Sorry, this is not the end of the line–there is no line. The following facts come from the Mid-America Institute on Poverty’s October 2003 report “Not Even a Place in Line: Public Housing & Housing Choice Voucher Capacity and Waiting Lists in Illinois.” Total number of CHA public-housing units: 31,536. Number of households on CHA’s waiting list: 55,909. Status of the waiting list: closed. Total number of housing vouchers under CHA: 34,070....

Jessica Graham, 36, is a sales rep for Maharam, a textile company with offices in the Merchandise Mart. She makes clothes for herself and occasionally other people. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Jessica Graham: I did a selection for a fashion show just for fun that was auctioned off. But normally I don’t work with our fabrics because it’s really hard to work with interior fabrics–they’re really thick....

If jazz were a smorgasbord, Italian clarinetist and tenor saxophonist Daniele D’Agaro would sample a bit of everything but never pig out. His lush, tremulous tenor tone would’ve fit right in with the Ellington Orchestra’s horn section, and his knack for negotiating obstacle courses of offbeat rhythms at a brisk pace suggests he’s paid close attention to the late-50s work of Rollins, Coltrane, and Monk. He demonstrates his facility with more modern methods on “Ultramarine #13,” a piece from his latest album, Chicago Overtones (Hatology); its graphic score provokes unusually contoured but carefully modulated performances from drummer Robert Barry, trombonist Jeb Bishop, and bassist Kent Kessler....

What’s a playwright to do when mere family dysfunction is no longer enough to carry a script? If you’re David Lindsay-Abaire, you toss a rare disease into the mix. The title character in this 2003 comedy is a 16-year-old rapidly aging because she has progeria, living in a family whose nonstop acrimonious screeching makes them sound like howler monkeys. Shade Murray’s actors, particularly Roslyn Alexander as Kimberly and Steve Haggard as her nerdy schoolmate (a relationship with echoes of Harold and Maude), bring plenty of energy to the show....

Marky Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Marky Bielat trained as an accountant in her native Czech Republic because her mother, a fashion designer, thought she should have a stable job. But last year, with the help of her uncle (a distributor of luxury shoes), she started a home-based business specializing in high-end Spanish and Italian shoe lines like Baldinini, Kalliste, and Pura Lopez–hard to find in the U....

Lead Stories Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Thomas Pinckney, 18, charged with criminal trespass in Tomah, Wisconsin, in June after a woman awoke at night to find him holding her arm, told police he had seen the woman’s keys hanging from her apartment door and was just trying to return them. A 27-year-old man, arrested in July after allegedly trying to rob a Bank of America in Enid, Oklahoma, told police he wanted the money to repay the national debt....

Chicago police officer Edward “Skipper” Keyes has worked in law enforcement since 1978, so he’s had plenty of practice helping people in need. He’s been a huge fan of soul music and R & B for even longer, though, and because of that devotion many of the artists he met as a wide-eyed teenager in the 60s are coming to him now looking for a different kind of assistance. “A lot of them seek me out to get advice on how to deal with these various labels that approach them, how to deal with contracts, how to get some of their royalties,” Keyes says....

The buzz about the Pennsylvania blues-rock trio Pearls and Brass has been building all year. Formed in 2002, they were largely unknown outside the Keystone State and stoner-rock circles until they scored a slot opening for ex-Slint guitarist David Pajo in Louisville in 2003. Slint invited them to play the All Tomorrow’s Parties festival in London in March and, along with the Fucking Champs (who became Pearls and Brass converts after sharing a bill with them at a recent show in Philadelphia), tipped off Drag City head Dan Koretzky, who signed them last month....

Rjd2 gets compared to DJ Shadow a bunch, but that’s mostly because Shadow’s the only really famous artist doing anything similar. Both create dreamy, instrumental hip-hop-flavored soundscapes out of odds and ends, but while DJ Shadow blows on his dandelion head and lets the seeds scatter where they may, Rjd2 keeps a well-tended garden. Though he skips from genre to genre, dabbling in prog histrionics, orchestral swirls, and snatches of breakbeats, the tracks on his second full-length, Since We Last Spoke (Definitive Jux), consistently borrow familiar structures from rock (verse, chorus, bridge)....

Mayhem ensues in Ray Cooney’s well-crafted farce when a bigamist cabdriver gets into an accident, forcing him into an ever expanding web of lies to his wives, two police departments, and the press. The cast maintains the necessary breakneck pace and split-second timing; J. Ben Parker does a particularly hilarious job as the cabbie’s well-meaning upstairs neighbor, who buries his two-timing friend further each time he tries to dig the bloke out....

