survivors from a plane crash / On the TV live and it’s a sad status quotient / Waiting for the sky to fall....

This annual showcase of experimental theater, performance, and music from Chicago’s fringe, coproduced by Curious Theatre Branch and Prop Thtr, runs through 11/12. This year’s festival includes an emphasis on work by, or inspired by, Samuel Beckett. All performances are at the Prop Thtr, 3502-4 N. Elston, unless otherwise noted. Several performances will be at Roots, an offshoot of Curious Theatre Branch located in a private home; the address will be provided when reservations are made....

I’m a straight woman who hasn’t had sex in five years. Why? Because every time I get close to a guy he’s shocked by the large size of my clit. I get “What is that down there?,” “It looks like a mini penis,” and “I wasn’t sure what to think–guy or girl?” Is there anything I can do? Surgery? I live in Canada, so I’m hoping our health-care system thinks this is as emotionally distressing as I do....

KILLING WOMEN THEATRE SEVEN OF CHICAGO INFO 563-505-7645 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The play begins with a killer scene: Baxter arrives home late from the office with his cool, sexy coworker, Abby. There he needles his mousy wife, Gwen, while Abby tells a scurrilously misogynist joke–interrupted when Gwen pulls out a gun and drops her husband with a single bullet to the heart....

Eric Ziegenhagen spent his high school and college years composing his humble, enigmatic folk tunes in places where he was sure no one could hear him. He plucked out simple melodies on a guitar he barely knew how to play, and he croaked out unadorned lyrics in a meek, untrained voice. “I assumed it was too simplistic, that it wouldn’t sound any good,” he says. “I assumed I was fake.”...

This is going to take a while to explain, so bear with me. My kid is a fan of the Age of Empires series of computer games, which give you a bird’s-eye view of the landscape on which your armies cavort. You can see an amazing amount of detail, but a while back I noticed something I found comical: whenever you come across an A-of-E island, you see waves crashing on the beach on all sides....

1909 W. North Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “W ant a beer?” Lindsay McKay asks, pulling a draft of PBR from a keg in a fancy minicooler. I’m not getting special treatment–McKay, owner of the new Bucktown men’s boutique TK Men, beers most of her (legal) customers on arrival. The guys are encouraged to watch wrestling DVDs on the large-screen plasma, play a little Xbox, and then maybe look around when they’re comfortable....