One of my best friends was recently diagnosed with HIV. Since college he’s been on an unending sex conquest, hooking up with countless guys he meets online to engage in risky activities. My concern is that he doesn’t seem fazed by his HIV diagnosis and says he has no intention of giving up his online sex crusades. I worry about his mental and physical health, but also about his seeming willingness to infect others just to satisfy his sexual appetite....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Sara Mead, a “senior policy analyst” at Education Sector, uses nothing but data to demolish the latest “boy crisis” fad. As a bonus, she also plows salt into the ruins–explaining how a claim with so little basis in reality could be turned into a bevy of books and pop-magazine sociology. “A number of conservative authors, think tanks, and journals have published articles arguing that progressive educational pedagogy and misguided feminism are hurting boys....

Born in Cleveland in 1935, Utah (born Bruce) Phillips helped shape American folk music for the generations following the WWII-era ascent of Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger. Like those two icons, Phillips emphasizes working-class tales; a card-carrying Wobbly, he’s performed and written countless pro-union tunes. But Phillips’s politicized approach, a product of his experiences in the army during the Korean war, is paired with a rich sense of humor that Seeger and Guthrie usually reserved for children’s songs....

On his recent debut, Metamorphosis (Kindred Rhythm), Cuban expat saxophonist Yosvany Terry Cabrera makes a strong case for what seems to be a developing strain of Latin jazz. Among the many leaders Terry’s worked for since moving to New York in 1999 is Steve Coleman, and here he takes the dense polyrhythms and hard funk characteristic of Coleman’s work and pairs them with a more lyrical, traditionally Latin sense of melody....

Controller.Controller’s History EP, released last year, stays mostly on the darkly melodic side of that dancey postpunk that’s sweepin’ the nation. Their forthcoming full-length, X-Amounts (Paper Bag), doesn’t cover much new ground either, but sometimes an album where every song sounds exactly the same transcends monotony and capitalizes on its consistency of mood, and this is one of those times. Like their Toronto cohorts Metric, Controller.Controller are concerned with expressing a certain cool malaise, and the two bands share similar angular guitar lines and aerodynamic drum rhythms, but dopey lyrics like “Come on, baby, answer / Every question is a cancer” (from “Rooms”) make singer Nirmala Basnayake come off like the type of solipsistic cosmopolitan Metric’s Emily Haines likes to make fun of....

Highland Park native Denny Zeitlin spends half his professional life as a full-time psychiatrist in San Francisco and the other half as one of the most distinctive pianists in modern jazz. While I’d love to skip the cliche that his science informs his art, I can’t name a more analytical musician–both in his serpentine improvisatory investigations, aided by his encyclopedic musical knowledge and exacting technique, and in the quickly shifting keyboard textures that surround them....

Choreographer Boris Eifman cuts to the chase in his evening-length ballet Anna Karenina, focusing on the love triangle at the center of Tolstoy’s sprawling novel. A master at establishing character and psychological situations through movement, Eifman has created an excruciating scene between Anna and her husband, Karenin, after their marriage goes bad: while he orbits around her abruptly, seemingly trying only to get her attention, she sits stock-still in a chair staring straight ahead....

The Illini were forced to confront one last demon before claiming a spot in this weekend’s Final Four. They had to face Arizona, which had upset Illinois in the regional final in 2001–the last time Illinois fielded a top-seeded, championship-caliber team. That Illinois team had size and experience up front in Brian Cook, Sergio McClain, and Robert Archibald and a skilled point guard in Frank Williams, but Arizona was simply tougher....

As host of the popular WFMU program Radio Thrift Shop, Nashville native Laura Cantrell has been celebrated for her catholic taste in country music; her playlists thoroughly explore country’s deep past but leave room for its gospel and jazz progenitors and modern-day outliers. But on her third album, Humming by the Flowered Vine (Matador), Cantrell seems newly intent on breaking down the distinctions between all these idioms: she and producer J....

It’s hard to believe listening to his records now that this Norwegian visionary–or crackpot, depending on your point of view–was a founding member of Emperor. The Grudge (Earache), Mortiis’s 2004 release, is more black patent leather than black metal; the music and even the lyrics (“You must be an emotional heretic / Your words become like shit on a stick”) are terribly Reznoriffic. But Mortiis’s heathen heart has led him down stranger roads than this: his mid-to-late-90s dark-ambient albums, even with their Wagnerian feel, were a far bigger departure from the church-burning scene than The Grudge, much as I might prefer them....